GraXXoR Posted December 3, 2022 Share Posted December 3, 2022 Why on earth would NQ set an exact 24 HOUR TIMER for recalibrations and not allow skills to reduce the time other than to hurt the players of their game? EVERY SINGLE DAY I'M HAVING TO STAY UP LATER AND LATER TO CALIBRATE MY MEAGRE T2 MINING UNITS.... Because on day 1 I set my mining units at 9:20pm after i finished work IRL and the next day, I wasn't able to set them until AFTER 9:20. As it happened, it was about 9:30 by the time I finished calibrating them. The next day, a client phoned me just before I could calibrate them and ended up calibrating them at 10:15... Now the next day, I was unable to calibrate them until 10:15 finishing at about 10:30 The day before yesterday, I went out for a drink and got back at gone 11pm. Now last night I was unable to calibrate them before midnight. So I had to skip calibration until Saturday afternoon at 12;30pm... I've used Hanlon's razor so much this last two years that the blade is duller than a taxman's suit. To the point where I could easily believe NQ chose 24 hour cooldown SPECIFICALLY TO IMPEDE their PLAYERS and INTERFERE with their PLAYSTYLE. There is no other reason why a GAME DESIGNER would PURPOSEFULLY choose such a PLAYER HOSTILE cooldown. This means that once a week I am effectively either losing sleep or losing a day of calibrations. Thanks for willfully and purposefully making your game a POORER EXPERIENCE at EVERY OPORTUNITY you get. Wearily yours, Jinx. huschhusch, merihimRefin, Leniver and 3 others 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
le_souriceau Posted December 3, 2022 Share Posted December 3, 2022 Well, its somewhat larger issue, that game (as it is) gravitates toward disign, that presumes "ideal" player has unlimited time. Like, unempoyed, retired, who knows what. Its not unique for more hardcore MMOs, but DU kinda pushes it hard. This why I argued back then with some retired boomers, who argued no one understands game economy, because its just takes 10 hours of flipping on markets a day to be rich. So, not suprising, that casual retention is so deadly low. merihimRefin 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MadSlapper Posted December 3, 2022 Share Posted December 3, 2022 1 hour ago, le_souriceau said: Well, its somewhat larger issue, that game (as it is) gravitates toward disign, that presumes "ideal" player has unlimited time. Like, unempoyed, retired, who knows what. Its not unique for more hardcore MMOs, but DU kinda pushes it hard. This why I argued back then with some retired boomers, who argued no one understands game economy, because its just takes 10 hours of flipping on markets a day to be rich. So, not suprising, that casual retention is so deadly low. I am retired but I have more to do with my time most days and if I have not my dear wife finds me something to do. It is not just the calibration timer we also have the log in reward that insists you wait over 24 hours in real time. Most online games get around this wait getting extended by simply classing a day as starting 12:01am at ending at Midnight server times. You still only get 1 award / recalibration in a 24hour period but it allows you to log in on day 1 at say 11am, day 2 at 10am, day 3 at 2pm etc etc and still get what ever it is. You also do not get the strange thing like my main gets the log in bonus at 9am and my alt can not get it till 3pm unless it misses a day and I can synchronise them. Pleione and RudiGaterau 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GraXXoR Posted December 3, 2022 Author Share Posted December 3, 2022 1 hour ago, MadSlapper said: I am retired but I have more to do with my time most days and if I have not my dear wife finds me something to do. It is not just the calibration timer we also have the log in reward that insists you wait over 24 hours in real time. Most online games get around this wait getting extended by simply classing a day as starting 12:01am at ending at Midnight server times. You still only get 1 award / recalibration in a 24hour period but it allows you to log in on day 1 at say 11am, day 2 at 10am, day 3 at 2pm etc etc and still get what ever it is. You also do not get the strange thing like my main gets the log in bonus at 9am and my alt can not get it till 3pm unless it misses a day and I can synchronise them. Yes. This is frustrating. I do remember it being 23 hours, though which was so much better than 24 on the dot because it meant that I could log onto the server around 9pm every day after i finish up work and get the reward and not have it ratchet towards midnight every day like the current system. Of course the once per time slot is a much more flexible system, so it’s likely never going to be implemented… the fact that you could stay logged in for a full week and yet only get the reward once is also… how can I say politely… “cerebrally challenged.” Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MadSlapper Posted December 3, 2022 Share Posted December 3, 2022 2 hours ago, Jinxed said: Of course the once per time slot is a much more flexible system, so it’s likely never going to be implemented… We could play sneaky and appeal to NQs better nature and list its points. 