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NQ quietly rolling out 0.24 ..


blazemonger

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Are we serious here? Sure, 0.24 is at best a very minor patch from what we know but a last minute announcement of extended downtime on St. Patricks day, a public holiday in many countries..

 

NQ seems to have really locked up the keys to their marketing playbook here. There was supposed to be an AMA with JC prior to 0.24 and with this I guess we can conclude that 0.24 really is some new rocks, soil, plant and trees, two new  voxel brushes which are questionable, a wallet and a jetpack function which no one seems to understand the use for. This is not worth being called 0.24 .. it's more the next 0.23.x

 

The fact that NQ is doing this quietly with just a 30 MINUTE NOTICE for a 5 hour downtime.. The fail is strong with this one and I would not be surprised if the patch break on a massive scale.. But we'll see

 

And just under 200 reaction on the Discord announcement, many of which are doubles no doubt., kind of tells a story here.. we're down to a few hundred players who actually still care enough and many would be backers so no further revenue for NQ..

 

Also, as the patch is rolling out, where are the release notes?

 

Good job NQ.. you really set yourself up for success here../s

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I cannot disagree with what you have pointed out, but its 0.24. If we are going for 1.00 I would think we are going good now.

Sure a lot of important peeps left, but let keep hope alive with the few that are left.

 

Me is chatting a lot on support and there are a few(12-20) who chat along. Also we are a small community in this game, and so are many others.

Lets hope NQ will have the funds to keep this alive and we will progress with a slow pace.

 

 

(I really just care for my ship to be done and have funds to explore the galaxy)

 

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I'm sure thousands are so excited that the leaves on the trees will look better than yesterday. I am getting so bored with DU waiting for something new to happen. Maybe a new planet/solar system might be more exciting but many of my old DU friends don't play any more, and I suppose these new fancy trees might be on my DU grave soon!. BORING!!!!!

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33 minutes ago, Peckem said:

I'm sure thousands are so excited that the leaves on the trees will look better than yesterday. I am getting so bored with DU waiting for something new to happen. Maybe a new planet/solar system might be more exciting but many of my old DU friends don't play any more, and I suppose these new fancy trees might be on my DU grave soon!. BORING!!!!!

No disrespect intended, but I believe you are looking at this the wrong way.

 

When I first saw this game a week ago on youtube, it looked horrible. And I almost didn't bother. Why ? Because the graphics are horrible. Only reason I played is because a friend helped me understand the potential of the game.

 

To bring in new players, they need eye candy NOW. So the "trees" is a step in the direction for this. To bring in more players, keeps the funds rolling in, and if the funds are rolling in, then NQ can thus keep working on the game. If people would stop being negative and try to get more players into the game, instead of pushing them out, then maybe NQ would have the funds to get this game into a direction we all want.

The old players will come back, once more substantial meat is put into the game. Like Astroid mining for example. But that won't happen if NQ can't afford to keep the server alive.

 

Bottom line, we need more paying players. And to do that, they must appeal to their graphical senses.

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19 minutes ago, Hexonymous said:

No disrespect intended, but I believe you are looking at this the wrong way.

 

When I first saw this game a week ago on youtube, it looked horrible. And I almost didn't bother. Why ? Because the graphics are horrible. Only reason I played is because a friend helped me understand the potential of the game.

 

To bring in new players, they need eye candy NOW. So the "trees" is a step in the direction for this. To bring in more players, keeps the funds rolling in, and if the funds are rolling in, then NQ can thus keep working on the game. If people would stop being negative and try to get more players into the game, instead of pushing them out, then maybe NQ would have the funds to get this game into a direction we all want.

The old players will come back, once more substantial meat is put into the game. Like Astroid mining for example. But that won't happen if NQ can't afford to keep the server alive.

 

Bottom line, we need more paying players. And to do that, they must appeal to their graphical senses.

We dont need new players NOW. We need to retain new players, old players, etc. The game is going into a direction THEY want. Their vision, their project, their money, etc. Old players are here or around here, dont worries :)

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11 minutes ago, Hexonymous said:

I believe you are looking at this the wrong way.

 

When I first saw this game a week ago on youtube, it looked horrible. And I almost didn't bother. Why ? Because the graphics are horrible. Only reason I played is because a friend helped me understand the potential of the game.

