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Let's talk DU quits


le_souriceau

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This last quitting survey is good initiative -- great to see all this communication/info gathering lately.

 

And I believe we (forum trigger-happy people) can contribute more to it by more extended discussion why people quit (or have some thinking process about it in terms of "if" conditions).

 

There is demographic waves (from KS to Alpha to Beta) with some differences in "road to quitting", but still, core issues, I think, are remain same for most.

 

Ehh.. I already feel a bit as Captain Obvious writing this, but can't stop : )

 

1) Broadly speaking -- tech issues.  Game not comfortable to play still for many people (impossible to play for most unlucky). 

 

2) Choking lack of content/mechanics. 

- no pvp warfare makes game stale for huge demographic who whats some action and meaning beyond "landmark in space", this is principal killer;

- rudimentary economic narrows interesting things for another great many people (both in time to be occupied and width of engagement);

- severe lack of social features to keep people at least this way;

 

Some combo of this was reason for 95% quits I witnessed in my circle of known players (most damage from boring world without full pvp and politics).


This content thing actualy go so far, that I failed to recruit several of my more critical minded friends after they asked "what can I do in game now?" After listening my best efforts (I tried to stretch list as far as possible), they refused, stating that it will not do. Maybe in 1 year.

 

So generaly, for serious number people, after initial gorging of available things to try/achieve, there is not much to du in game. Sad, but simple as that. Or not?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tech issues can be a real killer for many people, there's no doubt about that. I have one friend that gave it a shot but was unable to play effectively due to his computer specs. Admittedly, he could use an upgrade, but the point remains that optimization is a breaking point for many people.

 

But with that said, I think the existence of content that people are actually able to commit to in meaningful ways (e.g. multi-faceted player-driven economy, territory warfare, and exciting/rewarding exploration) will keep people coming back and renewing their subscriptions. DU already has a fantastic construct building system, and while that alone is enough to keep many people engaged, the above mentioned features ought to drive even greater retention.

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The issue is the game is at least 90% tedium no matter what 'path' you pick.

 

Industry?  90% tedium of fighting the lag of the link tool or the random breakdowns where some random element simply stops working. 

 

Mining? - mining is 100% tedious.

 

Pvp? 90% waiting around.

 

Ship Design? Voxelmancy is 100% tedium.

 

Trading? 90% tedium of flying around from A to B.

 

And the lessons haven't been learned.....

 

NQ adds 'wrecks' which are also 90% tedium of flying around looking for them....

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Planetary system is not implemented, there are planets but no planetary system, everything is just static, not even the sun is real.


Spaceflight is boring, mining is boring, building is super complicated, PvP is boring, industries are just unnecessarily complicated like TU and the links.


There are also technical problems on both the server and the client.


Surrogates are crap, why can't you steer a ship with them? Reason? So that you need 2nd accounts? And if u use them for a travel the ship will stop.


There are too many glitshes, just the Alt F4 issue, the client calculates the physics, no client = no physics, if you die, the ship stops immediately from 30000 to 0, in pvp too, force respawn, engine stacking, many duplication bugs.


Then there is the social issue, how is there supposed to be a "brisk trade" with these auction houses when you stand at the machine, why should I build buildings that nobody sees in the end because there is no reason to fly to anyone except trade .

The only thing that works really well is wasting time - it works great.

And with the whole background there is a PvP on top which is extremely unfair like XS Cores with L weapons/radar and engine stacking (u can stack all parts).


I can hardly imagine that someone who ignores all the points listed above and then still has the desire to continue after losing his ship in PvP, especially at the beginning, this can be fatal.


Quite simply, the game is far from having a large player base, as it is now, it will lose a lot of people, mostly forever.

Translated with Google if someone asks

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As others have said, tech issues and tedium (lack of content) are big deals...but I think some users aren't even playing long enough to be bothered by lack of content. 

 

Following DU for years, I tried to get my partner hooked on the game because he loves building games and will spend hours and hours constructing monuments to OCD. ?‍♂️

 

For him, it was presentation and initial UX. 

 

1. Initial impressions are really important...the tutorial was not a great first experience. It bugged out and required him to reset and he got annoyed navigating the starter area and listening to the voice over.
 

