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Dual Universe beta timeline?


Merlin3000

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17 minutes ago, blazemonger said:

I love that we have a CM come in and say that "we are planning quite a few communications about the state of the game and where we're going over the next while.". However well intended this comment is I'm sure. Historically this is NQ-speak for "we will start announcing new stuff soon".

They do that since 2016 or so. Occasional drop in to "announce Big things" which then is forgotten, not done or abandoned after the initial "omg. OMG. That is SO cool!" Thing from the community

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12 minutes ago, jdalto said:

I’m running a ryzen 1600 standard clock ,1080ti ,32g ram pretty old pc now and it runs du awesomely only get the occasional Sutter when first approaching high construct areas 

Post your resolution and FPS while walking through a factory.

 

 

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11 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

And the 'toxicity' you see comes from having asked questions like those above, over and over again for years without ever getting reasonable answers.

And worse having to watch NQ do the same types of mistakes over and over again, despite being told beforehand what would happen.

I believe I made myself clear on what I consider toxic and to clarify, it's not asking questions about the state of the game. 
 

At the end of the day, each of us in entitled to our own opinion, but playing victim in saying I am trying to shut you up or ignore some valid points that are raised is laughable. 

 

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On 3/25/2021 at 9:52 AM, Mordgier said:

If it doesn't run great for me, there is nobody it runs great for.  5950x and a 3090 doesn't get good performance out of this game.

I have a 1050 ti, i5-4690, and 16 GB RAM runs this game pretty decently when you're a fair distance from the districts.

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43 minutes ago, Uajrh1 said:

this game pretty decently when you're a fair distance from the districts.

Yeah - it runs pretty good at the menu too - but when you know actually try to play it and you know - build a giant base - like you're supposed to....

 

14 hours ago, jdalto said:

Well should do it from the same factory and make this an accurate comparison 

lol - you're not going to make me reinstall this that easily!

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not only SC, The issue with DU and the release date is not the actual date but what will be delivered and how far has it drifted from both kickstarter and early promotion materials. At the moment there is a pretty gap in it. Having no option "Building civilization" in the Poll says something. The promoted Build your unrestricted dreams, think big, starbases the size of a moon, were nice advertisement lines but looks like that was all. the solution to not use 2 km cores or larger is to place about 40 space cores together, and thats not even close to a moon.

Cities are not coming of the ground, the only city i ever saw in DU was during alpha and Lagg city, that was the only true concept of a city where independent people were building and living together.

For me its not PVP that i want to see back, its the possibility to actually build your dreams with no limit but nature itself. what use is there for player driven markets if the players do not gather anywhere.

 

When i designed the flying space city i read through all the dev topics, release notes, kickstarer and other info the wiki that was present at that time, vids,  and with those i concluded it was indeed possible to build that dream of a space city with the size and defense of a battlestar and the function of Babylon 5 and possible small industry. All through Alpha this dream was possible untill the time the restrictions, we were not supposed to get, kicked in. restrictions to give meaning to static constructs and ground warfare...you know the thing we will not get on about 80% of the planets, so my question is also, why the restrictions in the first place and why even keep them. Would also be a nice incentive for PvP and defense-PvP if people were actually building large scale industrial ships, and frankly we already have those anno 2021 on earth so how is it possible that we lose that insight while flying to a new solar system. Even the enterprice and the galactica have onboard industry, maybe small, but its there.

 

Restrictions started to lead us to this point in DU-time with the best one in scematics. Why the choise was for a quanty drain instead of an actual development goal and build in research and development for those scematics still makes me wonder. But its still possible to do so, sadly i dont think i or anyone here will ever be asked how we see these ideas working in DU.

 

 

 

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On 3/27/2021 at 11:04 AM, Aaron Cain said:

not only SC, The issue with DU and the release date is not the actual date but what will be delivered and how far has it drifted from both kickstarter and early promotion materials. At the moment there is a pretty gap in it. Having no option "Building civilization" in the Poll says something. The promoted Build your unrestricted dreams, think big, starbases the size of a moon, were nice advertisement lines but looks like that was all. the solution to not use 2 km cores or larger is to place about 40 space cores together, and thats not even close to a moon.

Cities are not coming of the ground, the only city i ever saw in DU was during alpha and Lagg city, that was the only true concept of a city where independent people were building and living together.

For me its not PVP that i want to see back, its the possibility to actually build your dreams with no limit but nature itself. what use is there for player driven markets if the players do not gather anywhere.

