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So, when is the game getting rolled back?


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30 minutes ago, CptLoRes said:

So let's say there is a wipe after beta ends. Do we really think this will be the last time NQ make a mistake of this kind, and everything will be perfect after beta?

As long as NQ keep focusing on fixing symptomatic problems and not looking at the larger picture, stuff like this will keep happening.

 

The error isn't the issue, their response to it is.

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6 hours ago, Dupont said:

 

I'm sure they have logs of the transactions. All they need to do is subtract the balance from the account that bought it. If the quanta balance goes negative, oh well. That account's owner will have that wealth somewhere. If they greedily sold it away at a discount then it's their problem. They can either work off their greed or self-ban their own account. Seems like poetic justice in my opinion.

 

Thats exactly what happened in EVE to me and it cured me from bug-using or abusing any non intended game mechanics.

After buying 1 billion from a china-farmer i was able to boost my economy. Half year later the balance of that account was put 1 billion into minus. So 800 million minus for me.

I had the choice to give up that account (with a lot of skillpoints) or to pay back the money. i decided to work with my other 6 or 7 accounts to pay back the money. It took some weeks and i did a lot of things i wouldnt have done because of lacking fun if i had played regularly. The earlier they had found out my fraud the less impact it would have had on the economy.

I admit that it was like a free credit for a period of time to be able to invest and to get me richer with my investments. But anyway it was a pain time and I never thought again about doing shit like that. In a game anything should be logged, so the developer should be able to find out and correct it somehow.

If a wipe cannot be prevented, it should be the answer.

 

 

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17 hours ago, SirJohn85 said:

To answer op's question:

Not at all. Consider the response time of triple A studios and their decisions on rollbacks in mmorpgs. They didn't wait several days. They acted immediately. 

 

I'm curious how many people think it's great that they pay money monthly for everything to be wiped after the beta. :)

 

I have paid monthly for 3 accounts put a couple hundred into the game, would probably be more up for playing it if a wipe did happen despite losing close to a few billion in assets and quanta.

 

I think i might be slightly bitter at losing the ships i have made in terms of the look but maybe they can allow blueprints to carry through, either way it's not like a wipe was always off the cards there was a caveat.

 

At this point there will probably be some players quitting due to this and some carrying on, NQ just needs to roll the dice and pray it goes their way.

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A wipe doesn't make sense at this point IMHO. 

 

There's gong to be more issues between now and release.

 

It isn't like their dev team will be gaining morale as time moves forward. They're facing ongoing churn, looming deadlines, and a project stuffed with six years of bugs. We just wanna play a neat game, they want to keep their jobs. Stress like that leads to shortcuts, which leads to more mistakes. 

 

In other words....if they do a reset tomorrow, there will be another exploit next month...so it isn't like it'll restore stability or fairness to the economy for long.

 

A big part of beta is testing for scale -- resetting players back to square one would be counter-productive. NQ isn't just concerned about meeting some promise, it's critical that they are able to test for stability as the game's content grows. They probably see this as more important than (what they perceive as) short-term glitches in the economy. 

 

Should they have made an effort to reverse this damage...? Yeah, obviously....but records don't appear by magic.

 

If they had ready access to a test server loaded with production data, this probably wouldn't have happened to begin with. Without that, there's no safe way to programmatically revert exploiters -- you'd risk further corrupting production data if you don't have a way to test such changes.

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2 minutes ago, michaelk said:

A wipe doesn't make sense at this point IMHO. 

 

There's gong to be more issues between now and release.

 

It isn't like their dev team will be gaining morale as time moves forward. They're facing ongoing churn, looming deadlines, and a project stuffed with six years of bugs. We just wanna play a neat game, they want to keep their jobs. Stress like that leads to shortcuts, which leads to more mistakes. 

 

In other words....if they do a reset tomorrow, there will be another exploit next month...so it isn't like it'll restore stability or fairness to the economy for long.

 

A big part of beta is testing for scale -- resetting players back to square one would be counter-productive. NQ isn't just concerned about meeting some promise, it's critical that they are able to test for stability as the game's content grows. They probably see this as more important than (what they perceive as) short-term glitches in the economy. 

 

Should they have made an effort to reverse this damage...? Yeah, obviously....but records don't appear by magic.

 

If they had ready access to a test server loaded with production data, this probably wouldn't have happened to begin with. Without that, there's no safe way to programmatically revert exploiters -- you'd risk further corrupting production data if you don't have a way to test such changes.

