Limited Sandbox Discussion

[NathanIsOnline]

I recently discovered that sandbox mode was scrapped indefinitely, a feature that I previously considered a given in a game like Starbase. Just to be clear, I'm not requesting a full sandbox; I agree a sandbox mode that's essentially a copy of the main universe is problematic.
When I say sandbox mode, I mean a single player mode that allows players to build, launch, and test ship designs without costing them resources. Ideally this sandbox would also have a handful of asteroids to test mining designs.

There are two major cons I see to not adding a sandbox mode like this. First issue is that you're going to slow down the research curve for new ship designs hard. And not just slow down, you're going to badly hurt the rate at which brand new ideas and concepts are discovered. Perhaps to the point where certain possible systems are never discovered, as no one is able/willing to spend the resources required on failed ships to eventually work out said idea. The discovery of new ship ideas (and not just new ships, but also mining methods, boarding systems, unique ways to weaponize ships, etc.) and finding counters for these new ideas, will be an ongoing source of continued play-ability for Starbase. Considering the effectively infinite potential for new ideas Starbase has, I see no reason to want to limit their discovery.

The second issue is that you're going to limit the research curve and limit trying out creative designs to certain people, mainly people who either have the time and desire to go collect extra resources so they can try new designs, or people who have large factions behind them to maintain a good resource supply for testing designs. Even in that latter scenario, not everyone in the large factions will be free to try creative designs, only those whoever is in charge things is good enough to warrant spending resources on.
Now why is this an issue, as a few people have already asked me? It's expected and makes sense that larger groups would develop ships faster, they say. My first reply is that I don't really see a reason to give larger groups more advantages than they already have, but I personally don't like extra large groups in most games to begin with, so that's not really an arguable point.
Perhaps a more arguable point is money. And not Starbucks either. If you look at other games with a building aspect, from Minecraft to Space Engineers, there is always a huge portion of the community that spends more time designing/building than playing the rest of the game. Telling them they can only try out their elaborate engineering feats by running around mining asteroids will not get most of these people involved in the rest of the game, it will get them to refund the game. I know a lot of hardcore people think that's the way it should be, you shouldn't be allowed to play with your toys if you're not willing to work for them (in a video game that they already paid money for), and all I have to say to them is "who took your Legos when you were younger?".
I really think that there are a lot of people who would be fascinated by Starbase's building system enough to pay the $40; but not have enough interest to really play the game. If the devs are willing to turn down that source of revenue, there's also the creativity of these people that you're losing, as most of those people like to share their work with the community at large.

If you think there are other reasons why a limited sandbox shouldn't be added to Starbase, I'd like to hear them so I can shoot them down discuss them with you in a civilized manner. Also happy to hear any additional reasons that people think it should be added, or if it should be implemented in a different way.

 

[Vexus]

There are two major cons I see to not adding a sandbox mode like this. First issue is that you're going to slow down the research curve for new ship designs hard.

This is an MMO, not a server-based game like Space Engineers. Slowing new ship designs and research down is a good thing, not a bad thing. This leaves time for any new player to invent something new and better than what exists. If everything is perfected offline - because it's the most efficient way to do everything - then everything is perfected too quickly and no one ever has an edge due to the research and design and production time required to make something actually good in the game. You mentioned "where certain possible systems are never discovered" and this is perfect for an MMO. A build never discovered is great for retention and new players who might see something no one else saw. Everything you're saying here thinking it is bad, is actually extremely good for the game.

The second issue is that you're going to limit the research curve and limit trying out creative designs to certain people, mainly people who either have the time and desire to go collect extra resources so they can try new designs, or people who have large factions behind them to maintain a good resource supply for testing designs.

Incorrect. The Empire and Kingdom factions will always have room for testing and research - the devs are trying to wrap the ability to just try at your heart's content into the game, not some offline mode where no one gets to see the results of your actions. Even if you're building in the faction safe zones, someone might be inspired by your work (success or failure) and go on to create their own thing. If you remove all that player interaction, there is no MMO, there's only husks of dead servers littering the internet.

You won't have to get resources when the factions provide these things for you to create something. They might even give you to a goal - build a fighter perhaps. Only from many failures will a faction find the right design for their new fighter. So people who just want to mess around should have all the tools they need to do so without gathering - though they might have to actually haul the materials or parts in to build, which again, is player interaction and gameplay that will make the game succeed.

