1.2 thoughts

[choxie]

Asteroid changes are good and long overdue and space salvaging is something to look forward to. Tactical map, whatever, I don't PVP anyway and there's currently no reason to use the lanes if we can't ever get more than a S core's worth of cargo at a time.
So are you still trying to do away with calibration mining and burn tiles? You sending us all to the asteroids? Cuz not only is that a gameplay loop we don't all wanna do, there's the issue of millions of talent points wasted on mining units and surface harvesting talents since thats what we wanted to spec into.
It is truly nice to see changes coming so quickly, but none of the upsetting ones from 1.1 have been addressed. This is starting to feel like too little, too late.

[CptLoRes]

Too little, too late.

[Wyndle]

Don't count your chickens before they hatch on the asteroid changes, those may not work as intended.  I'm reserving judgement until I see it in game.  I had a spark of copium when I read that until others pointed out that the image NQ used for the next segment was a poorly photoshopped rip from a website talking about Elite: Dangerous.

[blundertwink]

15 hours ago, choxie said:

It is truly nice to see changes coming so quickly

 

Quickly, though...?

 

It's been 71 days since release, almost 3 billing cycles...yes, it's a given they will focus on bugs and performance in the first cycles, but this hasn't been fast or effective enough. The game still suffers from far too many obvious bugs and performance issues.

 

NQ decided to monetize the game with a sub...they should have done even a little bit of homework about what a sub-based monetization actually means, because their update cadence is about the same as a single player game. 

 

With this current pace and their history of glacial dev, there's no feasible way they can actually maintain DU. It just isn't possible.

 

There's no realistic way they can grow the game faster than churn rates. Even if they had the most brilliant marketing campaign in the world, success would be short-lived because they can't retain players and there's no evidence to suggest this will magically change. 

 

It's easy to see this unfold on Steam, the world's largest PC gaming market, with active player maximums barely even breaking 200 concurrent players anymore (just 25% of its "peak" of only ~800 2 months ago).

 

There's now more people playing 2017's "Pinball FX3" than Dual Universe on Steam right now. A Pinball game from 2017 has more popularity than a brand new MMO. 

 

More people are playing Star Trek Online right now than have ever played DU on Steam concurrently -- STO also has its own launcher; this idea that everyone plays outside of Steam and that Steam stats therefore don't matter is hopelessly unfounded and absurd.

 

Steam users are the most qualified potential customers NQ will find anywhere. Valve pushes at least 1 million unique impressions to your product -- their conversion rate was just as abysmal as their retention.

 

If NQ can't convert these users even at the level of ancient MMOs like STO, the game just doesn't work. 

[Novean-61657]

16 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

Too little, too late.

Weren't you saying that during Beta... And look at us now! Still here... *facepalm*

 

Patch 1.2: It all sounds good, I just wonder how it will actually play work... We'll see!

[CptLoRes]

53 minutes ago, Cergorach said:

Weren't you saying that during Beta...

If only. I was complaining about slow dev pace and saying something was off even before alpha started. And sadly my gut feeling was not wrong.. 

[Maxim Kammerer]

4 hours ago, blundertwink said:

The game still suffers from far too many obvious bugs and performance issues.

 

I could live with the bugs and performance issues if there only would be gameplay. Currently the only reliable way to get cash for taxes are NPC missions. DU is a sub-based sandbox MMO with a main gameplay loop that would not even be sufficient for a free-to-play browser game! I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

[le_souriceau]

8 hours ago, blundertwink said:

It's easy to see this unfold on Steam, the world's largest PC gaming market, with active player maximums barely even breaking 200 concurrent players anymore (just 25% of its "peak" of only ~800 2 months ago).

 

Its mostly legacy thing. 

 

DU in way exausted/alienated potential demographics in long years before with very slow and troubled "Alpha" and largerly failed "Beta". Game belongs to quite sensetive genre niche, where number of convertable players with specific tastes and qualities in world somewhat limited. If they dissapointed (or not imporessed to try) with game, its end of story -- because its simple no way to just create new players with such portfolio in needed quantity out of "raw" people. 

 

Even Beta start was borderline "passable" in demographical terms, this release was like at least 3 times weaker on numbers. Not sustainable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Costanius]

8 hours ago, blundertwink said:

 

 

With this current pace and their history of glacial dev, there's no feasible way they can actually maintain DU. It just isn't possible.

 

It is possible if player subs are not their main source of income. What if its not about us as gamers or DU as a game? But about the server and voxel tech behind it? The CEO is talking a lot about the Metaverse and web3 and apparently has big dreams there. 

Its just speculation, but if its just about the technology behind DU, then we gamers playing DU could be just part of the package they want to sell to their real customers:  Companies or investors that want to jump big on the metaverse/blockchain/web3 -hypetrain. If this is the case then it doesn't matter how many players remain playing DU, als long as 50 hardcore fans remain and build cool stuff they can show, as part of the tech demo.

