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[Vivalas]

The unsubscribe button was missing on the website and then it wasn't working. Luckily you can easily unsubscribe without a hassle if use the original email you got when you subscribed.

I think not being able to unsubscribe is probably some violation of Xsollas policy but they probably "fixed" it by now and I'm not petty and /or angry enough to. actually try reporting DU to them, but I imagine that would be the next step if they make you open a ticket or some bullshit to unsubscribe.

[KoE]

To be clear, the lack of subscription management options was well before this patch and given how NovaQuark seems to be run, I'd be quicker to ascribe it to incompetence than malice. Still pretty ridiculous that it took them a couple of months to get around to it adding it though.

In the event this thread sees some more traffic in the future, I figure I'll also give a synopsis of  the hubbub over the past week and a half:

- They introduced a patch that removed useful 'debug' types of features (fetching constructs, Alt+F4 stopping all momentum, limiting the maneuver tool), introduced a harsh 'if an element is destroyed three times it's gone' that was also ham-handedly implemented such that any element with a life missing no longer stacks in inventory, and introduced 'Schematics' that much be purchased before you can run any industry recipe. These ranged from 75k for the most basic to 11 billion for the illustrious Warp Beacon. Other end-game items were around 656 million and higher-tier staples like Warp Drives were around 100 million as I recall.

- For context, you get 100,000 quanta for a daily login. It's difficult to place a price on what mining would have gotten you immediately post patch as Ore prices were in free-fall while industrialists scrambled to revive their factories and deleted capital to let the devs make it.
There were still dev-placed market 'bot' orders at 12.50/l as the price floor for Tier 1 ore. I'd estimate a nominally equipped miner could pull about a million an hour on average, though that's kind of a wild guess. This is the *only* way money was entering the economy, and it wasn't moving between players much except as scalpers tried to sell their stockpiles of high-end parts in the confusion.

- Needless to say, everybody hated that. Even the people who agreed that they were trying to fix a problem introduced it too early and in a poorly thought out, badly implemented way (unless the point was to wipe quanta and stall player momentum while other stuff got developed). At a bare minimum, the game really needed something else to do other than Mining, quanta-walled Industry, and now market-based Building.

- They reset everybody's talents entirely for people who no longer wanted to do Industry. They also increased the log-in quanta to 150k, doubled the price floor of T1 ore, and added a 50q/l price floor to T2 ore. Now everybody can mine more profitably, but prices for all the basic industrial output (read: T1 stuff) were stabilizing back to where they were pre-patch, meaning anyone trying to carve out a niche in low-end industry would take quite a while to recoup those costs, much less make money. The talent respec also basically meant folks interested in Industry could now optimize, so good luck if you aren't getting global 4 or even 5s in the industrial talents!

- On Tuesday the 15th, they massively reduced schematic prices - T1 stuff is around 60% of what it was, while higher-tier stuff is as little as 10% of its previous cost. They also announced their intent to remove element destruction from non-PvP damage and introduce the ability to scrap damaged elements into useful parts (which was a major gripe of PvPers - they had no choice but to destroy their loot). They've essentially heavily backpeddled here, which sets kind of a bad precedent and now literally nobody is happy, even the folks who thought this patch was in the correct direction, if poorly implemented.

- See also the description of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX66zIz461k; apparently JC plans to constantly alter schematic prices based on perceived ROI, which is basically just saying that the devs are keeping a heavy thumb on the economy, and given their previous attempts are probably going to screw it all up.

Personally, this just re-asserts to me that NovaQuark have little idea what they're doing, and I don't have a ton of faith in their stewardship of the game. However, I do find this absolute fascinating because of the push-and-pull between folks who are, like myself, here on the premise that this game is rooted in EVE and civilization building vs. folks who are here primarily for a Cool Building Thing. I think the core gameplay is strong enough that it can still survive long-term as its own niche thing and I hope it does. For now, I'm at least going to hang around another subscription period to see what the next trainwreck is.

[Vivalas]

Yeah, maybe I might stick around and see where the wind goes, since I do have until January until my sub ends, but I have very little confidence.

