THE FUTURE OF DUAL UNIVERSE - Discussion thread

[blundertwink]

NQ keeps doing the same thing and expecting magical results.

 

They post about the future of DU, but certainly can't be bothered to read or engage with feedback. 

 

We don't even get the generic platitudes like "we're listening and improving" or "we're working hard to fix things"...it's just business as usual. Slow dev, slow support, and no communication. 

 

The future of DU is more of the same...no growth, no comms, and no feature depth. Without some amount of major change soon, I don't see how DU can have a long-term future.

 

NQ could at least pretend to be making changes and improvements with generic platitudes, but even that is more effort than they want to spend on PR.  

[Bobbie]

.

[Pleione]

Believe is or not you can survive on ore prices well below 25.  Ran the math in another post and somewhere around 5 is the breakeven for paying taxes - and that excluded calibration ore, adjacency bonuses, talents, etc.

 

We tend to sell at "Average Highest" + 2 and the ore always sells quickly.

[Bobbie]

.

[Pleione]

Because it generates "good enough" returns.  We are paying our taxes on 15 territories, and paying our schematic taxes, and not having much difficulty.  Not accumulating any fortunes, but paying the bills.

[Wyndle]

18 minutes ago, Pleione said:

Not accumulating any fortunes, but paying the bills.

If you want to get a head in DU then build a guillotine?  DU is classified as a game, not a job.  If NQ wants players to build their game world then we need to be able to PLAY and time gated chores don't count.  

[Pleione]

3 minutes ago, Wyndle said:

If you want to get a head in DU then build a guillotine?  DU is classified as a game, not a job.  If NQ wants players to build their game world then we need to be able to PLAY and time gated chores don't count.  

 

Actually completely agree.  I think the game has been misnamed.  Needs to become "Time Gate!"

[Aaron Cain]

agree, the direction DU is going is only going to lead to selfdestruction.

 

systems based on taxes and timesinks as game features are dead but they dont know it yet.

The reason time sinks (instances) work in a regular MMO Are the rewards. What rewards are there on DU timesink? pay taxes? another time sink? maybe some talents 2500 or quanta 20k, but that is just throw away toilet paper worth.

No rewards per time unit spend, no reward per Quantasink, I stopped doing the tutorials because the rewards are so meaningless, I earn more by not logging for a day.

 

Someone in NQ missed the concept reward. Any game, Any, drives on rewards or leaderboards. But then again those leaderboards also contain rewards. So we are back to rewards. What rewards are there in DU? None, only time and quanta sinks

[Novean-133487]

This game is at end game.... less than 2 months in....

With architecture being the most hours played in the game.... And everyone able to import hundreds of hours of beta game play with a click of a button.... sadly we are at that stage. And I paid for 12 months worth of membership.  I get it is a sandbox.... But crap....  you force taxes... which in turn forces economy... but an economy to sell to who when everyone is end game?

Introduce random buy orders... all over the system... for random things....  force people to get off planet....  and then pay them for that time.... Not some stupid 300K for 5 hours of travel time or 2M in warp cells, but legit bonus for participating in your game.  Then you force them to mine or buy  ores... You force them to craft.  You force them to spend fuel.... you force them to play the game. 
 

Something so SIMPLE  yet we are worried about  AVITAR"S....  lol comical...  YOUR PLAYER base is asking for bones.... and you ignore them.... Without the addition of any sort of new PVE / PVP content.  All you can now do is log in.... Pay taxes....  Prey on the new guys mistakes at the market....  Hope you can sell enough t2 to cover expenses of all your 20+ territory taxes...  

I will now probably go back to Empyrion.  Much MUCH MUCH more to do.   Come back to pay my taxes every 7 days to make sure I do not lose any progress.... Try and keep enough money to pay taxes...  Doubt that will happen.  RIP  

[blundertwink]

On Steam, the largest PC gaming platform in the world, there's currently more people playing MONOPOLY Poker than Dual Universe. 

 

There's more people playing "FPS Monitor".

There's well over twice as many people playing "Car Mechanic Simulator 2018".

There's over three times as many people playing 2020's "Avorion", a game I like a lot personally....but was never supposed to be remotely competitive with a brand new MMO!

 

Avorion's 24 hour peak is higher than DU's has ever been. For a non-MMO that's 3 years old. 

