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The org changes, what do they mean?


Novean-32184

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I came back to the game and found not much changed since 0.23 really. All I am seeing is effort to drive cost down. The "org changes" do not seem any different and mainly seem to be meant to drive core count down.

 

My question here is, how does this translate to the game needing tens of thousands of subscribing players to work? I mean, will NQ go for "1 core per player, 5 max with talents" and call it a success? It feels to me that in all this, there is no thought into how the need for these drastic reductions will play into the actual requirements as far as player base for the game to ever be viable and bring in enough revenue.

 

The NQ announcement around this is entirely omitting any sort of validation/reasoning for the changes but in light of what has happened so far, I think the assumption this is another cost cutting action (or at best an attempt to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the bandwidth available) at the core is not unreasonable.

 

I was hoping for the game to be in a better place by now but it seems it has not really progressed much since last year.

 

 

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The original org implementation was a mistake and kinda broke the game, so they're fixing it in order to move forward because future mechanics are riding on it. And yeah it likely impacts cost and scaling too. Hopefully this is the last major hump they need to get over so they can progress the game.

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16 minutes ago, Haunty said:

The original org implementation was a mistake and kinda broke the game, so they're fixing it in order to move forward because future mechanics are riding on it. And yeah it likely impacts cost and scaling too. Hopefully this is the last major hump they need to get over so they can progress the game.

The next shitstorm will come with the energy-System....

 

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I think we'll see many more restrictions...

 

The reason they are doing these restrictions is because they want to start another marketing push and get more players into the game...and only now have they started to consider product cost and ROI. 

 

They can't justify a new marketing push if costs aren't kept under control, hence restrictions.

 

Cost is complicated because most players they acquire via paid marketing churn early on...and the few people that stay tend to build a lot...so the limits might still be too generous, but I think they are banking on new users having less churn than they did when open 'beta' first launched. 

 

Here's what I see happening...

 

- NQ introduces more restrictions (like Zarcata said, the energy system) to try to further reduce the cost/scale of 'hardcore builder' types

- NQ revamps / removes tutorials because they've never worked right -- does a few small things to help first time user experience 

- NQ does another marketing push to hype the game, gets another crop of new players. It works very well because DU is easy to advertise with flashy videos that don't match reality

- New players have almost exactly as much churn as they did in open beta...Ultimately (as the OP says), very little has changed since then. The few things they've added in the last 7 months won't be enough to improve churn (IMO) and the expectations set with adverts won't be met

- Likely: same wave of optimism followed by crushing sadness as NQ gets a crop of new players, but they churn after a few months...more drastic company or product changes as they consider the next steps 

 

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3 hours ago, ShippyLongstalking said:

The reason they are doing these restrictions is because they want to start another marketing push and get more players into the game...and only now have they started to consider product cost and ROI. 

 

 

Not sure about marketing, but they obviously clearing field for both price cuts and future milking of people who will be ready to pay for advantages.

 

ROI seems to be totaly out of reach by conventional means (demographicly), without said milking on very hardcore, abusive scale of mobile games.

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Or - instead of all the conspiracy theories it could be that the auto mining would be too profitable for someone creating lots of orgs as a solo player and claiming territories. I was figuring I could easily have 30ish territories for very little outlay with only one layer of organizations (also only on one planet). I suspect that was not the plan!

 

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I think ROI from an investor's perspective is years away and may never happen if NQ does not take drastic measures. I read the single announcement around the CEO change and while it is at best vague and as it turns out not entirely truthful as JC actually left the company entirely from what I understand Pann posted on Discord, it says (but are they?) the investors are in it for the long haul. Problem is the 22M NQ collected from them is probably gone by now so new funding is needed.

The introduction of energy management is actually good for the game as a whole but the issue I see is that NQ is pretty much in a development cycle which is far more based on an Alpha state of game dev than beta which they labelled the game as. Making deep and sweeping changes like they are really has no place in beta. I gave the whole energy thing some thought and I do not really see how they are going to introduce that without either forcing massive moves by org to be able to to continue their level of operation or (partially) wipe. Reducing the core count for orgs may also be a prelude to the energy introduction and result in both cost reduction on the server side as well as orgs reverting core ownership which then makes a move easier once energy comes in.

