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Let's talk DU quits


le_souriceau

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2 hours ago, SansBar said:

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. 

Why not replace that "safe area" with another game that is not advertised as "Sandbox MMO" ?

Like I get the the Madis/Thadis/Alioth is already safe and we need the safety for people do their first steps but why there should be any safety anywhere near t4/t5 resources.

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Good games are easy to learn and difficult to master.

DU is the other way around.

 

The is no real progression:

- mining: it doesn't get more complex / difficult, it' just more of the same

- crafting: it doesn't get more complex / difficult, it' just more of the same (requiring more and more sub components or more time to craft isn't complexity)

- piloting: it's harder to fly/leave/enter on the starting planets (Alioth and Sanctuary) than on all of the other planets.

- building: you can just place elements, voxels are a cosmetic option: there is no structural physics for ships and buildings leading to no real challenge in design.

- building: Voxelmancy is a joke': it's like forcing people to draw circles and curves without giving them a compass and then be amazed of what they have achieved with just a pen and a ruler.

- exploration: there is nothing to explore. The playable universe is simply too small.

- character progression: Talents should be a progression/reward of what you do. You should get better at piloting by piloting. That 'passive learning' system is just 'pay2win" disguised. It's not engaging and it will hurt the game in the long term (It separates too much vets from newbies). It rewards a meta (the longer you sub to the game) not something you do in the game. There is no 'joy' and fulfillment to obtain the highest rank of  a talent (other than having to wait 14 days or more ...).

- repeatability and differentiation: a 'Space Engine L' is always exactly the same whoever made it. There is no differentiation between players, between elements, between raw materials. There is no RNG (warning: too much RNG is very bad but a little might help). There only one way to make one thing. Study the Starwars Galaxy crafting system, there is a lot to be inspired by it (variations in ore specs, experimentation in crafting, etc).

 

What can be done:

- Surrogate is a fresh and new concept for MMOs but it is way underused and too limited. You should be able to 'pilot' with a surrogate and do more, may be have different talents for different surrogates. Leveling surrogates could probably be more fun than leveling a single avatar. Selling/trading surrogates could be fun too and a very new concept in MMOs (some players hate leveling , some love it).

It could be a way to engage in PvP (and the only way imho). See Ender's Game book/movie. Add IA/scripting/autonomy to surrogates ?

- more planets, more systems. it's too small for a 'space' MMO.

- not a  fan of the 'tile' system. I don't see why I couldn't mine everywhere I want nor place a static construct everywhere I want. I don't see the gameplay value of tiles. I'd rather have a 'zone of influence' around big structures (like Guild Halls in SWG (again!)) so Orgs can have big cities without grief.

- forced pvp: not a fan at all. You'll never get a general consensus here. You'll have to choose what part of 'potential mmo players' would have to give up on or split your single shard into 2...study more MMO "player profiles" . NQ clearly lacks knowledge of MMOs game theory and demographics. Don't ignore the silent majority to please a vocal minority or early backers (the person who can spent hundreds of dollars on backing a game isn't necessary the good final target audience for a successful long lasting mmo game).  

 

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On 11/14/2020 at 5:11 PM, Eternal said:

Also, why are ores more expensive than the finished products that they produce?

If the bot buy order 'exploit' described in the below thread is still viable, this is why: 

 

Also, one reason I quit is because NQ didn't seem to care at all about fixing exploits. When it literally took them 2 months to do the simple fix below to stop the linked container exploits, among all the bugs and mismanagement they invoked 'fixing' it, ... ones confidence is lost rapidly.

Quote
  • Removed linked container access when entering a surrogate station/tutorial

You only fix it now? *slams forehead into desk*

Why was that not how it worked from beta launch?

  

9 hours ago, Anomaly said:

but it was the handling of the  Market 15 heist that was the last straw for me.

Same.

 

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2 hours ago, Kirth Gersen said:

building: Voxelmancy is a joke': it's like forcing people to draw circles and curves without giving them a compass and then be amazed of what they have achieved with just a pen and a ruler.

