Where did all the playerbase and faction fun go?

[Megacrafter127]

Wait, bro; Didn’t GenX had a 50k ship block limit? I'm pretty sure it had... Did they drop it?

Maybe it was a mass limit?

 

[komatodik]

Wait, bro; Didn’t GenX had a 50k ship block limit? I'm pretty sure it had... Did they drop it?

1) it was 500k block limit 2) its now 1 million of block limit. and its 1 million for more than month...

 

[TheDerpGamer]

Lol no

Good leadership or no, the only factions that really stay alive seem to be the engineering factions, as there's basically nothing else to do. Even my faction quickly devolved into an engineering faction, for the most part.

Dovan Empire is one of the oldest factions still standing, maybe you should be more liek us.

 

[Kryniss]

I'll throw my two cents in - a friend and I have been toying with a server for awhile and we've noticed a few things when we try to get our friends to play, some of which were mentioned earlier...

Lack of interactions
No "rails" in the game to travel on
No clue how to build a good ship
No metrics by which to measure progress in the game
They are confused by the factory UI

It seems like a lot of these issues are being solved thru server configs and server admins acting as game play facilitators.

 

[jorgekorke]

Maybe it was a mass limit?

Ah, yeah. I'm still getting confused with the changes, we used to call mass, now block, derp. Silly me.

 

[Thomas Jetson]

There is far more to do than just engineering. It requires good leadership (there, I said it again) and a plan that is big enough to last more than one month. The typical StarMade player has neither of these things.

 

[Ithirahad]

...But a plan for what? Aside from engineering large projects, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of long-term goals in this game. Many MMOs seem to use guild systems that require resources, sometimes from dungeons, to rank up. EvE Online uses... well, truth be told, I don't know what they use, but it seems to be resources and ships. In StarMade, once you have a large fleet set up, there's not much to do besides engineer new things and shoot down the occasional petaQ' trying to sneak in and mess with your stuff.

 

[Claru]

 

[Master_Artificer]

Ah yes you make a very good point. +1 informative.

I have no idea what that means.

 

[ChoMar]

As someone quite new i wanted to make a Pot about some of this stuff, but meh, it fits in here too.
This game is incredibly complex. Controls and Block Interaction and Stuff.
Thats ok, i like it this way.
But it is also incredibly bad documented.
The Wiki is more often than not outdated, if you find what youre looking for at all.
Serverside and Modding-Stuff, whelp, kinda hard to find.
The Forum itself, finding information is hard between some silly flamethreads about some council and stuff like that.
Blueprints... is this something on the comunity? Is it seen as "bad style" to upload a Blueprint of, lets say, a good miner or something?

There are Youtube videos, but even there, except for bench most of them are more "look what I Build" instead of "howtos".

Most of these Problems are, indeed, community problems. Sure, the Devs/Schine could dokument everything, but there are quite a lot games where the Community does that.
Is it because the Game has been in Alpha for so long? Is it because the People playing this game have some "intelectual Property" thinking? Is it, maybe, because of the Factions? I only do stuff for my Faction, not the Community as a whole?

And before you say "why dont YOU update the wiki" - im thinking about it, but i have no wiki-experience and i fell like if just scratched the surface.

 

[Lecic]

Blueprints... is this something on the comunity? Is it seen as "bad style" to upload a Blueprint of, lets say, a good miner or something?

It's not "bad style," but rather that factions (the people building the majority of the highly advanced tech and well balanced ships) don't want to share what they've learned, and for good reason- it could give their opponents an advantage over them.

It wouldn't matter if the kind of stuff factions keep secret got leaked out anyway, though. With how often the meta changes, it'd stop being the best pretty quickly.

The wiki needs to be better maintained (especially with updating when the game updates) to allow people to learn and build ships rather than people handing out good BPs or block-by-block tutorials that'll be ineffective within a few months.

 

[Reilly Reese]

It's not "bad style," but rather that factions (the people building the majority of the highly advanced tech and well balanced ships) don't want to share what they've learned, and for good reason- it could give their opponents an advantage over them.

It wouldn't matter if the kind of stuff factions keep secret got leaked out anyway, though. With how often the meta changes, it'd stop being the best pretty quickly.

The wiki needs to be better maintained (especially with updating when the game updates) to allow people to learn and build ships rather than people handing out good BPs or block-by-block tutorials that'll be ineffective within a few months.

I've always thought it was awesome how you could tell the difference between a faction warfare ship and a corporate/private ship.

 

[ChoMar]

It's not "bad style," but rather that factions (the people building the majority of the highly advanced tech and well balanced ships) don't want to share what they've learned, and for good reason- it could give their opponents an advantage over them.

