What happened to Starmade?

[Sachys]

There is no truth in your words.

You fail to realise quite a lot of people (in the years I have played) do NOT play Starmade via Steam, so any arguement based solely on Steam statistics is poorly done, poorly thought out and entirely flaccid.

I'm not saying anything for or against your other points, just that you represent Steam stats as a be all and end all. Thats called a fallacy.

If you could correlate actual server populations entirely over this period and add in people who only played single player (both with or without Steam) then you might have something if it matched up, but Starmade is not platform reliant, and those statistics for single person play would also have to be voluntarily given making any statistics skewed anyway.

 

[DrTarDIS]

You fail to realise...if you could correlate actual server populations entirely over this period and add in people who only played single player (both with or without Steam) then you might have something if it matched up, but Starmade is not platform reliant, and those statistics for single person play would also have to be voluntarily given making any statistics skewed anyway.

Sample sized statistics are still statistics. You can't claim non-steam players widely change that graph. Learn some math and logic, it will do you good in life.

Steam counts single-player games as "playing" the game too. That means the above graph includes everyone making 3d pixelart alone while they happen to have steam running, not just players connecting to servers.

Correlation and causation are different things...but those major graph points can be reliably tied to some specific events, which DOES show correlation.

 

[Nauvran]

You fail to realise quite a lot of people (in the years I have played) do NOT play Starmade via Steam, so any arguement based solely on Steam statistics is poorly done, poorly thought out and entirely flaccid.

I'm not saying anything for or against your other points, just that you represent Steam stats as a be all and end all. Thats called a fallacy.

If you could correlate actual server populations entirely over this period and add in people who only played single player (both with or without Steam) then you might have something if it matched up, but Starmade is not platform reliant, and those statistics for single person play would also have to be voluntarily given making any statistics skewed anyway.

Sample sized statistics are still statistics. You can't claim non-steam players widely change that graph. Learn some math and logic, it will do you good in life.

Steam counts single-player games as "playing" the game too. That means the above graph includes everyone making 3d pixelart alone while they happen to have steam running, not just players connecting to servers.

Correlation and causation are different things...but those major graph points can be reliably tied to some specific events, which DOES show correlation.

I can tell both of you that since I made my discord bot, almost a year ago, we have not had more than a total of 53 people online simultaneously.
That record was set in the start of this year, if I remember correctly.
The there average when I probe the bot is probably 3-4 players, never really got a proper average set up for it

 

[The Judge]

Personally, I would go on to argue that no update in particular killed the game, rather, the survival aspects of the game are just really boring. The game's playerbase was already suffering before Power 2.0, at least going off the Steam graph. Sure, combat can still be fun, in fact, earlier this year some players did poke back in after the QF update. Despite that, nobody stayed simply because the survival mechanics are just insufferable. What's the point of bothering with combat if it takes hours of boring resource management to actually get there? Spawning ships is a complete nightmare, and gathering every single block needed to assemble a ship is just irritating and overcomplicated.

 

[Reilly Reese]

Minecraft (the base-game) was finished "released" a long time ago and was bought by microsoft for 2.5 billion
... and is still being expanded upon, (updated+mods).

Too many planned features ("ideas") has always been the problem, (Indie or not).

" just write it down send it to a dev and it gets fixed. "

...you seem to completely ignore facts:
Every game has exploits, META and bugs...
" no GameDev has been able to completely eliminate exploits, META, and bugs... ever. "
The amount of vested time is astronomically unrealistic, (is it even possible?).

I find your post to also be distractive / manipulative... like most here and I'm done with the endless arguing, It will never end, there is no point.
"poor planning" is the only thing we seem to agree upon, (which was also the inspiration for the post).

Fun Fact: most would rather die clinging to their beliefs than accept reality, (well documented natural phenomena*).
I believe in reality...

StarMade will likely never trump MineCraft, but it could be doing so much better if it just stayed true to its origin.

I literally have never read a more passive aggressive, dismissive and bullshit response to anything in my life, and I've read a lot of EA PR statements.

You're throwing accusations around and then implying everyone else is not living in reality that disagrees with you.

There is no "origin". There's the building component and that hasn't changed in it's function or form. What StarMade needs is simple. It needs to finish or temporarily or permanently cut the many half finished ideas in the game currently. It needs audio, and then it needs marketing.

What it doesn't need is people sitting here STILL ranting and arguing about a balance config for over a year. Nobody cares about the config anymore. It doesn't matter. Nobody who comes into the game now will care. Why? Because they are new, they haven't even learned it yet, what they see are outdated NPC ships, broken AI functions, and a bunch of other half finished features in the deathly silence of the game other than the hum of the ship core.

 

[Minsc]

Interesting stuff.

I'll tell why I stopped playing the game. I got older and priorities shifted. Not much else I can say. I'm not playing any games at the moment. Progress of StarMade is now a passing curiosity.

Blessings the the games continued development. My simple thoughts are for the small dev team to continue focusing on doing what they can do.