2. Initial UX...The UI simply doesn't look like it belongs in a professional game -- it creates a perception that the game is very "indie", as the UI was clearly made by engineers and not designers. It also makes it harder to learn the game -- clunky UI/UX on top of an already complex game. 
 

3. Initial speeder...when he finally got to Sanctuary (I had to help him find the drop ship because of all the market clutter ?) that first speeder visit to unclaimed territory was...not great. The visuals greatly reinforced the idea that this was a niche/indie project and not a "real game". I got him one of the starter flying ships, but still a lot of travel time to get back to his hex because he re-spawned at some point (for some reason ?‍♂️). 

 

4. Initial progression...breaking surface rocks and being told to go back and forth to the (rather far) market didn't help him understand what to do or how to get starting building, especially since the tutorials were very broken back when he started. I tried to help him get started mining but he basically quit after digging a hundred or so meters lol. Mining rocks is monotonous enough without digging through hundreds of meters of flat polygons.  

 

I'd bet a healthy number of those ghost speeders belong to similar players that never truly gave the game a chance because it simply doesn't feel like a professional, modern game should for a paid monthly sub.

 

It is hard to reconcile the promise of a vast space sandbox builder where you can craft and manipulate civilization itself with tutorials not working, simple visuals, and a clunky UX...and all this is just to give the game a chance...never mind some of the content/tech issues that are usually only relevant after you've bought into the premise and played for a bit. 

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The game has an extremely high initial bump which, combined with the very rough state of the game's development and rushed move into open and paid "beta" makes it hard to get into. Much of what is missing or what is not working well has been brought up and discussed long before beta started. NQ has never acknowledged any of this and has never shown any indication of being able or willing to adjust their development plans to accommodate this.

 

Most of the game is very much still in Alpha state, if not pre-alpha. When a "major overhaul of the UI" is announced, what basically happens is a reskin of it. The core UI is very basic and not suitable for several of the intended uses cases, most obviously the talent system. It does not appear there is any central management of the project and it appears "coding" devs are tasked with designing the UI and UX which leads to too much information and overly complex actions with too many clicks and important detail 2 or three levels down where they should be at the surface. The general UI design really has not changed at all, except for a different theme, since pre-alpha.

 

It's not helpful when, from the occasional communication, NQ paints a picture which wants to tell a story of "everything is great, we're pretty much on track and where we need to be" when the facts in front of us show that that is not the case.  And now we hear JC pretty much roll back core promises and vision for the game where "unlimited possibilities" have now become "we will limit what you can do to preserve performance". The amount of work NQ has set up for themselves combined wit he mountain of work that needs to be done to clear technical debt and core issues in the game should be a guide in understanding that it is not possible to get to the state NQ claims the game will be in a year when they intend to "release". The stubborn attitude of not wanting to move the roadmap out and by now plain unrealistic expectation being set by NQ is just not good and will make (new) players tag off and disengage.

 

I get that much of this will probably be due to the fact that NQ is not in a very good situation financially and needs to work on a very tight and limited budget, but it's hurting the game's progress quite obviously. The amount of work needed to be done to work around the roadblock of "no wipe until absolutely required" for the sake of keeping people subbed is causing ore pain than NQ is letting on. Th underlying tone of NQ having pretty much beg for players to get back to the game or fill out a survey where NQ should and probably does know very well what the pain points are is rather obviously  a PR stunt more than anything else.

 

From podcasts it seems that NQ in general overthinks what we, as the community brings up in the rarae cases there is a response, which is generally only happening on an ad hoc basis when confronted with a live question, and the "solutions" are often overly complex and in effect miss the mark as far as addressing the intended problem. IN general, NQ seems hellbent on reinventing the wheel over and over while solutions are often readily available.

 

An example is the call for better building tools, NQ will mostly translate this into "we want a vertex editor" and then go into detail on how difficult that is and how much resources it takes. What we actually need is more options to build without resorting to voxelmancy.. More brush options like slopes broken into two voxels, corner pieces and things like that. Making smooth and beautiful ships using voxeltech is great and some designs are amazing but there is no middle ground here between that and basic blocks/boxes. Why can't we have basic shapes like the ones we see in (or instance) Space Engineers? Why is there no single voxel size tetrahedron making it possible to make corners. here's basic block which IMO should be readily available in game (old SE source but valid here)..

blocks.png

 

 

 

The "general" public is not looking for a vertex editor, they just want/need more variation in basic blocks and would be perfectly happy with these. The argument "use a voxel library" pretty much rolls back to my earlier comment about NQ (and a good number of experienced players) not seeing the issue of  this being to complex for an entry level player.

