Jump to content

Analysis of why some people left after patch 0.23


Dupont

Recommended Posts

One of my close RL friends has stopped playing DU and it kinda sux because we now live in different states and DU was a great place for us to hang out together.

 

However, like others the frustrations overcame the benefits, so I started thinking about why. My conclusion is that the changes in patch 0.23 were an attempt at "behavior manipulation", and it did not work as intended.

 

The vision was to force people to interact using the market as the social glue. However, that can't work due to the following (in addition to being too boring):

 

Industrial Incest

 

Say what??   well...hear me out.  The end goal for many people is to have a ship or a fleet of ships. So, either buy them or make them.  The path of mining and selling ore to buy stuff is boring and torture to get enough cash. You literally need to find, mine, and transport several meganodes worth of ore to buy a couple of decent ships. That's a tough way to go.

 

So, people prior to patch 0.23 just made their own factories. This at least was fun and was challenging with figuring out how to make a cool factory. However, one thing I noticed is that there is a very high degree of re-use of different materials and parts in the production pipeline. I believe this is the root cause of undermining two of the most important pillars of the game. (bear with me here - it will make sense in a bit)

 

1. Pillar One:  Having different materials on different planets to create zones of differentiation. - this should in theory lead to strategic assets to fight for and defend.

 

2. Pillar Two: Market specialization.  People would "in theory" build specialized factories.

 

In order to specialize in a practical way, a thing needs to be able to be built from a subset of all that is available. As it is, you cannot build a ship with a subset of minerals at a tier, as you really need all of them (in a practical sense)

 

Think of this as a tree - for specialization to work,  the production path from the root (ore) to the leaves (elements) must be separate. However, the DU industrial pipelines double back and use parts from the other branches, so it is no longer a tree but more like a vine, that twists and turns,  crossing inherited paths as in the incestuous royal blood lines of the middle ages.

 

Since the required parts need prior parts which themselves need a most of the broad spectrum of refined pures, you really can't have specialization because to make most parts of a ship, you really need a full industrial setup.

 

However, now with expensive schematics having a full industrial supply line is almost impossible .... by design (JC's vision). The only alternative is to spend your whole day going shopping for parts - very hard to automate because people are not reliable in a game environment. Mission contracts only work until the doer gets bored of it. You are essentially trying to buy someone else's time with your own.  It is a net loss unless you bring in real money through selling DACS (monthly subscription tokens).

 

If this was an attempt to create more interplanetary traffic to give pirates more opportunities for plunder then it failed.

 

==> It's like putting 80% of the spices in your cupboard into every soup you make - too much variety per soup recipe is a bad thing because all soups will taste same even though you have 25 different spices available. If every soup recipe has to use 20 out of 25 overall, then the cooks have to shop at the same stores and the spice vendors can't specialize.

 

........

 

The right way to implement this would have been to make advanced, rare, and exotic mineral be available on only one planet (even on zone in the planet) , but make the industrial pipeline not dependent on having all of them. This is, I believe, a big game design flaw - the interdependence of late stage production elements on using such a large percentage of possible inputs. What's the point of a palette if you need all of it anyways?

 

No element should need to have more than 10% of the possible ores in game required to build it from scratch, and it should be possible to build a complete fighting ship with less than one third of them. Enable parts alternatives, like space fuel variants, but with different characteristics.

 

For example missiles would need lithium and railguns would need nickel, but missiles would not need nickel and railguns would not need lithium at all. This would create different technology trees based on what organization controlled what territory. Now you have battles worth participating in and joining up with friends. Food for thought for the next star system?

 

Social glue needs to be based on adrenaline, not chores.

 

I want to spend my limited time either being creative or fighting for a common goal with my friends, not shopping.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interestingly I took a totally different paths from the majority.  I have never sold ore to bots, infact never sold it to players.  I rarely mine and when i do I mine relatively small amounts (rarely carrying anything over 1kt).  I made my fortune from selling mainly T1 products to players, since the second day of headstart.   I made satellite factories at key planets producing certain alloys, which I then shipped to a central space station of make higher tier items.  My favourite was my Cat3 factory on Lacobus, where i managed to create 1000 Cat 3 and get it on the market for beta launch, selling at 100k EACH.

Not just ship parts but also anything else I could make.  I was soon making 100's of sales a day and huge levels of quanta.  I never tried to build a super factory or be self sufficient.  i made what i sold and used the profit to buy stuff other people made.  I never made massive spammy super haulers, because I never felt the need to move huge quantities of ore.

When 0.23 hit, it didnt really effect me as much as other, nor will any future patches, because i never tried to do anything that I didnt feel was part of the civilisation we are hoping to build.


