CraftAU shutting down.

[Lecic]

Change the colour of the forums. It's that easy. This forum is not a happy place, its colours inspire darkness and night-time, it makes me feel like I’m in a dungeon, and this I feel is why many people get so worked up over things here.

Please no, I value my eyes not being burned out of my skull by bright themes. Dark themes 4 lyfe.

An option for a lighter theme would be nice though.

 

[Shaker]

The games not ready to be advertised yet, you dont want another wave of players leaving once they have figured there is nothing after the "cold war" style of building bigger ships

The problem with not advertising is, they are stuck with the forum dregs that have scared everyone off that doesnt agree with them.

In the end its schema 's game, take ideas out of the suggestions forum if they suit your idea, but dont give in to the rubbish they keep spewing up, they are the minority, just a vocal minority

 

[DukeofRealms]

I wonder when will they. At some point they'll have to...

Sure, at some point we will have to. However, StarMade (and I've said this many times) is not ready for the average consumer. The state the game is in currently is unstable, unbalanced and incomplete, we know this, the average StarMade player knows this, but the average consumer does not. We read all our steam reviews; we read all the discussions that take place on the steam forum, we read every support ticket, and bug report sent. We know what the average consumer thinks, we know what the average StarMade player thinks, and we know what long time players think. We take in criticism and document it from all locations; we watch new players play our game on Twitch, YouTube and similar sites, we document where they have issues, and we document what they thought.

We only ever advertise/promote StarMade when we need more funds for development, since releasing on the Steam EA program, we've been able to maintain development without further exposing StarMade to the public. We will likely begin a second round of advertisements in the near future, as purchases have slowly declined at a steady rate since first release at Steam EA, which is to be expected. We saved quite a significant portion of the first few months of Steam EA, which we've used to keep development going. This is not "game is dying", this is a calculated exposure rate and expected decline. It's not surprising to us that the number of active servers will decrease as well, it doesn't make sense to host a server when player activity is low. (I do want to say that from January to June, we've always seen a large decline in purchases/player count, and then a sharp increase in the second half of the year. This is the same with other games and media.)

It's a lot harder to get back old players than it is to get new ones, it would be detrimental to StarMade development to launch a massive advertising campaign. We now have a rough idea of what it's going to take to get to beta and have a rough internal timeline of how we're going to achieve that. Further exposure is slated, but it won't be on a large scale. You will be seeing advertising pushes here and there leading up to beta; beta launch will likely see a significant advertising campaign and the final advertising campaign will be at release.

There are three main reasons StarMade is in open alpha, funding, testing and developing a community and resources for beta and release launches.

by first focusing on increasing the total population of starmade (something that any business would surely benefit from, after all, schine is a company)

See above.

You cannot keep replacing parts of your game that make it unique just because a few players feel that it is old, uncomplicated, and undesirable.

The reason we replace parts of our game is because we want to replace them. We evaluate the "feature"; we see whether it helps us achieve our goal. We see whether it can be improved. We read steam reviews, SMD posts, reddit, and we observe new players. Finally, we have our systems evaluated by other professional game designers. From all these different sources, we come to a conclusion. If we find a system is not helping us achieve our goal, we are willing to replace it. We don't replace big systems lightly, heavy consideration and lots of planning go into it.

 

[The Judge]

I think 'The game is dead' really means the Factions community has lost pretty much all its activity. The problem for the community at least is keeping the senior members engaged rather than bringing new members into the community.

 

[NaStral]

There's tons of little upstarts on places like Brierie and others. All the older factions are taking a break and waiting for an uptick in activity brought about by a stable enough release. At the current build it's pretty hard to play empire, though progress is actually being made.

 

[The Judge]

There's tons of little upstarts on places like Brierie and others. All the older factions are taking a break and waiting for an uptick in activity brought about by a stable enough release. At the current build it's pretty hard to play empire, though progress is actually being made.

