Castanietzsche

I still LOVE THIS GAME - Glad it is not just me
Add some asteroids with mega nodes.  - Agreed, though I have not done any asteroid mining since Beta.  
Unbalance some of the game.  - Agreed, max speed was not the way to 'balance' ships, should have been acceleration balance  based upon mass and engine thrust (Small ships would always reach higher speeds first with this).  
Schematics: - Agreed, its not a fun system that's been implemented and have suggested a tech tree alternative (rewarding long standing players but allowing all to participate. which is better in my opinion). Though it has been pointed out originally it was sold as no sub parts being required and that sounds like less server taxing and might be better, certainly worth a try in my opinion if the only reason for schematics is server load.  
Add something for us to aspire to. - I am not sure about this the game was sold as player driven and as the game is people can aspire to what they want to do. Though I guess a story intro might be nice to teach all the aspects of the game in addition to the tutorials.  
Bring back the bots. - I am not sure about the bots, I agree the market is not quite as it should be but T2 ore is still more expensive than they were in Beta, where as T1 ore is much lower in prise. I think they might just need to rebalance of the ores quantities (Especially since T2 is the fuel ores and needed just to fly around). I have suggested an exchange of scan results for ore amounts on a tile of the players choosing to make ores more attainable and all tiles potentially useful.  
Cut the weekly fee on territories by at least half.  - I do and don't agree with this.
I think the home tiles and the HQ tiles should be without taxes for all players.

I also think the corporate taxes should be higher than the individual player taxes, the reason for this is individual players can only manage so many tiles, whereas the organisations can have infinite numbers - dependant on members. So maybe I think leaving the organisation at the current price and simply reduce the taxes for player owned tiles to maybe 100,000 each week would make the single player a more relaxing experience (it is meant to be a game after all). Where as the organisations, which I would have thought will be more likely to PvP and should be more tightly wound as a result.

I also think that all single player who owns no tiles other than their home tile(s) (Haven / Sanctuary) and the HQ tiles, should receive the money payed into the taxes divided equally between them (Being part of an organisation would not affect this). Since this would also help drive the economy with single players having funds to buy items from the market and take away the tax blackhole, which provides no services in exchange for the payment of taxes.

The blackhole is my personal biggest issue with the tax being in place.
  Mining units… the upkeep is just irritating. - Agreed. I like you can have bonus or but, I do not see why I need to keep calibrating the units every week to keep them going (these are the things keeping the market going even a little after all).
  Introduce clear voxels.  - Agreed, I would have liked this at the start ship building, I have found a 'work around' for using the glass panels but I am nowhere near a good enough voxel'er to make it look really nice. I think I could just about manage clear voxel though in box or oblong form.
  Reconfigure the Large Dynamic cores for a 2nd style. - Agreed, it would be great to be able to keep the volume of all cores but change the way that volume is shaped. My ships would look much better, even with my limited voxel skills. Great post Sinjin 

I got my Arcship passenger ID card in the mail a few weeks ago.
 
I didn't have any other physical rewards though, so I don't know about the T-shirts.

I like the concept of DU, the way things are mostly seamless, specially regarding to flight (atmospheric and space), they do have good tech, made by really talented people here.
The big mistake (that still happens), at least in my point of view, is that while the game was created with the intention of everything being player-made or player-driven, they still keep adding arbitrary limitations to the game, which goes completely against the sandbox concept (sometimes, even the concept of a game, which is being fun).
 
For example, limitations regarding what's allowed via scripting or building hurt quite a lot, but timers also hurt as well. Plus, some things that would have made the whole experience much nicer haven't been implemented until today.
Player markets could've been so nice, like, if we could add a Market Pod ourselves to a Container Hub and have a centralized place where we could add buy/sell orders in our construct, with that the number of districts and overall markets could be reduced per planet, which would give players a reason to make connections to get better offers. That's the kind of mechanic that is kind of implemented already, but is restricted and can't be implemented by players in any way. It gets even worse when we don't have reverse dispensers that buy stuff or don't have even the basic QoL to dispensers, which would be allowing to increase number of batch sizes at buy time...
 
The game idea is good, and I'm sure there's lots of talented people working on it, but sadly, whoever is in charge of making decisions doesn't seem to understand that for emergent gameplay to properly flourish you need to offer players freedom and tools for that...

best trolling ever ^^

an Anniversary wipe

They've said many, many times that there are three projects in the works other than DU.
 
Just a few weeks ago the CEO mentioned that NQ still has just under 80 employees. If you look at the CEO's most recent posts, it's really clear they have already pivoted and  are focusing on new pitches, publishers, and investors. 
 
