Dual Universe has taken to the belief that players of the game should be allowed to help themselves and one another instead of coming to the game’s support team for things like stuck characters or constructs. With the most recent update, players can now utilize features like an /unstuck slash command for when their characters are fused to the geometry, a Fetch contextual menu option to retrieve constructs that are stuck in the ground once every 24 hours, and joinable general, help, and trade chat channels, which veteran MMO players know are always wellsprings of insight and knowledge.
With that all said, live support isn’t necessarily going anywhere, as the post notes that support staff members will be monitoring the help channel for any issues that are eligible for assistance, as well as providing knowledge resource advice or to recommend when players should file a support ticket. Players can further call attention to support staff in the help channel using @GM; players who do so should wait 10 minutes for a response and then file a support ticket if there’s no reply.
The devs have also this week posted the first and second part of a three-part dev blog series. The first discusses the small size of the team and the challenges of switching to trying to develop the game while also running a live beta; it promises to rely on player feedback and stay flexible as DU continues development. The second covers performance plans and the cost of running the game, which turns out to be a lot more expensive than the studio originally though.
“The consequence is that, in the upcoming months, we will be rolling out significant backend improvements in order to optimize these operational costs. We made the conscious decision to keep pricing low in order to make the game more accessible for people who want to play, but that means that we need to keep operational costs in check. Developing these optimizations is time-consuming, but it is fundamental if we want to have a viable game as the playerbase continues to grow. It’s important to make players aware of this because some of our upcoming releases may not seem like much to you. While they won’t appear to include much in the way of new features, they will be updates to deploy these fundamental under-the-hood changes. For instance, the upcoming 0.25 release will be primarily focused on introducing a “game-changing” incremental storage mechanism for edits to the game world that will have a major positive impact on our database costs. The good news is that we think that some of these modifications will improve performance for the players.”
Tomorrow’s piece will apparently discuss gameplay and the vision of the game. Neither piece includes any mention of the fact that the game’s founder was just ousted or that Novaquark still hasn’t addressed who exactly is running the game.
