Is this game dead?

[benzilla3]

The community is REALLY small. For a space sandbox game of this scale, the most populated server on a summer night should not consist of 27 people. A while ago, Youtubers caused the game's population to spike, but now apparently the population has fallen down again.

I have been following this game, but I still can't really tell for sure. And by ''dead'' I mean RIGHT NOW, I am not saying ''is there no hope that the community will grow ever at all''. I am just wondering if there is some hidden colony of Starmade players on a server that for some reason doesn't show up on the Starmade servers list (http://starmade-servers.com/servers/players/).

Oh yeah, don't get all defensive and shit because DEAD≠BAD (Global Agenda is a good example). Last time I asked this a lot of fanboys got pissed off at me for no apparent reason, so spare yourself some dignity and don't make yourself look stupid.

 

[Planr]

Indeed, we have lost around (i'd say) 90% of the playerbase we had last year when yogscast did a three-episode series on Starmade. Back then, our game's popularity exploded. Our old IRC chat system literally had over a thousand people in it on one night. We had so many help threads from newbie yogscaster fans than we could handle.
Now, I think we're better prepared this time for such a thing to reoccur again, and perhaps this year Yogscast can do another video series on the game, and given that we have lots of more content compared to when they last played this game, there is plenty more for them to do.

We just need to get back in the spotlight again. That's all :D

 

[CyberTao]

Indeed, we have lost around (i'd say) 90% of the playerbase we had last year when yogscast did a three-episode series on Starmade. Back then, our game's popularity exploded. Our old IRC chat system literally had over a thousand people in it on one night. We had so many help threads from newbie yogscaster fans than we could handle.
Now, I think we're better prepared this time for such a thing to reoccur again, and perhaps this year Yogscast can do another video series on the game, and given that we have lots of more content compared to when they last played this game, there is plenty more for them to do.

We just need to get back in the spotlight again. That's all :D

Not sure how great, but there might be a Minor Boom.
Yogcast is doing a small Animated series based off their old Videos, next episode is gonna takes clips from their Starmade series o -o

But yeah, would like to see a small boom, even if only for a while *^*

 

[Qweesdy]

Let me walk through how someone like me plays a game like this. You want to be awesome, which means having an awesome ship. To build an awesome ship you come up with the initial concept and draw rough sketches on paper to work out the shape of the hull, what sorts of systems it'll have on it, what types of things will dock onto it where, etc. This can take a full day of planning or more.

After that you start researching all the formulas for things like thrust, power regen, DPS, shield capacity, etc. Based on those formulas you build up a mathematical model of the ship's design. I'm a programmer so I do this by writing an ugly hacky utility in C or Java; but you could do it in a spreadsheet or manually on paper or whatever. The point of this is to get good estimates of how many blocks in what configuration you need and to allow you to "tweak" the design to get the maximum benefits. I actually start from the player's credit limit (~2 billion credits) and work backwards from that to determine everything else (blocks needed for shields, power, each weapon system, etc). It can take several days of work.

Once all that's done I start building a prototype hull, interior areas and the docking areas; then start designing and building the docked ships (turrets, etc). After that it's time to fill in the middle. For a large ship this can take quite some time; especially if you're doing anything slightly complicated (e.g. your design includes "docked power generators" used to boost the mother-ship's power regeneration or something). Of course this is just the original prototype - if the estimates from the design stage weren't very good, you scrap it and start again (which can mean going back to your "ugly hacky utility" and adjusting calculations, etc and then starting again from your empty shell; but can also mean going right back to the "sketches on paper" phase) .

Basically; from start to finish, designing and building a ship can easily take several weeks of work.

Now...

When I found out (many months ago) that the weapons systems were going to be redesigned; I stopped playing because there's no point building decent ships when you know you'll have to rip them apart and rebuild them again to suit the game's new weapons systems.

Now that the weapons systems have been updated I've "tinkered". However, the weapons are still unbalanced and the way shields work may be changing "soon"; and until all that settles down (e.g. we reach a consensus on weapon balance) there's still not much point building decent ships when you know you'll have to rip them apart and rebuild them again to suit "correctly balanced weapons" and the new shield system.

Of course once all of that has happened, there's going to be something else (thruster changes? FTL?), and there still won't be much point building decent ships when you know...

Do you see a pattern emerging?

 

[Qweesdy]

Do you see a pattern emerging?

Also note that to do all the planning and design, I only really need the formulas. It doesn't actually matter if it's implemented in the game or not.