If people from the community here really want to see the game progress they can learn to and help code the game the people in charge want to make. One thing I do know is that job is not for me.

Thoughts and research on StarMade open source

This is an up to date status/ramble on opening up StarMade to contributions and potentially going open source. These have come from my own research/understanding and documenting concerns/ideas from legal advice. Note: None of this is definitive, or necessarily correct. Just my (DukeofRealms) cur...

docs.google.com

My uneducated thought is to go with Option 3.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

I'm kinda in the same space boat. ;-)
I've been unable to play games due to family and personal events impacting time I would normally use to play games.
When I do get time, I tend to play on my home server messing with old projects.
It would be nice to finally see a universe update.
I must jump onto a server some day soon and see what people are up to.

 

[DevajC]

Simple reason why this game got nowhere is because it got nowhere. Boot up the version of starmade from 2013 and it's exactly the same as today, minus a ton features that don't add up to an actual game.

Shipyards, factories and production chains, logic, rails and new weapons and new power system and fancy new textures and a ton of different new blocks, none of these things add anything to any gameplay that isn't building ships. The game still feels like an ancient tech demo.

2 years later it's even worse. Its a constant disappointment that gets worse every 3 years when I remember it and search it up again.

 

[Jason_Pra]

Here's what happened. Starmaid went far too long without any meaningful updates. For the longest time mostly updates for minor tweaks and Bug fixes.

Players got so used to things just being the way they were that whenever it minor fix or tweak were to modify anything to do with the power system nearly the entire player base got angry about it because they would have to fix their builds again.

Then finally came along a couple of massive updates that massively changed how all of the systems worked in the game. These were the weapons update that overhauled and in my opinion improved combat in star made as a whole.

That update introduced a lot of bugs into the game many of them were fixed and some of them have gone to not be fixed still to this day. And then they pushed forward the power update. Making it possible to create a large Capital ships a lot of empty space which also had the added bonus of making an entirely possible to make role-playing ships viable in combat as well as being able to make specialized ships for certain tasks.

As per usual this update also included a bunch of bug fixes and quite a few new bugs as well. The community predictably was up in arms about this update as well as it completely changed the core systems that everybody's builds were relying on. Many veteran players at that point in time just stopped playing the game.

And then they announced the universe update that was due to come out sometime after Christmas several years back. As you can probably tell it was never released. The player base the entire time went to a full standstill waiting for this update to be released not wanting to make anything new and fear of their builds being broken again. This update was supposed to address the lack of content in the game that everybody has been complaining about for years.

Ultimately the scope of the update was far too ambitious for the small team of Developers and so it was never completed. The studio started having Financial issues and I believe I heard somewhere that many of them were forced to get part-time jobs the time they had to work on the game has been reduced because of that and I believe I also heard from another source that they have started on other projects and plan to maybe come back to this one sometime in the future.

That's the gist of it a classic story of a small Indie game Studio getting too ambitious for their own good with their updates they should have focused on a bunch of smaller updates instead of releasing everything at once I believe that to be the games downfall.

 

[Redfredrick]

Here's what happened. Starmaid went far too long without any meaningful updates. For the longest time mostly updates for minor tweaks and Bug fixes.

Players got so used to things just being the way they were that whenever it minor fix or tweak were to modify anything to do with the power system nearly the entire player base got angry about it because they would have to fix their builds again.

Then finally came along a couple of massive updates that massively changed how all of the systems worked in the game. These were the weapons update that overhauled and in my opinion improved combat in star made as a whole.

That update introduced a lot of bugs into the game many of them were fixed and some of them have gone to not be fixed still to this day. And then they pushed forward the power update. Making it possible to create a large Capital ships a lot of empty space which also had the added bonus of making an entirely possible to make role-playing ships viable in combat as well as being able to make specialized ships for certain tasks.

As per usual this update also included a bunch of bug fixes and quite a few new bugs as well. The community predictably was up in arms about this update as well as it completely changed the core systems that everybody's builds were relying on. Many veteran players at that point in time just stopped playing the game.

And then they announced the universe update that was due to come out sometime after Christmas several years back. As you can probably tell it was never released. The player base the entire time went to a full standstill waiting for this update to be released not wanting to make anything new and fear of their builds being broken again. This update was supposed to address the lack of content in the game that everybody has been complaining about for years.

Ultimately the scope of the update was far too ambitious for the small team of Developers and so it was never completed. The studio started having Financial issues and I believe I heard somewhere that many of them were forced to get part-time jobs the time they had to work on the game has been reduced because of that and I believe I also heard from another source that they have started on other projects and plan to maybe come back to this one sometime in the future.

That's the gist of it a classic story of a small Indie game Studio getting too ambitious for their own good with their updates they should have focused on a bunch of smaller updates instead of releasing everything at once I believe that to be the games downfall.

I also bet a certain world event that happened a few years back didnt help the state of the game either