 

So...people wondering about the future of DU is perfectly valid and reasonable, but it's just business-as-usual silence from the studio? No urgency at all in making updates...? It's not even upsetting, it's just...weird. 

[Thunderblaze]

The future of DU is

[Aaron Cain]

Well re-reading the letter did not give me more trust as all it said about features, scrap that, the direct future was recycling. All other stuff, and i dont include glam or gifts as those are not the future but a kickstarter promiss so it should not even be named in a future notice, was said to take massive time and people working on it. in my line of work that means "has been delayed indefinitely".

 

So all i got out of linked posts and leters was a recycling unit, and stated, it only recycles Some parts......so probably nobody will even use it.

[JohnNoGoodman]

we the people

who are trying to find an enjoyable way

to  P L A Y this game,

by the people for the people

have had it with the corporate style of "playing"

 

a month after the release the one world is brimming with "user" content blueprinted in the 6 years of beta

 

New players taken aback by the steep learning curve starts mining and selling ore (some game play huh) 

Next they buy a 2-6 million blueprint and buys the elements and honeycomb and fly away in to the sunset.

 

We (me and my friend) started out in the beta for a few months  before the announcement of wipe.

Now we play the full Monty as we see fit. Yes we had blueprints from the beta but they stay mostly in the Nanopack. 

We bought blueprints of nice ships and used industries to manufacture A L L  the parts. Only tier 2 and 3 ore we had to buy since the ore scanner L and the uncommon mining units L was useless  in finding A N Y ore above tier 1.

Did I mention we have a day time job too? We are struggling to find reasons to stay in the "game"

 

Let's just finish  this ship and manufacture only warp cells and kergon fuel so we can explore this relatively empty universe and look at all the beta blueprinted mega complexes made in the image of god  before NQ goes bust.

 

A bleak future awaits us all. It's all too sad.

 

Believe all things

Hope all things

Endure all things

[Captain Hills]

I always return here and read the forums. Daily almost. I realized some time ago that something is wrong with me.

Obviously, its because of Dualuniverse - the game - and the fact that I loved to play it and I still like to play it !

 

But I'm missing that bloody underground mining game. Finding ore using the scanner and these things - I always felt alive, hungry and satisfied when successfully finding and winning the good ores. OMG, like some of you too, I was a freaking mole. 

 

My friends did the shiny part. Building tons of things, which are there no more.

I did the digging and the industry, but that's as well .. there no more.

 

What the game has become to me, totally cut off the cord. 

 

Steam does not look so good. Its sad, I really wished NQ can do a wealthy restart. I'm sorry for that.

My prediction for "the Future of DualUniverse" is very bad, to answer the thread.

[Pleione]

11 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

So all i got out of linked posts and leters was a recycling unit, and stated, it only recycles Some parts......so probably nobody will even use it.

 

The big debate now is if this future recycling unit will require schematics to run.  And if so, which schematics?  If your recycling a Warp Beacon will you need a 5,000,000, 11 day Warp Beacon schematic to dismantle it?

[Pleione]

1 hour ago, Captain Hills said:

My friends did the shiny part. Building tons of things, which are there no more.

I did the digging and the industry, but that's as well .. there no more.

 

There is always Roid hunting... of course for anything useful, you risk being blown up.  Thought shields would fix that, but of course, they way they were implemented leaves you to receiving 75% of the damage unless your on your ship and manually tune.  That of course, only works for awhile, but that would be expected.  And, all it takes is 2 attackers using different weapons and your toast.

 

But All Hail the PVPers!  They are the engagement center of design for the game.  NQ has repeatedly bowed to these players and are now reaping that reward.  I actually supported the concept of a PVP zone, an arena where players could go to strut their stuff, but that wasn't enough for them.

 

Its all very depressing.  I'm 64 years old and have been actively engaged since early 2018.  I'm the "Pleione" that wrote the 30+ page FAQ I supported pre-0.23 that helped hundreds of people and ate countless hours of my time engaging on the Discord channel to learn what people were having problems with and writing up guidelines to help.  This was suppose to be the "Eve Online" experience that I could enjoy from the beginning and spent the next 20 years, if I'm so lucky, to play.  And today... I see it dying.

 

Recently spent 3+ hours of travel time scrolling around in F2 sorting my talent queue.  Even after deleting ~100 items I was still left with over 1300 days of training (almost exclusively in Industry and Crafting).  I found myself laughing at myself when I was down to pushing the 7 day skills ahead of the 19 day skills... thinking "I should be so lucky for the game to survive until I get to this point".  I find that sad.  (Let ignore that a single button called "Sort by time" could have saved me those 3 hours.)

