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NEW SCHEMATICS - Discussion Thread


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I really don't wish to talk about schematics because for me are simply wrong anyway they are in the system so what I care is to redistribute my talents because I don't need anymore for the industries that will not really run anymore so are useless and wasted my time. You made a change that for many it means rethink completely how to play and what to do in DU, a talent reset for me is a must even if really boring. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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8 hours ago, Maliciouss1 said:

an easy fix would be make all tier 1 free of schematics like the refiners are now.......it lessens the schematic load quite a bit

 

They don't want to lessen the schematic load, they want to lessen the server load.

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After some more time with this change, it is quickly becoming apparent that it is designed to reduce large scale industry as a main goal and in the process reduce "we make everything ourselves" industry within orgs.

 

As long as you do small scale industry with no more than two stages, it's maintainable. After that it becomes a chore. Even a basic warp cell factory becomes too much to manage.

 

 

NQ seems to want to deconstruct the one game mechanic that keep people in the game besides building. It feels like they can't afford the cost massive industry drives server side and so are nerfing player's abilities to run these. I agree this seems designed not to improve gameplay but to cut cost and try to maintain a balanced server budget financially more than anything. And that is pretty much what Deckard said on Discord anyway.

 

DU has quickly become a series of UI driven mechanics with as little actual server interaction as possible. It's getting more and more removed from the promise of "unlimited possibilities" and a truly open sandbox MMO. NQ is laying tracks everywhere to put players on rails and control what they can (or can't) do directly and intensely.

 

It really begs the question how NQ pans to finance the required upscale before release to accommodate the large number of incoming players they will need to both reach and provide with an experience that makes them stay.

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I feel like it is long time already that NQ knows things that they don't want us to know. Probably they perfectly know the path of this game like probably they know since long time if there will be a wipe or not but seriously... who would play a game spending money and time if they know there will be a wipe? Of course they are not going to tell us and they would keep it in the clouds.

 

Same story is with the server problems, is now long time they are trying everything to reduce the server cost telling us is for the game play, I was much happier when I could explore any planet and just dig and find something, now no, we are obliged to go always on the same spots where we placed the boring autominers for which we have to pay taxes for the owned territory. This wasn't for a better gameplay but to reduce the server load. Everybody want a server that runs well but can't everything focused to reduce the cost of it, it is not funny anymore. By the way we are paying for everything, paying to extract the ores, paying to refine them unless Tier 1, paying for the schematics to produce most of the items and getting crazy to understand how many schematics we need to produce something for ourself or to sell. Schematics that also take time to be produced so to delay the final production and discourage players to make industries. I repeat also that since the game play is completelly changed now I want to use my talents point for something else.

 

After I see the dictat from NQ imposing the new systems I don't have much to say and I can't believe in anything anymore. What the community is for if it is not used to understand if a new idea is what the players want before to introduce it?

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Why has NQ's technical leadership apparently failed to push back against designs that were never, ever scalable...? Or have they done so, but NQ's pie-in-the-sky CEOs refused to listen...? 

 

Their CTO was (for a short period) Högni Gylfason, an ex-CCP vet that has had a ton of experience going back into the late 90s. They lasted less than a year (11 months) and left in 2019. 

 

Now, it's someone whose only previous job was as a 4 month engineering intern. Please let that sink in for a bit...

 

NQ's CTO is someone whose only real experience in engineering is with NQ itself.

 

Their specialty is graphics rendering...hardly a simple field, but not someone that has experience building or scaling an MMO (or any online software for that matter - they've only had the 1 job at NQ and a 4 month internship lol). 

 

When it comes to scale, practical experience matters a lot. Someone with experience knows how even one tiny change can crash servers at scale...and knows why and where things break down at scale. Techniques that work with low pops or traffic simply won't work at scale. 

 

So when NQ talks about how much server costs they have, keep in mind that their technical leadership really doesn't have experience in this domain.

 

Ultimately, this is the person responsible for making technical choices and no matter how bright, they will be severely limited by experience. 

