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Thinking of quitting Dual Universe? Stop by here first


DemonAn9el

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If you're a new player or someone who has been here since the early release of Kickstarter we have all had a lot of setbacks so far. Too many to honestly post in a single thread here. Let it be clear, I absolutely love the "concept" of this game. But honestly with their latest changes since release and lack of communication throughout the entire process of this game I am seriously giving thought to just dropping it. 

 

The main reason to my thought of quitting is simply this. 

NQ wants us as players to create the content of this game however every time we try and create things they get taken away or the time gates get extended because NQ simply doesn't think we should have X items or X number of quanta yet in a game where THEY placed the mechanics to acquire them in such time. These types of changes should have been worked out in beta that WE PAID FOR. Doing changes like this in a released version of the game is unacceptable and I will not continue to pay into this. 

 

Secondly, NQ simply cannot and for some reason refuses to establish proper communication within the community with no proper layout for future updates or planed releases. They haven't even given us things they would like to implement to retain some of their player base with sheer interest and at this point they have removed more than they have put in. Not sure how they think this will work but my goodness they really need to pay attention to what's going on around them and the status of their own community, and to be clear it seems their communication has gotten worse and not better.

Also, as a side note, I have seen several instances where players who have been banned due to part of their ban wave of people who were "exploiting" and buying things from other players. The players that had no idea they were being sent money from the exploiter were getting banned as well. Without the opportunity to contest the ban and additionally no longer have access to their account to REMOVE their subscription and the ban process NQ has does not automatically remove the subscription so if you're not paying attention they will go ahead and charge you money for an account you can't even access.......I would consider this to be theft.

 

As for the T1 bots. Well, heh this is a fun topic. 

  1. Bots should always be in the game to purchase excess ore period.
  2. These could easily be regulated by limiting the amount of sell orders they are willing to give players at a time. This is done all the time with dispensers so don't see why a similar implementation could be setup for bots. 
  3. Missions just don't do enough unless you are part of the wealthy who can afford multiple accounts.
  4. To establish a proper economy the bots shouldn't have a static pricing but a dynamic pricing that increases and decreases depending on what the economy is actually doing. 

 

 

The actual point of this thread is to bring light to potential players who are thinking about quitting the game and to post their frustrations as to why they might end up quitting. NQs job at this point needs to be more focused on player retention and getting new players into the game to secure funding for the future as well as introducing fixes and new content for players to actually have something fun to do vs spending their entire time just trying to pay for their tiles so they can make things.

 

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"Previous text deleted"

 

If anyone new needs help in gaining knowledge feel free to contact me, best by joining cats tranquility but feel free to poke me on discord too and ill help with knowledge where i can. I will also be building a large HQ building near port district one soon with about 30 places for people to crash and sleep if anyone is in need of a home

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1 minute ago, Aaron Cain said:

ok, well i thought all here were trolling ill delete my post

No problem, the thread is to hopefully bring a massive amount of players that are upset about this to light so NQ can potentially change their minds about how things are setup.

 

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11 minutes ago, Aaron Cain said:

"Previous text deleted"

 

If anyone new needs help in gaining knowledge feel free to contact me, best by joining cats tranquility but feel free to poke me on discord too and ill help with knowledge where i can. I will also be building a large HQ building near port district one soon with about 30 places for people to crash and sleep if anyone is in need of a home

Lamo, hijack a thread to advert your org is even funnier

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Well, To be honest NQ cannot upset me as there is the need of hope to be upset and well hope is delayed disappointment and i already passed that point at 0.23

 

0.23 made about 80% of my friends quit and those who did not yet have beta acces just decided to go somewhere else and they not even bothered to join DU after release.

What NQ misses to understandf about schematics is that with production of large numbers of cheaper goods people take more risks with their crafts and thus more get shot down, more stuff is needed and you get a positive circkle of life, but also mega factories, massive ore transports and loads of players as there is stuff to do.  so what did 0.23 actually do?

Not only did it kill most megafactories but it also stopt casual players, kiled small orgs, stopped massive ore transports, flow of elements to market, building of actual fleets, community being there.

 

What did it gain: reduction of server load, less players dying game.

 

Who listened to the people testing it befoer it reached beta? who listened to the people playing beta?  Well not NQ but loads of possible new players or kickstarters did and none of those came play after release.