 

What depresses me the most if the lost opportunity.  This should have been a great game.  Too old now for anything else to replace it (If tomorrow "Space the Game" was announced, I'd be pushing 70 before it hit the market...  I'm literally out of life time to see this happen).

[GreedyMutha]

Suggestion - separate a portion of the haven market from normal, have 25q orders for t1, market only accessible to accounts no older than x days, weeks etc...

[GreedyMutha]

2 hours ago, Pleione said:

 

There is always Roid hunting... of course for anything useful, you risk being blown up.  Thought shields would fix that, but of course, they way they were implemented leaves you to receiving 75% of the damage unless your on your ship and manually tune.  That of course, only works for awhile, but that would be expected.  And, all it takes is 2 attackers using different weapons and your toast.

 

But All Hail the PVPers!  They are the engagement center of design for the game.  NQ has repeatedly bowed to these players and are now reaping that reward.  I actually supported the concept of a PVP zone, an arena where players could go to strut their stuff, but that wasn't enough for them.

 

2 hours ago, Pleione said:

 

 

Edited November 18, 2022 by GreedyMutha
Messed up the quote

[GreedyMutha]

This is so incorrect, if you engaged in pvp, you'd see how underdone it is. Pvp and pve are vital elements to a virtual economy. PvP is not on the top of the list.

[Clatten]

I am so glad this game was ment as a "the biggest ORG win the game" kind of thing. 
I have nothing bad to say about any org's in the game but i have things to tell NQ. 

The org's have done their things, claimed ore spots and worked out the best solution for themself. I have nothing against that. 
But NQ seriously you need to start thinking about other players too, new people to the game then maybe have a look at the Solo life in DU. I am fully aware that no one was supposed to be SOLO in DU, it became very clear in one of my bug reports from beta. You we're aiming for groups, people teaming up.

 

But the problem is, if you don't give the solo player a reason to work toward something, he is not gonna stay. 

NQ Deckard, plz work your magic and keep this game alive!.
And to the rest of the NQ people, fix your shit!

Also NQ, you are aiming too high 

[Celestis]

The Future of DU is devoid of pretty surface rocks on all planets as they do not respawn... it will be dull and boring.

[tbowick]

I think I'm finally done. Long ago NQ nerfed the ability to mine manually on planet, so the game became pretty boring. You don't really have anything to do while literally WAITING on skills to train - other than building valueless little constructs waiting to make enough money to get off-planet to higher tier resources. Voxelmancy was fun FOR A WHILE.

Then they nerf calibration dynamic, so DU is now truly just an Idle Clicker.

The ideology behind the economy has driven it into the ground. Base, unrefined resources have more value to sell than high-tier industrial elements, and even the base resources are SO CHEAP they are hardly worth idle-mining.

Alioth is a prison with nothing interesting or challenging to do. I'm part of one of the larger orgs and it's still a prison.

I have been a supporter since Kickstarter, but NQ really has done just about everything they can to reduce the value and fun of the game. It seems like such poor decision-making with such great potential. I still have more than a year's worth of DAC just from supporter rewards, and it's not even worth playing for free anymore.

Maybe I'll jump back on in a year or two if it hasn't continued to ride the rocket down into a ghost-town shell of obscurity.

I'm not just posting this to complain or dump on Novaquark, I genuinely care about the game, and if by chance someone from NQ reads this, I want them to know why I left (and I think why others have left), to give them an opportunity to succeed in this impressive endeavor.

[Pwnst4r]

16 hours ago, tbowick said:

I think I'm finally done. Long ago NQ nerfed the ability to mine manually on planet, so the game became pretty boring. You don't really have anything to do while literally WAITING on skills to train - other than building valueless little constructs waiting to make enough money to get off-planet to higher tier resources. Voxelmancy was fun FOR A WHILE.
...
...

I have just returned from about a one year hiatus and I'm still not sure what to think.  Aren't asteroids supposed to help with this? Can't you still mine on other planets, just not Alioth?   I left once after betas initial launch as not much had changed since alpha. Beta round 2's changes to how Schematics worked was.. a blow to my confidence to say the least.  I played again anyway, got schematics, built a ship and moved off Alioth.  It was okay, but still some things were lacking and the industry change really made me question why I was playing this game.  PVP was not in a good state per se at the time and death cubes or w/e they were called were the meta.  (I'm sure they still are, I haven't looked)  Nevertheless, we tried to make our way, but just fell out of touch with the game and left for a bit, in hopes that release would have some answers for us.

