Hello,
At some point, a PTU server was fired up for Starbase so features could be tested in a test environment by players and devs before being pushed to the official main universe "live" server. This isn't itself a problem as many games do test their releases internally before releasing to their playerbase. However, the issues with the way Starbase added their testing environment caused many easy to foresee problems that hurt the game as a whole.
I recall when the PTU was first released. As soon as people found out they could spawn unlimited resources and have infinite credits, everyone left the live server to work on ship design in the PTU. Needless to say, this was even more devastating to the playerbase than the SSC/Space Ship Workshop was - so many players were removed from the 'live' game world that the live universe's activity dwindled rapidly. As players stopped interacting with other players (because players were in the PTU designing ships for free) a compounding drop in players began to happen.
It is hard to show the direct results, but the release of the PTU around August 12th (the middle-left of the above image) is when the rapid down-trend of player activity occurs. This isn't to say the PTU is the only issue at fault, however I would say it is one of the top 3 contributors to the playerbase dissipating so heavily.
The Problems With Starbase's Test Universe:
1. With access to free resources and infinite credits, players had no reason to play on the "live" universe anymore. Since the end-game of Starbase at the time (and perhaps still is today) is the creation of unique high-performance special-purpose ships, the main limiting factor for testing ship designs and perfecting ship designs came down to resource acquisition and credits. This was the main draw of the game universe - that you had to go out there and get stuff, and either bring it back to market or use it for your own ships. This meant you had to play the game at least a little bit even if you wanted to spend lots of time designing ships.
Even if you wanted to design ships, as I was fond of doing, I still needed resources and credits. This let me manage my company, sending out my crew to get resources and credits while I worked on ship design. It was a team effort and they needed my ship designing skills, while I needed their ability to acquire resources (and engage in combat, exploration, and all manner of fun in the meantime!).
The PTU introduced what essentially was "cheat mode" by giving players unlimited everything. Games are supposed to offer constrained entertainment, not free everything. If in the game of Chess all pieces were Queens, it would destroy the game as a whole. It is the limiting factor of each piece that makes the game as a whole worth playing. Starbase took out the limitation of having to actually play the live game universe to engage in the "fun" of Starbase - or at least, one of the key elements at the time which was ship design.
As a Company leader, I was disappointed as my own crew went off to the PTU to prototype ship after ship. Worse, they then began engaging in fights with other players who were testing their own ship designs. I observed in gamer-horror as the area around PTU stations became littered with wreck after wreck as players spat out ship after ship, engaging in pointless combat for the sake of something interesting to do. Worse, players began to devolve into orbiting-style dogfighting. In doing so, they began to create ships purpose-built for that strange style of combat, finding ways to improve "dueling" behaviors of ships with no regard to cost. Prototype after prototype was created, tested, and thrown away with zero impact on the live game world. The live game world crashed hard as players were able to outsource the game's "fun" into a meaningless test universe with meaningless combat and yet... meaningful ship design.
The worst part about the ship design, however, is that those ships were able to be transferred over to the live universe. This meant there was no reason not to test ship designs in the test universe, because anyone doing so on the live server was basically burning resources and credits for nothing. Everyone else who went to the test universe to design ships was in effect making millions of credits per hour worth of gameplay action with no downside.
There was no reason to play on live anymore, because it was more cost effective to test ship designs on the PTU. Anyone trying to play on live now found it even more barren of other players than expected. Any issues that you ran into on live were heavily punished, because you could have just done those things on the PTU without risk of loss. The playerbase dwindled - Starbase promised a game where your actions mattered, and then promptly introduced a "cheat mode" that completely gutted that idea that your actions mattered. Now your actions meant nothing, because everything you tried to do on live, you could do for free on the PTU with zero effort or risk.
2. The next issue with the PTU, which surrounds the "cheat mode" aspect of it, is that players began hyper-specializing ships. With free access to every material and infinite credits, the types of ships players began producing were far ahead of what would have otherwise been possible in the live game universe. Because players could experiment for free, testing ship performance for free, and working out bugs and issues with "meta" ships - from fighters, to miners, to haulers and more - the types of ships that began arriving were far in excess of what would have otherwise been reasonable given a pure live-universe environment. Even though the same tools were in place on the live server, the issue here is time. Because no player had to spend any time in the live game universe to get resources and credits, the rapid iteration of a ship design where you could simply ignore a flawed design on the PTU and remake it meant not only were players spending more time in the PTU than ever, but that players were incentivized to spend as much time as they could in the PTU solving every single issue their ship might have before ever launching it on the live server.
No longer were any ships thrown together, patched up, repaired by hand or otherwise worked on by actual players. Instead, ships were completely perfected to the designer's idea of perfection, then tested in combat on the PTU with no risk of loss, reiterated after finding issues, and perfected again. This process, again although possible on live, incurred no cost to players on the PTU, where on the live server it would have taken time, resources, credits, or something else to incentivize players to play the game instead of sitting in the SSC on the PTU all day.