A simple commitment to a full wipe at or near end of Beta should be no issue then. Gives them complete flexibility to alter how the game works and screw up before the 'no wipe' period starts where they need to be ultra careful about their system in place to protect from this stuff they developed during this 'beta' test.

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So the below obviously all my opinion/thoughts only.. even when the writing is on the wall in a pretty bold typeface 

 

 

Monday came and went. NQ does not care and have closed this issue internally. They think and hope that by ignoring it, it will just go away and the comments will end. They expect us to be good kids and let them off the hook once again. The level of ignorance and disrespect is astounding. But I expect they stopped reading these threads (if they ever did) as .. they could not care less and will just ride it out until if blows over again. The few that can and likely would want to engage are probably told to step back and stay out of the discussion.

 

 

Today is the day that the additional month subscription runs out for the ones that were eligible. It would be interesting to see what happens next. I'm guessing NQ may actually silently allow subs to continue for a bit in the hopes some will (eventually) resub. They're down to tricks to try and keep the player count up. Meanwhile, going into month 6 of "beta", claimed tiles count on Sanctuary is pretty much stuck around 35K (Alioth is well behind at below 30K) and with 20K+ backers and their 40-60K beta keys, 60-80K potential player accounts that all play free through beta, it is fair to question the viability of the game as far as revenue. NQ won't say obviously, but the numbers we have and see speak volumes. Two offices in very expensive locations, around 100 staff, external partners and massive server infrastructure cost will roll around what I'd expect to be substantial 6 figure monthly operating cost at least.

 

 

As I see it, DU will be the next Landmark, it will continue to run for a bit longer and then the announcement comes that he servers wil be shut down and the company dissolved. NQ will be the next in line of indie devs with a dream but lacking the ability to actually make it work, killing their own game by stacking one mistake onto the next without ever really taking ownership and ignoring their player base. At this point, I have my doubts whether they can make it to the end of the year, I see nothing that makes my think they might at this point.

 

Frankly, when the end comes, they only have themselves to blame. Their lack of engagement, responsiveness and support as well as their indecisiveness and failure to utilize and understand their userbase (and take them serious) is what will have done them in.

 

And yes, I hope I am wrong in having this rather bleak outlook here and NQ has a trick up their sleeve we don't know about to pull through and deliver the game they say they will. But the numbers just do not add up. DU deserves and has the potential to be better but I just fear NQ is not the company capable to deliver.

 

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2 hours ago, blazemonger said:

Meanwhile, going into month 6 of "beta", claimed tiles count on Sanctuary is pretty much stuck around 35K (Alioth is well behind at below 30K) and with 20K+ backers and their 40-60K beta keys, 60-80K potential player accounts that all play free through beta, it is fair to question the viability of the game as far as revenue.

Player numbers are my major concern for long time now, its obviously super-dangerous for MMO. For some reason NQ seems to be quite non-sensetive to this, crudly alienating a lot of people with 0.23 (and several smaller mishaps before and after) + not indtroducing long promised recruit a friend program (like 6 m now?), not making other visible steps, that can increase game atractivness for new people outside.

 

They maybe done some Twitch investment with court CCs, but looks like little of people want to watch them.

 

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This is just yet another avoidable repeat of what happens when a company is incapable of acting professionally towards it's customer base. Anyone thats been around the game world awhile has seen this scenario play itself out in EA games before. I would be surprised if they didn't have enough funding to carry them through this year, otherwise they probably would care more about what I would guess is the majority of players being free accounts.

 

I like this game a lot. It highly disappoints me to see a game developer make such a glaring mistake in how it handles what should be a common sense response to a problem they created. This was not some unpopular game design thing that can be argued to be better for the game as a whole. This was a patch to their reputation , and it got nerfed.  

 

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Churn is inevitable with a sub-based product, especially one that hasn't really been updated in the 5 months since release. I doubt they expect subs to grow while in beta considering the lack of substantial updates. 

