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My three day experience and suggestions.


Perry666

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I really really really want to like this game and play it all of the time. it has so much potential. But what is preventing me from liking it a lot is a multitude of things.

1) The game is very very confusing. Sand box idea, i love it, i get it, its great but just because it's a sandbox doesn't mean we can have more direction. For example: I took a shuttle from sanctuary to alioth, It took me roughly 30 minutes to find out where the shuttle is, why? CAUSE THERE'S NO SIGNS! Now, when i got dropped off on alioth i was just dumped in the middle of some massive station, no other shuttles around, no signs no sense of any direction. You know what i did? Got frustrated and logged off. Even the tutorials need a lot of polish. I think I played the building one five times or more. make the maps interactive, there's a lot of work that can be done there. Show active populations, have a heat map where battles might be taking place, something! Put more descriptions on things. Oh and make the beginning hover speeders faster, they should go double the speed. Going from my tile to the market is straight ass.

2) The game is very laggy. I think it may be because there's hundred of ships and tiles with little tiny piece of industry all over the place. Solution: introduce a decay system; after 30 days if your ship, factory, whatever is not rendered a decay timer activates and you have ten days to render your good or they go *poof* and your tile is forfeited.

3) Increase mining capabilities drastically, including early game surface mining. Make it much much easier and faster to dig and find seems of veins. Increase vein size and number. I've been playing video games for over 40 years (Yes, I'm old) In my experience the vast majority of the gaming community hates farming. The player base for this game will not grow if the farming continues to be as horrendous as it is. If the mining is easier, then ship building will become easier and then more people can get out in the world and pvp or whatever and the world will come alive. Not many people at all want to spend an hour digging around chasing a coal seem.

4) make the game a little more exciting / dangerous. Idk, give us some npc's to fight, or allow us to schedule tile defense from npc's. this would be a big project, we would need hand weapons and turrets to set up for base defense. Who doesn't love a good base defense? even if its from some raggedy npc's. I've spent idk how many hours already running around picking up rocks; BORING!

Again, i really really want to love this game tell my friends all about it, hell I'd even buy a few of them subscriptions' but i just can't. the game need so much more work before i can do any of that. I want to say more but this post is long enough. if you read it, thank you. i wish the best for this game.

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Hello Perry666 and welcome to DU.

 

I wanted to give you some answers that might help out your gameplay experience overall. Most of these answers can be found by searching youtube for DU or reading through the forums but here are some simple things, I hope they will help you.

 

1.) Early game in any sandbox mmo is going to be difficult. It isn't meant to hold your hand, its meant for you to figure life out on your own.  But I can tell you that once you do, the experience you will have will be vastly different. The original tutorial validity has changed compared to where the game state currently is, and the only reason to do the tutorial options is for the bonus quanta/talent points early.  You can see "claimed tiles" on the map, but no "heatmap" because this is by definition a pvp game, and although territory warfare is not yet implemented, it will be coming soon.   You can easily find combat in pvp space, but to succeed at it requires knowledge and talents. Even then doing it alone will not be easy.  The starting "speeder" is crap, its designed to be that way.  But did you know you can buy 1 xs engine and 1 xs wing, and then attach them to it, suddenly you are at double the speed and actually flying instead of hovering. :)  Now imagine what you could do with larger engines and bigger wings. This is why the speeder sucks, so that you move on to build your own.

2) The game is laggy.  This issue can generally be solved by fixing up your graphic settings.  DU is a hungry game, more hungry for resources than any other game I've seen.  Its well known amongst the community to set your graphic settings with the following options;  # of Threads set to 2, Voxel Quality set to 1.4, and keep shadows on and "low or medium".  If you change all of these you should have a much better gameplay experience without as much "lag".   The game will use "as much resources as YOU allow" and this often results in new players experiencing 100% CPU usage.  Markets will always be slightly laggy, as will some massive buildings.  This lag does disappear though once you have "loaded" all of the shapes/voxel details from the server.  (I live in a massive base that when I have cleared my cache will be laggy for about 5 minutes, then perfectly fine to run around in until I clear my cache again)

