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Demeter=DU has failed in fundamental game design requiring either a full rebuild or re-kickstart


Warlander

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Checkmate NQ.

 

I think it summed this situation up when Pann said we have two groups asking to delete scans or keep them and we dont want to wipe their hard work and we have a situation where are are caught in the middle and dont want to cut the baby in half. To which I say you might not want to cut the baby in half as you are attempting to strangle it in the crib when in reality its not even born yet and all of it is hypthetical to begin with.

 

Demeter exposes fundamental critical flaws in their initial flawed game design under JC's helm that pretty much developed them into a corner that is game ending to the point that it will require a complete rework if not ground up rebuild to make DU feasable going forward.

 

Why? (TLDR version)

 

  • JC had a failed vision and hired a bunch of yes men/women who followed him and continue to keep following his misunderstanding of what is was they were trying to emulate and not make it their own.
  • Going with a voxel game not bothing to do the research that it sounds good but is still not technically feasable in terms of data costs, internet bills, and performance and not knowing it would limit a space game to a single solar system since any additional solar system basically compounds the problem rather than using a hybrid of static mesh worlds you can build voxels onto in order to have enough performance to justify expansions.
  • Then inviting the building communities of the failed games the tried Voxelization with the promise of Space Landmakr combined with Space engineers.
  • The builder community killed any chance of PvP and the PvP community killed off the builders along with new players.
  • Setting unrealistic expectations for mega orgs by feeding them and not establishing factions instead and doubling down by constantly feeding then misunderstanding that not limiting them and being forced to put out feeble attempts to slow them down while crushing everyone else with misguided updates that take out more then is added to the game.
  • Because of all of that now needoing to pivot and remove and limit mining in order to cut costs to up performance, add a vertex tool that takes from that performance, and then fill it back up with hundreds of thousands more TU's, miners, containers, transfer units, machines to produce them, and making the world more desolate.
  • At the same time not understanding that Taxes didnt work in the first place with the Finite Resource pool then turning it Infinite when the game was not designed for it which forced the Ore to be made more "Rare and less Propigated" which further compounds the issues since anyone 6 months from now that comes back will likely never play anything higher than a T1-2 version of the game since that is the only ore they will ever get and the progression they will experience.
  • Taxes yet again meant to slow down mega orgs that further creates unbalance since NQ wont get rid of scans and they will instantly take all the tiles worth anything and make more than they are taxed while everyone else experiences the full weight of the tax and forced to pay for it with T1 mats which wont be worth anything since everyone will be doing the same thing with dwindling returns and a limited production of ore since there are more sinks than influx to the system.
  • NQ now making the game based on Ore Per Month to align with their sub model which makes it as such as you now have to mine asteroids once per week or run missions to cover tax, and log in to use charges and beyond that there is no reason to actually play the game.
  • Because of that it makes it so that production of consumables like space gas, warp cells, and even scrap will be in short supply since people will need to sell ore for tax and they will be the only thing worth anything since this update completely negates the need for atomospheric parts since spacestations are not taxed and all content is space based now. 
  • Ore transfers will take a year of subs to get a full container of ore so PvP will suffer even if people are forced to slow boat between planets except for this with ore monopolies which will use warp cells with their ship scanning scripts on XS ships to hunt for anyone to kill until nobody goes between planets except for VR.
  • When people start to default on their taxes and the month after demeter goes live and those people have nothing to come back to there is no need to play at all and they will tell their friends to write this game off.
  • Which will force NQ to knee jerk forced updates like Territory wars since nobody is playing, building, moving ore, traveling, fighting, and those with ore monopolies roll over everything that still remains its game over since there is litterally nothing left and you let them win the game long ago.

 

There are no moves left NQ is willing to do that can take them out of checkmate, they simply just dont have a budget to rebuild the game from the ground up. They have developed themselves into a corner starting with the conception and direction JC took this game down.

 

And with the comment of we dont want to cut the baby in half it shows that NQ will never reign in mega orgs that have and will continue to kill the game since NQ knows where their bread is buttered and keeps feeding them. Funny since most of them are likely alpha backers who will never pay them a cent through their packages and armed with 3 beta keys that wont pay them until launch.

