Yeah, I still read the forums
The doomsayer pattern seems to be that they want some immediate, cheap remedy which would maybe add a week more of playing for them, usually by burning a lot of remaining people with it, and then the game would be finally killed off for good. And if I dare to comment that no, we are doing it the proper way it attracts even more of those who have already given up to attack me and the players who dare to agree with the proper fixes.
Now I must kindly ask the doomsayers: please, stay civil or live up to your promises.
Well let me make a post then. Cause i do like this game, i'm still very interested, but it's quickly dying (which is also why i haven't posted so far). I haven't fired it up in months and i honestly don't feel a need to after just looking through the steam reviews, discussions, and these forums for a good hour or two to check on progress.
I've also played MMO's for decades (first one was Redmoon Online released in 1998) and beta tested them too (city of heroes/champions online closed beta, End of Nations closed alpha) so i'm not new to this.. game.
First off, player count. You're running an "MMO" with a bottom player count of <200 between 8-9 in the morning my time (seems your remaining player base is mostly EU with peaks around 22:00 Dutch time). This is a MAJOR problem.
You can quote early access to me, and i'll tell you: You are
still asking €32,99 of me for that! This isn't a FREE alpha! Well, i bought it, but from the perspective of new players. Since your business model doesn't include a subscription, you live and die by new sales - and nobody's going to buy a MMO with 200-400 players,
not even a fully built game. Feel free to argue with me on this, i've also written a few books on money and value. What's your burnrate/income and how long do you expect to maintain that, hmmm? Got any outside investors willing to invest with these kind of numbers? I wouldn't. It's not just the doomsayers that have to put up or shut up yknow. If money's no problem, then why release it in this state? Do you care about your customers, or just making a game?
Explain to me how your game is worth literally twice of Dyson Sphere Program, a Factorio like game where you build your own massive dyson sphere. Also EA, runs stable as a rock and VERY optimized, all about building massive things taking hours and hours. Because your game is an MMO? Not with ~375 players it's not. And "soon" doesn't entice impulse buyers.
Secondly, you say you're doing this "the proper way", but this couldn't be further from the truth. Let me show you one very simple EASY fix to bring back a few players, that REDUCES your burn rate, changes NOTHING about the game's roadmap progress, and is
so obvious that you're gonna smack yourself in the face for not considering it before.
Why does this game have a PTU? Because "you're an MMO and you need to have a public test server"?
Patched more often? I checked the PTU forums and the EA announcements - they're dated approximately equally far apart. PTU updates don't come
that much more often. Early access already comes with an implied more-frequent update schedule.
More unstable?
The early access argument cuts both ways! You're asking €32,99 for this buggy piece of shit that's still eating ships after months and you have a server
that's even MORE buggy?! lord help us! That's not a good look yknow.
Now, i'm being facetious just to prove a point. Most reviews i read are basically "Where's the content", "this game is buggy", "It's EA it's supposed to be buggy", "There's nothing to do but grind". Yet - on the PTU, you're holding events!!!
EVENTS! WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ARE YOU NOT HOLDING EVENTS IN THE MAIN GAME THAT'S BORING AS HELL?!?!?!?!
WHICH IS ALSO IN EARLY ACCESS! YOU WANT ME TO BETA TEST EARLY EARLY ACCESS?!
Again, trying to prove a point. You can
either tell me to expect bugs and implement stuff into the main game,
or sell me a stable main game with some actual content and have a buggy test server for feedback. Having two buggy servers for feedback doesn't make sense!
especially not when you're so swamped with bug reports you can't do both at the same time anyway. And no need to say you can, i've already seen comments to the effect of "i sent them a mail but they stopped responding to me". You guys are obviously swamped.
Worried about resetting the main world/consequences of that? Uhm, i hate to tell you, but
not planning a wipe when you've already launched
this early into the game's history
is insane. Your economy is completely broken. HOW are you going to make credits rare again and the ores more valuable WITHOUT forcibly draining people's liquidity, or hurting one group over another, without creating vested interests/godlike companies? (hint, you won't).