 

There's a lot they could do before giving up:

  • They could push the game to release and delete these forums. Presto-chango, they have a bunch of new players and all their beta mistakes magically vanish. 
  • They could lay off a bunch of people -- which is the worst. We might have opinions about the game, but it is never good to see someone's livelihood affected by poor leadership. 
  • They could permanently close those expensive offices - I'd guess everyone is working from home, anyway.
  • They could shrug and keep going. We have no idea how much runway they actually have left -- for all we know they still have funds enough for another two years of dev and they never really planned for beta users to generate significant revenue. Perhaps the reason they haven't amped up marketing/social growth is because they know the game isn't ready...and are saving those dollars for actual release. 
  • They could sell the IP and actually give up/go home, but I wonder if anyone would buy it.

 

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16 minutes ago, XKentX said:

IP ? Using amazon loadbalancer is not IP.

IP in this context stands for intellectual property. E.g. they could sell the game and tech to a different studio. I highly doubt this would ever happen, but JC was able to pitch this product to investors and somehow secure over $20 million despite never working in game dev before...so it isn't outside the realm of possibility. 

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On 1/21/2021 at 5:03 PM, Deintus said:

This happens in the normal world. What makes you think it would happen here? The track record of the company speaks for itself.

 

I've worked in data centers that don't allow devs direct access to production servers, and after a proper testing phase only admins push updates, which is ideal. It doesn't guarantee no mistakes, but does minimize them in practice.

 

NQ is a mess, and it really shows in this game.

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50 minutes ago, XKentX said:

IP ? Using amazon loadbalancer is not IP.

IP = Intellectual Property


As a 2 week old player.. I think what they have made is pretty good! Its certainly rough around the edges and a few years from release but tech like this is unheard of.

 

No one likes to be told the thing they have worked on for years if crap, everyone's dumping on them lol im sure it feels real great.
Looking forward to what this game becomes in a year or two!

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38 minutes ago, NoRezervationz said:

I've worked in data centers that don't allow devs direct access to production servers, and after a proper testing phase only admins push updates, which is ideal. It doesn't guarantee no mistakes, but does minimize them in practice.

 

NQ is a mess, and it really shows in this game.

Yeah, it's standard practice.......but. 

 

DU uses products like DynamoDB, which isn't all that cheap. If their data has significant heft (which is likely), replicating production data for testing becomes very material (thousands per month). 

 

Sure, you can load it with production data only when testing -- but that isn't fast and still has some cost.

 

If NQ's dev team is already facing a mountain of technical debt and looming deadlines that will make or break their company, it doesn't surprise me that a dev might cut some corners in the name of expediency...hell, they probably explained the risk to their boss, who decided that testing production data was too expensive and time-consuming. 

 

Not making excuses, still a bad decision and bad policy. Baffling they don't have the tooling required to identify/fix exploits right after (or didn't want to use those tools if they exist). 

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2 hours ago, michaelk said:

Churn is inevitable with a sub-based product, especially one that hasn't really been updated in the 5 months since release. I doubt they expect subs to grow while in beta considering the lack of substantial updates. 

 

There's a lot they could do before giving up:

  • They could push the game to release and delete these forums. Presto-chango, they have a bunch of new players and all their beta mistakes magically vanish. 
  • They could lay off a bunch of people -- which is the worst. We might have opinions about the game, but it is never good to see someone's livelihood affected by poor leadership. 
  • They could permanently close those expensive offices - I'd guess everyone is working from home, anyway.
  • They could shrug and keep going. We have no idea how much runway they actually have left -- for all we know they still have funds enough for another two years of dev and they never really planned for beta users to generate significant revenue. Perhaps the reason they haven't amped up marketing/social growth is because they know the game isn't ready...and are saving those dollars for actual release. 
  • They could sell the IP and actually give up/go home, but I wonder if anyone would buy it.

 

 

None of this actually ends in a healthy game world we can all enjoy. Let me add another option:

 

They could stone up and say there will be a full wipe near end of Beta where players can retain skill points only. Pretso chango , now people won't care to terribly much what they screw up along they way, and they can stop with all this secretive ATV insiders nonsense because who cares what people know is coming in a test environment Ah, and of course they would promise that after that wipe the ATV or insiders test server will be abandoned in favor of the public test server and the company will never give handouts to any players on the live servers be they streamers or best friends or whatever.

 

Then they can also make sure to give streamers goodies or handouts on the test server (so it doesn't affect the live server) to do their periodic "whats coming in DU" promo videos and whatnot. Aside from the few streamers that run orgs in the live game or whatever, most will only sweep in for major updates and move on anyway.