Ironically, myself and a friend both quit for a while because of the kneejerk changes made after 0.23, such as changing the schematics prices and increase the bot buy prices.  Both of which caused us more problems than the initial patch itself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This problem was worse earlier in development when every element at a tier had exactly the same recipe (with adjustments for size). No specialization was possible at all.

 

I agree there's still too little opportunity. Doing something like missiles need lithium and railguns need nickel, might encourage a missile factory on Talemai and a railgun factory on Madis... and create a need to transport something other than ore, which would be good for me. Generally, I agree with the OP.

 

BTW, I've mostly been out of game since 0.23 dropped because it completely killed the markets - so much for encouraging market use. The ore market is just starting to recover although prices are so low, it's only marginally worth mounting a mining expedition.

 

I don't mind shopping for ship parts, which is what I was doing anyway, but I am annoyed when I can't find something because no one thinks it's worth making and that I have to fly to ten different markets to put a ship together.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 minutes ago, Daphne Jones said:

I don't mind shopping for ship parts, which is what I was doing anyway, but I am annoyed when I can't find something because no one thinks it's worth making and that I have to fly to ten different markets to put a ship together.

From a producer perspective I can tell that there aren't this many incentives to produce if items takes literally weeks to sell :s

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

People I know left (or at least -- half-left, not playing, but not quiting totaly) because they lost faith in NQ ability to produce meaningful disign, not just plug holes with more clumsy "how it supposed to be played" and even more grind.

 

Funny thing, before 0.23 I actualy used market quite a lot, mining when in mood and selling ore to players and bying some elements I was lazy to bother to produce. Granted, it was relativly small things, but I done it regulary.

 

With 0.23 I can't afford things I need anymore. So I not bought single one since patch arrival.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No idee if 0.32 made it worse, friends who build a mega refinery and a mega factory just stopped playing, the markets i go to are now empty and I am building my own super store to get the things i need to decorate my builds. Mining i think is still more troublesome then 0.32. Selling ores to bots does make a nice cash i guess but that results in industrialist that also need to mine as the market ores are not cheaper then the products you want to build

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Good point, and it feels like balance is lost, but that is also because of the bots buying and selling. As some told before, best to just get rid of them all and play DU without market Bots. Its better to just throw more helicoptermoney to all then to keep these bots. That said i do hope @NQ-Admin They Finally Fix the daily quanta Bug that does not give it to some, having this bug still since day one beta is just a slap in the face.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Physics said:

Why does economy suck? Because the game loop is unfinished. Without risk activities involving pvp for profit, everyone is a builder and no one needs one.

I agree, however economically speaking, there is no such thing as "pvp for profit".  PvP is a less-than-zero sum game overall.  There is always less value in the economy after a PvP fight than before one.

The only practical way to have PvP activities inject money into the economy is to have AI enemy bots as targets.  In addition to the loot of the kill, the amount of economic injection can be tweaked by using game-provided bounty rewards like the login/universal income/helicopter monies but you actually have to work for it.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Physics said:

I get the idea behind 0.23 but it was never going to do any kind of economy jump start, just the opposite. Why does economy suck? Because the game loop is unfinished. Without risk activities involving pvp for profit, everyone is a builder and no one needs one.

Actual PVP combat is inherently a loss center. Don't count on making profit from that.

 

Attacking unarmed ships, which I'm sure is what you mean by PVP, can be profitable, but the ships won't be there for you to attack - they'll stay in SZs or be armed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

Good point, and it feels like balance is lost, but that is also because of the bots buying and selling. As some told before, best to just get rid of them all and play DU without market Bots. Its better to just throw more helicoptermoney to all then to keep these bots. That said i do hope @NQ-Admin They Finally Fix the daily quanta Bug that does not give it to some, having this bug still since day one beta is just a slap in the face.

Welfare just doesn't strike me as a good game mechanic. A better choice would a reverse tax - an incentive payment for supplying the market with goods it's currently short on. (and keeping a regular tax on anything that's oversupplied.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Reverse tax is an interesting concept, but I wonder if it will turn into a bait-and-switch scenario by accident.  The schematics for many things are very expensive, so unless there is a long term demand, it's just not worth the up-front investment. 

 

One of problems with reverse tax is that you never know when it will go away, thus you may never get your investment back.

 

The other problem is that the very success of the industrialist (that spends tens or hundreds of millions on a schematic) will cause the reverse tax to go away as they ramp up production. So in essence, the bold industrialist is competing against himself/herself.  

 

It is fundamentally a problem of lack of demand overall. Can't fix it with any kind of supply side mechanic.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I played with a new group of players who joined DU for the first time after the release of 0.23
Just one / two days later.

