jsam333

I'll give Nick one month of grace period to sort mess (JC left him) out. Not super trust guy, but kinda have cautious hope, that he can du something with DU.
 
One thing that I still see absolutly critical for NQ to improve fast(er) -- comms. Ideally -- re-think whole mode of opetations, go for KS promises about transperancy and using players feedback in innovative ways. Before this was more of joke. But now there is a chance do it without any jokes.
 
Comms can be both "start of rebirth" point (if changed) and "same old shit" return to swamp (if not).
 
 

I would like to put my thoughts on the CEO change out there as I actually feel a lot of this aligns with what I have been saying would be good for the game for a long time.
 
Right now, DU was forced into an early public release for what many expect will be funding needs. And it did not work out. The short-term thinking and rushed implementation of features has only done one thing, cause more delays and waste dev time because a lot needs to be redone.
 
NQ, by means of JC, kept a brave face, and kept saying that all would be well, that there were no signs that they would not be able to meet the end of 2021 target for a full release. The list of features to be done as well as the immense mountain of technical debt, bugs to be squashed, optimization and polish to be done simply make a release in the true sense of the word at best unlikely for the end of 2021.
 
Now, the vision of JC for the game is great but poses a lot of challenges that are extremely hard if not impossible to overcome. The idea of implementing several vastly different playstyles and preferences in one world by itself is tough, the technical challenges remain huge. JC the visionary could and did dream of his game and how it would all come together while JC the CEO of NQ needed to temper expectations and bring that vision down to a manageable and viable level. And that IMO is where things went wrong.
 
 
When I backed the game, shortly after Kickstart ended, I was certain (and had no issue with) that NQ would not be able to hit the December 2018 release as it was clearly unrealistic for a game this scale. When Alpha opening to backers was delayed by several months and we then found ourselves in pre-alpha and under NDA instead at the end of September 2017, it should have been clear it was never going to be possible to get a release done in about 12 months. Yet, it took NQ nearly a year to announce an updated roadmap which pushed release to the second half of 2020. That new release date was clearly still overly optimistic at best seeing the state of the game at the time.
 
Then a new studio opened in Canada, we can only guess as to why but a combination of using a better tax environment for software development, more access to talent and yes, they speak French there. We do not know the ins and outs of how the management structure worked/works but it seems that much of the decisions were made in Paris still. When the first studio lead left the same year JC moved to Canada.
 
With some fanfare a new backing round by investors was announced by JC in June 2019 and when looking at the normal timeline for Venture Capital investment this was a pretty standard Round A option that was taken after the initial seed. Crowd funding never played much of a role in all this with the eventual 2.5M or so being spent before it was received basically.
 
Around November 2019 and honestly very little actual progress later, still under NDA a new roadmap was released pushing the release out for another year to end of 2021. That roadmap still read more as a wish list of features and still seemed very optimistic to me as NQ still had to implement all main features outside of mining and building.
 
Then, 30th of April 2020, JC announced that the game would come out of NDA and go to public beta with subscriptions instead of the planned closed development up to release for backers only. That was the moment where some of us backers started to see signals that NQ was not doing great and needed to start generating revenue which was never the intention. Meanwhile NQ had been operating on a total budget of around 25Million since end of 2014 so it was only reasonable to assume they were running on debt which in itself is fine as long as you can pay interest and keep paying your bills.
 
In December the 0.23 patch dropped which caused much discontent and an exodus of players with changes which were really not bad in themselves, but the implementation was terrible and very superficial. NQ, again by means of JC, blamed the need for the changes on the small groups and solo players who did not use the markets and did everything themselves so that needed to change. Add several badly handled exploit fallouts to the mix and the fragile player base shrunk at an alarming rate. To me, this was a massive signal that JC the visionary was not able to separate from JC the project manager or JC the company president/CEO.
 
JC also said on several occasions that he saw no reason to assume that it would not possible to meet the release date on the roadmap of end 2021, anyone understanding the amount of work left to do and especially the list of feature JC brought in as “coming in the next year” towards the end of 2021shoudl have been a clear sign of the many red flags regarding hitting a 2021 release.
 
Then, as the next major update came around it was underwhelming at best and NQ had to spin missing their milestone by announcing that 0.24 would arrive in “phases”.
And so, here we are start of April and we know that JC has resigned as CEO with anew CEO being appointed in the person of Nicolas Granatino who also is the CEO of the main investor in NQ. And from here all we can do is speculate on what is next.
 