1/ it will reduce the server load. 2/ it will encourage PVP. 3/ 99.9% of the players don't want it. Then they will implement it tomorrow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wyndle Posted December 3, 2022 Share Posted December 3, 2022 11 minutes ago, MadSlapper said: NQs better nature Wow. Not sure if I should laugh hysterically or pull out an Einstein quote. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MadSlapper Posted December 4, 2022 Share Posted December 4, 2022 Feel free to laugh, that reply was written as a humorous take on NQ, their attitude to the players and their decision making policies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GraXXoR Posted December 4, 2022 Author Share Posted December 4, 2022 21 minutes ago, MadSlapper said: Feel free to laugh, that reply was written as a humorous take on NQ, their attitude to the players and their decision making policies. As, I believe was Wyndle’s reply. what really amazes me most now that I’ve calmed down, lol, is just how self defeating NQ’s design “strategy” (loosely applicable) is. Reducing the ease of access to play loops is a sure way the make sure player numbers atrophy. Of course, it could be just a necessary shoestring budge cost saving ploy to smear player load and smooth out the peaks in demand over the entire day by reducing periodicity, to reduce the need to spin up pricy peak load servers. this would be much like the peaks in demand that power utilities used to struggle with in the 90s during the adverts of Coronation Street, a very popular soap opera in the UK when everyone would get up and put the kettle on. My whole thread of thought is pure speculation, tho, so read into it what you will. Who knows the reason why NQ would introduce such a player-unfriendly limitation? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CptLoRes Posted December 4, 2022 Share Posted December 4, 2022 And people wonder why at some point I stopped giving constructive feedback, and all that is left is to just straight up make fun of NQ. Hazaatan and Hecticus 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GraXXoR Posted December 4, 2022 Author Share Posted December 4, 2022 2 hours ago, CptLoRes said: And people wonder why at some point I stopped giving constructive feedback, and all that is left is to just straight up make fun of NQ. there are still constructive threads. It’s the hopelessly optimistic (or just hopeless) threads where forum users go wild. Lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zeddrick Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 On 12/3/2022 at 3:55 AM, Jinxed said: Why on earth would NQ set an exact 24 HOUR TIMER for recalibrations and not allow skills to reduce the time other than to hurt the players of their game? EVERY SINGLE DAY I'M HAVING TO STAY UP LATER AND LATER TO CALIBRATE MY MEAGRE T2 MINING UNITS.... Because on day 1 I set my mining units at 9:20pm after i finished work IRL and the next day, I wasn't able to set them until AFTER 9:20. As it happened, it was about 9:30 by the time I finished calibrating them. The next day, a client phoned me just before I could calibrate them and ended up calibrating them at 10:15... Now the next day, I was unable to calibrate them until 10:15 finishing at about 10:30 The day before yesterday, I went out for a drink and got back at gone 11pm. Now last night I was unable to calibrate them before midnight. So I had to skip calibration until Saturday afternoon at 12;30pm... I've used Hanlon's razor so much this last two years that the blade is duller than a taxman's suit. To the point where I could easily believe NQ chose 24 hour cooldown SPECIFICALLY TO IMPEDE their PLAYERS and INTERFERE with their PLAYSTYLE. There is no other reason why a GAME DESIGNER would PURPOSEFULLY choose such a PLAYER HOSTILE cooldown. This means that once a week I am effectively either losing sleep or losing a day of calibrations. Thanks for willfully and purposefully making your game a POORER EXPERIENCE at EVERY OPORTUNITY you get. Wearily yours, Jinx. A friend of mine once said "Never attribute to malice something that you can attribute to incompetence", and I think that holds true here. It seems pretty unlikely that someone set out to break the game here, because that would be counter-productive for everyone. But incompetence? That certainly sounds believable doesn't it? With the mining units, though, you aren't really meant to calibrate each mining unit every day. 24 hours was always the minimum but the intention was that you would calibrate after the efficiency starts to drop, which is a lot less frequently (Can't remember exactly, 72h?). I expect they just picked 24 hours because it's a day and nobody complained until now because everyone was just picking them up and re-dropping anyway for the high tier and ignoring the calibration game for the lower tiers. Seems like 22 hours would work better and not really change the max yield much. merihim 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
