New Direction NI Staff let go.

Some interesting comments found on EntropiaForum:

... the most beautiful of the planets...
(Cherries Jubilee)
... some of my favorite spots in EU are there...
(Miles)
... NI has the best mechanics when it comes to players economy...
(Fred Zed Gerard)
... NI is not an exact copy of the old Calypso system...
(Fifth)

Entropia Universe is not rocket science and it's not brain surgery. It's not rocket surgery either. It's a game, nothing more :)

 

It has the feel and attraction that makes it unique the the universe. All it needs now is some polishing, updating, and some love. Then toss in a bit of advertisement and whulla!! :) A simple receipt that isn't so simple when your on the other side.. I think this is what is happening atm.. The planet is there... the idea is there... the concept is there... but the end goal is not.. In the end, all the rest won't matter a hill of beans until you have the finished product. Once that happens, you market it and then bring in the people.. The rest sorts itself out.. LOL

 

1. They did a good start with praetorium. And if they somehow manage to pull the next VU out, Sorensen Stone.

2. When NI was new:ish, there was a mob called "sacred boar". I guess it was MA who pulled it back - at about same time there was Proteron on calypso that had huge HP and was doable by mid-level players. Ubers complained about this, and proteron got changed (less HP, tougher attacks and regen). The Sacred Boar simply vanished.

During the space launch competition, I did a few Vulcan Drake Stalkers, and a few great white sharks. Those should be possible to get an ATH from. Vulcan Drakes are doable at mid-level using Vigi+6a armor, great white sharks well the bigger nearly impossible (but doable with say 20 visits to revival lol) (hardest thing with them is the misty water so it's hard to see what's ahead of you, it's easy to get a stalker on you wen you were looking for a young). Better equipped players seem to like "Quartermasters" (pretty decent HP though they hit hard).

3. If you don't like ND, just don't visit "his" server area, it should be as simple as that lol. (Though you can't hunt vulcan drakes and great white sharks if you do). There are other potential people people might dislike for thousands of reasons - land owned by an anonymous "group of investors", land owned by (as I define it) resellers, land where tax is higher than what I see morally right, land owned by locked people (and still eating tax). I wouldn't leave an entire planet just because I don't agree with a certain landowner (or ideas he has implemented on his land are) if there are options. I know some people got mad about Vampire and Zombie globals from Rocktropia (while on calypso), but I don't think it's serious to complain about that. I was more wondering what was going on at the time 90% of globals on Calypso was Atrox (well 90% might be a little to high guess lol) (it was back in vu 9 when "everyone" hunted small atrox for some reason).

4. ?

5. Well it needs good in-game desigers. When it comes to texture design, I guess Arkadia is the winner (leaving even Calypso behind). (Actually it's hard here to compete: To make a texture that looks "special", you need mobs that looks special. And I guess huge purple parrots, green spotty cats and grey big hedgehogs doesn't fit that well in on NI.)

I hope whoever will continue the running of Next Island would be able to pick up the work in progress and finish what's in it.

 

I have loved NI since it came into Eu. Visually it is the one planet I choose over all the others. If the new management can put forth the effort Arkadia has it will be a success.

 

You can always hunt untaxed Vulcan drakes over at Vulcan's Pass...

 

There are so many useless crystals in loot. It's even a pain to sell the valuable ones but there is so much unused crap in loot. A working economy (ressources, BPs, items) is most important for a planet to survive. RT is still sturggling with this, Arkadia seems to do ok, NI has a long way to go yet. Introducing even more ressources is the wrong decision in my opinion.
NI should look to get the same advantage like Ark and RT and have their unique mats spread over some BPs not related to NI.

Hence I said 'back'. Can only speculate what happened though. I know about players willing to hunt the Sacred Boars and if I remember correctly Kitten was talking about a place where a few spawn every now and then.

Will never hunt at 5% tax anyways else I do not have any problem with ND but I know about quite a lot who have do to some shady situation like the scanner fiasco on RT. I don't think having this name spread over a planet will help the reputation as it used to.

Iron Mission.
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Imho, it was good to let the scanners drop. Or more like, MA should a long time ago have made better scanners been availible (let's say (L) scanners with longer range and SIB), however, that never happened.