 
 
My hope is this:
Under new management the potential and promise of DU is acknowledged while at the same time the need for more time is established. A big factor in the assets of the game is the server tech which can be developed and licensed to third parties with potentially considerable revenue. For that reason, Novaquark will be receiving a fresh investment injection with a business savvy and financially qualified CEO at the helm. 
 
To achieve this, the company will need to go through a restructure and cut a lot of mid level ballast. I would really hope that NQ will have the balls to relabel the development to where it is, alpha, and postpone the scheduled release with a TBD new date.
 
Then spend time to fix what they have, work through the technical debt, stabilize the backend and improve their community facing communication to a point where we do not need details but do find NQ to actually listen and be responsive and not “be heard” and then hear nothing back. So many great suggestions and ideas have been lost because NQ has shown a chronic lack of engagement and interaction at even the most basic levels.
 
I have always said and still feel that DU has such massive potential and promise as well as will be able to appeal to many different play styles and ideas but NQ as it was, has never really shown the ability to make that happen. I hope that this change is not the end of the company (despite the "letter", I would not disregard that option yet) but a new start in making that potential come alive and a reality.
 
 
I really feel NQ (and with it DU) has a chance here to recover and grow. From where we now are and for it to work, NQ needs to do their part in showing progress and improvement in many ways while we, as the community, need to start with giving them the space to do that and then get past what was and work with what is to come..
 
 
Let's have a good discussion here and not dwell on the past, we're all here because we have a passion for DU and the only way DU will stay alive is for "new NQ" to be able to make it happen. 

I never saw the linkedin post in question, so I am a bit confused reading some of the statements here.
Was it not just a link to a public linkedin account? So while maybe in bad taste to post, it was that person who made the choice to have a public linkedin account with full name etc.
I mean all I have to do, is search for people with novaquark in their resume to find them on that site (if they have public accounts).

I seriously don't understand why NQ insists on destroying the ability for the market to stabilize. So we had bots buying ore , then the bots slowly got eaten away and people started trading ore with each other again. Prices were beginning to stabilize in the upper teens , then bam without warning suddenly the bots refill their orders today. Everyone buys out the lower orders and sells to the bots and we are right back to everyone dumping ore to the magical bot orders.
 
How in the world do you ever expect any player market stability to form when you insist on a whim destroying whatever pricing has stabilized. Not to mention the fact that you make it even harder for producers to acquire ore in bulk because everyone is selling it to bots. No one knows your bot plan , so I'm certainly not going to post buy orders above the bots , because for all I know if I wait a week or two you won't refresh them and then I will have bought a bunch of ore at twice the going rate.
 
I mean seriously where is the common sense that your haphazard bot orders are unhealthy to the game world. At least if you said "we are permanently having bots buy these ores at this price" we could actually plan around that. Same would hold true if you said "after this batch of bot orders there will never be bots buying ore again". You don't however communicate any of this with the player base. This paralyzes the markets because producers cannot properly plan pricing , traders risk at buying and selling products is forever at risk at the carpet being pulled out from under them.
 
I mean truly , you have central bank like power with these bot orders and apparently none of the common sense that would generally be required of people in those positions. No one knows what your doing, no one can anticipate when you'll wave your hand and completely unhinge the market again. Seriously , please treat the player base with some respect and either tell us your plans with the bots or just remove them and let the players actually control the market without your random sledge hammer bots.
 
  
 
 

After this mornings huge screwup and bot prices were reduced 100x, I've seen screenshots of 10s of billions in schematics, and have heard of people who bought items at the bugged prices and resold to players who made hundreds of millions in a few minutes. When is this getting rolled back?
 
At this point it is probably too late to just reverse the market transactions. People are trying to hide the money in ore or moving it around, so the only way to catch it all is to rollback. If you just remove the schematics and return the money, you screw over all the people who had their buy orders filled and the people who sold them bugged items get to keep all that money. The longer it takes to rollback, the more annoyed people will be, so probably best done sooner rather than later.
 
I won't speak for everyone, but if people are allowed to keep these items, or the money they got from selling them, then I'm personally moving on to different games. There is no reason to play if someone who logs in for 5 minutes at the right time makes more progress than others who have been playing for months.

When territory warfare gets implemented you can fight for your org? I don’t get this question. It’s a sandbox, you make your own goals/fun. NQ has already stated that pvp will be an equal part to many pillars of gameplay, not the main focus.