 

What we need is:

  • In build mode, select voxel placement tool
  • press E to cycle though basic shapes
  • press-hold E to bring up either a radial menu, use scroll wheel to cycle through all available blocks or the option to "click and pick" from a more varied choice of block "brushes"

 

Another example is power management. It has been discussed with some good suggestions provided since Alpha but NQ never acknowledged any of it or engaged with us on these ideas.

 

Then, while it's unfortunately a meme by now, the question is a valid one, where is the canopy glass? Why has NQ not ever acknowledged this and why is this element on display in game but not available to players? It is another simple option to make designs easier to make "pretty".

 

 

Lastly, it is _very_ disappointing and a tell tale sign of how NQ thinks that the NDA forum section has been archived and is no longer accessible. It means a wealth of information and content which could be reused in beta is now lost. Arguments to maintain access to these clearly, and frankly expectedly, fell on deaf ears as NQ does what NQ does regardless of what we, as a community think. Why make a post in the tone of an invite to discussion when you really just make an announcement?

 

If you, as NQ, intent to do things your way anyway, why pretend to care enough to ask for our input/feedback. I know this post will no doubt trigger the fanbois in the community once more but he fact I get quite a few messages from community members when I make posts like this saying how they agree tells me I'm not wrong. What we're seeing now is pretty much what happened when Naerais joined and it lasted for maybe a month or two before NQ fell right back to being their usual self. I hope I am wrong and this time NQ will move in a different direction but I reserve the right to expect they won't and it's just a temp  band-aid before it's back to business as usual. I'll be happy to be proven wrong though, we'll see.

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I haven't played for awhile because the core features are extremely unsettled and I don't want to spend a bunch of time on a project only to have the core gameplay change. But it's Beta.... it is what it is. That's just the stage of the game.

 

The core issue with DU, though, is in my opinion that it must choose between being a building-with-friends game and a game that people play who enjoy challenging progression. It feels like it tries to be both, which I do not believe is possible.

As someone who enjoys progression, I played a lot of DU but simply ran out of things to do. Everything is far, far too easy to get. I don't have an issue with the *amount* of content, for a Beta game... But the ease with which you can get to late-game content really seems bad.

 

Some players want to play more or less in creative mode, and if NQ adds 10x the content depth those players will want everything to be 10x easier. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to enjoy and a reasonable game to make, and it looks to me like the direction DU is going.

 

Other players (like myself) prefer to struggle, to need to work at progress, to lose ground every now and then. To fight for resources, to team up for protection. Doing this, after some *years* of playing, it should be possible to reach late-game toys.

 

It looks to me like DU will never be satisfying for players like me, at least not for long. Prioritization decisions made - leaving PvP for last, the balance of resources in the game, the ease of crafting, the balance of recipes, etc. - have cast this die already.

 

But I hope that NQ does not continue to try to straddle both gameplay styles, because that cannot be done. You cannot have creative mode on one or two planets and challenging progression gameplay on another. Whichever style of gameplay DU will be, it needs to be a choice and it needs to be baked deep into the design of the game.

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I stopped months ago because

- gameplay is super boring or so tedious (and I played eve for more than 10k hours) and useless that I get cancer when playing longer than 2min

- UI is garbage 

- mechanics I'm interested in (pvp) are super boring

 

But thats all really not that bad compared to the main point why I really got fed up with NQ: cause of NQ themselves. 

Pretend to listen but really don't. I told them about errors/bugs/possible exploits/possibly bad ideas years ago but they don't want feedback anyway, they do their thing no matter what and after it Turns out to be a shitshowthey Half heartedly "fix" the issue which introduces even more problems.

 

Asked questions YEARS ago and they're still open and "coming soon".

 

Sell us a game on KS and change it as they go, without even getting basic stuff in order first (UI). 

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2 hours ago, Lethys said:

But thats all really not that bad compared to the main point why I really got fed up with NQ: cause of NQ themselves. 

Pretend to listen but really don't.