For a random example; if I knew that in a few months time FTL will be implemented, and that I'll need "(shipMass / 16) * (shipMass / 16)" new FLT blocks to make it work and that it's going to cost "(shipWidth + shipHeight + shipLength) * 1234" of power to activate it; then I can do everything needed to design and build an FLT capable ship that just has a hole in the middle somewhere (where the FTL blocks would go some time in the future when FTL is added to the game).

 

[0ldSkull]

spare yourself some dignity and don't make yourself look stupid.

 

[FlyingDebris]

I do have to agree, faction recruitment is a sad example of how slow things have gotten. I remember back in the early days of the faction we had 6-7 people online at any given time. Now, and this applies to every faction across the board, it's rare to see three or more online at a time unless there's an attack.

What we need is a lot of fresh blood, and another yogswarm would do just fine now that we have the resources to handle it.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

The game isn't dead, but it may be dying. I would just cite Qweesdy as a reason. However, another reason will be if the developers listen to the very vocal screechy noobers who want to change every single fundamental thing in the game (will be naming no names, but we already know who they are...).

I do hope I'm wrong, this game is one of the best I've seen and Space Engineers just doesn't match up. I also like the community here on the forums especially with people like Aceface and Ithirahad kicking about.

Spoiler

Every game or project will have dark days so let's just hope we come through it looking good

 

[Jonj57]

However, another reason will be if the developers listen to the very vocal screechy noobers who want to change every single fundamental thing in the game

While off topic, I'd like to point out that just because somebody has a different vision for the game as you doesn't mean that your opinion on where the game should be is any more or less valid than theirs.

 

[MrFURB]

Dead? Hmmm... Not on the dev's part, definitely. The community is at a size that points to about how much effort is being put into gaining mass popularity, which isn't much.
I think Schema's going to wait until the game is all shiny and beta before attempting any marketing for exactly the reasons Qweesdy pointed out; mechanics that are integral to the game are being replaced as they begin to show their age relative to new features. I'm sure that Schema and friends are learning tons as they make Starmade, and often look at older parts of the game and think 'What the heck IS that?'

I'm of the opinion that we'll see a lot of stream and Youtube activity once the game portion of the game is implemented and ship building is finalized.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

While off topic, I'd like to point out that just because somebody has a different vision for the game as you doesn't mean that your opinion on where the game should be is any more or less valid than theirs.

I'm fine with other people's opinions. I'm on about a few select few people who a while ago may have started a very inflammatory discussion because people disagreed with them and it basically amounted to 'Yeah? Well you're clearly not educated enough to disagree with me!' This was a while ago though so maybe I overreacted.

I can see why my post looked dickish tho, apologies for that.

 

[Aecetym]

I've been thinking this for quite some time now.

This game is pretty much still only a sandbox building game. We got a new weapons system, but this fighting other players is still as pointless as before. The new logic system is in a nutshell a fancy door opener (don't reply on this with a list of all it's small uses), using it for animating detail on a ship will result in the logic system crashing after a short while or falling out of sinc. The economy/crafting aspects of this game are to put it in 1 word 'laughable'. ...

Now I know this is an alpha so I'm not going to keep beating the dead horse, just wanted to point out this game offers very little except building. And because of it a lot of great builders and your average players alike have just left the game.

And at the moment I'm pretty much still waiting for the next stable update before I can start refitting my ships just because

...there's no point building decent ships when you know you'll have to rip them apart and rebuild them again to suit the game's new (weapons) systems. ...

 

[kupu]

Huh? I think i recall Duke saying we were seeing more traffic then ever?

Keep shouting something loud enough for long enough and more people will join in, regardless of it's veracity i suppose :D

I think it feels like the community has shrunk as a few prominent figures from a year back are now no longer with us. But newer ones are emerging. Also, like others have said, we've not been pushing for publicity (yet) or released to steam or even gotten out of alpha.

I am just wondering if there is some hidden colony of Starmade players on a server that for some reason doesn't show up on the Starmade servers list (http://starmade-servers.com/servers/players/).

Yea, i think there is actually. There was quite a sizeable french Star-made community last time i checked. Also just by gauging from the twitter hashtags i think theres a following in Japan.

Is the game mega huge and servers packed? Nah, not yet. Hopefully soon though!

 

[QuinnSquared]

As a side note, publicly listed servers aren't the only place people hang out. I happen to have private server that I don't advertise often because it can't handle very many people at any one time, but I've had most of my friends on there. I happen to dislike big servers because I feel out of place on them, so public servers are actually not much of a draw to me, and I'm sure there are other players like me who really do just enjoy building a big project on their own time in their own little pocket of the universe.
So while the servers may not have many people on them, they could be playing single player too.

 

[rariisan]

The new logic system is in a nutshell a fancy door opener (don't reply on this with a list of all it's small uses), using it for animating detail on a ship will result in the logic system crashing after a short while or falling out of sinc.

