Sometimes, you need to be positive.

[Comradecolonel]

Looks like the fanbois are still mad that somebody dare disagree with the devs. If you honestly think that the reason that the game has been having issues is because of the community, you crazy. Its having issues because the development team is riding by the seat of their pants. When they don't know what to do they reach into their big box of suggestions and pull something out. Having kept up with the development of many games and mods over the years, I would not put the Starmade dev team too high on my list. They aren't bad people obviously, but it is clear to me that there is a lot of room for improvement.

The planning of features, implementation and general thought processes have been lackluster since I've been here. We never know what we are getting because the devs keep changing what is a priority and what is not. Game systems have been recreated again, and again. I know its alpha, but I know of very few alpha games that scrap their main mechanics multiple times. Not features mind you, like the core mechanics of the game. Imagine a shooter where the devs every year decided to scrap all the weapons and damage model and make a new one. I wouldn't imagine too many people would just go along with that.

It's funny because while there was a group of people that were rude and obnoxious about how they felt, the majority of people were reasonable and offered a lot of suggestions. Many of the suggestions were listened to and attempts were made at improving the system. The reason that people are still upset is because the systems that were reworked really don't add much to the game. Is it really worth scrapping my entire fleet for a frankensteined system rework. All the systems provide almost the exact same functionality that they did before. I really don't see the point.

I think instead of being standoffish with the people that disagree with the devs you should just forget it. I've seen so many threads like this that essentially tell people to quit whining and just love Starmade. I love Starmade why can't you? We disagree, simple as that. You might not like what people have to say, or how they say it, but there's no point in trying to convince they with the same weak and tired arguments.

 

[Aesthetics]

I get the distinct feeling that this thread will devolve into passive-aggressive finger-pointing.

Well done, Aesthetics. You're perceptive, as always. Abandon thread.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Or they could wait for development to continue patiently and quietly. There's no need to scream, that doesn't accomplish anything.

That leads to the problem I originally cited to time and resource being wasted on intrinsically flawed ideas. Schine is good enough at programing to pull off a great game. What they do with voxel optimisation is something that nobody gives them enough credit for. Loading a a 5 million block movable, multi-entity, voxel system and then being able to blow it up with another 5 million block ship while playing on an off-the-shelf 7 year old computer is nothing short of a modern marvel. But where their low-level technical skills shine, their eye for game-system mechanics is rather lack-lust. Most notably, they seem to lack the ability recognize exploits in their ideas on their own which typically get predicted within minutes of ideas being released to the player base.

I don't expect them to be better than they are, but they historically make poor use of the community they have at their fingertips.

Also, if we all just shut up, new power would still be tied to 1-dimensional stab distances... or in the grander since, the game would still have docked armor, zero-point injectors, chain-jammers, pulse-drives and/or chain-drives, targeting disruptors, speed-tanking, docked batteries, and docked passive exploits, etc. as the standard issue requirements to make a "basic" warship.

And in all honesty, that was the community's fault.

We had a group that made it their mission to do nothing but scream at the devs and stamp their feet until they got their way. They'd say X is a problem, and suggest Y as a fix. Devs would go "Hey, you know, you're right, X is a problem. We hear ya about Y, but we think Z is a better solution, so we're going to do that right now." Said group then screamed that the devs didn't listen (despite the fact the thing they were screaming about was a direct result of the devs listening), and were just overall very hostile and toxic towards them.

While I agree that cooler heads should have prevailed here, you are missing the fact that Z often made bigger problems than X or just plain included new problems that Y would not have had.

• Zero-Point Reactors/Shield Injectors - They removed the ability to add self servicing support tools, instead of just fixing the return algorithm on entities protected by EMP/Ion.
• Docked Armor - They added restrictive bubble shields instead of fixing inheritance and penetration issues... there are still exploitable penetration issues BTW.
• Integrity - Both me and you proposed highly performant systems that would not have crashed the game, but now months later, the game still dies from blowing up a frigate.
• Power 2.0 Chambers - All the original talk was about making reactors become increasinging complex with bigger ships so that you would have to "design" it, by adding chambers. The biggest complaint about why power 2.0 was needed was that Aux power made designing power systems on big ships all about dropping copy-paste cubes of systems. Very few people cared about self powered turrets because they frankly didn't help much. This update was supposed to give ships more flavor in how they are powered. Instead, chambers became a catch-all for all effects that became illogically bound to power output and destroyed all sorts of game mechanics that took years to get balanced right, and destroyed all sorts of creative freedom along with it... frankly I could write a college thesis on the problems that happened here.
• Power 3.0 Weapons - Still in dev; so, I don't want to be too critical yet, but BOY are there some major oversights here already.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes their ideas are great. New beam tracking system and faster cannon velocities seem like well thought out improvements. While I don't like many things about how chambers are implemented, I do like the general idea of chamber skill trees.