The devs should take note that the 2 most popular forum topics in the last couple weeks or so are either new players asking to refund/unsub, and old players saying there needs to be a wipe before release(after all core game features are implemented).

To everyone who didn't see Captain Jack's interview with JC today, JC made some clarifications. If NQ does a server wipe they will give everyone  "magic blueprints" of their constructs that will not require materials to place so that people can keep their progress.

The devs should take note that the 2 most popular forum topics in the last couple weeks or so are either new players asking to refund/unsub, and old players saying there needs to be a wipe before release(after all core game features are implemented).

The devs should take note that the 2 most popular forum topics in the last couple weeks or so are either new players asking to refund/unsub, and old players saying there needs to be a wipe before release(after all core game features are implemented).

I really dont understand why some people are so negative concerning a wipe. Beta testing involves alot of balancing espically after significant content additions and if some of that rebalancing is significant enough, only a wipe restores the intent moving forward. I'm not leaning either direction but in beta, I would not rule it out. I want this game that I have been following for years to last for a decade plus. Just because we are paying a sub, I dont think we are entitled to never realizing a wipe.

This is a fantastic insight that might be why I am seeing significantly reduced t3-5 ore on my recent Jago scans compared to my scans from week 0 of beta (not restricted by NDA because I still have all those scans and I can show them to current players). I have scanned over a hundred tiles on and off for the last few weeks and the concentration of t3-5 ore is tiny compared to earlier. I have also come across a few fully cleared mega nodes of ore on those tiles. I just assumed a player mined them before I got there but NQ could have actually removed a significant portion of mega nodes from unscanned tiles. All the mega nodes I had been mining before were all still there but all the new tiles were really lacking in high tier ore. I was just scanning random tiles in the ocean away from the markets so it's unlikely that someone mined out all the tiles I scanned recently while leaving my first few tiles untouched.

The thing though is that days into the "early start" for backers (as has been well documented), mostly due to a number of oversights and NQ being their usual overly optimistic and "you'll need years to do this" SELF, a lot of high tier ore was not only mined but pretty much removed form the game in order to fill up bank accounts. Even today, selling T1 ore and some easily crafted goods to bots is in many cases still a profitable and viable way to fund other activities, sinking massive amounts of resources into the black hole of the markets.
 
NQ had an opportunity then to fix that but decided it was all fine. now that they find players are pulling material out of the ground much faster than they expected (again, naïve thinking), they find themselves wit he dilemma of pretty much having removed the easiest way to resolve this from their toolset by not excluding wipes but pretty much making it a very hard sell for them to use that option and not run into an ocean of tears.
 
What will probably happen is, yet again, the general player base will see the fallout in overarching limitations and further nerfs and increase in cost to do basic stuff in game. Industry will probably get a lot more expensive and no doubt T2 industry elements will be brought in to further discourage the average player form making their own stuff and forcing them to the markets. And all of that because NQ really doe snot want the "Satisfactory" feeling the game currently has to become the predominant gameplay loop besides building ships (it's currently the only one really).


All of this and the needed balance passes really can only lead to one thing, a wipe. If NQ doe snot change their position on this they will just find themselves in a position where they can't properly balance the game and they will find themselves outpaced by the player base as far as how fast they will need to bring in new content and features which they will then need to rush through which will cause more balance problems. NQ said they will not wipe unless they have to and guess what.. They will have to, and sooner than they think.
 
It will be a very tough sell and there will need to be a lot of sweetening to make the wipe get through without to much of a riot buit a wipe will need to be done. Frankly, if they let us keep blueprints and put talent points back into the pool I honestly see no problem with it. The problem is that NQ seems to keep pushing the "no wipe unless absolutely needed and even changed their plans, sacrificing the game's visual quality, to do so.
 
Man up NQ.. I really believe it should be obvious you are not getting away from this, so bite the bullet and plan for a wipe, maybe sometime before Xmas. Good time to encourage new subs to come into a fresh, new and improved world and create some much needed revenue in the process.

Player: Some jerk stole my ship by using an exploit!
NQ: qq more pleb. This is part of the game.
Also NQ: Some jerk stole our market by using an exploit!
(PERMA BAN)

The devs are continually under estimating players, this time they did not even expect them to hit 'B' .

Oof. Find bug, make sure it's a visible problem. Get banned.
 
I guess it's time to cancel my sub. Been an interesting time guys, but if you want to completely hammer a promising game into the ground and punish people exposing issues while doing so is pretty much a total no-go from me. I'll watch the dumpster fire from the sidelines.