Edited by blundertwink
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3 hours ago, Jake Arver said:

NQ seems to want to deconstruct the one game mechanic that keep people in the game besides building. It feels like they can't afford the cost massive industry drives server side and so are nerfing player's abilities to run these. I agree this seems designed not to improve gameplay but to cut cost and try to maintain a balanced server budget financially more than anything.

 

 

i sadly need to keep telling this on these forums.

 

the cash cow became a cash drain and somehow the illusion of profit needs to remain.

 

Every patch the game gets worse and going to other games feels as the best choice, its sad.

 

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When I first got into this game, it was under the promise that it was a open world, sandbox type game. A player could come in, and if they wanted they could join up with a large organization and enjoy the benefits of it, or they could either join up with a small group of friends, or go it alone. And although joining with a large org would definitely have it's benefits, playing the game with a small group or without any obligation to a large org would be possible. It would take longer to achieve certain things, you wouldn't be able to have many bases on many different planets, etc...but you would be able to play & enjoy the game if that's what you chose. We were also promised that, although there would be  wipes, they would be minimal at best, and they would never reset our talent points or wipe the money we had made.

 

By the time the first of these promises were broken, my small group of friends had managed to build up a respectable business. We had a factory for our personal use, we were able to build most of what we needed, as long as we could feed it. But we had also managed to work out some beneficial trade deals with several orgs in the game. It worked out well. We met some really great people, had fun organizing mining runs to different places, fulfilling orders for different materials, and had managed to bank a tidy sum that was helping us grow our org. We rarely if ever used the market, but that was because we were able to conduct our business bartering for what we needed. And we were trading things all the time.

 

So the first big wipe comes along, and we find out that not only  are we going to lose the structures we had build, that materials we had accumulated, and the ships we'd built, but they were going to reset and wipe the accumulated talent points, and wipe all the money from the game.  So everyone started over from 0. All the work and effort we had in the game, thousands of hours of play time, all wiped out with nothing to show for it. Didn't like it...in fact...hated it...but fine...whatever...it's a new game and there  is so much potential, so we'll bitch & moan, but we'll start over. We built it up once, we can do  it again.

 

Like everyone else we start over. We start rebuilding what we had lost within the new parameters. As we start to get back to something resembling sustainable, here comes schematics and another wipe. Revamping mining, changing the way factories work, making it so it's extremely hard & expensive for anyone not in a large organization to fare. So we rebuild...again. Now, after spending hundreds of millions of quanta on schems, hundreds of hrs redesigning factories so they'll work, and trying to get back to where  we can actually create a service that can be  sold or traded in game we are once again screwed. Factories have been revamped, schems have been completely wiped and again...we're having to start over with nothing to show for our work, time, & effort.

 

I get that it is a game in development. We all got into it  know that there would be hiccups, changes, and unforeseen circumstances that may make parts of the original vision of the game unattainable. However, you don't continually bend over your player base, break promises, change fundamental aspects of the game, and refuse to compensate for those loses without expecting to take a serious hit on the number of people logging in. And if fewer people log in, fewer are paying your subscription...which leads to problems affording to keep up servers. This game was never going to compete with WoW, however you have/had a chance to make a very good game, with a very respectable player base. The more this game changes...the more it reminds me of another sandbox MMO that was very popular in the early 00's, and it went down the same path of changing things up. They got greedy. They forgot that they were a niche game and that while they would have a dedicated & avid player base...it was never going to rival WoW. Ask Sony how Galaxies worked out for them.

 

I refuse to be forced into joining a large organization just to be able to play the game. I enjoyed interacting with the other players and organizations without having to be in one. I'm tired of starting over. I'm tired of re-learning basic aspects of the game. I'm tired of building things up just to have them erased with absolutely nothing to show for it. And most of all, I'm tired of being lied to. And yes, whether intentional or not, the players were and are being lied to. And anyone who doesn't think they knew this latest wipe was necessary months before it happened is kidding themselves. They just  didn't want to deal with the anger they knew would ensue beforehand.

 

I don't know if I'll continue playing, if I'll just log in once in while to ck things out, or if I'll try and start over...yet again. This isn't a 'I'm mad and going to quit' rant. This is a 'this is BS' rant.

