Matt_Bradock
The Shrink
Nice one.So, I'm going to resist the urge to nitpick a few posts above me ("more than ten hours a day" indeed...) and give my two cents as to what the issue is with the community. I will say this is sort of a hunch on my part, based on my observations of the community.
I believe that the majority of major arguments between forum posters on this site are due to differing visions of what the game is going to be at the end. Some seem to think it's going to be a pretty direct analog of Minecraft ('Star-craft' if you will), a space RPG sandbox. IN SPACE! Others think it will be a simulator (once again IN SPACE!) with oxygen, happiness for NPCs, etc. After reading the Developement direction I get the feeling of something like a mix between Majesty and Age of Wonders III with a little Allegiance, (none of which I will link despite their obscurity because I'm definitely an elitist snob who does nothing to grow the community of anything), also IN SPACE! Others seem to think the game is going to be.... nothing, I guess. they get upset about there being nothing to do and act like killing pirates is going to be the end of the gameplay. in space.
Now chances are we are all horribly wrong, or at least only right by shear luck, but either way I feel like the next few months of updates are going to help unify our visions for this game so we can move forward together, with an unbreakable shared purpose that will help us raise this community into the stuff of legend, riding a banner of goodwill and brotherly/sisterly love that will....
HA HA HA HA HA!!!!! I had you going for a second I bet. But seriously, I think we'll see less and less of the major flame wars as more of us finally catch the vision of the end goal for Starmade, and I have high hopes for the next ~three months of development. And then of course, if we can hold on through to a stable Beta we should be ready to really kick the growth into high gear.
And THAT is when we'll really see some trolls.
I never thought this should (or would) be something like Minecraft. The resemblance ends with the use of blocks and procedural generation of the universe. The scale was so much larger even from the first time I started playing 3 years ago, it was blindingly obvious this game has very little to do with Minecraft.
I'm strongly opposed to the simulation endgame goal too - if I want to care for the emotional and physical needs of people I have only partial or no control of, I'll play Sims or go out and start something called a family (pun intended :D )
Right now, I'm curiously waiting to get a glimpse of what the devs imagined the whole point of playing Starmade would be. Right now, the community and server operators are not strong and organized enough to start creating their own major content that could progressively compel players to keep playing and have a balanced enough risk-reward (by reward I don't necessary mean ingame items or credits, but the fun factor of participating too) equation to get people involved. Very few tournaments are held at very irregular times, servers don't have high risk, high reward zones that would get people to clash over, even build contests are pretty rare, and what's worse, their vast majorty require aesthetic skills over an extensive knowledge of system efficiency.
So nonetheless, I'm curious how the community AND the dev team will tackle these issues.