Your concerns are mainly alleviated if the devs create sufficiently-sized starting safe zones (for Empire, Kingdom and Neutral), ones you can exist in for an entire year without ever fighting another player if you want to while experiencing most of what the game has to offer. It is important that the safe zones are large enough to facilitate players living in them where it is not too cramped and everyone has a chance for a piece of something. And again, with the factions providing the resources for research and design and testing, there's not much need to go mining - because those resources came from jobs the factions are paying to other players to go out and mine, so you don't have to if you're a builder/designer.

Your comparison to Minecraft and Space Engineers regarding people wanting to just build is, unfortunately, extremely biased. There is no game to compare Starbase to in that regard. People built in those games, because there was no other way to achieve an MMO scale in them. In other words, "What else am I going to do on this dead server?" This is what Starbase might change completely. They might just break that paradigm and allow "Minecraft in space, as an MMO" which is unheard of, and why I am so hyped for Starbase. I'd more compare things to Rust, where tons of people like to build - but check the servers, and the PvE servers are low population, and the high population ones are the PvP ones with heated combat and fighting. In other words, people like building, but if there's no meaning behind the building, if there's no one to show it to, then it means nothing. You're just playing adult legos alone, and no one actually enjoys that for long until they move on to another game. In Starbase, when you build something that matters to someone else, that's going to make you stick around long term, and keep investing time and energy into the game, because people get to see your work, and appreciate it, and give you feedback - humans are social, and need this feedback to feel apart of the game.

In terms of real world financials, Frozenbyte is taking a risk. A single-universe, new peer-to-peer networked, sci-fi space-based FPS, with building complexity as good or better (I think better, with YOLOL) than Minecraft, with polygon fracturing and voxel-based ships and stations allowing for dynamic destruction and repair... it's insane. It's a huge risk, and it's a PvP game first and foremost. Thankfully, all the top played games long term are PvP games. But open world PvP has never been done right since Ultima Online really. Many games attempt it and fail. I think... I hope... Starbase does it right. Everything I see says good things, that they're paying attention and realizing the failures of every other game and trying hard to avoid those failures for their own game. As such, if they can pull it off, it's not some one-off game-buy that people drop for the next new single-player game that comes out. Instead, Starbase becomes the next EVE, which was a massive success and still is. Starbase has the power to be around for over a decade or more, and if they think that far ahead, they cannot let the game die at the very start with an offline builder mode where everyone will retreat to in order to test designs. This does not work for an MMO, to have your players dipping out of the game world - no longer interacting with any other player - to design and test - and then to only come back online with their perfectly-designed ship to spawn it in and begin playing, missing out on potentially weeks of player interaction because it's just more efficient to do offline.

This is a PvP MMO. Too few players and there's never that critical mass of interaction that causes the game to grow and blossom. It needs players to succeed, and lots of them, and lots of them in relatively the same area. Even someone who does not want to fight, everything you do, from designing and testing a new ship, has PvP implications and your work can span months and years if you make the right design. And everyone will know you worked hard to make that design in the live game that everyone else gets to experience at the same time. This is very important. There might be an amazing ship someone builds that becomes an icon in the game world, that everyone knows about. Others might keep their designs secret, and you'll want to get a look at how they built that ship so you can copy it because it seems so good, leading to so much underlying gameplay that it simply cannot be measured. Gutting this part of the game with an offline design tool is not worth it - doing so would guarantee Starbase become much like Space Engineers; a cool, good game that a lot of people enjoyed, but ends up being a dead game, server-wise, in terms of people actually playing it.

The quality and time and effort the devs have put into Starbase so far so too valuable to throw away. Starbase needs to be around for a long time, and always have something for the new gamer to come along and find their own place in its universe. Every player needs to be valued and all their actions need to matter. If so, Starbase becomes the greatest MMO of a generation, and we'll get to play it. I cannot wait.

 

[NathanIsOnline]

I don't understand how allowing giving everyone a tool to encourage ship design, as opposed to making ship design extra painful and complicated because you can, somehow equals the death of PvP and Starbase at large. I'm not asking for entirely separate server or something. Just the tools to make ship design slightly cheaper, and far easier. Ship design will of course be slightly cheaper with a half decent sandbox to test in, but the main thing is that it will be much easier and more straight forward, especially for solo players and small groups. There's no reason to slow down ship development. There is not a finite number of ship designs/concepts to be found in a game like starbase, we don't need to save them for future players to discover.