 

The taxes are aimed at them since they have been spoon fed this whole time by the devs who dont know how to punish them properly to slow them down and arbitrarily do things like say "hahaha boohoo you dont want to pay taxes" and at the same time hand them all the resources and prevent everyone else from getting them going forward or progressing beyond a T2 version of this game since the ore is rare and even sparse then before and all the metadata they are using is based on them with a flat tax when misunderstanding they are handing them all the T3+ ore which makes all their tiles profitable since everyone else will be sitting on T1 tiles and lucky if you can even find a T2 ore tile and stuck with all the taxes aming it not worth putting down a TU.

 

The real issue nobody is even considering is that because the planets and moons are all voxel based and not a static mesh the Voxel construct of the planetary bodies no longer matters at all and it was the sole reason we are stuck in a cramped solar system in the first place since it is not feasable to have anything beyond it and so we are just grasping at straws and trying to punish ourselves even more for no reason. If there were multiple solar systems, deep space, or a universe to spread out in none of this would matter. But the plan was always to ransack this solar system and then open up jump gates you can spawn camp so that mega orgs could have their own solar system to themselves and wield infinite ore against the server anyhow which always sounded dumb to begin with when everyone is stuck with a picked over carcass to fight back with.

 

The only thing that will save this game is a full rebuild from the ground up but seeing the mediocre dev team they have and the things they are deadset on actually making seem to me they are incapable of doing that unless they clean house and bring in actually MMO developers.

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They have developed themselves into a corner starting with the conception and direction JC took this game down.

 

I have to say....that JC's "vision" is both the reason most people started playing the game...and the reason it has generally failed.

 

It's like if I decided that I had a great idea for a new car. It would be fully electric, but with just as much endurance as gas. And it would be cheap and easy to make. And self-driving, of course. 

 

Is that a great idea with a lot of "potential"...?

 

No, it's an idiotic idea because I have no experience engineering cars. My ideas about what would make the next great vehicle are irrelevant because they aren't backed by experience or real-world proof that my idea actually works. 

 

The same is true with JC and DU.

 

His idea was not based on experience or real-world proof that his "cutting edge tech" would work...he had no experience in gaming at all. 

 

He sold everyone on the idea of DU, but it was never more than an idea -- it never became working plans. As a result, NQ still thinks it's okay to iterate, throw it up, and adjust it later as if DU is an early alpha developer sandbox and we ought to understand "that's how things are done". 

 

This isn't how it's done....

 

First comes the idea, then comes the design, then comes implementation. DU is what happens when you try to develop your plan, ideas, and implementation all at the same time....it doesn't work for a complex game. 

 

This is usually the very first thing novice game devs learn....but JC didn't want to learn the craft or listen to the voices he hired that understood it. 

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14 minutes ago, Nayropux said:

We get it man, you're mad you can't sit on hundreds of tiles solo anymore. You need a better way to work through your grief than spamming the forums constantly.

 

Cool. Umad cause its all true? Im just glad I havent payed these clowns a single cent yet so whats there to be mad about?

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31 minutes ago, Nayropux said:

We get it man, you're mad you can't sit on hundreds of tiles solo anymore. You need a better way to work through your grief than spamming the forums constantly.


Honestly, I am mad that I am being punished for having a life outside of DU vs. scheduling everything around this game for "optimized" calibrations for tile taxes, when I just wanted to have my little island resort of 20 tiles with protected views that I spent 2 years on, and was really coming together until this shit cut loose.

So mad to lose hard work... yes, mad for being punished for working a lot rl and game trying to enslave my free time... yes. mad that I spent hundreds of hours doing things I didn't want to in order to just build and create... hell yes... and I am not the only one that feels any of these things.

 

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They really need to pick the brains of the Boundless devs.   Or at least look at how they prioritized updates after release.
 

that game doesn’t even have a sub, and they couldn’t even convince players to maintain upkeep on land that just needed leaves as a tax (exactly like Minecraft tree leaves).   The devs also suffered hard enough to players refusing to ever return after land was reclaimed/advancement lost, that one of their first major updates was returning stuff to inventory on failure of paying upkeep.

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Meh. If it comes to it, all NQ has to do is to change the seed for the ore distribution while not updating old scans and the pools of all the tiles would be different.