merihim Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 4 hours ago, Zeddrick said: Seems like 22 hours would work better and not really change the max yield much. They could just implement a reset time for all units every day. Then they have a day cooldown and the time is everyday the same. Other games do this too.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CptLoRes Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 Yeah.. The sensible way is that you get one calibration every day, but when you calibrate within that time slot does not matter since it would reset at midnight regardless. And the dev logic for this is dead simple, so the way it is implemented now is just the result of laziness and not having put any effort into understanding the task. And just another example of NQ's tendency to reinvent the wheel, and somehow always manage to make a worse wheel then what everyone else is using. Kezzle and merihim 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wyndle Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 1) They are tracking how many thousands of individual MU timers? 2) They are doing so to reduce server and DB load? It isn't just us, the players, that are being hurt by the design choices. Poor design isn't the only issue here. The above questions clearly illustrate that NQ's apparent/stated goals do not match the actual results and MU nerfs are not alone in this. GraXXoR 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GraXXoR Posted December 5, 2022 Author Share Posted December 5, 2022 11 hours ago, Zeddrick said: A friend of mine once said "Never attribute to malice something that you can attribute to incompetence", and I think that holds true here. It seems pretty unlikely that someone set out to break the game here, because that would be counter-productive for everyone. But incompetence? That certainly sounds believable doesn't it? With the mining units, though, you aren't really meant to calibrate each mining unit every day. 24 hours was always the minimum but the intention was that you would calibrate after the efficiency starts to drop, which is a lot less frequently (Can't remember exactly, 72h?). I expect they just picked 24 hours because it's a day and nobody complained until now because everyone was just picking them up and re-dropping anyway for the high tier and ignoring the calibration game for the lower tiers. Seems like 22 hours would work better and not really change the max yield much. like I said in my post, “I've used Hanlon's razor so much this last two years that the blade is duller than a taxman's suit…” If they are indeed merely ignorant then there must come a point where this number of gaffes and ignorance becomes weapons grade. we know very well that the vast majority of recent NQ decisions regarding the game have almost ENTIRELY been designed to slow down the players and impede their progress. They’ve said themselves that there’s too much money too much progress too quickly and the servers can’t handle it. So until what point do decisions purposefully designed to impact the players -that then subsequently and adequately fulfill their mission- remain classed as mere incompetence and not slip into willfulness? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GraXXoR Posted December 5, 2022 Author Share Posted December 5, 2022 4 hours ago, CptLoRes said: Yeah.. The sensible way is that you get one calibration every day, but when you calibrate within that time slot does not matter since it would reset at midnight regardless. And the dev logic for this is dead simple, so the way it is implemented now is just the result of laziness and not having put any effort into understanding the task. And just another example of NQ's tendency to reinvent the wheel, and somehow always manage to make a worse wheel then what everyone else is using. NQ: we’ve just invented the wheel. Behold!!! reveals a 4x4 square of voxels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wyndle Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 19 minutes ago, Jinxed said: They’ve said themselves that there’s too much money too much progress too quickly and the servers can’t handle it. Building is one of the key components of the game yet the servers can't handle the amount we're building already? What happens when (though not likely at this point) the game becomes popular and triples in population from peak? If it can't handle it now then it never could and looking less likely by the day that it will be able to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GraXXoR Posted December 5, 2022 Author Share Posted December 5, 2022 21 minutes ago, Wyndle said: Building is one of the key components of the game yet the servers can't handle the amount we're building already? What happens when (though not likely at this point) the game becomes popular and triples in population from peak? If it can't handle it now then it never could and looking less likely by the day that it will be able to. I have never used AWS but I believe there are two basic repeating charges. number of CPUs used and peak CPUs. Amount of data transferred. Lets say If we double the number of players, the we generate double the cpu usage. this in and of itself is no issue because we’re doubling income but salaries and office space rent won’t change so they’ll get more profit. the problem comes with the fact that from day 1, the amount of constructs and data served per players will generally increase. at some point in the future, you could envisage a time when players have so many constructs that NQ can’t afford to have them downloaded to all the players. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mordgier Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 1 hour ago, Jinxed said: I have never used AWS but I believe there are two basic repeating charges. number of CPUs used and peak CPUs. Amount of data transferred. Lets say If we double the number of players, the we generate double the cpu usage. this in and of itself is no issue because we’re doubling income but salaries and office space rent won’t change so they’ll get more profit. the problem comes with the fact that from day 1, the amount of constructs and data served per players will generally increase. at some point in the future, you could envisage a time when players have so many constructs that NQ can’t afford to have them downloaded to all the players. So the cost of DU is not really CPU cycles but CloudFront - DU uses Cloudfront to push out all the voxel data. Any construct or terrain change you make is stored in cloudfront and pushed out to other clients as needed and then stored as cache by your client, at least till the cache is invalidated. Just how much data is pushed is easily tracked by checking your cache size folder. For the estimated costs it's pretty easy - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ You can confirm this easily by the way - Keep in mind that NQ likely has a contract with AWS that is for negotiated pricing, it's pretty rare for any significant users to just pay the list price. That's why mining had to go and that's why constructs have to get destroyed if not tied to a paid account - else they are forever sent out to other clients and NQ pays for it. Tracking millions of autominers is just a bunch of rows in a table - it's not a significant cost really. As to why NQ made the AM timer 24 hours instead for 20h like the "daily" timers in many games - it's because they have a consistent history of failure to learn from the mistakes made by other games. "Daily" timers being either set to a specific reset time or less than 24h to avoid the constant 'shift right' for the players has been standard practice for some time in other games. I had previously posted a breakdown of what I estimated NQ to be paying for hosting and how many players they needed to cover their staffing costs with the profit assuming France average DEV costs + taxes - and that post got deleted and I took a 3m ban for it sooo uhh not doing that again - you're welcome to draw your own conclusions though...admittedly I did also state that you shouldn't buy into DU because of that data because well...uhh...DOA. huschhusch, Novean-61657, Duragon and 3 others 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blundertwink Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 21 minutes ago, Mordgier said: Keep in mind that NQ likely has a contract with AWS that is for negotiated pricing, it's pretty rare for any significant users to just pay the list price. That also depends on what you mean by "signficant user" -- I'm skeptical NQ is actually big enough to leverage much of a break. For example, an adtech company I worked for had well over $50,000 a month in AWS usage. The only break they gave was in flexibility of payment terms...that was helpful, but hardly game changing. The only other discount they pointed us to was in reserved instances, which is very significant but also comes with very significant up-front costs. Other services (like bandwidth charges for CF) have built-in discounts that scale based on usage, already. I can't emphasize enough the world of difference between on-demand and reserved instance pricing -- the more you can afford to pay up-front, the more affordable (and less flexible) AWS is. Otherwise, the only other discount I know of is for their enterprise level plans -- e.g. companies with more than $5 million in spend per year start to get discounts, with more committed spend leading to more discounts. Honestly, I was under the impression that it's really rare for Amazon to give special pricing, except through very high levels of enterprise spend or existing discount programs -- that's the experience I've had with firms that likely outspend NQ, but I'm hardly an expert with the biz side of AWS. Either way, with the list of the top AWS customers being mostly billion-dollar entities, I don't think NQ would be a "significant user", relatively speaking. Also...I wouldn't underestimate their CPU usage! CF might push huge loads of voxel data, but there's still plenty of server-side processing that relies on traditional infra, likely including RDS as well. We can only guess on their usage, but I wouldn't lay a bunch of bets on their stack being efficient. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mordgier Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 2 minutes ago, blundertwink said: That also depends on what you mean by "signficant user" -- I'm skeptical NQ is actually big enough to leverage much of a break. For example, an adtech company I worked for had well over $50,000 a month in AWS usage. The only break they gave was in flexibility of payment terms...that was helpful, but hardly game changing. The only other discount they pointed us to was in reserved instances, which is very significant but also comes with very significant up-front costs. Other services (like bandwidth charges for CF) have built-in discounts that scale based on usage, already. I can't emphasize enough the world of difference between on-demand and reserved instance pricing -- the more you can