 

3)Mining can be improved with knowledge of "how" to mine efficiently. Surface rock mining is trash, for good ore you need to be in the ground.  However there are many things you can do to improve this.  Talents that don't take to long to learn, few hours to a few days, to get yourself into a position where mining becomes a lot more fluid for you.  There are items called Territory Scanners (expensive) that you can buy off players/markets.  When these are placed on a construct and brought to a Hex (the tile on the map) and then activated, after 15mins it will tell you all of the ore it scanned under the ground.  Then its just a matter of finding it.  Tier 1 nodes for example range from 6000 ore to 4 million of a single ore type in some tiles.  This takes some luck to find the "mega nodes" but they are still out there.

 

4) NPCs are not something currently planned for implementation according to NQ from the many many new players that have asked.  Secondly you as a 3 day old player are in no position to actually defend your stuff if it was.  Combat requires knowledge of game mechanics, systems and defenses.   There is no "alien invasion" that has attacked this system at this time, therefore no NPC to actually push at us.  If you followed the lore of the game even just slightly then you would know that we are technically by the lore the last remaining survivors of humanity and we arrived here to start a new life for humanity.  Humans now called Noveans, have only been in this system for a short while and although we have not found an "alien" species to fight yet, there is plenty of fighting going on outside of the safe zones.  There are many PVP orgs out there, many pirate orgs and if you want to experience combat there are many players who can help you find that experience.

 

 

Conclusion:  Yes Perry this game is new, its system of design is not for everyone its true.  However this is a gem of a game, not only is there many things to learn through the early game, but the game provides the ability to use your imagination and build/do whatever you want. It takes time to learn this game. Unlike Conan Exiles. This game takes what you build with voxels and converts it to 3D meshes upon leaving build  mode. (no other game does this).  This game pushes the technology bar for new game technology that doesn't exist in the market currently and hasn't since EQ Next was shut down by Daybreak.   This is NOT a SOLO game experience. This is a community game, join the community, find friends, bring friends, make alliances, make enemies, or frenemies.  This game is all about what you make of it.  I played SOLO for 6 months and struggled as you did, learning as much as I could, but once I mastered many things, I quickly realized that in order to attain my own goals, I would need friends to help me or I just wouldn't make it fast enough.

Lastly I would say that the DU community is very tight knit, very friendly and helpful and always accepting of new players.  You can easily see this by tuning into any of the twitch livestreams as the chatters and streamers are all friends and seen in each others streams regularly.  If you want the best experience then its the community you want to seek out, and we will help you get to the "sense of this is a good game" rather quickly.

 

Salute! o7

 

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Thank you for the long and well informed reply friend. I do plan to keep playing, haven't quit yet. We'll see how it goes I Guess. The game does have a lot of stuff I'm interested in and I hope it keeps going. Have seen too many games just crash and die. Though I've only been playing for four days now I am concerned about the future of the game. The things I wrote are based on many many many hours of all types of mmo experience. I really hope the player base grows exponentially and many new features are continually added to the game. Time will tell. Cheers mate.

 

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We all have noticed the things that you pointed out. Some have suggested the exact same solutions you suggested. 

 

So why have things not been fixed? It has several factors. 

But there is one that appears to stand out. 

 

The existance of the "JC's Vision".

JC was the CEO of NQ and founder of thr project. 

 

The initial kickstarter video and info was about his "vision" of what DU should be. 

 

 

The problem was that in some aspects, his vision was not viable. Here are some examples:

Player made content. He assumed players would create the world and their adventures. 

He also assumed allot of general mechanics without thinking of the details like hiding bases. 

 

Now that he has been replaced as the CEO, the new managment does not want to completely trash his vision completely because players invested in that vision and would feel scammed if the vision changed. 

 

So we are left with an unviable vision... 

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Interesting. Have the new management laid out their vison of the game yet? Is the game still making money? If finances dry up... Kind of why I feel it's urgent for whoever is running the game to work on drastically building the player base asap.

