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Do you think it's Sadistic Tendancies?


Jinxed

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You assume that the shift to the right in the calibration time is an error. But maybe not.
This is a good way to reduce progress. Very often used, for example, with all sorts of battle passes and timers for all sorts of boxes with loot.
Considering that calibration time is important for high-level ore, this is a significant nerf to your abilities.
Let me explain. If once a week you miss one calibration due to a shift to the right, then you lose almost 15% of the possible high-level ore.

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4 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

Here is what the ChatGPT AI has to say when asked.

 

This description is hilariously inaccurate in my opinion -- it's very kind to use NQ's description of what DU is...

 

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It is a massively multiplayer online game that features a vast, procedurally generated universe

 

Wrong on two counts -- it isn't "massively" multiplayer. That applies to games with a massive audience -- when there's more people playing games with small-scale basic multiplayer than DU, that's not massive.

 

When I can log into NMS and interact with dozens of more players by happenstance compared when I try to seek out crowds in this "MMO"...that's not "massively multiplayer". DU is a persistent multiplayer game, but at this point I don't agree that it is an "MMORPG". 
 

Obviously there's no "vast procedurally generated universe", there's a single solar system and no evidence they will ever add another system...and the procgen that does exist is boring and lifeless.

 

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with real-time, emergent gameplay

 

Real-time? Even that is arguable with how much time gating there is.

 

Emergent gameplay...? That fled the game long ago because they couldn't develop the tools to support this. Gameplay is "emergent" today not because the game offers so many wonderful tools...but because NQ doesn't even test gameplay, so everything people do is "emergent" in some fashion. 

 

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and a focus on player-driven economics and politics

The only "emergent" politics is people stealing stuff from orgs thanks to a permission system even the devs couldn't work properly then screaming about it on the forums or Reddit. The only other "politics" in DU now is in arguing about how long the game will stay online, lol.

 

Forget the economy...we all knew DU's economy would never work as NQ wanted and I can't help but roll my eyes and the idea that players "drive" the economy when players can't even build their own markets.

 

Also who thinks it's a good idea for players to "drive" anything...? It's a game and needs actual game designers to balance it -- putting players "in control" does not make a good game even if that was how DU worked. 

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Well.. The AI is designed to be civil and avoid anything that can be considered controversial. Which is why you get a boilerplate answer to if the game is any good, and information that is taken mostly straight from the official web pages instead of forums etc.

 

But it is interesting that even despite this, when you push a little it has managed to catch some of underlying problems related to DU.

 

And that said, the AI is crazy good at certain things. For example.

 

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On 12/5/2022 at 1:39 PM, 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.  

No, the things you mostly pay for are number of servers and amount of data stored (or storage available depending on what it is). Networking does cost money but typically less than the cost of the nodes generating the traffic, although DU might be a special case.

 

So when they deleted half of the planets, for example,  this would have generated a significant cost saving as it would reduce the data storage required.

 

You have to wonder, then, why they made it so all those landers and starter would end up strewn across haven and never get looked at again.

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50 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

So when they deleted half of the planets, for example,  this would have generated a significant cost saving as it would reduce the data storage required.

 

You have to wonder, then, why they made it so all those landers and starter would end up strewn across haven and never get looked at again.

It makes me also why they refused to have idle tunnels "collapse" after a while, especially on the territories which had been completely mined out. Should've been easy enough to code a check for active player constructs in the tunnels to cater for buried bases.

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Just now, Kezzle said:

It makes me also why they refused to have idle tunnels "collapse" after a while, especially on the territories which had been completely mined out. Should've been easy enough to code a check for active player constructs in the tunnels to cater for buried bases.

 

I'm not so sure it's so simple...it's one thing to "heal" vertex data back to an original seed -- doing it conditionally is very different.

 

That's far more difficult than healing terrain data to a seed because you need to delete a large amount of vertices without breaking the terrain. 

 

They would need to algorithmically "fill" terrain tunnels, constantly checking to be sure there's no player bases in range and that they haven't created holes in the terrain. 

 

Those checks aren't cheap, and filling terrain to delete vertices without breaking it can become complex.

 

There's probably some smart ways to do something sort of like this efficiently, but I wouldn't classify it as being especially simple. 

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23 hours ago, Cergorach said:

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! 😉

 

Well back in the day NQ did manage to get Intel to brag about how good a multicore CPU is for DU - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/intel-core-i9-processors-reduce-open-world-load-times.html

 

Guillaume Gris is still at NQ so I'm not sure it's totally fair to say that they don't have the talent to pull off some fancy overhyped whitepaper for a vendor  that could be used as leverage for a discount - but given that DU has squandered it's potential I doubt any vendor today would be eager to have a NQ logo on their customers page with a case study attached to it....

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9 hours ago, blundertwink said:

 

DU is a persistent multiplayer game, but at this point I don't agree that it is an "MMORPG". 

It requires an overly loose and generous definition for the R and the P to consider DU a Game at this point.

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On 12/6/2022 at 3:41 PM, ColonkinYT said:

You assume that the shift to the right in the calibration time is an error. But maybe not.
This is a good way to reduce progress. Very often used, for example, with all sorts of battle passes and timers for all sorts of boxes with loot.
Considering that calibration time is important for high-level ore, this is a significant nerf to your abilities.
Let me explain. If once a week you miss one calibration due to a shift to the right, then you lose almost 15% of the possible high-level ore.


Right! …which was the main thrust of my OP. 


It has got to be designed to purposefully impede player progress. I miss about one to two calibrations per week on average due to weird timers and occasional social commitments. 

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On 12/6/2022 at 2:52 PM, blundertwink said:

DU is a persistent multiplayer game, but at this point I don't agree that it is an "MMORPG".

I actually don't agree with you.

 

I have a big issue with the use of persistent and have difficulty with attaching the term 'game' to DU, at this point it's more like "DU is a very long (2 year) multiplayer experience."

 

The Role Playing part is actually true for many, in a greater or lesser degree. That it doesn't use stats in the same way Dungeons & Dragons uses them or that there are no NPCs to really interact with does not make the experience any less 'Role Playing'. We're all playing a miner, a trader, an industrialist, a ship designer, a pirate, etc. The only downside is that all of our characters have only one 'quirk', namely all being 'sadomasochistic'... How else do you explain the 'gameplay' and our pursuit of it... 😉

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1 minute ago, Cergorach said:

I actually don't agree with you.

 

Funny how when I said this I was just talking about the multiplayer aspect thinking that was snarky enough....but the only letter people haven't contested is the "O" for being online, lol!

 

So at least everyone agrees that DU is at least an "O" game. Finally we have reached consensus! 

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22 hours ago, blundertwink said:

 

Funny how when I said this I was just talking about the multiplayer aspect thinking that was snarky enough....but the only letter people haven't contested is the "O" for being online, lol!

 

So at least everyone agrees that DU is at least an "O" game. Finally we have reached consensus! 

 

Sure, if O stands for overpriced.

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