This is a big part of what is happening and it's not new as us backers know all to well. And no disrespect to fresh blood bringing an attempt to get this fixed but if the core of the  company does not change it's trajectory it will not have the effect we may all want to see.

 

The latest example is the changes to the forum but it is a trend throughout, NQ comes out with " here's what we are looking at, what do you think" while in fact the call is already made. Then when community members bring up arguments against or to improve these actions it's pointless as the action is already set in motion. NQ does not engage in discussion with the community at all ,they do not talk with/include us in any way. The just talk at us and do what they intended to do anyway if it's not already done.

 

So many just do not bother any more and others just gave up and left. NQ seems to be oblivious to this and just keeps going in the same way they have for over three years now. It's just somewhat painful to see some who frantically and sometimes passionately opposed me and others bringing this up early on now pretty much coming out and voicing the exact same concerns and being disillusioned because NQ is not  listening at all and seems to just not care.  Frankly there is still time to fix this but NQ will need to make some tough and possibly painful choices (and do that quickly) to right the ship and be able to bring what is such a fantastic vision and concept to and over the finish line.

 

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3 hours ago, Poliwopper said:

The core issue with DU, though, is in my opinion that it must choose between being a building-with-friends game and a game that people play who enjoy challenging progression. It feels like it tries to be both, which I do not believe is possible.

I think there is one of greatest misconceptions of our community that builders (at least true ones) somehow in opposition to challenging mechanics or pvp. They are not. Because all what they need is access to T1-T2 voxels, safe tile and some social aspect to have fun. It simply little conflict of interest, they can even coincide (like its more fun for builder to observe drama while building something in comfort).

 

Real opposition and category of players NQ catering (voluntary or not) is who I call "hoarders-braggers", people who are not nessesary super into building (sometimes totaly not) -- ones who want to have everything in game (as fast, easy and in large quantities as humanly possible, not nessesary honest way) to show it off, brag about, feel rich and powerful, but never ever risk.


Generaly, same guy...

 

Douchebag Meme: Scumbag Steve's Legacy - CraveOnline

 

Dupes diamond blocks in Minecraft, then mocks noobs that they are poor.

 

 

> Sorry for little derail, but I think its important point in terms of our dicussion.

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2 minutes ago, le_souriceau said:

I think there is one of greatest misconceptions of our community

 

I do not think it's a misconception at all.
 

NQ promised and promoted an open world game where what you do and how/where you do it matters and right now that is not the case.

 

NQ has instead created a game within a game where those who want a creative mode can just stay in the safezone triangle and have all they need while staying out of harms way instead of creating a challenging game where you can, provided you work together with others and  build communities (and no, creating a self sufficient org is not "building communities"), be fairly safe and secure to do what you enjoy doing and in doing so, contribute to the community/society you are a part of.

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55 minutes ago, blazemonger said:

I do not think it's a misconception at all.
 

NQ promised and promoted an open world game where what you do and how/where you do it matters and right now that is not the case.

NQ clearly promised to this "two world parts" in KS presentation text (that can be considered first official statement document).

 

Devil in balance.

 

I totaly agree that creative/isolation component now obviously and dangerously bloated in expense of competitive/interaction one. This is my exactly point with corresponding demographics -- in way whole "build in peace pillar" thing was kinda hijaked from actual buiders (who for most part have parrellel, not competing interests with "action guys") by agressive "poweplay" caregrizzlybears who are insaitable in grabbing free and easy stuff, even if such balance harmful for game as whole. This is different playerbases, even if they look quite similiar at first glance.

 

I feel this especialy sharp as very old minecrafter, where same issues was everywhere on big multi servers.

 

One guy just cut some trees and dig stone around and build something great, never asking or needing anything else. Other whining to administration no end that he had not enough diamond blocks for his diamond block box house. They both can be called builders, but fundamentaly they are very different. Same thing here.

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5 hours ago, blazemonger said:

So many just do not bother any more and others just gave up and left. NQ seems to be oblivious to this and just keeps going in the same way they have for over three years now.

Exactly. There is a limit to how many times you will bother reporting bugs and sometimes OBVIOUS design problems, when years later nothing has happened or design was implemented with all the problems we already pointed out beforehand. And then we have to watch NQ scramble to make quick fixes that only address the symptoms and not the actual cause.