It's probably only me but the reason I'm waiting is a game that has you mine for 5 hours doesn't sound very fun.

 

[alternateCGU]

come play on genx really nice mining rates

 

[Az14el]

"We're not going to announce it, we're not going to announce when we are going to announce it, and we are not going to announce a strategy about announcing it or about when we are going to announce it either, or about the announcement strategy surrounding the announcement of the strategy."

some guy talking about the world record highest revenue generated for an entertainment product within a 24 hour period, that sold like 30 million copies in a year or something

Developement hype isn't the be all end all of marketing, though it's fair to say Schine isn't Rockstar, they're not doing anything wrong by focusing so much more on developement over marketing at this stage.

 

[The Judge]

come play on genx really nice mining rates

Lag

 

[DukeofRealms]

some guy

It's slightly amusing you mention "some guy". He's taught me a lot, seriously.

 

[Shaker]

All the older factions are taking a break

You will find they are taking a break as they are waiting for others to group up, waiting for a reason to undock combat ships, a reason to own an additional system besides the homebase protected one.

They will wait awhile as the devs keep getting stuck in doing rewrites of systems(planets/power/weapons) instead of adding some gameplay functions to try and keep some of their community before they get bored.

Fleshing out factions, giving incentive to group up, a reason to fight player made stations when they are actually online would also be a good one lol

If you focused just 1 month on game functions to keep players in the game, you wouldnt have to worry about advertising.

Thanks DukeofRealms , you seem to always be the first dev to respond in threads and know whats always happening. Much respect, good work.

 

[RabidBat]

Sorry for the late reply, Easter Weekend, lot of work keeping me busy and being tired. Instead of a wall of text I decided to make a video response.
It may provide better context than reading, as from experience reading seems to confuse a great many.
Covered some of the major points, wanted to cover more but the first video I did went over an hour. If I wrote it out it would be the great wall of china version of text.


If you want some clarification feel free to ask.

tl;dr: People are bored, people are uncertain of what is going on, gameplay is stagnate. Feels like we get the same stuff over and over with a new paint job and little that is really new or FUN. Games need to be fun, they need gameplay especially after years of playing them.

 

[7Echo]

The reason we replace parts of our game is because we want to replace them.

You may want to rethink that idea... Doesn't seem to be working out so well so far.

 

[Ithirahad]

I am not sure how 'the power talks killed the community'.
Many understood it 'as is' proposal, and there were only very few constructive comments in the whole thread.

Nobody wants to do anything (especially building) if they know that everything they have will have to be torn down and completely redone at some unknown undefined time. Whether or not people find the power proposal to be any good or not is actually not the primary point here, though I suppose some were discouraged by what they percieved as Schine's intentions of the game based on the initial proposal (designed to accommodate RP vs. balanced for PvP, ease of construction vs. current [supposedly] depth of systems design)... though I guess this is off topic.
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• Lack of fresh features

I'd say it's not so much this as the fact that every supposedly cool feature, even if it took easily three times the intended two-week development cycle, ended up buggy, disappointing, and unfinished. Big dodecahedron planets? Laggy and useless. Fleets? Buggy, and they can't even hold a command when the issuing player gets offline, meaning that for the one main purpose we wanted fleets for (base defense when offline) we might as well leave our AI ships with just the BOBBY AI and no fleet like before, meaning that they can be lead away from the base... so the fleets are mostly useless too except the carrier features, and the unloaded combat that was mentioned as the 'second part of the fleet update' never came. NPC factions? No reward for helping them, no reward for destroying them, and server owners can't even make them have wars otherwise their database will be spammed up with tons and tons of ships, because again... no unloaded combat, and apparently Schine's focus has shifted yet again. So, useless as well. Cargo? There's no real ingame economy, so useless as well (though it is a really good system). Shop trading? Just removes player agency, really, as we can't even send our own trade ships to fill out orders.

I can go on, if you'd like. But I don't think it's necessary.