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2 hours ago, NoRezervationz said:

I've worked in data centers that don't allow devs direct access to production servers, and after a proper testing phase only admins push updates, which is ideal. It doesn't guarantee no mistakes, but does minimize them in practice.

 

NQ is a mess, and it really shows in this game.

Agreed. As I have seen for myself, as well as many others here have stated. Touching a production model is verboten except by a specific person. The only time I have ever seen servers touched like that is just when they're in alpha state.

 

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On 1/26/2021 at 5:57 AM, bleakcon said:

 

 

I have paid monthly for 3 accounts put a couple hundred into the game, would probably be more up for playing it if a wipe did happen despite losing close to a few billion in assets and quanta.

 

I think i might be slightly bitter at losing the ships i have made in terms of the look but maybe they can allow blueprints to carry through, either way it's not like a wipe was always off the cards there was a caveat.

 

At this point there will probably be some players quitting due to this and some carrying on, NQ just needs to roll the dice and pray it goes their way.

I can't even blueprint my two largest ships which I've spent several hundred hours on designing, tweaking, rebuilding, tuning with skills and finally voxelising the hell out of them!
Can't even make blueprints.

"Just copy and past the voxels to a new core" NQ said... "And then delete and repaste the elements... simples."  

Yeah, on an L core with hundreds and hundreds of elements, some placed cheek to jowl. There is likely no way I'll ever get them back in their original positions. Like if I move one, I can never seem to put it back to where it was, I have to undo...  Poor construction practices I know but the thing is optimised to hell and back: It's personal, it's unique and I wanted to keep it or even sell the bloops if people are interested.

 

But NQ don't even KNOW why I can't make blueprints... I could before. I have MUCH older blooped versions of these ships in my inventory... So there's no way I'm rebuilding them if NQ can't even root out the cause of the issue I'm having!

 

So if the wipe comes without them fixing the problem with the bloops, it's likely Sayonara with a capital S!

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14 hours ago, michaelk said:

If NQ's dev team is already facing a mountain of technical debt and looming deadlines that will make or break their company 

 

You can delete the "If" from the start of that .. the technical debt in DU is massive as NQ has not really fixed anything overt the past years, they mostly just tweaked the numbers so that the issue does not occur. The underlying cause is still there. There is also a lot of inconsistent behavior and different devs writing different code to do the same thing which to me implies there is no central library of "common actions" but it's pretty much a "sort it out yourself. Hell, in some places the same functionality on different sections on the same UI screen act differently (case in point, the two search boxes on the market main screen).

 

The amount of technical debt collected by now is enough to last them for the remainder of the year to fix. And seeing how they plan to add more features and content in the next 8-10 months than they have in the past three years.. Yeah.. it will not be a problem at all to get the game ready for "release" AND out the door by year's end.. not a problem at all, ther are no red flags JC sees that make him think otherwise (what he literally said).. And that in itself.. is a massive deep red flag IMO..

 

NQ creates workarounds for symptoms, they do not address root cause and that is why from time to time these issue keep creeping up. This is especially true for the backend which is in a constant state of being close to falling over.

DU is at least 18-24 months away from being in a state you could qualify it as an actual beta IMO, another year on top of that probably to actually be in a release ready state. And frankly, that timeframe (9-10 years from project start to release) is entirely normal and reasonable for a game this scale if developed by an experience dev team, not by an indie studio on their first project.

 

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4 hours ago, GraXXoR said:

I can't even blueprint my two largest ships which I've spent several hundred hours on designing, tweaking, rebuilding, tuning with skills and finally voxelising the hell out of them!
Can't even make blueprints.

"Just copy and past the voxels to a new core" NQ said... "And then delete and repaste the elements... simples."  

Yeah, on an L core with hundreds and hundreds of elements, some placed cheek to jowl. There is likely no way I'll ever get them back in their original positions. Like if I move one, I can never seem to put it back to where it was, I have to undo...  Poor construction practices I know but the thing is optimised to hell and back: It's personal, it's unique and I wanted to keep it or even sell the bloops if people are interested.

 

But NQ don't even KNOW why I can't make blueprints... I could before. I have MUCH older blooped versions of these ships in my inventory... So there's no way I'm rebuilding them if NQ can't even root out the cause of the issue I'm having!

 

So if the wipe comes without them fixing the problem with the bloops, it's likely Sayonara with a capital S!

Frankly when energy comes in your going to have to completely redesign that ship anyway. 

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