An Urgent Message to Schine

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    Highly questionable assertions driven by massive delusions of grandeur. Why say something when you can simply know? What good reason could one have to make such claims in front of a bunch of loser space lego nerds? Please though, don't stop on my account. SMD is still full of inexhaustible lolcows I see. Don't ever change.
     
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    In the end it turned out that a few of them (unknown how many) were actually involved with a crowd-funded knock-off of this game that is much more... 'pay-to-play' (I believe it even has micro-transactions?) and may have had some "vested interest" in giving Starmade as much bad press as possible.
    What is this alex jones conspiracy theory crap? Get out of here. Unless you're going to name names you're stirring shit for the sake of it.

    Just a friendly reminder that this is an irreversible issue that the game will have when it comes time to market to this theoretical "actual audience".


    And before you call me a russian bot or whatever it is you think people who have issue with starmade are:


    I've logged 2k+ hours in this game. The quality has gone downhill. Those three positive reviews were left 3-4 years ago.

    May 14, 2017 Power Update was announced.

    We stopped building new things with the mindset that we'd wait Power 2.0. We were hoping for a release date range of August. Typically devs don't announce major changes until they are ready to (close to) implementing them. Power 2.0 didn't come out until January of 2018! That is nearly a year later or 8 months.

    It wasn't the changing of the power system that drove players away. It was Schine inability to deliver that change in a timely manner while people were still interested in the game. We didn't lose faith in the game we lost faith in the developers ability to develop the game.
    THIS IS THE ISSUE. RIGHT HERE. Schine shouldn't have announced new power until it was a month out from release. That is why your community is a ghost town. That is why there are a grand total of 8 people playing multiplayer starmade right now. You can argue conspiracy theories, industrial espionage, even divine intervention all you'd like. It won't help or change anything.

    gorilla warfare snip
     
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    Stopped reading after the first page. not careing to much about SM tbh.

    ...You mean AI right?

    The PvPers were pretty much the last bastion of activity on this forum, I noticed a huge drop off in Shipyard posts a good while before the PvPers left due to various issues with the game and changes in moderation.

    I'm gonna admit, it's pretty depressing remembering how I could get 30 alerts a day on this site at one time, now it's a miracle if it's 5 a week.
    Awww man that is depressing but well the actual mechanics not really support ship development. Every single one of these so called "pvpers" (i'd call them players being able to build operating ships with balanced offensive and defensive systems) understand that the actual game mechanics, no mater the default value tweaks, will never result in a fun game to play. The mechanics themselfes are way to restictive and have way to much artificial complexity to deliver a "easy to learn, hard to master" experience.
    So there will again be a complete overhaul of mechanics, even though shine might not admit that yet, it has to come trust me on that. So why bother with an interim system? Maybe some, like me, are still lurking but...

    [ WARNING: TEXT WALL ]



    And who do you think pushed the metas and exploits that resulted in countermeasures that caused issues in the first place, and were so toxic that changes in moderation were necessary?


    You are blaming the messenger. Those people did that to show, what shine was not able to balance. Because Shine often lacks in vision about what their changes may result in gameplay/gamemechanics wise. As demonstrated with those recent changes of crushing a energy system, which allowed freedom of building and design, within certain constraints, to a system, that strongly favors cigars as only valid design choice, efficiency wise.
    These "pvpers" just utilized the mechanics the game allowed, not to ruin the game but to help the development because those people actually cared, to make the game become deep, easy accessable, but still challenging.
    That not everyone is able to understand the mechanics to this level, just shows how immature the underlying gameconcepts were. NOT how godly these players were, just how hard it was for people to get into the mechanics.

    Sure, there were people "enjoying" their "supremacy" over the "skilless" "majority". But most of the real PVPers i knew only tried to help the Devs but were mostly ignored even though provided Real solutions to some system weaknesses.
    These people not being around here anymore, will never result in a good fun game.

    Shine delivering a system worse than the previous one just shows the lack of vision that causes these strong imbalances resulting in META builds. So either they will somehow figure out good mechanics which will actually allow for a system that can be balanced, or more likely they will dumb the game down to oblivion ruining the game for everyone.

    Don't defend that disposable minority of the playerbase. Starmade PVP was made by PVPers. If the PVP dies, Starmade and it's remaining majority of players remains. Those that are here for just the PVP, that's their problem for having that unrealistic expectation of what SM is. That "last bastion" b.s. is just holier-than-though elitist crap that has no place in any community. The short-sighted and self-absorbed PVPer mindset, distilled into meta-junky mentality, produces this same rhetoric of gloom and doom that has pushed away players long before the recent changes in mechanics.
    Actually the game before these changes had at least ONE resort it provided some fun.
    Just because the lions left the enclosure that had crappy fences does not proove the stability of the newer fences. It just means, that should somewhen a single lion return, the cycle of misery will start over, not that sheep vs lion is now a balanced game.
    Only good game mechanics will result in a balanceable game thus providing fun for every "faction". But well shine still has to come up with something better than the previous power system... actually, my guess is, most pvpers doubt shine actually can.