 

NQ, You could end this stupid speculation easily: Just give us an update about the state of the game, Your plans with DU for the next months and the coming year 2023, Your vision for the game and a new roadmap! I assume there is a vision and a plan for DU as a game. Is there?

We kickstarter-backers bought into the  original idea and concept of the game and without our initial succesful investments and pledges on Kickstarter there would be no DU at all! So it would be just fair to all backers who supported the project all the years during development, and to all active players now,  to  let us know whats going on and what You are up to!

[GraXXoR]

On 12/7/2022 at 9:06 AM, Wyndle said:

until others pointed out that the image NQ used for the next segment was a poorly photoshopped rip from a website talking about Elite: Dangerous.

imagine releasing assets from another company’s product and trying to fob it off as your own work before being called out and then replacing it with a clearly inferior illustrator knock off. 
 

their version doesn’t even have any vertical information. It’s a 2D plane like the current in game minimap. 

[Wyndle]

It is worth repeating; NQ already lost my trust and has a limited time to show that they can improve the game without further breaking/killing it.  This issue of borrowing assets is at best lazy, but on its own not worth ranting over any more than I already have. Once the feature is live I will give it the same scrutiny I would give any "Release" game, including any bugs that may coincide. 

[Kezzle]

15 hours ago, blundertwink said:

With this current pace and their history of glacial dev, there's no feasible way they can actually maintain DU. It just isn't possible.

 

 

To which:

6 hours ago, Costanius said:

It is possible if player subs are not their main source of income. What if its not about us as gamers or DU as a game? But about the server and voxel tech behind it? The CEO is talking a lot about the Metaverse and web3 and apparently has big dreams there. 

Its just speculation, but if its just about the technology behind DU, then we gamers playing DU could be just part of the package they want to sell to their real customers:  Companies or investors that want to jump big on the metaverse/blockchain/web3 -hypetrain. If this is the case then it doesn't matter how many players remain playing DU, als long as 50 hardcore fans remain and build cool stuff they can show, as part of the tech demo.

If DU is a sideline/tech demonstrator, the pace of development isn't going to get any fater though, is it? They'll do jut enough to keep those 50 die-hards interested. Are you going to be happy with that?

[blundertwink]

13 hours ago, Costanius said:

It is possible if player subs are not their main source of income. What if its not about us as gamers or DU as a game? But about the server and voxel tech behind it? The CEO is talking a lot about the Metaverse and web3 and apparently has big dreams there. 

Its just speculation, but if its just about the technology behind DU, then we gamers playing DU could be just part of the package they want to sell to their real customers:  Companies or investors that want to jump big on the metaverse/blockchain/web3 -hypetrain.

 

This idea comes up a lot, but I don't really understand it. 

 

You don't spend 8 years just to create an elaborate, secretive demo of technology that doesn't even scale or perform well. If this was the plan, they would spend a lot less time and effort creating a demo that showcases the tech in a positive light. DU isn't even close to that. 

 

Creating a game like this is absurdly difficult -- yes, made 10x more difficult by a lack of design clarity and technical due-diligence early on, but still...making any modern MMO for ~$22 million is not going to be easy. 

 

I can't buy into the conspiracy that NQ has been secretly trying to sell technology this whole time. I believe they spent the last 8 years trying to make a game and a lot of mistakes have coalesced into an unsustainable product.

 

That's the most likely situation in my mind. It happens all the time, even with experienced studios...but especially for new studios trying to do something extremely, extremely ambitious. 

 

It might seem like they have made so many obvious mistakes or simply "don't care"...but all I know for a fact is that they've spent many, many years working on DU as a game.

 

If they really only cared about the tech, why pay for forums and customer service at all? Why market to gamers or put it on Steam? Why spend so long on such an immensely counter-productive "demo" in general?

 

Who is the market for this tech and can you really expect them to pay enough to sustain NQ as a company?

 

Skilled devs can certainly implement voxel-to-mesh (a fundamental concept in all voxel-based implementations, hardly unique to NQ) and NQ's "server tech" is hardly proven to be scalable or robust (besides the likely vendor locking with AWS)...so what's this "tech" even worth...? 

 

I do think NQ might try to sell their their company in general now that it seems so impossible for DU to scale...but I don't believe this was their plan all along, and if they did sell...it'd probably be for a loss compared to the ~$22 million invested. 

[Wyndle]

40 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

This idea comes up a lot, but I don't really understand it. 