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15 hours ago, blazemonger said:

An example is the call for better building tools, NQ will mostly translate this into "we want a vertex editor" and then go into detail on how difficult that is and how much resources it takes. What we actually need is more options to build without resorting to voxelmancy.. More brush options like slopes broken into two voxels, corner pieces and things like that. Making smooth and beautiful ships using voxeltech is great and some designs are amazing but there is no middle ground here between that and basic blocks/boxes. Why can't we have basic shapes like the ones we see in (or instance) Space Engineers? Why is there no single voxel size tetrahedron making it possible to make corners. here's basic block which IMO should be readily available in game (old SE source but valid here)..

 

The "general" public is not looking for a vertex editor, they just want/need more variation in basic blocks and would be perfectly happy with these. The argument "use a voxel library" pretty much rolls back to my earlier comment about NQ (and a good number of experienced players) not seeing the issue of  this being to complex for an entry level player.

 

What we need is:

  • In build mode, select voxel placement tool
  • press E to cycle though basic shapes
  • press-hold E to bring up either a radial menu, use scroll wheel to cycle through all available blocks or the option to "click and pick" from a more varied choice of block "brushes"

 

 

I literally wrote a detailed forum post over a year ago saying the exact same thing. So, I completely agree with this point, I wish someone a novaquark would at least take the time to read it, and read the comments suggestions by other people in that thread.

 

Here:

 

 

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13 hours ago, Poliwopper said:

enjoy challenging progression

 

DU makes the common mistake of confusing tedious gameplay with challenging.

 

For example, getting T4 ore is simply tedious. It's a time sink. There is no skill involved. It's literally just bite down on something and sink in 10 hours looking for nodes.  It's time consuming and tedious and the only real 'challenge' is forcing yourself to suffer through the waste of RL time that it is. In short - mining is a time sink.

 

Industry isn't much different. Anyone can build a giant factory that will produce everything given that they are willing to sink in enough time to produce 500 transfer units.  There is no real challenge here either - and that's strange given how countless games have managed to lay the foundation for how industry design games can be challenging by  having complex ratios and the like. Factorio,  Satisfactory, X3/4,  Fortresscraft Evolved - I could go on, but all of these have industry design challenges that DU simply does not. Industry in DU is a  time sink - assuming it works right - which it frequently does not with "unknown error" constantly breaking production lines.

 

So the two most fleshed out features of the game are simply time consuming.

 

I would say that currently, the only actually challenging aspect of DU is voxelmancy - and ironically - it's the one that should NOT be challenging at all.  Anyone should be able to sit down and build a passable looking ship without having to resort to watching hours of youtube videos and hunting for voxel libraries...

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On 11/13/2020 at 4:03 PM, Mordgier said:

The issue is the game is at least 90% tedium no matter what 'path' you pick.

 

Industry?  90% tedium of fighting the lag of the link tool or the random breakdowns where some random element simply stops working. 

 

Mining? - mining is 100% tedious.

 

Pvp? 90% waiting around.

 

Ship Design? Voxelmancy is 100% tedium.

 

Trading? 90% tedium of flying around from A to B.

 

And the lessons haven't been learned.....

 

NQ adds 'wrecks' which are also 90% tedium of flying around looking for them....

This. ^^^^

 

It could probably have more explanation but at its core this.

 

The game wants to be tedious because "realism" or because that's the "designers vision" in areas it really doesn't need to. But where is the realism in bot trading, magical safe zones, scrap repairs, nano pack crafting, etc.

 

Also, one of my biggest complaints would be that they want to make the game harder and I don't think is going to pay off like they want it to. 

 

One example I can think off is with the new power management system is going to make ir so you can't use the same amount of brakes you can use right now.  A new player goes building a ship so he can leave atmosphere and when coming back he crashes because breaking and landing from atmo is not as easy as most space games. You can say realism but loss of progression because of mechanics in game that are not well explained will make a lot of new players want to rage quit on the spot..... they crashed in....