There's just no evidence that DU's dev is ongoing in any real way; I'd be surprised if there were even a dozen people still working on DU out of those 80. Based on the last few months of no real activity, it is likely even less than that. 
 
DU's dev is effectively dead...which is not a surprise as they have only managed to bleed players since launch (per the only stats we have). 

I still LOVE THIS GAME and don't want to see it die.  Here are some easily implemented suggestions to bring DU back form the brink:
Add some asteroids with mega nodes.  We miss those!  If you are the one who discovers it, you get double the amount of time before the roid gets broadcast. Unbalance some of the game.  Give our L-core ships some of their speed back!  Give some overall power back to airfoils and engines for getting off Alioth. No one was complaining loud enough about balance to keep some of the changes made in place.  The changes just made everyone mad. Schematics: You guys were solid until the .23 release when schematics came out.  I know it helps balance the game, but no one cared!  It was an improvement when you dropped schematic requirements off low tier items and introduced schematic containers, but everyone still hates them.  You said getting rid of them would be a tough job.  Ok, then drop the cost to dirt cheap and go back to only one schematic needed on a machine.  Needing repeated schematics in a machine is just dumb.  Who needs more than one set of blueprints to build things? Add something for us to aspire to.  DU really is my only game, so I don’t what that would be.  But there really is no purpose to DU.  I build stuff.  Then what? Bring back the bots.  The market is collapsing.  Bots in a limited form will help the small player.  There aren’t enough players in the game for me to sell enough things to keep afloat. Cut the weekly fee on territories by at least half.   Single players should pay no more than 100k.  You’ll have to figure out something else to deal with those to keep territories and don’t use them.  Perhaps set up a sliding scale based on your performance in the game.  But I can’t afford the weekly rate.  I don’t generate enough income.  I would LOVE to set up mining units, but the market is bottoming out bad.  It’s not worth the upkeep. Mining units… the upkeep is just irritating.  Simplify it and make the need to visit them less. Introduce clear voxels.  I have some weird window shapes to fill and the glass panels and canopy shapes just don’t cut it. Reconfigure the Large Dynamic cores for a 2nd style.   Don't need more voxels, just need them to be longer.  Make them thinner and longer would make A LOT of people happy. I'm hopeful these are easy things to do and could be a sign of good faith to the player base.
 
Many will call me naïve or foolish for trying, but I don't care.  What do you say NQ?

Hi
We pretty much all were hyped about the Dual Universe game concept but most of us actually abandonned the game.
What went wrong ?

IMO, the very fundamental gameplay bricks were very frustrating.

voxelmancy is counter-intuitive and crafting a ship is hard. having smooth surfaces, a canopy and a functionnal ship is so hard, most players chose to travel space with a space brick.

missions were also very frustrating (long, repetitive). the flight model is awesome but doing the same mission again and again is lame. As is mining. having to endure this grind every day to pay taxes is another frustration.

I think industry wasn't a great idea. interaction between real time and in-game time is frustrating. scan mining was a good idea on the paper but all tiles should behave the same. there shouldn't be T1, T2 or T3 ore.

Hi
We pretty much all were hyped about the Dual Universe game concept but most of us actually abandonned the game.
What went wrong ?

IMO, the very fundamental gameplay bricks were very frustrating.

voxelmancy is counter-intuitive and crafting a ship is hard. having smooth surfaces, a canopy and a functionnal ship is so hard, most players chose to travel space with a space brick.

missions were also very frustrating (long, repetitive). the flight model is awesome but doing the same mission again and again is lame. As is mining. having to endure this grind every day to pay taxes is another frustration.

I think industry wasn't a great idea. interaction between real time and in-game time is frustrating. scan mining was a good idea on the paper but all tiles should behave the same. there shouldn't be T1, T2 or T3 ore.

The only thing I actually still expect from NQ is that they send me my t-shirt.

I enjoy the ship building and do not mind spending some time each weekend to collect ore and then sell products and some ore to make money for this activity so the game was mostly fine for me beta because I had a head start on all the blockers (mainly schematics and taxes). However, after the wipe I am still scanning for tiles I can use and only have a modified starter ship with a scanner added.
 
So, I would say that the main issue with the game is how many players NQ actually expected in game, with resources being extremely rare in the game now much more so than in beta - sighting the T2 ore price, which is about 3 times higher now and that being the basic ore needed to just move around the game. It just feels like they assumed they would have  low number of players and would make sure the game resources reflected that.
 
My secondary is the tax system itself is hard for new players to pay if they do not do any challenges or missions, which I imagine most will not do (as I have) almost 100 of each challenge since release and doing a scan a day on each T2 ore tile I have to try and make them profitable.
 