Conclusion: NQ does not know when to listen or does not work with the information coming from the community

 

Why not?  No idea

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6 minutes ago, DemonAn9el said:

Lamo, hijack a thread to advert your org is even funnier

learned it from NQ.

 

Well in short, if newcomers need help just ask for it ingame, most veteran or new players are very willing to give it. Just dont ask for cash or mats, ask for how to get it. ;)  better?

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5 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

learned it from NQ.

 

Well in short, if newcomers need help just ask for it ingame, most veteran or new players are very willing to give it. Just dont ask for cash or mats, ask for how to get it. ;)  better?

Its not about if its better its about the fact this is supposed to be a thread to showcase players who are on the verge of quitting the game, not a place of advertising orgs. 

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28 minutes ago, Cergorach said:

Yes, at this point I should quit. But I have trouble doing so, it might be some form of Stockholm syndrome or straight out addiction...

 

Spent all my upvotes, but please have a virtual beer...🍺


The problem is that this game has (and by "has" I mean "had")so much fkkn potential... It's so clear by just how satisfying it is when things work as intended... There was and still is nothing quite like this game out there right now... I tried SE and Hyperion but they didn't grip me...

Kerbal is obviously incredible but for entirely different reasons and only for the ship-builder in me.

NMS has a 3000 element hard build limit that is impossible to circumvent legitimately so I ran into that wall about a month after starting, for all that game's goodness and progress, there is nothing there for the long-haul, Eve-like experience.

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28 minutes ago, Snow said:

youre desire for them to improve and listen more wont get them to actually listen it has to come from their desire to listen and improve 

 

Yep...NQ made a choice many years ago that player feedback was worthless and that they'd be better off developing the game in a hole where only their "expert" opinions matter. 

 

I can understand that sentiment, honestly...but it's a fact that devs aren't objective after working on a product for so damn long.

 

It just isn't possible for them to view the game as players do. That's why feedback is so critical, especially for an MMO. They somehow thought they could just keep doing business as usual come release -- and they've no one to blame for the implosion that followed but themselves. 

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33 minutes ago, Rimezx said:

They will listen to their subs disappearing. Or they will go under. Either way in 6 months at most we will know. #Unsubscribe

It hasn't happened before, so why do you expect a different result now? Isn't that the definition of insanity?

 

Some will be confused "What did we do wrong!?!?" others will be like "That lasted longer then expected!"...

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11 hours ago, DemonAn9el said:

NQs job at this point needs to be more focused on player retention and getting new players into the game to secure funding for the future as well as introducing fixes and new content for players to actually have something fun to do vs spending their entire time just trying to pay for their tiles so they can make things.

Player retention RULE #1:  Don't lie to your customers.  Keeping certain things close to the chest is risky but that isn't what we've seen here.  Even though NQ's motives and intentions were plainly obvious for several community members, when pressed for comment NQ chose to mislead and in a couple of cases outright contradicting what was obvious (and later confirmed).

 

Securing funding?  I find it hard to swallow that NQ is making choices based on what will bring in more funding.  If funding were the goal then why don't we have at least the skeleton of a cosmetic cash shop?  The cosmetic cash shop has been the primary profit source for the vast majority of online games and MMOs for well over a decade.  This being a game with an incredible building system; a cosmetic cash shop should have been the number one development priority in early Beta if not sooner.  Combining this glaring omission with the repeated violations of trust I have to wonder if there may be a darker, more sinister reason behind DU not falling apart after JC left.

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17 hours ago, Wyndle said:

... I have to wonder if there may be a darker, more sinister reason behind DU not falling apart after JC left.

 

It looks like NQ has filed some patents for their "game engine".

These patents deal with spatial subdivision combined with object subscription techniques.

I read those patents, and they seem awkwardly  generic. 

Basically every 3d onlinegame could / should use those things.

Yet, the patents were granted.

 

So maybee, the point of the NQ business is not to run an online game at all ...

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1 hour ago, Aaron Cain said:

well as long as they think 2.5 million on schematics only to get some lights is viable this game is doomed

Not only lights. Try to make an L detector. The situation is the same as with the lights. Materials required as per XS. The main price is an expensive schematic L . And so with many other elements.
This clearly shows the fact that the schemes were developed by a person who does not understand his own game in the production chains. And what is done on what machine. Just used a template.

