Back to the Future 0.23

[enjeyy]

Hey guys.

It was December 10th, 2022. I’ve just found a schematic for a flux capacitor at the highest peak of Feli. Later that night I was watching these visionary writings on the screen in my bunk and remembered this day two years ago, the focal point for the things to come:

“It's indeed at the heart of what we have tried to do with 0.23 to make it more like the game is a "society of players" rather than solo/small group self-sufficient entities.”

Spending another three months in the mines I finally managed to finish my time machine and came here and now to warn you.

Dual Universe released officially in the summer of 2022. It was a huge success. The initial wave peaked at 33104 players... Six months later, only 700 players were spread in the vast universe at peak times. How could this happen?

The devs analyzed the dire situation and did the unthinkable. They wiped it all. Let me loosely quote the results of their analysis:  

 

“What We Learned from Season 1

Let’s get that settled right away: a lot of things in the first season didn’t go as we expected they would. Many balance mechanics either didn’t work or backfired altogether.

We wanted to create a game in which PVP can be enjoyed by solos, small groups and large communities alike. … We thought it surely would make the game quite enjoyable for any playstyle.

Well, it didn’t. I could fill dozens of pages with our analysis, but I think it’s better to jump to some of the bigger conclusions.

Clan member numbers exponentially increase the power of a group.

Solos and small groups didn’t have the necessary tools to defend themselves.

Large clans bottlenecked the progression of smaller groups.

The grind, omg, the grind.”

 

I wish this never happened to Dual Universe. But the vision…

There is time. Save this game. Please.

This is a pvp game. Well, not yet, but the mindset of the players is tuned to a pvp game. In pvp games there is no such thing as “all players hugged each other, drank some wine and lived together happily ever after”. It’s a competition, and the blockade of Lacobus because of the Thoramine showed clearly that the quotes apply fully here as well. The big orgs were, are, and will be self-sufficient, and use anything to their full advantage, including the markets, as a weapon to keep others weaker than them. Naturally.

The benefits of being in a large organization come from the numerical superiority and the communication alone, and are sought after by many players, as soon as they find their footing in the game. You don’t need to further increase these benefits, like limiting solo pilots to xs weapons, or to a single radar type, or making it nonviable to build and maintain their ship alone. On the contrary – if the benefits of being in a big org are not limited intentionally, you lose most of the player base. One of the very few successful pvp MMOs of our time has several anti-zerg mechanics for exactly this reason (google “disarray anti zerg” as an example), others try limiting the maximum size of orgs (which doesn’t really work).

It’s not about the game style and setting, it’s about player interactions in a persistent open world pvp game. I could go deeper into stuff like the Bartle's taxonomy of player types or the Maslow's hierarchy of needs in order to explain what motivates players to play a game, to have fun and to generally feel good while playing and thus stay and keep playing. To "nudge" them will backfire. But this is all said and discussed countless times. The question is, can the vision of building of a universe by a society of players coexist with a fulfilling solo/small scale gameplay? I believe it can.

 

*Most of you know, what I’m quoting here. I hope, the one I’m quoting doesn’t get offended by this. I have great respect for him and truly hope his game succeeds. I just wish that such things don’t happen that often to these very few magnificent and extremely difficult to create games, which try to provide a persistent single shard pvp universe to their players.

[OmegaWeapon]

devs please remove SHAMEtic system. It s very terreble thing to deal with

[Elitez]

" They wiped it all." you've lost me here. 

Math checks with Last Oasis. In few aspects game is similar in some not. This game wont be in seasons like you think it will be. At core its a Civilization Building MMO with Second Life aspects while outside Safe Zone there will be war and politics. Inside safe zone you can o7, roleplay and live as you want but outside safe zone its kill or be killed.

Every single type of gamer on our planet will find a place if he is into: Eve, Minecraft, Roblox, Satisfactory, Kerbal while NQ has to develop different roles (sp wise) for Pilots, Gunners, Industry, Miners, etc. The skill points (sp tree) wont end here and more specialties will come in game.

o7 for Maslow and Bartle.

[Fra119]

I don't know what really happened at lacobus, but I can make a guess, now, the reason it happened it's probably couse it's still a safe zone, make it PvP free and it would have been a thousand times harder to do whatever they did.