Pleione

Its been years, but if I recall those top levels were for people backing at over $2500 each.

Bottom line: NQ is not a charity, its goal is to make money. It does that via subscriptions and the creation of a game worthy of people paying that subscription. Being able to craft a DAC, although perhaps personally (for you) desirable, defeats the core income goal. In my opinion: DACs should be limited to their role of being a reward. e.g. An extension of the subscription model. So founders, that paid significant funds up front, get rewarded at release with the ability to play for a number of months directly associated with the quantity of funds they paid. That is what was published during initial fundraising and is not only fair, its probably legally required. I could see DACs (likely singular) being given out to players who uncover major bugs and whom go through the effort of writing up detailed enough bug reports that enable the developers to find and squash that bug. Of course, that would be controversial (why did Sam get a DAC and I didn't...) and would likely require some bug report scoring mechanism which was included in a reply. Something like: "You were the first person to report this bug so earned 0.5 point, your bug report was clearly written (0.1 points), you provided a scenario that was repeatable (0.3 points), and you included illustrating screen captures (0.2 points). This bug affects everyone in the general population (0.8 points). Congratulations, your score is above 1.0 and therefore we have placed a DAC in your inventory. Thanks for the great work." I'm vehemently against being able to trade DACs. Doing so is a gold bot's wet dream.

Pre 0.23 my small corp managed to build a large space station, JITA Trading Station, with the goal of making warp cores. We were 2 days away from having a warp beacon go into its 30 days of cooking time when 0.23 hit. All of a sudden, we needed schematics. Ok, how much? Just 840 MILLION quanta for a warp beacon schematic... We were crushed. Note that is the three main players saved up the 150,000 daily quota to buy that schematic it would have taken us over 5 years. Believe they tweaked that price down, but really? 840 MILLION quanta to enable us to build the warp beacon we had been striving for since pre-beta launch? I'm sure schematics to build all the required parts would have added up to something similar, if not much, much, more. Likewise for all schematics required to allow us to keep our 24 warp core factories busy. The group of us just gave up, and decided to wait for launch.

Completely agree - I suspect doing so would even be a violation of some Kickstarter (inc.) agreement - e.g. the terms and conditions between NQ and Kickstarter.

That seems perfectly reasonable. Basically grant everyone "temp DACs", that look and feel like real DACs except they carry some identification tag and can be purged at release. Give everyone enough to play until release, via the same mechanism buying regular DACs will be, except price them at a dime apiece. I'd throw a dollar at it to get enough to help test the system... since they need to make sure the credit card processing worked as well. Great idea! At least for Patron class people that are playing free right now. Not sure how to integrate that into those Beta players paying a subscription. Maybe continue the subscription as the primary method of payment, and have dime DACs grant an additional hour of play - or something similar - just for testing purposes.

Exactly what they talked about doing back when the price drop was announced.

I guess somebody should ask it: "Just a desperate attempt at generating cash, or a real attempt at building something they will need for release?" I can see it both ways, but if the later, it sounds like they are starting from Ground Zero in this part of the effort.

Your an Alpha Patron and this surprises you? <smile>

That was the promise.

Really unclear here: Are DACs going to be required to play the game going forward? e.g. Am I going to have to start burning my backer DACs before the game is released?

Now that is sickly funny... especially since it rings of truth.

Decision with timing please.

I can't resist, sorry: Perhaps they were with "...policy of being as transparent as possible and to keep everyone informed..." .

Your not wrong. What's disappointing is this thread was started with "...policy of being as transparent as possible and to keep everyone informed..." ROFL. Its something NQ says freely, like they are trying to convince us, but once again demonstrates the opposite. They have had years of complaint about this and we only see communication decrease, if anything - just look at what the Discord community was vs. what it is now.

Getting a bit off topic here folks.

With NQs performance of Athena, I fear I have to suggest TWO wipes. One to test the process, another, perhaps a month later, to actually implement. Athena felt like early Alpha: 4/26 Athena outage - all good 4/26 30 minute "number of issues" restart, oops, taking longer, oops, one more thing to patch, ah, got it - territory resource pools reset, territory ownership issues resolved, market ownership in Haven fixed, quanta and inventory issue for older accounts fixed, but space radars still broke and shield generators funked. None of these things showed up in PTS? 4/26 Another restart 4/26 Another 30 minute outage, oops, just kidding, going to take longer 4/27 Another 30 minute outage 4/28 More bug fixed, hour outage, dot release 5/1 Login server issue (Really? That basic code still isn't solid after 4+ years?) 5/1 Wow... login server is really borked. No idea how to fix it (at least they were transparent and honest) 5/1 OK, 30 minute outage to fix login problems 5/2 More maintenance needed, will do tomorrow 5/3 30 minute maintenance complete 5/4 Another hour needed, will do tomorrow This is the expected turmoil during an alpha cycle, without a PTS. Anything like this after "The Big Restart" would be embarrassing (if not to NQ, at least to all the players trying to bring friends (back) online).