 

[mop82]

You won't have to get resources when the factions provide these things for you to create something.

Where'd you hear this? It's hard to keep up with the state of the game. This is the first I'm hearing about the sandbox mode being scrapped, too. I was looking forward to being able to hop into it.

 

[Recatek]

"What else am I going to do on this dead server?"

If designing and building ships becomes too tedious and people just leave the game as a result, then this question gets asked all over again.

 

[Vexus]

Where'd you hear this?

Discord. Part of the idea in doing away with an offline mode is that dev factions will give out jobs, like mining. You bring that back to the faction base. Then there's jobs for turning those mined resources into ships, or building the station bigger, etc. So it's not like the stuff comes out of nowhere for free or the dev factions are infinite-sources-of-stuff. More that with enough interest and the starting 'bank' of these factions, if you want to design ships, they'll be the best places to start.

If designing and building ships becomes too tedious and people just leave the game as a result, then this question gets asked all over again.

Incorrect, because the game is not a ship building simulator. Ship building is only a very small fraction of what there is to do in the game. People do the most tedious of things, because they're worth doing. If they're not worth doing, then tedium is bad. But if they are worth doing, tedium is fine.

Just the tools to make ship design slightly cheaper, and far easier.

I think you should re-read what I posted; according to devs talking on Discord etc, the plan is to wrap this kind of stuff into the dev factions. So if you want to build cheaply without doing all the mining, pick up a ship building job after joining one of the factions. In terms of ease, it's an MMO, so there needs to be difficulty in doing the things that will potentially shape the entire game world, such as ship design: as well as ship manufacturing and logistics and so on. If it is easy, then it has little meaning. If your goal is just to sit in an offline editor and design ships, then a sci-fi space-based FPS PvP MMO is not a spaceship design simulator - though, you can make it be that. The game has so many facets it is up to you to decide, and yes, sometimes it might be more difficult than if they built a spaceship design simulator - but they're not making a spaceship design simulator. They're making an MMO.

There's no reason to slow down ship development.

I disagree. With a slower pace of ship design and release, the devs have time to make balance changes as they see necessary, and to adapt to the incalculable potential of gamers to break the game. Slower is better for an MMO. It needs to be at a certain pace to allow people to have fun, but not immediately set up a logistics, manufacturing and production facility with automated mining and factories to pump out 1000's of ships per day because all the 'work' getting all this set up was done offline. And the key part in slowing this down is that you don't make a factory for a product you don't know exists. As such, a slower pace for developing a great ship that is worthy of all that production cost goes a long way to allow the game to develop naturally.

Lastly, would you have posted for an offline-mode for World of Warcraft, so you could solo dungeons and learn them by yourself before taking on the real game as a noob? Would you have posted for an offline-mode for EVE, so you could learn all the ships and how they handle and all the modules and how to fight NPC enemies before taking on the real game? Would you have posted to have an offline-mode for Final Fantasy XIV or Elder Scrolls Online so you could explore the world solo and see things in the game alone so you're not unprepared when stepping into the online game world for the first time? Starbase is an MMO, that's the difference between it and its competitors. It is challenging EVE and Star Citizen, not Space Engineers, for players. It's trying to be something bigger. As such it cannot afford to have solo players dipping out of the game world, as every person online, each bit of the player population, matters in making the game feel alive. It might be better for solo players, sure, to have an offline mode where they don't have to play the game. But this is an MMO. The solo players are valuable citizens in the game universe and have their part to play in it. Yes, you will have to interact with other people. This is an MMO.

 

[Recatek]

I think people are more concerned with their own experience than they are with being background decorations for yours. As far as "what am I going to do today when I log in for a two hour play session?" your options so far mostly boil down to (a) collect resources/money to build a ship, (b) design and build a ship with those resources/money, (c) use that ship to collect more resources/money, or (d) use that ship to blow up other ships. There's only so much tedium someone is going to be willing to put into (a) and (b) in order to get to (c) and (d). If the time you spend having fun with your ship is dwarfed by the time you need to put in to afford/design/build it then, well, there are a lot of other games competing for that time that have more favorable grind-payoff ratios.

 

[Vexus]

I think people are more concerned with their own experience than they are with being background decorations for yours.

Except as an MMO, it is the reality that you as a player spend a lot of time as background decoration for everyone else. That's part of making an MMO. Part of all social activities. Most of the people there are background decoration for everyone else. Go to any social function and notice the people you interact with closely are a tiny fraction of the total numbers of people around you. From concerts, to clubs, to office holiday parties or a simple walk through a city, most of the people are background decorations, as are you simply background decoration for them.