Problem was probably more like MAs drop algorithms, dropping all at once. And people related to Neverdie (staff?) taking advantage of the situation.

Sure, it devaluated the currently ingame ES500/ES400 scanners, on the other hand those rarely shifted hands, at least not officially (=in public auction), though I'm fairly sure a bunch of people used those borrowing from socmates and such. And more people having access to better scanners, sure in a long run less value of scanning skills. On the other hand, I've been skilling plasma with my oldschool-type plasma rifle, and MA drops "eredicator type four" and a few happy or rich people can skill way faster. (Sure I'd want one of those, it would mean a weapon closer to my skill level than Heatray B...) When I got in contact with someone who looted one of those scanners I deposited peds to buy it. I wouldn't have deposited PEDs to buy one of the few ones that would float in auction like once every third year...

The fiasco was that staff/employees (people who had inside information what was about to happen) took advantage of the situation, the drop itself wasn't a fiasco from NDs side.

As for the missions, I'm more angry about MA, letting people who was able to do the missions the first day get a stamina point, and when MA had fixed the missions, the people who had done the missions first day got to keep their stamina but it got unavailible for the rest. And now a simular thing apparently have happened on Rocktropia for their missions (suddently silently been changed by MA).

 

I hope if there would be a new team for developing Next Island, they can just focus on economy, make NI own weapons, armors, tools etc.. that uses NI specific hunting loot and minerals as materials. Just like what Arkadia did in their launch. You want people to stay then you need a economy to let people survive, it's fine if missions or whatever things comes later. You need to let the economy go before everything else.

It's quite useless to have tons of missions but no economy at all, ubers might come to do missions that give attributes because they just want it and they are rich enough to not care about TT those loots. Just like Rocktropia, they have much more missions than Arkadia, but the population in there is much less than Arkadia. Because there's no economy at all( I knew it is getting better recently), people in there have many missions to do but without blueprints to consume those RT specific hunting loots and mined minerals. So they make clean mining area for miner to attracting miners who mine for markup to go there. That is even a bigger wrong decision, people mine in RT and import those minerals back to calypso, yeah RT might get some decay as revenue from those miners, but it doesn't help local market at all. I"m glad they finally noticed this has no help in local economy and start changing minerals distribution in RT to add more RT specific minerals.

I"m not here to saying RT sucks and Arkadia is great. I'm showing my opinion why Arkadia is better atm. Two planets Arkadia V.S.RT focus on two different things Economy( means blueprints and specific minerals) V.S. Missions then show the result we have seen now. So I really hope if there would ever be a new development team for Next Island, can maybe do an overhaul in hunting loots, silently reduce the amount of crystals and animal body in hunting loots. There are more than enough amounts of crystals and animal bodies in loots. What I mean amount is mean the total Crystal number should be reduced. If entropedia is right, there are 81 different crystals in loots, it might be good if NI has the same big economy as calypso. This should have a re-balance by new NI team, and put abit more NI specific mining loots.

Above is all my own humble opinion;)

 

The missions on Next Island are fairly manageble, it's not the grinding missions that frustrate people on Calypso right now and take up a lot of time. (I do miss a staminapoint from the missions on NI; I had to hurry back to Calypso for an event in the middle of one of the pappoo missions and forgot about it and didn't realize I would never get it until it was too late).

My feeling is that the Iron Mission rush on calypso is draining people from the other planets a bit, and it was pity that NI would die (before the upcoming VU) and before things on Calypso got back normal, and not being able to sustain until migration (on Calyosp) is over and the "mission nerf" had kicked in (so everything would get back to normal).

I got the feeling Arkadia, in the beginning, wasn't really self-sustaining either: It had a lot of huge mobs which hunters loved to kill (for some reason some players like huge HP mobs). At that time Arkadia was more or less adapted to attract hunters from Calypso. Also there were no beginner-friendly main settlement (the main settlement was on the island with dinosaurs). It was later on those mobs got change same way as proteron ("rebalanced"), Celeste Quarry got built with beginner-friendly mobs around and well designed place with terminals and teleporter and now is the Arkadia version of VU8 Port Atlantis I would say.