 

And clearly you have little to no experience in real-world software development as a "a full rebuild from the ground up" is among the most foolish things a company can do. Over time you cut out pieces that doesn't work and add pieces that hopefully does. The whole ignorant "just rewrite it" mentality it the only reason I even bothered replying to this post.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Torsten said:

Meh. If it comes to it, all NQ has to do is to change the seed for the ore distribution while not updating old scans and the pools of all the tiles would be different.

 

And clearly you have little to no experience in real-world software development as a "a full rebuild from the ground up" is among the most foolish things a company can do. Over time you cut out pieces that doesn't work and add pieces that hopefully does. The whole ignorant "just rewrite it" mentality it the only reason I even bothered replying to this post.

 

 

 

Yeah "Clearly" NQ is doing great and has millions of subs and this game is blowing up the internet with their awesome PvP game. 

 

"Clearly" NQ is in damage control mode trying to figure out how to amputate all JC's cancerous design choices that have metastasized and are going to kill the company if they dont act right now while asking for more money. Its obvious they dont have the time to do this "Over Time" since they are hemeraging subs as is and are now going towards forcing you to play/pay or you lose everything you earned if you take a month off. 

 

"Clearly" they dont have the time to sit back and do this "Over Time" and they dont know what cancerous desgin choices to amputate next as they seem to want to cut their arm off to sew it back on again and send us the bill only they dont realize most people playing still are alpha backers who will never pay them, the beta key players who arent paying them either, or putting it all on the few people who actually pay subs currently.

 

Mining needed to go nobody is trying to keep the status quo as it made the game unplayable.

 

The thing is that this patch was supposed to fill holes to make the game playable again with a full geometry reset but for whatever reason knowing the data costs it has they doubled the geometry complexity and then back filled it with a more complex vertex tool that makes everyone a voxelmancer and at the same time limit the complexity and adding more flora props on top of it further reducing and potentially adding more performance hits since there will be hundreds of thousands of miners, TUs, Cores, Containers, scripts, etc required to mine. And on top of all that they put all the ore right back in as asteroids. Good luck ever seeing a new solar system added as it just compounds all the problems it would aleviate.

 

"Clearly" 

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Warlander is angry because two of the basic dogmas of game are being changed.

Dogma 1 - once you install TU, territory is yours forever. This was never promised. The battle over territories was promised. But nobody was expecting economic battle …   

Dogma 2 – planetary/meganode mining is the most effective income method for solo players/builders. They are not much into mission running with 50 alts. This method is being lost and nobody explained them how they will work in the future. Most of them is mining because they need quanta to do their projects, not because they love mining.

He doesn’t know how to operate after change, schedule of the change, NQ communication is NQ communication.  I understand his angry reactions. I see that he is trying to find some solution. I don’t agree with his solutions but I like that he is trying to.

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I don't disagree that NQ has failed with most of the design fundamentals with DU.

 

But it's also true that there's no way they can re-kickstart or reboot the project. A project reboot would involve years and years and millions of dollars and wouldn't erase any of the flaws with NQ's design philosophy or culture. We'd likely be back to the same place in 5 years, anyway.  

 

Their top investor has over $20 million invested in the company and even stepped in as CEO temporarily -- the goal now is recouping at least some of their investment. They would never green-light any big refactor/reboot.  

 

I'd argue that NQ might actually be on the right path to recouping that investment. 

 

DU doesn't seem like it has long-term life potential. So in that case....who even cares about current customers? Who says their strategy is to make a successful long-term game at this point...? 

 

I'd argue they will revamp new player UX and (combined with lower server costs and higher sub costs) will market the hell out of DU in some early release form.

 

They will aim to secure 100-200k subs and have no intention of holding onto those subs. They know that most players won't try the game for more than a few hours. They know the churn rate will be just as bad (or worse) than open beta, and that's okay for them because they aren't trying to create long-term subs.

 

Thanks to Xsolla, they know that many of the players they hook with (likely misleading) adverts won't even churn right away...that's just how sub-based billing goes. 

 

So the goal isn't really to make a game that survives, it's to recoup as much money for Adurance Ventures as possible and to keep the company itself afloat for as long as feasible. These changes might help them do that in one big marketing push. 

 

Maybe the reason NQ doesn't care about communication or player anger is because they stopped viewing DU as a game and it's now a product to milk as much as they can before it dies. 

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Seems like a lot of big org hating here... 

 

Why?

This is a civilization building game or at least it has been promoted as such. It is not a single player game where you can solo fly a battleship and take down anything you encounter without loss. That is called a single player game with a difficulty setting of  "ridiculously beyond easy". 