Without that sense of 'this is a popular spot!' there is no MMO.

If the time you spend having fun with your ship is dwarfed by the time you need to put in to afford/design/build it

I sincerely doubt you built your own car from scratch. Most players will log in for the first time, do some manual labor for credits for a little bit, and buy their first ship from the cheapest ship available, and then explore the game and check things out in the game world. Each station will likely have dozens of player-run shops that sell premade ships. The tedium for players is not the same here as in other games - after the rush of early players, everyone else coming along just dives into the game. Only the initial super-hyped up players are going to have a 'hard time' making all the pieces connect and they will love it. After all the issues are sorted out they will begin selling ships and the economy will take shape as people advertise their lowest prices and so on. In a conversation with a friend, they too get too focused on each player starting out like they're in some sandbox. This is an MMO. All these complex things will be available to players through the free market. There's no requirement to bolt and wire your own starter ship from the start. Buy a ship and go at it. Or join a faction and grab a ready-made ship from a dock and get into the fight. There's not much tedium except for the pioneers in those areas, which again, should be worth it if they capitalize on their efforts and sell to the rest of the game world their creations. There is a lot of misconception - due to the nature of other games out there - that somehow players will begin and have to bolt their own existence into place from the start. In reality, most of the groundwork will be done by pioneers in their respective areas - factories, ship design, parts manufacturing, scrapping, mining, etc - and as a new player, you have the choice to engage in the economy and do it easy, or to mine all your stuff from scratch and build your own car from scratch, knowing it will take longer and be harder than simply buying a pre-built ship, disassembling it fully, and redesigning it however you want. The MMO part of this changes everything. There's no fresh server to spawn into with nothing in it.

 

[Marski]

I made an account just so I can reply to this thread.

Vexus, it seems like you're more focused on selling a wild fantasy of what you hope the game will be like. Most of your arguments fall back on using "this is an MMO" as justification for just about anything, or drawing a comparison to something completely inapplicable. For example, building a ship in Starbase in real life probably shouldn't be as time-consuming or difficult as building an actual car in real life, because one is a video game and the other is a job. I only hope that the devs realize that people like Vexus do not represent the entire playerbase, and that they should not make any massive decisions like cutting a sandbox mode without substantial, concrete data to justify that decision. A few forum posts by a loud minority do not qualify as such.

 

[PopeUrban]

The idea that shipbuilding is hard and complicated and should be easier is already daft when you look at the sort of game starbase is. Building literally anything is already harder and more complicated than it needs to be.

The idea that you have to fund R&D somehow is a net positive. This is a real world cost in any economic model that isn't commonly represented in MMO economies. The idea that developing a product has a cost, however minor, and even if it's just "this is the band of mats we use for ship design recycle prototypes and put them back when done" is a good thing. it means that the act of developing it has intrinsic value, and that's value someone may be willing to pay for.

I'm certainly not going to pay someone for a ship design if I can spend all the time in the world using an infinite amount of resources to design and test one for free. I actually might pay someone for a ship design if it is a potential financial risk for me to iterate on and test said design.

I also don't see any value in speeding up or slowing down the "research curve" as there is a very low ceiling of practical complexity in a game like this. Ships have armor, weapons, and tools. These things are simple to implement and this idea that there's an equivalent of a drastic leap forward in effectiveness based upon ship design is quite frankly unrealistic. Everyone knows how to make a sturdier or higher DPS ship already. Everyone knows how to hold more cargo, increase turning radius, etc.

All designs possible are variations on simple themes. This isn't lockheed martin. This is legos. The "research curve" is very shallow already.

The sky isn't falling here and while there's no particular harm in having this "sandbox mode" there's also no real harm in skipping it. Industry won't stop innovating and Big Research won't have a monopoly on new meme-worthy uses for missiles. You might have to actually play the game a little to design ships and incur a little risk. I fail to see how that's a bad thing. If you just wanted to design things there are a ton of single player building games.

 

[Recatek]

Regarding "real world" examples, I'd like to point out that the real world doesn't need to respect your time in order for you to engage with it. A game like this does. It will be much harder to get people to stick around as window dressing for the MMO fantasy if the game makes them suffer through tedium to get to the fun bits. If you constantly have to pause any creative or design work to go out mining for more disposable prototyping materials then, well, everyone has a breaking point where it just isn't worth continuing.