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On 11/22/2022 at 6:36 AM, DemonAn9el said:

As for the T1 bots. Well, heh this is a fun topic. 

  1. Bots should always be in the game to purchase excess ore period.
  2. These could easily be regulated by limiting the amount of sell orders they are willing to give players at a time. This is done all the time with dispensers so don't see why a similar implementation could be setup for bots. 
  3. Missions just don't do enough unless you are part of the wealthy who can afford multiple accounts.
  4. To establish a proper economy the bots shouldn't have a static pricing but a dynamic pricing that increases and decreases depending on what the economy is actually doing. 

 

If you give the bots dynamic pricing then how is that different from the buy orders players are placing which react to the economy by increasing or decreasing the buy price?  People would keep ore back when the price went down, knowing that it will rise again, and then sell into the high, knowing the price will then fall again.  But this is exactly the same as selling to other players who will do exactly the same thing (i.e. increase buy prices until the order fills).

If the problem here is that the buy orders are at D6 and not the market local to you then that sounds like a great opportunity for someone to make an ore hauling business.  You can post the sell orders and when the buy at D6 gets high enough it will be profitable for someone to take your sell order at the price you wanted and haul it to be sold.

 

I think the big problem with the player-driven economy is that it isn't really player driven at all.  We have a bunch of player driven bits but then we have a bunch of things like tile tax, mission money and ships at the UEF store which inject things at a constant level and do not change with the market at all.


IMO it would be a lot more interesting to make the *tax* respond to the market instead of just consuming quanta.  If bot orders are not injecting the quanta then there is less need to take it back out with tax, right?  We could make the TCU operate like an industry machine and tax can get paid with an item which gets crafted and put into a bay in the TCU.  Crafting would consume quanta (because schematics) but a big part of the cost would be resources.  Make it like Kergon where you can get tax tokens made from different ore types.  When the ore price drops you can make tax tokens cheaply, pushing the price of the ore due to demand.  Or people can just make tokens from what they get on the tile, meaning that a low ore price is less of a problem for paying the tile tax.

 

For missions, I think that should be part of the player economy too.  At the moment it just generates quanta and is completely outside the economy.  If too many people run a mission the reward doesn't change and there is no requirement for the missions to actually get run.  If nobody runs one of them the universe doesn't run out of anything.

I'd change it so missions pay, say, 20% in quanta and the rest in some sort of item.  Perhaps a plasma-like thing enabling certain items to be crafted?  Perhaps certain schematics cannot be researched and have to be gained by running particular missions (military versions of schematics perhaps, different mission package sizes for different item size schematics).  That way mission running becomes more dynamic -- the less frequently run missions could be the most valuable and certain missions will need running more than others to supply.

But I think this is too much work for NQ at the moment as they are busy finishing off the highly anticipated and massively game-changing dancing avatar and pet features ...

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If we look at Eve's mission system, you have to grind rep to unlock better item rewards, including ships. I dislike rep systems in general but it gives a more robust mission system in the example.   A straightforward copy won't work for DU as all NPC missions are from a single source.   Perhaps orgs could apply to become mission ambassadors and function as agents?  Perhaps with a list of items and BP copies of NQ approved ships the org has to maintain for rewards, getting a fixed price compensation per item once collected and the mission collateral goes to the org when not returned to the player. 

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Having thought about it just a little longer, I think the idea of Org sponsored missions could help with several issues.  Since the org would be supplying elements and BP copies that would have an upfront sink in ore.  The org leadership would accept a mission to supply a list of parts in a package placed in a mission container on their own tile.  The package would generate a special mission that becomes available with the package and a small amount of quanta as the final reward.

 

The mission system would still be entirely under Aphelia, but the player created rewards could be a huge boon for mission runners, factory players, and ship builders. For mission runners to start getting weapons and other niche items to improve their ships would give a sense of improvement for having run the mission.  The ships are where it becomes a burden because we don't want to give prank (or inappropriate) ships out to new players who may not even know they can strip it for parts.  This could also lead to regular ship building contests specific to designing mission reward ships.

 

I suspect that this was the intention for player made missions but it didn't stick with only quanta being exchanged.   

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