I totally agree! I just watched another recent dev interview just before writing this and I don't think they see how important addressing this issue is. Most people who are not into PVP are builders. This is a civilization-building and PVP MMO! They have a priority in addressing the lack of PVP contents but what about what is lacking in civilization-building? The biggest problem is the building editor itself. Those builders would be more likely to stay, join this game, or continue playing for the long-term if the editor improve to be more intuitive (easy to use), robust, and productive, and the extensiveness to be available without the complicated and time-consuming method of voxelmancing. Nobody wants to put up with voxelmancy and creating voxel libraries from voxelmancy because of the time-extensive and difficult process. Please see the importance in this!

 

I used to be a hardcore and dedicated player. I've been following this game since 2017 when I first heard about it and I backed this game up 3 times. Furthermore I own 3 high-end computers on 1 large desk all capable of running this game. I've been playing/testing the game before for atleast 8 hours everyday and I do have a very demanding job. Right now, I've transitioned to being softcore (casual) because the building editor is terrible. What was once a male lion that will eat anything is now a pussy cat. This is not a good sign because I am losing my interest in the game. To restore my dedication, the editor needs to be improved so content creators like myself can produce designs and build at better quality without the ridiculous and unnecessary effort that it currently requires.

 

I'm still playing the game but I'm now playing it very casually. It is not that I cannot put up the time (I do have the time), it is that I'm losing my interest.

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7 hours ago, Kirth Gersen said:

- exploration: there is nothing to explore. 

Well, to be brutaly honest, "exploration" aspect in DU always was practicaly marketing bovine manure (and probably stay so).  They added it to KS because every space game kinda needs this "stapple" -- no matter how true or not true it will be. Like every lame RPG states "deep character progression options" even its not so.

 

DU game disign at core level not support any meaningful exploration. Because on macro level, even with regular addition of new systems, for 99,9% players there will be nothing to truly explore -- someone already be there first. On micro, local level... well, tiles just basicly empty and relativly same -- nothing to see. Sure, you can find meganode with scanning, but I guess we safe to not count it as exploration most people want.

 

So, yeah, its painful to say, but some promised things were simply not exactly true (even with beta state corrections). This is contibuting factor to disspointments and quits too. 

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I can put it quite succinctly why I decided to put the game on a long wait.

 

essentially the devs put themselves in a position where they can not keep/make anyone happy.   The people currently playing love the hell out of the building system (IE: aerospace expos), but content for updates require major overhauls.   Likewise there are a hell of a lot of PvP fans who’ve barely even gotten their systems implemented.   The devs don’t have the resources to keep both happy, and based on the design skills they’ve displayed whichever system they work on first will be pretty "off”/"wrong” requiring time consuming babysitting by the devs.

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Well, I haven't quit yet. But there are two reasons I might

 

1. NQ's complete lack of engagement with players. Used to be I could get help when a bug interfered drastically with game play. That's no longer the case.

 

2. Dumbing down of building. I used to build ships with working airlocks; functional engineering stations; bunks; bathrooms - but now I have to build for unwanted combat encounters. I can't afford to have to replace those things to re-deploy from a BP if I get ambushed. I also can't afford the extra mass that could be allocated to either armor or cargo. So instead of cool, fun spaceships, I'm building easy to replace crap. I don't even use doors on most of them. I no longer use windows.

 

Building isn't much fun any more.

 

Hmmm... I guess there's a third reason.

 

3. Lack of progress in Lua - actually regression in Lua, since we can no longer capture info from radar.

 

My big complaint on this is lack of access to orbital parameters. NQ said back in alpha that we would get this and I've been holding off on adding nav to my script set until with have them (rather than adding ad hoc orbital calculations in Lua that will fail as soon as the next star system is added). I'm assumed the game was calculating orbital parameters in C to draw the trajectory lines - but now that I think of it, if the orbital parameters are not really being calculated, that would explain the apparently unstable orbits.

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I know I already posted once...but also Xsolla. 

 

If NQ had an actual subscription system, maybe they wouldn't need to ask players to dump in a forum because they would have proper exit surveys.

 

If the process to cancel wasn't so scammy and purposefully obfuscated, people would be less angry and provide better feedback. 

 

Asking why people are quitting really shouldn't be an afterthought because you won't get objective, actionable data.

 

It's too easy to dismiss complaints here as "just one opinion" when you don't have real data...devs are human beings that become intensely personally attached to projects, especially after so long. Objective exit survey data might help cut through some of that anxiety.