 

[PopeUrban]

Regarding "real world" examples, I'd like to point out that the real world doesn't need to respect your time in order for you to engage with it. A game like this does. It will be much harder to get people to stick around as window dressing for the MMO fantasy if the game makes them suffer through tedium to get to the fun bits. If you constantly have to pause any creative or design work to go out mining for more disposable prototyping materials then, well, everyone has a breaking point where it just isn't worth continuing.

How is this any different than pausing your shooting at other players to get materials or currency to afford another ship or more missiles? Designing ships is not special compared to any other activity in the game. I fail to see a compelling argument that is should be uniquely isolated from any requirement to interact with the resourcing and economic systems other than the entitlement of ship designers.

If mining is that boring... then why make anyone do it at all? Your logic doesn't really hold up unless ship designers are somehow a special protected class.

If your combat pilot or miner or station bar owner is expected to plan ahead for the costs inherent in their profession, is it really such a stretch that the same rules apply to vehicle design?

 

[Recatek]

It isn't different. It's all part of a grind/payoff ratio. If it takes hours to gather resources through mining, hours to design and build a ship, and hours to get where you're going with it, only to use it and lose it in minutes (you've seen how quickly they blow up, right?), then the ratio would be wildly skewed and there wouldn't be a good motivation for a reasonable person to continue engaging with the game. This isn't a toil and labor simulator. There are ways to reduce that grind relative to the fun/payoff bits of the game, and giving us more powerful prototyping and evaluation tools help a lot on that front.

I want to spend my time being creative and making decisions, not unnecessary mining runs.

 

[PopeUrban]

It isn't different. It's all part of a grind/payoff ratio. If it takes hours to gather resources through mining, hours to design and build a ship, and hours to get where you're going with it, only to use it and lose it in minutes (you've seen how quickly they blow up, right?), then the ratio would be wildly skewed and there wouldn't be a good motivation for a reasonable person to continue engaging with the game. This isn't a toil and labor simulator. There are ways to reduce that grind relative to the fun/payoff bits of the game, and giving us more powerful prototyping and evaluation tools would be a good avenue to pursue.

Firstly, no, ships don'rt actually blow up that fast. FB has stated that the current destruction values you see in footage are placeholders to test destruction physics and their mantra for the final version of damage is "easy to disable, hard to destroy"

Based on the footage I have seen this game is ABSOLUTELY a toil and labor simulator. It's probably the most involved toil and labor simulator ever built, and a ton of time and effort was put in to simulating toil and labor. What do you think a robot standing on an asteroid with a pickaxe is? What do you think individually bolting single armor plates together is? What do you think NPC jobs to assemble office chairs are?

The acts of toil and labor exist, as they do in most games, to give contextual value to tools, equipment, or manpower that can do them for you. They also exist because some people actually like doing them. The idea is that you trade your preferred activity for theirs.

I'm not convinced by the logic that says ship design should be a special snowflake to combat grind. If anything, the appropriate place to adjust grind is in the amount of resources acquired from mining, as it holistically adjusts the value of minerals across the economy rather than simply making one activity less grindy.

 

[Recatek]

Based on the footage I have seen this game is ABSOLUTELY a toil and labor simulator. It's probably the most involved toil and labor simulator ever built, and a ton of time and effort was put in to simulating toil and labor. What do you think a robot standing on an asteroid with a pickaxe is? What do you think individually bolting single armor plates together is? What do you think NPC jobs to assemble office chairs are?

Yikes. That sure isn't a compelling sell. Is it really safe to expect a vibrant, bustling, well populated online world when if order to play Starbase (a leisure activity video game) you would need to sign on to that philosophy? I think the game can do better than that and be fun first and foremost, not a second job.

 

[PopeUrban]

Yikes. That sure isn't a compelling sell. Is it really safe to expect a vibrant, bustling, well populated online world when if order to play Starbase (a leisure activity video game) you would need to sign on to that philosophy? I think the game can do better than that and be fun first and foremost, not a second job.

I mean lets get real here. What's the content of the game or indeed most sandbox games?

Acquire resources>build equipment>use equipment to more efficiently or safley acquire resources>repeat

That's the central model for every sandbox MMO with player harvesting mechanics. Its a staple of the genre and its what makes the genre's risk and reward mechanics function. Its a function that encourages and rewards creativity and cooperation.