You should be ashamed for talking about something you most probably know nothing about. I know you aren't now, but in 3 months you'll look back and say "God, was I ignorant".

 

[Aecetym]

You should be ashamed for talking about something you most probably know nothing about. I know you aren't now, but in 3 months you'll look back and say "God, was I ignorant".

3 months is a long time, but lets say it gets optimized, new blocks are added, ... What I said now about it, at this time, is still true for this moment.

The moment you start with personal attacks you lost the argument. And in your case you didn't even gave anything to argue about, just pointed out that in the future the logic system might be more optimized and most likely expanded. What will most likely be the case.

 

[BDLS]

Most players losses are likely from people who don't have the patience to sit through alpha/beta changes. I've definitely had some periods where I get burned out from it. Retrofitting ships can be a chore, I can see why people with really large fleets lose their will to continue with constant changes. I'm sure once the game reaches a more complete stage there will be a popularity spike and a steady increase in player population. Lots of great changes lately, but personally I'm waiting for combat to get smoother before devoting a ton of time into the game.

 

[Maranello]

I remember the time when Captainn_Spaulding was doing livestreams with 80+ viewers when doing the Thunderdome-turnaments in august 2013. im trying to do something similar, but with a racetrack instead. It takes a lot of work to make people interessed in what I do, and to build and plan all the events D:

 

[Ithirahad]

Let me walk through how someone like me plays a game like this. You want to be awesome, which means having an awesome ship. To build an awesome ship you come up with the initial concept and draw rough sketches on paper to work out the shape of the hull, what sorts of systems it'll have on it, what types of things will dock onto it where, etc. This can take a full day of planning or more.

After that you start researching all the formulas for things like thrust, power regen, DPS, shield capacity, etc. Based on those formulas you build up a mathematical model of the ship's design. I'm a programmer so I do this by writing an ugly hacky utility in C or Java; but you could do it in a spreadsheet or manually on paper or whatever. The point of this is to get good estimates of how many blocks in what configuration you need and to allow you to "tweak" the design to get the maximum benefits. I actually start from the player's credit limit (~2 billion credits) and work backwards from that to determine everything else (blocks needed for shields, power, each weapon system, etc). It can take several days of work.

Once all that's done I start building a prototype hull, interior areas and the docking areas; then start designing and building the docked ships (turrets, etc). After that it's time to fill in the middle. For a large ship this can take quite some time; especially if you're doing anything slightly complicated (e.g. your design includes "docked power generators" used to boost the mother-ship's power regeneration or something). Of course this is just the original prototype - if the estimates from the design stage weren't very good, you scrap it and start again (which can mean going back to your "ugly hacky utility" and adjusting calculations, etc and then starting again from your empty shell; but can also mean going right back to the "sketches on paper" phase) .

Basically; from start to finish, designing and building a ship can easily take several weeks of work.

Now...

When I found out (many months ago) that the weapons systems were going to be redesigned; I stopped playing because there's no point building decent ships when you know you'll have to rip them apart and rebuild them again to suit the game's new weapons systems.

Now that the weapons systems have been updated I've "tinkered". However, the weapons are still unbalanced and the way shields work may be changing "soon"; and until all that settles down (e.g. we reach a consensus on weapon balance) there's still not much point building decent ships when you know you'll have to rip them apart and rebuild them again to suit "correctly balanced weapons" and the new shield system.

Of course once all of that has happened, there's going to be something else (thruster changes? FTL?), and there still won't be much point building decent ships when you know...

Do you see a pattern emerging?

This is why my ships are always partially hollow. :P

 

[Viridis00]

Most players losses are likely from people who don't have the patience to sit through alpha/beta changes. I've definitely had some periods where I get burned out from it. Retrofitting ships can be a chore, I can see why people with really large fleets lose their will to continue with constant changes. I'm sure once the game reaches a more complete stage there will be a popularity spike and a steady increase in player population. Lots of great changes lately, but personally I'm waiting for combat to get smoother before devoting a ton of time into the game.

I've felt the burnout myself. I'm not really interested in playing until everything is decently balanced out for vanilla. Once we get more features and stuff, I totally want to jump onto a multiplayer server and do some stuff though.

Starmade is certainly far from a dead game though, especially in development. Nowadays if a game isn't AAA you can't really expect the server traffic COD and Minecraft kiddies generate. Strangely enough as an adult I forget kids are a huge playerbase for games, and sci-fi is more niche now than ever I feel. Not popular with kids for the most part.

If anyone really wants to see what a ded game looks like, take a look at Corneroids.

RIP, SWEET PRINCE.