The thing I guess is that their could well be an actual plan behind all this but with NQ not really being as open and transparent as I think they should be (and really claimed they would be). Both energy and power management will have respective massive impact on static and dynamic construct application in many ways. It will be interesting to see how NQ will handle this as it is very easy to see a number of ways in which they can bork the introduction of these like they did with schematics while any of these mechanics by themselves are actually good ones.

 

I've been back in the game for a week or two now and it's just unfortunate that DU has not actually progressed beyond "having a lot of potential" for well over a year now, as I would really have preferred to start seeing some of that potential become a reality or at least be a solid light at the end of the tunnel. I remember the jolt of lightning the voxel meshing was when it arrived little over a year ago, it relit the flame for many of us as it showed an instant leap forward in a big way. from there however it feels like all that NQ has been doing is add "pretty" and frankly overdoing most of it (what's with all the VFX now.. it is massively distracting and out of place in the overall design), changes to cut cost as server expenses went through the roof and very little substance.

As it stands, I'll probably set the game aside again, hoping it gets better over the next year or so.

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10 hours ago, Cheith said:

Or - instead of all the conspiracy theories it could be that the auto mining would be too profitable for someone creating lots of orgs as a solo player and claiming territories. I was figuring I could easily have 30ish territories for very little outlay with only one layer of organizations (also only on one planet). I suspect that was not the plan!

 

Then it would have been quite sufficient to take away the right of the sub-organisations to have more tiles or to orientate them to the current limit of the main organisation.
But at the same time they reduced the core limit of each organisation and lowered the number of organisations per player from 5 to 1.

You can run through life as positively as you like, but then with your eyes wide open.

Seriously, what is left in the game for content that keeps us players occupied in the masses for a long time? I'm not talking about permanently grinding, but about game content that can really be fun for years, in order to bind players to the game and thus generate long-term revenue?

The building in itself is a very great content and has contained endless fun or occupation - unfortunately, however, this was so strongly limited by core limitation that one would not even be occupied with it for a year and the players become bored. By the way, destroying what already exists has a negative effect on many who want to build up an entire society.

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3 hours ago, Zarcata said:

Then it would have been quite sufficient to take away the right of the sub-organisations to have more tiles or to orientate them to the current limit of the main organisation.
But at the same time they reduced the core limit of each organisation and lowered the number of organisations per player from 5 to 1.

You can run through life as positively as you like, but then with your eyes wide open.

Seriously, what is left in the game for content that keeps us players occupied in the masses for a long time? I'm not talking about permanently grinding, but about game content that can really be fun for years, in order to bind players to the game and thus generate long-term revenue?

The building in itself is a very great content and has contained endless fun or occupation - unfortunately, however, this was so strongly limited by core limitation that one would not even be occupied with it for a year and the players become bored. By the way, destroying what already exists has a negative effect on many who want to build up an entire society.

It is about cost - the main reason you have sub orgs when soloing is to get around the escalating territory costs. Simple as that.

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NQ naïvely implemented geometric costs for tiles in a way that took me all of about 10 seconds to work around... The stupid thing is not that NQ were naïve but that it took them this long to close a glaring, and by that I mean flashlight to the face kind of glaring, loophole.

The cynic in me is saying that they waited this long so that large orgs would be forced to consider forking out for extra ALTs to keep their orgs in their own hands rather than offloading massive tracts of land and cores to simple org members they can no longer control.

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33 minutes ago, GraXXoR said:


The cynic in me is saying that they waited this long so that large orgs would be forced to consider forking out for extra ALTs to keep their orgs in their own hands rather than offloading massive tracts of land and cores to simple org members they can no longer control.

Are you allowed on the DU forums if you are not a cynic?

Also, one shouldn't really call org members simple - just saying ?

 

I tend to go with the simplest explanation - largely because most corporations are stupid as a collective, even if they have smart people. You may, though, be right but we will likely never know. It will be interesting to see how many hexes free up after this (if any).

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4 hours ago, Cheith said:

It will be interesting to see how many hexes free up after this (if any).

Sadly,I don’t think any will be freed up. I think on chat (others probably know better) that they have said that the territory will just keep heading up the chain until it is in an org with a legit super.

 

This means once again there is an exploit, NQ finally get around to patching it so it can’t be done in the future, but those who did it will have billions worth of hex’s which would probably take a regular player ten years to ever catch up with

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2 hours ago, CoyoteNZ said:

Sadly,I don’t think any will be freed up. I think on chat (others probably know better) that they have said that the territory will just keep heading up the chain until it is in an org with a legit super.