 

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18 minutes ago, Perry666 said:

Interesting. Have the new management laid out their vison of the game yet? Is the game still making money? If finances dry up... Kind of why I feel it's urgent for whoever is running the game to work on drastically building the player base asap.

 

 

No public information has been release about the financial situation. But most players expect it to be very grim. 

 

The thing is, the game does not have any long term joy. 

 

Sure its very fun to build up ships and take those to space. But can it sustain a subscription based game? 

Then we have the massive exploits. Players trying to play the game in a legit way often find their gameplay ruined by someone that took the advantage of some exploit. 

Money exploits

PvP meta and exploits

Griefing exploits. 

 

Lone/new players often find themselves on a situation where they have to face a experienced group of 10 fully geard hunting dedicated ships. 

 

 

Some of us, pre-beta players, have been asking for NPCs to reduce the amount of pain experianced by new/lone players. 

But NQ keeps insisting in this player created content, AKA "kill on sight"... 

 

On my personal opinion, this game is dead.

But NQ may be able to sell this technology to some other producer. So its not 100% loss. 

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Ouch. Yeah my instinct is telling me that this game is dead as well. these forums are dead. I rarely see anybody out in the world. There seems to be only a few people in the general or help chats. It's a shame, this game has so much promise. Hopefully the new management can get the ship righted and expand the player base which will bring in new money.

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Game is far from dead. This is just a few "nay-sayers" that push that propoganda, like they do in every MMO. (you said you played hundreds, then you are aware of this). Financially speaking the game isn't broke and is still on full blown development cycles. We can see this based off the time between regular updates/announcments.  The main issue you are feeling (which is common) is that you don't see people.  The main reason for this is the sheer scope of the size of the solar system itself.  (it takes 7 hours to fly to outer planets without warp for example).  That's like saying a Country is Dead because you don't see people on the back roads while travelling across the country. 

DU's population suffered a major hit in November due to the schematics update that was not well received, this is true. However most of the people who pushed through this update are still around. Its also hard to compare the server population via the # of twitch streamers due to the sheer resource cost of running DU and OBS together often requires a 2nd pc for streaming, this limits the number of streams.  It also helps if the people streaming are "actually" entertaining. No offence meant to any, but some of the streams are basically just Discord streams to friends that someone decides to put on twitch. There is no "show" attached to the stream like there are in other games.  Not to mention DU is not a "stream" friendly game, many of the gameplay loops are boring to watch others do.   This does leave some great "chatting" streams though and these are where the DU twitch community engages in amazingly fun discussions and "theories" about what NQ is up too.  But remember we always hear the "loudest" voices. Make your own decisions.

 

Also of note on General Chat- this chat function is literally a month and half old. Ie: prior to this we didn't have general chat. Its a newly added feature that was just included a few patches ago.   You also cannot see the general chat while you are in build mode, and since the vast majority of the games players are building something for most of their play time, they don't actively chat.  (people you see chatting constantly are likely people with nothing to do, no motivation to do anything, or scammers looking to recruit new player mining slaves.)  From those that aren't builders are the miners, and they are usually lost in an audiobook or watching netflix (other shows) while mining mega nodes of 2+ million ore. 

If you like playing with voxels and building you will enjoy the game longer than if you are waiting for NPCs to fight.  If you just care about shooting npcs, you will want to move on. If you are content with shooting players instead of npcs then you can have hundreds of hours of gameplay ahead of you.  Simply min-maxing your pvp pirate craft can take you months of tweaking, learning and fighting.   

