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Is this Beta or a paid Alpha


SimIan

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This is almost unplayable, and almost means you can play in "slow motion" waiting for the server to process your requests. to me the game should be at least playable to be called a beta even an early beta, this is more a paid alpha, to be a beta it should at least be playable and the excuse that there is not enough server capacity should have been sorted in the alpha phase of testing. Saying "we didn't anticipate the demand" is basically a cop out meaning they had no idea what server capacity the would need, if they had the slightest clue as to what capacity was needed for X players they would have had extra capacity available to bring on-line if needed. It's obviously needed as the performance of this game is as said almost unplayable and they need to get this sorted ASAP if they want to keep players around and stop the DU name becoming the latest in the line of failed games.

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It's a paid beta. Simples.

 

The big problems they are hitting now are precisely  what a classic beta hopes to discover: issues based around scaling the number of real concurrent users, whether with infrastructure or compatibility with "uncommon" client hardware configurations. And by that measure, this is an insanely successful Beta; just look at the problems it's unearthing! :)

 

Not that it's a "classic" beta; there are still several significant game pillars which are non-existent, including Avatar to Avatar combat, and Construct v Construct in Atmosphere. But those weren't scheduled to be in their Beta; they launched to Beta with the major features they planned to, per their roadmap of last December. And if 20 bucks meant that much to someone, perhaps they should have checked what features the game had before they forked out.

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I am happy with what they have in the game, it's not about that. It's the fact the game is unplayable with the server lag which they should have the capacity for but obviously not. had they run this as an open beta without charging us for the privilege then they could have spent the first month getting the servers sorted to deal with the capacity and people would not have an issue. I am a carer and have a very limited income but a load of free time so paying for something is always a big decision. had they actually had monthly subscriptions it would be less of an issue but having to fork out for 3 months and finding out the game in it's current state is unplayable means i have wasted that money as it's unlikely i will continue to play with the way things are going.

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I agree,   Unplayable.    I have had thousands of errors since i started.  Its s cool idea to use one massive server for everyone.  At this point though I have to say I would rather the game was playable with several smaller servers.    These could be combined after they get them working correctly. 

  1. internal errors after game freezes for 1 full min. while accessing crafting screen on a machine
  2. placing blocks then they disappear 
  3. part of the building disappears or re-appears after you stop editing
  4. cant mine  but once every 2 minutes
  5. pick up 3 containers one after another and loose the third one completely
  6. stuff disappearing out of my inventory 
  7. lag when flying ships  or using speeders

Some annoyances 

  • not able to queue up multiple parts in machines 
  • having to have 4 separate of the same machine because the assembly lines don't make everything the smaller ones do
  • Voxel based building tools could be much more refined 
  • frame rates drop to nothing outside of markets because of all the ships.   Maybe allow people to Pick up their small ships "put them in your pocket" 
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its unplayable...i get its in development etc... but i've been unable to build anything for 7 or 8 days or so because the voxels disappear when i exit build mode. (yes i have tried the usual build replace build replace etc and clearing the cache.).  

 

They said in the Q&A that they had designed the server architecture to cope so they were confident it would work.  They were very very wrong.  They gave the impression to people that there would be 'some' bugs (JC said that in the Q&A streams) But what they have is a mess.  I really hope they are able to come through this, the game has great potential...but they are on an upward climb at this point. 

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9 hours ago, Kezzle said:

It's a paid beta. Simples.

 

The big problems they are hitting now are precisely  what a classic beta hopes to discover: issues based around scaling the number of real concurrent users, whether with infrastructure or compatibility with "uncommon" client hardware configurations. And by that measure, this is an insanely successful Beta; just look at the problems it's unearthing! :)

 

Not that it's a "classic" beta; there are still several significant game pillars which are non-existent, including Avatar to Avatar combat, and Construct v Construct in Atmosphere. But those weren't scheduled to be in their Beta; they launched to Beta with the major features they planned to, per their roadmap of last December. And if 20 bucks meant that much to someone, perhaps they should have checked what features the game had before they forked out.

 

I would argue that if you are selling a paid subscription that you have released the game and it's not a beta. But even ignoring that, beta is supposed to mean that the game is feature complete (or close to it) and just undergoing some stress testing or polishing. Unfortunately, DU falls far from that criteria.

 

There are major missing features:

  • Power systems
  • Avatar vs Avatar PvP (as you mentioned)
  • Atmosphere PvP (as you mentioned)
  • Player based economy
    • Bots, NQ premade ships
    • timegated currency rewards
    • Inablity to sell player ships/blueprints
    • Inablity to sell/protect lua scripts
  • Player Skins / Armors (included in most early supporter packages)
  • Pets (included in most early supporter packages)
  • Planet Generation Coding
    • Trees can't render in time so they just removed collision
    • No lifeforms at all
    • Improved planet generation has been discussed and will likely cause planetary wipes during beta (that's far from complete)

On top of that the big problems you mentioned the beta should discover, ARE NOT NEW PROBLEMS. Pending operations issues, client dsyncs, internal server errors are not new to the beta. Combine this with login issues, referral program issues, beta key issues, and major server instability and I have to laugh at "insanely successful beta".