 

Why do people care about what someone else has? 

How would anything be different in 2 years if the game wiped everything right now? 

Having no player snowball effect in persistent game state is a really hard problem very few games ever crack with giving up something major.  Maybe put the salt away and tell us what do you want to give up for these two incompatible aspects?

 

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Sure this forum is just full of salty vets who havent realised they are playing a beta, crying over pixels that dont actually mean anything.  Cant wait to see how angry you will all be when the game is actually live.  Will make sure I have plenty of popcorn.

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7 hours ago, tomasco said:

Warlander is angry because two of the basic dogmas of game are being changed.

 

Dogma 1 - once you install TU, territory is yours forever. This was never promised. The battle over territories was promised. But nobody was expecting economic battle …   

 

Dogma 2 – planetary/meganode mining is the most effective income method for solo players/builders. They are not much into mission running with 50 alts. This method is being lost and nobody explained them how they will work in the future. Most of them is mining because they need quanta to do their projects, not because they love mining.

 

He doesn’t know how to operate after change, schedule of the change, NQ communication is NQ communication.  I understand his angry reactions. I see that he is trying to find some solution. I don’t agree with his solutions but I like that he is trying to.

 

Lol!

 

You assume im mad when I got my monies worth and havent paid them a single cent so far and wont till DU goes live

You assume I have never played or enjoy semi/full loot PvP games before and I dont care about loss or permanance

You assume nobody wasnt solo mining and running missions at the same time for 2x profit like group mining wasnt laggy af

You assume I didnt see this coming and prepared for it as soon as they talked about miners and already know how to exploit it.

 

Keep putting words in my mouth. 

 

But yeah, Its not like I dont normally roll with top of the server PvP guilds in most games I play even if I chose to play casual this time around or anything in between in other games. If there is actual legit PvP with a purpose im all game for that so dont act like im against it or that I dont also root for the underdogs to make PvP not some one sided steamroll if the meta is hella imbalanced.

 

Dont assume shit that I dont think of every play style when I speak and not just my own sake. I like destroying whole servers in PvP territory conquest, destroying economies for fun and profit till they ban me, and exploiting everything the system will let me get away with most people cant even connect the dots for themselves when a PvP game is LEGIT since UO and the 50+ other MMO PvP games ive played since.

 

This aint a PvP game as much as it is Mine Craft, EQN:LM, and Space Engineers. Nothing they can do now can make it anything other then that. Sure they can turn on FFA but its not going to go as they plan without actually making factions of orgs and seeing as they didnt want to actually make the content or tools to facilitate that and put it all on us to do it for them it failed in its infancy barring the seldom blocades and weak content we do have.

 

 

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2 hours ago, Kobayashi said:

Sure this forum is just full of salty vets who havent realised they are playing a beta, crying over pixels that dont actually mean anything.  Cant wait to see how angry you will all be when the game is actually live.  Will make sure I have plenty of popcorn.

 

Dont know if you noticed but all games now are permabetas.

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4 hours ago, Endstar said:

Seems like a lot of big org hating here... 

 

Why?

This is a civilization building game or at least it has been promoted as such. It is not a single player game where you can solo fly a battleship and take down anything you encounter without loss. That is called a single player game with a difficulty setting of  "ridiculously beyond easy". 

 

Why do people care about what someone else has? 

How would anything be different in 2 years if the game wiped everything right now? 

Having no player snowball effect in persistent game state is a really hard problem very few games ever crack with giving up something major.  Maybe put the salt away and tell us what do you want to give up for these two incompatible aspects?

 

 

Seeing your Alpha tags you actually bought into JC's acid trip vision quest. 

 

NQ never actually built the tools to facilitate a civ and put it all on you and asked you to play pretend with playschool voxel houses and somehow a Civ would emerge. Lol yeah right.

 

Players arent devs and most dont even know how to make any kind of content worth playing let alone the 90% of the population who is the content comsumers who will find all this completely underwhelming unless you like an Elevator simulator or quazi F-0 racing  or quazi mariocart. Beyond that they never game us enough tools to make anything different with limit Lua code access and the lagtastic experience it makes.

