Pleione
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Posts posted by Pleione
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5 hours ago, CptLoRes said:
Anyone still playing DU is doing so despite NQ's best efforts to chase players away. The golden age for this game was in early alpha, and play ability and enjoyment has slowly been decreasing patch, by patch since then.
Most (if not all) major updates released for this game has lead to decreased player numbers, with changes made against community advice because apparently "NQ knows best".
I remember during alpha server restarts that results in login queues in the THOUSANDS (a stat they eventually removed). Those days are long gone. Early alpha (seem to recall pre-alpha) devs actually interacted with players a bit - not real time, but would comment about constructs, question how players accomplished things, etc. Those were the "good ole days".
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1 minute ago, mghtyred said:
I'm guessing another 50 years or so waiting for Kickstarter physical rewards. Sound about right?
Your being optimistic...
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24 minutes ago, blundertwink said:
Except that other sci-fi sandbox games are far more popular -- Empyrion has over 1,700 people playing the game as I type this. Dual Universe has 28 people playing, which is also the 24-hour peak.
It was a great advert, but like most advertisements, fails to mention the flaws that are keeping people away. Its my opinion the tax system is the most constraining. When me and my playing partner left we were spending 6 days a week, 4+ hours a day, earning the in-game cash needed to pay the taxes on our infrastructure. That left us 1 day a week (about 14% of our playing time) to explore near items and actually PLAY. It just wasn't worth it.
FWIW I consider both property taxes and the schematic fees "taxes", since they serve no purpose other than to slow players down and constrain them.
Lack of deliverance of some features - like player owned markets that have been long promised, didn't help.
Of course, I laughed out loud on the "Explore new planets" - we had more of those in Alpha and Beta than exist in production. But that concept died when they abandoned procedurally created planets; not that they had a database which could have handled those.
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11 hours ago, Wyndle said:
Oh the irony. Wasn't the point of making it a cloud based system specifically for the intent of making the game dynamically scalable? Weren't all the features that were dropped (or handicapped) what attracted a significant portion of the initial interest?
Yep. Personally played pre-alpha and was thinking this was the game for me for the next decade. Then patch by patch they reduced it to the current state, with things accelerating after V0.23 (as previously mentioned).
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22 hours ago, Wyndle said:
While I concur with your observation that unwanted PvP is detrimental, it is optional; based on where you choose to go. If you stumble into an active paintball field don't be surprised if you walk out with paint on you. If you cannot stomach PvP then only fly the safe zone missions. PvP players got more attention but they were not the only ones who had complaints or suggestions addressed/adopted in the game.
In general I agree with the Op, but the analogy is weak. Paintball fields representing an infinitesimally small percentage of places one could stumble into, and are often fenced in to prevent such stumbling. Personally, had that been the approach for PVP, I would have been fine with it.
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Hunt for The Golden Goober. Note the 3rd definition you silly Frenchman. Is SO describes what DU has devolved to.
goobergoo͞′bərnoun
- A yokel; a bumpkin.
- A foolish or silly person.
- A gob of phlegm.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition. -
I think this song sums it up pretty well:
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1 minute ago, SirJohn85 said:
It's always amazing what random people on the internet claim people want.
Especially when you ignore the previous bakers who supported something other than what they have now got. And above all, mechanics that were revised several times only to end up with mining units.
But of course, 99% of the players and their feedback should be ignored, says a random guy on the internet who wasn't even in the beta.
I concur. I was one of the pre-alpha players that took time off work for the 3-4 day play periods per month of the early Dual Universe. Logged 72 hours in one of those 96 hour periods once. I remember login queues of 2500+ people. Sad to say but those were the best days of Dual Universe. Too many time NQ tried to sell "Performance Improvements" that were nothing but efforts to reduce resource consumption due to bad initial design. To compound that, their fix was often poorly implemented.
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What is the community reaction to Novaquark's CEO (Nouredine Abboud) stating on Linked-In:
"And Novaquark has pushed the idea of Dual Universe as far as possible, with a bold shot at building a persistent MMO built by the players with next generation voxels and a single shard server tech."
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So long, fair well...
My org decided today to shutter its doors - will spend the next week or so HQing everything we can, and hauling all the good stuff, like Rare Mining Units, either to Haven or our space stations. Its been interesting, but its just drudgery now. Will be watching for the next year or so to see if they turn things around and give us the game they promissed.
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On 2/14/2023 at 12:46 PM, Tordan said:
If you don't want to play, don't. It is a game, not a job. No need to also shut it down for everyone else. Some of us love this game.
Actually elected to compromise: I'm going to play when I feel like it, with total disregard for 24 hour calibration cycles. Yeah, I won't make as much profit, but hopefully it will start feeling like a game instead of a job. Maybe I'll play daily, maybe I won't, but I won't feel guilty if I skip a day or three.
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Honestly, I wish they would just pull the plug. Then I could quit playing guilt free. Now I'm in a small group and play to support them, but its really feeling like duty now, not fun.
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4 hours ago, Tordan said:
That the devs are continuing to work hard on the game, perhaps not with the lightning speed a larger dev house might achieve, but with dedication to a beloved project and a steadfast commitment to treading thoughtfully.
