GraXXoR

Think about it. Even if NQ fired every staff member tomorrow and switched off the office lights, they would have to still pay for data... With us players being some of the the most creative people on the planet... (Seriously, just look at the talent some of the people in this Community have... it's absolutely professional grade, no lies.) This data is going to increase constantly as players create more. The DATA PER PLAYER ratio is key, here. There comes a point in time when the cost to deliver the data per player outweighs the subscription fee income. Imagine if only the hardcore legates of orgs remain after their creative players have left... There will be a legacy of epic proportions that needs to be fed to the dwindling number of remaining players. At some point, this ratio will tip into the red and NQ will start winding up the marketing hamster to deliver another corker of an excuse as to why they need to WIPE ORL THE THINGZ.

Just saw the title of this thread.... "Creative Director" A DU Oxymoron if ever there was one... heck, im gonna post while I still can.. can't see my privileges lasting for much longer. REMEMBER MP15... Justice for @Scoopy.... etc. etc.

If anything, the wipe has exacerbated the inequity. Those who learnt how to game the system after a year of NQ fakking everything up left-right-and-centre were ready to game from DAY ONE after the wipe and were on top of the world before other chumps were even off the planet. Even our little, two-bit remains of Nova X has managed things that few noobs and even some other mid-tier players would ever be able to accomplish. We have magnified the distance between us and the tier of beginners who have likely, mostly already departed given the now 33% decline in monthly Steam numbers. As an aside, three days ago, this decline was still 30% which means the last week has been A HARD DOWN on DU noob numbers, because, let's face it, few established players are going to move over to steam, we can be certain that most Steam players are noobolinas...

This isn't a browser game... You'd need a completely separate virtual computer install of this game on top of a completely separate install of windows for each alt on top of a randomised VPN if you wanted to disguise your account. That's far too much trouble to do. Fact is the anti cheat engine already fingerprints the OS and sends salient information such as a hash of the windows serial number and hardware footprint to DU... If you log out and log in of your account even using VPN IP swap between each login, the anticheat will link your logins to a single windows licence or hardware footprint... I don't care either way, they are not going to cut off their whales to appease a few paupers like us. e.g. there is this one guy who claims he runs about 40 alts, and if he is not full of shiit when he says he plays by buying DACs with his 400,000,000 daily income, he is still consuming 40 of other people's DACs a month.

^^ This... NGL @Cergorach is basically 100%, acerbically correct... If this were a 1990s fanzine run by university students spending half their time pissed and the other half high, it's exactly the sort of quality I'd expect... but since this is supposedly a 21st century tech-based enterprise with multimillion investment, the investors must be absolutely livid with their fiscal OBLITERATION. They might as well have just taken he money outside and buried it in a landfill...

Sounds like an NQ bot, but we know NQ never reads the forums, so this is likely a legit player... SMH As with everything... ever... It's the trend that is far more important than the absolute figures.

That's just a bloop creating an L CORE schematic costs 725,000... A single core. CREATING any L size LIGHT schem costs 37,500 JUST FOR A FKKN LIGHT!!! plus you have to make the T2 parts. Given the atrocious lighting in this decade old graphics engine, we need about a dozen lights or more per core to keep things cheerful, which bumps a core price up by OVER 50% JUST FOR FKKN LIGHTS. Basically the 100k daily stipend will pay for 2 lights max. Imagine that!!! Lights in a game set 12,000 years in the future of matter replication and teleportation are a fkkn premier product. This game is blowing more by the day. Any remaining respect I have for the creators of this debacle is rapidly heading south. Also, speaking of fkkn joke income, 85 Tonne payload planetary missions with 600 ℏ per kilometre payout are a fkkn joke, too. THIS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE REAL LIFE!!! THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A GAME.

What bothers me is that a player can say "only 5 characters, nothing silly" and keep a straight face. FML.

Only for the moment... all the money and DACs will be gone in a couple of months. Then people will be flooding the market with unsellable multimillion quanta mcguffins that nobody can afford.

To an extent, yes. but the economy was completely broken. We had EVERYTHING within a year running autonomously with zero input. Ores in.... product out mega factory... Heck, our small 5 person org even had a Warp Beacon a few days before popping out, when 0.23 came along and made our whole factory worthless. Five average skill players like us should not be able to make a Warp Beacon within a year.

Only 50 scans? The current champion of bad luck is, if we are to believe them, a group of half a dozen who have made nearly a thousand scans between them of Alioth, Madis and Thades and found nothing over a single digit. And every one of their finds has been the dregs of others' T2 rosettes, much like us. That was still "sort of OK" when you could "100% legitimately and not exploitationally" spam MUs... but then a week later NQ pulls a fast one and they all got kicked in the bollocks. It suffices to say that only two of the six apparently continue to play. The Effort / Reward mechanic in this game is skewed oh so very far in the direciton of effort. It reminds me of those tedious Chinese FTP iPad farming games with the icky graphics and eerily floating tiddies... which take ages to make any progress at all... which begs the question: Are they going to implement DLC? I can see paid "scan booster" DLC which highlights general hotspot areas for 24 hours, or a "Monthly Tier+1 Mining Booster" DLC which upgrades a tile to the next Tier for a month before tapering off. Excellent value at just 0.25 DACs apiece. Arguably far more useful than a 1,000,000 XP injector DLC.

the future of DU? NQ are going to have to pull their thumbs out, and sharpish, or there will be no customers left at all. 30% down in one month? And this is the second month with the same trend. just look at the rhythmic 7 day drop off pattern. To be frank, I’ve never seen such a regular, periodic drop off pattern in a game I’ve played. It’s like every Sunday 10% of the player base just calls it quits. That’s a rate of hemorrhage that should be sending major alarm bells ringing in NQHQ. The first thirty days were no better. For context, here’s my screenshot from the end of September.