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I'm the one here with the least varied sentence structure and limited word choice to the point that people have accused me of being a chat bot as they see the same rhythm on my writing. To be honest, I find it very difficult to write in English (ironically I'm from Canada); it takes me a lot of time than what it normally should take and I rely on Google Dictionary to compose my writing. I'm running out of words or perhaps I've already ran out of words but I will repeat my points once again: Dual Universe is a space MMO building game. I bolded "building game" because I want to emphasize this particularly. Let's talk about broccolis; they don't taste like raspberry shake because it's a "vegetable" -- all vegetables taste like leaves! It's a property of vegetables to taste like this! A building game should have a flexible and intuitive (easy) building editor, not just extensive as this game's building editor currently is. The current building editor is capable of producing extensive results (and I do acknowledge this), but this extensiveness is gated behind voxelmancy, a workaround method of manually moving vertices of a voxel to modify it's shape. With how the building editor works and how it is designed, it is very complicated both in terms of difficulty and time-consumption to use. It is not a productive and is a very complicated building editor by design. You are required to have or to build your own voxel libraries to even get started in building/designing which is very complicated itself to create. The process to build/design in this game is very time-extensive and very difficult. Content creators will see how capable and extensive the editor is, they will try the game, they will see the process of building, and they will quit. This is the problem here! This kind of editor is not good! It requires too much effort because the flexibility is locked behind a very complicated process. It should be about the creativity of players! Lock the flexibility in voxelmancy and all content creators (real content creators) will have to voxelmance because they must have access to the flexibility. They will create their own voxel libraries because shapes are very hard to produce manually (they will do this to make those shapes reusable and save time). More brushes of shapes on default shapes (on "e" key) will not fix the problem! What will fix the problem is eliminating the voxelmancy process completely by adding flexible intuitive tools on the editor. If voxelmancy should remain because of the lack of available tools, it is a problem and no content creator want an editor like that!  We got a problem with this editor!

 

Next thing that I want to emphasize is "MMO". An MMO is not just about co-existing in one space, it should also foster interaction. Hardly anyone interact with each other in this game because the game is systematically designed like that! How can we have an economy if everyone is self-sufficient? If a country is self-sufficient, do they have to import anything? A country like Singapore export assembly and chemical products, all of which are finished products from raw resources that they import because they got no raw resources. If you don't export anything, you don't import anything for balance of payment (BOP) to be 0. If you import more than you export, you got a BOP deficit. This brings down your current account and increases your capital account. This means you are plunging into debt! Singapore has no raw resources, what do they export? they export human and mechanical resource to balance their trade! We can do this in the game: A player balancing their trade to acquire the things they need. You must not be self-sufficient! Self-sufficient means you don't need to trade with other players!

Also, economy is consumption and production. If there is no consumption mechanics in this game, why the need to produce? You can see this reflect on the increase of purchasing power of quanta (deflation) everyday continuously. There is too much production and very little demand! Add consumption mechanics! Continuous deflation is bad for the economy because it doesn't incentivize you to invests the cash, instead it incentivize you to hoard! Why invests on items if they go down in price indefinitely? Ofcourse you will invests on liquidity!  So here is another problem: the economy of the game is broken! 

Also, why are ores more expensive than the finished products that they produce? How can this ever pay for the logistics? How can secondary and tertiary sectors exist if there is no money to pay for them? If the chair is cheaper than the wood needed to create the chair, where is the profit? You see, you don't incentivize production at all! You only incentivize production for self-sufficiency! Why would you craft to rip yourself off by sellling it off on the market? I've played other MMOs with player-driven economy and I can tell you that this is the worst I've ever seen!

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As a mostly solo player, I got nothing to do anymore. In 1 week I made enough quata to buy everything I wanted or needed (not with exploits, but just buying low and selling high). I could probably continue to collect more stuff, but nobody can attack my base to take it so there is no excitement and challange in this kind of play. I have always liked the solo play in Rust, where the more I have, the more I need to protect it. Generally, I hoped that DU will be more like Rust in space, but without periodic wipes. Unfortunately for me, it is nothing like it.

 

Also, I don't like the communication style of NQ. The best I could describe it is childish and a bit arrogant (please note that I do not follow every news on DU, so this reception comes from my limited perspective, after seeing some interviews, posts, social media comments and comparing it with the ingame reality).

 

And bugs... oh maaan, one month ago it was on average 1 crash every 15-30 min. I logged on yesterday and it was 1 crash every 1-2 minutes, so no thanks.

 

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About 90% of the people I play with dumped the game. They still have sub but they just don't login. Some still do but usually only to change the skills of about 20 alts each of them have.

 

Digging some, building a ship and getting to space is all this game can currently offer. It's a luckster content but I think that's OK for the early game. 