 

/rant off

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I have been gone for over a year because the game stopped loading for me.
After all that time it finally started again.
Why I liked the game was for escape from the hoards of players that love to have Multiplayer and

PvP.
I liked it because I could come here and escape the everyday world and just build up my own little corner and slowly
build everything myself without all he economy market BS,

Now that is all gone. I am being forced to do this game as a small bunch of people thinks it should be played. I have to join an org or sell in market to make money just to build things. Use a whole schematic to build one item! The whole joy of experimenting in quiet space is gone now. 

 

I agree with Memoti. This totally ruined the game for me - they are gonna do this all over again and waste my few valuable few free hours I get each week for all this overthinking bs has ruined this game. It had promise but boy the pooch is going home really sore now.
 

Horrendous development choices here guys.

 

Edited by Yt Noyz
used wrong name for Memoti
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23 hours ago, Memoti said:

 We were also promised that, although there would be  wipes, they would be minimal at best, and they would never reset our talent points or wipe the money we had made.

 

There has never been any promise of talent points or quanta not being erased. Not once. There also was never a promised that wipes would be "minimal at best"

 

The ONLY "promise" around wipes that ever existed was that you would keep blueprints. The talk around and after beta has always been no more wipe like at beta which was a full/gobal wipe with only blueprints being retained. At some point NQ did say that in case of further wipes magic blueprints would be available allowing you to spawn back constructs without the need for materials or elements but seeing how there have been many serious exploits which have yielded some players multiple billions of quanta and much of that was invested in high tier elements, that option really became not viable as well.

The recent schematic change also "rewarded" those who exploited another NQ mistake by buying the most expensive schematics at 99% discount end now getting refunded the full price of these, which again will have handed billions to some.

 

And as there have also been several issues with blueprints where one could make core blueprints from constructs where you are not the creator of the construct, before DRM was activated on these, the only realistic option here is to wipe where the world is completely reset, 1uanta erased, collected talent points be returned to the talent point pool and retaining normal core blueprints of which you are the creator.

 

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On 7/18/2022 at 6:24 PM, CptLoRes said:

With regard to the alpha/beta/release state of the game, I keep coming back to questioning where did all those dev hours go?

 

Despite what some people think, NQ cannot really be classified as a indie company when they have two office locations (Paris & Montreal in Canada) and had about 150 employees at one time (currently 76 employees according to linkedin). Meaning that regardless of how big a budget NQ may, or may not have there should have been lots of people working on the game for all those years.

 

This question bothers me for years as keystone between all other dev questions. Only realistic answers I found for myself, that:

 

- First of all we don't really know how many things on tech side experimented/changed/remade inside all over this years -- its possibly largest burner of dev time. With such tech-heavy game is obviously things you must do, risk a lot resource waste.

 

Beyond that:

 

- Quite a lot suspicion exists, that people  working on actual game (assets, coding) are relatiove minority within bloated administrative structure of the company. Its probably something to do with how JC approched company building. And even after he left, it likely proved to be very hard "reform" such structure, because if anything, such chimeras usually very defensive on self-preservation.

- Not helps, that there is deadly rotation (barely any survivors from first iteration of team left, only our favorite Nyz, that kinda ironic for people knowing community managment situation context).

- On conspiracy side (hehe). We can't exclude, that NQ not working on some sort of parrarel thing not entirely about DU, especially considering Xolla involved with their shady history of "coercing" devs to this and that.

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17 hours ago, le_souriceau said:

Despite what some people think, NQ cannot really be classified as a indie company when they have two office locations (Paris & Montreal in Canada) and had about 150 employees at one time (currently 76 employees according to linkedin). Meaning that regardless of how big a budget NQ may, or may not have there should have been lots of people working on the game for all those years.

 

Yes...and no. Over $20 million in funding is way out of reach for a typical indie studio...NQ would be more like a "III" studio -- indie relative to big and established studios, but hardly a small shop. 

 

However, MMOs are a different beast.

 

Commercial MMOs often involve 10x NQ's funding -- $200 million or more. A big part of that is marketing, sure, but the point is that NQ never really had the budget to make something as ambitious as DU...especially when they didn't roll their own servers or engine (throwing it all on AWS is vastly expensive as NQ eventually learned). 