I felt their fantastic enthusiasm die a little at a time crashing into bugs, optimization completely absent (one of them has a PC for work with which he runs Cyberpunk at ultra and fixed 60fps: DU snaps them ...) countless ships destroyed by docking mechanics, lethal manouver tools, endless loading and handling of game problems ... nonexistent -> impossible to reach markets.
When the technical assistance put the umpteenth ticket of one of them on hold indefinitely (after a week they still have not said anything) they started to abandon the game.

And the same thing happened to 2 other groups of players in the last year.

The problem with DU is not 0.23.
DU's problem is NQ.

Contradictory communications, advertising bordering on deceptive (we all know how they presented the game for the launch of the beta ...), lack of communication with the community.

I understand that they are short of breath and that they are trying to save the shack.
But they are doing it bad.
Really bad.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Daphne Jones said:

Actual PVP combat is inherently a loss center. Don't count on making profit from that.

 

Attacking unarmed ships, which I'm sure is what you mean by PVP, can be profitable, but the ships won't be there for you to attack - they'll stay in SZs or be armed.

To me PvP starts when you accept and take on the risk of contested territory. Don’t matter if you are a pirate, military force, rescuer, scavenger, armed escort service, armoured hauler convoy, fast hauler or the person who goes in with a seat strapped to a wet paper bag who waves their fist and calls anyone who one shot’s them griefer’s. Once you cross that border you give full consent to the risks because you want the rewards.

 

Imo For the economy to work NQ needs to finish the planned pvp development and ability to skip pvp for higher tier resources removed. Other incentives for taking on risk needs to and will be added later. 
 

I’ve read that some people think because pvp has not had any updates in a while that it is just a “feature”. That was funny to read. PvP seems to be last on the Dev cycle but that would only be because it is important to get the infrastructure ready first. PVP content is what will close the loop and jump start this ship.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Dupont said:

 

 

It is fundamentally a problem of lack of demand overall. Can't fix it with any kind of supply side mechanic.

 

I really don't see any demand problem. I do see a big supply problem - I often can't get what I need.

 

Now 0.23 definitely killed demand for ore, but that is finally recovering.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Pvp will change absolutely nothing.

What will happen will be that those who want to enter the PVP zone will do so with armed ships and the pirates who now enjoy shooting unarmed ships will be blasted by heavily armed cargo ships. The pirates will arm themselves more and it will all end in a search for small lonely targets to attack. Which will be few. And alone they won't make any difference to the economy.

There will be some movement at the start for the arms race. Then everything will stop.
PVP is a pillar of the game.
But "ONE".
NOT "THE" column.

It all has to work together for it to "really work". All column together.
And right now they are raging on mining because they have realized that they have greatly underestimated the players' extraction speed, combined with lag problems.

You may have realized for yourself that schematics are not an attempt to fix the economy.
The economy of the game does not give a damn. There are simply too many industries in the game. Too much industry = too many processes -> too many processes = too much lag.
Or do you think that going from the single liter of ore needed to craft pure ore to 1800 liters served some gameplay purpose?

Let's be honest: NQ isn't proving to be interested in game mechanics, but just trying to plug some technical problems that have exploded in their hands.

NQ please deny me.
But not in words. With those you will never convince me. To me and everyone who has lost faith in your way of handling the game.
With the facts.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Daphne Jones said:

I really don't see any demand problem. I do see a big supply problem - I often can't get what I need.

Agreed that's the primary problem. I suspect no one making the stuff you need because it is not profitable given the cost of schematics and industrial equipment if it is high tier.
 

So the question becomes why isn't it profitable? Well,  possibly because there isn't enough volume - not enough people that are willing to put down cash for it. Even if a high price was offered but by only one person would still not add up to much.  Total Profit = Number of Buyers * (Price - cost)

Which becomes a demand issue.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was going to type out a huge post but meh.

 

I think it had a comedy of errors:

  • Talent Reset
  • Fighting the game to play the game (lag, bugs, expoits (voxels), and just random occurances)
  • Fighting the gamer to fight against the developers to play the game (you arent allowed to do much with talents, time locks, time sinks, money sinks, resource sinks, system mechanics, arbitrary nerfs, removal of necessary tools)
  • Fighting the game to fight the developers who want to play their way to find out they cant because this game is desgined for a very narrow group of zerg guilds and everyone else must be punished who does not want to conform to NQ's idea of a faction.
  • The complete shut down of our industry
  • Destructive Elements
  • Shutting down of our industry when we were flying through progression into T4 ores suddenly kneecapped and ransomed to get it out of mothballs.
  • Shadow brake nerfs
  • over saturated markets
  • unbalanced/incomplete pvp

All combined with losing our main hauler right as 0.23 hit hurt enough and we wanted to keep going till NQ suddenly shut our industry completely down, cut our brake lines, and added like a 50+ mil h ransom. Before that we were starting to climb T4 ore progression able to make pretty much anything we wanted and were doing pretty good for ourselves until it came to a grinding game breaking halt and all but three of us remain now out of the people we had who either had enough or that starting over from scratch looking at all the things we built around us suddingly useless and a whole mountain of grind to get started again was pretty devistaing. We were almost at the point to start pvping but we are still trying to fully dig ourselves out of the hole NQ put us in.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

33 minutes ago, Dupont said:

Agreed that's the primary problem. I suspect no one making the stuff you need because it is not profitable given the cost of schematics and industrial equipment if it is high tier.
 

