GraXXoR

That is pretty funny, heh. Not the intention in my phrasing, as if I can overlord the forums or something. Just a colloquialism I use too often

I said "the one person that bothers to DM you...", not that one person will view the content. Perhaps you should double check what I'm saying before you guess. 
 
But that's not really the point, I don't care one way or the other about this person's content or if it's good or bad or if it has a few thousand views or a few million.
 
What I have an issue with is coming into a forum and demanding that people only DM you and declaring you'll ignore comments...in a forum.
 
So it clearly wasn't about discussion at all for the OP, it was about everyone else doing stuff for the sake of this person's YouTube channel. 
 
I think it's arrogant to do a "survey" that was never going to have enough replies to mean jack anyway in this sort of way...again, don't care about this person's youtube channel or if it's good or bad because that isn't the point. 

I expect you'll find:
 
A: Few if any people want to DM you directly
B: No matter how you collect feedback, there's not nearly enough results for it to be meaningful. 
 
I don't understand why you're mandating how you get results and have decided that only DMs will count...
 
Don't see why you expect people to do this, what benefit it has, or why you expect to get more than a small handful of replies this way...for a clearly unscientific / unofficial survey whose entire purpose is apparently for your video content...? 
 
If you want to use the forum, use it for a discussion...no one cares about your video "assessing the state of DU's launch", your "deadline" for replies, or your arbitrary demand that we DM you instead of using the forum to discuss.
 
But hey I'm sure the one person that bothers to DM you will enjoy that video. 🤷‍♂️

I used to be in NovaX during alpha, but I left because I just didn’t have time to play and didn’t feel I was able to be very helpful with how sporadic my DU presence had become. I remember the discord only having half a dozen or so people, but optimism was abound.
 
In fact, my first time leaving alioth was with NovaX; we crashed on Madis at the base of the canyon and had a hell of time getting to the surface. It was grueling, but somehow hilarious at the same time. Good times, somehow. Most of my nostalgia is from that period, really.
 
Even if my time with them was limited, they were a great bunch. I’m sorry to hear so few of you remain.

They fixed ore drops and digging. 
 
man!!! now I lose 1/3 of all my ore calibrations and every time I try and dig I get internal server errors every few seconds. 
 
Great fixes NQ. 
 
He doesn’t read this, anyway.  

Agreed 100%. 
 
another “1st alpha” backer here where most of our time initially consisted of waiting for the servers to open up. 
 
I remember at one of the first Alpha resets where inventory was introduced, spawning on the arcship, literally hundreds and hundreds of nondescript (no colors yet) players constantly pouring out and flowing across the bridges like somewhat low frame rate water. 

there was a sense of eagerness and we honestly felt like pioneers on a search for a grand vista to place down our first cores. I remember bumping into a then promenent backer called Yamamushi and we chatted about how groundbreaking the game was and how it was basically a cross between Eve and Minecraft and how huge it was going to be… and with the sun shining down from bright blue sky and the snowy mountain peaks glistening in the distance, and seemingly endless players flowing past us over the bridge and away from the Arcship in every direction, we could believe it, too.  

Cut to the final release, and the fifth reset for me and the feeling of pioneer is just a distant long forgotten memory, like a dream of a dream…
 
every release has been a diluted, lesser version of the one before to the point where this time, the “release” came and I couldn’t even be bothered to place my STU. 
 
For many, STUs themselves arrived far too late to make them relevant either ingame itself or as a valid player number counter. 

the old guard are generally tired, disaffected or outright bored. 
 
NovaX was on MP2 on Alioth for the first Alpha release, then for the Balpha (alpha masquerading as a beta) we were part of the MP3 development on Madis, along with MTI which was, AFAIK, the biggest Madis development that spread 15km end to end and consisted of perhaps 500 L cores by the time the suspicion of an incoming wipe knocked the wind from our collective sails. 
 
Madis was never a busy place, even MP3 but you’d always see a yellow marker or two at any time of day or night. People visiting via surrogate pods or dropping in at the market to buy something. 
 
numerically, there were I think six first wave backers in NovaX.  Of those two of us remain, but by the Beta we had grown to pushing 60 players (not alts) of which 20 or 30 might have been on at any one time. 
 
now there are four of us and I am usually on by myself, much like the last half of the Beta. 
 
damn, I’m getting the feels now…
 

Happens when you think you are "god" in your own world, cannot accept critici to talk and think its your right to change stuff on the go, forget about promisses and have a double moral on how to treath players and for who an offence is bannable and for who not. Throw in a few wipes like its SE and just make the grind even harder as a korean mmo, next call it an mmo without limits but add so many the people are feeling "work"  and add pvp, but dont add the stuff that Is PvP.
promiss 6 pillars but only deliver 1 or 2  and reduce the others to minigames.
cancell or reduce features due to server stress, but name it upgrades and dont deliver what is promissed.
Add an HQ while you already have one, kickout the people that actually listen to the players and only think Profit while making none.
 
