Do not make this game die

[jorgekorke]

I'm totally late for the party, but I'd like to point something out.

The OP is unclear regarding the word "meta". I consider "meta" the method of winning on a fight situation. A combo which is the most ideal from all possible outcomes. And, of course, I'm glad that the waffle guns are gone.

About the reason of why we are losing people? There are plenty and have already been yelled to the death by a lot of people, including myself.

A game can not die if it keeps receiving updates.
The community can become small, but it will keep existing.


And my take on the PvP vs PvE debacle is: why not let the faction decide if they want PvP or not?
Let them have the options:
Peaceful: nothing can attack your homebase sector and you can not attack anyone elses.
Survival: Pirates can attack your sector, but no player can. Nor can you attack anyone elses sector.
Challenge: Factions with the same selected option can attack your homebase sector and you can attack theirs.

Changing the option takes 24 hours.

So you can set it to peaceful when you start, move up to survival when you get turrets on your base, change to challenge when you have titans and a giant base.

And with "nothing can attack" I mean either do 0 damage on all weapons or can't fire anything inside the faction homebase sector.

If a faction is not willing to PvP, not even fighting pirates, then they should consider leaving the public server. They are causing wastage of CPU and RAM resources, which are very scarce, considering how hard is to host a SM server. A more fitting option would be hosting a little ready-up server, like PingPerfect stuff for them to do survival on their own.

This is a problem the servers are facing - people who just log-in, and live inside their "bubbles", not contributing to anything to happen at all.

 

[StormWing0]

Can we all just let this topic die already. >_>

 

[Madman198237]

Yes, let's, please, for the love of all things good, LET IT DIE.

Quit coming back, just let the crap fade. Or decompose. Or whatever this particular kind of forum-garbage does.

 

[ZektorSK]

You can surely ask admins to close it, and move it into archive

 

[banks456]

I have to breathe life into this topic for one reason. I'm on Star Citizen forums. Im on Space Engineers forums and I make a lot of comments on Battlefront . Do you know every single one of these games have someone complaining about the game is losing support . lol Every game has people like that. The truth is Starmade is one of those games that will be here for years because it's the type of game that becomes more of a habit than something for entertainment just like minecraft. In 5 more years someone else will make the same claims about Starmade and so on. I'm not saying his complaints aren't valid but in my opinion they do not change the fact that this is a very enjoyable game. I have complaints about Starmade too but I still end up playing it everyday.

 

[GalactusX]

Starmade every day will be a more complete game, with more possibilities, with more content, more new people; is that in the last year, many of the servers present have had to close, but this is not because people have lost interest in the game, is by the monetary question, because keep costs money server, and because the game is free to play, this does not generate an income to servers, do not know why people complain.

Take a look of other games, like minecraft ... he lost a 80% of people because is always the same, and this game has a limit for the player, Starmade not (at least from my point of view), Starmade does not impose an actual limit for the player, he can build from a single ship of 3 cubes, to monsters of millions of cubes, intricate systemas logical and fantastic space bases, things that other games have only achieved by modifying its own structure using Mods.

 

[solarapple]

starmade has potential but like 3 guys in their garage are building it right now.

 

[Comr4de]

starmade has potential but like 3 guys in their garage are building it right now.

Yeah, that's part of the problem. It's been ~3 dudes working on this game in their spare time for the past three years.

I have to breathe life into this topic for one reason. I'm on Star Citizen forums. Im on Space Engineers forums and I make a lot of comments on Battlefront . Do you know every single one of these games have someone complaining about the game is losing support . lol Every game has people like that. The truth is Starmade is one of those games that will be here for years because it's the type of game that becomes more of a habit than something for entertainment just like minecraft. In 5 more years someone else will make the same claims about Starmade and so on. I'm not saying his complaints aren't valid but in my opinion they do not change the fact that this is a very enjoyable game. I have complaints about Starmade too but I still end up playing it everyday.