 

When i designed the flying space city i read through all the dev topics, release notes, kickstarer and other info the wiki that was present at that time, vids,  and with those i concluded it was indeed possible to build that dream of a space city with the size and defense of a battlestar and the function of Babylon 5 and possible small industry. All through Alpha this dream was possible untill the time the restrictions, we were not supposed to get, kicked in. restrictions to give meaning to static constructs and ground warfare...you know the thing we will not get on about 80% of the planets, so my question is also, why the restrictions in the first place and why even keep them. Would also be a nice incentive for PvP and defense-PvP if people were actually building large scale industrial ships, and frankly we already have those anno 2021 on earth so how is it possible that we lose that insight while flying to a new solar system. Even the enterprice and the galactica have onboard industry, maybe small, but its there.

 

Restrictions started to lead us to this point in DU-time with the best one in scematics. Why the choise was for a quanty drain instead of an actual development goal and build in research and development for those scematics still makes me wonder. But its still possible to do so, sadly i dont think i or anyone here will ever be asked how we see these ideas working in DU.

 

 

 

in three words...va por ware :)

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DU is not vaporware, obviously.

 

But, sadly, with every passing week (and people taking "breaks" or quiting), it feels less and less salvagable. Population dynamics is utterly unforgiving for MMOs, especialy with one shard idea. Well known competitor likely outpace ever slugginsh NQ with Release vs PvP update (may), making things even worse and comparisons even more mocking.

 

 

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1 hour ago, le_souriceau said:

DU is not vaporware, obviously.

 

But, sadly, with every passing week (and people taking "breaks" or quiting), it feels less and less salvagable. Population dynamics is utterly unforgiving for MMOs, especialy with one shard idea. Well known competitor likely outpace ever slugginsh NQ with Release vs PvP update (may), making things even worse and comparisons even more mocking.

 

 

 

I don't care about the competitor because I don't like being a robot. Don't know exactly why, maybe because I cannot identify with a "thing" - mind you, I don't have a problem playing an alien, Orc, beast, Elf or what have you, but robot - no ....

 

But that's just me.

 

 

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SB disallowed all social engineering / scamming etc. It's like a sandbox where you can't raise sand higher than 5cm from the ground because you can accidentally hit other player eyes... "Intended gameplay only" now.

So SB is dead for me and for many other players like me. PVP there is just an arcade shooting anyway. Seems they want to go the soft way putting money on soft/casual playerbase.

 

DU ? It's still crap and dev velocity seems to be non existent but NQ can still salvage it if they put their heads out of their a??es. ATM game lacks content, any end-game goals or meaningful PVP objectives.

 

I just played MO2, hell, if that game come out before DU brings me PVP, bb DU ?

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2 hours ago, XKentX said:

SB disallowed all social engineering / scamming etc.

I have some concerns over how "soft" it will be too (and where is limits before its bad).

 

But realisticly. Sure, 1% of Eve vets are ultra-horny on whole concept of stealing shit by infiltration (personaly I think sometimes -- unhealthy so, but its long topic), but for 99% of players (even in DU with much more Eve-like vibes and ghosts) its berely any... value to have such thing possibile beyond fear or something like that? So for younger and more causal auditory of SB it will be even less relevant.

 

In PvP zone its still FFA full loot. So, its not that drammatic overall.

 

As relativly soft hearted person I kinda can live happly whithout stealing from kids in games in SZ by pretending that I'm their friend. 

 

 

 

 

 

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11 minutes ago, le_souriceau said:

I have some concerns over how "soft" it will be too (and where is limits before its bad).

 

But realisticly. Sure, 1% of Eve vets are ultra-horny on whole concept of stealing shit by infiltration (personaly I think sometimes -- unhealthy so, but its long topic), but for 99% of players (even in DU with much more Eve-like vibes and ghosts) its berely any... value to have such thing possibile beyond fear or something like that? So for younger and more causal auditory of SB it will be even more irrelevant.

 

In PvP zone its still FFA full loot. So, its not that drammatic overall.

 

As relativly soft hearted person I kinda can live happly whithout stealing from kids in games in SZ by pretending I'm their friend. 

 

 

 

 

 

The whole "stealing" part in games like eve, and now DU can definitely be a hot topic.  But I think in the end most are somewhat ok with the ability for it to happen, as long as they are given sufficient tools to prevent it.  In eve having multiple corp wallet divisions, and now citadels where people have their own hanger, and asset safety as long as it fueld helps a ton.  In DU they need much more added to the RDMS, and especially in the org wallet to give a Super legate, and even legate, to have tools to tier funds and such, as to not have it an all or nothing when it comes to access.  I mean thats the real world equivalent of giving an employee a company card to purchase gas while driving a company car, but that card is also the same one that has access to 100% of the companies funds.  Its just plain stupid. 

