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Analysis of why some people left after patch 0.23


Dupont

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On 1/19/2021 at 3:18 PM, Dupont said:

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.

 

You've talked about yourself in DU, which is great. Now can you take a moment and focus how 0.23 will bring more value 1 year from now for the actual/future players ?

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35 minutes ago, Elitez said:

You've talked about yourself in DU, which is great. Now can you take a moment and focus how 0.23 will bring more value 1 year from now for the actual/future players ?

Sure. All I can do is guess at NQ's intent at the moment.

 

I think they were trying to expand the dynamic range of scarcity and capability of items produced by players. I suspect they were surprised how quickly players moved from low tiers to high tiers, so they attempted to widen the gap between low end and high end items to have something to strive for.  Well, we all know how well that worked, closing the barn door and all that.

 

So future players, in theory (I'm guessing here), would have the benefit of staying interested in the game longer because it takes longer to get to the high tiers with the added requirement of cooperation from other people. In my opinion it was a sideways attempt at creating more social interaction. If this was done from the start, then it was the right thing to do. The sin was destroying all the hard work and efforts that people already put in for months and months, which did not respect their time.

 

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7 minutes ago, Elitez said:

You've talked about yourself in DU, which is great. Now can you take a moment and focus how 0.23 will bring more value 1 year from now for the actual/future players ?

Well, I don't think it was intended to bring benefits to the players, at least not everyone.

The point was to extend the game lifespan by both give NQ time to expand their tech (remember that the more we build the more servers are under stress, and there's a point where servers can't keep up anymore, this is fairly common in this kind of games) and slow down our progression, which honestly was quite fast if you consider top tier org.

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19 minutes ago, Fra119 said:

 

... and there's a point where servers can't keep up anymore, this is fairly common in this kind of games) and slow down our progression, which honestly was quite fast if you consider top tier org.

Another game, Reign of Kings (also voxel based), had the same problem. Too many objects in the virtual world was overloading the servers.  

My opinion at the time was to have a steadily increasing maintenance cost of the tile/construct/building based on the number of objects it contained. That would give incentive to create efficient and elegant structures instead of sprawls. It's too late for that for DU in this star system, but perhaps the next.

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2 minutes ago, Dupont said:

Another game, Reign of Kings (also voxel based), had the same problem. Too many objects in the virtual world was overloading the servers.  

My opinion at the time was to have a steadily increasing maintenance cost of the tile/construct/building based on the number of objects it contained. That would give incentive to create efficient and elegant structures instead of sprawls. It's too late for that for DU in this star system, but perhaps the next.

This is precisely why this game needs taxes/property taxes based on how much you cram into tiles or surrounding area along with upkeep/maintenence based on usage of ships or industry to slow down top orgs as well as limiting how much you can put in the market. If you can only put so much into each market and production has a scaling cost to run mass industries or you are hoarding mass quantities of items in a warehouse those items should also slowly take damage or change into something like rusted iron if you dont use mats for a given time like a week/month unless you want to re-process rusted or onidized materials.

 

Either way something has to be done about it.

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40 minutes ago, Warlander said:

This is precisely why this game needs taxes/property taxes based on how much you cram into tiles or surrounding area along with upkeep/maintenence

On second thought, the core idea of slowing down unrestrained growth is good, but maybe maintenance has its own problems. If people don't play for a while, you end up with a lot of "decayed" areas or items which could have the side effect of creating slums.  Also, you want to welcome someone back who hasn't played in a while. Decay due to loss of maintenance has the opposite effect and could turn off returning players.

So, the resistance to unhealthy growth needs to happen at the time of construction. Perhaps the next voxel you place takes a fraction longer or takes slightly more materials based on how many are already there. Once it is built, then leave it alone with no maintenance.

 

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22 minutes ago, Dupont said:

On second thought, the core idea of slowing down unrestrained growth is good, but maybe maintenance has its own problems. If people don't play for a while, you end up with a lot of "decayed" areas or items which could have the side effect of creating slums.  Also, you want to welcome someone back who hasn't played in a while. Decay due to loss of maintenance has the opposite effect and could turn off returning players.

So, the resistance to unhealthy growth needs to happen at the time of construction. Perhaps the next voxel you place takes a fraction longer or takes slightly more materials based on how many are already there. Once it is built, then leave it alone with no maintenance.

