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RIP DUAL UNIVERSE


SpiceRub

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RIP Dual Universe. 

 

It was fun while it lasted.

Kind of?
 

I remember accidentally stumbling across a video of Dual Universe, the alpha feature showcase running ~50 minutes long. Boy oh boy was I impressed. In the past I've played things such as starmade, and empyrion, and always loved the idea of a space sci-fi and as a star wars fan myself, always building large scale stuff like star destroyers and blah. As fun as these games were to play, they always suffered from having next to no major interaction in multiplayer. As you can guess, the whole idea of Dual Universe being a space sci-fi sandbox in an MMO setting was an incredibly grand and alluring idea. I had plenty of fantasies and imaginations of how awesome DU could turn out to be, as many many others had too. Unsure of what exactly I can say without breaching NDA, I'll keep it vague. Playing the Alpha build was pretty frustrating lol. However, the community made up for a lot of DU's pitfalls. I had discovered a sort of 'role play' civilisation building community that spanned over years of living under a shell of tight NDA alpha development, which was quite interesting. Everyone was eager for DU to enter beta, and to get serious. To let go of needing to 'Role play' and just be able to take their metagaming to the next level in the persistent world of Dual Universe.

The Beta launch was certainly a real mouthful. Everyone rushed out the gates to make their mark in the world, a race to cement their existence into DU's solar system. Damn were there a lot of people, compared to the current population it's almost unbelievable. Even NQ didn't expect such a huge influx of players to jump in. This caused a lot of dumpster fires during the start of beta, and a lot of NQ's efforts were directed toward putting them out. It was choppy as hell, but it seemed like DU really had a major ingredient to succeed, player population. Regardless of the hugely buggy nature of the game which many people criticized as being no way near beta ready, especially paid beta ready, people still trucked on hopeful of what DU could be. One extremely common phrase among critics and players alike, was that DU had so much potential, and every one of them were right. 

 

With the introduction of larger than alpha resource nodes amongst all of the planets, and meganodes for each ore, DU experienced a huge boost in progression, as everyone grinded their brains out to collect as much ore as they could. Mega factories popping up left and right, in every nook and cranny. Production and resource exploitation at an all time high left NQ worrying about the fast paced progression they seemed to be quite uncomfortable with.

 

The idea behind DU was that it was oriented to group play in such a way that people would build organisations, alliances, countries, and civilisations. Unfortunately, apart from marketing efforts DU wasn't really setup to encourage any of this. Being weary of needing to RP to really do any of this, most older groups began to grow uneasy. The cause for this controversially being the implementation of safezones, and lack of territory warfare, which was a desired addition for the beginning of beta. Initially, the idea was that the only safe place in the solar system would be the Sanctuary moon. The absolute only reason for its current existence. Instead of a creative solution to allow organisations/nations to create their own safezones, their own mark in the solar system, we were given a very, very lenient absolute safe space. In my opinion, the sole existence of any safezones aside from the sanctuary moon works only to remove any incentive or encouragement for a nation or country to emerge in any part of the solar system. Everyone joined into DU with their own dreams, and their own desires of creation. And everyone was very much free to move about and do as they wished, on their own. It's likely NQ were forced along this path due to simply not having enough time to develop critical gameplay mechanics, coupled with problems among the studio itself, with none of the original team who initially worked on DU no longer even working at NQ. DU now has effectively turned itself from a promising civilisation building MMO, into a quiet, enormous and extremely overpriced museum for sci-fi voxel creations.

 

The PVP, and effects of it are nothing short of Pitiful.

 

NQ's move to stifle progression and control it's rate among DU, backfired miserably and completely decimated DU's saving grace, its player population. The introduction of update 0.23 unsettled and enraged SO many people, eesh. If you're reading this and your opinion is that 0.23 was a great patch, you clearly don't see the incredible damage that it's done to DU, NQ, and their PR. Enjoy your giant space museum while it lasts. NQ certainly took a major step back in communication in the aftermath of update 0.23, which only further annoyed the playerbase.