It's not like the "Starmade is dead!" criers have no impetus for these claims. Server attendance and steam stats show a marked drop in players. While there are spikes, most of them are associated with updates and new version releases. Weekends are still (relatively) active but there is still a downward trend. I don't want to evoke tomino here but it is a little alarming. Average playercount for starmade this month is 94.
I don't remember Starmade server attendance being this low in the past four years. While correlation =! causation it is a trend to be aware of.

It may be the cool thing to do on here to try to fit in, but denying obvious trends and problems does not address the issues. The whole "meta" discussion is a moot point. Game balance is probably the best it's ever been. The problem is player retention and growth.

 

[kiraen]

Those steam stats are pretty irrelevant.
I, for one, hate using Steam to play StarMade. I don't even let it do the updates since it always screws it up, I have lost multiple universes to corruption after a steam update.
According to my profile there I have only played for 3 hours. It's closer to a 3000.

I very much doubt that I am the only one.

 

[Comr4de]

I'm on a roll here so I'll keep going

Spoiler: Sidebar

Space Engineers - Steam Charts
Space engineers is also in decline, and losing players at a greater rate than Starmade. Granted,they also have a much wider playerbase to lose so the losses can be absorbed to a degree. Space engineers faces several different problems than Starmade, namely the fact that SE multiplayer is borderline nonfunctional at this point.

My point isn't that skub is dead and we should all give up and play Factorio but rather that the playerbase continues to dwindle and the trend of features being broken on release (and remaining broken for months or even years <I know this one was fixed but it took schema over a year) is starting to catch up with Schine. The tutorial itself is broken and outdated, making it difficult for new players to figure out game mechanics. Starmade has some glaring issues and I'm frankly getting tired of seeing people lap it up like obedient dogs.

Those steam stats are pretty irrelevant.
I, for one, hate using Steam to play StarMade. I don't even let it do the updates since it always screws it up, I have lost multiple universes to corruption after a steam update.
According to my profile there I have only played for 3 hours. It's closer to a 3000.

I very much doubt that I am the only one.

I very much doubt that the majority of starmade players use the non-steam client. Saying that steam stats are irrelevant because you don't use steam is like saying that vegetarians aren't real because you eat meat.

For discussions sake, the demo is even more of a ghost town on steam StarMade Demo - Steam Charts

 

[Nauvran]

I'm on a roll here so I'll keep going

Spoiler: Sidebar

Space Engineers - Steam Charts
Space engineers is also in decline, and losing players at a greater rate than Starmade. Granted,they also have a much wider playerbase to lose so the losses can be absorbed to a degree. Space engineers faces several different problems than Starmade, namely the fact that SE multiplayer is borderline nonfunctional at this point.

My point isn't that skub is dead and we should all give up and play Factorio but rather that the playerbase continues to dwindle and the trend of features being broken on release (and remaining broken for months or even years <I know this one was fixed but it took schema over a year) is starting to catch up with Schine. The tutorial itself is broken and outdated, making it difficult for new players to figure out game mechanics. Starmade has some glaring issues and I'm frankly getting tired of seeing people lap it up like obedient dogs.



I very much doubt that the majority of starmade players use the non-steam client. Saying that steam stats are irrelevant because you don't use steam is like saying that vegetarians aren't real because you eat meat.

For discussions sake, the demo is even more of a ghost town on steam StarMade Demo - Steam Charts

I hate it when you're right.

 

[Comr4de]

I hate it when you're right.

me too tbh

 

[banks456]

Yeah, that's part of the problem. It's been ~3 dudes working on this game in their spare time for the past three years.

It's not like the "Starmade is dead!" criers have no impetus for these claims. Server attendance and steam stats show a marked drop in players. While there are spikes, most of them are associated with updates and new version releases. Weekends are still (relatively) active but there is still a downward trend. I don't want to evoke tomino here but it is a little alarming. Average playercount for starmade this month is 94.
I don't remember Starmade server attendance being this low in the past four years. While correlation =! causation it is a trend to be aware of.

