Where did all the playerbase and faction fun go?

[Zeveryn]

Id like to firstly say that i really have no idea if there is any background faction politics going on or if there really is no one bothering anymore..

So why am i writing this and why should you read it ?

Well, i've been abscent for quite some time from this game but still trying to keep up to date, i have after all been around in starmade for soon 3-4 years, one and a half years on the old website and two years here on the new one.

I've been in several successfull factions and had alot of fun with the drama and politics it produced.
The factions being CR and TE and a short time with other factions. However these are the ones i've been with the longest.

I've been part of hosting two very successive servers ( i think successive when the entire community decides to focus their playtime on said servers )

Risenonline and then Illusive.

Now, where do i want to get with this?

Well all the faces im used to.

Incap, Comrade, Flyingdebris, Nauvran, krosulhah, Claru, Refinderium, Twoniner, Ridik_ulass, Kamika and Cirdanoth, all of these are veteran players, but where are they now? We've all done something to shape the faction politics that are ran today or helped shaped the game to what it is today, But no one really bothers to do what we used to do, there is no drive anymore. I cant find the politics that made my blood pump hot and take to the game to help in producing stuff to help a war, make a planetbase or proove that my fleet is stronger then any other fleet.

More or less ALL the old factions are dead or dying, there is no new flow of blood into the game that i've seen and every time i've come back to read up on the game and check the politics there seem to be less people for every time i come back.

Im not saying its the massive enforcement of no forum drama, but i am saying that when there was forum drama ( to some extent ) we had a more interesting playerbase, people came in, read the forums and war was usually caused by something said on the forums.

Im saying that this game is in a playerbase decline, and as far as i know there is no one around to say the differ and if you do then you're in denial. I ask often if someone wants to play starmade with me and usually i get a slight negative respond due to either wierd server issues or that it isnt what it used to be.

Where is the action that factions need?
Where did everyone go?
Why is there no Faction politics anymore?

Well.. at first sign of any kind of drama or any kind of faction propaganda some mod comes by saying

"hey man, you cant do that here. bring it elsewhere"

No one dares to say something that can be considered as "flamebait".

Obviously you might think i am ranting on mods and how stuff is being handled.

But honestly something is wrong and things seems so.. slow.. and if anyone says anything else you get met with "nah man. its just school and work and etc etc" you can just read the faction politics today and compare with the old days.

One could say that there is no reason to go to war because there is no profit in it.
I had a conversation with Furb soon a year and half or two years ago where we discussed how one could improve above statement, adding in factionpoints that would be rare and used in combat etc etc and you could only gain it from a station industry or wealth i cant remember really. but we had a good conversation over this and well.. this fell short since you now get income from members activity, but it didnt really change much towards faction warfare, there is still no gain in attacking another faction.

What can you do ?

What do you guys think of this? Im sure im wrong about some things that've written above but this is what I feel and what I think, some of you might disagree and some might agree, but i ask that you think about what im trying to say and read between the lines instead of taking what im saying too litteral.

Thank you for reading my toughts and oppinions.

( i know i've forgot a ton of names but these are the ones who i remember and therefor class as important to mention, sorry chev and rest of TE dont want to clutter to much )


// Zeveryn

 

[Crusade]

I agree, the players are dwindling and even though the site apparently reports more visitors, we see less activity on servers and less flow of new players. I would like to see some of the faction drama come back, but let it be contained within the faction areas. We need a 'bad guy' to cause a stir and push the community along. A peaceful world is a boring world.

 

[Master1398]

While i agree that currently not much is going on i feel the need to say that we definitely should await the rise of Empires (Game wide Factions using the Citizen Registry). I really hope the citizens of the Frontier will tremble upon new common enemies.

 

[Jake_Lancia]

It will be back soon, I assure you. IMO, the playerbase has been dwindling not because of a lack of an enemy, but a lack of good, fun, non-restrictive servers. When EE2.0 comes online that might rectify that a bit though.

Incap, Comrade, Flyingdebris, Nauvran, krosulhah, Claru, Refinderium, Twoniner, Ridik_ulass, Kamika and Cirdanoth

Pretty much all these guys except Claru and Kamika are still around AFAIK. Hell, NFD is still going strong and Comr4de, Incap and their lot have joined a mega-faction, so there's still a lot going on, but it seems a lot of it is on hold until a decent server comes up.

