In regard to potential competition on the pre-alpha-frontier, I'm actually more excited about 'The Dual Universe'. Because those guys really want to build a sandbox game, that can scale up to massive multiplayer. That is something, starmade can't do. What is the vastness of a virtual universe worth, if only a very limited number of players can 'live' in it. So that's a big dream for me
Great dream. I think a lot of us share that. The network and server code for SM has needed work for a long time and has never gotten much attention. More than 1 galaxy = crash. We've asked the devs to remove them / add a config line to limit # galaxies. No response. More than 30 or so players = crash. Any big battle = lag & crash. No useful entity cleanup tools. No AI tools. Buggy AI & NPC spawns. Planets buggy & crashy.
So SM isn't mmo. Some of us have tried to mod it to have some MOBA or PVP arena gameplay, and it is just buggy. Gravity is a problem. Planets are buggy. Space arenas are a nightmare of bouncing from one sector boundary to another (big sectors just crash the game and ruin the rest of the galaxy).
Across the history of development, Server & client stability and performance has gone steadily down instead of up. This is not progress.
I don't think Schine anymore can figure out what they really want SM to be, but it's not any longer what it started as.
...That is unless Schine does something to drive away all its players.
Well, we're all seeing them hard at work on this very thing right now, and for the past few months. They're dinking around changing the fundametal structure of the game at a pre-pre-alpha level, even pre-coding level. The proposed power & system changes take SM all the way back to whiteboard and brainstorming level and they should have done this before EVER writing the first lines of code.
Schine are not developing well, and it makes me & a ton of others worry that SM was just a cash grab to make a new start-up studio, especially with the Steam release. Statistically, "everyone" has left this game. SM is already dead, and the devs are pushing many of the leftover stalwarts like myself farther away towards quitting with all their continued BS.
We've been asking for some things, features, bug fixes, now for 3-4 YEARS. We've been playing, promoting, streaming, hosting & paying for servers, testing, bug-reporting for 4+ years now, and many of the bugs we've worked so hard on are completely irrelevant now... Server admins have NEVER gotten any support or features... That's a slap in the face.
Big
Slap.
In.
The.
Face.
This is not how a good game & devs treat their players & testers.