And i saw a message that asteroids were recently regenerated in the safe-zone, so you effectively already broke that promise. People starting now get more advantage than people starting a few weeks ago. That's hypocritical - but it was also necessary and the right thing to do. As is just deleting the main server and making the PTU the main server
as long as you say the game's still in alpha. When you release the official Beta, you can think about splitting them again... but not during pre-alpha lol. And don't give me that "true early access" bullshit either i've got 761 games in my steam library, don't think you're the first to say that.
As long as there's no economy, doing a wipe matters very little - and your economy is already beyond broken (i've written books on economics). Your only concern in this type of game concerning wipes during Alpha are Blueprints and YOLOL code, which is where the hard work people want to actually save goes - and you can selectively not-wipe those. People can blueprint their favorite ship, import it into the full game when it's ready, and still get a massive head start even with farming the resources all over again, as new players have to still learn this highly complex game. If updates threaten to break blueprints, rename all existing ones (OUTDATED) and have players deal with the fixes.
Let me point out another simple thing: Capital ships and moon bases aren't gonna bring people back. Very simple reason:
That's end game content right?
Your early game is boring. Before i can even get to a capital ship (or the moon for that matter), i have to mine rocks, and that's it. There's no trading, no story, nothing. Learning to build ships takes tens of hours. It only makes sense if you join an already-rich company that just feeds you stuff to skip the early game. What if i wanna play with a couple of friends in a universe, rather then a xx player limited dedicated server? How long will it take us to get a Capital ship in labor hours?
And how many ships will i lose to the easy ship builder to get there? Last i read it's still buggy. You talk about doing it properly, but i read back through the game's testing history, and it seems the EZ ship builder was added last minute before release with very little testing.
To appeal to the casuals. Don't deny it, don't think you're the very first game i saw panic because they were too afraid their game was too complex, and redesign a bad feature last minute to "make it work", making it worse all along the way and dying
as a direct result of it.
Feel free to explain this to me:
How is the easy ship builder
actually easier to use than the fully fledged one? I would
highly suggest renaming the darn thing to the "quick ship builder", because that's exactly what it is: Quick and dirty way to modify a ship. Fly in, swap a part, fly out, no fuss with individual plates or beams or whatever.
How is
actually using the easy ship builder, easier than
actually using the full ship builder + pre-fab modules? I'm dead serious here, i've played factorio, satisfactory and dyson sphere program; all essentially the same game from a top down, 1st person and 3rd person perspective, and i gotta say - top down works
so much easier for planning and logistics than first person does, even 3rd person does because the camera's further back and there's more overview. I get disoriented in Satisfactory all the time with belts going everywhere - and that's not unlike how cables/pipes work in starbase.
I've played your game. The big one's better.
If you had put ALL THIS TIME you've put into the easy builder, into tutorials for the fully fledged one, your playercount would be much higher. Less frustration, more fun, and your goal is to have people either end up there anyway or not mess with ship building at all and just focus on repairs, because some people just won't be interested in that.
Launching a game that is
this complex
without any proper explanation
ingame about its functioning parts
is not doing it properly. And i'm being kind here, because in all honesty, it's just plain stupid and shows a complete lack of care towards your customers. The wiki is barebones compared to the questions the game raises as well as horribly out of date in sections (never did update that station builder tutorial link huh?), and relying on a wiki is basically Minecraft level, which was a student project. Hoping other people fill it in for you isn't gonna happen with 400+ people. I'd hope they're in now.
"Early access" doesn't count when you have
a choice to implement all kinds of things, and you didn't choose to implement tutorials at launch. That was a stupid choice.
Focusing on capital ships and mining when everything leading up to that sucks and is a boring grind, is also a stupid choice. Then testing them away from the main server and public view - in a early-alpha state game - is even stupider. Not wanting to wipe and not implementing a proper economy is stupid too.
And that's another easy fix too!
Disable the origin station AH, enable player-stations AH via UI only, make each AH separate from each other and tell players "Proper implemented player trading NPCs will be coming later, but for now, we're enabling location based auction houses to facilitate inter-station trade". Give half the transaction fee to the player (or company) owning the station so there's an inventive to draw a crowd (since a popular station lets you buy alot of ore instead of mining it, increasing power, company or no).