    Schine is playing the long game, as are the players who can openly acknowledge the need for experimentation and failures in a still-fluid game. Patience is what is lacking here. Starmade has no shortage of problems. Creating more problems is the specialty of pushy children who don't want to be constructive and want things fixed now, which is pointless since many of those fixes will be overridden or unnecessary later on anyways, swept away in the next stages of development.


    You obviously are not a so called pvper. otherwise you'd understand the actual problematic replacement of bad with worse.

    It might take years or even a decade to finish this game, all the better reason to keep those around who aren't juvenile trolls or angry, demanding adults. The mix of non-toxic veterans and a good ad campaign will instill new life to a playerbase that was never really supposed to be big at this stage in the first place (you can thank the Yogscast and subsequent Youtube coverage for that premature popularity).

    Exercise something other than doom-saying and ego-boosting, preferably patience and constructive criticism.
    P.S. The above response was intentionally harsh. Most players do not fall into the category of meta-junkies or trolls, and PVP/PVPers are not inherently negative or toxic. Take these paragraphs with a grain of salt and TRY not to take it personally.

    Starmade doesn't need many new players. It hasn't for some time (again, that sudden boost from Yogscast/Youtube gave it more than it needed). What it needs are better players, those who contribute to the game and existing community positively. That, or to rid itself of the existing toxicity (something that has been worked on to great effect). You can't expect to have a stable house on an unstable foundation, so before the walls or roof go up, SM needs to settle it's base. Part of that base must include players who do or are willing to understand the development process of games.

    You already hit the nail on the head when you said "it's less work to add all content and then fix those systems once, without doing it every time new content comes out", but what you didn't mention is that it is also better for the flow of development. Polished mechanics in a fluctuating game break. That's how it goes. If new players are complaining about the "unpolished" things, then they can come back later. If we lose them entirely, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they weren't going to handle the game well anyways, so why have them stay. The next set of potential players will come along, and the next, and the next. If that's too stretched out for you, then you can move on to something else, and like those other impatient players, return at a later date if you feel so inclined.


    Starmade isn't the family dog. It can be revived. <---
    wow look how totally supercalifragilisticexpialidociously edgy that is i almost cut myself typing it wow
     

    Erth Paradine

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    I cannot recall any modern game which as weathered and rebounded from a significant player decline, even after major overhauls. Can you?
     
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    What is this alex jones conspiracy theory crap? Get out of here. Unless you're going to name names you're stirring shit for the sake of it.
    youre talking about me. macthule accused me directly of being a rival game developer last december along with a bunch of other crazy shit. he wanted to post up some self serving bullshit here now that "were all banned" ... ... lol
     

    Edymnion

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    I cannot recall any modern game which as weathered and rebounded from a significant player decline, even after major overhauls. Can you?
    Considering virtually no game lets the public in the door during alpha stage in the first place? If anything we ended up with TOO MUCH exposure TOO EARLY, and that has been the cause of most of the "problems". People who, like in the screenshot above, don't understand that alpha literally means "the game is going to change drastically every time there is a major update", because that is literally what being an alpha state game means.
     

    Reilly Reese

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    Love or hate pvpers, without them all you're doing is accumulating blocks in your invulnerable base.

    Pvpers balance an economy, they remove surpluses and drive stories. Noone ever heard stories of exploration or mining adventures on games with weapons.

    No, they hear about the great war of EE or the pirates ambushing supply lines getting rich off the bounty of merchants. Without PVP you end up with what you have now. A husk of a game with no server activity and subpar storylines. The problem is lack of forced development on servers. Too often people get hit by pvpers or pirates and just jump servers. This is why eve gets it right, you can't do that. You end up with excellent prolonged war stories, stories of hauling a 1B Isk load through a civil war, stories of a 1,000 ship betrayal.

    Pvpers make storylines, PVEers play their part in developing those storylines further, but this game can survive without them. Dont believe me? Go look at YouTube content for starmade. It's mostly pvp
    A History of Starmade Factions [2011-2013]

    Proof ^ PvPers and the Factions generated more content for StarMade than the game itself has in 7 years pretty much.
     