 

As far as megaorgs go

 

Under JC NQ just tried to push everyone into mega orgs in a feeble attempt to make a faction system and not coding it themselves. For that reason the more they want me to play as they want to im just not. NQ does not apply any forom of tangible limits as much as they use how much mega orgs exploited this game as a benchmark for everyone else and the feeble attempts to reign them in with content gates and sinks are just speedbumps for mega orgs vs mountains to most other orgs or groups of friends to bar their progress to force people to join up.

 

Mega orgs have exploited this game to rediculous heights with changes that should have required multiple wipes and I get why they are just waiting for the full gameplay loop to do it. The problem is that with Demeter it is going to push people out the door unless you exploited the system to the max. If NQ wants them to box out everyone else from experiencing anything other then T2 industries and content and allowing mega orgs to continue to arm themselves to steamroll whats left of the  player base then yeah its a great patch if you got trillions in the bank.

 

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There is a reason why ALL the tiles around the Alioth ring are taken.

 

It has been confirmed by NQ multiple times that the ring would be a safe-zone. So there is an strategic value there since you can take your time and not worry about future territory war, and at the same time have close access to central markets, mission hubs and other people. So in other words. People in the ring, are specifically looking for a permanent risk-free and persistent place to build.

 

And the persistent part here is important. This has always been a MAJOR selling point of DU. And demeter tax turns this up side down. Suddenly you have to play the game in a way dictated by NQ (which is completely opposite from the original premise of make-you-own-game), and do daily chores or else risk loosing tiles. I.e no longer persistent.

 

And it is true that we all knew that territory war was coming in the future, and tiles outside safe zones would be as risk. But that means that people who want to do t-war, are building strongholds outside the safe safe zones and preparing for that.

But as indicated by the popularity of ring tiles, there is also a demand for a stress-free alternative where people can relax and build at their own pace close to other people. And demeter completely decimates the stress-free scenario. Leaving only sanctuary and space stations where you are mostly alone and no longer feel part of a community like in the ring.

 

And to address the counter claim that tax is needed to remove inactive tiles. That is to put it frankly, bullshit. If the goal of demeter was to remove inactive tiles. Then all NQ would have to do, would be to look for inactive players. I.e. if the player is no longer paying the subscription and/or has not logged into the game in a long time (many months).

 

Demeter tax on the other hand feels more like an desperate attempt at generating player interaction by way of adding artificial scarcity to the ownership of tiles.

And to me this has all the trademarks of a classic NQ "quick fix" where they try to generate content with minimal effort. And look at 0.23 for an example on how well that usually turns out..

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I don't see what game is actually left after Demeter, except an auto-mining-tax-simulator. From what they have been saying in the dev blogs "you should be able to make a profit from auto-mining", it certainly doesn't sound like there will be enough ore to actually build anything one you'e paid your taxes. How are you supposed to gather the 1m ore needed for even a small base worth of voxels? Login every two days and play the auto-mine mini-game...for a few years...until you have enough ore to actually build something?

 

 

 

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On 11/15/2021 at 9:40 PM, Warlander said:

And with the comment of we dont want to cut the baby in half it shows that NQ will never reign in mega orgs that have and will continue to kill the game since NQ knows where their bread is buttered and keeps feeding them.

 

I highly appreciete your summary (and agree with 95%, very on point), but totaly disagree with "mega orgs" problem and who "kills" game/balance.

 

All, lets say "pressure" (both inside game in economy, and outside in terms of vocal opposition), produced not by some mythical monopoly giant stuctures, but pretty much over dedicated individuals or small groups of them, as small as 2-4 people. Sure, they can, on paper be members of some 500 people organization, but they likely be only ones still playing (so its means nothing).

 

In short, NQ allowed most free time and maniaclly dedicated players do whatever they wanted for years (often even outside rules), and now, obviously, such individuals will be cement boots on legs (what they gladly doing in any discussion for some time), in regard of any change (even positive ones), only interested in saving they accamulated advantage over incoming plebs, especialy when this prospect is so near. Its all these 10000 machines, all plannet scanned, 10 trillions in bank guys etc. 

 

Not kinda blame such players totaly (human nature) its fundamental NQ fault.

 

I see full wipe as least thing that can be done (along side with complex of other changes), but probably NQ never gather balls to do this.

 

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21 hours ago, blundertwink said:

Their top investor has over $20 million invested in the company and even stepped in as CEO temporarily -- the goal now is recouping at least some of their investment. They would never green-light any big refactor/reboot.  