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On 11/13/2020 at 10:16 PM, blazemonger said:

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.


I'll start by addressing the very last line of your very thorough and thoughtful post (much appreciated, by the way) - only time will tell. Certainly the hope is that you'll feel pleasantly surprised by NQ in the coming months. We'll see!
 

Quote

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.


Excellent suggestions re: build mode and E key functionality.

If it's not too much trouble, would you mind posting the links to some of the power management suggestions here? You seem to be a fixture on these forums, so I figure you might have some of the best/most detailed suggestions handy. :) (No pressure, of course. I'm happy to hunt for this info myself!)
 

Quote

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".


Haha, it's for sure become a meme based on what I've seen so far! #triangleglasswhen

To my understanding, the canopy glass elements that you all see in-game were meant to be available to players, but they suffered from severe collision issues which made them difficult to 'snap together' (especially the diagonal ones). We kept those specific designs for internal use only while we worked to resolve the collision problems, which is why they're present in-game as elements but players can't craft them... yet™. ;) 

 

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On 11/13/2020 at 10:16 PM, blazemonger said:

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?


Oh yeah, shoot! Sorry about that, folks. Totally my bad. I shuffled a few things around as I was tidying up the forums, and forgot to create the new Alpha Goodies section. It's up now! ?

You'll probably see things moving around here for another month or so as I comb through posts and watch for your feedback. Nothing's going away permanently, though! I just need it to look and feel more organized for my brain's comfort. :P I like to use an iterative approach in all that I do to ensure the best balance is ultimately reached.

 

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1 minute ago, Emptiness said:

Even with the precision move keys?


I should give you a disclaimer: I'm attempting to understand this as a person on my third week at NQ and a non-programmer, so "snap together" is the best verbiage I have at the moment. ?

It's definitely more complicated than that, and I'm currently attempting to get a programmer to explain it to me in a way that programming-savvy players can appreciate.

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1 hour ago, Daphne Jones said:

Well, I haven't quit yet. But there are two reasons I might

 

1. NQ's complete lack of engagement with players. Used to be I could get help when a bug interfered drastically with game play. That's no longer the case.


This is something I'd love to help with, if I can. :) 

Where are you seeing the lack of engagement currently? I know the joke around the forums is that nobody posts on the forums, but that has and will continue to be different now that I'm on board.


Please elaborate, and I will bring your concerns to the rest of the community and support teams.

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2 minutes ago, NQ-Naunet said:


This is something I'd love to help with, if I can. :) 

Where are you seeing the lack of engagement currently? I know the joke around the forums is that nobody posts on the forums, but that has and will continue to be different now that I'm on board.


Please elaborate, and I will bring your concerns to the rest of the community and support teams.

1. CS tickets are just ignored as far as I can tell. I reported a game-blocking bug on day one of beta (dynamic core exploding on deployment) which has yet to get a response. I assumed it had been fixed, but one of my org mates experienced this bug last week. (And you still owe me a Territory Scanner to replace the one taken by a container bug - I doubt anyone in NQ has read that ticket yet.)

 

2. NQ no longer monitors the badly mis-named support channel in game. Support used to actually be available there for critical game stopping bugs. I used to have pretty relationships with several NQ- people, but now they're ghosts.

 

3. Apparrently the only remaining channel for communication with NQ is a discord completely controlled by players who are hostile to me... so not even slightly useful. (And to be fair, I'm hostile to them too, but they started it.)

 

 

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14 minutes ago, NQ-Naunet said:


This is something I'd love to help with, if I can. :) 

Where are you seeing the lack of engagement currently? I know the joke around the forums is that nobody posts on the forums, but that has and will continue to be different now that I'm on board.


Please elaborate, and I will bring your concerns to the rest of the community and support teams.

Thing is tho, and this is no offence:

It doesn't really matter if you're here now and start Posting. It's about NQs Attitude as a whole and actually listening to player Input and hearing and acting upon long standing issues. It doesn't matter if you inform the team or whoever and if you know what's going on when NQ as a whole doesn't care or do anything. 