 

[Mr.Steam]

My son could barely play PC games when Starmade was first released several years ago. He can now build better ships than I can build.

THE POINT:

Crusty old farts like us can all go on to other things but in a few years there will be a brand new batch of players willing to try the game. If SHINE builds it and it is a good game (even if it looks nothing like it does today) players will come.

 

[JinM]

The power change might come in half a year and maybe later, and Shine said like 1000th times that they will not force it but let people have booth systems for like minimum another 3 months - or longer just look how long the old turrets existed: 1 year! Even assuming that the power change will come in 3 months, you still have half a year with the old systems.

A If you are not a titan ship builder that has over 10 ships over 20k size in his yard, you should consider playing tetris instead of Starmade if you are unable to change those systems within 3 months or longer.

Secondly why do people argue about some stuff with their game that might happen in half a year? In this time half of the now arguing players might play a totally different game or not at all anymore.

Third if you really say that your builds are entirely about the power systems instead of rail and logic functions or other design stuff, you are basically a pvper that puts his stuff into cubeshells of grey standard armor. I mean putting systems into a ship takes me 2 hours, whereas design that thing takes me 10 times that. I am just curriuos how many hours you guys play in a week and what time 2 hours are compared to that. I mean if you really need 10 ships with a system upgrade, then you can do one ship in one week and still only wasted 1/10th of your playtime of a week (and I am pretty sure with 20 hours playtime a week I hit the right ammount with some guys here =) ).

Do you know how a system upgrade could look if the power change would come as propossed? You would take the replace tool, replace the old power blocks with shield capacitors, and gut a chunk of shield capacitors out of your ship, where the reactor would then be fitted. Now tell me how long that would take! Just try to see a positive scenario for once.

But the bare assumption that you HAVE to do a system refit, IF shine does a power change, EVEN THOUGH they said that the old system will continue working, is out of any logical thoughts and working with wanting to see the most negative scenario in every case and totally denying that Shine said (and I repeat it again for you): the old power will continue working!

OH wait in case you didnt notice I want you to remind again:
The old power will continue working in case of a power change!

Wait for the slow ones pls read that:

Spoiler

Shine said often enough: The old power will continue working in case of a power change!

I am just so done with this "the propossed power change killed it for me"

 

[7Echo]

I am just so done with this "the propossed power change killed it for me"

Have you considered not reading the posts here in order to save yourself from all the aggravation?

 

[kulbolen]

This is not "game is dying", this is a calculated exposure rate and expected decline...

...It's a lot harder to get back old players than it is to get new ones, it would be detrimental to StarMade development to launch a massive advertising campaign.

from the starmade steam advertisement:

“We already extensively involve the community in the development of the game. Pre-steam release we were roughly at 300,000 people registered on our account system"

that release was years ago now. have you put serious thought into the percentage of your potential audience youve already exhausted, given your consideration that its hard to get old players back?
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If you are not a titan ship builder that has over 10 ships over 20k size in his yard, you should consider playing tetris instead of Starmade if you are unable to change those systems within 3 months or longer.

many players here fit that exact description. i myself dont mind refitting my ships, but this is still a consideration for many.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

It was a long while playing Starmade before I learned of the CraftAU server.
I'm from New Zealand and will sorely miss CraftAU. :-(

 

[JinM]

Have you considered not reading the posts here in order to save yourself from all the aggravation?

I wrote, because I wanted to share a point of view, that lead people, who didn't give up on Starmade, to some positive thoughts. I think this constant harassing and negative talking about this or that wrong direction of the development actually can kill the game if not countered right. Ofcourse my words are very agressive, but there is a difference between me and some other guys: The spirit. I can say what I want too, if some guys who have static opinions on the road this game takes just don't care for the spirit anymore.

There is a big difference between saying once: "hey I disagree with this or that dev direction", maybe even "hey I am frustrated" OR constantly trying to get the morale down by repeating the same old bullshit over and over again!