 

That is not how the investment type in play here works, this is venture capital which means that a group of investors puts money in a pool and back X project, expecting only a percentage o fthose to end up successful but to th extent that the gains from that will yield a profit AND cover the losses from the failed investments.

 

So there is no direct exxpectation of recouping investment here even if that would be nice obviously. Also, I believe JC left for a number fo reasons, part of which being that he simply was not able to run the show and he came to the realisation that his vision was not going to be working out and di dnot want to mak ethe compromises needed to keep the compoany going

 

 

21 hours ago, blundertwink said:

They will aim to secure 100-200k subs and have no intention of holding onto those subs. They know that most players won't try the game for more than a few hours. They know the churn rate will be just as bad (or worse) than open beta, and that's okay for them because they aren't trying to create long-term subs.

 

The 22 million investment would need a _lot_ more than 200K subs to be quickly repaid if at the same time the company needs to keep the lights on and servers running. I'd expect it to be much more likely that he investors know and accepted this is a long term thing and they may get some money back on their investment over a  5-6 year run.

 

I did run some basic calculations and came to the conclusion NQ needs about 50K active subs to pay their monthly cost, including staff. Anything above that would be profit. If they would manage to somehow hit 100K subs the might be able to pay back on the investment in the 5-6 years mentioned above without much of a profit.


Just take CCP as an example, they have about 230K active subs, an active shop and a monthly revenue of around 5 million overall. EVE is a MUCH bigger game though and CCP employs a multitude of the staff NQ has, so running cost are higher. They own their own servers though and they have been running for many years now so cost there are probably relatively low and network traffic outside of their own cluster is relatively low actually, including player facing traffic. This data and the numbers are all public and can be verified if you'd want to.

CCP actually did a 4 hour stream earlier this year with their networking/hardware team which was very interesting to say the least.

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I can see like same 5 people posting on the forums/discord.

 

And you talk about 50k sub levels. Comparing this to eve... Imagination is good for DU I hear.

 

In eve, it's a megalpolis. Some huge dramas can happen and you may not notice them as there is just too many people and it can be you are not involved there.

In DU, it's more like provincial isolated 3-buildings neighborhood. 3 girls, 2 carebears and 1 bully. All know each other.

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On 11/15/2021 at 6:40 AM, Warlander said:

Checkmate NQ.

 

I think it summed this situation up when Pann said we have two groups asking to delete scans or keep them and we dont want to wipe their hard work and we have a situation where are are caught in the middle and dont want to cut the baby in half. To which I say you might not want to cut the baby in half as you are attempting to strangle it in the crib when in reality its not even born yet and all of it is hypthetical to begin with.

 

Demeter exposes fundamental critical flaws in their initial flawed game design under JC's helm that pretty much developed them into a corner that is game ending to the point that it will require a complete rework if not ground up rebuild to make DU feasable going forward.

 

Why? (TLDR version)

 