 

We don't know how many employees NQ actually has or had, but even at 150...that still isn't a AAA level of development scale for an MMO, especially if there isn't a lot of experienced people.

 

Their CTO hasn't had a job other than NQ (and a 4-month internship), so it isn't like they are overflowing with experienced technical minds.

A team of mostly mid and junior devs isn't going to make quick progress...and when the most senior technical person at the company has only worked at NQ before, that's not a healthy sign. 

 

Their CTO hasn't likely released software before, and certainly hasn't released a game. Think about that for a moment. How is NQ planning for release when their technical leader has no experience about what's involved? 

 

17 hours ago, le_souriceau said:

- On conspiracy side (hehe). We can't exclude, that NQ not working on some sort of parrarel thing not entirely about DU, especially considering Xolla involved with their shady history of "coercing" devs to this and that.

 

This isn't a conspiracy; why do people think this is some secret...?

 

NQ is very, abundantly clear that they are working on multiple projects. Their CEO has stated this more than once. 

 

Yes, NQ is working on more projects than DU.

Yes, that does likely mean that DU is not getting 100% of NQ's development resources...although even when DU was their only known project dev was very slow.

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After reading the director's note on schematic changes I believe I can see what NQ has in mind and it isn't a horrible solution.  Granted, the old timers will never like schematics but I see potential for a serious gameplay loop.  

 

I highly recommend putting the most common tier 1 schematics in nano crafting and/or tying a tutorial quest/FTPE to those.

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14 hours ago, Wyndle said:

I see potential for a serious gameplay loop.  

 

DU is still merely "potential" after this many years of development...IMO, "potential" isn't enough at this stage in the game's final months before release. 

 

I do see how this change improves early gameplay -- it isn't all bad. 

 

But...when viewed holistically alongside the last several changes, the game overall has become less engaging, less scaled, and less fun. 

 

After the early game, players have little to do other than reflect about how much "potential" the game has as they monitor auto miners, shovel paper into machines (up to the limit of their patience), and build mostly for the sake of it, since there's so little functional mechanics after these 6-8 years of development. 

 

You don't judge changes based on potential alone...especially in the final months before release where they don't have time to fully exploit that "potential".

 

So to me, especially with the game nearing release, potential is another way to say "not good enough" or "not there yet". 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Remove schematics. I already have a job, I dont need another tedious game to drown myself completely in it.

I see a lot of games lately start using schematics. Who in the world came with this idea??? They were not meant for this type of game.

I`ve got a feeling that in the game industry there is a budle idea on how to terminate a game without causing too much rage, and in this bundle there is "schematics".

We are suppose to discover the game, not losing our selfs into an ocean of meaningless things that makes you completly forget what the game is all about, Anakin !!

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The good:

 

- limiting the amount that a single person can build is good

- letting people trade away their building allowance for money, or for influence within an org is good

- having in effect a "building tax" is good, as it gives NQ another economic lever

 

The bad:

 

- almost everything else about this design

 

Discussion:

 

You can see the ability to create a limited amount of schematic copies as a "building allowance". I think that's a good thing. It gives people uninterested in building something that they can trade. It also means that people have to combine in order to build a lot.

 

The fact that making schematic copies costs money is good in some ways, since it is a mechanism for tuning industry. However, I think the cost is being levied on the wrong people. It should be levied on the person doing the building, not the person making the schematic copies.

 

How it should work:

 

- People should have a building allowance which is just another form of currency/points. It should build up over time with no user intervention. People should be able to trade this allowance. Orgs should be able to hold a balance in this allowance.

- Factories should be powered by these points. Individual machines shouldn't need "loading" with them. Either a single machine should need loading (for the whole factory), or the points balance of the factory owner should be automatically consumed.

- Consuming these points should cost some money for each item they build. This can be justified any way you like - as the cost of the power used, as a "tax", as the cost of Aphelia converting the points somehow, whatever.

 

All the other stuff - having to micromanage which schematic copies to make, having to keep manually making them, having to manually load them into individual machines - that's all tedious nonsense. It adds nothing to the fun, and it is just another boring game mechanic which looks like a naked attempt to force users to log in every day. There are vast numbers of users for whom that's impractical, or unattractive. In its current form it will simply discourage people from industry, which will damage the game economy and push the power further into the hands of big orgs.