It may be the cool thing to do on here to try to fit in, but denying obvious trends and problems does not address the issues. The whole "meta" discussion is a moot point. Game balance is probably the best it's ever been. The problem is player retention and growth.

You could take the word "starmade" out of your statement replace with it another game. I've yet to play a game that doesn't have players take a break from the game. There isn't a game that I know of that can hold all it's players attentions and not to mention a majority of gamers are not going to play one game all the time. Most gamers may play starmade for a a while but go months without playing it because there are tons of other games out there to play.

I agree you shouldn't deny a problem if it exist but making a big deal out of something that happens to all games is a little much in my opinion. There are mainstream games with 100s of million dollar budgets having this same conversation and sometimes it's valid but most of the time it's not. Starmade is not even a finish game yet we are all playing a Alpha version of the game which an Alpha version of a game isn't there to please anyone. It's a play at your own risk kind of thing until they get all the bugs worked but once this game is finish then I can understand having this conversation.

 

[Madman198237]

This thread really, really, REALLY needs to lie down and die a quiet death.

Personally, I think that there's lots of people who don't use Steam (Extra steps to load the game sometimes) and that the real way to tell would be to get some system somewhere that could somehow measure online and SP play time aggregates for periods of time and compare the change over time.

There, I brought economics and data analysis into it. We don't have solid metrics, so conclusions right now are utterly and completely unsupported...mostly.
Other than the conclusion that some things are occasionally broken in an alpha-stage game. Oh, look, that sounds like SM!

 

[StormWing0]

Unless you recorded the number of active players through the server list that'd be the only way to check how many totally players were online but that only gets multiplayer server users.

Also this topic needs to die already.

 

[Jerry_Brinefield]

Yeah, that's part of the problem. It's been ~3 dudes working on this game in their spare time for the past three years.

It's not like the "Starmade is dead!" criers have no impetus for these claims. Server attendance and steam stats show a marked drop in players. While there are spikes, most of them are associated with updates and new version releases. Weekends are still (relatively) active but there is still a downward trend. I don't want to evoke tomino here but it is a little alarming. Average playercount for starmade this month is 94.
I don't remember Starmade server attendance being this low in the past four years. While correlation =! causation it is a trend to be aware of.

It may be the cool thing to do on here to try to fit in, but denying obvious trends and problems does not address the issues. The whole "meta" discussion is a moot point. Game balance is probably the best it's ever been. The problem is player retention and growth.

Those stats are actually really interesting. While the steam graph isnt representative of all users, I'd say that its probably a scalar representation. While the actual number of people playing starmade is probably much higher (me for instance I don't use steam), the graph of people playing versus time probably looks very similar. As the learning curve continues to increase and the content continues to stagnate, it's likely that we will see a continuing decline until the next major update or content release. This game has largely survived off of its uniqueness and amazing building system, but those legs can only carry it so far as the genre begins to become more polluted/competitive.

And in regards to your conclusions about the relevancy of the data, I absolutely agree with your analysis. While you cannot make a conclusive determination, you can create a pretty good estimate of what it actually looks like. Hell, just look at the forums. While the fleet submissions have caused a surge in activity, for the most part, this place has been a ghost town. It's something crazy like one reply to shipyard threads a day. Hopefully new content will turn all that around.

 

[Comr4de]

There, I brought economics and data analysis into it. We don't have solid metrics, so conclusions right now are utterly and completely unsupported...mostly.
Other than the conclusion that some things are occasionally broken in an alpha-stage game. Oh, look, that sounds like SM!

We absolutely have solid metrics. Steam stats are a good indicator of steam user interest in starmade. I'm not blowing anything up. I've been around for a long time and things have slown down a lot around here. If you're having fun, great, fantastic. I'm not trying to take that from you. But the trend of "people are giving up on the game and less people are playing it" is clearly demonstrable with steam stats, server graphs, and other metrics that we have at our disposal. For fucks sake, two major servers have shut down in the past month (Mikeland and EI). Mikeland was even kind enough to share how the playerbase had dwindled in the waning days of the server. It's a perfectly valid subject for discussion, if you don't want to see the thread then fuck off and ignore the thread.