Final note:  Game isn't dead, new players join everyday and the finances of the dev team aren't even at the point of reliance on player subs, the investors are still on board and working with NQ to continue to develop.  But DU is a game where time=ability and time=wealth. So that said, many people who started in September that are still around are super rich and have maxed out the talents they wanted, they are currently waiting for content.  The best advice I can give you is this;  It only costs 1 Starbucks coffee to play DU per month. Not many MMO's are this cheap.  If you play 2 hours a week or 16 hours a day makes very little difference to the "grand plan" of the developers(also talents develop over time so taking breaks is encouraged by design).  DU is a game where you get out what you put in and like any game if you cannot find something to be passionate about you likely won't remain.  I for one put in my daily 6 hours, but then I go play other games to not burn out, however when I find passion in a build then I can easily put in 16 hours and maybe not go to bed on time either. ;)

Make your own decisions, gaming is about having fun.  Don't let a few voices ruin your fun and remember, there are a lot more positive quiet voices that NQ listens too, then the few "super complainers" everyone else hears.

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The player base won't expand until the game is more complete, it's still functionally in alpha. The development actually seems more structured now than it used to be, still slow but you can see things happening with a clearer direction. There are some major hurdles they have to get over like the org restructuring, fixing past mistakes, then hopefully they can focus more on moving forward and making the game more fun at all levels.

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@DekkarTV @Haunty I hope you guys are right. I hope they get the ship straight and make improvements to the game that bring in people and money. There's a lot I like about the game. I don't want it to die, but my opinion about the game in the short amount of time I have spent here is that it's not looking good right now.  Hopefully things change and improve for the better.

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3 minutes ago, joaocordeiro said:

I said the game is dead because it does not generate joy compared to the pain it generates. 

Do you have a counter to this? 

If video games cause you pain, you probably shouldn't be playing them.  There are many people with chronic illnesses that play DU and are a large part of the community that suffer from actual pain.  As such, no I have no counter to your pain caused by playing a video game in general.  Arguing about your quote is not beneficial to the community or constructive, simply independent feelings.  But obviously if you are still active, then others must be as well.  Unless of course you are just replying for the lulz. If you aren't actually active in DU, then you shouldn't be commenting here to new players either, because plain and simple, you don't play.  Credibility is all that matters, and NQ has done factual changes for the betterment of the game, up to and including today to decide to delay org changes because they listened to the feedback of the community. 

 

If your pain is due to the system issues, crashing, lag, etc... the game is now available on GFN and its free to use the service, this removes much of the issues people have with hardware, and many many people are using to play on their tv, laptop, chromebook and even cellphone.  This agreement in of itself with Nvidia proves that NQ is aware of the hardware barriers but has opened the game to a much larger playerbase through GFN.  

 

If neither of these are the reason for your pain then it might be psychologic in nature, and that is okay. We welcome you. We accept you. That is the nature of the DU community. :)

 

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@DekkarTV

Im talking of near zero exploration content + very high stakes + unbalanced game giving exponential advantage to older players that translates into pain with no reward. 

And why will the mainstream MMO player pay a subscription to experience pain... 

 

@Perry666

Ppl like dekkar are part of the problem. 

 

During the alpha stage some of us explained in a very detailed way why some parts of JC's vision were flawed. 

 

personally commented, in more than 10 seperate occasions how it was impossible for mmo players to build a civilisation without some basic enforced guidelines, like EVE security zones and NPC missions. 

 

But when 1 of us explained a problem, 3 guys like dekkar totally destroyed our threads.. 

From, 1 of them, counter argument with very unlikely exceptions and the other 2 agreeing with him. 

Passing by the old: "you dont understand the vision" 

And sometimes ending in personal accusations or offenses to make sure the topic would be locked. 

 

JC, with his huge ego, failed think about the problems we were presenting. 

 

For many years, ppl conplained about "pending operations" but in my head, that was never a real problem. Because solving the "pending operations" issue was a technical challenge that was 100% solvable, just needing time. (i even created a major thread about UDP and suggested NQ to buy some already established protocol+api instead of trying to invent it. Coincidently a few weeks later NQ changed the protocol to minecraft proto) 

 

The real problem was the hostility of the game to new and lone players. 

 

The current model of players do everything allied with the average type of MMO player creates a universe between anarchy and ruthless dictatorship. 

 

With the time investment needed to have a ship and the very high chances of total loss when going outside of the pvp free zone, this game is just a massive maker of pain. 