 

The biggest game-breaker is "no sand in the box".

It's advertised as sandbox game but there is no sand in this box atm. People can't affect other people. There is 0 way to have ANY meaningful PVP. There is no way of creating like drama/alliances/enemies as all this is just doesn't matter. Dramas and people fighting each other or spying etc that what makes sandbox games work and self-generate content.

 

DU Just made a safe heaven with poor toys that get old fast.

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On 11/13/2020 at 10:57 PM, Poliwopper said:

I haven't played for awhile because the core features are extremely unsettled and I don't want to spend a bunch of time on a project only to have the core gameplay change. But it's Beta.... it is what it is. That's just the stage of the game.

 

The core issue with DU, though, is in my opinion that it must choose between being a building-with-friends game and a game that people play who enjoy challenging progression. It feels like it tries to be both, which I do not believe is possible.

As someone who enjoys progression, I played a lot of DU but simply ran out of things to do. Everything is far, far too easy to get. I don't have an issue with the *amount* of content, for a Beta game... But the ease with which you can get to late-game content really seems bad.

 

Some players want to play more or less in creative mode, and if NQ adds 10x the content depth those players will want everything to be 10x easier. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to enjoy and a reasonable game to make, and it looks to me like the direction DU is going.

 

Other players (like myself) prefer to struggle, to need to work at progress, to lose ground every now and then. To fight for resources, to team up for protection. Doing this, after some *years* of playing, it should be possible to reach late-game toys.

 

It looks to me like DU will never be satisfying for players like me, at least not for long. Prioritization decisions made - leaving PvP for last, the balance of resources in the game, the ease of crafting, the balance of recipes, etc. - have cast this die already.

 

But I hope that NQ does not continue to try to straddle both gameplay styles, because that cannot be done. You cannot have creative mode on one or two planets and challenging progression gameplay on another. Whichever style of gameplay DU will be, it needs to be a choice and it needs to be baked deep into the design of the game.

There is a rather simple solution to this. If you play/build/grind in the "easy mode" sector of space, your creations simply can't leave that "safe" area and there is no PvP, and include a "closed" market with its own unique currency. This would encourage players like yourself to venture out and take the game as a challenge. 

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I'm holding to a hope that NQ-Naunet is here because someone higher up has picked up on the theme of dev communication in so many of these quitting threads. Time will tell if this is real or a show to stem subscriber loss. He's done a good job of bringing people back to the forums for now.  

 

My impression of the dev team has been, that of a programmer led team - which means they do amazing things with code but completely fail to predict what players will do when set loose in their creation. I keep yelling about communication because,  from what I've seen, I don't think this team is capable of balancing all the parts that need to be balanced. 

 

For the short term, if they want this game to stop bleeding subscribers, they need to implement their PVP overhaul and then give us something to fight over.

It doesn't matter what. It could be resources, it could be unique base decorations. It just needs to be something players will want and that most players can get to. 

 

Alternately they could implement NPC enemies to fight - something to threaten bases or ships and provide a new dimension to building.  I know they have said no NPCs but everything should be considered at this point. 

 

As for quitting - I don't want to rekindle the argument here but it was the handling of the  Market 15 heist that was the last straw for me. Naunet's arrival provided a enough hope that I felt like playing a few hours last week but nothing like my activity before. I still think Dual Universe has the potential to be something great so I continue to linger on the forums and watch for some sign that NQ has learned something.  

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The way NQ handled the M15 situation is what caused me to unsub my paid for alts for sure as I do not feel NQ is in a place development and  engagement wise where they can really expect people to pay for access to the game.

 

Naunet is doing what Naerais did before him/her (we don't know if it's a he or she).. building report with the community. It's all the basic stuff we've seen before, including setting up a survey and a lot of empathic wording. The actions from Naunet's side however are very much NQ and really not much has changed as of yet. To be clear, I respect and like Naerais generally but she has closed herself off quite a bit after coming onto the "scene" in a very open way and I have no idea where Nyzalter is at these days, if he still is with NQ even...

 

NQ will likely start a PR campaign shortly, leading up to a patch in probably 4 weeks and allowing for two weeks of "fixing" time before Xmas break. I honestly do not expect much to substantially change until probably end of February next year at the earliest.

 

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