 

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39 minutes ago, Kten78th said:

right now its a failed paid stress test! enter the fan boi's stage right---->

 

Unfortunately you won't find many fan boi's here.  I'm guessing you werent here during Alpha.  Even the most diehard people of DU who love it, have been the most critical of it.  But compared to other games *cough* scam citizen *cough* its such a low investment on a potential big reward, that we are willing to wait and give NQ some time.  A large portion of alpha backers only paid $60.  That means by release, they will have played DU probably around 2 full years (with some obvious downtimes during alpha as servers werent up 100%).  So sorry, those of us "defending" aren't fanboi's as even we have stated there is a certain expectation NQ has to meet or even we too will abandon the game.  Its just for $60 most of us are willing to give NQ at least 6 months of beta to show improvements.   Like I said, very little investment for possible big returns.  I'm gonna let me money ride and hope things improve.  If we are having these same conversations 6 months from now, even I will be playing other games than DU.  

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Do you know, when I saw that you needed to drop 3 months' subscription on this I very nearly didn't do it, thought I'd wait for a reaction. I'm not really regretting it, I sort of thought to myself that I was backing it, maybe I'll get burned, dunno. A twenty quid punt, something that I very rarely do with games (I'm old enough that I know patience, I wait for a popular game to come out in a sale a couple years down the line).

 

I'm somewhat disappointed about the lack of features. I agree with the viewpoint that it's more an Alpha than a Beta. I'm not fussed about server instability, it's only had user load like this for a few days, give 'em a chance. If it's like this in a month regards server instability, then I may have to face the facts that I wasted my money. If it doesn't have a lot more features on the way (actually on the way or in) when my sub runs out in 4 months (1 free month), then I'm out, no more money from me until they make a more feature rich game.

 

But if you dropped 20 quid on a game like this and wasn't prepared to get burnt, I got no sympathy for you. If you dropped 120 dollar on this and are already upset to the point you want out, you're an idiot. Do stop whining now, it's terribly dull. If you feel like you got burned, then stop bending the ears of the rest of us who are going to stick it out for a bit. I don't care about your refund. I can ignore your forum posts (I didn't on this occasion, but that's why you wrote it, right?), but I can't ignore your whining in the chat rooms, where I need to go to get information. It's constant. Whining. Then getting salty about fanbois when really most people just want you to shut up. Shut up shut up shut up. Just bugger off quietly if you don't like it. Jeez.

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15 hours ago, GhostWolf70 said:

On top of that the big problems you mentioned the beta should discover, ARE NOT NEW PROBLEMS. Pending operations issues, client dsyncs, internal server errors are not new to the beta. ...major server instability...

Those issues are always going to potentially be there in a game with the underlying architecture of DU. How frequently they occur is related to the number of people trying to play and the level of AWS that NQ has paid for. Ideally, they should be rare because there's enough AWS backing the game up. Obviously, they are anything but rare, so there's something wrong with either the load-per-user scaling predictions or the money supply for buying more AWS. If it just needed more AWS, and the money was there to buy more, the problems would have gone away. So it must be more complicated than that (or as simple as "it's probably never going to work under the current architecture").

 

The exact nature of the relationship between those two factors has been discovered to be different to what DU thought it was (or DU didn't/can't throw enough cash at AWS to get the needed-predicted level of service to support the client base). Determining the true hurdles to scaling up in this fashion is an entirely legitimate aim of a Beta Test, and they're doing a lot of "discovering". Nothing they've done by way of a fix, so far, seems to have improved things very much, but the problems are about how the game deals gracefully with scaling, and scaling is a legit BetaTest subject.

 

15 hours ago, GhostWolf70 said:

I would argue that if you are selling a paid subscription that you have released the game and it's not a beta.

I would counter that it is whatever it is, and labels these days are open to wide interpretation, so caveat emptor.

15 hours ago, GhostWolf70 said:

... beta is supposed to mean that the game is feature complete (or close to it) and just undergoing some stress testing or polishing. Unfortunately, DU falls far from that criteria.

 

There are major missing features:

  • Power systems
  • Avatar vs Avatar PvP (as you mentioned)
  • Atmosphere PvP (as you mentioned)
  • Player based economy
    • Bots, NQ premade ships
    • timegated currency rewards
    • Inablity to sell player ships/blueprints
    • Inablity to sell/protect lua scripts
  • Player Skins / Armors (included in most early supporter packages)
  • Pets (included in most early supporter packages)
  • Planet Generation Coding
    • Trees can't render in time so they just removed collision
    • No lifeforms at all
    • Improved planet generation has been discussed and will likely cause planetary wipes during beta (that's far from complete)

I completely agree with all of that. It "should" never have been released as a "Beta". There's another pillar of the player-based economy that's missing: the ability to advertise for services. Right now, a hauler, say, has to find their customers by either Discord chat or trolling round all the locals seeing if they need hundreds of kL of stuff shipping somewhere. Same with people offering protection against random PvPers. 

15 hours ago, GhostWolf70 said:

...I have to laugh at "insanely successful beta".