You could take the word "starmade" out of your statement replace with it another game. I've yet to play a game that doesn't have players take a break from the game. There isn't a game that I know of that can hold all it's players attentions and not to mention a majority of gamers are not going to play one game all the time. Most gamers may play starmade for a a while but go months without playing it because there are tons of other games out there to play.

I agree you shouldn't deny a problem if it exist but making a big deal out of something that happens to all games is a little much in my opinion. There are mainstream games with 100s of million dollar budgets having this same conversation and sometimes it's valid but most of the time it's not. Starmade is not even a finish game yet we are all playing a Alpha version of the game which an Alpha version of a game isn't there to please anyone. It's a play at your own risk kind of thing until they get all the bugs worked but once this game is finish then I can understand having this conversation.

Okay, but most games also don't spend four years in alpha. Starmade is a niche game, and of course I don't expect the same playerbase as LoL or DOTA or any other game you'd use as an example. Except there IS a trend (AND A PROBLEM), and if you had bothered to click any of the links I posted you would see that. Let's look at another early access game, SubNautica. I'm picking this partially because it's niche-ier than starmade but similar enough in gameplay to make a comparison. There is a clear difference in player attendance. Again, I'm not saying starmade is dead, but the average player count is now in the double digits and the way forward is unclear at best. Schine has a bad habit of releasing new features with minimal functionality or outright broken. Look at mining fleets, shipyards, weapons. At release, they were incomplete or had major bugs that interfered with their use. Shipyards are still unusable with any ship using turrets. Many negative reviews for starmade on steam note this problem in particular as the cause for the negative review. I've been with this game for over three years now. I was part of the first council term. I wouldn't sink this kind of time into a game I hate. I'm not trying to shit all over schema, I'm just concerned that a game I love is displaying necrotic symptoms.

And in regards to your conclusions about the relevancy of the data, I absolutely agree with your analysis. While you cannot make a conclusive determination, you can create a pretty good estimate of what it actually looks like. Hell, just look at the forums. While the fleet submissions have caused a surge in activity, for the most part, this place has been a ghost town. It's something crazy like one reply to shipyard threads a day. Hopefully new content will turn all that around.

Yeah, none of my data is conclusive but it all corroborates what the other data points to. If there was some way for the registry to track time spent in game (spoilers: it doesn't) it would be a simple matter of asking for access to that data. New content is always nice, but what kind of feature would be enough to rekindle public interest in the game? We've already had our steam release almost two years ago and very few games have ever successfully pulled off a "relaunch". The question to Schine at this point should be "How do you intend to rekindle interest in starmade, and what is the plan to get there?".

 

[Zyrr]

Most of you are too new to really notice the trend. Virtually all active members besides a handful (of whom I can name off the top of my head easily) are post-Steam release or just around it. You were never here to see the life factions used to have, the life servers used to have, the life chat and the forums used to have. The decline in player activity has been gradual since then, and the unseasoned could pass it off as normal despite it not being so.

I'm not saying that in a braggadocios or egotistical way - I envy you all and I'm sure the others do too. Ignorance is bliss, as they say. But the game, as it stands, is very far along a downwards spiral and unless the Schine team turns itself around it will remain so.