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3 minutes ago, Daphne Jones said:

1. CS tickets are just ignored as far as I can tell. I reported a game-blocking bug on day one of beta (dynamic core exploding on deployment) which has yet to get a response. I assumed it had been fixed, but one of my org mates experienced this bug last week. (And you still owe me a Territory Scanner to replace the one taken by a container bug - I doubt anyone in NQ has read that ticket yet.)

 

2. NQ no longer monitors the badly mis-named support channel in game. Support used to actually be available there for critical game stopping bugs. I used to have pretty relationships with several NQ- people, but now they're ghosts.

 

3. Apparrently the only remaining channel for communication with NQ is a discord completely controlled by players who are hostile to me... so not even slightly useful. (And to be fair, I'm hostile to them too, but they started it.)


Thank you for the quick response! I'll let the support team know that ticket times still feel longer than necessary. (Please note that the team was previously understaffed, but we're working on that! Wait times should be reduced going forward.) Would you mind sending me a DM with your in-game name? I'll do some investigating. ?️‍♀️

As for the in-game support, I believe that's going to be relied upon more heavily now. We are directing everyone asking for certain kinds of assistance on Discord to please go through the official in-game channel instead so that the GMs can do what they need to do.

Lastly, I'm really sorry to hear that you aren't feeling welcome in the Discord community. I hope this space feels better for you.

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4 minutes ago, NQ-Naunet said:


Thank you for the quick response! I'll let the support team know that ticket times still feel longer than necessary. (Please note that the team was previously understaffed, but we're working on that! Wait times should be reduced going forward.) Would you mind sending me a DM with your in-game name? I'll do some investigating. ?️‍♀️

As for the in-game support, I believe that's going to be relied upon more heavily now. We are directing everyone asking for certain kinds of assistance on Discord to please go through the official in-game channel instead so that the GMs can do what they need to do.

Lastly, I'm really sorry to hear that you aren't feeling welcome in the Discord community. I hope this space feels better for you.

Glad to hear you're starting to monitor the in-game channel again. I hope that means the highly toxic environment that developed there as soon as beta was opened up to the public will get moderated a bit.

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13 minutes ago, Lethys said:

Thing is tho, and this is no offence:

It doesn't really matter if you're here now and start Posting. It's about NQs Attitude as a whole and actually listening to player Input and hearing and acting upon long standing issues. It doesn't matter if you inform the team or whoever and if you know what's going on when NQ as a whole doesn't care or do anything. 


None taken! ;) 

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. You'd like to see the fruits of my labor (gathering feedback - > sharing it with the team -> telling all of you about fixes/updates/whatever that resulted) before you determine whether or not increased communications here mean anything. Totally reasonable. We'll all just have to wait and see!

The one thing I can guarantee all of you right now is that JC (and everyone else at NQ) cares deeply about Dual Universe and its players. Hopefully you begin to see more of that attitude going forward. ❤️ 

 

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I baked Dual Universe because I looked for a building game where you can actually build good looking things (so not blocky like in Space Engineers) and do something with them.

I played in Alpha for a little bit, but stopped playing after I was unable to load the game for several month.

After the Beta launch, where NQ again expertly showcased their lack of communication skills, I started playing again, this time with a friend, for several weeks.

 

We stopped playing DU a few weeks ago, because the need to constantly mine in order to get resources and the total lack of enjoyment in that process combined with my realisation that we couldn't do anything with our L-size ship. 

 

I'm still angry that NQ dared to call this a beta. It's an alpha! Beta means the software is feature complete. 1: NQ is not feature complete. 2: "Feature complete" does not mean a given feature (e.g. CvC) just exists. It means that it's in a working state, where bugs needs to be fixed and the feature might need some adjustments. Not a total rework!

 

Regarding the feedback from NQ for our suggestions:

NQ can't respond to everything. This does of course not excuse the lack of communication for some of the serious issues.