 

 

 

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I'll say it again: The game has a ton of potential, but it also has some major flaws that make it unattractive to many members of the gaming community. There are quite a few things I am enjoying about this game, but there are also quite a few things I find maddeningly frustrating. 

I want the game to succeed and hope that the devs put some serious serious work into the game to bring in fresh players and fresh money.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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44 minutes ago, Perry666 said:

I want the game to succeed and hope that the devs put some serious serious work into the game to bring in fresh players and fresh money.


So do i.
But we, alpha ppl, have seen this movie too many times before...

It's like seeing a movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme and expect him to not kick someone in the face.

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13 hours ago, joaocordeiro said:

@DekkarTV

Im talking of near zero exploration content + very high stakes + unbalanced game giving exponential advantage to older players that translates into pain with no reward. 

And why will the mainstream MMO player pay a subscription to experience pain... 

 

@Perry666

Ppl like dekkar are part of the problem.


Part of the problem? Really going to throw insults. 

So what your saying in your post is there is nothing out there to explore and you have already "seen" everything in the game. Which is fair, by the look of it you are a very old player with "old ideas".  My post was not hostile and was direct to the point that NQ has made leaps and bounds since January in improving the game overall.  Noone (except maybe a few) expect that a 20-30 man game development team would be able to produce World of Warcraft or EVE content in a matter of months. 

There are ZERO stakes if you don't fly in pvp space like an idiot. Don't fly the pipe, this rule doesn't even come from DU it comes from OTHER mmos. Don't fly what you can't afford to lose is another rule many people listen too.  Attacking people for voicing an opinion about the current state of the game just because it doesn't "jive" with yours doesn't really help anyone.  Its obvious NQ didn't listen to you during Alpha, and you are now upset with them, which is fair.  

PVP Was a huge issue with massive problems up until a month ago when NQ fixed much of the talent errors for damage on higher tier talents and fixed the Desync between ships to be more responsive.  Since then many of the DU pvp player community has returned.  Don't believe, just ask in game if anyone is pvping.  Mission runners are getting killed daily. 

Every single MMO in existence has a huge disadvantage for new players vs old players.  Most of them do eventually try to do a "catch up mechanic" however we are still in beta and that hasn't yet been put into place.  (Use EVE as a great example, players with 15 year old accounts have far more wealth and skill points then new players, unless new players bust out their wallets (catch up)).

This game isn't for everyone and statements like "part of the problem" really are just trolly AF. What problem? The fact not everyone hates DU like you? Give us a break.  

 

 

5 hours ago, Perry666 said:

I'll say it again: The game has a ton of potential, but it also has some major flaws that make it unattractive to many members of the gaming community. There are quite a few things I am enjoying about this game, but there are also quite a few things I find maddeningly frustrating. 

I want the game to succeed and hope that the devs put some serious serious work into the game to bring in fresh players and fresh money.

 

NQ is very much aware that the new player "on boarding" process of the game is very very unrefined and can be extremely frustrating for new players.  Especially since up until missions the only way to make money was to mine.  But since many of the best mining nodes had already been located by those Alpha players that knew were to look before the rest of us and claimed them, it made making money even easier.  Combine this with the tutorial system that doesn't function properly and the UEF store with ships created by ALPHA players that don't even work in the new systems.   That said, they are aware, much of it is planned for change in the future, and missions have provided an easy alternative to making money early while you wait for your talents to improve.  

Have exploits for money occured, yes, have schematics exploits occured yes.  Are the people who did them still around? Not really.  The last exploited warp cell schematic (purchased for 10% of value) was sold off in Feb.  Did they make a killing, sure, but quanta is less valuable than the elements and money in DU is 1000% easier to acquire now than it was when that happened.  Most people who didn't exploit these things are now richer than those who did, so there is no real advantage anymore. 

There are a lot of ALPHA backers that "will talk straight" about how much "potential" the game had that it didn't realize since they put their money in and feel that it is now their job to tell everyone how "bad" the developers are.  There are also many White Knights who love building who will tell you how "good" the game is.  At the end of the day you need to make your own decisions.  For $7 per month for most its a risk they are willing to take, for others its not.