 

To bring in new players, they need eye candy NOW. So the "trees" is a step in the direction for this. To bring in more players, keeps the funds rolling in, and if the funds are rolling in, then NQ can thus keep working on the game. If people would stop being negative and try to get more players into the game, instead of pushing them out, then maybe NQ would have the funds to get this game into a direction we all want.

The old players will come back, once more substantial meat is put into the game. Like Astroid mining for example. But that won't happen if NQ can't afford to keep the server alive.

 

Bottom line, we need more paying players. And to do that, they must appeal to their graphical senses.

 

I play the game since a few days and agree with this.

Ugly graphic, even in a beta, shouldn't be.

I payed for three months and there are several things i don't like.

 

First of all is the missing information and keep the community up to date. This is very important, no matter how long the work will last. As long we get information about what is happening, we will be lucky and pay ! For sure.

Not geting information about a server down and how long it will take, steals my time by hiting the login button for an hour (just doing it and pisses me off)

The discussion about the bp's i can understand, even if i was in the game before the bps came in. Way to expensive, takes to much time in a testing phase. For testing the bps shouldn't cost any quantas...after release it is, like it should be.

I am tester and pay for it...okay, but what we get after release ? A free time to play ? A special item ingame ? A wet handshake ?

 

The game runs smooth so far on an AMD 2700X with 8 Cores 16 Threads with 32GB DDR4 3200 and a 2070 8GB on a M.2 with 500GB. Some micro stutters, thats it.

 

And you are right: The old players will come back IF the game will see it's release. Until then, new players like you and me are here ^^

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18 minutes ago, Elitez said:

We dont need new players NOW. We need to retain new players, old players, etc. The game is going into a direction THEY want. Their vision, their project, their money, etc. Old players are here or around here, dont worries :)

Remember, it's about money in the end. If old players have already paid, but not enough of them are sticking around, and are getting refunds, then that money is taken away from NQ. And I have seen many say they got refunded. So NQ needs money. To do that, they need paying customers. New players is how they do that.

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I love this game started a month prior to .23 update, when it happened I was a hater. It did take me a month to make my small container factory. I thought the Schematics added to the game was efffed up. Whole industry worth nothing and I just got it up maybe got 3 lg containers. Now i understand the point of the schematics and makes the game more of a challenge. On topic the graphics don't bother me at all. I joined the game because of the concept of being able to build and create a space civilization. Cool ship builds and buildings and functional element's. the amount of diversity in this game is amazing you can do allot. I personally have so many projects going on this one character, I am having a blast playing this game and of course the lags and glitches are a negative. Any improvement as far as I am concerned is a plus to a already cool game. So cool grass text and trees cool some thing is better then nothing. I just wish i could make more money with my product then just selling the ore. Bring back element damage penalty. so we can cell parts. there's a few element's that are pointless to even use or get. like the repair thing being one it does what. Cool with the up date. Remember build something cool, Oh food for thought a in game news paper instead of discord would be cool, and some events on the game people wanna show there stuff of people are proud of what they make. Ship shows product shows. Oh it be cool to if you had high pilot skills or what not and you make a product and place it on the market that those skills would transfer with the product. So some one with a higher skill could set a appropriate price.  Just ranting kids at school and I WANNA PLAY ty

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We all ways need new players, Think the old player gave it a whirl and it didn't pan out for them. or the schems might of really hurt allot of players and they dont want to bother with re doing there indust that they put time into. the old players if they wanna come back cool but we don't need them it'll take a new player over a old player. A old player jumps on and knows everything and is pissed off cause now they know nothing, but still thinks that what they knew should be. A new player really doesn't know what to know. You know

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1 minute ago, Blacksunshine said:

We all ways need new players, Think the old player gave it a whirl and it didn't pan out for them. or the schems might of really hurt allot of players and they dont want to bother with re doing there indust that they put time into. the old players if they wanna come back cool but we don't need them it'll take a new player over a old player. A old player jumps on and knows everything and is pissed off cause now they know nothing, but still thinks that what they knew should be. A new player really doesn't know what to know. You know

don't worry, as long as NQ can't provide basic kickstarter goals they promised, vets won't come back xD

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I'm about 6 month in and still enjoying it. Yup no pvp, cool cause not in a rush to get my cool ships messed up or my base. graphic's not the best but played far worst, yup I play Minecraft, you can build cool stuff man. No missions and the market blows for selling products, but i am still here cause my home made tie fighter and imperial shuttle slash scanner is the coolest thing and when you or i get into a ship that you build and fly it and crash it and fix it and improve it and then it does what you want its the coolest yupper and all you grammer spell check people dis 1 4 u get a life

 

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1 hour ago, Hexonymous said:

Bottom line, we need more paying players. And to do that, they must appeal to their graphical senses.

