michaelk Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 I've been following DU obsessively since it was first announced, and know from experience that MMOs at launch are rough at best. Even more with a beta launch... Still, it's a little vexing that this game was built on the promise that everyone can play together in a shared world -- that's a huge part of the marketing. When the servers crumble almost right away and remain unreliable through the weekend, I'm not sure if they really took this promise seriously. Most big launches have struggles in the first day or so, but I had different connection problems on my extremely fast internet through the whole weekend. If they can't scale at launch, how are they going to scale when players have created huge organizations and battles? If they had marketed this as a public alpha, I think people would be more forgiving. I don't really think this is a beta version -- and frankly I believe they have years to go before the product is refined enough to launch or even call a beta. I have strong No Man's Sky vibes where marketing materials capture a concept that the game itself doesn't replicate. I will definitely come back and check out the progress, but I don't expect it to be really playable for another year or two. In my cynical mind, I can't help but wonder if the motivation to go to a subscription model was because they knew it wouldn't be ready for a while and need a more steady source of funding to keep afloat. PS: to top it off, I just got the email about resetting everyone's passwords...I know first-hand how hard tech is, but I have strong doubts that a company can delivery an extremely ambitious cutting-edge multiplayer experience when they can't even handle passwords securely... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bastion Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 Mate I can't even log into the game. Made my payment and got confirmation and such, can't log in, password link doesnt work, so I cant even sort the problem out myself. This game is clickbait. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scotsman Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 Agree - continual crashes out of windows for me even when you do get in. There is no way this thing should even be a public alpha ATM until thats all resolved and much more stable than it currently seems to be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Megaddd Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 I understand having the outlook on it that you do, I'd be in a similar position, had I been experiencing the same issues you have. I've been playing for a week now and had mostly none of the hard game-breaking issues that quite a few people seem to be experiencing, and that is down to simply me leaving the population-dense areas ASAP. Launch is exactly that kind of environment when all of the players pouring into the game in just a few dozen locations at once will create the highest load on players' computers, internet connections and server management for the shard system. It is the place where most teething issues with scaling are most likely to arise. What's most interesting about the system is that people outside of the population dense areas are enjoying a relatively normal gameplay experience. It is unfortunate that for the most part all the starting players shoved into the highest density areas in the game are who experience the most amount of issues. This is just hearsay, so don't take my word for it, but I've heard that while they could add servers and that would fix most of the issues, problem is they might be locked into a business agreement for X amount of servers with Amazon, and adding more is not as simple as flipping a switch, and likely not possible overnight. Sounds to me like Amazon bureaucracy is a likely candidate for the performance issues plaguing everybody currently. As for the No Mans Pie-in-the-Sky argument, it's just not true. No Mans Sky Sean Murray initially in interviews promised features of the game that had not been present in the game on launch whatsoever. This is not the case in Dual Universe. Performance/Technical issues aside, if you get into the game without encountering technical problems, all of the promised content is currently in the game and is playable. This is very much a real Beta, not the kind of "Beta" term that most in the industry currently use as a shield for any gameplay issue complaints, but the real, old-school type of beta that only QA and hired game-play testers would be seeing back in the day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scotsman Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 Not the case....I am in the middle of nowhere and get hard crashes out windows when in build mode for example. No other title I have does this...no issues with anything else played but this title. It's simply not close to being ready for what they are attempting to do with it. Just too many bugs and errors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Megaddd Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 7 minutes ago, scotsman said: Not the case....I am in the middle of nowhere and get hard crashes out windows when in build mode for example. No other title I have does this...no issues with anything else played but this title. It's simply not close to being ready for what they are attempting to do with it. Just too many bugs and errors. That is likely due to your game hitting memory issues, If you're running 16GB try allocating more page file in Windows. Also there seems to be a memory leak currently with building for long enough it will just eat more and more RAM and crash eventually. Only fix is to restart the game every now and again when it hits 11GB+ RAM usage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthSharkbait Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 Yeah no wonder they would only let you sign up for 3 months minimum. Trying to squeeze as much money out of us that they can until people start to realize everything they have been saying is a joke. Waiting in an hour queue just to play this new game with "industry leading technology" yeah not a fan. I'll check this out a few more times during these 3 months but if I don't see much improvement then I won't be coming back for a while... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daphne Jones Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 Definitely a stretch to call this beta, but what do those terms even mean anymore? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moosegun Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 1 hour ago, michaelk said: I've been following DU obsessively since it was first announced, and know from experience that MMOs at launch are rough at best. Even more with a beta launch... Still, it's a little vexing that this game was built on the promise that everyone can play together in a shared world -- that's a huge part of the marketing. When the servers crumble almost right away and remain unreliable through the weekend, I'm not sure if they really took this promise seriously. Most big launches have struggles in the first day or so, but I had different connection problems on my extremely fast internet through the whole weekend. If they can't scale at launch, how are they going to scale when players have created huge organizations and battles? If they had marketed this as a public alpha, I think people would be more forgiving. I don't really think this is a beta version -- and frankly I believe they have years to go before the product is refined enough to launch or even call a beta. I have strong No Man's Sky vibes where marketing materials capture a concept that the game itself doesn't replicate. I will definitely come back and check out the progress, but I don't expect it to be really playable for another year or two. In my cynical mind, I can't help but wonder if the motivation to go to a subscription model was because they knew it wouldn't be ready for a while and need a more steady source of funding to keep afloat. PS: to top it off, I just got the email about resetting everyone's passwords...I know first-hand how hard tech is, but I have strong doubts that a company can delivery an extremely ambitious cutting-edge multiplayer experience when they can't even handle passwords securely... The game was running so much better than this in Alpha (infact it ran really well in the headstart week), the majority of these problems are due to server load. You can see that with the issue that game is having, the servers cannot cope with the player actions. The reason they have not yet 'scaled' properly is MONEY, they have been pretty honest about that, they need money to upgrade the number of servers within the mesh, the more servers they add, the more machines in locations to deal with requests (such as mining calls, scans, players building etc). I am pretty confident that they can sort the issues, if the game was performing as well as it did in alpha then it would be ok (it would still have a lot of work to do). When it works, like it did, this game starts to live up to its massive potential, it is a real shame people arent seeing that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CommanderConflict Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 I just dont think they were expecting a player base like current. Also, with all the ships on dock they need to find a way to rid themselves of clutter. Next, they put out information for like a year about all the things that the game will have and to explore. I guess they under-estimated people especially during a pandemic. Last, but not least I think that in a month things will settle down as the new stuff for people to come in and check out the game will go away and the population will drop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bastion Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 I think I will just ask Xsolla for my money back, goods not working as intended. I can accept laggy servers but I havent even got that yet. Such a shame, wanted to try this game out for a while Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daphne Jones Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 15 minutes ago, CommanderConflict said: I just dont think they were expecting a player base like current. Also, with all the ships on dock they need to find a way to rid themselves of clutter. Next, they put out information for like a year about all the things that the game will have and to explore. I guess they under-estimated people especially during a pandemic. Last, but not least I think that in a month things will settle down as the new stuff for people to come in and check out the game will go away and the population will drop. The unexpected number of players thing doesn't really fly. Every one of those excess players is $20 that could be spinning up more capacity. Since we old players aren't paying any more, the more new - paying - players the better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidCampbell Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 I was playing in alpha as well and I love this game, it has great potential and I'll keep on playing for the foreseeable future. But I agree, it's a rough start, especially for the newer player whose first contact with DU is the queue and constant disconnect. They didn't get to experience the game in its later alpha state and It could litterally kill the game if too many of them think it's not worth waiting for things to get sorted out. NQ needs to resolve the connections issue ASAP. Pending ops can wait, just make sure people can get into and stay into the game. And at the very least, some sort of communication addressing the issue while they try their best (as I'm sure they do). GL to everyone in NQ, and kuddos to the poor bastards that got stuck in discord chat. You guys are heros! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scotsman Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 1 hour ago, Megaddd said: That is likely due to your game hitting memory issues, If you're running 16GB try allocating more page file in Windows. Also there seems to be a memory leak currently with building for long enough it will just eat more and more RAM and crash eventually. Only fix is to restart the game every now and again when it hits 11GB+ RAM usage. Nope - I have 32 GB... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobBacklund Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 So far Ive been playing for maybe 8ish hours. I have had a few crashes but nothing like what OP is experiencing. Most of mine all happened in the crowded areas or in the tutorials. Once I got out away from the masses it runs much better. Still some issues but nothing that will make me rage, totally playable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkimage Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 59 minutes ago, scotsman said: Nope - I have 32 GB... I have 16gb myself and a 8gb fixed pagefile...MSI Afterburner was reporting pagefile useage upwards of 25gb and my game was crashing. Increased to 16gb and the max hit ont he pagefile was around 30gb...so it's a solution. That obviosuly doesnt fix server disconnects. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michaelk Posted August 31, 2020 Author Share Posted August 31, 2020 I will definitely keep coming back to check on the progress. I really want a game like this to be successful. I think there are some major downsides to the single-shard idea in general. I do hope they get figured out! Nothing will ever stop high bursts of player activity -- large battles like Eve or player-made cities. If they can't adjust quickly, I wonder how the game will play out at scale. If they are running on Amazon servers, I know how AWS autoscaling works. It isn't exactly fast in the context of gaming! Spinning up servers in response to spikes (e.g. player battles) is difficult because by the time you can respond, it's often too late. Of course you can solve all scalability issues with money -- e.g. by paying for a fleet of servers to idle so that you have more time to respond to spikes. As far as contracts go...there's nothing stopping them from spinning up servers, they just might pay a lot more for instances outside their contact. That they seemed unable to scale up for the first weekend makes me wonder what the heck was going on. It makes me nervous that some part of the technical design itself may never work exactly as promised. They surely know how important first impressions are and a lot of new players probably won't be coming back with the same mentality -- they won't be as forgiving if issues don't get fixed soon. I hope I'm wrong! Expecting great things from DU! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MadFrenchie Posted September 1, 2020 Share Posted September 1, 2020 Even outside of heavily populated areas, the performance is very sluggish. Chalk it up to the fact that it's a test build and the available graphics settings are terribly limited. I'll likely put it on hold and come back in a while to see if the optimization reaches an adequate point and more customization is enabled. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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