The result is two-fold. First, there was an influx of meta ships into the live game universe that before did not have any. Where players initially had to consider the time cost of ship design and production, including the time it would take to produce each individual item of a ship, which would limit the practical and reasonable allocation of time and resources to something usable, now ships could be mass-produced without regard to those limitations because the ship design was already perfected for free. 2000-create hauler ships, before would have taken you a dozen hours to craft the individual components, or otherwise pay a hefty credit cost to bypass manufacturing, were now created perfect with no need to wonder if your ship was even usable anymore. In other words, there was no need to get a return on your investment, because you had already worked out all the bugs of your ship in the PTU where you knew for certain now that your ship was good to go on the live server.
Second, anyone else who wanted to make a ship now was forced to go into the PTU to design their ships. This is because it would be a disadvantage to working on a ship design on the live server when everyone else was using the PTU with free materials and free credits. I personally prefer the live universe, however I was forced to retreat to the PTU SSC because it was just too cost effective.
(In this image, you can see the rapid prototyping of ships on the PTU, with no regard to cost or consequence - the vast amount of gameplay lost here deeply saddens me)
The end result was a bunch of people getting all the excitement of combat while testing their ship designs on the PTU, with none of the risk/reward mechanism which is necessary to keep players playing the game being implemented. As the live universe began to see less people due to the PTU, some players found no fun in an empty universe. Compounding the effect, as players realized they were better off going into the PTU to do their own ship design, the live game universe again was hit by another wave of people abandoning the live universe to go ship design in the PTU SSC. In the end, players routinely now completely avoid the live SSC until their ship has been perfectly designed in the PTU SSC.
Again, it wasn't just combat ships, but mining and all the other effort that otherwise would go into actually playing the game itself was lost due to being wiped away by "cheat mode" PTU access.
This is, unfortunately, a huge problem, and comes because... devs didn't ask me the consequences of such an action damn I need to start a consulting company or something... But besides that
The problem comes because of the free access to resources and credits. That is the main issue at hand. A test server is not a terrible thing, though I would argue that for an MMO, it is completely counter to the point - splitting your playerbase in an MMO is a bad thing! It is the reason MMOs release expansions, not new versions. World of Warcraft has expansions, not separate clients for each new set of content. By keeping players in the same game world, they are going to form friends, groups, guilds, alliances, enemies and more. When you split the playerbase into different "games" - in this case, Starbase "cheat mode" and Starbase "live mode" - it is devastating to the player population.
3. With risk, comes reward. The last problem with the PTU is obvious but I wanted to point it out. By taking away all the risk in creating and testing ships, the PTU then took out the reward of defeating your enemy. This affected the market and the overall fun of gameplay on the live server, because any ship defeated on the live server was either not perfected in the PTU SSC, or wasn't as "fun" as engaging in an orbit-dogfight pre-scheduled combat event on the PTU. In other words, the reward of using your ship to defeat another ship became negated, because there was no value to the "win" - you already had access to infinite resources and credits to design whatever ship you wanted. No need to scavenge parts or secure materials off the other ship when it was more cost effective to design ships in the PTU SSC and then print the ship on the live universe. Your time was better spent in the PTU, so doing anything other than killing another ship and leaving became a "waste of time." In effect, the "reward" of playing on the live game universe was gutted, and without a meaningful reward for actions taken (which is time! TIME! i.e. gunpowder in Rust i.e. takes a long time to make, so securing an enemy's supply is rewarding as you didn't have to spend that time!), players were not incentivized to keep playing.
Problem: Starbase's PTU incentivizes players to not play on the live server for any ship-designing efforts, removes any consequence of testing ship designs, removes vast amounts of gameplay by giving players credits and resources for free, and splits the playerbase.
Solution: Remove the "Dev" tab and free credits from the PTU. Wipe the PTU weekly to disincentivize players staying on the PTU. Allow the PTU to exist as a test environment, not a new home for ship designers who then avoid having to play on the live server until they have a perfected ship design.
Note: This problem ties in heavily into so many other issues, such as the economy on live and so much more. As "mistakes" are no longer part of the equation on the live server, much of the live market economy is affected when players get only as much as they need for their perfected ship design. As these perfected ship designs also allowed for the amassing of wealth on the live server far beyond what was practically possible beforehand, the "cheat mode" PTU has cascading consequences that are truly devastating to the game in multiple ways. As other players see that the PTU is a better place to spend their time, they too go off to the PTU for their ship designing. When a player has their perfected ship design, they come create the ship on live, only to find out no one is playing on the live server - they're all off perfecting their own ships on the PTU. It is a huge void to have cheats available to players in any game, and this issue must be solved if Starbase wants to keep an engaged population of players.