afford to pay up-front, the more affordable (and less flexible) AWS is. Otherwise, the only other discount I know of is for their enterprise level plans -- e.g. companies with more than $5 million in spend per year start to get discounts, with more committed spend leading to more discounts. Honestly, I was under the impression that it's really rare for Amazon to give special pricing, except through very high levels of enterprise spend or existing discount programs -- that's the experience I've had with firms that likely outspend NQ, but I'm hardly an expert with the biz side of AWS. Either way, with the list of the top AWS customers being mostly billion-dollar entities, I don't think NQ would be a "significant user", relatively speaking. Also...I wouldn't underestimate their CPU usage! CF might push huge loads of voxel data, but there's still plenty of server-side processing that relies on traditional infra, likely including RDS as well. We can only guess on their usage, but I wouldn't lay a bunch of bets on their stack being efficient. Fair points - our cloud hosting bill is about 25M per year so given our scale we've never paid list for anything but I have no idea how low the bar goes for "You pay list and you don't" - I admit my general mindset is that "list price isn't real price" but I might be totally out of touch here... Org scale is not the only thing, sometimes "unique' use case that can serve as whitepapers/case studies for the vendor or proofs of concept that they can use to secure other clients can be used to reduce pricing at least in the short term. AWS going around pointing at NQ as a K8 cluster success story in the gaming world given Amazon's push into game hosting via GameLift might be enough for them to cut them a deal - but who knows. You're also right about the compute costs not being 'insignificant' but I just have no way to know how intensive or not their backend is because none of the data points are visible to us. All we do know for a fact is how much data DU pushes to clients by looking at our cache size. I'd love to have more insight into the DU backend - especially given that DU is a fairly unique concept - but doubt it'll ever be public data. blundertwink 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wyndle Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 2 hours ago, Mordgier said: Tracking millions of autominers is just a bunch of rows in a table - it's not a significant cost really. Compare the number of bytes in a timestamp to the number of bytes in a 0 or 1 (unitCalibrated), multiply that difference by the number of MU being used in game. It my be a tiny difference but when you're shaving every coin already it seems counterproductive. 1 hour ago, blundertwink said: I was under the impression that it's really rare for Amazon to give special pricing, Even Amazon owned properties are paying near full rate for AWS, though that is in part to protect their prices charged to external customers. Amazon discounts are typically a [filtered]-for-tat; so what value would NQ/DU bring to the table to warrant a price break? Edit: over simplistic auto-filter? The original text is a legit, non-offensive term. blundertwink 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
le_souriceau Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 At any rate, no serious MMO can be profitable with like 300-400 concurrent accounts online (totally not even people in DU case), no matter what monetization model it uses. GraXXoR 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CptLoRes Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 That explains it! The reason they are making the game unplayable is to keep the player count low enough for the "Free" tier on Cloudfront. It all makes sense now!! Hazaatan and GraXXoR 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Novean-61657 Posted December 5, 2022 Share Posted December 5, 2022 6 hours ago, Mordgier said: Org scale is not the only thing, sometimes "unique' use case that can serve as whitepapers/case studies for the vendor or proofs of concept that they can use to secure other clients can be used to reduce pricing at least in the short term. AWS going around pointing at NQ as a K8 cluster success story in the gaming world given Amazon's push into game hosting via GameLift might be enough for them to cut them a deal - but who knows. It also matter greatly how much prestige the person doing the negotiating is bringing to the table, the use case as you mentioned, the potential future growth and at what point in the lifecycle the product being negotiated is. I've seen folks making incredible deals that just blow away the list prices and others with far, far bigger companies just getting a 20-25% discount (which isn't insignificant, but not blowing away the list price). It seems a bit like how much decision powers does the negotiating person have (how quickly they can make and approve the deal) makes a lot of difference. Also having a large and well connected 'network' helps you hook in higher into a company and just get better deals overall. I have none of those skills (nor do I want to pursue those), but I've seen people in action that do and it's incredible seeing that contract signed! 😉 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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