Except that DU is a sub-based game, which means that high churn rates will destroy them. 

 

Better graphics might attract new players, but it won't keep them playing for longer than a month. 

 

Let's remember that these new graphics aren't even things they developed themselves, they're third-party assets -- they take the game from 1999 to 2010, hardly enough to fundamentally change the game. 

2 hours ago, Hexonymous said:

To bring in more players, keeps the funds rolling in, and if the funds are rolling in, then NQ can thus keep working on the game. If people would stop being negative and try to get more players into the game, instead of pushing them out, then maybe NQ would have the funds to get this game into a direction we all want.

I've seen this sentiment pop up a few times recently...the issues with DU have nothing to do with funds.

 

There's no evidence of that at all -- they've had six years to get the game into a working state. That's longer than most games spend in development for a release version -- big/complex games with similarly-sized teams. Plus 6+ months of paid beta... 

 

How much more time do they need, and why is it our job as paying customers to be NQ's marketing team?

How does having more money and time change the design philosophy within NQ, which is their biggest problem? 

How does more money infuse NQ's leadership with experience? (JC has never even worked in game dev before)

How does more money actually increase dev velocity? Considering the codebase is 6 years old and written in an engine no one in the industry uses...?

How does more money improve NQ's communication, which is one major reason people around here are so negative? 

 

NQ could have another $60 million tomorrow and these issues wouldn't magically vanish. Not saying money doesn't matter, but having more time/money doesn't guarantee success in dev. 

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4 minutes ago, ShippyLongstalking said:

Except that DU is a sub-based game, which means that high churn rates will destroy them. 

 

Better graphics might attract new players, but it won't keep them playing for longer than a month. 

 

Let's remember that these new graphics aren't even things they developed themselves, they're third-party assets -- they take the game from 1999 to 2010, hardly enough to fundamentally change the game. 

I've seen this sentiment pop up a few times recently...the issues with DU have nothing to do with funds.

 

There's no evidence of that at all -- they've had six years to get the game into a working state. That's longer than most games spend in development for a release version -- big/complex games with similarly-sized teams. Plus 6+ months of paid beta... 

 

How much more time do they need, and why is it our job as paying customers to be NQ's marketing team?

How does having more money and time change the design philosophy within NQ, which is their biggest problem? 

How does more money infuse NQ's leadership with experience? (JC has never even worked in game dev before)

How does more money actually increase dev velocity? Considering the codebase is 6 years old and written in an engine no one in the industry uses...?

How does more money improve NQ's communication, which is one major reason people around here are so negative? 

 

NQ could have another $60 million tomorrow and these issues wouldn't magically vanish. Not saying money doesn't matter, but having more time/money doesn't guarantee success in dev. 

No one is saying it will garantee success. But it's a start. It's the negativity that runs potential PAYING players off that is a problem. I almost left myself do to that.

And to beat a dead horse, people have gotten refunds and bragged about it. You said yourself, "high churn rates".

In otherwords, it's ALWAYS about the money. Every decision a game company makes is about money.

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13 minutes ago, IvanGrozniy said:

This graphical update is a downgrade. No graphical cohesion whatsoever, contrast is borked, etc.. 

I disagree. I like the element and terrain changes that I've seen so far. As a small example, the new elevators look nice and I'm able to see more detail in other elements. The lighting and voxel changes are mixed for me, I'll need to update the materials on my constructs to see if there are new versions I like better. I was using vertical lights and voxels to create some simple shadow patterns before and that no longer seems to work. It's a shame if there's no longer a way to do that.

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19 minutes ago, IvanGrozniy said:

This graphical update is a downgrade. No graphical cohesion whatsoever, contrast is borked, etc.. 

They already brought this to everyone's attention.  Read their release-notes. They are trying to standardize, which is very needed. They even said that you would most likely need to rebuild. So for many of us, this was to be expected.