 

 

Side note:

 

- Can we at least have a better name than "schematic copy"? In English, it's awfully clumsy. I realise that English may not be the first language of some of the game designers, but I was hoping that by release time these sorts of bits of clunky language would have been cleared up; there are a number of them, but this one is particularly egregious.

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On 8/22/2022 at 10:36 AM, Samedi said:

The good:

 

- limiting the amount that a single person can build is good

 

This is not limitation. This is just slowing down the enthusiasts. Limits would be nice.

This only increase the gap between enthusiasts and non enthusiasts. It will completley discurage the non-enthusiasts to have any form of basic industry while the enthusiasts...well...they will still get there eventually.

I believe that a non-industry person should still have access to some form of basic industry without all the hassle. At the momment it does not matter how small or big is your industry...it`s still a hassle and schematics makes it even worst.

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21 hours ago, xTru said:

I believe that a non-industry person should still have access to some form of basic industry without all the hassle. At the momment it does not matter how small or big is your industry...it`s still a hassle and schematics makes it even worst.

 

I think it matters a great deal how big or small your industry is. The impact is minimal for a small setup where you are just making a few things yourself. Sure it is annoying, but it is almost back to where things stood pre 0.23.

 

For a large factory, the impact is huge. It is not impossible to do a large factory, but it is so tedious it sucks the joy out of it.

 

Try out the FTEU and start building from scratch. The schematics are not bad on that scale. I sure hope they address the need to put the schematics into each individual machine before we get too far beyond release, because people are going to burn out on that fast.

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What bothers me most about the schematics so far is that not all items needs schematics and you often feel like you're waiting twice.

 

Example: 
"Oh cool, I built the intermediate parts, now I can finally build Basic Metalwork Industry M".

"Oh, I forgot to queue up a Tier 1 M Element Schematic Copy, I'll just do that." 

"Oh, I have to wait 50 minutes and pay 15,000."

 

The reaction is already a... for me:  "Hmph." 
It doesn't feel good. Especially at the beginning, when you're still doing a lot with the nanocrafter and then you switch to the machines, you often forget that or don't have it in the back of your mind. At least that's what happened to me now that I've started all over again.

 

Edit: 

I'm sure it's already been said, but I'll write it down just to be on the safe side.

 

It is also irritating for me why an Atmospheric Fuel Schematic Copy is needed for Nitron in the Machine and not in the Nanocrafter. I miss this consistency in the concept. The result is that I then simply build all things in the nanocrafter. The same applies to Al-Fe Alloy as an example. 

 

Why?

 

Edit 2:

I understand where this is going and what they were thinking. I think it's better than buying individual schematic copies (System after 0.23) for individual machines, now they are no longer limited to the element being built but category dependent, which is a big improvement.

 

The approach is fine as far as it goes. But we are not yet where we should be. This "hmph" feeling has to go away for me. Give me a reason to get a reward feeling, after I've built the intermediate parts.

 

Edit 3:

Maybe this will be clearer, since most people will look at the list that is required to build something?

mLr5vvU.png

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Is @NQ-Admin going to do something with these comments?

 

The new schematics system is in the long run far more timeconsuming and farfar more costly then what we had, moreover is the actual time you need to put them in machines far greater then previous.

 

How is this better for players?

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27 minutes ago, Aaron Cain said:

Is @NQ-Admin going to do something with these comments?

 

The new schematics system is in the long run far more timeconsuming and farfar more costly then what we had, moreover is the actual time you need to put them in machines far greater then previous.

 

How is this better for players?

 

They are not going to do anything, they decided to launch the game like this against many player's opinion neither testing enough the consequences of these changes.

 

These are the promises they didn't keep and to me is a huge disrespect for all the players that supported them. Said so I think there is nothing to add.

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/25064-reset-news-announcement-discussion-thread/page/4/#comment-189300

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I think the new schematic system is an improvement, fewer schematics to deal with and players can contribute to manufacturing in another way. I don't like that you still have to put them into each machine, schematics should just be another component of what you are crafting.

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