That the devs do in fact read these forums. They just don't always reply to every post, particularly ones that don't provide any new insights.
Really? I can't remember any such post since launch, and they were far and few between (the occasional "We are reading and working hard" but nothing meaningful) before that. Excepting patch notes of course.
I'm working with another game that has a total of 5 devs, plus support staff, that is moving much quicker - and they talk to us on Discord, often DM us to make sure we are ok, etc. And they appear to be happy to do so. We hear about the trials and tribulations of their current efforts, they send out meaningful, neutral, surveys (not marketing ones), and remind us they are human and take weekends off. The environment is SO much better. Because of it, the test base is friendly and non-corrosive. Testers help by voting on the bugs they want to see squished first, and they actively solicited suggestions, also open for voting. The environment is SO much better. Because of it, the test base is friendly and non-corrosive. Oh, and despite being pre-alpha, they have more online players than DU...
As a result, my 12 hour a day addiction to DU is down to a few hours a day - mostly calibration mining a few dozen MUs in order the pay taxes on our 24 territories. I'd never consider spending another dime on DU, mostly because the devs don't give us any meaningful clue about if there will even be a tomorrow. Like the last roadmap was published in December of 2019??? Over THREE YEARS ago? In fact, I commented today to my last remaining org mate that I'm actually rather pleased - for awhile I didn't think DU would make it to 2023.
About the "DU is live - join us on Twitch?" No major news, just an hour or so of looking at player constructs. (Plus 30 minutes of "Hello xyz!") Bleh.
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Pre-0.23 there was a very shiny chrome honeycomb. So shiny if you built a platform and looked down, you would see stars at night.
Does that still exist? So far everything I've tried has been dulled down.
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I'm definitely not extending my 4th alt - the one I created using Steam at launch. One other I'm funding with DACs, along with my main. Have 2 I subscribed for 13 months. Basically its become a chore but I log in daily to run my T2 & T3 calibration runs, and every 5-6 days for the T1 Sanctuary/Haven runs. Keeping my factory fed with schematics, and spending any extra cash on Warp Cell schematics. So probably average 2 hours a day, down from 14.
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9 hours ago, Jinxed said:
Average players is now well below 100 for the last 30 days.
And I wonder how many are alts...
What's really sad is that I'm playing another pre-pre-alpha game (less than 500 invited) and we average 250ish people online at any time. The devs chat with us constantly, bug reports are acknowledged within a day, typically with a heartfelt "Thank you", suggestions are being implemented routinely, and acknowledged with thanks, they have a public bug tracking and public suggestion tracking system, and the team is a fraction of the size of Novaquark.
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3 hours ago, Jinxed said:
at this point, there's really not even any meaning talking about the game in a way that developers might pay heed.
The whole thing is going to burn so might as well talk about exit strategies...What in the blazes would an exit strategy be? Buy DACs on the long shot and leave. That's about as complicated as I can see it. Short version: just leave.
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44 minutes ago, MrTenneal said:
What's odd is that the machines have HP,
That because, once long-long ago, you could have industries on dynamic constructs. It was an early goal of mine, before they eliminated that and the turned "Galaxy" into perhaps adding another solar system, of having a Stargate Universe class ship that could explore the universe and over a period of a month or five, pop out a stargate and then do it again.
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Agree completely. Lack of lore - a consistent believable story/concept line - is a major problem throughout the game. Starts with "We are the last remnants of humanity, so lets establish a new civilization with the goal of killing each other" and goes downhill from there.
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... "Maintenance Units" with a description of "Various lubricants and other wearable parts used to produce a product", I suspect people would have bought into it with little complaint.
OK, OK, the implementation is currently tedious, and could be improved, but the concept would have been acceptable.
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I think they know they would never survive another wipe...
... with maybe one exception: A wipe after a 2 year shutdown to retool the game, with subscriptions being put in suspended animation, and generous bonuses to all who come back.
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5 hours ago, Cergorach said:
See it as a House in control of Dune, the Spice must flow (if there is enough demand for it) or people will get motivated to kick you out (or they might get motivated anyway, because it's their nature)...
That would be the case if playing DU was a requirement of life. Its not. Much more likely people will just get frustrated and leave.
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39 minutes ago, Tordan said:
I have faith that they are listening and developing.
"Faith" is what it takes, there surely is no evidence they are doing either.
Many of us love the game, and continue to play, but do not share your faith. We are just stubborn and choose to believe "Its not dead - yet."
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Right now I'd be happy if they just backed off the "fix" for the "rare" mining unit issue. The issue was real, hit it a half-dozen times since launch and dutifully reported completed with log files.
Post 1.2.3 and the "fix" it is happening to about 1 in 5 of my calibration efforts. Ballpark. My org members are talking like this is the last straw... the huge bump in frequency was reported in hours on Discord and via ticket. No excuse for why they have not backed it off - beyond them simply not caring. Or so it feels.
THE FUTURE OF DUAL UNIVERSE - Discussion thread
in General Discussions
Posted
If only they added things... instead every major change was designed to lighten their server load. That was Goal 1, with "substitute" game play instead.