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    TheDerpGamerX

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    can we stop making these threads kthanks

    seriously this point has been made to death. schema doesnt care end of story

    so what hes banned half the community and completely fucked balance?
    he doesnt care theres no point in arguing it
    [doublepost=1540784727,1540782543][/doublepost]
    In the end it turned out that a few of them (unknown how many) were actually involved with a crowd-funded knock-off of this game that is much more... 'pay-to-play' (I believe it even has micro-transactions?) and may have had some "vested interest" in giving Starmade as much bad press as possible.
    no, no one was being paid by the french dude to shit on starmade. take your shitty conspiracy theories elsewhere. they shit on starmade because of how the community and schine had treated them end of story.

    also i dont think skywanderes has micro transactions. but if they did maybe it would be something like this
    https://starmadedock.net/threads/microtransaction-idea-community-store.21152/

    checkmate flat aethists
    [doublepost=1540785514][/doublepost]
    May 14, 2017 Power Update was announced.

    We stopped building new things with the mindset that we'd wait Power 2.0. We were hoping for a release date range of August. Typically devs don't announce major changes until they are ready to (close to) implementing them. Power 2.0 didn't come out until January of 2018! That is nearly a year later or 8 months.

    It wasn't the changing of the power system that drove players away. It was Schine inability to deliver that change in a timely manner while people were still interested in the game. We didn't lose faith in the game we lost faith in the developers ability to develop the game.
    This is the only post worth reading on SMD.
    Truer words have never been spoken.
    Pretty much all major groups stopped most building and some even stopped activity because we all thought the servers would be reset after Power2.0 was released. It was only in the final weeks when we got impatient and said "fuck it this update is never coming" did people start doing stuff on servers again. There was actually a fair amount of activity then but it pretty much died when p2.0 came out

    Personally, I would love to leave Starmade, but I have yet to find a game I like that I can move Dovan to that would be similar. I feel like I've invested too much time into this game, and I do believe the game will one day have players again, its just that they've pretty much ruined any faith a lot of people had in them.
     

    Az14el

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    Only good game mechanics will result in a balanceable game thus providing fun for every "faction". But well shine still has to come up with something better than the previous power system... actually, my guess is, most pvpers doubt shine actually can.
    b-but this way nobody gets punished? how ever will our community survive if there's no witches to burn at the stake

    for real though valid point (the rest too)
     
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    Edymnion

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    TheDerpGamerX

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    Hey, even Minecraft has it's store like that these days. And I've bought several skins from it. So if that was supposed to be a jab at me, it wasn't a very good one. :)
    thats cuz microsoft is greedy, not because the players wanted it
     

    Az14el

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    nah nah, what starmade needs is clearly a lootbox & daily rewards system
     

    Skwidz

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    Hey, even Minecraft has it's store like that these days. And I've bought several skins from it. So if that was supposed to be a jab at me, it wasn't a very good one. :)
    well that's sad
     
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    The most ironic thing ? RP was never the opposite of PvP. Actually PvP is Player vs Player, and afaik you can fight players when you RP. So it's even dumber, as these "PvP gods" didn't even knew what PvP is. Or didn't want others to know it, idk.
    I agree with this view completely.
    It's why I tend to build my ships (particularly the larger ones) to serve a working crew of players. RP should be a natural outgrowth of actual game-play and whatever activity the player(s) are currently engaged in should serve as a framework upon which role-playing can be layered.

    Pilots on a carrier should be able to see others running for their ships and launch as they scramble man-able fighters. Larger industrial ships in particular should be designed to accommodate working crews, rather than single pilots and a bunch of idle passengers. For industrial and military ships especially, this means fairly spartan, easily navigable interior spaces whenever possible and easily accessible, clearly demarcated sub-ships.

    Too many people crafting such ships make labyrinthine interiors that are difficult to navigate under the best of circumstances, but when in the barely-controlled panic of combat for instance, add confusion to an already bad situation. Industrial settings are only different in that efficiency matters for regular, long-term, workaday use, rather than saving precious seconds that might win a battle, but they should still provide that same sense of collective effort and promotion of crew interactions when everyone heads to the mining ships or what have you.

    With the devs now concentrating on making this game more of an actual game and trying to draw new players in, I feel that more ship-builders should be designing ships which serve and promote cooperative effort among players that is like any other tool: Highly functional, easy to use/maintain and easy to store when you don't need it.

    I look at it quite simply, really. If you're about to put a whole ton of crew quarters, etc., into your ship build, ask yourself what all those people would actually do on your ship. Instead of building 50 rooms of crew quarters, build 5 or 10. Then imagine people actually living in those rooms while the ship or station is in operation.

    Now give each of them a job to do when the ship or station is performing it's intended function. In this way, RP is built into the very fabric of the construct, coming easily and naturally to the players who use it. You don't have to be a good actor to have good RP if you're actually doing what you're playing at.
     

    Az14el

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    Who's the "PVP gods"? that's a new one

    But yeah RP and PVP are not at all opposed, which imo the survival multi sorta players have always been pretty vocal about especially. When one suffers the other does, and that definitely fell on deaf ears for way too long. Starmades not really the same as other "pvp" games in that the pvp & pve side essentially rely on the exact same mechanics (no "resilience" or special pvp only gear/specific pvp mode etc)