At some point, a PTU server was fired up for Starbase so features could be tested in a test environment by players and devs before being pushed to the official main universe "live" server. This isn't itself a problem as many games do test their releases internally before releasing to their playerbase. However, the issues with the way Starbase added their testing environment caused many easy to foresee problems that hurt the game as a whole.
I recall when the PTU was first released. As soon as people found out they could spawn unlimited resources and have infinite credits, everyone left the live server to work on ship design in the PTU. Needless to say, this was even more devastating to the playerbase than the SSC/Space Ship Workshop was - so many players were removed from the 'live' game world that the live universe's activity dwindled rapidly. As players stopped interacting with other players (because players were in the PTU designing ships for free) a compounding drop in players began to happen.
It is hard to show the direct results, but the release of the PTU around August 12th (the middle-left of the above image) is when the rapid down-trend of player activity occurs. This isn't to say the PTU is the only issue at fault, however I would say it is one of the top 3 contributors to the playerbase dissipating so heavily.
The Problems With Starbase's Test Universe:
1. With access to free resources and infinite credits, players had no reason to play on the "live" universe anymore. Since the end-game of Starbase at the time (and perhaps still is today) is the creation of unique high-performance special-purpose ships, the main limiting factor for testing ship designs and perfecting ship designs came down to resource acquisition and credits. This was the main draw of the game universe - that you had to go out there and get stuff, and either bring it back to market or use it for your own ships. This meant you had to play the game at least a little bit even if you wanted to spend lots of time designing ships.
Even if you wanted to design ships, as I was fond of doing, I still needed resources and credits. This let me manage my company, sending out my crew to get resources and credits while I worked on ship design. It was a team effort and they needed my ship designing skills, while I needed their ability to acquire resources (and engage in combat, exploration, and all manner of fun in the meantime!).
The PTU introduced what essentially was "cheat mode" by giving players unlimited everything. Games are supposed to offer constrained entertainment, not free everything. If in the game of Chess all pieces were Queens, it would destroy the game as a whole. It is the limiting factor of each piece that makes the game as a whole worth playing. Starbase took out the limitation of having to actually play the live game universe to engage in the "fun" of Starbase - or at least, one of the key elements at the time which was ship design.
As a Company leader, I was disappointed as my own crew went off to the PTU to prototype ship after ship. Worse, they then began engaging in fights with other players who were testing their own ship designs. I observed in gamer-horror as the area around PTU stations became littered with wreck after wreck as players spat out ship after ship, engaging in pointless combat for the sake of something interesting to do. Worse, players began to devolve into orbiting-style dogfighting. In doing so, they began to create ships purpose-built for that strange style of combat, finding ways to improve "dueling" behaviors of ships with no regard to cost. Prototype after prototype was created, tested, and thrown away with zero impact on the live game world. The live game world crashed hard as players were able to outsource the game's "fun" into a meaningless test universe with meaningless combat and yet... meaningful ship design.
The worst part about the ship design, however, is that those ships were able to be transferred over to the live universe. This meant there was no reason not to test ship designs in the test universe, because anyone doing so on the live server was basically burning resources and credits for nothing. Everyone else who went to the test universe to design ships was in effect making millions of credits per hour worth of gameplay action with no downside.
There was no reason to play on live anymore, because it was more cost effective to test ship designs on the PTU. Anyone trying to play on live now found it even more barren of other players than expected. Any issues that you ran into on live were heavily punished, because you could have just done those things on the PTU without risk of loss. The playerbase dwindled - Starbase promised a game where your actions mattered, and then promptly introduced a "cheat mode" that completely gutted that idea that your actions mattered. Now your actions meant nothing, because everything you tried to do on live, you could do for free on the PTU with zero effort or risk.
2. The next issue with the PTU, which surrounds the "cheat mode" aspect of it, is that players began hyper-specializing ships. With free access to every material and infinite credits, the types of ships players began producing were far ahead of what would have otherwise been possible in the live game universe. Because players could experiment for free, testing ship performance for free, and working out bugs and issues with "meta" ships - from fighters, to miners, to haulers and more - the types of ships that began arriving were far in excess of what would have otherwise been reasonable given a pure live-universe environment. Even though the same tools were in place on the live server, the issue here is time. Because no player had to spend any time in the live game universe to get resources and credits, the rapid iteration of a ship design where you could simply ignore a flawed design on the PTU and remake it meant not only were players spending more time in the PTU than ever, but that players were incentivized to spend as much time as they could in the PTU solving every single issue their ship might have before ever launching it on the live server.
No longer were any ships thrown together, patched up, repaired by hand or otherwise worked on by actual players. Instead, ships were completely perfected to the designer's idea of perfection, then tested in combat on the PTU with no risk of loss, reiterated after finding issues, and perfected again. This process, again although possible on live, incurred no cost to players on the PTU, where on the live server it would have taken time, resources, credits, or something else to incentivize players to play the game instead of sitting in the SSC on the PTU all day.
