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I think it's time for NQ to downsize.


Xennial

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I think it's time for NQ and us all to accept that the DU sandbox is just to big. All these planets and moons, most of which serving zero purpose outside of containing an ore type. With that tiny player population thats left we are just never going to see anything but vast stretches of nothingness with a spattering of constructs in 95% of the game world.

 

Proposal : Keep the core 3 planets and moons and drop the rest of the planets for now. Ring the 3 planet area with a persistently spawning asteroid belt outside safe space. T3+ ores found out there.

 

Someday in the distant future if DU is ever a success and you need more room add the outter planets.

 

Obviously this would make the most sense with a wipe, but if it could be done without then all the better to not lose more of the few players that remain.

 

Then NQ can focus on giving players more tools for setting up their own cities / markets etc. Maybe just maybe, people would have a reason to build things and feel like they are not totally alone in the universe by moving 2 tiles outside of their org/home tiles.

 

Territory wars and all that jazz was a nice dream, but even if it was implemented tomorrow, no one would bother living outside the safe zone. You would have a few mining platforms spattered around with whatever defenses as no one would risk any big investments. Lets be fair the combat technology in DU is abysmal and will never be anything buy abysmal because of the way they handle the simulation with this engine. Leave the ship-ship pew-pew in the asteroid belt and call it a day.

 

I strongly suspect in a matter a few weeks we will see most planets barren of territory claims now that they actually have to be upkept.

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Interesting proposal.

You idea makes sense from a player interaction point of view ...... however :)

Can the game currently handle a city.  I dont think so.

Since the start of beta the game performance dies as soon as a number of players and their constructs get together.  Making the "space" smaller might actually make performance worse. 

At the moment, I really dont think NQ care to much about the player base they seem to be focused on the final game and are not concerning themselves with the short term playability of the game.  For example  .23 (industry wipe) and now Demeter (mining and scan wipe) are probably beneficial in the long term future of the game but are basically punishing players who did hard work for the future.  On this forum there is a player trying to save a race track from destruction since many of the builders (hex owners) dont play anymore.  Why would a player contribute to a massive society structure right now when at any time another patch might wipe it out.  Imagine if we all got together and built a city and they wiped it.   Its pretty clear we are in Alpha and NQ is treating us as alpha players .....  the title "beta" is only there so they can justify the price.  Well thats my opinion anyway. 

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@Xennial Torn on this....

1. Performance wise, cramming us together will definitely hurt game performance for a lot of players. (I see Underhook just stated that).
2. I agree with you that the space is too big, too many planets. We could have 5 planets. 3 safe (T1-T3), 2 pvp (T4+T5), without getting too crammed.
3. Sanctuary along with other planets need everything magic Bp'ed back to people and then all planets fully wiped of constructs.

I mean at this point massive damage has already been set in motion for all community projects, with very little in the way of preventing loss. Things have been so destabilized I feel the players who will be in the best position in the future are those with an M-Core ship or smaller, with optimized MU's on 7 tiles with industry if they enjoy that.

Anything bigger is just exposed to too much risk due to the destabilizing changes.

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6 minutes ago, Underhook said:

Interesting proposal.

You idea makes sense from a player interaction point of view ...... however :)

Can the game currently handle a city.  I dont think so.

Since the start of beta the game performance dies as soon as a number of players and their constructs get together.  Making the "space" smaller might actually make performance worse. 

At the moment, I really dont think NQ care to much about the player base they seem to be focused on the final game and are not concerning themselves with the short term playability of the game.  For example  .23 (industry wipe) and now Demeter (mining and scan wipe) are probably beneficial in the long term future of the game but are basically punishing players who did hard work for the future.  On this forum there is a player trying to save a race track from destruction since many of the builders (hex owners) dont play anymore.  Why would a player contribute to a massive society structure right now when at any time another patch might wipe it out.  Imagine if we all got together and built a city and they wiped it.   Its pretty clear we are in Alpha and NQ is treating us as alpha players .....  the title "beta" is only there so they can justify the price.  Well thats my opinion anyway. 

 

In general I agree with your points which is why I say it would work best with a wipe. Of course as soon as you say that , the diehards who think there will never be a wipe attack like your kidnapping their children. 

 

That being said I also agree with your performance point, which is why I think static markets are a fail. Let players create markets which will more naturally spread players and movements around the planets. This is what I meant when I was referring to more tools for setting up markets etc. 

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4 minutes ago, Creator said:

@Xennial Torn on this....

1. Performance wise, cramming us together will definitely hurt game performance for a lot of players. (I see Underhook just stated that).
2. I agree with you that the space is too big, too many planets. We could have 5 planets. 3 safe (T1-T3), 2 pvp (T4+T5), without getting too crammed.
3. Sanctuary along with other planets need everything magic Bp'ed back to people and then all planets fully wiped of constructs.