And you literally haven't got to do anything more then run a X amount of copies of the origin AH you already have! No interlinking required because you
want them separate. That'll
automatically create points of interest in the game as some stations will see more activity than others. Which gives people a reason to explore: To see other player stations
and to see what their auction inventory is like. Some stations will sell for higher prices, introducing arbitrage -
by which trade lives and breathes. You have NO arbitrage in your game right now!!!
Developing games is a simple question of effort/result, and the above would be the
lowest possible effort with the
highest rate of return, and expand things to do in the universe
without taking away alot of development time from capital ships. So it
should be prioritized!
If this was WoW, you're basically announcing test raids on Onyxia when half of Elwynn Forest is missing.
Currently you've got an MMO with only 1 point of interest: The origin trading station. Because there's
no way to trade outside of origin! There's no way to ferry items back and forth either.
Speaking of which. You say you wanna do this properly. You've made a MMO in space, all about grinding ore and building stuff with it.
Yet it is impossible to transport anything except ore across space. There is no inventory for items, station parts, modules, etc etc.
How stupid is that?! There's no sugar coating this one. YOU made an incredibly stupid decision to focus on the wrong things. You're making a space game with a HEAVY focus on trade
without the ability to trade (right now). And to compensate, you're focusing all trade on a single station, while promoting player stations as something to strive for! You can save the PvP argument -
wars run on finances. If you want me to build a capital ship, but you don't wanna give me creative mode, i'm going to need to fund it. Considering the name, i'm expecting expensive.
If there is ONE GODDAMN THING that should've been in on day 1, it
SHOULD HAVE BEEN the ability to craft items in mid-flight and transport items between stations. You've got a game BASED around doing NOTHING for HOURS as you travel back and forth - AND you've got an ENTIRE PROGRESSION TREE BASED ON CRAFTING!!!!
God that's such a frustratingly stupid contradiction. You guys have just forgotten you're building a game, and you're trying to build a universe simulator. What's the logic for no UI based inventory based on crates like you have for ore, only then for items or station modules? Volume? Oh but suddenly i can carry one of these modules
on my fucking back and wave it around like a god because it's a game and placing it shouldn't require a team of construction workers? C'mon now.
Adapt the ore crates to hold items, modules, ANYTHING player inventory can also hold. **** volume, go by weight only and call it "gameplay mechanics till we find a better solution". Treat all items like ore for the time being, and just have them stack up based on weight, and make the weight distribution model the same too.
I'll stop typing since i've been at this long enough and i've voiced enough of my frustrations with the game i suppose. The last thing i can stand is a snobby developer saying "they're doing it properly" with so many goddamn glaring stupid mistakes. How about an apology instead for false advertising? (Attachment plates, Fully fledged station builder, Origin station traders/shops, Stuff REMOVED from closed alpha before launch which was NOT communicated!!! I had to look for HOURS to find attachment plates were removed, but they were all over the wiki though! Again, poor maintenance, barebones wiki, feature creep, the list goes on.)
I would like to see the path forward of the game fixed, cause i did enjoy many tens of hours building ships (but not actually flying them i never got into YOLOL). I'd very much like to build ships and make this my MMO of choice. But as it is now, the game's turning into an echo chamber that'll just die when the funds run out. I've seen this before with End of Nations.
No need to take my word for it. I thought about typing economy suggestions in the suggestion section, until i saw the last
post from there was
more then a month old! Not even enthusiastic kids anymore suggesting completely unworkable ideas? That just tells me the number of people passionate about the game is very low. Veteran testers don't suggest changing mistakes because the mistakes are already too numerous to change and the backlog too large, while the hyperactive kids have moved on to something they
can be passionate about. Just like i've alpha tested games before, i've hung around on those forums before.
And yes, i know about the discord - but that's not the public face of the game. The website and steam reviews are. On which it's showing you had 1 negative review on November 9th,
no reviews on the 10th, and 1 negative review on the 11th. People are barely even bothering to leave reviews anymore. That's real bad for
any EA game.
I wish you guys luck, i really do. But don't pretend you're even close to a sustainable path or doing things properly. This has been, without a doubt, the worst MMO launch that i've ever seen in 20 years of playing the darn things. And yes, like the late great Total Biscuit used to say: If you're charging money, you've launched.