I have now joined to find that schematics are consumables and you cannot mine on Alioth. Is there a post that explains why they did that?  I assume it's so we don't have giant sink holes like before, but like.. maybe make a note on the tool so I don't spend 2 hrs searching. I am about to leave Alioth for the first time and attempt some safe zone Roid-runnin' and maybe hit a moon.  I just got an advanced mining machine (industry? idk) and am going to test that out.  I feel like the starry eyed new guy about to be smacked in the face with realization.

 

I am hopeful that PVP brings some new life to this game for me as the mining machine should afford for more leisure time and dorking around in pvp zones as we wont be so strapped for cash / higher tier resources. I assume enough people cried about the difficulties of mining so thus the machines.  If they actually got rid of mining and i just sunk a bunch of points back into it for no reason, then I am going to be upset. I hope this change is good and allows for sort of a balance.  Those that are willing to mine and know how to will make more per hour than that of a machine, but with enough money, machines and space, you could over come this.  However, this would still afford for the skilled old timer to manual labor and enjoy the fruits of their labor without being crowded out by surface gatherers.  (entirely, obviously it would be competitive)

 

I went heavily into industry and only the items which the talents I am close to max or maxed out on are viable to sell.  The margins seem slimmer, but it all still seems doable.  I have never been in a big org, so I am not sure what that looks like, but it seems like it has gotten harder and harder to be a solo / duo and try to make your own things.  We have been relegated to surface gathering to make ends meat and trying to corner any market opportunity we can scrounge a profit from. I haven't tried out any missions yet, but most of the ones I saw were for nothing and were like, "Come check out our Voxel Library for free!"

 

This isn't meant to be a complaining post by any means but more of a how much of this is true and how many of these are just whiners being whiners?  I have big hopes for this game and hope to see it continue to grow.  (also, is it just me or did we lose some planets?)

[Pleione]

Ah, where to start... well probably with an advanced apology because I'm sure I'll get some of this wrong, but:

 

Post launch we have 5 planets, not the original 12 - although they are suppose to bring the others back someday.  Ore has been shuffled around so that its all still available.  Jago got stripped of 2 of its Tier 1s, so you can't bootstrap there anymore.

 

Conventional mining was removed because the data load of tracking all those tunnels was not sustainable using the tech they use.  Mining machines are the "low resource" way of doing it now.  Conventional mining still works on Asteroids, diluting your talent pool due to the spread between conventional mining talents and the surface harvesting and calibration talents,  The surface of all planets can still be terraformed, but your not going to find any ore searching them.  Planets do have NON-REGENERATING surface ore - once its gone, its gone.  Surface harvesting talent points apply to Calibration bonus ores - so are worth having.

 

Schematics  are a massive quanta sink now.  You have to make them using Ctrl-K which pops up a kinda-somewhat-similar panel as K still does.  It takes time and money to make schematics, a lot of both in the case of tier 3+.  The concept of a core schematic is gone - all schematics are now consumable.

 

Taxes on Territories are another massive quanta sink.  No limit on how many territories you or your org can own - but be prepared to shell out 500,000 quanta each WEEK if you want to mine of those territories.  You can flag 3 as headquarters, but you must shell out the 500K/week if you want miners to run.

 

PVP is pretty much the same as always.  Ships now (depending on when you last played) have an options for shields, but they are not absolute protection.  4 classes of weapons, 4 settings for a shield.  You can have a 25% damage reduction across all four and can shift shielding percentages - which is cool if only one person is attacking you.  If its a group, your going to die all the same, just a bit slower, presuming the group uses all 4 classes of weapons.

 

Have fun using a territory scanner.  Just a rough number, but T2+ ores are like 5 times harder to find.  I use to bitch about having to do 40 scans to find a T2, now hundreds are required.  One teammate has been exceedingly unlucky and has done over 1000 on Alioth and its moons with no hits.