Sandbox games are about avoiding tedium, and for that model to function tedium must exist. EVE is the granddaddy of space MMOs and is still going strong at the ripe old age of 17 and is built around this model, having outlived more casual games with less tedium too numerous to count.

I wouldn't discount how compelling the existence of tedium is as part of a holistic design, or more accurately how that tedium shapes economies, player looting, and risk/reward and makes their context more compelling.

 

[Vexus]

Vexus, it seems like you're more focused on selling a wild fantasy of what you hope the game will be like.

I'm not just pulling this out of the air. I've been gaming since I was 4 years old, and have spent a great deal of my life playing and observing and interacting with the gaming world as a whole. I see what works, and what doesn't work. I am heavily invested in the success of games. There are lessons to be learned from the mistakes other games' devs have made in the past. Starbase devs are not immune to making bad decisions either. My only goal is to showcase the pitfalls of certain decisions that ruined other games in the hopes it helps the devs craft a better experience for all the players - not just me or my personal playstyle. If you have a specific point you'd care to counter on, where I'm either incorrect or wrong in my thinking, I'd love to hear it. You made only one point which is nothing I said, but I'll talk about:

For example, building a ship in Starbase in real life probably shouldn't be as time-consuming or difficult as building an actual car in real life

I agree, and I never said it should be as time consuming as building a car in real life. I am simply pointing out that Starbase as an MMO is not a ship-design game. Nor is it a ship-dogfighting game. I say that it is an MMO in the hopes that people can see there are many facets to gameplay. The people who want to design ships are a small fraction of the population. If anything will draw people in, it will be the most popular gaming mode - FPS combat. It is the most familiar and most popular gaming mode; the easiest to get into and the easiest for players to understand. Left-click, shoot enemy. As such, as long as the process from entering the game, to getting to shooting an enemy, is quick and easy, it can compete with other FPS games and become popular. Likewise, as long as someone who wants to just get a ship and go explore can easily enter game, do some stuff, get a ship and go explore - there's no need for everyone who joins the game to create a ship from scratch.

Likewise, if you want to join the game and build a ship from scratch, you can, and it looks fairly simple for a basic ship, though very complex for huge ships with literally thousands or tens of thousands of bolts. As such, it doesn't matter how much you would like to design a ship, if you placed 1 bolt per second it might take you hours and hours and hours to simply bolt the parts together in the first place. This is not the key market - ship building - for making this MMO a success. To build a small ship will be just fine for you to do solo. To build the next best Dreadnought will be a task you likely won't tackle yourself unless you're really committed.

My goal is to showcase what works and what doesn't in gaming and to make points around those ideas in hopes Starbase hits the right note and captures the most audience. Starbase competes, right now, with Minecraft, all FPS shooters, Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous and more; basically over half of the most popular space and shooter games. The devs are not all-seeing when it comes to every game that has come along and failed or succeeded. There's little success in a "ship-building MMO", or a "spaceship simulator" aka Elite: Dangerous - which is successful but not to the MMO level required. I see Starbase having an open world and an open ended gaming experience that supports 400,000 players, not 400 like other games, not 60 per server like other games. In order to pull this off, they cannot make mistakes other games have made, or else it will never hit that point.

Regarding "real world" examples, I'd like to point out that the real world doesn't need to respect your time in order for you to engage with it. A game like this does.

I completely agree. As such, it must be rewarding to design a ship - not just something anyone can do and all your efforts were for nothing and all your time spent was pointless. It is much more respectful of your time to allow you to just join the game and jump into a premade faction ship and go about your business, than to build a ship from scratch because it's as simple as Robocraft in terms of designing a ship, though still taking quite some time to get it right. More people are served by it being more difficult to build an efficient ship from scratch and then selling that ship on the open market, than to make everyone build a ship from scratch. The population of ship builders is extremely small. Most players just want to jump in for 1-2hrs, shoot some enemies and go to bed. You might want to build a ship, but you will also know you can spend 1-2hrs per day for as long as you need to build it, and when it is done, it's something that exists to thousands of other players. That's important. If you want a ship-design simulator, one of the community members has already made an unofficial third-party program that does just that. You might not want to admit it, but what draws you to Starbase is not the limited ship-designing. Many games offer that. It's the multiplayer aspect of showing other people your creation that is appealing. That your creations might actually matter. If your goal was simply ship design, there already exists many other games to satisfy that niche.

I think the game can do better than that and be fun first and foremost, not a second job.

