Question about development (Oct 2015)

[TartarusMkII]

Rather than saying this to each quote, I'll put this forward first:

I quit the game at the beginning of summer, after spending time at Shattered Skies. A few users and moderators there convinced me that I should try to run for the council as a representative of new players. Following issues with the game, the server, the community, and a 0% retention rate of everyone I tried to bring to the game (and creating data for development about why they all quit), I chose to back out of the game and wait to see an improvement; I had lost faith that the council functioned properly, and I once again doubted that the developers genuinely wanted to know what new players were thinking, because the new player's experience and voice was being squelched at every turn I came to.

Without bringing in unnecessary detail, I was given the idea by someone important, that by wanting to represent the new player's perspective, I was "weaseling my way" into places I was not needed. Now, I understand that the community of SS is not all developers, and I absolutely separate the two in my mind. Needless to say I was discouraged from continuing, and that's where my last point of contact was with SM.

Unfortunately, because of this i get the feeling people assume we are capable of working on ONLY what we have mentioned.
As others have stated (and poor Bench has to keep reiterating), multiple projects are worked on concurrently by different departments

Hi Kupu, thanks for the response. I realize this, But my biggest concern with the road map as I last saw it (which was when it was first revealed, mind you), is that A) it did not address any of the concerns that the majority of non-veteran players had, and should have already been known, and B) there were things that I already knew (leaks) were purposely being hidden from the road map, which in my mind belayed the transparency from square zero. I feel that the point of the road map is to avoid surprises, but there were already plans to have surprises. I think there's a difference between a surprise project, and a test project that the devs don't want to tease the community with. That line was not, in my mind, drawn properly.

Again, the contact is good, but some of the most !@#$ed up AAA games had supposedly the most community interactions from the Devs and even the CEO (SOE's Planetside 2) we had ever seen.

I'd like to know if there was a particular aspect of the game that TartarusMkII was looking forward to. It has been well known that flora and fauna would eventually make it into the game, and flesh out some of the astronaut side of things. Additionally lot's of improvements to factions and the economy will be coming.

Hello Criss, thankyou for responding, it's great to hear from you. Before I left SS, I prepared data about the new player experience that still exists on my google drive. I was told by people involved with development that my data was being transferred, and that turned out to either be a misunderstanding, or a lie.

Since you ask, the #1 thing I'd be concerned with, excluding all others, would be ship piracy balance, and glitches with systems that are meant to prevent ship piracy. When new players log on with a missing ship, and no clues as to where it has gone, the game becomes pointless very quickly, and was the leading reason why of my own test group, I had 0% retention.

^ Pretty much what therimmer96So you might see a few releases first-off that have slightly random features, like transporters, or bug fixes or performance stuff etc. But that's only because we're getting in components that we need to integrate with larger features...

Hello Bench, I am happy you chose to respond. I am not a game developer, but was close to joining a development studio in the past. I can definitely understand the separation of responsibilities, and the work flow that comes with that.

My concern that I wish to pass on to Schine, though, is that to a community at large, the actions of our developer-gods mean a lot more than what comes at face value. For example (and I speak for myself), the reason the transporters and race gates bother me so much is that it paints a picture of where development thinks the game is going to go; supposedly that the players want to skip through parts of their ship, avoid any kind of transportation through their ship, and that the players at large would much rather race their ships rather than fight better AI or create industry, even if those two groups of things are developmentally totally unrelated.

Thanks again for your replies, and incase someone gives a !@#$, the alert system meant to e-mail notifications doesn't seem to be working right. I look forward to the community's response!

 

[Bench]

I quit the game at the beginning of summer, after spending time at Shattered Skies. A few users and moderators there convinced me that I should try to run for the council as a representative of new players. Following issues with the game, the server, the community, and a 0% retention rate of everyone I tried to bring to the game (and creating data for development about why they all quit), I chose to back out of the game and wait to see an improvement; I had lost faith that the council functioned properly, and I once again doubted that the developers genuinely wanted to know what new players were thinking, because the new player's experience and voice was being squelched at every turn I came to.

Without bringing in unnecessary detail, I was given the idea by someone important, that by wanting to represent the new player's perspective, I was "weaseling my way" into places I was not needed. Now, I understand that the community of SS is not all developers, and I absolutely separate the two in my mind. But that's where my last point of contact was.

Hello Bench, I am happy you chose to respond. I am not a game developer, but was close to joining a development studio in the past. I can definitely understand the separation of responsibilities, and the work flow that comes with that.

My concern that I wish to pass on to Schine, though, is that to a community at large, the actions of our developer-gods mean a lot more than what comes at face value. For example (and I speak for myself), the reason the transporters and race gates bother me so much is that it paints a picture of where development thinks the game is going to go; supposedly that the players want to skip through parts of their ship, avoid any kind of transportation through their ship, and that the players at large would much rather race their ships rather than fight better AI or create industry, even if those two groups of things are developmentally totally unrelated.

Hey TartarusMkII thanks for replying back. I can't speak to those who advised you not to push the perspective of new players' but I for one would be very keen to see whatever you have been able to put together (PM me and I'll take a look).

Thanks for sharing your concern. I can see how, out of context of a bigger overview of our plans for the game, features of upcoming releases can paint a concerning picture. You mentioned how the roadmap doesn't really express all that's going on. In the past it's been very tentative as we're in Alpha and so features that we might have planned we may realise don't work in the game once tested out in dev builds and the like. So we've generally avoided sharing in detail many features until they're practically released just due to that. We've been working towards being able to share a lot more about our direction of the game, pending a couple things, so expect to hear more about that in the next week or so.

 

[TartarusMkII]

Hey again, Bench.

I know this is generally frowned upon, but I do want to compare SM's process to KSH's Space Engineers. With the exception of some blatant leaks, they are great at keeping secrets. But with those secrets come strategic weekly updates. The gist is that every week, they do work 'in general', but the man assigned to bug fixing is able to at LEAST push bug fixes every week.

Now, at some point they were adding a lot of odd scripting tests, like the ability for modders to make their own scripts and make their own missions, game modes (akin to race gates), and the community started to murmur, "wtf is this all about?" And with that, the community manager wisely explained in a general update post to remind everyone, in good words, that to make AI and other mission-type scenarios, the framework has to be built first.

Compare that process and issue/response to what we've got here for Star Made. And yes, I realize most of Schine is still new at the game in a sense, but Schema is not. Personally, I don't find the explanation that Schema made racing gates to pass the time while he waited for Saber to model things to be respectful of Schema's own intelligence.

 

[AnthonyAnderson]

From what I know: most likely

That would be awesome. No longer have to find and activate a gravity module (assuming there's no logic blocks that already activate it for you) since you'd already be under the ship's gravity effects