Gasboy
BLRP
I know, I've done alpha/beta testing for triple A games in the past. But most alphas are not available for the general public to play, which is not the case for Starmade. Most folks expect that if a game is available to play, there's support, and the game is regularly updated (not necessarily content patches, but quality of life patches, bug squishing, protection from virus/malware issues, etc.). They also generally expect that there's a community to play with.Yeah, but having a community and a running game isn't really essential at this stage as long as they haven't run out of whatever tiny amount of money they need to run development. They're still developing the game, and in equivalent phases in other games there are usually small closed alphas or no community availability at all.
Community is kind of important for a game that is open-world and with no single player storyline. You might not get enough players to make a test server even worth it if you don't grow a community. It's very much like a garden, if you don't care for it and water it, it will wither and die.
Me, I'm a patient guy. I'm willing to wait it out, Schine has always appeared willing to continue development of the game. They've stated they have enough funding to continue development and pay for needed things for some time to come. They do lack when it comes to keeping communication up with the community, though I get it, if there's nothing new to announce, it gets tiresome for everyone to see weekly news posts of "No news.".
As I said, I'm a patient guy, I've no big complaint, just minor ones that will be ironed out in time. But I do get the folks who have complaint about the apparent lack of forward movement in development. I do wish they would be more constructive than the OP of this thread, though.