I mean at this point massive damage has already been set in motion for all community projects, with very little in the way of preventing loss. Things have been so destabilized I feel the players who will be in the best position in the future are those with an M-Core ship or smaller, with optimized MU's on 7 tiles with industry if they enjoy that.

Anything bigger is just exposed to too much risk due to the destabilizing changes.

 

Actually you raise a good point here I hadn't really been thinking about with the race tracks etc. Many of the big co-op builds are likely to be gutted soon and scavenged by all the people who think they are getting some sort of massive windfall they will keep forever. It is very likely in a few weeks all we will see is the nashing of teeth of players on hiatus that come back to check on things only to find all the stuff they / their org worked to build gone. 

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I think the hardest part about having a community focused build pre-dementor is, that when I protested instead of people being supportive of my work, I was told I as a solo player didn't deserve what I had built. People honestly don't value most of our community based/focused builds, they are generally dead and empty cause their isn't a community/social culture in DU at the moment. 

I believe there isn't infrastructure or in-game features that really promote/drive social gameplay in a meaningful way either. There are hundreds of great builds 95% of us have never seen, nor will we every bother to visit as we grind for quanta and adjust to these hard pivoting (Alpha state) changes during the "Beta" before launch.

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7 minutes ago, Creator said:

I think the hardest part about having a community focused build pre-dementor is, that when I protested instead of people being supportive of my work, I was told I as a solo player didn't deserve what I had built. People honestly don't value most of our community based/focused builds, they are generally dead and empty cause their isn't a community/social culture in DU at the moment. 

I believe there isn't infrastructure or in-game features that really promote/drive social gameplay in a meaningful way either. There are hundreds of great builds 95% of us have never seen, nor will we every bother to visit as we grind for quanta and adjust to these hard pivoting (Alpha state) changes during the "Beta" before launch.

 

DU has always had that identity crisis. Is it a sandbox builder? or a 4x space game? There is zero reason to build anything thats not a ship in DU outside of a player deciding to be creative. Why did I wrap my factory in a building? Because we thought it would be cool to have a city like thing going on for our org. We made runways, parking spots etc. There was zero point to do this other than our desire to make something look cool. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of work required turned it from a cool idea into a grinding misery to finish.

 

We set up on Thades, in large part to avoid the performance misery that is Alioth. Sadly there are no real tools in the game to make it easy / convienet for us to set that up as a hub of activity for other players to come to and do business. So I naturally ended up hauling most of our factory goods to alioth to sell because no one ever bothers to go shopping elsewhere unless forced like with schematics.

 

Which really goes back to my point, the gameworld is to big. There just is not any incentive for player to do anything but go to alioth markets to transact. Static markets will forever remain one of the things that prevents communities from evolving. If everyone who produced things could setup their wares on the searchable marketplace listings at least people could setup shops, which in turn would lead them to desire to 'pretty' up their shop space. 

 

Anyway I am rambling at this point like we all do about what DU "could" be. The core point remains, the gameworld is vastly to big for the few hundred? players left actively playing? Heck I only resubbed because I needed to tear down my factory and store everything on a personal HQ tile so it doesn't get scavanged since out of the 300+ org members we have maybe 1 or 2 are ever bother to play anymore. 

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Careful what you wish for, if NQ did something like this you find the original idea return of only sanctuary and 20km around ark ship as safe zone.

 

Also you will se very hard speed limits and acceleration nerfs in order to maintain that “big world” feeling.

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I have to admit i laughed very hard when reading this.

Now just go search the kickstarter info and all the info from alpha and you will see the current version of DU is already a downgraded version of the promise made. Any additional downscaling would be to pull the plug, but since they still hold two offices in not the most cheap locations and have a full staff to think about stuf as mining for 400L per hour is best for DU I would not worry to much, all the latest changes were to cut costs for servers, however it is called, added more monthly pay per person, so the future is bright. except not for the features in DU. The only people who will like these changes are those who exploided to the max and were never handled.

At launch we are all to get 3 alts per character, probably that is the next thing killed. Organizational owned Territories was the latest although its not called that way, a million tax a week is effectively killing all small organizational claims.

Downsizing is well underway, do not be mistaken.

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Not sure how less planets would help. It would basically kill any space travel mechanics like pvp, exploring and trading in the game.

 

What DU needs more than anything is more features allowing a complete game loop that enables more variation and .. well.... fun.

And the problem all stems from the abysmal slow dev rate at NQ, and their inability to generate any substantial improvements in the game even after 7+ years of development.

 

And having a large universe is mostly a server cost/maintenance issue, that since the planets are already there should have minimal impact on available dev time.

 

 

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19 minutes ago, CptLoRes said:

Not sure how less planets would help. It would basically kill any space travel mechanics like pvp, exploring and trading in the game.