I feel it would be good if whoever manages NI now at least temporarily hires in some of the old staff to try to make as much as possible from what was planned for the VU and tries to get it through MA. Not using what's been made would feel like a real waste.

Also I think another thing is that from time to time, developers (well either some manager, or community rep) shows up ingame. It's especially importent on Next Island I think now, because there are very few players around. (I would stay there longer on my visits if I could - but as I don't have any warp capable ship of my own I have to follow the schedule of the scheduled rides, and because of soc events and such, and without a way to quickly get back to calypso I prefer to make sure I can log in there the next day. (I missed the movie making event because I wasn't able to get a ride in time from Calypso without an expensive, >100 ped, charter.)

 

bump for some info!! ;)

 

Really sad to hear of the current situation, was so hopeful once the new 'CGO' started posting about all the good changes coming. David continues to tweet about NI as though nothing has changed, from Meg's dev blog about new content in August, the last trailer etc (his Twitter feed is linked on the front page here as well). Very confusing, but then I never got the impression that he even knew he owned an official forum, or that it is where those who are actually playing on his planet (or would like to) go for news and info, that doesn't seem to have changed either. It took Meg a really long time to notice the forum existed as well so guess her boss had no reason to.

Fingers crossed he can hire a proper dev team thats more than one person and get NI back on track to being the great planet it had the potential for from the beginning (still miss it, still the prettiest planet, but a roll back or two is needed to make it what it once was for sure).

 

I know hon, I meant the original forum, the one that was there from the beginning. Not slagging Meg off at all, I know she did all she could for NI, wearing many hats, was just saying it took a long time from the early days to see her interact on the forum. She was originally the Social Media manager, and as such, did a lot of Twitter and Facebook, but very little on forum (but of course back then we had the NDS guys running/interacting on the forum, no one was really the CM specifically, Meg was an admin on it who did social media.) I don't think David ever interacted here at all.

Oh well, was just remembering fondly how much fun NI was the first few months, but those early days are over now. Just hope someone who truly has a passion for the place can come on board now, that's what it takes to make things work in gaming, as in much of life, passion.

 

Next Island was fun in the first few months, and it was fun in the last few months as well :)

 

Point taken :) I left NI as my 'home' planet when Arkadia launched, and have only visited a few times since, but I'm sure those who remained or visited more often had fun as much as the first day settlers did, so please don't take my reminiscing about the early days the wrong way. Fingers still crossed for some good news from Mr. Post about the next phase.

 

Truth.

 

I keep hearing "new direction" but all I see is a personal blog post and speculation. Where is this new direction?

 

CHeck upper right corner

 

have been there around and its very nice designed place when not the most detailed around.

lot introducal to basics by missions, some grinding mission on boars from some small pappoo i found in some ruins.

all the place at crystal center is like some social critics changing from nature into industral flair with these fences around the boars and scientists containers. "what impact have humans on a natural surrounding" type like very impressive.

having a look at items you find very powerful swords which close a big gap in melee tools in the complete universe. serious to take weapons.

then i saw these scientist googles armor part with a very good protection and a new way to design armor apart from the usual "combat warrior type" uniformity was great.
the announcement of further scientist type storyline was a very great preview. unique inside the eu.
serious upward trend to see that there is alot thought behind.

why did that come so late?
was there any roadplan in terms of number of population over time?
who took management of planet economy?

found info on PCF that there was anger about a bugged forum for month without visuable movement. after voices raised from the community that was changed then and a professional provider went on it.

flower bed empty of flowers and when they grew it was put into a state of the unknown.

what about all colonists with inventory there now?
what about property owners?

why is the staff fired before a deal takes place? isn't that obliged to judge about the staff by or with a new owner/manager/investor?
what value should it have now without the involved developers?

whats that with that twittering tool?

get the persons back to their work this must be solved constructively. it's a reputation thing now with a worldwide patchwork community not chez jaques' fried cheese restaurant around the next alley.

the planet needs consumable (L) items made by crafters which can compete with the rest of EU tools or own planet system purpose if mindark dont likes further comparable tools to prevent players burnout.
after that i got to complete an scientist armor set.