Good. You were meant to. :)

 

But still, the big things that are stopping people playing the game as they wish remain in the realm of "expected" (though extreme) beta test issues.

 

And maybe the promise of free game time will come to pass, and isn't some marketing guy going off at half-cock. I hope so, for the sake of the new subscribers; doesn't affect Alpha backers.

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17 hours ago, JohnnyTazer said:

Unfortunately you won't find many fan boi's here.  I'm guessing you werent here during Alpha.  Even the most diehard people of DU who love it, have been the most critical of it.  But compared to other games *cough* scam citizen *cough* its such a low investment on a potential big reward, that we are willing to wait and give NQ some time.  A large portion of alpha backers only paid $60.  That means by release, they will have played DU probably around 2 full years (with some obvious downtimes during alpha as servers werent up 100%).  So sorry, those of us "defending" aren't fanboi's as even we have stated there is a certain expectation NQ has to meet or even we too will abandon the game.  Its just for $60 most of us are willing to give NQ at least 6 months of beta to show improvements.   Like I said, very little investment for possible big returns.  I'm gonna let me money ride and hope things improve.  If we are having these same conversations 6 months from now, even I will be playing other games than DU.  

I am a backer of both DU and Star Citizen. To date I have paid MORE real money to be part of DU (Alhpa Backer) than I have to be part of Star Citizen. You can get a base package for SC for about £39.00 I think (about $45) and it does not have Sub model and you do not need to pay any more than that. If you do that is your decision to invest in new ships - that you can earn in game anyway.

 

DU will cost me much more over the course of time than SC will due to the sub model.

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Hey, at least most of you get to login, and stay connected for more than 10 min. I feel completely ripped off, and there is next to no support anywhere. Good thing I only spent $20 on something I can't even "test." Flame me all you want but,  if you can't log in  how on earth could you test the game? You would think one of the few criteria to move into beta from alpha would be the log in process..... Also, do not give me the "traditional beta" baloney. Most traditional games do not charge a fee for beta - they pick testers out of a pool for FREE because they're essentially doing FREE work by testing for bugs. I am so glad I trusted my gut and didn't back this game. 

 

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2 hours ago, Kezzle said:

How frequently they occur is related to the number of people trying to play and the level of AWS that NQ has paid for. Ideally, they should be rare because there's enough AWS backing the game up. Obviously, they are anything but rare, so there's something wrong with either the load-per-user scaling predictions or the money supply for buying more AWS. If it just needed more AWS, and the money was there to buy more, the problems would have gone away. So it must be more complicated than that (or as simple as "it's probably never going to work under the current architecture").

I think "it will never work like they promised" is going to be the case. The entire point of traditional MMO servers is to split player load. They decided to invest a lot of time on something that defies this convention...but for what? So that everyone can build a mega-city together? So there can be huge mega-battles across vast organizations? 

 

That's only going to make reliability worse. No matter how much you pay for AWS, when players decide to wage the next war you'll need to pile on so many servers so quickly...scaling just isn't that fast. If players decide to all live in the same city together? Like they advertised? Doubting it...

I get that's its beta, but they've had ample time to fix issues relative to any tech company whose core product is having scalability issues with a public launch. 

Maybe they realize the core premise of a single shard server is counter-productive and don't have a way to get out of that box. 

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14 minutes ago, michaelk said:

 

I think "it will never work like they promised" is going to be the case. The entire point of traditional MMO servers is to split player load. They decided to invest a lot of time on something that defies this convention...but for what? So that everyone can build a mega-city together? So there can be huge mega-battles across vast organizations? 

That  is kinda the point, yeah. Both those things, though the latter more so than the former, I feel.

14 minutes ago, michaelk said:

 

That's only going to make reliability worse. No matter how much you pay for AWS, when players decide to wage the next war you'll need to pile on so many servers so quickly...scaling just isn't that fast.

What's the response time of AWS autoscaling to an application needing more server provisioning? Looking at their blurb, it seems like it's pretty dynamic. Every player is carrying a bit of server capacity allocated to them, and the travel speeds will give time for additional server resource to be allocated to handle the exponentially increasing number of interactions as players get closer. I think that some buffer capacity would give enough notice for additional overcapacity to be brought online.

14 minutes ago, michaelk said:

I get that's its beta, but they've had ample time to fix issues relative to any tech company whose core product is having scalability issues with a public launch. 

I think that's a bit of a stretch. What they're shooting for is a pretty hard target that no one has hit before. I'd give it at least til the end of the month before calling it "ample", and would hope that before that time, CJ Bailly would be making some comment on the state of play. He should have been doing that regularly over this past week of Pending Operations; he's CEO, and shouldn't be getting his hands dirty in the guts of the code.

I pick "a month in" to draw the line, because of the suggestion that people will be credited an additional month of play time, so it can go a month without resolution, without anyone having lost anything.

 

14 minutes ago, michaelk said:

Maybe they realize the core premise of a single shard server is counter-productive and don't have a way to get out of that box. 

That may be the case. At which point I lose my backer bet :) I hope it isn't, though. Those mass space battles would be Epic.

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