I do disagree with deleting player content if people leave, I think instead it should be archived off into magic blueprints sat in the players character inventory. There are two reasons for this:
 
1) The main reason people say they will not return is they lost all their stuff.
2) The people who made the better creations should really be enticed back into the game so we can all enjoy their stuff again.
 
Also I would suggest that being able to vote for landmark constructs that stay in game regardless of the creators in game status should be a thing It could be a monthly / yearly competition type thing with the three top voted entries, becoming landmarks and staying in the game for all time (Or as long as DU). I am sure many people would enter this to have their claim to fame etc.
 
Anyway if they do keep releasing content at present, I will keep playing the game for a second year to see how it develops.

This isn't a game in the sense that they can just give you a copy of the code, and you get to play it forever.  It's an unfinished project that requires them to maintain servers so you can play in a shared persistent world.
 
Well not according to their advert which states:-
Dual Universe is a first-person Sci-Fi MMO built and driven by players, in a single persistent universe. You can build almost anything out of voxels, trade in a free economy, lead industries, travel through space, explore planets, or wage war in a fully editable sandbox universe. Subscription-based.
 
You will notice the game is NOT being tendered as an alpha, beta or any other non finalised game but a full game. The full advert page is on Steam and still shows non existing game play in the videos like mining below the surface, you can even spot JCs avatar in the advert.
 
As for server costs name one single game that does not have server costs or dev costs for any updates/patches. NQs CEO has even stated on the record they have taken DU as far as they will do and they are no longer treating it as something to work on as they have 3 other projects they are working on instead. 

there has to be MANY Potential players who see DU  as i do...Love this game and if I could buy this game outright for say $60 or $70 i would be playing right now! having to continue to pay to play is just not something I am NOT willing to do. It's not really about the money cause I could easily pay up a year But then what??A year passes by and now pay another hundred to keep what you have been building up for the last year. many games I been playing 8+ years... to do that with DU would cost you over $1,000 for a  game...I don't think so

for 5000+ years in the future the game is set, 2.5 engine types is weird, it needs to be one type.
for 5000+ years in the future, we need wings?  a short aero sim for air resistance should suffice.
for 5000+ years in the future, maneuvering thrusters(ie adjusters) and brakes would be more efficient(not have cover a ship to get great reaction)
for 5000+ years in the future, we only need one radar type... seriously why do we need 2?
and where are the hinges and rotators to fold parts of a ship when landing or going faster?
and why can't hovers be used as engines?(i changed the tags, but they're hardcoded?)

NQ made a very stupid move in marketing their product. They advertised PVP, the weakest mechanic in the game. And hid the strongest side - it's an amazing building system. As a result, the game got the completely wrong audience - people who were looking for battles and rivalry. And when they realized that they were deceived, then DU received negative reviews, and continues to receive it. At the same time, people who the game needed so much just passed by, thinking "why do I need PVP and wars, I'm a creative person with great artistic talents. I love to build and create beautiful things. So this game does not suit me."
I love DU but the developers their project and hurt me. It's a pity.

I get what you're saying and think a lot of people likely agree........but technology isn't magic. Not every problem has a solution. There do exist limits to scalability, especially when cost is a factor. 
 
Building games often requires compromise between technical reality and design. To your point, NQ hasn't been good at finding that compromise.
 
They buried ore so absurdly deep it was a mole simulator, but then complained about costs and removed digging for ore completely, eliminating an entire pillar of exploration-focused gameplay to replace it with a mini-game.
 
That said...a core issue with DU is that the general premise of the game wasn't on solid technical footing from day 0.
 
The very idea of a single shard MMO sandbox is arguably impossible to scale as imagined.
 
Players creating cities? Terraforming moons? Building whatever they want without limit in a persistent multiplayer world? That concept would only ever work with a highly optimized tech stack that used some sort of cutting-edge breakthrough to manage scale and cost...which NQ claimed to have early on, but that claim ended up being total, absolutely BS. They didn't even write their own engine or stand their own servers. 
 
There was no fix to that BS, so there was no way to make the "vision" work. There was no way to "buckle down" and just fix things....the core premise and core technical foundations just didn't make sense. The only way to just fix things would have been to start from scratch, which wasn't practical after years and years of JC's "leadership". 

The lying started for me right at the start of beta. They had videos showing territory warfare and atmo-pvp. Both don't exist to this point in time. After several years. And that was under JC. They were just making things up without having anything to back it up. For me that is lying because they knew they had nothing but were still using it as an advertisment.

