.
One could argue that it's because they decided to revisit a core system, which while not perfect worked "pretty well" and had many hours of fine tuning and debugging which are simply being discarded as not good enough.
Agreed. I also agree that "pretty well" was indeed "not good enough".
Far from being "incapable of behaving itself" I think the community has provided a lot* of useful feedback, as well as a lot of less-useful feedback that nevertheless honestly represented the opinion of the player.
My point was that the noise to signal ratio was VERY high. For every person giving cool headed feedback, there were 10 screaming.
The community as a whole has basically stopped playing the game because when the update comes out this is going to be a new and different game. I hope we like it. And I appreciate the devs giving everyone a heads-up that everything we've done so far is going to need to be rebuilt almost from the ground up. That was useful information and players are making rational decisions with the information they've been given.
Agreed. The slump in active players waiting for the update is expected and understandable.
At the time it was first announced, however, it was NOT a rational decision. They had said "Hey, we're thinking about doing this sometime in the future. We don't have it on the time table yet, we're just brainstorming", so the "I'm not going to do ANYTHING until this happens" was just silly because it would be months before it happened.
One of the rational responses of someone who's going to have to throw away dozens of hours of loving labor, because someone else chose to throw away dozens of hours of work, is to lose their shit. That is one of the appropriate, rational responses to the information we've been given.
To which I would say "This is an alpha. You were told up front when you walked in the door that things were changing constantly. If you can't stand the idea of having to redo your stuff, you shouldn't be in an alpha in the first place."
There isn't a single game out there that lets you keep alpha and beta characters when the actual game launches. Everybody has to start over from scratch in any other game. The idea that everything you do is going to be permanent and forever in this one is just silly. Since launch, we've done an overhaul on thrust not once but twice, we've seen docked reactors come and go, we've seen power soft caps double, etc. There have been a LOT of ships invalidated by updates. We will have many more invalidated in the future.
And its not like you have to even start over from scratch here. You can keep your hulls and ships and stations, you just have to retrofit them. Frankly installing systems is EASY. Even the biggest of ships you can fully install systems in in just an hour or two. Making the hull as anything beyond a doom brick takes 10x longer and represents most of the work that goes into any given ship.