I think the biggest issue is they failed to harness the MMO nature of the game. The issue wasn't small corps and individuals (like me) making stuff, since it was still usually cheaper and easier in most cases just to buy things I didn't immediately need. The issue was mining being the only form of income until you either had a factory or a ship or an org and were able to set up some tertiary market processes like rescue, or transport.

IMO, they should have automated those. Having the ability to set up shipping contracts to move goods to factories automates the profit of industry barons, which helps them, and provides a somewhat more interesting economic activity for people who don't want to mine or arbitrage or hunt down freight contracts. That sort of "quest" system being formed has been talked about for a while and would have greatly mobilized the economy  by providing for tons more shipping activity but instead they just wanted to tamper with it instead.

[dragdeler]

Seriously fuck this game. I tried to force myself to pick it back up and I don't think one is meant to:

Can't even make fuel without schematics and reading your way through the skilltree.
13-14 fps in flight.
Tried to fly to sanctuary for some reason my space engines wouldn't light past 4000m.
Where the fuck are my atmo fuel gages.
I turn around.
My base and landing pad loads last among all the assets as I return, causing me to an awkward spin through a bunch of bases suspended in the air.
Of course I crash.
My main is respawned at marketplace because node HAD to break too...
I try to repair with my alt, core needs to be replaced with a new one.
Of course I had to buy it, I also had to skill up to be able to place it.


This is an absolute shitshow this game feels like a 24/7 job and it runs lousy.

[Journier]

Then It sounds like the Eve playerbase will flock to it if it sounds like a job.

Nailed It fella's.

[dragdeler]

Ok it has been 6 months I raged at the state of the game over the introduction of schematics. I want to put that in perspective first: I went through 2 wipes shortly before the beta release I bought in at a really unfavorable moment. At wipe I found a few people to play with but we weren't intensely teamworking or something... So after grinding all different Ores together 3 times, I repeat 3 times, mostly soloplaying. So easily 500-600 hours (probably way more) of mostly mining later I was doubting really hard there'd be a pay-off, me being a noob at voxelmancy on top of all. Then they released the schematics update at a moment when morale was really low, not only for myself I later learned that the update dropped the player count by quite abit.


Recently a friend suddenly showed interest, after I had tried to interest him hundreds of times, so I found the motivation to get back in. I now get the deal with the schematics, it was a good way to force specialisation, else everybody was doong all industry themselves and trading little... Now there is schematics where it's obvious you might be happier just buying the damn item straight off the shelve. A set of allmost all basic schematics in reasonable amounts (like basic screws times eight) will come in at 80-120 million quant, possibly more I'm not done yet... Had been grabbing login rewards on two accounts pretty consistently but that amounted only to 45mil.


Long story short I have been unfair to the game and eventhough it has a long way to go, I feel willing to invest another few hundred hours easily. If any have been hesitating to get back in it, let me know if I can make it easier.

[Folly]

Yes, adding a major up-front cost to crafting limits the influx of new elements, increasing their value and forcing people to buy the things they can't make themselves. But without pvp destruction driving up the demand, prices still end up gravitating towards the cost of production. Which means that any production line you start up will take many months before it becomes profitable. And many players just don't find that fun or satisfying.

The next major update is expected to include asteroid mining and pvp rebalance. Hopefully that will be a bigger step in the right direction.

The most recent major update added hauling missions, which has at least been enough to prompt my crew to hop back into the game and start working on building some new interplanetary haulers. We're also considering getting a anti-gravity shuttle and a space station together so that we can easily ferry packages up and down from space.

[Android]

Im still keeping an eye on this thread, let me know if and when it becomes worthwhile to take a look at again

[KoE]

So the game has been scheduled to 'release' on September 27th, along with a nearly-full wipe.  Apart from your blueprints, friends list, and organization membership, everybody's reset to 0. Folks who had a paid sub during Beta will get a monthly stipend of Talent Points and cash, scaling at >3 months and >12 months. (Also it'll be coming to Steam, with all that likely entails)

If you had a sub, you also get 2 free weeks after launch to come and try it out again, so I figured I'd mention it here. I decided I'd give the game another whack since I like these sorts of initial rushes, and I resubbed early to shake the rust off so I'd be ready to hit the ground running. Here's what's changed since I quit around January 2021. Also if for some reason you want to crawl through the ruins of a destroyed world where all your crap's probably already gone, you might be able to go to reddit/Discord and bum 'Summer DAC' (basically a game time token) that was given out to folks who were actually active during the summer. (As in: not me). This is only open to new accounts though.