 

Well, the first thing should be a limit on how many cores you can have simultaneously, now we're at 17 but this can easily be expanded by creating your own org. I bet NQ can find a reasonable number between 17 and literally hundreds that could both please anyone and prevent the 500Lcore tall towers.

 

The second thing should be finding a way to despawn constructs after X time from the owner's last login, let's say a month. Ofc you'll find magic blueprints in your inventory to redeploy everything as you come back.

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2 hours ago, Dupont said:

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.

 

 

I was mostly kidding, but your argument was essentially that supply is bad because the suppliers think the demand is weak. That's not a demand problem... that's a problem with the suppliers' confidence.

 

There's only a demand problem if sell orders are on the market and no one is buying.

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1 hour ago, Daphne Jones said:

... that's a problem with the suppliers' confidence.

Now I understand. Thank you. Yes, I agree with you on that for sure. 

 

At the moment, I am personally deciding if I want to put a 10 million quanta element on the market  - the tax and storage costs aren't free if it doesn't sell.

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2 hours ago, Warlander said:

This is precisely why this game needs taxes/property taxes based on how much you cram into tiles or surrounding area along with upkeep/maintenence based on usage of ships or industry to slow down top orgs as well as limiting how much you can put in the market. If you can only put so much into each market and production has a scaling cost to run mass industries or you are hoarding mass quantities of items in a warehouse those items should also slowly take damage or change into something like rusted iron if you dont use mats for a given time like a week/month unless you want to re-process rusted or onidized materials.

 

Either way something has to be done about it.

Whats the difference between these 3 scenarios server wise, upkeep wise ? 10 buildings on 3 tiles, 1 tile and 2 tiles. What difference does it make for you ? Dont you think there are ways to bypass these scenarios ?
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4 hours ago, Fra119 said:

Well, the first thing should be a limit on how many cores you can have simultaneously, now we're at 17 but this can easily be expanded by creating your own org. I bet NQ can find a reasonable number between 17 and literally hundreds that could both please anyone and prevent the 500Lcore tall towers.

The number of cores for an org should be limited by the sum of the corresponding skills of all members and not by a single player with the best skills only. It makes sense that a large org can have more cores than a small or even single-player-org. That would solve the problem with hundreds of cores for single-player-orgs.

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.23 just made it so I had to spend 2 weeks mining to continue playing with my remote, self sufficient T1 element factory.

 

That’s it, just a pointless barrier of tedium. My wife quit because she just wasn’t willing to afk grind scanning and mining all day long to get back the elaborate factory she spent a month+ building and optimizing. 

 

I’m trying to get her to come back now that our factory is online again and we’re building our line of prototypes, for an eventual commercial ship building industry; but she’s moved on and doesn’t trust NQ’s ability to understand the consequences of their decision or how to achieve their vision in proper order of necessary operations.

 

At this point every bit of effort should be going into alternatives to currency generation other mining. Mining is t he foundation of t he game’s economy, it’s the only labor selling job, and it’s shit. That isn’t viable.

 

Most people are not going to spend 100’s of hrs playing other games and checking in to move a ship 1k and scan every 30mins or watching Netflix or absently clicking their mouse for hours on a meganode — they’re just going to play a game that’s actually fun.
 

I get this game wants to be a competitor to Eve, but it’s like it only wants to appeal to their most dedicated fanbase... who are just going to keep playing Eve....

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12 hours ago, Detroitdregs said:

but she’s moved on and doesn’t trust NQ’s ability to understand the consequences of their decision or how to achieve their vision

Yeah, there doesn't seem to be much consideration from NQ of the time and energy people have invested into building up their assets and estate. When you betray that trust, many people never come back because it can easily happen again. If you lent your car to a friend and he trashes it and doesn't even apologize, are you likely to loan them your car again?

 

If they spent a little bit of extra effort into thinking of how to preserve people's existing infrastructure, and make sweeping changes only for new things (like in the new star system), then players would not have been so alienated.

....

 

It's an easy thing to happen for game developers in general. They live, breathe, eat and sleep in that universe so they start thinking that everyone else playing does too.

In the attempt to be as realistic as possible, the game design makes certain false assumptions. For example in real life, if you are faced with challenges you can't just quit and do something else, so you are pretty much a captive audience to reality.  In a game that isn't the case and you can easily walk away.

Game development requires a keen understanding of how much hassle is too much. At what point does the pain overcome the fun?  Violations of trust lowers that inflection point quite a bit.

 

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