We need a 'bad guy' to cause a stir and push the community along. A peaceful world is a boring world.

This ^^

definitely should await the rise of Empires (Game wide Factions using the Citizen Registry)

This system is going to be an interesting addition to factions, it should liven things up a bit too.

 

[jstenholt]

Maybe you've noticed it more lately, but I don't know. It seems like this is the natural ebb and flow of Starmade. Major update, smattering of bugfixes, community dwindles, one or two small updates, rinse and repeat.

Just join one of the big servers, like SS or EE. You'll hardly notice.

 

[Keptick]

An overly large amount of butthurt, moderation, lack of reasons to fight and ships being a pain to produce with the current economy is what happened...

 

[Zeveryn]

I dont mean to come off as rude but all of you except Crusader and keptic are new faces to me and propably much younger then the ones im talking about.

Im talking about the epic toss of someones loss in face of their entire faction to spark conflicts that lasted months just to end up being allies against another faction. Im talking about times when you had backstabbings and insane politics ruling this forum..

This is today forbidden and to be honest this game is the first i seen in my history of gaming that used the forums and gaming as a battlefield alike and the game prospered to be honest
[DOUBLEPOST=1446479639,1446479244][/DOUBLEPOST]Ok no worries then.. a server that has no rules basicly?

 

[FrankRa]

The forumside faction scene has been pretty fucking dead because of the general spread of factions across servers coupled with the inactivity of said factions after hey find those servers full of homebase hugging shitters . Interfactional interaction has been on the low side for the past months but I still have hope that recent events and the return of Elwyn will kick this dead horse back to life.
As for an antagonistic figure missing from the scene, I think we should be pretty alright now that Odium has returned and TGT seems to be going in that direction.
And as a bystander back in the days of the faction crossfire, I do hope for some good faction warfare in the future. :D

 

[Reilly Reese]

Well...

 

[Zeveryn]

Well...

???

 

[FlyingDebris]

NFD is alive and well, albeit greatly reduced in numbers compared to the DFN of 2013. This can be said, unfortunately, for all the factions aside from TGT who are likely to lower in membership eventually just as the rest of the factions have unless something changes.

I think the main reason we don't see faction drama nowadays is because the conflicts are no longer ingame or with actual ships, at this point they are entirely social and really nothing more than people doxxing and making IRL threats. (This goes for both sides, not long ago I was privy to the collection of a specific set of information which was intended to be sent to Blackhawk's superiors in the military, the contents of which would have almost certainly resulted in his discharge. This was averted by Ridik's return.) Essentially, what used to be mere dislike and banter turned into genuine contempt. Some, like Thryn, continue to remain involved in the conflict, while others, like NFD, have elected to never come near the factions scene with a 10 mile pole due to its toxic nature as of late.

This, coupled with a general shift towards factions using Teamspeak and Skype as well as the forumside banning of every single Odium leader and many members outside of Komatodik and his bunch, has led to less interaction. (In fairness, all but one or two of the bans were well-deserved and many had almost nothing to do with faction forum specific rules.)

This, combined with the lack of a good, central server, has resulted in decreased interaction. Really though, it can all be traced back to two things; The lack of new players due to minimal attempts to publicize on SMD's part, and the genuine hatred of each other as people and not as factions by the majority of the faction leaders/membership.

 

[Nauvran]

I'm still alive Zev.
And no I'm not in TGT, I am not in any faction at the moment and I do not intend to join any.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Big powers are spread across many servers, their is no incentive for another faction to move to another server and challenge the ruling faction cause A) it requires a lot of work for blocks, and not just credits, and B) some factions have an admin or two from said server and factions should never have admins. Moderators sure, but never admins with admin powers, no matter how responsible they seem/are.

Moderators try to use chat to resolve issues, with maybe a /report command or copy paste stuff to a google doc for an admin to take care of, but no teleports, invisables, godmodes, /deletes, faction editing, or itemspawn.
The loser will always take the easy way out and instead of saying "they are better than me", they will say "they cheated" and spread discontent, even if server logs later prove otherwise.

Also, sometimes server owners will look at the top faction and say "well your successful and obviously know the game, what changes would you recommend to make this server BETTER?" And unless said faction is completely benevolent, they will often times change the rules so they either have an edge or it will be harder to be like them, insuring top dog forever. And even so, other factions will be like "This Faction changed A and B on server X, obviously they have server owner in pocket, blacklist server forever." even if A and B are not totally unreasonable. They would blacklist it for the sake of blacklisting.