(The short version: territory decays after up to ~90 days of not being tended, you get 3 protected hexes, mining is now asteroid mining and planet mining is handled by automated machines and a minigame that charges them for a ~week or so, schematics were changed from lump-sum to time-gated consumables that non-industrialists can sell to industrialists, performance seems to be improved, districts were cleaned up, there seems to be a curated advertising/community area)

---

First, all my crap was already gone. I don't fully understand the system, but basically territory now requires a flat upkeep fee. You can put up to 13 weeks worth into a territory ahead of time, and after you miss your first payment industry on it shuts down. After two more consecutive missed payments, the territory unit goes offline and can be claimed by whoever wanders by. You can also designate 5 (reduced to 3 on release) territories to be Headquarters, which are protected from going offline, and the same is true of your tile on the sanctuary moon.

Unfortunately that means there's still plenty of abandoned megastructures, so the new world may see an Alioth with skies crapped up by long-abandoned space elevators too. They did, however, reuse the system to cause ships parked at markets to become abandoned after a week, and apparently they eventually decay completely. Now the District markets are mostly ghost towns, which is good for performance. They also apparently did quite a bit under the hood and added some options to reduce constructs that are drawn.

The biggest change is probably that mining as we know it has been relegated to asteroids that now spawn through some voodoo I likely won't figure out before release. The primary way to get ore now is to plop down a building. You then spend a 'calibration' charge (you get 1 per six hours by default) to play a triangulation minigame that immediately rewards you with 2-4k ore (in the form of big chunks you mine like the ubiquitous surface skittles) and charges the unit.

While charged, each unit produces some amount of ore per hour. This seems to depend on the charge level and, of course, a Talent. You also have talents for producing more skittles from the minigame, gaining charges faster (capping at 3 hours 30 minutes for a charge after maxing two talents), and how many charges you can hold at a time (starting at 25 and capping at 75 after maxing two talents). You can also apparently play this minigame through VR. You also get bonus production from owning adjacent territories running mining units on the same ore. The astute will notice that this is the reason territories are taxed; supposedly, any hex should produce enough ore to pay for itself passively.

The last major mechanical change I'm aware of is that they redid schematics. Now rather than having to buy one big expensive quanta sink per assembly line, you have a menu accessible from anywhere where you 'copy schematics from Aphelia'. First, they're only for end-stage items and not each step of the process - you can make all the screws and hydraulics you want. They've also been greatly condensed - you make a 'Tier X Y Size Schematic Copy' for basic elements, the Core Unit ones will make any of the three types of cores, and some stuff like Warp Cells or Territory Units only make themselves.

The limiting factor now is that they're consumable and take time to copy. You have 5 slots that each accept a batch; for example, I could do a batch of 5 Tier 1 L Element copies overnight so I wake up to an empty slot, or I could run 5 batches of 1 to get the same number in just under 2 hours. This is sort of neat in that it gives folks who aren't interested in industry completely passive quanta. Or encourages industrialists to make even more alts, I guess. Also in a major curse, even basic tier 1 construction honeycomb is gated like this.

They also, at some point, added a Space Market equidistant between the three safe planets; I have yet to go and I'm not sure why that would even be remotely convenient, but it's there. More interestingly they added an area called the Alioth Exchange that seems to have replaced the non-stop advertisements at the markets that now get deleted (and allegedly policed by GMs). It's not a big deal but it's a positive note I approve of.

Oh, right, I completely forgot because the wipe was announced a month ago so it's currently Very Dead: There's a mission system. You can basically set up a job to have another player haul your junk from a container you designate to market or vice versa. The hauler puts up a collateral fee that they forfeit if they too long or steal the package (the contents of which are invisible until they do so). They get paid if they succeed. There's also a 'job board' that currently only has recruitment ads, but is apparently for offering quanta to be taxied, rescued, etc. This is of course, not enforced, though apparently there's some sort of reputation system. I saw a few Discord folks saying they used the system both ways.