 

What DU needs more than anything is more features allowing a complete game loop that enables more variation and .. well.... fun.

And the problem all stems from the abysmal slow dev rate at NQ, and their inability to generate any substantial improvements in the game even after 7+ years of development.

 

And having a large universe is mostly a server cost/maintenance issue, that since the planets are already there should have minimal impact on available dev time.

 

 

 

This I disagree with. Space is vast. Having all the roids located outside of safe space would provide plenty of pvp opportunties. So long as the belt is big enough not to make it easy for pvp'ers to 'camp' the entirety of it then pvp gameplay would be fine. 

 

Exploring doesn't really exist in DU, it's a Point of Interest gameworld, the rest of all that space is pointless to be in. Which is the same problem as the surface of planets right now, only the marketplaces really matter, the rest is just for mining.

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But that is kinda my point. There is no real exploring, and everything else is centered around mining for the markets. But this is more a problem with lack of game features that enable other ways to play the game, then number of planets and size of the universe.

 

And the moment you get features like proper exploring for alien artifacts or whatever, then you want those planets to be there.

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7 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

I have to admit i laughed very hard when reading this.

Now just go search the kickstarter info and all the info from alpha and you will see the current version of DU is already a downgraded version of the promise made. Any additional downscaling would be to pull the plug, but since they still hold two offices in not the most cheap locations and have a full staff to think about stuf as mining for 400L per hour is best for DU I would not worry to much, all the latest changes were to cut costs for servers, however it is called, added more monthly pay per person, so the future is bright. except not for the features in DU. The only people who will like these changes are those who exploided to the max and were never handled.

At launch we are all to get 3 alts per character, probably that is the next thing killed. Organizational owned Territories was the latest although its not called that way, a million tax a week is effectively killing all small organizational claims.

Downsizing is well underway, do not be mistaken.

 

To be honest I always laugh when people reference the kickstarter like that matters anymore. My call for downsizing has nothing to do with NQ's development or costs, it purely from that practical point of view that the game world is too big for the number of players DU has, or even that it ever had playing.

 

The game world will never feel 'alive' with this much of it empty and devoid of any activity. 

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16 hours ago, Xennial said:

Proposal : Keep the core 3 planets and moons and drop the rest of the planets for now

This would fit the trend since 0.23, remove content, eliminate game play loops and take things out of the game rather than add content.

 

I dont think it's a great idea, more NQ resources thrown away to add nothing of value. 

 

On the other hand, if we remove planets we might as well remove ship elements needed to get into space and limit flying to atmospheric only. Then the ppl who are left in game we "feel" like the last planet has more people playing. NQ would probably save money on server costs. :)

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16 hours ago, Creator said:

@Xennial Torn on this....

1. Performance wise, cramming us together will definitely hurt game performance for a lot of players. (I see Underhook just stated that).
2. I agree with you that the space is too big, too many planets. We could have 5 planets. 3 safe (T1-T3), 2 pvp (T4+T5), without getting too crammed.
3. Sanctuary along with other planets need everything magic Bp'ed back to people and then all planets fully wiped of constructs.

I mean at this point massive damage has already been set in motion for all community projects, with very little in the way of preventing loss. Things have been so destabilized I feel the players who will be in the best position in the future are those with an M-Core ship or smaller, with optimized MU's on 7 tiles with industry if they enjoy that.

Anything bigger is just exposed to too much risk due to the destabilizing changes.

 

Issues I have in context to a solar system:

  • Planets dont adhere to any kind of geology or realistic makeup of materials, minerals, etc.
  • Planets dont adhere to any realistic format of planets in general in size, mass, density, and makeup of all materials to quantify where it is in a solar system playing a part in the makeup of the solar system.
  • Lack of gas giant planets or inhospitable planets like Mercury/Venus being too hot, or gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune being gas giants you likely will never see the core with different gases, wind speeds, etc or ice planets like pluto that are  dense enough to land on but are too jagged and cold to live on without any kind of life support or survival elements.
  • Planets only exist to serve as places to get ore and are too big since you really only need a set amount of goldylocks zone planetary bodies.you can actually go to and live on with variable conditions for survival like air, living conditions, erosion, etc.
  • asteroid belts that make sense in the context of mass by what planet that should exist in the planet slot or moon slot.
  • No unique features to explore or see or occeans, canyons, POI's, etc.
  • No real Teraforming system that does anything to need it in the first place
  • No weather system, Wind system, or planetary rulesets.

 

 

The whole makeup of DUs solar systems make no sense in a space game or reality as much as they felt they needed to fill up space with something.