Another issue is server resets. If a server unexpectidly resets or resets too often, small factions and single players get fed up and leave. While if a server never resets (the late EE *cough cough* Rock into Jump-drive computers factory blueprints *cough cough*) then eventually the factions become "entrenched" and have unlimited resources and players slowly lose interest because endgame is... lamegame... Losing is of no consequence resource wise (unless your Doughnut and have a billion health in shields alone and broke the games numbers when armor and system points came out requiring 2 patches to fully fix it...... wwhhhyyyyy), and winning gets you just forum points that people will be butthurt over.
Also, don't latch onto your homebase when you have a ship big enough to fight them with. If they completely outnumber you in men and materials, then that is another story and being curb-stomped is never enjoyable. But do something, like stealth warhead bombers, to fight back where you can hurt them and they can hurt you. But plinking away with a HB mounted turret is lame if you cant even beat the regen.



There needs to be less servers, Admins can't be involved with factions because people will always accuse you of abuse when you beat them, and alliances need to be flexible. Not this cold war shit that developed until the "collapse" of Odium leaving everyone else to kinda muck about. And while some claim that Odium is still kicking, they are nothing like they were at their height.
Alliances are short convenient things, lasting maybe a few weeks.
We don't need a big baddy. We need multiple camps with occasional skirmishes between them. Many equal sized factions, or many clusters of equal sized alliances, not two or three.


Post pictures of ships (maybe not stats duh) and brag about how it will kick so and so's ass on your own faction thread, (not on other peoples faction thread, that is just kinda weird). And most importantly, take pictures/video when you do something! "Pics or it didn't happen" is not the reason, its so new people looking at starmade can go "whoah this is awesome" or "I like this faction because of their war photos" or something. It attracts new players seeing how kickass your fleet is and that you can get 4+ people together in the same game to fly around. And new players, not new alts, is something we need.

 

[starhaiden]

We require something to fight over, like an asteroid belt that actually generates asteroids.

 

[Comr4de]

Probably because faction combat sucks since all you really ever need is a homebase and singular territory

 

[Lecic]

We need a 'bad guy' to cause a stir and push the community along. A peaceful world is a boring world.

From what I've seen, a "big bad" just spreads salt and annoyance among experienced players, and completely kills the enjoyment of the game for unexperienced server natives who get crushed by forumers higher level tech, tactics, and numbers.

Serverside natives are a joke to fight. The only time I've felt threatened by one is when I was flying a tiny boarding cloaker and he was using a ~400k mass super swarmer.

I do think we need a big "bad," just not like Odium, who ruin the game for the little guy and drag IRL business into a game about lego spaceships. I'm hoping TGT can fill that role.

 

[Jaaskinal]

Probably because faction combat sucks since all you really ever need is a homebase and singular territory

This, and the way to win beyond it. The only way to 'win' the game is not in the game. Doxxing, social engineering and other behaviors that are typically negatively viewed are the path to victory.

 

[Miraak]

And the Eternal Dovan Empire continues to slowly putter throughout history, being there but not enough for anyone to mention them often or get large amount of players.

 

[karkinosz]

Another issue is server resets. If a server unexpectidly resets or resets too often, small factions and single players get fed up and leave. While if a server never resets (the late EE *cough cough* Rock into Jump-drive computers factory blueprints *cough cough*).

Will you folks ever let me get past that :|
<----- the reason the late EE reset.
It's been awhile so Im getting that out there.

 

[Mortiferum]

From what I see, some people are still keen on regurgitating past event to demonize another group, while presenting nothing of value of their own.

No action
No participation
Only forum warfare

Everyone will eventually get sick and tired of the bickering. Other than that, lag, being burnt out, fallout 4, Australian internet, etc leads to a lower player count. Home base protection does not help either, since no one fights, everyone hides behind a home base while yelling insults to each other. And particular factions are quite good at that, I will not name names.

Lack of new players getting involved in forum side/ faction gameplay also lead to every faction to stagnate. As a whole, everyone seeks action of some sort, and use different ways to get what they want out of the game. Of course, Odium currently plays the "big bad role", universally hated for some past events, some good, some bad, and some inappropriate. No one takes them on, no one does anything in-game, only forum stupidity and rage came from it.

Attacks anyone - Immediately flamed
Post content - Immediately flamed