 

[Top 4ce]

Okay, but most games also don't spend four years in alpha. Starmade is a niche game, and of course I don't expect the same playerbase as LoL or DOTA or any other game you'd use as an example. Except there IS a trend (AND A PROBLEM), and if you had bothered to click any of the links I posted you would see that. Let's look at another early access game, SubNautica. I'm picking this partially because it's niche-ier than starmade but similar enough in gameplay to make a comparison. There is a clear difference in player attendance. Again, I'm not saying starmade is dead, but the average player count is now in the double digits and the way forward is unclear at best. Schine has a bad habit of releasing new features with minimal functionality or outright broken. Look at mining fleets, shipyards, weapons. At release, they were incomplete or had major bugs that interfered with their use. Shipyards are still unusable with any ship using turrets. Many negative reviews for starmade on steam note this problem in particular as the cause for the negative review. I've been with this game for over three years now. I was part of the first council term. I wouldn't sink this kind of time into a game I hate. I'm not trying to shit all over schema, I'm just concerned that a game I love is displaying necrotic symptoms.


Yeah, none of my data is conclusive but it all corroborates what the other data points to. If there was some way for the registry to track time spent in game (spoilers: it doesn't) it would be a simple matter of asking for access to that data. New content is always nice, but what kind of feature would be enough to rekindle public interest in the game? We've already had our steam release almost two years ago and very few games have ever successfully pulled off a "relaunch". The question to Schine at this point should be "How do you intend to rekindle interest in starmade, and what is the plan to get there?".

It's hard to argue with that, to be honest, and you bring up very good points. I agree with most of it. However I want to bring a different perspective from one who's played the game just about as long.

I think this issue has been seen by Schine before it ever started to get to where we are today, and I also think that the devs are already creating solutions for it. I see the recent developments in the game as building the framework for more robust and interesting systems. We as a community have been told the plans of where this game is headed and the features involved. The features have been implemented as they said they would, but a lot of them as you say are very rough. This game is currently not for the impatient to be sure. I do see the light at the end of the tunnel (as in successful release, not death). I don't think this game's numbers will increase a whole lot till the beta stage, the support for starting players just isn't there.

To bring a comparison, look at KSP. It's development cycle was similar, and up until the recent 1.1 release, it was hard to call the game complete. In the earlier days of development, the game had a small and hardcore community because very few knew how to do things within the game. As the game became more approachable to newer players, more players came. I think our community is currently the small and hardcore one, because this game is daunting to new players. With new features and changes to old ones its even more difficult. This of course is obvious to the team, and I think they're rushing features out so the can work on better education systems and balancing mechanics. I don't think this game is dying, I think this game is difficult to approach from a new players stand point, add little to do after the basics, and only the hardcore stick around till release.

 

[Promethesus]

Personally, many many years ago, I played this game, and got hooked on it, i lost my first ship because i didnt know about sheilds.
My goals were to better my ship to withstand against pirates, when i finally managed to kill a pirate and steal the loot to sell, i bought more supplies to even better my ship. I then ran into a player, and lost, which inspired me to better my ship even further. As i grew more into the game, i made alliances with the higher powers, and eventually moved onto what was called rebel alliance (now redshift) server, before it was shut down. The server had 30+ players, and i enjoyed flying my ships to spawn locations for all the new guys to check out, and i'd fly them back to my base and show them the ropes of the game. With the introduction of warp drives, i saw fewer and fewer players within the proximity of spawn, wormholes and jump gates threw them further. on a sever with 30+- players, it became rare to find another player.

Ive always wondered about schema adding a few official servers, this way majority of the players could be on it, and since its a official server, schema and his crew could closely monitor the server's performance and tweak it to optimal performance, to keep lag down, yet allow more players on a server, and to figure out what incentives to add for players to still remain within close proximity of each other (certain planets which regenerate rare minerals for special blocks like jump/warp gates) And with those incentives, players would claim those areas, and make trade routes with other players, to establish a kind of economy, people would pvp for sectors, trade for resources, and explore for opportunity.

Some planets should generate unique resources (1 mineral per planet, for a defined sector perimeter , requries players to explore planets, without completely destroying them.)

Another incentive, would be searching for planets with life forms( claim the planet, get extra *Highly skilled* crew members)
Simple things like this make the game more broad and interesting, having multiple incentives to go out, establish a empire, trade, fight, and survive. be the best?