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3 hours ago, le_souriceau said:

I have some concerns over how "soft" it will be too (and where is limits before its bad).

 

But realisticly. Sure, 1% of Eve vets are ultra-horny on whole concept of stealing shit by infiltration (personaly I think sometimes -- unhealthy so, but its long topic), but for 99% of players (even in DU with much more Eve-like vibes and ghosts) its berely any... value to have such thing possibile beyond fear or something like that? So for younger and more causal auditory of SB it will be even less relevant.

 

In PvP zone its still FFA full loot. So, its not that drammatic overall.

 

As relativly soft hearted person I kinda can live happly whithout stealing from kids in games in SZ by pretending that I'm their friend. 

 

 

 

 

 


Person A joins corp C where person B is super-legate/CEO.

 

After 2 months person A makes corp K and transfers assets to it.

 

Person A claims it's belongs to newly found corp K as the assets were acquired during his participation and under his leadership.

Person B claims it is a corp theft.

 

Have fun SB GMs figuring this out.

 

There is reason why sandbox is a sandbox and why GMs should not intervene if no exploits are used. This is only 1 simple example. Let me not get started on how they gonna enforce their "Luring people to pvp space is not allowed". This is just bs. 

 

P.S:

Last article in your blog:

https://mmopress.wixsite.com/newmeroviachronicle/post/story-time-orion-and-large-prey

explains how AC docked and dragged another ship to space(against his will) and destroyed it:

While doing so, one of the AC ships slid in close the the SC Orion causing it to dock with the larger ship and took itself and the now docked SC Orion back into the combat zone. The weapons of the three L AC warships blazed to life and the SC Orion erupted into fire.

This is described as exploit and bannable offence:

Parenting Ships - Dragged to PVP Space

https://support.dualthegame.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016890940-Clarification-Regarding-Bug-Exploits-and-Griefing

So AC should get sanctioned as they did exactly this as you explained. You say rules in sandbox is a good thing right ?

 

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@XKentX, important detail: SC side (author of this short story), as I know, also not made any "official complains" via ticket. Partly I published this exactly as sort of "rhetorical question" in air, beign overall neutral, but bit trolly party in whole affair. Technicaly, NQ likely just even not knew about accident.

 

Returning to starboxes and baserules. As I mentioned in first post, I have my doubts how far this system of "be good or else" rules can go before becoming unsustainable. Thing is, while you have your Eve experience to bring into matter, I have my Minecraft one. 

 

Long ago I was deeply involved in managing quite large ru pirate "server group" (several servers united in one project), with pretty serious infrastucture and up to 300-400 concurent players at zenith. Most of them were children, obviously or individuals kinda leaving this status, but not exactly responsable adults. And we run set of rules relativly close to what SB devs trying to do (like they stolen our old textbook!), with punisheble griefing, stealing, scams, traps, lures and other "distruptive" behaivor.  Why? Because without such rules (even if not super-well enforced) whole situation repeatedly disintegrated to total clustermuck with kids both gladly contibuting to chaos and suffering from it, hating it, crying (literaly) and quitting (and server loosing players and money). In short, with liberty they were able to produce only self-destruction. 

 

Its all not that simple.

 

So, I guess, SB devs somewhat running this way, suspecting their players base will behave like fast and furious 12-13 olds playing Minecraft, not some smartass 40 yo Eve players with middle age crisis.


Are they right? Hate this stupid quote, but time will show. But I guess they somewhat downgrade strictness of rules to keep them sustainably enforced. So it will be less cringly and more realistic.

 

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On 3/25/2021 at 10:05 AM, blazemonger said:

 

Over the past 3.5+ years, I have yet to see NQ actually come in, sit down with us and have an open and frank talk about al that we feel is wrong, why they do (or don't) agree and how they intend to handle those issue going forward. Most of us here _really_ want DU to be the great game it can be and would love to see NQ actually engage with us to talk through how that can be made a reality. Instead, NQ just tends to talk at us, ignoring all the issues (at at best mention them, then brush them off and move on), many of which have been around for years.

 

just a few..

  • What about backend performance, how will NQ improve that? It would seem the game server itself is actually doing pretty good. The backend is what is causing a lot of pain.
  • What can NQ share with us to relief the concern and worry many have over the financial situation of NQ
  • Where is JC in all this?
  • Why does/did NQ continue to prioritize "pretty" over function when pretty is in the eye of the beholder and many features that could be implemented fairly easily would actually benefit the game and drive gameplay/bring in new players.
  • Why does NQ remain adamant they can deliver a release ready game en dof this year with everything still to be done? how is it not possible to provide a realistic outlook on this and possible push release to create the time to make that happen

 

IMO all of these are valid questions to ask and all of these are questions that have been asked by NQ has never even closely bee willing to provide sensible answers.