Also some stuff happened with PvP but I don't know what. Element destruction is supposed to be turned on on release. And at this point I think the topic's gone on long enough. I'm probably gonna spend at least a couple months with the game because I really enjoyed the good parts even if there's a lot of jank on NovaQuark's part. I can't really say the game has changed to be better, but it does seem like there's a solid core to the Dual Universe community that will carry the game on its back long after it should probably die. Whether or not they're presently dragging a corpse, we'll probably find out with the Steam release.

[Folly]

Whether or not they're presently dragging a corpse, we'll probably find out with the Steam release.

I think the very fact that they are doing a wipe is evidence of this.
There is absolutely no good reason for doing a wipe, except that they know there are not enough active accounts playing right now to keep the game alive, and they hope that the wipe will draw in new blood. But the devs still have not delivered a fraction of what they promised years ago. As soon as the new players realize that, they'll ghost.

[Android]

My opinion was they had to wipe because of all of the economy changes that have taken place. Free money just for logging in yada yada

[Folly]

Any arguments about the economy are nullified by the simple fact that it's a persistent MMO. Without any sort of regular seasonal wipes, there will always be players emerging who have significantly more wealth than others. The existence of bots will accelerate this phenomena, ensuring drastic wealth disparities within weeks after the reset. And that's okay, because the game is designed so that rich players have no meaningful impact on poor players and their game experience.

[dragdeler]

Thank you, and any map changes they were intending to do could have been handled with magic blueprints as promised initially... That was also a fake issue.


But the majority dropped the ball hard because the game wasn't being developped in a tempo that suited them, and the lowest common denominator was to blame NQ for a lack of wipe, so that narrative most easily gained footground. Nouredine is happy to sell us a relaunch and move on to greener pastures...

This wipe is tainted, the rewards are insulting, somebody who subscribes for 13 months last minute gets the same ingame boost as people who spent the price of a used car. No talent points will be conserved, BUT, we have to assume they will stay in blueprints.... So none of this will be fair if you think about it for a second, it's just unfairness with extra steps that make it less obvious.


But it's the first time since 2020 you can hear some optimism from the community, meaning the majority of people, who all dropped the ball and instead of just coming back one day, because that's what you do in an MMO, but instead had this fixed idea that they needed a wipe to have a reason to come back - like this is a sandbox like any other... and not just a glorified browser mmo in 3d that doesn't respect your time in order to keep you subscribed.

And since the only redeeming quality of such a game would be the community, and since the community is what I just described, I'm super done with the game. At most I'm gonna place a few voxels awkwardly to make people crash, to really drive home the point that no issues were solved by deleting progress.

[KoE]

The economic issue isn't really that some percentage of entities have a larger number of digits in their wallet; it's that the market developed an enormous supply glut thanks to two years of development apparently more focused on reducing server costs than anything else. Despite the initial schematic roadbump, gigafactories have been delivering ever more supply to market, and demand is linked directly to player count since nothing other than PvP (or inactive player HQ tiles) removes that supply.

Assuming the goal is to have more than a building sandbox, that supply had to be wiped *somehow*, at *sometime*. And the supply likely would have lasted for a long time without some draconian sink, whether the wipe we got or some sort of aggressive decay system. Ideally the issue would have been solved more rapidly, but Novaquark has proven to be anything but agile.

I can't say that the release universe won't wind up in the same place, but it should arrive somewhat slower. Now that factories *consume* schematics, there's a practical limit to how many machines are kept running by a single account's allocation of schematic-copying-time. That's at least some reduction on the faucet; on the sink side all we're getting is element destruction from crashes, which I highly doubt will be significant in the long run.

Hopefully Novaquark has also developed some institutional policies on other things they let run rampantly unchecked in the beta. The linked container exploit has apparently been abused with minimal repercussions for the whole duration and is only hopefully fixed. It took them a month and a half to respond to a support ticket I lodged in early beta about an easy atmospheric fuel dupe that was easily discoverable, and it was still around when I quit a month or so later.

Overall I still can't say I have high expectations, and hardly blame anybody for washing their hands of the project. But I think the game's in a better place than the general chorus of salty bittervets indicates, even with all the broken promises and jank.