And that results to about 80 actives per time period,

Agreed 100%. 
 
another “1st alpha” backer here where most of our time initially consisted of waiting for the servers to open up. 
 
I remember at one of the first Alpha resets where inventory was introduced, spawning on the arcship, literally hundreds and hundreds of nondescript (no colors yet) players constantly pouring out and flowing across the bridges like somewhat low frame rate water. 

there was a sense of eagerness and we honestly felt like pioneers on a search for a grand vista to place down our first cores. I remember bumping into a then promenent backer called Yamamushi and we chatted about how groundbreaking the game was and how it was basically a cross between Eve and Minecraft and how huge it was going to be… and with the sun shining down from bright blue sky and the snowy mountain peaks glistening in the distance, and seemingly endless players flowing past us over the bridge and away from the Arcship in every direction, we could believe it, too.  

Cut to the final release, and the fifth reset for me and the feeling of pioneer is just a distant long forgotten memory, like a dream of a dream…
 
every release has been a diluted, lesser version of the one before to the point where this time, the “release” came and I couldn’t even be bothered to place my STU. 
 
For many, STUs themselves arrived far too late to make them relevant either ingame itself or as a valid player number counter. 

the old guard are generally tired, disaffected or outright bored. 
 
NovaX was on MP2 on Alioth for the first Alpha release, then for the Balpha (alpha masquerading as a beta) we were part of the MP3 development on Madis, along with MTI which was, AFAIK, the biggest Madis development that spread 15km end to end and consisted of perhaps 500 L cores by the time the suspicion of an incoming wipe knocked the wind from our collective sails. 
 
Madis was never a busy place, even MP3 but you’d always see a yellow marker or two at any time of day or night. People visiting via surrogate pods or dropping in at the market to buy something. 
 
numerically, there were I think six first wave backers in NovaX.  Of those two of us remain, but by the Beta we had grown to pushing 60 players (not alts) of which 20 or 30 might have been on at any one time. 
 
now there are four of us and I am usually on by myself, much like the last half of the Beta. 
 
damn, I’m getting the feels now…
 

Agreed 100%. 
 
another “1st alpha” backer here where most of our time initially consisted of waiting for the servers to open up. 
 
I remember at one of the first Alpha resets where inventory was introduced, spawning on the arcship, literally hundreds and hundreds of nondescript (no colors yet) players constantly pouring out and flowing across the bridges like somewhat low frame rate water. 

there was a sense of eagerness and we honestly felt like pioneers on a search for a grand vista to place down our first cores. I remember bumping into a then promenent backer called Yamamushi and we chatted about how groundbreaking the game was and how it was basically a cross between Eve and Minecraft and how huge it was going to be… and with the sun shining down from bright blue sky and the snowy mountain peaks glistening in the distance, and seemingly endless players flowing past us over the bridge and away from the Arcship in every direction, we could believe it, too.  

Cut to the final release, and the fifth reset for me and the feeling of pioneer is just a distant long forgotten memory, like a dream of a dream…
 
every release has been a diluted, lesser version of the one before to the point where this time, the “release” came and I couldn’t even be bothered to place my STU. 
 
For many, STUs themselves arrived far too late to make them relevant either ingame itself or as a valid player number counter. 

the old guard are generally tired, disaffected or outright bored. 
 
NovaX was on MP2 on Alioth for the first Alpha release, then for the Balpha (alpha masquerading as a beta) we were part of the MP3 development on Madis, along with MTI which was, AFAIK, the biggest Madis development that spread 15km end to end and consisted of perhaps 500 L cores by the time the suspicion of an incoming wipe knocked the wind from our collective sails. 
 
Madis was never a busy place, even MP3 but you’d always see a yellow marker or two at any time of day or night. People visiting via surrogate pods or dropping in at the market to buy something. 
 
numerically, there were I think six first wave backers in NovaX.  Of those two of us remain, but by the Beta we had grown to pushing 60 players (not alts) of which 20 or 30 might have been on at any one time. 
 
now there are four of us and I am usually on by myself, much like the last half of the Beta. 
 
damn, I’m getting the feels now…
 

Agreed 100%. 
 
another “1st alpha” backer here where most of our time initially consisted of waiting for the servers to open up. 
 