Without successful KS getting all other money prob be much harder/impossible. Its critical.
 
 
 
I think, yes. Because now, retrospectively, its clear, that:
 
1) NQ entered KS almost empty handed on development progress (with barely most basic prototype of tech), this why they spend years in agony making it work, not work on proper game systems > see 2) / 3);
2) lot of promised features (hello atmo combat) were put just to push KS money, without any idea how to do them (''figure something out later''), then it never was time for them > see 1). 
3) completely unrealistic dates for KS delivery, considering state of affairs they jumped in, 200% they knew it in terms of internal capability, so re-scheduling was certainly pre-planned, on grounds that people can eat it (like they always do on KS);
 
So it was lying and foul play from moment zero, even if ''good intentions'' to actually make a game ''somehow'' in future. Overpraising is when you legibly believe goals are realistic. They knew they are not -- just decided to give it a run anyway in dirty way. But its backfired.
 
 
 

I would have never worked on PVP to begin with.  You spent all this time making this amazing voxel system, that could have been this awesome mesh of satisfactory and minecraft and you waste all this time trying to make PVP. 
 
There's so many pvp games out there.  What brought anyone here was the building aspects of this game.   All they really had to do to be successful is make the game more like satisfactory.  Factory chains, production, etc... really get into it.  Conveyor belts, power, needing resources to produce energy to mine to produce goods.
 
Realistically though, If I'm talking about current state if it was launching right now?

Disable PVP, disable Schematics.  Just make entirely about the building and flying/space trucker/construction aspects.  Then I would have immediately took all those existing PVP parts and worked on PVE content to create a social thing for people to do together. 
 
For me one of the lamest gaming moments I ever experienced was mining an asteroid in PVP space, dug down deep in the asteroid, come back up and my ship had been disabled, and the two pvpers were trying to figure out how to steal and fly the ship out.  I could no longer control it, it had been taken over.  So all I could do was watch in horror as these people spent 10 minutes taunting me.  I couldn't pull out a gun and defend it, nothing.  Just watch.   I logged off and never played it again lol.  At least eve gives me plenty of ways to escape/stay out of danger in pvp areas and doesn't take nearly as long creating a ship/flying it somewhere so the loss/time ratio isn't as bad.

There is A LOT that went wrong. But the fundamental problem has always been communication.
 
Here is what NQ said during the kickstarter.

 
But as we all know, this lasted only a short time before they went the complete other way and started to ignore the community instead.
And remember this was back when the community was under NDA restrictions and played with the sole purpose of testing and giving feedback on early game play no less!
 
And NQ was never able to receive constructive criticism. If you played the cheerleader and told NQ how great they where, they would interact and be all smiles and thumbs up. But any type of constructive criticism or legitimate concerns with the game design and it would be radio silence or at best some boilerplate  "don't worry guys" and "we know best" type of answer. And when things would boil over and the entire community would rage, we would get some "we hear you" type of deal with promises to do better. All promises that where broken over and over again..
 
And that is why the community turned toxic against NQ, and things are the way they are today.
And it is basic math really. When testers are telling you that things aren't working, but you ignore them and keep doing the same things. Then chances are that you will fail.
 

IF NQ had implemented their original concept for factories, as presented in Kickstarter... it'd be a singular item that is fed resources and output a finished construct. (See Empyrioin) That would not have created the server load like the MMO version of satisfactory we got did. 
 
At peak my mega factory had 14,000 elements, with at least half of that running full tilt during my peak ship production. I'm sure it created server load .. it definitely ate bandwidth just standing next too and sometimes took 10 minutes to fully load in. 
 
Still sad that DU has a much smaller playspace, and that I can't make the same sort of factories to output finished ship kits without a ton more work/hassle. That was fun for me, and it's largely gone. As a solo player I could spend an hour a week picking up my ore, dump it into my factory, and output ships for a week with minimal hassle... took a lot to get to that point, but in the live game... its much more tedious, ore rates are heavily limited now, and while it was possible with one account in Beta to do what I wanted, not possible in live... with a higher sub cost. 
 
I miss DU, but I miss the DU from beta when we had in ground mining AND mining units AND asteroids... and factories could be largely automated... ya know, when it was easier to obtain resources and spend more time creating cool stuff... without worrying about land taxes, construct slots, and sub time running out and loosing what is created.
 
I can see what players warned NQ about has come to pass, many said going back on their promise of no wipes, raising the price, and reducing game content... might see a spike of hype but will fade... and looking at steam, game is pretty dead looking, with the top comment recommending another dead game, Starbase lol. 
 
