- Joined
- Jul 4, 2013
- Messages
- 425
- Reaction score
- 273
I hate the crafting system so much. It's something that actually interests me, playing survival to build up ships from a planet etc., but it's just so overly complicated for no reason. I also really hate grinding.So, I only really logged in when I checked on the forums because of this thread. That being said I'mma share some ancient wisdom with the newbs having the same old arguments.
TLDR: It's not weapons 3.0, systems 2.0 or even really unnamed Fascist left-wing retards they decided to promote to mod in 2017's fault the game doesn't game anymore.
So, circa 2012-13 on my older account, the game was, quite frankly, crap. But it still had more "game" to it than it than as of the last time I actually played. I'll leave that one as an obtuse statement you can check out for yourselves if you download one of the ANCIENT build.
Fast forward to 2014-15, I'll call this era Weapons 1.0 era. I check back in, but alas I can't remember my password and old email provider has shut down so I'm not getting that back any time soon. Oh well, I'll be DrTarDIS (the name is a meta-joke, and I doubt many have ever figured it out). Oh wow, we got cannons AND missiles now? Cray cray. Missiles are crap tho, yer cray if you use them. Functional player-driven tech tree, better build mode, semi-sane crafting system...damn the game is a GAME now. It is a golden age, each weapons system has a bunch of sliders to let you REALLY tweak your builds. you want a sniper-cannon? Dial-back your reload or your Damage Per Projectile and crank that Projectile Speed and Range. Real easy customization for your blobs of weaponry. Arguably, there is a very exact "best weapon period" being a 2kish blob with 0.1 reload, 8km(4 sector) range, max proj velocity and 2-3 dmg above the hp of advanced armor. Core-drilling was all that mattered. Mounting this weapon system was utterly game-breaking, but only because core-drilling was a thing. Missiles were fun, but useless, only because core-drilling was a thing. SD-BB & SDKB cool concept, flat-faced implementation. GenX Nova admins can only defeat my 2-man-clan if they use /destroy-entity-dock. Even then, it only lasts for about 20 seconds because we own ALL the credits in every shop for 90-some sectors cubed and have them stashed in "black-box" stations. The end-game is forming a post-scarcity society anyway, PvP is just a side-game. Stacking a chain of max-level recipes (which you have to research yourself) so that you have an infinite supply of literally every resource on hand. Cannons, shields, hull? Can make all of it in server-breaking quantities in around 10 minutes out of a 2 flowers and a bit of lava for seed. That's the endgame. Sweet. PvP salt-n-pepper on the side.
2015-16 we see several major improvements to the game. Also, several total face-plants that are to this day unaddressed. Shields are split into recharge and capacity to allow more variance in ships, fkin awesome. AIming changed to a "random block" instead of just "the core" so 8km insta-gib turrets aren't the ONLY meta anymore. kinda cool. Good job. Weapons 2.0 drops. We get beams now. Nice. WE lose our awesome slider-weapons tweaking but it's moved over to ratios of the "main blocks." Sure. Can adapt. makes some sense. PvP is once again viable as core-drilling is phased-out and system/mass HP replaces it. (cause yeah, insta-gib core-drilling up to 3k blocks in under 1 second is just wrong and broken and we should feel ashamed for taking advantage of it in our ship-that-never-leaves-cloak while killing ships that are 3 times over Bobby's server mass-cap just to make them feel bad about themselves...) Good job Schine. We have a game. CRAFTING 2.0 drops Adding the 3 different factory types, getting rid of the old crafting system with a super broken one that uses too many resources and doesn't use them well is kinda bad but...I guess grinding is a thing now. Adapt, overcome. Oh, all the server-optimizations are screwed-over because people need to have a personal Unicron/beast to be able to field a ship over 10k mass...well...ignore that...grind is a NECCESARY PART OF A SPACE SIM...Do NOT address horrible "crafting system" and it's impact on server-lag and game playability because "people need to grind to be allowed to build ships now and that is how this game is supposed to be and that is that STFU playerbase we are here now!" Find new ways to become post-scarcity societies is still the end-game(**cough cough shipyards are useless as shipyards but I can get free resources out of them so cool COUGHCOUGHcough**). Systems 1.1 is a thing, for a while we can have Ships that Absorb weapon damage over-parity in either shields or hull, resulting in hilarious unsinkable things that GAIN up to "null-pointer" shield integrity by taking damge. Well that's fixed not by enforcing a max value on shields systems or armor hp, but by tweaking the max-active-blocks of your systems. Whatever, you do what you want shiine. it works...too bad the servers are still being rendered unplayable by massive block-changes from mining rigs but...
2017 we have fleets now! They add a whole new level of depth to gameplay! they can mine for you so you don't have to grind...oh wait they're spinning in place...i guess fleets are ballerinas now...ballerinas crashing into everything and causng more lag....whatever we're bored working on fleets it's time for...Oh, yeah Systems 1.1 wasn't enough. We need 2.0 now, because 1.1 is laggy (It's totally NOT because of laggy mining system and crafting system we are NOT going to talk about that! Do NOT look behind the curtain! Don't look at fleets and their poor behavior either!) We don't have a "game" anymore but it's not crafting 2.0's fault! it's not system's 2.0's fault either! Oh, and we're not going to spreadsheet the systems 2.0 or use any of our "assets" we spent months making for the fleets enhancement as guidelines before we "design it".....aaaaaaannnnnd we're going to update weapons too...no spreadsheeting on that either.....aaaannnd it's 2018 now and those weapons are just Starting to be spreadsheeted, a little, but only because they're laggy and unbalanced...
At the moment, I don't bother with survival anymore, and the times I do try it, I just sell ore instead of bothering to try to refine it. I also dislike the change to stations that prevented getting them easily and getting salvage...completely stupid; tearing apart one of those stupid asymmetrical square stations for hull to make my ship out of while home-basing at an intact one was fun and not OP; the new abandoned stations would be super OP to tear apart, but really, they should be NPC-owned and you hav to fight for them; instead they're just these empty set pieces you visit once to look at and then that's that.
Now, all of that stuff about crafting aside, I'd say the tl;dr here is that a lot of StarMade's mechanics are just implemented half-baked without actually being fun, often with a cry of PERFORMANCE except that the game is never performant because everything is so high scale and complicated.
I think Power 2.0 doesn't help things, and the current state of Weapons 2.0 won't either.