I remember at one of the first Alpha resets where inventory was introduced, spawning on the arcship, literally hundreds and hundreds of nondescript (no colors yet) players constantly pouring out and flowing across the bridges like somewhat low frame rate water. 

there was a sense of eagerness and we honestly felt like pioneers on a search for a grand vista to place down our first cores. I remember bumping into a then promenent backer called Yamamushi and we chatted about how groundbreaking the game was and how it was basically a cross between Eve and Minecraft and how huge it was going to be… and with the sun shining down from bright blue sky and the snowy mountain peaks glistening in the distance, and seemingly endless players flowing past us over the bridge and away from the Arcship in every direction, we could believe it, too.  

Cut to the final release, and the fifth reset for me and the feeling of pioneer is just a distant long forgotten memory, like a dream of a dream…
 
every release has been a diluted, lesser version of the one before to the point where this time, the “release” came and I couldn’t even be bothered to place my STU. 
 
For many, STUs themselves arrived far too late to make them relevant either ingame itself or as a valid player number counter. 

the old guard are generally tired, disaffected or outright bored. 
 
NovaX was on MP2 on Alioth for the first Alpha release, then for the Balpha (alpha masquerading as a beta) we were part of the MP3 development on Madis, along with MTI which was, AFAIK, the biggest Madis development that spread 15km end to end and consisted of perhaps 500 L cores by the time the suspicion of an incoming wipe knocked the wind from our collective sails. 
 
Madis was never a busy place, even MP3 but you’d always see a yellow marker or two at any time of day or night. People visiting via surrogate pods or dropping in at the market to buy something. 
 
numerically, there were I think six first wave backers in NovaX.  Of those two of us remain, but by the Beta we had grown to pushing 60 players (not alts) of which 20 or 30 might have been on at any one time. 
 
now there are four of us and I am usually on by myself, much like the last half of the Beta. 
 
damn, I’m getting the feels now…
 

We spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on stuff that went POOF(tm). You want to get quanta, do stuff again, like the rest of us. For voxel work, that means new voxel stuff you can sell.
 
And even IF you had known AND acted on it, you wouldn't have sold 3B worth of DRM free BPCs... You always knew that people using/sharing those BPCs would be a real possibility...

I don't think Sanc can be used as any measure of how many "old guard" have stayed in the game. I don't believe any of my Org, who're all pretty much Alpha players, some with a couple or three "backer" accounts have placed STUs on Sanc Moon. The problems with issuing STUs mean that Sanctuary tiles have no distinct reason for grabbing and are only being claimed by a few old timers who like the place specifically, or are doing it "because they can", or any other personal reason.
 
In similar vein, I don't think any of my org-mates are using actual money to play the game; that's all  been paid up-front, years ago. Might be a couple of "discount annual sub" alts in there, but mostly running on DACs they bought with packages.
 
I have never seen a player from another Org. I've seen their ships and statics, but never actually managed to bump into one in person. I don't go to the busy markets, but back in beta, there were always bods around-and-about on Madis. Either the necessity of leaving your hutch has reduced, or the numbers are well down on that period.

It would be great if you could share some of that long list sometime.  Give people a bit of optimism for the game's future and all that ...

I do not agree with this statement.
Automining generates ore (goods) and does not introduce quants into the game. Through ore, quants could only be entered into the game by bots to buy ore. This remark may seem unimportant, but it is not.
After all, ore can be dug on asteroids and collected on the surface.
In fact, none of these actions give you money directly. As a consequence, if ore prices fall, then all of the above activities suffer, not just auto-mining.
Now only these direct actions give money in the game:
1. Daily entrance to the game.
2. Completing missions.
3. Complete daily missions in the surrogate station.

im with Yoarii on this one. I think the HQ were merely places to put your stuff without taxes are without worry of them becoming unclaimed. I don’t remember specifically hearing that they would be a permanent repository. 
 
Sanctuary, however was supposed to be the place you could put all your stuff and it would never disappear. 
 
is that still the case?

Were they though? I can't remember ever seeing NQ saying that straight up. Only permanently safe place were supposed to be Sanctuary/Haven.
 

No this is untrue, We were interested in T2/T3/T4, what was listed was the flowers we didnt need. The best ones we kept and the rest we sold to the open market. 

We only have t1 flowers on alioth as we used calibration tiles like everyone else for our ore : )

T3/T4/T5 on Jago was the same, we kept what we needed sold what we didnt. I know some orgs kept everything preventing access to those fields from the majority of players but I can confirm on Jago we sold many flowers. TRIs to players and orgs of all sizes.
 
We will do the same on the next planets, we arent hoarders, we just love scanning : ) its like the rush you get from scratching a scratch card : )

As mentioned, high tier ore is now distributed in hot spots the same way as with the MU mini game.
 