From what ive seen, "advanced Tech" is not too advanced. Sure, logic blocks and balancing is an issue, but....
Most Ships I see so far are beautiful, not efficient in terms of PvP.
What do i need for PvP?
Minimal Costs and Weight for the Ship. Maximum Weapons, Thrust and Shields. Minimum Target Area, but thats only maybe.
The Way the Game works that means a Cube with Turrets flying to Space. Every non 90° Angle adds mass and costs Material.
Of course, no one wants those cubes in Space, but if you want your beautifull designs out there, why not share them? In a SERIOUS PvP or even Faction v Faction situation youll go back to cubes. And your enemy will. Sure, FIghters may come in handy here or there and stuff, but even they will rather look... cubular.
And, before someone goes for "Roleplay Server"... Look at the ISS, its not beautiful but optimized for minimum structure with maximum usage. This optimizations are perfectly realistic...

 

[Winterhome]

From what ive seen, "advanced Tech" is not too advanced. Sure, logic blocks and balancing is an issue, but....
Most Ships I see so far are beautiful, not efficient in terms of PvP.
What do i need for PvP?
Minimal Costs and Weight for the Ship. Maximum Weapons, Thrust and Shields. Minimum Target Area, but thats only maybe.
The Way the Game works that means a Cube with Turrets flying to Space. Every non 90° Angle adds mass and costs Material.
Of course, no one wants those cubes in Space, but if you want your beautifull designs out there, why not share them? In a SERIOUS PvP or even Faction v Faction situation youll go back to cubes. And your enemy will. Sure, FIghters may come in handy here or there and stuff, but even they will rather look... cubular.
And, before someone goes for "Roleplay Server"... Look at the ISS, its not beautiful but optimized for minimum structure with maximum usage. This optimizations are perfectly realistic...

Cubes are impossible to effectively armor. Every flat surface facing the enemy is an invitation to having your hull ripped wide open by missiles, cannons, whatever.

Good looking shapes come with the benefit of being possible to protect the ship extremely well.

As for "advanced tech", there are weapon designs out there that are worth far, far more in practice than their equivalent block count in "regular" weapons. Same goes for defensive tech.

 

[Lecic]

From what ive seen, "advanced Tech" is not too advanced. Sure, logic blocks and balancing is an issue, but....
Most Ships I see so far are beautiful, not efficient in terms of PvP.

Factiontech is primarily grey area semi-exploits and strange meshings of systems that weren't meant to be combined, resulting in powerful and bizarrely operating craft. And that's on top of superb system balancing built on tons of tests and math.

 

[Ithirahad]

The ISS looks pretty damn cool compared to certain SM combat ships.

Industrial, practical, but cool.

In any case, due to recent armor changes and things, decent-looking shapes (or at least, things that aren't cubes) actually do have something of an advantage. And in any case, this isn't the answer to our problem.

 

[Master_Artificer]

From what ive seen, "advanced Tech" is not too advanced. Sure, logic blocks and balancing is an issue, but....
Most Ships I see so far are beautiful, not efficient in terms of PvP.
What do i need for PvP?
Minimal Costs and Weight for the Ship. Maximum Weapons, Thrust and Shields. Minimum Target Area, but thats only maybe.
The Way the Game works that means a Cube with Turrets flying to Space. Every non 90° Angle adds mass and costs Material.
Of course, no one wants those cubes in Space, but if you want your beautifull designs out there, why not share them? In a SERIOUS PvP or even Faction v Faction situation youll go back to cubes. And your enemy will. Sure, FIghters may come in handy here or there and stuff, but even they will rather look... cubular.
And, before someone goes for "Roleplay Server"... Look at the ISS, its not beautiful but optimized for minimum structure with maximum usage. This optimizations are perfectly realistic...

Now that their is an HP system, you can use some really clever engineering and sloped armor to epic proportions.
And with missiles blast update cubes are now just inferior in every way, even rectangles are now out of date.
And thrust means you don't need to mind the dimensions when you want to make a ship that can spin fast.

If you are facing a DIMENSION limit and not a block or mass limit, that is the only time cubes are better.
Needle and prism ships op, pls nurf lol. Pretty much all faction ships seek to minimize the profile that would face the expected incoming enemy fire because missed shots deal no damage.

 

[OmegaGame]

I predominately play on a survival server with finite resources. But in our case. We rarely fight because we simply do not want to see our ships that we spent weeks/months building become destroyed. Also old factions rarely ever take on noobs any more simply because no one wants to walk them through every step.

 

[Master_Artificer]

I predominately play on a survival server with finite resources. But in our case. We rarely fight because we simply do not want to see our ships that we spent weeks/months building become destroyed. Also old factions rarely ever take on noobs any more simply because no one wants to walk them through every step.

You must of missed a lot.

 

[Bogdan]

I predominately play on a survival server with finite resources. But in our case. We rarely fight because we simply do not want to see our ships that we spent weeks/months building become destroyed. Also old factions rarely ever take on noobs any more simply because no one wants to walk them through every step.

We take on new players sometimes, since we believe that everyone should be on a similar level, offering them advise and assistance in getting to terms with starmade's technologies