I think you miss the point. Not everyone is going to want to, or have to, do any of any of these things. You can mine if you want to. You can build ships if you want to. You can design factories if you want to. You can make small components and sell them if you want to. You can run fuel to derelict ships. You can repair abandoned ships and bring them back to sell from your junkyard. There's 1000 different ways to play the game. At its core, if you do want to build a ship, with 10,000 bolts, that's hours and hours and hours and hours of simply bolting required to make that ship. This is not some fantasy - this is what the devs have showcased to us already, that is what they have shown us does currently exist in game. As such, yes, the game is labor and toil intensive on the root level of gameplay, but immediately after the game takes off, all these issues will be solved by automation and YOLOL and most players will simply play the higher level game. On a personal note, I find it very fun to perfect every bolt and plate placement, to make it pixel-perfect. But that's just me and my fun.

 

[Recatek]

Sandbox games are about avoiding tedium, and for that model to function tedium must exist. EVE is the granddaddy of space MMOs and is still going strong at the ripe old age of 17 and is built around this model, having outlived more casual games with less tedium too numerous to count.

EVE is brimming with systems to reward the time you put in getting a better ship. Ratting, exploration, archaeology, missions, contracts, incursions, wormholes, territory control, research... the list goes on -- and all of these either unlock or get strictly better as you get better and more specialized ships and equipment. Starbase, early in development as it may be, has basically two ship activities: either you use your ship to mine more, or you use your ship to blow up other people's ships. This shrinks the "payoff" part of the grind/payoff ratio, since having a better ship doesn't really change the game for you all that much. It doesn't really open any gates or provide new content. So, if you're asking players to put in a ton of grind for something that doesn't really change their gameplay experience that much at the end, then I think that's a hard sell.

 

[Vexus]

So, if you're asking players to put in a ton of grind for something that doesn't really change their gameplay experience that much at the end

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mouse+trap

I hope you understand the reference. People will invent the next best ship, and it might be worse than the current best ship, but because they hyped it as the next best ship, it takes off and everyone proclaims it is the next best ship, and so everyone buys it. This is reality within an open ended physics-based system, that you can build a better mouse trap. EVE had a vertical progression for certain things, so if you wanted to do X better - stick around paying $15/month for a few more months until you unlock the ability to fly it! That was part of their model, to keep players locked into the payment model to get that next vertical climb to do content better because they had an aged account. Starbase does not have that, so instead of vertical progression, it will be lateral progression and fairly dynamic progression as people find and solve new problems they never saw before. I see this as a better model and is one all the sandbox games seem to have found success with - everyone is on the same playing field, it is up to each player to define their 'best' stuff, be it base building, or ship design or whatever. There's no need for artificial progression-locks on a game like this. Imagine you couldn't even build any ship at all until your account was 3 months old - would you agree to that? I doubt anyone would.

Starbase will reward you - not from the artificial payments from NPC AI in game - but from other players. Some artificial rewarding does exist with jobs and so on, and perhaps they will find a need to add in a little more of that kind of thing to satisfy those who cannot be bothered to interact with others in an MMO, but I doubt that need will arise. In most other MMO games, the systems are always out of balance where it's so much easier to just not deal with other players, and to instead just farm NPC AI or play some sub-game within the main game loop - no other players required. When other players are required, this builds the community, unity, shared goals, and you don't get in this pattern of seeking reward from the slot machine of NPC AI random loot payout. Instead, you focus on what you can do for your fellow players, your team, your faction. This is healthy for the game, because of its game mechanics. It would not be healthy for Starbase, if you had to wait 3 months to unlock the ability to fly the next class of big ship, that lets you stomp on new players and their puny little ships - this is a different game where vertical progression is limited by the game engine, the ingenuity of players, and their ability to efficiently use resources. Eventually that will plateau, and the devs will, down the line, need to add some meta-changing event to throw a wrench in all the best ship designs - but that's far, far out in the future. The point is, the lateral progression is just fine for Starbase, and can be no other way. Build a better mouse trap.

 

[Recatek]

The point is, the lateral progression is just fine for Starbase, and can be no other way. Build a better mouse trap.

I'd like to steer back to the topic of sandbox mode. The in-game ship designer already allows you to build ships and test their flight and structural integrity. It would be nice if they also included a clay pigeon of sorts to shoot at, or a dummy asteroid to test mining lasers on. I think most people would be satisfied with at least that.