The Future of Luduvo: Regarding All That Has Happened. (:

sorry for any typos, making this on a spare laggy computer lol

The Future of Luduvo

Recently I haven’t been feeling particularly happy and hopeful about Luduvo: I realised that a lot of things I had aspired to be and tried so hard to achieve (such as a Limited Collector, a Game developer) have slipped from me, and I feel uninterested. Now this may be quite a lot of personal opinions, but I hope you can see my points.

The Hype

There was a LOT of hype for Luduvo: they even put an announcement out there saying they got too much hype. I feel like the hype made Luduvo seem a lot better / polished than it actually was, and the 'cord tidbits didn’t exactly help: they seemed very high quality and polished, with all sorts of beautiful graphics that the game didn’t actually have or run well.

Playing games now, my PC that I use for quite heavyweight gaming struggles sometimes on Luduvo, it’s fans accelerating and things being slow to load: despite all the promises of optimisation, it seems largely unoptimised and quite laggy.

The Bugs

Luduvo has a lot of bugs. I, for one, spent ages trying to install Luduvo (and failing) and despite being a batch one alpha tester, I only got to actually use the client a week or so after launch, being only active on the forum and studio. This I have come to believe was partially a networking error; so maybe not Luduvo’s fault: forgive me for being uneducated on Windows :sob:

Also, when I play games, not only the textures don’t load and it’s quite buggy, but accessories don’t seem to load on people’s avatars. The only thing that loads is the occasional face and hat, why only some I am unsure, but it takes some of the life out of playing.

I feel like launch was rushed: Alpha testing was buggy, but that’s Alpha, except on launch most of the bugs remained unfixed. It wasn’t completely the fault of the dev team though: I feel like they were pressured by some of the community to launch, similar to something like what happened with so many other games.

Originality

I feel like Luduvo has lost a lot of it’s originality. It seemed so different from Roblox at first, but slowly seemed to become more of a copy then it’s own platform. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of differences, but the gap just seems a little to close.

For example, take the pirate hat. It looks very similar to Roblox’s pirate hat. Hot Take: Remove pirate hat

(full link to my post about the pirate hat)

Then we have the body builds. Although this has been mostly put aside and has a lot less point with the addition of the ‘Bundles, Bundles, Bundles’ update, the original Body was new and original, and now the base looks almost exactly like Roblox’s R6. I think if you saw the Trapezoid bundle you might think ‘oh yeah that’s the duvo’ but if you saw the Luduvo avatar on the Blocky R6 like form you might just think ‘thats roblox’. I feel like to build a name for yourself you need to have originality and a mental picture that is iconic to YOU.

Another thing is the games. The games I see with most players are just either blatant copies or very similar to games on Roblox, going so far to have even the same UI build (I don’t want drama with the devs, but I feel its got to be said). This is another thing: why should I play a knock-off on a smaller, less developed, less polished platform with less players if I could play the original? And If I just go back to the original, when someone says ‘want to play duvo’ they are just going to think ‘duvo? nah id rather play the actual game.’ They will be subconsciously influenced by the fact that the most popular game isn’t even native to Luduvo.

I suggest this be ‘fixed’ with the introduction of ‘Luduvo Originals’ a handpicked tab from the devs for games for Luduvo from Luduvo. (also sorry to whoever game that was, I don’t want to throw shade, just raise a point and a bit of food for thought).

And speaking of devs…

The Dev Team

No insult to the Dev team. Seriously, I just want to congratulate you on what you have built, despite its flaws it is truly amazing and has so much potential. I don’t want to sound like I know everything, I couldn’t build something like this.

It’s just I feel like the dev team have become a bit disconnected from the community: something No-One wanted to happen. I get that this has probably been influenced by the growing amount of users, and trying not to create even more drama (:sob:) but some features have been pushed quickly without really consulting the player base, which is not great. For example, the forums are being pushed as a place for discussion over 'cord, which is good in some ways, but not in others: In 'cord we didn’t need a thread or a topic to chat, we just could. Also we have no cat gifs close at hand :crying_cat: .

I missed just casually chatting and having developers interact with my reasonably often, which is quite selfish of me, but then I don’t see them really interacting with anyone else either: except Isaac randomly in the forums.

(ok after typing and reviewing this, I have actually seen Isaac quite a bit in the forums, but nobody else)

Events

I didn’t enjoy itemageddon. At all. Maybe I just like to know what’s happening at all times: and I just didn’t here. The main thing was that if you weren’t on the 'cord, you wouldn’t really know it was happening. I didn’t see any announcements on the website at all, and you would only know about it through 'cord or yt: things I sometimes try to avoid when I want to have a good time.

I feel like there should be an Event tab UI, but more on that later lol (:

Conclusion

All in all, despite Luduvos (many) flaws, it really has the potential. Just don’t loose the plot, like every other big company has.

I really hope some of the Dev team can see this, and tell me what they think.

thanks for reading!

duvo aint dead

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bump

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I SAY THIS ALL THE TIME

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The main advantage and reason to play luduvo is the small community and a development team who considers their players’ ideas and what people want.
But most Roblox players just want to play fun games, so luduvo looks like a cheap knock off

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i like luduvo for its community too

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I can see where you’re coming from. I think the only UGC platform that runs surprisingly well is Roblox (where I average 30-40 FPS on most games), with everything else I’ve tried mostly being 20-30 when the game is anymore detailed than a raw baseplate. That’s not surprising though, since Roblox had 20 years and millions in funding to make a good engine. But when compared to other non-Roblox UGC platforms, Luduvo has the most consistent frame times hands down. Even when frame rates are occasionally crap, it’s at least a steady stream of crap instead of having constant lag spikes and whatnot. Igor has said that Luduvo 5X is going to focus on making everything fast and consistent, and since there are 4 engine devs now hopefully things will start running better for you soon.

