Last week, the Dual Universe community erupted in frustration over the beta’s 0.23 patch, which touched on everything from buy orders to blueprints and seems to have annoyed nearly everyone with the perception of intense grind and expensive schematics, especially in a paid beta. But now, Novaquark is responding, explaining why it made those decisions and how it’s rectifying the situation.
“What we did in 0.23 is at the heart of the vision for a game where a society of players is interacting directly or indirectly with each other through an elaborate network of exchanges, cooperation, competition and markets,” the team says, arguing that the game had become “isolated islands of players playing in almost full autonomy.” The changes were meant to “nudge” DU players into interactive gameplay, but it’s apparently a struggle since trading and money faucets aren’t all implemented completely yet.
“Here’s our plan for now. We will modify the formula of the schematic prices to make it considerably more affordable for Tier 1 and still challenging and worth a commitment but less intense for anything Tier 2 or above. This will allow most factories focused on T1 to resume their activities rapidly while keeping an interesting challenge for higher tiers, spawning dedicated industrial facilities aiming at producing to sell on the markets. We will also reimburse players who have bought high-priced schematics since the launch of 0.23 (please give us some time since it may take a few days as we go through the logs). We will keep monitoring the price of schematics to see if it makes sense to increase or decrease the costs. The right approach to set such a price would be to evaluate how much time it takes to recoup your investment by selling the products that the schematics allow to produce. It should be a few months so that the investment is a real commitment and it makes sense to plan for it. We currently lack the metrics to properly assess this return on investment time. We need a player-driven market price for the components and a market price for the products to assess the profit made by each run of a schematic. This will come when the markets start to work as intended, and we can gather more data about them.”
In the meantime, Novaquark is proposing an open public test server with short release cycles so testers can actually muck about earlier. That’ll go live with the 0.24 release. It’s also working on tweaks to element recycling and the introduction of asteroid mining too.
After reading through the reactions from our community regarding the recent 0.23 update, we’ve gained some valuable insights. Read about the mighty 0.23 update and what we’ve learned about our ever-evolving community in our recent DevBlog. Link below ⬇️https://t.co/iTSpi3eBmX pic.twitter.com/oIwbTd1vOm
— Dual Universe (@dualuniverse) December 16, 2020