 

And none of this is negative or toxic, it is realistic and objective outlook on expectations for the game and how NQ deals with them. And I think honestly that anyone with a sense of reasoning can see that questions like this come from a desire to see a game do wel, not to see it fail.

NQ, let alone any developer, doesn't have an obligation to do that. Players are a conglomerate of differing opinions, and tbh the early supporters/backers have been overly spoiled with their level of interaction with the development team. A healthy development cycle is conversations on forums/discord, and then the developer dropping announcements/progress updates. They do not need to consult players directly, and as a private company they sure as heck do not need to disclose their financials. In a perfect world they would drop updates more regularly, maybe every 2 months if they were generous, but even so we got a look ahead update back at the end of December if we get another one in this month then its quarterly and thats fine. Remember road maps are estimates, its a low priority update.

 

Back end performance (and related) is about the only explicit complaint in those bullets I agree with:

- Desyncs in close quarters with others

- Frame rates

- General server stability

 

I personally think they also need to address their gameplay loops:

- No reason to be in space outside of travel/PvP

- No reason to PvP outside of blood lust - No real economic reason to do it, and you can't get to the places that would actually hold value (planetary PvP).

- No reason to build buildings since the structures can only mechanically serve as aesthetics

- No reason to build in space outside of the fun of having an space station because there's no point to having space dedicated ships

- No reason to focus on specialized industry when everyone/every org can be a generalist (even with schematics)

- No reason to use rockets, especially when you can just strap 20L atmos engines with 10 L ailerons to lift pretty much anything.

- Not enough reasons to build different purpose built ships outside of "atmos only" & "space/atmos hybrid".

       - What about space only for efficiency? Moon minerals are outshined by planetary ones & PvP doesn't have a reason outside of blood lust, maybe asteroids will help.
       - Add ship specific tools dedicated to roles like salvaging ships?

       - A ship designed to help you out mining instead of being just linked and stationary at the surface?

 

Until there's purpose to these things I won't be loading up the game, but will be keeping tabs. My 2 cents.

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2 hours ago, le_souriceau said:

So, I guess, SB devs somewhat running this way, suspecting their players base will behave like fast and furious 12-13 olds playing Minecraft, not some smartass 40 yo Eve players with middle age crisis.


Are they right? Hate this stupid quote, but time will show. But I guess they somewhat downgrade strictness of rules to keep them sustainably enforced. So it will be less cringly and more realistic.

Someone pointed out that Alpha testing isn't the place for social engineering. I tend to agree. The game in it's current state is for testing. I don't think SB should be policing that after full launch, but in its current state it doesnt need people throwing hissy fits and sowing drama in the interim.

 

Social engineering is extremely common. DU within its first little bit of Beta ran into its share of it. NQ wrote it off as "well if you screwed up your permissions, that's on you". Ironically then a market got stolen because they screwed up permissions and we all know how that ended. Happens a lot in World of Warcraft too, the guild bank ninja isn't a meme/stereotype for nothing. I love and hate DU's permission system. I think it's overly complex, which makes it easy to screw up but I also think its amazing for the flexibility it allows. Love hate relationship. Add it to the list of things that need a UI revamp.

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32 minutes ago, Treelover69 said:

NQ, let alone any developer, doesn't have an obligation to do that. Players are a conglomerate of differing opinions, and tbh the early supporters/backers have been overly spoiled with their level of interaction with the development team. ...

 

 

They actually promised to have the most transparent development in their Kickstarter where they were asking for our money. So yes, they do have an obligation to talk to us as they promised that to us as part of a giant marketing campaign.

 

Quote

 

"- Absolute transparency about the development progress"

"- Engage with the community and listen to your feedback, with new and innovative ways to get you directly involved in the roadmap decisions."

 


https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1949863330/dual-universe-civilization-building-sci-fi-mmorpg

There's all sorts of other promises they are not going to deliver on too.  If this link redirects to a video, you might have to search for it on google. Last time I checked any reference to it on their site, forums,  etc had been redirected to one of their promo videos.