So the question becomes why isn't it profitable? Well,  possibly because there isn't enough volume - not enough people that are willing to put down cash for it. Even if a high price was offered but by only one person would still not add up to much.  Total Profit = Number of Buyers * (Price - cost)

Which becomes a demand issue.

 

Its all about the mining on the front end and lack of limits to megaorgs or having hard finite limits to how much you can sell on the back end. Since NQ lets metaorgs destroy the game through mining, production, and market saturation it breaks the rest of the game. Since NQ sees the common players, casuals, soloers, and small orgs as enemies of the state in this game and not the megaorgs breaking everything it will never change. You cant change mining without taking away scanners. You cant change the market without changing mining. PvP is broken because of mining and production and ships costing too much to throw away. They need to balance to mid size orgs and chop from the top with all the sinks directed at megaorgs over new players. Until NQ realizes this nothing will fix this game or make it possible for more than a handful of orgs to enguage in pvp on any regular basis.

 

I dont even really see it as being much of a demand issue as it is a group of players using the analytics tools to systematically keep the market down by the top power players and employing an army of bots to drive the market down and box the community at large out of the game and making the money we do earn take more effort, time, etc vs the megaorgs who are chewing through all the ore and further boxing out any potential competition if you cannot get any higher tier ore and the ganking type pvp that has claimed tons of haulers by now right into the hands of the people doing all the damage to the game.

 

Without balance anything they try to do will do the opposite of what they think they are trying to accomplish until they chop from the top with hard limits and make mining more accessable to more people. At this point its pretty much too late to even do that without a complete wipe and new world generation to make the grind less monotonus but even still it just delays the enevitable of it happening all over again if again hard limits are added to slow down megaorgs and power guilds by forcing them to constantly pay upkeep/rent/taxes that scale by total property per person or putting upkeep on machines by what they run since they will likely never take damage.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Dupont said:

Agreed that's the primary problem. I suspect no one making the stuff you need because it is not profitable given the cost of schematics and industrial equipment if it is high tier.
 

So the question becomes why isn't it profitable? Well,  possibly because there isn't enough volume - not enough people that are willing to put down cash for it. Even if a high price was offered but by only one person would still not add up to much.  Total Profit = Number of Buyers * (Price - cost)

Which becomes a demand issue.

lol. Now there's classic blame the victim.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/20/2021 at 1:02 AM, Daphne Jones said:

So did 0.23 make that better or worse?

From my point of view definitely worse. Before 0.23 it was quite easy to make profit on the markets. Just build a universal T1/T2 factory, watch the markets and than produce and sell produtcs with high margin. With 0.23 prices nosedived because industrial players tried to sell all their stock (even with loss) to get the schematics they needed to restart production. Than it loked like the markets would slowly recover. I was able to buy raw materials and sell products with profit. Not a quarter as good as 0.23 but better than nothing.

 

But in the last two weeks I sold almost nothing anymore (on different markets on Madis) - even at costs of goods. There are still products that might sell quite well. But since 0.23 I need to buy schematics in order to switch to a new product and with the latest developent on the markets I can't expect a return of investment. Thus I stopped production for now and wait for the markets to recover or collapse completely.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, Daphne Jones said:

lol. Now there's classic blame the victim.

My apologies, not my intent.  Although I am not exactly sure what is meant by that, my point was that the economic structure of the game is missing incentives for people to buy stuff. A person needs two things to be willing to part with their money.

 

1. Money

2. A desire or need for that item that is greater than having the security of that money

 

At this point of game development both of those factors are facing challenges.

 

 

Note for devs: 
As a systems engineer, I work with ways to make dynamic systems stable. Economies and industry are two examples of systems that contain elements which make their own decisions.  So, for stability to be possible, the response curves of inputs-to-outputs of opposing forces cannot be of the same polynomial order. For example supply and demand curves cannot be both linear as there is no point of lowest "energy", or stability so it is very susceptible to the tiniest changes. (also known as the butterfly chaos theory)

Only when a linear response curve is matched against an exponential curve (or some other non-linear function) can points of stability exist. Otherwise, the system will never be tamed.

 

When I am referring to stability I don't mean small adjustments of the intersection point, I'm talking about falling off one end of the curve or the other due to feedback effects.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...