The result is two-fold. First, there was an influx of meta ships into the live game universe that before did not have any. Where players initially had to consider the time cost of ship design and production, including the time it would take to produce each individual item of a ship, which would limit the practical and reasonable allocation of time and resources to something usable, now ships could be mass-produced without regard to those limitations because the ship design was already perfected for free. 2000-create hauler ships, before would have taken you a dozen hours to craft the individual components, or otherwise pay a hefty credit cost to bypass manufacturing, were now created perfect with no need to wonder if your ship was even usable anymore. In other words, there was no need to get a return on your investment, because you had already worked out all the bugs of your ship in the PTU where you knew for certain now that your ship was good to go on the live server.
Second, anyone else who wanted to make a ship now was forced to go into the PTU to design their ships. This is because it would be a disadvantage to working on a ship design on the live server when everyone else was using the PTU with free materials and free credits. I personally prefer the live universe, however I was forced to retreat to the PTU SSC because it was just too cost effective.
(In this image, you can see the rapid prototyping of ships on the PTU, with no regard to cost or consequence - the vast amount of gameplay lost here deeply saddens me)
The end result was a bunch of people getting all the excitement of combat while testing their ship designs on the PTU, with none of the risk/reward mechanism which is necessary to keep players playing the game being implemented. As the live universe began to see less people due to the PTU, some players found no fun in an empty universe. Compounding the effect, as players realized they were better off going into the PTU to do their own ship design, the live game universe again was hit by another wave of people abandoning the live universe to go ship design in the PTU SSC. In the end, players routinely now completely avoid the live SSC until their ship has been perfectly designed in the PTU SSC.
Again, it wasn't just combat ships, but mining and all the other effort that otherwise would go into actually playing the game itself was lost due to being wiped away by "cheat mode" PTU access.
This is, unfortunately, a huge problem, and comes because... devs didn't ask me the consequences of such an action damn I need to start a consulting company or something... But besides that
The problem comes because of the free access to resources and credits. That is the main issue at hand. A test server is not a terrible thing, though I would argue that for an MMO, it is completely counter to the point - splitting your playerbase in an MMO is a bad thing! It is the reason MMOs release expansions, not new versions. World of Warcraft has expansions, not separate clients for each new set of content. By keeping players in the same game world, they are going to form friends, groups, guilds, alliances, enemies and more. When you split the playerbase into different "games" - in this case, Starbase "cheat mode" and Starbase "live mode" - it is devastating to the player population.3. With risk, comes reward. The last problem with the PTU is obvious but I wanted to point it out. By taking away all the risk in creating and testing ships, the PTU then took out the reward of defeating your enemy. This affected the market and the overall fun of gameplay on the live server, because any ship defeated on the live server was either not perfected in the PTU SSC, or wasn't as "fun" as engaging in an orbit-dogfight pre-scheduled combat event on the PTU. In other words, the reward of using your ship to defeat another ship became negated, because there was no value to the "win" - you already had access to infinite resources and credits to design whatever ship you wanted. No need to scavenge parts or secure materials off the other ship when it was more cost effective to design ships in the PTU SSC and then print the ship on the live universe. Your time was better spent in the PTU, so doing anything other than killing another ship and leaving became a "waste of time." In effect, the "reward" of playing on the live game universe was gutted, and without a meaningful reward for actions taken (which is time! TIME! i.e. gunpowder in Rust i.e. takes a long time to make, so securing an enemy's supply is rewarding as you didn't have to spend that time!), players were not incentivized to keep playing.
Problem: Starbase's PTU incentivizes players to not play on the live server for any ship-designing efforts, removes any consequence of testing ship designs, removes vast amounts of gameplay by giving players credits and resources for free, and splits the playerbase.
Solution: Remove the "Dev" tab and free credits from the PTU. Wipe the PTU weekly to disincentivize players staying on the PTU. Allow the PTU to exist as a test environment, not a new home for ship designers who then avoid having to play on the live server until they have a perfected ship design.
Note: This problem ties in heavily into so many other issues, such as the economy on live and so much more. As "mistakes" are no longer part of the equation on the live server, much of the live market economy is affected when players get only as much as they need for their perfected ship design. As these perfected ship designs also allowed for the amassing of wealth on the live server far beyond what was practically possible beforehand, the "cheat mode" PTU has cascading consequences that are truly devastating to the game in multiple ways. As other players see that the PTU is a better place to spend their time, they too go off to the PTU for their ship designing. When a player has their perfected ship design, they come create the ship on live, only to find out no one is playing on the live server - they're all off perfecting their own ships on the PTU. It is a huge void to have cheats available to players in any game, and this issue must be solved if Starbase wants to keep an engaged population of players.
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