LOL... yeah... This thread is about marketing spin and covering up gaffes. I knew a kid at school who always tried to claim that his mistakes were done on purpose to annoy people. Everyone just laughed at his expense, rolled their eyes and went back to flicking elastic bands at the teacher. Some well selected points made in the OP. I have made a number of the same points myself multiple times in the past. Specifically 3,5 9 and 11. Years ago, I made a whole thread on "missing" elements like L wings and ailerons yet so far only the missing XS space fuel tank was ever addressed. What is wrong with point 8? I dont see why space elevators or floating platforms are an exploit. personally I think a blanket >1km ban was a BAD IDEA(TM) and should have only been enforced around markets. This limit has destroyed a few of the builds we planned to resurrect after the beta was disguised as a release and everyone got their shiit wiped.

I mentioned this in another post. Someone I know landed on a Limestone tile day one. releasing what they had found they bought up surrounding tiles and finally used a TS to figure out the hotspot... He has 13 Limestone tiles now but does not use 6 of them. instead he has locked them down with his Alt's HQ allocation to make sure nobody else can use them. He DOES sell ore because he can't possibly keep up with the supply. He occasionally rents the spare tiles out to others for calibrations, turning them back into org tiles to get the adjacency bonuses on his other tiles... (though not so much since the new limit, obviously)... He has a stable contract for 200kL Limestone per week which nets him 20M quanta to play with as he sees fit. He is seems to be basically chilling out and enjoying the Alioth ambience while building up his assets as the limitless money rolls it to the tune of over 80M per month. With that money, he is able to build and sell things at rates that others couldn't possibly compete with and will never have to put in effort or do things he doesnt want to, ever again.

Who knows, but we are finally getting back our helmets without feIIatio holes, so... yippee...?

I get this all the time. The game is too stupid to recognize two rocks in the same place. Or it’s too stupid to place rocks in empty spots. basically the game is stupid and is programmed stupidly. So I calibrate. Pick up. Calibrate. pick up. In that order, rather than calibrating multiple times with different machines. also many times I find the calibration ore doesn’t even spawn at all…. because the game is stupid and is programmed stupidly. im beyond biting my tongue with regards to this complete fustercluck of a game.

A friend of ours landed on a tile with 5/h Limestone on day one... He then just scanned around and now has 13 tiles in total... The ones he isnt using he has locked down with his Alts as HQ tiles to prevent others from claiming them. Due to the snowballing income from a fixed 20M ℏ a week contract for 200kL of Limestone, he has never had to struggle with cash and is basically set for (the) life (of this game). It seems like he is playing a completely different game to us, spending millions on schematics every day whenever he needs one... He just casually plays with not a care in the world whereas myself and my org mate who have played since alpha are constantly struggling for the next week's quanta to pay the taxes on our tiles. Just think, he randomly landed on a T2 tile on day one, now pulls in over 1500L of Limestone an hour (or 150kℏ an hour value at current market rates) and thus his entire gaming experience since that day forth was completely different to 95% of the other players. What an odd game this is to allow a certain subset of their players to basically do whatever they want FOREVER and endlessly, while other players can barely afford to enjoy themselves and end up leaving after a couple of fruitless months.

In Japan, a lot of English Language Schools tout their school as "TOTAL ENGLISH IMMERSION" and "100% English Speaking environment"... They are merely using marketing spin on the fact that their teachers are uneducated, were literally picked up off the streets and can't speak a word of Japanese while trying to make it sound positive... Programming PVE's AI is hard work. Likely beyond anything the devs at the time (more-so the current hamstrung team) could have managed. So instead of admitting their mistake, they just blag and fob it off as "100% player driven" maximum spin, minimum effort.

Spot the mistake.

This is what kickstarter/alpha backers fail to see... They turned up, grabbed their mates, crafted a space capable ship in a couple of hours and headed to Alioth MP6. The noobs are basically forced to be mining hos for the orgs now that T1 bot orders are gone. Either that or rerun the unfun missions. So now the only place buying ore at anything approaching reasonable prices is Alioth MP6... Other places like Thades have ore listed at anywhere down to 2.5 quanta per litre or only 10,000 or 20,000 L wanted at "real" non-troll prices.

yes, I was debating adding a smilie... but it seems one was not necessary.

That is making the assumption that nobody is buying schematics... One single L core schematic costs 725,000 ℏ. building 10 L core constructs removes 7.25 MILLION ℏ from the game. That is a lot of spitty (censored apparently!!) missions required to run just to build something decent. Considering this game ONLY has building, it's like trying to use a CAD program but having to Fugg (Also censored) around with a random feature every hour in order to keep doing what you want to do. Now, if those sub processes were in any way fun it would be considered "playing the game" but the fact is the DU PVE content is about as fun as a colonoscopy.

NQ apparently consist of one intern dev responsible for epic changes such as updating the in game credits, one CS part timer who has been instructed not to interact with non-NQ personnel and 48 managers. (Apparently NQ are a company of between 51 and 100 people.) Yes, this is how cynical I have become re. this game.

Currently NQ are trying to reduce server load. Their #1 method to do so is to dissuade new players from signing up and clogging the servers with their noob activities. Their #2 method is apparently to do everything in their power to reduce the number of current players renewing Basically there is so little fun left in this game that NQ are on course to achieve their ultimate dream of zero server load within a year of release.

Talk about top notch DEV work! Imagine how much effort they must have put in for this alone. Hundreds of man-hours, at least. I bet they can hardly sleep at night with all the dev-crunch needed to squeeze out a complete steamer this massive. Updated the ingame credits.