Recently a new Community Manager that went by NQ-Naunet was hired, and made strides in engaging with the remaining DU community. Only just recently, after only 4 months of working at NQ, Naunet has left NQ without a word. Naunet was much appreciated by the community, and her departure left a gaping hole in the communities confidence in NQ's ability to manage a community, sparking a recent freefall dive (absolute shitshow) in NQ's temporarily completely unmoderated Forums, with only NQ-Naerais left to hold the reins on a fragile and wavering community.
 

Another recent incident involving NQ deciding to completely remove ingame support, and discord support has also caused unease and frustration throughout the entire playerbase. Leaving the only form of support to the ticket system, which is famous taking up to a month or more for a response, and often the responses were extremely unhelpful. The removal of NQ's ingame support system basically blew up any players hope for help in navigating DU's buggy and problematic nature.

The ingame support team did an incredible job of handling many of the problems thrown at players, most of which simply made no sense to wait months for. Most of the tech support workers have left NQ after this move.
Their names are:
NQ-Wokk

NQ-Blacksun

NQ-Gallion

NQ-Astratum

NQ-Samaritan

NQ-Stargazer

NQ-Orion

NQ-Reaper

NQ-StarFire

NQ-Xeno

 

Apologies for anyone I've missed, but they've singlehandedly been through the rivers of buggy shit to ensure that players had the best possible experience in DU.\

 

Now that the support team is gone, Naunet is gone, any Liason between community and NQ non-existant, most people just want to see DU put out of its misery. Was a fantastic concept, but it seems like it'll just never work. With the whole idea of DU having millions of players, but only being attractive to a very niche group of resilient and hardcore players, and the recent decision of NQ, DU has just lost it's much needed momentum, and as we can see with numbers pulling out of NQ's roster, including more prominent and notable names, faith in NQ's ability to deliver DU as advertised, promised, and pitched, are at an all time low.

 

Even JC's in rough shape after 0.23, poor dude.

 

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As for JC himself, mad respect for the dude. Starting a brand new company to develop and handle his dream game (as was ours), was bold and brave of him. We all wished him the best in his endeavours, and are all sad to see what is to come of DU.

 

If you're new and wanting to get into DU, I'd advise against it. If you have friends to play with and wanna muck around DU, all power to you. DU isn't really that pricey, probably won't last for another 3 months anyway.
But for anyone looking for what DU was pitched as, it's looking like a hard skip. 

And now some random memes to dust off the post.

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RIP, nobody wanted you here. Except for maybe your competitors, although they probably feel guilty about it now.

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Bye spicerub! Your reasons for leaving are all spot on and things we all worry about and struggle with. I hope you enjoy whatever game you move onto. I’ve always been a big fan of your ship building and will miss seeing your designs out there.

 

obligatory can I have your stuff? :) 

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That list of NQ names who left in all fairness and IMO more likely is a list of employees working for a BPO with whom NQ had a contract to provide support. As NQ ended that contract, these guys would no longer show up and would either be redeployed to other clients or let go by the BPO. 

 

But yes, it's not DU. The game, or what is supposed to become a game, has all the promise and potential in the world and it has certainly been shows that the tech behind it needs work but could function as advertised. The problem is not the game, the problem is NQ and it's "senior staff" and "managers" culture. If NQ were a dozen of programmers in a shed with a somewhat flamboyant and driven  project lead/manager (ehum.. Hello games) who decides to hunker down and not say a word until they fix the damn code on a botch (for whatever reason) first attempt.

 

NQ's LinkedIN mentions 74 staff, from their titles it is very possible to create a fairly solid and organized development structure on all fronts. The one thing that is missing there is a project manager who oversees everything and has the authority to make decisions on what happens (next). To me it feels like JC is currently doing that and while he may be a mad scientist and have a great vision for the game, that in itself would make him not fitting for the role. I fully expect he will put vision over what is technically feasible and asks for things that simply can't (yet) be done or only drives the high level (visual) designs while ignoring (because unaware) of the underlying low level requirements.