Thanks.
DekkarTV - Part of the problem.

 

 

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22 minutes ago, DekkarTV said:

What problem? The fact not everyone hates DU like you? Give us a break.  

 

Does DU still has 10k players? 

If not, is that not a problem? 

If yes, what is the reason for this problem and how to solve it? 

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NQ has not published this information at any point. 

 

How is it you "know" the current number of players? Inside info?

 

 

If I were to just go based off Market Scanners (LUA code that records names at markets) as of last week there were approximately 8,442 unique avatars scanned over a 1 month period, this is after duplicates were removed scattered across all markets in DU.  (obviously some players aren't listed because they didn't go to any markets). So if you aren't running LUA to determine player numbers how are you determining your value? As an Alpha player I would expect you might have some other way to determine this that we "new players" aren't familiar with?  Also not all appear as duplicates which means some of those people may have already quit. There are all sorts of "ideas" we can come up with from the data pool, but nothing concrete.  Also some people know well enough to hit Ctrl+Backspace to remove the LUA from affecting them so its not 100% accurate either way. Nor did the scans hit 10,000 people so we can't accurately say there are 10k players. 

 

Obviously these may all be Alt accounts of 1 player, so there is that.  But please inform us of some factual information you have access too that the rest of us do not?  Or again is this your "feeling?"

So I will state again, we only have factual data provided to us as players by NQ, everything else is either opinion or rumor.  I choose not to live in rumor. Got some facts?  

Rumors like "ground mining is going away" or "DU is Dead move on" aren't credible sources if they don't come from the developer.  Yet the loudest voices always respond negatively. 

NQ has provided all the information they are willing to provide on the DU-Discord and its easily read through.   We literally have weekly updates since March.  There development process hasn't slowed or stalled out. 

We all agree the game has a lot of work ahead, but this is to be expected, its okay to take breaks and come back later.  The passive talent over time system lets you set up talents for endless learning, you could literally queue up every single talent and come back in 5 years when they are all maxed. Even WOW people play for 2-3 weeks after an expansion and they lose 1-2 million subs within 4 months of a new expansion. Does that mean the game is dead or dying?  To some, sure, to others not at all. 

If you take nothing away from any of this, just take the following;

 

For $7 you can easily put in 100 hours of enjoyment and entertainment into your budget with little overall risk or cost.  If you don't, simply don't renew your subscription until you see improvements or move on to the next game you enjoy.  (Even for $30 for 3 months, its still cheaper then most games, Conan Exiles, Ark, Eve, WoW, Archeage, Black Desert, etc...)

Thanks,

DekkarTV (A bigger problem exists)
 

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45 minutes ago, DekkarTV said:

Nor did the scans hit 10,000 people so we can't accurately say there are 10k players. 

 

In the beginning of beta, the servers would crash allot and had to be restarted often. 

This reflected of ppl entering the login queue, but the server not being ready to let them in. 

 

We got some good, realistic counts at that time. 

 

At that time, there would be 3 or 4 ppl helping in General channel, with 10, 30 questions per minute. How many do you see now? 

At that time, the last post on this forum would allways be 1 to 10 minutes ago, at any given hour of the day. How idle does this forum get? 

 

At any given time we would see 10-50 players moving around any alioth market with 1 or 2 ships doing landing/lift of maneuvers. How many do you see? 

 

Do you have any doubt this game has a fraction of the users it had at October? 

 

If you do, you are in a dream land, together with JC... 

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You obviously haven't been online since the GFN and Mission system releases cause if you were you would see the same amounts, just minus the constant server issues, because NQ has already fixed most of those issues. You can't go to most markets in the ring without seeing 5-30 people during peak NA or EU playtimes.  Help channel is constantly full of questions.  If you want to continue debating that is cool it will be one sided. But comparing "Now" to "back in my day" didn't work for the Boomers and won't work for you either.

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