Biggest issue... is DU is more punishing that any other MMO I have played if you take a break... you could loose a lot of your built up stuff that you grinded for... meaning that those that leave the game are even less likely to comeback as their personal investment in the game essentially gets deleted. This one reason alone is why I'll never come back, and why DU will likely never recover... I doubt this issue is even on NQ's radar. 
 
Maybe a couple years of solid development... but development feels  non Existent in 2023. 
 
So glad I got to play that version of the game, sad it doesn't exist anymore. Good times, thanks for all the fish NQ. To all the NQ staff I've interacted with, besides one, thank you. I hope your next endeavor is better! 

I think its 50% servers (NQ money on them), 50% they not understanding their demography.
 
We talked over years many times about this. Its pretty much still social game with almost zero social tools. And community page just meme example, its 1000 more low dev effort things NQ never even considered.

Frankly, looking back to the start the main issue here is the servers, the ideas are still nice, the outcome is not. What did make the most difference? I believe its server stress, from day one till now.
 
All restricions should be returned, mining should be mining, ores should regrow, schematics scrapped and replaced with a working tech tree, industry real and the production cheap and abundant, this all to make the most stuff possible so nobody cares if their capital hip gets destroyed in all out war.  reintroduction of the ultra cores, and thats upto 2 km or larger, or better yet introduce core-less structure building.
Make industry dynamic, actually add the stargates And make the teleport systems be produceable to all.
Make it possible to actually have effective cities, so reintroduce html, also beds, chairs, showers need an actual, use, also homes should have a use. that way people come and actually feel like they have a life in DU, add a bit of Sims into DU. If NPC should be there make them automatically appear in cities and able to communicate, bond, etc by a impressive AI system.
Add other races but make them all playable, and then not some groce stuff, just popular stuf like androids, kitties, whatever
 
In short, maka a game we dont need npc other then simply social interaction, and maybe marry and get DU-kids with because we can actually all be what we want to be since servers dont restrict us, bring out those other solar systems, stop with the 3 HQ restriction and make plots buyable and selleble per plot, and stop taxes.
 
I can continue for hrs but well im not in game development, If you look at all other popular games and combine all the stuff there its about 5 minutes and you have anything you need  in a game. 
 
I still think this can be turned around, so NQ give me a call and lets see what I can DU for you now  Ill even DU it for free! I'm not into MMO gaming for over 30 years for nothing, my word is my bond.
 
So here an open invitation to invite me and more here to look at what can easely be done to turn the game around.
 
First Tip, open an event for modders to add functions to lifeless stuff that actually matters!

So for me, there were all sorts of small failures along the way (many in beta, some since) but they are all really just details next to the central problem.  One of the key features of the design for DU was that players would provide *all of the content*.  That meant that the game just needed to provide the mechanics and frameworks and literally everything else would be player driven.
 
Now players did actually try to do this.  There were people who created puzzles, etc for people to solve, created factions who fought each other, tried to build whole cities and many other interesting things.  The game and its developers seem to fight against content creators at every turn - recent examples being ship builders being put off because the stacked element checker means they have no way to know whether or not they are selling ships which will error 6 months later and warring factions being put off because nobody can shoot each other in battles.
 
Putting that aside though, I think that the one thing this game has proved beyond all doubt is that a game with solely player built content does not work.  You need to have some other content created by the game itself first in order to create gameplay loops that players can do when they aren't doing any group content.  A player needs to be able to just log in, play for 1/2 an hour, enjoy that time and profit from it.

So the one thing I would have done right away is add some background life to the game.  Put creatures in that might attack the player, make some basic challenges on the ground and in space, give players something to shoot at and reasons for doing so (protect base, get resources, whatever).  That would also give them a reason to team up, live in walled villages or space stations with a large shield, etc.  Some of this was in the original game design videos which were put out.  Then I would have built on it by adding more of a survival element to the game, adding PvE and NPCs to allow players to make their spaces more interesting.  I can build a huge space station but it has nobody in it at the moment, let me make it more interesting, make a bar where NPCs come and players I let in might be able to get missions from those NPCs.  I think that would have given players much more of a sense of shared purpose and struggle and a reason to come together into groups and play together.
 
As it is the game is, frankly, boring.  It's a game relying on player created content which literally deletes player created content on a regular basis made by a company which has no problem with breaking existing content and blaming that on the players trying to create it.  The world itself, and the constructs the game allows you to create, are fairly static and uninteresting too and it is difficult to come up with actual functions for many of the rooms in a construct.  I can add a bed but it has no use.  A lot of the cool stuff I see is just huge empty shell buildings with one or two rooms because people made them to look pretty rather than because they needed the space for things.