Then you likely have not become uncomfortably familiar with the concept of government sponsored black (as in shadow/secret) projects.  Congrats on making it this far in life without that knowledge or first-hand experience.  Seriously, why does the US DoD have a cyber defense team that just happened to start at the same time online hate and spam ramped up ten fold?  Gotta be a coincidence because the US Military wouldn't inflict psychological warfare on citizens or the world in general... right?

 

40 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

I can't buy into the conspiracy that NQ has been secretly trying to sell technology this whole time. I believe they spent the last 8 years trying to make a game and a lot of mistakes have coalesced into an unsustainable product.

1)  The CEO is literally at a state sponsored metaverse event discussing topics that, IMO, are extremely dystopic.

2)  The design was flawed from the start.  We can speculate on what parts of the design were at fault but without a comprehensive list of VC investments it would be nigh impossible to get an accurate picture of motivation behind the first (or subsequent) round(s) of funding. 

 

40 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

If they really only cared about the tech, why pay for forums and customer service at all? Why market to gamers or put it on Steam? Why spend so long on such an immensely counter-productive "demo" in general?

Because those things are expected of a game in development and at release.  It would raise too many questions or alert too many would-be "customers" if those things were completely absent.  In other words, it is a cost of doing business in this field no matter what the motivation of the funders may be.

 

Ever hear of Stuxnet?  It was developed and spread for many years before it found the target computers in Iran. 

 

40 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

Who is the market for this tech and can you really expect them to pay enough to sustain NQ as a company?

This is extremely difficult to answer for several reasons; chief among them being if this is a state sponsored psy-op then a correct guess could literally mean a death sentence.

 

TL;DR - Your guess is as good as mine but I've been around the rodeo for a while.

[CptLoRes]

I honestly think NQ started out with a 100% focus on making DU and only that.

 

But as the years went on and the game continued to struggle, my bet is that the people behind the VC money told NQ to start looking for other means to make money. And I don't think it is a coincidence that JC left around the time this happened.

 

So in this scenario where DU is no longer the main focus, it also suddenly becomes more likely that the DU being keep alive as a 'tech demo' thing might also be true.

 

 

 

[Novean-61657]

On 12/7/2022 at 5:22 PM, CptLoRes said:

And sadly my gut feeling was not wrong.. 

Dude! That was a bad taco! 😉

[Costanius]

15 hours ago, Kezzle said:

 

To which:

If DU is a sideline/tech demonstrator, the pace of development isn't going to get any fater though, is it? They'll do jut enough to keep those 50 die-hards interested. Are you going to be happy with that?

Of course not! As a kickstarter backer I bought into the vision, concept and plan JC had for DU. I would prefer to have a great popular game which is a commercial success as well. And because I have no insider insight into NQ, its all just speculation. But the sideline / tech-demonstrator theory would explain a lot of their behaviour, the slow development, apparent cost-cutting changes and lack of communication. So if they don't talk to and with us backers and players, who are they talking to? Where is their focus? Who is their (real) target audience? What is all the staff working on, what are they doing all the time if its not working on improving DU as a game? And why is the CEO travelling to metaverse conferences and posting/liking articles about metaverse/blockchain/web3 stuff and when talking about DU is praising the voxel-technology they (NQ) developed?

[Aaron Cain]

Planets when?

end of missions when?

end of schematics when?

warfare when?

community page when?

All scrapped features return, When?

 

Revamp planets when? as they still all look like a 2000 mmo and nothing fancy

Roadmap when?

f2p when?

 

ooh wait, learned we need to add a smiley, here it comes:

 

[GraXXoR]

11 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

Planets when?

end of missions when?

end of schematics when?

warfare when?

community page when?

All scrapped features return, When?

 

Revamp planets when? as they still all look like a 2000 mmo and nothing fancy

Roadmap when?

f2p when?

 

ooh wait, learned we need to add a smiley, here it comes:

 

Love you, Aaron, but most of those statements are ifs.  
 

If Planets

If end of missions 

If end of schematics

If warfare

If community page

If all scrapped features return…

 

and most importantly. 
 

☺️

[HollyDOL]

Asteroid revamp is a joke... 1 man job for 1-2 days tops (okay +2 for test) - a bit of touching on one frontend view and RNG on spawn + timer on despawn on server. That's all. We still get ridiculous broadcast, we still get Damn Stupid Asteroid Tracker. Unknown asteroid composition before tracking out... while we already have spectroscopy irl, that at least makes sense from game point of view. Change like this could have easily make it to one of small weekly patches.

[Wyndle]

Quote

• Matching transponders now act as a social feedback in inworld marks & in the tactical map.

Does this mean that transponder range has been fixed?  Or does the range only affect LUA? In other words, will this be reliable enough to prevent friendly fire consistently?

 

I understand the logic and intention, but this opens a whole new can of worms for all the issues we've seen with transponders. Is the transponder now a required ship part for upcoming flotilla changes?