 

My main issue with this being a Civilization based game:

  • Complete lack of a law and order system or consequences of any kind. Being a space pirate and endlessly attacking people should carry some kind of detriment to what you can do. Wether that is flagging your dynamic constructs to realiation for 24 hours compounded by every person you attack for being a criminal and not being able to use markets while flagged as a criminal or generating bounties or paying off the damages.
  • Acknowledging that a planet would essentially be a break away civilization with their own government, military, law enforcement, industry, mining, commercial, building, and populace that has different aims, goals, drives, and age.ndas.
  • Lack of regions in terms of if you turned a sphere into a cube you have 6 continental regions, 9 districts, and each of them should have an org running a district playing a part in a faction of orgs who cant attack each other unless in open space outside a planetary bubble around its moons.
  • Lack of zoning or fulfilling some kind of ecosystem within a society in terms of a district having a central spaceport surrounded by residental and commercial tiles, The four coners being miilitary areas for military, Then 2 tiles being set aside for industry, and two tiles being se aside for mining so that you can produce ore, craft something, put it into use as military or law enforcement, with tiles set aside for infrastructure for roads, tunnels, etc and giving builders something to do to build a central city tile, military structures, mining opperations, or industries.
  • Lack of a government structure that collects taxes for orgs to progress within their own area while still paying taxes to a planetary government that also spends the tax to actually do something with it to keep society functioning. If the planetary government is invested in making sure all districts are constantly being built up, repairing damage, etc and generating district wide missions, repair missions, etc using resources to replace broken or damaged voxels/elements, or creating a crafting ecosystem to where districts mine ore with a work order, then craft what needs to be replaced, build ships for logistics, atmo based law enforcement, military in space, or transit to take people to different districts to where missions are generated to keep the ecosystem fluid rather than stagnant.
  • A lack of neutral trading posts between planets that have a small bubble around them that just have a protected market people can trade at.
  • A lack of a space map that has highway routes with warp gates, a lack of planetary orbital sensor showing who is where within the bubble and where sensors pick up enemies or patch the radar together as a collective system
  • Lack of any sort of group technology research system like a civilization game like age of empires, stallaris, or civilization.
  • Lack of any group mechanics or formations.

 

Even if they call Du a civilization builder it has no actual civilization aspects to the game as much as a free for all that has no real cohesive meta for encouraging teamwork, grouping, etc. You can do just as much solo as with a group and there is no need for society if you never need to really interact or help anyone. And with the way planets aer generated and run there will never be any meaningful PvP.

 

My issues with resources, strategy, and meta:

  • There is both finite and finite ore coming into the game each week depending on how much ore you get with no effort, the number of mini-games you play each day, how many rocks you mine while traveling, or the amount of finite ore you can grab per week with finite voxel ore.
  • There is nothing taking ore, components, or parts out of the game for how much ore is coming into the game via Destructive Elements, wear & tear, or a finite part lifespan.
  • The is bot infinite quanta flowing in with only so much quanta being taken out and unqually applied to those who should be taxed more by how much you do in game.

 

The ore/Quanta influx is out of sync with what is being taken out of the system in quanta, ore, and parts leaving the system which will cause inflation, excesses, and getting to the point where everything you generate will be worth less, needing to sell more, and not being able to sell anything if the proper sinks are added.

 

 

 

 

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On 11/27/2021 at 5:03 PM, Xennial said:

 

To be honest I always laugh when people reference the kickstarter like that matters anymore. My call for downsizing has nothing to do with NQ's development or costs, it purely from that practical point of view that the game world is too big for the number of players DU has, or even that it ever had playing.

 

The game world will never feel 'alive' with this much of it empty and devoid of any activity. 

you can laugh but probably if they kept true to their word DU would not feel this empty. it is also practical not to fly for a long time to other planets still i dont expect them to be placed closer together. Also practical to delete schematics, or to make resurection hubs also in transporter hubs so you can practically move between territories. But in the end almost all the things proposed in the forum have never seen the light.

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10 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

you can laugh but probably if they kept true to their word DU would not feel this empty. it is also practical not to fly for a long time to other planets still i dont expect them to be placed closer together. Also practical to delete schematics, or to make resurection hubs also in transporter hubs so you can practically move between territories. But in the end almost all the things proposed in the forum have never seen the light.

 

IT's hard to say, but it is pretty easy to see the more strangles they put on the gameplay loop the more players they lose. When beta started it was utter easy mode compared to now, thus we had a lot more player happily going along making their own stuff, mining, building ships and whatnot. Now it's suck a 'job' to accomplish anything in the game world only a the few diehards in established orgs even bother because they are already at the point of being able to do whatever they want.

 

I don't care what 'new player' experience changes they make, the grind from zero to being able to do anything of consequence will drive off players in droves ... if droves even bother to try the game. And thats before those players would even come to realize the established players are so far on the power curve they will never compete in PvP etc.

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