As far as bugs go… yeah there do be dragons. I think launch fixed some of the bugs, but there were definitely a good amount that slipped through the cracks from alpha. All the alpha bugs are basically solved now, so there’s a silver lining. Fast-forwarding to the present, I haven’t played enough of Luduvo 50 yet to encounter many game-breaking bugs, but there was 1 time when my face didn’t load. When I died it came back though, so I didn’t really have enough evidence to make a proper bug report. Outside that, Luduvo 50 fixed most of my major bugs from Luduvo 47/48/49. I was about to say that Luduvo is still in Alpha (its just a public alpha instead of a closed one), but they removed the alpha notice so I guess not. However, this:

Is probably not true. Luduvo has been wanting to rush to the market even when I first joined in like January. Isaac also has said that their pressure isn’t the community more than its time itself (unless people keep throwing accusations at them and dragging their name through dirt lol). I don’t know the details, but if I had to guess, it probably has to do with Luduvo’s “angel” investors applying pressure for growth and/or results, which led them to launch. Maybe their cashflow is conditional on player/profit milestones that they have to hit? Or maybe they need to have better numbers to attract funders in future funding rounds? Unsure. Don’t quote me because I don’t know anything for sure, but if it truly is an investor thing causing this, I have to guess that the deadline they set is either the end of 2026 or sometime early-mid 2027. So if you want to know why they’re rushing, that’s my theory.

Next up, originality. While I wouldn’t say there is too much they have in common with other UGC platforms, the things you can point to that are similar will make an immediate (and probably permanent) impression on people. The fact that an R6 default avatar is the first thing that most people will see does not help the feeling of being a “copycat”. While the website takes a significantly different (and better imo) stylistic approach, it still matches Roblox’s site layout. Again, not a good first impression when the first thing you see after making an account is a Roblox-style home page.

As far as my opinion on Luduvo games, I will keep my hypocritical mouth shut. I’ll say my feelings when I actually make a game lol. But I am willing to say this: regardless of your feelings on clone games, having clone games is better than no games. When Luduvo stablizes though, the argument for not caring about originality of games lowers dramatically.

I’m willing to bet that the originality problem won’t be fixed in any meaningful way simply by highlighting the original ones. Both Polyt*ria and Roblox are great case studies of this. Polyt*ria’s folly is the funnier of the two though because they got that giant “Featured” banner and their most popular game as of writing is still a natural disaster survival clone lol.

In my humble opinion, the only way to keep such games at bay is to actually disincentivize people from making said clone games. Heavily. But again, that’s a problem for an older Luduvo.

Everyone else is busy doing their jobs. I, too, wish we could see the devs interact more often like they did before the cord got shut down, but if they don’t want to, then that’s that. A weakness of having forum-only communication is that it’s not as easy to use/check as a Disc*rd server. Polytorians also complain that their devs exclusively communicate through Disc*rd. Higher barrier of entry and all that jazz to open your browser, find the forums, and scroll through Community > General Discussion than to open the Disc*rd app and observe shenanigans happening in #general. I personally prefer forums to Disc*rd because I’m a typer, but most people understandably don’t share the same sentiment.

When it comes to Luduvo’s events, I think I like the idea of an itemmageadon. In execution, it’s boring to spend a day and a half staring at a Disc*rd channel to buy up limiteds before they all sell out :p. I’m not much of an item trader, but I was able to make out like a bandit during itemmageadon because I kept undercutting people when they overprice their limited by 1000+ lunes lol. I like to think that I’m personally responsible for the initial low RAP of some of the itemmageadon limiteds.

I suck at puzzles so I don’t think I’m going to get much out of the Halloween event. Puzzles are another thing that’s better suited to a disc*rd channel than a forum, since they involve rapid prototyping and the ability to post images and links without waiting for approval, but I’m sure people are already in some kind of server they can use. I hear that the event is a game so I’m pretty hyped to see that. Good luck Sharkify!

Yeah, Canvas should make their own Luduvo group and announce item drops there! Same goes for Isaac when he needs to make announcements that aren’t global-banner-worthy. Being able to “subscribe” to group message/announcement boards and get them forwarded to your messages inbox would be a cool feature. Seeing message notifications in-game and as an email would be neat as well.


If I were to draw my own conclusion, it would likely mirror yours pretty closely. So far I don’t think Luduvo will lose the plot, but no one knows what the future holds

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The title giving me a flashbacks of Volamon :sob::sob:

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what is Volamon?

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For performance, on luduvo intergrated graphics just sucks. 40 fps on lowest settings when the igpu in my laptop usually gets gtx 1050ti level performance, when an actual 1050ti gets like 100 at 1440p max settings.
I think they really need to work on optimizing luduvo for intergrated graphics since most players are on laptops, and luduvo needs to run on cheap phones if they want a mobile release in the future.

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Volamon is a mini mod dude in p#lyt#ria before he got termed

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it’s really hard to think that Luduvo ISN’T dead, with 0 players on every single game i noticed since 9 days ago. every single person i added as a friend on the platform has already stopped playing, and lost interest.

i’ve seen those videos that say that roblox revivals/alternatives are always going to flop or not take off, and now I can really see it. not to dog the devs or anything, I see a ton of effort but like.. yeah..

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