I would suggest to overhaul and improve the suggestion page:

  1. Clear all votes casted on the page
  2. In order to post and vote you have to log in with your NQ account
  3. (For NQ internal use) Make an overview of who upvoted what suggestions: What is their playtime? Are they still playing? Alpha/beta backer? etc. 
  4. Make it easy to comment on the suggestions, e.g. by being able to link the suggestion to a forum thread
  5. NQ need to respond to highly upvoted suggestions and talk with the community if their responds is not "We will implement this exactly as suggested" or "We will not because (very good explanation here)"

 

Some comments/opinions from myself about some game mechanics:

  1. Industry: While the concept is fine (see existence and success of Factorio and Satisfactory), the implementation is terrible. The linking system simply does not work with such many items. I would suggest introducing (covered) conveyer belts (see Space Engineers) which can transport solid items and pipes for gases and fluids. In both cases they just create a network, like in Space Engineers, which just transport everything connected. Throughput and max size per item are of course parameters.
  2. PvP: I haven't done it and I will not in the current stage.
    1. It must be possible to have a competitive ship that actually looks like a ship and not a cube. Otherwise every trailer where non-cube ships fight are just deceiving and a lie. Several people already posted 
    2. Please remove the ugly missile launchers and replace them with realistic missile launch bays. What you now have are RAMS and NOT anti ship missiles!
    3. Make everyone involved in space CnC decision making watch at least the first session of The Expanse. Thanks.
    4. I'm not an expert in physics but why are your railgun rounds exploding on contact? You use railings to make holes in things. And no. using anti-matter ammunition is not an answer, because using that is just so incredibly stupid. Matter will explode when colliding with other matter when traveling at high enough speeds, but I'm not sure at what velocities (are they achievable with such small railguns?)
  3. Mining: I hope I don't have to add anything here...
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3 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

If it's not too much trouble, would you mind posting the links to some of the power management suggestions here? You seem to be a fixture on these forums, so I figure you might have some of the best/most detailed suggestions handy. :) (No pressure, of course. I'm happy to hunt for this info myself!)

 

 

Quote


To my understanding, the canopy glass elements that you all see in-game were meant to be available to players, but they suffered from severe collision issues which made them difficult to 'snap together' 

That makes sense in a way but at the same time, it only takes a little bit of time to visit the way these are implemented in other games (like Space Engineers) to realize why this is. The solution to this is also not difficult, it just requires understanding that you can't have "one" element for a triangle piece but you need one for each possible orientation that can't be achieved by rotating.

 

Please do not take this the wrong way, but one of the things I personally find strange still is precisely the way you reacted to my suggestion of using the E key in selecting a voxel brush. I get you may not have played a lot of MMOs or know game design but what I describe is pretty much the industry standard for implementing the UX for things like this; Have the basic choices for a function using a (repeated) key press and bring up additional/more advanced functionality  by press-hold on the same key which then brings up a (radial) menu for this purpose OR have the press-hold of a key offer a function (radial menu) to select what a single press for the key does.

 

NQ suffers from what seems to be a feeling they need to reinvent the wheel on everything and hardly ever follow the generally accepted and understood way of doing things which is one of the bigger reasons why new players find it hard to get into the game. Things "do not work as expected".

 

 

 

3 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

Oh yeah, shoot! Sorry about that, folks. Totally my bad. I shuffled a few things around as I was tidying up the forums, and forgot to create the new Alpha Goodies section. It's up now! ?

Phew.. and thanks.. !! All good ;)

 

 

2 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

(BIG thanks to all for being civil, too. I appreciate that a lot.) :) 

Many of us have been around the game a long time and feel passionately about it which sometimes gets carried a bit far maybe but, especially when you have been around MMOs and see the way NQ often stumbles around and makes things way harder on themselves than needed can be very frustrating, especially when there is zero engagement with the community basically just trying to point these things out.

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1 hour ago, Takao said:
  1. In order to post and vote you have to log in with your NQ account

 

The upvote page should be part of the website and only be available when the visitor is logged in. If that is not possible then whoever created the website really does not understand webdesign as that is really not hard to accomplish.

 

Here.. I fixed it for you...

 

fixedit.png

 

 

BTW; why are the items in the account window (once logged in) a different size and color that the normal menu items?

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2 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

to please go through the official in-game channel instead

As the official ingame "Support" channel has been the unofficial general discussion channel, could we please get some more official ingame chat channels? I suggest: General, Building, Industry, Trade, and possibly a couple more I didn't think of just now.

 

The whole chat system really needs a rework, with customizable chat window sizes, positions, and more settings.

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