 

EDIT : The terrain changes are also great. Sure I see some hiccups, but it's all a step in the right direction.

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Just now, Hexonymous said:

They already brought this to everyone's attention.  Read their release-notes. They are trying to standardize, which is very needed. They even said that you would most likely need to rebuild. So for many of us, this was to be expected.

Textures look like plastic. You're welcome to rebuild.

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How I expect NQ looked at this:

Let's find a way to compensate for not bringing in our new planet tech because a wipe could possible loose us a lot of players

We've been talking about our new texture system and how grat this will be but hav enot delivered on this at all. We need something not too expensive that can allow us to move past it and check the box.

Hey look.. these two fit the bill nicely.. done..

 

 

My View:

After looking into what the middelware NQ now uses can actually do,  IF (and that is a big IF) NQ can manage to get the issues caused by the bolting on several middle ware all doing some of the same thing slightly differently then they have a opportunity here. Especially Quix Megascans has all sort of interesting possibilities, including offering voxel texture packs in a cash shop. These scans look amazing by themselves but clearly do not translate well currently into the world for DU and NQ will need to fix that.

 

I would prefer NQ drops YEBIS as much of what it does can actually be done just fine in Unigine and it really adds very little to the game. A lot of the weird rendering artifacts and reflections seem to come from the voxel engine which as far as we know was the only part of all this that was actually developed in house.

 

Yes the 0.24 patch is underwhelming and yes I do fully expect that his is because NQ is stuck and has no solutions yet to some major issues they need to solve, possibly even bigger than the issues they had with voxels until the meshing came in. I expect this i smore related to database management and unless they fix this problem they have no real path forward with regards to a lot they still need to do like the energy, PVP revamp and Territory warfare.

 

 

And all of that is actually fine IF NQ would finally show some balls and start being honest and open about their challenges. many of us want this game to succeed and for that to happen NQ needs to do well and I doubt that any other dev would be interested in the game at this point so DU is stuck with NQ and we are stuck with NQ. 

 

The reception of this patch, even as rough as it is, would have been a lot better if NQ had not cold dropped it in this state on the community and if the had actually done anything with the reports and feedback from the PTS which was entirely ignored. Instead of addressing what was reported, they choose to push back the mission system but apparently rush in challenges instead which clearly backfired if only for a massive and frankly dumb exploit. It almost felt like someone got out of bed this morning to find they entirely forgot to announce the patch was due today

 

 

What happens next may well determine how this ends.. If NQ sticks to their MO they will pretend it's all fine, not say a word and start hyping "phase2".. But we can always hope they finally wake up and start acting like a dev team that takes ownership of their mistakes and shortfalls and deals with them in a fair and transparent way. 

 

We can always hope..

As the game deserves that much IMO..

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8 hours ago, Lethys said:

don't worry, as long as NQ can't provide basic kickstarter goals they promised, vets won't come back xD

Given how absolutely toxic you lot are, good and good riddance.  I backed this game very early on, forgot about it until after .23 dropped, and just now getting into it and you vets are CANCER.  Most toxic community I have ever seen, and as a life-long gamer, that's saying something.   I would say you lot are driving more people away than lack of features, support, or any other thing you want to whine and cry about.  Every time I come here looking for info, I want to uninstall.   First post btw, because all you vets cry and whine so much, people like me don't even want to participate ffs.

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8 minutes ago, Jizzlobber said:

Given how absolutely toxic you lot are, good and good riddance.  I backed this game very early on, forgot about it until after .23 dropped, and just now getting into it and you vets are CANCER.  Most toxic community I have ever seen, and as a life-long gamer, that's saying something.   I would say you lot are driving more people away than lack of features, support, or any other thing you want to whine and cry about.  Every time I come here looking for info, I want to uninstall.   First post btw, because all you vets cry and whine so much, people like me don't even want to participate ffs.

Never intended to get anyone new in here nor ever suggested this game to anyone. Because, guess what, it's just not very good. Maybe in some years, who knows. 

NQ ignored good feedback for years, didn't communicate, never told us how and what they want to do, only fed the hypetrain and left players with hope, yet never delivered. Since I got ruby and a lifetime sub, Ill speak my mind regardless of what you think about it and will stay here for a loooooooooooooooong time xD hf 

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