  • JC had a failed vision and hired a bunch of yes men/women who followed him and continue to keep following his misunderstanding of what is was they were trying to emulate and not make it their own.
  • Going with a voxel game not bothing to do the research that it sounds good but is still not technically feasable in terms of data costs, internet bills, and performance and not knowing it would limit a space game to a single solar system since any additional solar system basically compounds the problem rather than using a hybrid of static mesh worlds you can build voxels onto in order to have enough performance to justify expansions.
  • Then inviting the building communities of the failed games the tried Voxelization with the promise of Space Landmakr combined with Space engineers.
  • The builder community killed any chance of PvP and the PvP community killed off the builders along with new players.
  • Setting unrealistic expectations for mega orgs by feeding them and not establishing factions instead and doubling down by constantly feeding then misunderstanding that not limiting them and being forced to put out feeble attempts to slow them down while crushing everyone else with misguided updates that take out more then is added to the game.
  • Because of all of that now needoing to pivot and remove and limit mining in order to cut costs to up performance, add a vertex tool that takes from that performance, and then fill it back up with hundreds of thousands more TU's, miners, containers, transfer units, machines to produce them, and making the world more desolate.
  • At the same time not understanding that Taxes didnt work in the first place with the Finite Resource pool then turning it Infinite when the game was not designed for it which forced the Ore to be made more "Rare and less Propigated" which further compounds the issues since anyone 6 months from now that comes back will likely never play anything higher than a T1-2 version of the game since that is the only ore they will ever get and the progression they will experience.
  • Taxes yet again meant to slow down mega orgs that further creates unbalance since NQ wont get rid of scans and they will instantly take all the tiles worth anything and make more than they are taxed while everyone else experiences the full weight of the tax and forced to pay for it with T1 mats which wont be worth anything since everyone will be doing the same thing with dwindling returns and a limited production of ore since there are more sinks than influx to the system.
  • NQ now making the game based on Ore Per Month to align with their sub model which makes it as such as you now have to mine asteroids once per week or run missions to cover tax, and log in to use charges and beyond that there is no reason to actually play the game.
  • Because of that it makes it so that production of consumables like space gas, warp cells, and even scrap will be in short supply since people will need to sell ore for tax and they will be the only thing worth anything since this update completely negates the need for atomospheric parts since spacestations are not taxed and all content is space based now. 
  • Ore transfers will take a year of subs to get a full container of ore so PvP will suffer even if people are forced to slow boat between planets except for this with ore monopolies which will use warp cells with their ship scanning scripts on XS ships to hunt for anyone to kill until nobody goes between planets except for VR.
  • When people start to default on their taxes and the month after demeter goes live and those people have nothing to come back to there is no need to play at all and they will tell their friends to write this game off.
  • Which will force NQ to knee jerk forced updates like Territory wars since nobody is playing, building, moving ore, traveling, fighting, and those with ore monopolies roll over everything that still remains its game over since there is litterally nothing left and you let them win the game long ago.

 

There are no moves left NQ is willing to do that can take them out of checkmate, they simply just dont have a budget to rebuild the game from the ground up. They have developed themselves into a corner starting with the conception and direction JC took this game down.

 

And with the comment of we dont want to cut the baby in half it shows that NQ will never reign in mega orgs that have and will continue to kill the game since NQ knows where their bread is buttered and keeps feeding them. Funny since most of them are likely alpha backers who will never pay them a cent through their packages and armed with 3 beta keys that wont pay them until launch.

 

The taxes are aimed at them since they have been spoon fed this whole time by the devs who dont know how to punish them properly to slow them down and arbitrarily do things like say "hahaha boohoo you dont want to pay taxes" and at the same time hand them all the resources and prevent everyone else from getting them going forward or progressing beyond a T2 version of this game since the ore is rare and even sparse then before and all the metadata they are using is based on them with a flat tax when misunderstanding they are handing them all the T3+ ore which makes all their tiles profitable since everyone else will be sitting on T1 tiles and lucky if you can even find a T2 ore tile and stuck with all the taxes aming it not worth putting down a TU.

 

The real issue nobody is even considering is that because the planets and moons are all voxel based and not a static mesh the Voxel construct of the planetary bodies no longer matters at all and it was the sole reason we are stuck in a cramped solar system in the first place since it is not feasable to have anything beyond it and so we are just grasping at straws and trying to punish ourselves even more for no reason. If there were multiple solar systems, deep space, or a universe to spread out in none of this would matter. But the plan was always to ransack this solar system and then open up jump gates you can spawn camp so that mega orgs could have their own solar system to themselves and wield infinite ore against the server anyhow which always sounded dumb to begin with when everyone is stuck with a picked over carcass to fight back with.

 

The only thing that will save this game is a full rebuild from the ground up but seeing the mediocre dev team they have and the things they are deadset on actually making seem to me they are incapable of doing that unless they clean house and bring in actually MMO developers.

The fundamental point you’re missing  is that games like DU are based around a concept. They will implement different ideas, get feedback, adjust, and evolve the game. Assuming some all knowing designer has the vision mapped out from A to Z is naive at best.

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3 hours ago, Ving said:

I don't see what game is actually left after Demeter, except an auto-mining-tax-simulator. From what they have been saying in the dev blogs "you should be able to make a profit from auto-mining", it certainly doesn't sound like there will be enough ore to actually build anything one you'e paid your taxes. How are you supposed to gather the 1m ore needed for even a small base worth of voxels? Login every two days and play the auto-mine mini-game...for a few years...until you have enough ore to actually build something?

 

 

 

This is my concern exactly. I think more will snowball eventually but I am worried there will be a debilitating shortage for a while.

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