 

As for us old-timers being spoiled, I can only LMAO at that.  NQ has NEVER lived up to that promise - ever.  Not even close.  Not even close to close.  Had they ever bothered to have real discussions with us  or tried to listen to even a small fraction of our feedback - this game probably wouldn't be in its current state.  It was a bait and switch.  They wanted free bug testers and they got them.  And even then many of the bugs we found have yet to be fixed after all this time.

 

So that's why so many of us are so salty.  They made a promise, took our money, and didn't even try to keep that promise.

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18 minutes ago, Dhara said:

As for us old-timers being spoiled, I can only LMAO at that.  NQ has NEVER lived up to that promise - ever.  Not even close.  Not even close to close. 

 

This is true. And direct and open communication from the side of NE pretty much ended the day pre-alpha went live back in 2017.

 

To get back to what @Treelover69 said though, I do not agree that these questions can't be asked or should not have answers at all.

 

Asking how NQ think they can actually make good on the delivering a release ready product in 9 months from where they currently are is entirely valid. I'd also say that NQ not having made much, if any, progress in actual core game performance and stability in about a year (it was last year April they delivered the only major performance boost since pre-alpha started in  voxel meshing). Hiding performance issues by making backend calls less frequent is not solving anything, it just removes symptoms of an underlying issue.

 

Why NQ keeps stacking on more middleware and only now, about two years after they made changes to water that made mining near impossible due to no visibility was that "resolved". We brought this up the day that patch arrived and entirely in line with their MO, NQ literally said exactly nothing about it ever.

 

NQ has always and continues to seem to live in this odd internal reality bubble where the think it's all fine and they will be able to deliver with no problems. What we have seen in them having an increasing difficult time hitting milestones and now have actually had to spin missing it as using "phases" to bring what was supposed to be in 0.24 over an as yet undetermined period of time.

 

I just do not see how NQ, with the attitude and quality of work they have shown so far can go from what du is now to a game with complete game loops, stable, bug fixed and polished in the next 9 months when several major features are not even in game yet. But you can bet the excuse will be "as an MMO, development is never finished" which is absolute nonsense in this regard. NQ will try and spin that anyway I can almost guarantee you they will.

 

Currently DU is a collection of mostly half done mechanics with no coherence or interdependence. much of that is still entirely fabricated and handled by bots because there is no actual gameplay to facilitate a self sufficient world. Prime example being schematics where what's on the surface may be there but there is nothing that enables this mechanic in gameplay at all. It's just bots seeding these. Schematics as an in game item would be the end product of one game loop and the start of another. Right now it's just a thing you buy that really has no purpose or value but being a cost factor.

 

It all just feels like a bunch of ideas thrown together without any sort of plan or design to make it gel.

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10 minutes ago, Dhara said:

They actually promised to have the most transparent development in their Kickstarter where they were asking for our money. So yes, they do have an obligation to talk to us as they promised that to us as part of a giant marketing campaign.

Transparent =/= consulting players in a round table meeting. It means being clear about direction which happens in their "Look Ahead" series. Like the level of detail or not, it's about as transparent as things need to be.

 

 

 

As far as community consultation is concerned, that's what this is for:

https://upvote.dualuniverse.game/?order=new&filter=all&tag=#controls

 

As for the kickstarter, no point in being salty over it. The page is very explicit about the game they were developing, the game mechancis and the risks. And aside from territory warfare and AvA combat, literally every game mechanic that was listed in the kickstarter has been delivered. Even with the caveate that:

  • Development of a Dual Universe Secret: Participate and work with us on one of the secrets that Dual Universe will contain (the team reserves the rights to refuse ideas that would be technically irrealistic or not compatible with the storyline).

 

Don't forget the risks part of the page:
- We don’t create content, or traditional game level design. We do high-level game mechanisms, which are complex and hard to balance.

- We have several new technologies, in particular the server technologies, that are trying to solve problems that have never been solved before. It may not work as planned, or as our current testing suggests.
- We have set for ourselves an ambitious fast release cycle. We may encounter unseen problems that could delay our schedule. Unless what you do has already been done before countless of times, you can never be sure how much time it will take.

- The whole game is a brand new way of doing MMO. What will emerge from this universe? It’s at the same time exciting, but also very risky. We try to orient the game design towards interesting dynamics, but we cannot be sure.

 

I'm not even shilling here, I'm just pointing out objective truths about how the game was advertised and what was explicitly promised from their kick starter page. I may not be happy with the current iteration of the game but I also will never agree with saying that promises were broken given information to date and what was promised. One of my old orgs had someone who was very closely tied to the internal DU team, their attitude was "NQ is going to fix X problem for me, or else..." - that's not a healthy relationship with a developer and it's what happens when the boundaries between the developers and players gets blurred.

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