 

This means once again there is an exploit, NQ finally get around to patching it so it can’t be done in the future, but those who did it will have billions worth of hex’s which would probably take a regular player ten years to ever catch up with

You might be right - I read this and wasn't quite sure what was meant by it. If I have my sub-orgs owning territory does this mean that it will all just get moved to the main org for free? If that is true what is everyone panicking about then? Confused!

 

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13 hours ago, Zarcata said:

By the way, destroying what already exists has a negative effect on many who want to build up an entire society.

Indeed, lots of organizational empires are build out of a lot of organizations. Alliances out of alot of members and this really messes stuf up.

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It is basically a wipe ...

Imagine you have spent a lot of time building that 1375 large cores into something big and they say you you have 1 month to comply...

i thank god i didnt spend my time doing it so ....now i will simply let it go...

DU has became from a builders game to a more centralized pvp game which we will see if it is worth it in the upcoming time...

Let it be for the best of DU then ....

 

Habitant

Habitants Organization

 

 

 

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On 6/26/2021 at 12:11 PM, Habitant said:

DU has became from a builders game to a more centralized pvp game which we will see if it is worth it in the upcoming time...

That's the big question.

The main pitch JC always used when presenting DU, was 'unlimited' open world possibilities with communities building large cities and asteroid sized space stations. And PvP was never meant to be more important then any other part of the game, something that together with the 'unlimited' building and scripting set this game apart for all the others.

 

But the game engine has never been able to demonstrate that it can handle anything even close to this. And every move NQ has made lately, seem to move DU away from the initial premise.

 

Granted, this can be seen as a good thing since NQ is now finally starting to make hard and realistic choices needed to progress the game. But at the same time the DU subscription model was already a hard sell even with the initial game promised, so the question is if people will buy (literally) into this new more limited direction.

 

 

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3 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

But at the same time the DU subscription model was already a hard sell even with the initial game promised, so the question is if people will buy (literally) into this new more limited direction.

 

Doubt it. Game (so far) ended up as deep niche within niche, with very specific sort of players have long-term interest/patience to stay. And even much stronger overall titles struggle with attempts to go sub model.

 

Realisticly, if feels like game will be financialy viable only with some mobile-level predatory monetization, whales milking beyond sub pay (if it even stay).

 

Probably whole direction of changes is slow crawling to position for serious hitting of wallets of "hardcore" nerds.

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Honestly, the way they go into a complete other direction then the kickstarter promis makes the whole thing rather a scammy way to get cash.

Exodus of veterans might be incoming soon, oh wait lets rephrase that. Exodus of small leftover group of veterans incoming soon.

 

And still the lag is killing, markets are hell, and even random cores somewhere out in the open cause so much lag the Game freezes.

I do hope we for once dont get a new patch with all kinds of, come play because we are cool stuff but with actual performance boosts so people might even stay longer then 20 minutes after hard crash in the first location they spawn, or the first market they land on to get stuff.

Game Idea is still good, kickstarter original was just awesome, so from awesome to good is not the best growth potential. with the next patches we will see if it stays good or goes down further

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I hope that players will not buy more altaccounts just to maintain existing org structures, because this would only encourage this greedy system to go further in the wrong direction.

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5 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

Granted, this can be seen as a good thing since NQ is now finally starting to make hard and realistic choices needed to progress the game.

 

Yeah i also think these choices needed to make the game a final product and eventually release the game finally !

 

Also ...

24 minutes ago, Aaron Cain said:

Game Idea is still good, kickstarter original was just awesome

 

I wish they just pause the game before schematic introduction( what was that 0.22 -0.23?) and make no updates EVER even if it crushes ....

but i admit i cant wait for the final release ... the rules of the game .. the undeniable plan ... the unchangable facts ... the final release update ...

so we build and expand and proceed to the game and know what we are doing in this world !!! :D 

 

Habitant

Habitants Organization

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On 6/23/2021 at 5:31 PM, Zarcata said:

The next shitstorm will come with the energy-System....

 

Wont be a shitstorm from me, but then we dont stack elements and build ships to carry stupidly large volumes.  Players that have built normal ships will be fine with energy, those that think haulage weight should be unlimited are going to have to rebuild everything.

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and thus the system works that all property from nested orgs that are going to be deleted will go to the superlegate, personally. Abuse will still be there, only thing this does is kill community organizational structures that are years old.

 

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