This particular thread is only 10 days old, but the calls for Wipes have been happening all along, especially after each major exploit (or just bad decision) was made.

I always visioned the "Dual" in Dual Universe to be Eve and Space Engineers...

I'd be good with that. Once a month 72-96 hour not guaranteed test periods like we had before.

This actually makes a lot of sense to me, I've just never really thought about it. Alioth (and Sanctuary) became my least favorite places because of their gravity well. Why make the starting planets the hardest to fly from???

Sincerely appreciate you checking in and letting us know! Any ETA on when a decision will be made?

I'm sensing a LOT of frustration from Blaze. Believe he gained interest in the game in 2016 - 6 years ago now and still is not seeing many things originally promised. Myself, I joined in early 2018, around the time one would take work vacation days to be able to play for 72 to 96 hours once a month or so. Recall telling my wife "Have a great weekend, see you in a couple of days" when the first 48 hour test came out - and yeah, I played 32 of those 48 hours (with sometimes hourly server reboots, launching queues with 1000s of players, etc.). Blaze is VERY practical and has historically shown light on NQ finances he has scrapped together from public sources. Like most things, dreams are great, but accomplishing those dreams cost money - something NQ doesn't have a lot of right now, so I think he is seeing things through those lenses - which is, well, realistic. It is, after all, the FBI M.O. - follow the money, so as an approach is well founded. I know for a fact (because I worked with him on a few efforts) that we have TRIED to help NQ, but JC in particular not only had a vision for the game, but had a specific vision for how the game should be played, and anything out side of that was simply ignored. That made the game less and less a sandbox for many of us. Just for perspective, in the early Alpha days, it was perfectly reasonable to have the goal of building a Stargate Universe class ship that could go around and build some future gate technology for use between solar systems. That got nibbled away, piece by piece, often in thinly veiled excuses which translated to "current system eats too many resources, need to cut cost". Personally almost choked on the first phrase of this thread. NQ has been one of the LEAST transparent companies I've worked with in almost 50 years of gaming (started in 1975). We love what DU started out as, and have watched that slowly be chipped away until its barely recognizable. We have also tried, MANY MANY times, via Discord, via this forum, via tickets, via direct mail, etc. to help with suggestions, most often with little more than a "this suggestion will be forwarded" and no other word or action seen. Sadly "this suggestion will be forwarded" is the most positive response personally seen - most of the time hours, days, and sometimes weeks of volunteer work behind suggestions were simply ignored. Guess this is mostly a vent, but please do try to understand some of the history of our efforts. edit: Blaze posted his own reply above when I was typing this.

Wow... $20 all of 4 times... Wow. Believe I shelled out $175 for my Patron account. Remember that the core of Alpha and Beta "free" accounts made early investments.

Blaze has MANY peoples respect on this forum, including NQ in a kind of love/hate relationship (my perspective) since he gave credit when it was due and called it as he saw it when he needed to. Personally, spent Alpha learning to play, and adjusting as the game changed. Spent the pre-Beta and Beta release building and daily maintaining the 33 page FAQ that the Discord mods would routinely reference, and countless hours helping on their Discord channel (as have many other Alpha and early Beta players did, including Msoul). It was sadly amusing when NQ refused to endorse the FAQ - I heard because, shockingly, it implied the game had bugs since it pointed them out and provided work-arounds. Apparently can't have an endorsed FAQ that implies the game isn't perfect. Also coordinated the creation of a formal player communication plan that was also deep sixed. So yeah, NQs listening skills leave a lot to be desired, but I believe we all owe Blaze and Msoul and a few other key players a debt of gratitude and our respect. (ps. Dropped supporting the FAQ on October 31st, 2020 around 0.23 release if I recall)

Want a (sad) laugh, here is the original Release Roadmap: Note the general tone in things like "Craft your Components" - one was suppose to be able to make everything you needed for your base and ships - not forced to become the universes best Advanced LED manufacturer (e.g. Specialization); "Markets" - build your own and become a mogul - not "join a corp, and become a cog in a wheel"; and the feature that made me an alpha backer: Galaxy - explore new solar systems (note the plural), all due 22 months ago. Once procedural planets disappeared, so did Galaxy - although its still out on the roadmap as a post release thing, its now "explore new solar systems as we add new ones to the game - at whatever pace we deem that appropriate".