 

[NaStral]

At this point there's not much that can be done. Are people disappointed with decisions by Schine? Yes. Can some interesting things still come out of this game as it changes? Sure. I think one of the major issues was and still is people still putting too much faith or expectation in products that are ultimately beyond their control. I think a lot of people seem to latch on to games in an alpha state because they (often accurately, but certainly not 100%) believe they can influence it's direction and also meet others with similar interests and goals. That state of player engagement can be harnessed for good but the downside is you are also going to get a lot of egos butting heads over things with each other and the devs. I'm not really sure it could have gone any other way considering the various strong personalities involved.

In spite of all this people should still make their suggestions and criticisms. If you feel your not being given what you believe your due, then try your luck with competitors. This goes for servers too.

 

[Edymnion]

While I don't like many things about how chambers are implemented, I do like the general idea of chamber skill trees.

See, this I find perfectly acceptable.

I like the general idea of holistic, defined, connected systems. Hence, I like chambers and conduits. I do actually feel like I'm building something "real" when I use it as opposed to the previous "Well this gordian knot makes no sense logically, intuitively, or in-universe, but thats the way it is" reactor line system we had.

I like the reactor trees and how ships are forced to specialize.

Is the system perfect? No, of course it isn't. But as long as we can agree on a basic "Welp, this is the system we have now, we gotta work with it, not against it", I think we can make it better.

That was the other big issue people were getting wrong, IMO. The whole "The old way worked (and we're used to it's flaws now), and this new way isn't 100% perfect right out of the gate, so abandon it and flush a year or two's work down the drain!". Even when it was quite clear that this was the direction things were going in, people wanted to trash all of it, and that obviously just wasn't going to happen.

But, if we can all shift gears to "Okay, this basic idea is here to stay. How can we optimize it, smooth it out, and make it more interesting to use?" then everyone will win in the long run.

 

[Arcaner]

This thread is a joke, pretty sure half of the people not responding feel like-

 

[Nosajimiki]

See, this I find perfectly acceptable.

I like the general idea of holistic, defined, connected systems. Hence, I like chambers and conduits. I do actually feel like I'm building something "real" when I use it as opposed to the previous "Well this gordian knot makes no sense logically, intuitively, or in-universe, but thats the way it is" reactor line system we had.

I like the reactor trees and how ships are forced to specialize.

Is the system perfect? No, of course it isn't. But as long as we can agree on a basic "Welp, this is the system we have now, we gotta work with it, not against it", I think we can make it better.

That was the other big issue people were getting wrong, IMO. The whole "The old way worked (and we're used to it's flaws now), and this new way isn't 100% perfect right out of the gate, so abandon it and flush a year or two's work down the drain!". Even when it was quite clear that this was the direction things were going in, people wanted to trash all of it, and that obviously just wasn't going to happen.

But, if we can all shift gears to "Okay, this basic idea is here to stay. How can we optimize it, smooth it out, and make it more interesting to use?" then everyone will win in the long run.

Well, there was a lot of talk about how to make chambers more balanced, but it all got ignored or overlooked. (Thus my original statement about better communication, no better responsiveness). Right now, only the reactor has a "Class", and all chambers are equally scaled to it, no matter how inconsequential. Instead each chamber should be scaled to the relevant subsystems of your ships, and in some cases, even strait mass. These proportions should be something logical like this:

Thrusters > Mobility Chambers
Reactor > Reactor Chambers
Shield Generators > Shield Capacitors AND Shield Chambers
Armor (Basic/Standard/Advanced) > Armor Chambers
Salvagers/factories > Logistics Chambers
[Anywhere: just based on mass] > Stealth, FTL, and Mass chambers
[There needs to a primary system for this] > Recon​

This would allow balancing system sizes based on relevance (a key feature of power 1.0 passives that we lost with this update). Just because ship A has a 10 times bigger reactor than ship B does not mean I should need 10x as big of a thruster chamber if they both have the same amount of thrusters.

If you want to encourage the "making it real" element, you could even make it so that you need to pipe multiple systems together before you feed it into a chamber where using more than one. This allow creative layouts with distributive systems, while still encouraging localization of like systems. So, if you want 3 shield generators, but one shield chamber, you could use conduits to connect them: this tells the game to treat them all as one group for purposes of chambers, then conduit one of them to the chamber (this maintains the single pathway logic necessary for trees.) The main point here is that if you have a big thruster, but a small shield, your big thrusters should need big chambers in comparison to your shields. They could all still share the same tech point pool, that is fine, but it would be much more logical.

As for your comment about people missing specific elements of power 1.0, I think you've missed the point. Very few people were saying "stop changing things", they were saying "stop replacing things that work better, encourage more thoughtful designs, or encourage more creative freedom with systems that don't fix anything." There is a very big difference. Again, I'm not saying that Schine is incompetent or that the community is always right. I'm just saying, a better dialogue and understanding of how people play the game would go a long way.