 

We had T1 ore bots for awhile, buying at 25, but those are almost all expired now.  Rumor of them coming back, with great trepidation they will do it in a manor that won't make a few lucky ones billionaires.  When I was at the market a few days ago, most T1s were selling for around 10, coal I think was at 13 (Average Highest - which feels like its being manipulated, since we sold out at AH+5 recently.  Kind of like it averages sale price and ignoring volume - so someone could sell 1000 units of ore one at a time at 1 and lower the Average Highest)

 

Oh, Industry now does batches of batches to force a run to take at least 3 minutes - again a server workload hack.  I say that because come on!  How hard would it have been to just adjust each industries batch size so that it took at least 3 minutes?  Nope, they had to add another layer of code to the process instead.  Of course, this results in things like "Out of schematics.  Number of schematics left: 4.  Also, some Transfer Units assignments still run on 10 second intervals, but I guess Transfer Units are a separate chunk of code so the hack didn't apply.

 

Hope you find something that keeps you interested.  The number of time-gates in the game have annoyed many players.

 

Sorry if I come across overly sarcastic or disappointed - but I'm still playing, at least for now.  Hard to get excited about it though.

[Kezzle]

23 minutes ago, Pwnst4r said:

Can't you still mine on other planets, just not Alioth?

Nope. Only on asteroids. Everywhere else is MU-tastic.

 

23 minutes ago, Pwnst4r said:

Aren't asteroids supposed to help with this?

Asteroids are the theoretical replacement for the scan-dig game, aye. There are problems, though:

• there aren't very many of them in safe-space, so they tend to be swarmed the moment they spawn by crowds of miners. Get there an hour late, and you have a worm-eaten potato. They also don't have anything over T2.
• the PvP 'roids (where the higher Tier ores are available) tend to be magnets for (let's be generous) raiders who'd rather core your ship and tow it away than core an asteroid out for ore. 

27 minutes ago, Pwnst4r said:

PVP was not in a good state per se at the time and death cubes or w/e they were called were the meta.  (I'm sure they still are, I haven't looked) 

Currently, light, voxel-less slices of S-core with autocannon are the meta, since CSA makes such a big difference to hit resolution. So not Cubes Of Gold any more, but an equally unsatisfying meta.

 

29 minutes ago, Pwnst4r said:

schematics are consumables and you cannot mine on Alioth. Is there a post that explains why they did that?  I assume it's so we don't have giant sink holes like before

Schematics were made into consumables because the cost-of-entry when schems were buy-once was prohibitive. That's what made me set the game aside in 0.23 when it was introduced. The elimination of on-planet mining was because they preserved every single terrain change, both above and below surface, and the tunnel-riddled crust of all the planets was proving impossible to manage in the servers. So they chose to get rid of planetary mining entirely, and have asteroids (which are much smaller and despawn periodically, so their variations in morphology don't need to be constantly tracked and updated) instead.

32 minutes ago, Pwnst4r said:

I am hopeful that PVP brings some new life to this game for me as the mining machine should afford for more leisure time and dorking around in pvp zones as we wont be so strapped for cash / higher tier resources.

I hope your aspirations are realised, but I fear they will not be. Higher tier resources are difficult to come by just with MUs. Sure you don't need to spend time digging; the time taken to run the calibrations to keep your mining rigs efficient is probably less than you'd need to gather the same amount of ore. But it's a ceiling. Before, you could mine all day and come home with many tens of kL. Now you'll take rather longer to accumulate the same amount of paydirt. If you can find it, claim the territory and put a high enough Tier of MU down to extract it.

36 minutes ago, Pwnst4r said:

I assume enough people cried about the difficulties of mining so thus the machines. 

Far from it. The machines are entirely there to make the devs'/server admins' lives easier. MUs are a boring minigame.

38 minutes ago, Pwnst4r said:

This isn't meant to be a complaining post by any means but more of a how much of this is true and how many of these are just whiners being whiners?  I have big hopes for this game and hope to see it continue to grow.  (also, is it just me or did we lose some planets?)

Some of what people are complaining about might be a little bit hyperbolic, but there's a strong basis there in fact. The game is showing little sign of growing. It still (after how many years) lacks any PvP other than Space Construct v Space Construct. There is no way to make effective player markets. There aren't any significant developments announced.

 

Yes, we lost a bunch of planets. Can't remember why; they redid the surfaces IIRC before launch, and presumably didn't have the time to give all the planets the TLC they felt was required. Currently, we don't have a timeline for their reintroduction, only nebulous promises that they'll be back.