Meaning there is no longer any need to scan all the tiles, since you can find all the tiles worth having just by scanning periodic tiles in a system.
 
And as I said many years ago, I still think ore should be distributed based on geographical features.
 
Coal should be found in segments with lots of forest etc, metals in mountain areas, silicon at deserts and gold along the coastline etc.

I think the craziest symptom of this oversharing is the way you used to be able to see all the tunnels inside the planet you were digging in, if you managed to clip your head through a tunnel wall (which wasn't as rare an occurrence as you might hope...). What's the point of my machine even knowing about things that are entirely outside my ability to perceive or affect.
 

Word.
 
It's not feature-complete and many of the features that are "done" aren't; they're tentative frameworks for placeholders.

100% -- the fact that orgs need to give people "destroy the world" permissions just to get stuff done is itself a problem that can and should be solved within the game rules. 
 
The challenge is that any real solution isn't realistic because it would require too much work.
 
NQ didn't design this properly from the get-go and it's probably too late to fix it now. 
 
They had ample time to fix it when this happened during beta -- any idiot could see that this wasn't a realistic "mechanic" for release...especially in a sub-based MMO with no NPCs where there's so damn little to do. 
 
If orgs are going to be so vital to keep people engaged, their property should be entirely separate from personal property.
 
There should be specific rules for when org property is allowed to become personal property -- e.g. only from specific dispensers which have quotas. If you donate something to an org, you can't take it back except through those specific means. 
 
Any logistical operations that would require a legate to "take stuff" temporarily can be refactored in a variety of ways...for example, org property could be tagged so it can't be resold or transferred to third parties, or reverts back to org control somehow...or probably best, implement mechanics such that orgs don't need to grant elevated permissions to begin with!
 
There's infinite ideas on how to make this work...but the point is that orgs are a central concept in DU and the effort you put into them needs to be somewhat protected. 
 
If the only real currency is trust because theft can't be retaliated against in any meaningful way...that's not remotely scalable in an MMO, especially one with so little else to do.
 
You can't both say "you need an org to really enjoy DU" and "orgs are entirely trust based and anything you contribute can vanish because one person gets bored or unsubs". 
 
People can say "welcome to the harsh reality of DU" and claim it's just part of the game....but saying "it's part of the game" doesn't work when the game has so few players and is shrinking steadily.
 
Yet NQ can't even accept that permissions are a problem...never-mind actually implementing a solution.
 
Hence why after 3 months their numbers are so abysmal...honestly, with player counts like this, they don't even need a mechanical solution and bugging GMs to fix things wouldn't even be such a burden, lol. 
 

I do wish there was another form of build access in the RDMS. One that would allow players enter build mode, and add /remove voxels and add elements, link elements, but not remove elements. 
 
Beyond that, Legate position is too powerful and should not be handed out freely. The only people who should receive legate positions are people that need to change the RDMS, and people that need to access the org wallet.  If people dont need to do those two things they should not be given a legate position.  Especially first year rando's you dont really know. 

So the board for bug discussions is bugged?  Of course it is.

quick bug posting? That bus has already departed.
there is only the ticket system and it's more like a post-Tory NHS than a well oiled triage.
 

Anyone saying there’s no way to enforce it “mechanically,” (programmatically?) is wrong. 
 
there could be audit system and permissions systems like the barter system that could be used to mitigate the chance of one person leaving with everything 
 
though it won’t save a ship, it could save an entire multiplex of containers. 
 
there could be an RDMS system which requires a vote to undertake actions
 
Eg.. want to remove something from the coffers? requires a vote or a predetermined wait time before automatically being accepted. 
 
problem is that the system would be somewhat cumbersome and no way in hell a team of NQ’s caliber could pull it off without another major Market Place 15 debacle. 

atill, as flawed as it is, it is possible to use org structure and RDMS to protect much of your wealth. 
 
back in alpha and second alpha etc we legates split our org into five functional sub orgs. Each of us and our respective Alts were the only full legates in our sub-org so the maximum any one of us could have stolen from the whole was approximately 1/5 of the total org value. 
 
it did present challenges if someone was away but even then only 1/5 of the org went offline until they returned. 
 
the central org Nova X, where each of us was a legate and our sub org members were also members was the staging ground for all our current builds and drop boxes for ore etc. 
 
we’d deposit the stuff for the build into the central org ‘s containers and cooperate to get it built. 
 
ore for processing was placed in the master refinery. 
 
once the build/refining was complete it was handed off to one of the sub orgs and locked down. 
 
this system served us well until player churn killed or org. 
 
TL/DR; management is a thing.