 

And it shows. The schematics system introduced in 0.23 really is not bad, in fact it could be great and in the big shiny example for JC, EVE, it works fine if not great. The reason it work in EVE though is because there are several underlying game loops and mechanics that feed into that and enable that. All of this is missing in DU and not only that, they are not even a consideration. NQ, by means of JC, only wants to bring in the high level "visual" stuff, they want to see all the pretty effects and lighting hung on the ceiling but ignore the fact they need to run cables for power and control to all those lights for them to work, all neatly tucked away in cable trunks and well organized. Instead, as they find "oops we need power", NQ just start mad rushing in extension cord which are then seen hanging from the ceiling all over the place. The result is a messy, unmanageable pile of cables, not a fun, flashy lighting grid. NQ bypasses the one person that can make all that be what it needs to be, the guy with the plan for the lighting grid, who knows what he owner wants and knows what he needs to have the engineers do to make it happen.. 

 

 

JC is a nerd, he gets all "look at this cool stuff people do in my game" on Twitter and that is all he sees. To put it bluntly he chooses (as he is an intelligent person) to ignore all the problems and only wants to go "oh, shiny".. And that is a problem when the same person is the one setting the direction for the development team to follow.

 

 

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For me most of magic died out, when I realised, that (at least -- currently) game not about cool space empires/interconnected society, politics and wars, but about small groups (or even solo) of boring nerds, sitting on their factories and containers, bragging how much useless shit they producing, owning or building. Amazing creations.

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1 hour ago, le_souriceau said:

For me most of magic died out, when I realised, that its (at least -- currently) game not about cool space empires/interconnected society, politics and wars, but about small groups (or even solo) of boring nerds, sitting on their factories and containers, bragging how much useless shit they producing, owning or building. Amazing creations.

...it's a game that's only been in beta for like...a year?  You know before there were world-spanning empires, there were just small tribes of selfish people simply trying not to die, eh?
Same thing, just gotta not self-delete out of sadness before it gets moving.  Tribes will band together and form little kingdoms.  Kingdoms will become empires.  Empires will become nations.  Nations will become galactic spanning federations lol

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RIP  Blacksun... Wokk... Stargazer  the NQ GM Trio with the Most fun and intresting ideas to break the game in many different ways....


Blacksun tryd one of the best attempts to Fix mining and broke his hand while writing code man i Hope its recoverd...

Wokk Best Pepe Troll but also a Super friendly NQ GM what did a lot of good stuff to everyone.

Stargazer The Person what got my Ships Out of the Voide BUG and helpt also Many others but i was not able to gift him my Ship before he left... Also the guy who crashd with me the Alpha server once ❤️ And on his tile on live server Testing a bug with Sanc units :D
 

 

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On 3/11/2021 at 9:13 PM, SpiceRub said:

RIP Dual Universe. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Unfortunately, I share some of the same sentiments. I was promised a PvP focused game, and the PvP is just so bland and not engaging at all for me. I like mining, I like building, but I want to play a game, not whatever DU is.

 

DU just isn't fun. I don't know what the devs are thinking, what direction they plan on taking the game, but other then flying and trying not to crash I just don't enjoy it. I was hoping for massive fights, people breaking into each others bases, and then having some form of AvA combat so you can take over the base without completely destroying it.

I no longer have hope for DU, as I feel like I was lied to, or at the very least that the initial videos the Devs made talking about DU isn't anything close to what is being developed.

I wish NQ luck, and keep working towards making a game. But, right now this just is not what I call a game, it's just not fun.

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I don’t know if it’s dead yet, but my main concern is we’re going to have another playerbase purge if they don’t pull something cool out of somewhere before Starbase goes early release. 

 

More  and more people are starting to talk about it on our discord. 

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