Who do we want as Counselors?

[Master_Artificer]

I don't feel like I want builders as counselors anymore. I want people who understand the mechanics of the game and how to build competitive ships.

Not so that a new style of ship combat emerges or anything, but to help refine what we got, because what we got is pretty good.
Also that way not all the work is on Lancake to run everything.

Sure builders push for pretty blocks and new we have fans and slabs, but I want more mechanics now.
The cargo update was awesome. The Rail update was awesome. The Thrust update was awesome. The shipyards still needs to be finished, but the fact that it is in is awesome.


But I want more conflict in this game, not "build ships and collect dust". I want to use them, and not on build servers or events. I want to fight FOR something, or fight over something, WITH a competent opponent who is trying to kill me in this game too. (ares mod is a lot of fun, but it doesn't have meaning or lasting effect like survival does).

Bring on the mining update, the economy update, and the pirate update. But for people to handle this, I think we should vote in players who know mechanics, and discover cheaty exploits.

I want people who when they receive the box with instructions, they read the instructions, take apart the box, and then find a whole new use for the dang thing. They know the box inside and out, and I think we should have at least one or two people like that who know the box and work with the community.

What say you?

 

[Jaaskinal]

When do we want them?
NOW
IMO having a builder wouldn't hurt, since some building/decorative options are still being explored (chairs? chairs.) But PVP, immersion, and just general aspects in survival are being looked at more and more.

 

[therimmer96]

Once again, people seem to be thinking that the council will have some say on the new features. They don't. They just tell schine what the community wants, being a filter between the forums and schine

 

[Master_Artificer]

People want 'balance', people want results. I feel like some of the people fighting for those would make good staff as they already have a pretty good filter of what to pass on.

 

[Aynslei]

I guess I will chime in here. I don't think the council should even be a matter of public choice.

Yes I am a gamer in this community, and I would want my input to be valued like any other member here.
However I don't think that getting the player-base to decide member ship will benefit Schine in the log run with finding dedicated and knowledgeable councilors to help inform them of the player-base.

If Schine chose the council, and every action that council proposed / voted on / discussed was made public then later passed on to allow public discourse we could get more done. People would end up finding out which councilor actually thought and performed in ways they could agree with and show support for that councilor.

The council has never been about telling Schine what to do, I always understood its purpose as to be a medium between Schine and the community.

I just don't like the idea of the community making a choice and then not really knowing how their vote really mattered in the end.

 

[NeonSturm]

They need to be able to give advices - for many topics. I could.
They should also be available when needed. But that is not my strength - maintaining social life continuously.

I see exploits. I know balance. But the game heads not into the direction I want in a few crucial points.

If there would be decent modding API, the community would extend SM 100x faster - the visible side, not optimisations.
But if not careful, it would split compatibility of ship-builds and servers.


What is the most important task? Getting a modding API. Make modding tools available that work on all 3 major platforms (Win, Mac, Linux).

But as soon as that is done -even now with community content-, it is not longer Shine's game. It will be a game built by community AND Shine.
And the community is not going to get access the whole. The whole of a thing that is made fun because of THEIR work on it.
At least these mods are often open-source, but badly written OS.

If you step ahead of any possible competition and deny the modification of existing, you are a monopolist. That's what happening right now.
Partially I want to see good features done, because it forces other games to implement the same before sale. On the other hand, if not for free2play and Linux-compatibility, I wouldn't play SM at all - no matter the stuff it has. Because even if you pay, you don't own the right to help creating a better experience with it.

​

So continue without mod-support, Shine and one game will step beyond in this most important area.

 

[Comr4de]

I don't want tomino back as councillor

 

[Captain_Boroski]

I don't want tomino back as councillor

After his meltdown I think it's safe to say that accepting any of his MF crew into the council is a worst-case scenario for Schine.
It's like letting Putin investigate the death of the entire Polish government in a airliner crash.
Or Greece to be in charge of economical changes.
Or making me a moderator in the forums.
Or creating roleplay sub-section.
Or supporting Israel.

Spoiler

Or voting Trump.

 

[therimmer96]

Or creating roleplay sub-section.

It's called chat.

 

[Kilim]

Artificer, I totally feel your pain.

The factions scene both in the forums and serverside has become extremely dead and meaningless. The game has no point, and the ones who try to make a point (by starting wars etc.) are declared assholes because they have no reason. The economy is completely borked, just too boring the way it is, nobody wants to make ships to fight, and those who have ships, have no reason to fight. I was on GenXnova day before yesterday, looking at the online players. There were ONLY 1 man factions (probably it was just my timing), but point being, factions don't matter, they should matter because multiplayer is just so damn boring now. Shipyards are cool, storage is cool, slabs are cool rails are cool, but now really we need something to play online together for.

In my opinion playing together for a common goal is the most fun thing in the game. After leaving my 1 man pirate faction, and playing with some friends to develop ships against a common foe who kept warring with them, was so fun. Then fighting was even better. But this was only shortlived. Soon people got bored, because in the end, apart from making up wars, there was no point in them. Eventually we would just quit the servers (talking about old Brierie here).

I just really wish we could have a purpose to playing multiplayer, because I really would like it so much if there is one. I really just wished there was a proper economy, a proper meaning to claiming territory, and this would give a meaning to war and diplomacy and factions. It feels like these things are being completely ignored by the devs, and it really is time for the councillors who are not builders - but actual multiplayer players who have actual experience - to speak up!

Here are some threads I'm talking about that can give insight into what ought to be changed from actual players.
https://starmadedock.net/threads/the-solution-to-economy-the-exchange.22474/
https://starmadedock.net/threads/un...-and-density-getting-the-wheels-turning.6425/
https://starmadedock.net/threads/raw-resources-used-in-shipyard-bp-construction.22232/

 

[nightrune]

We still need a builder but yes, main focus is on mechanics. The groundwork is basically here now.

I want to fight npcs, make alliances, take strategic points, explore a big galaxy with unknown dangers, Build science stations in exotic locations, Need to take warp gates to access enemy territory! Run cargo from one end to the other!

 

[Master_Artificer]

We still need a builder but yes, main focus is on mechanics. The groundwork is basically here now.

I want to fight npcs, make alliances, take strategic points, explore a big galaxy with unknown dangers, Build science stations in exotic locations, Need to take warp gates to access enemy territory! Run cargo from one end to the other!

Explore the galaxy and discover warpgate routes! Highways of commerce (to be plundered and protected)! Own spaces! (10 spaces!(FF7A reference ftw))!

 

[NeonSturm]

In my opinion, exponential-grind+economy breaks balance between players and factions even more.

If you want war, you need roughly equal sides. You also need at least a third side to balance things out once one gets the upper hand (be it player or PC-missions that give reward to the lower ones)

I think PvP should be more like chess with action-elements. Like it is in Robocraft.

Fighters equal Farmers
Flagships equal the King
Titans equal the Queen (but there can be multiple, because it's not chess)
You can also choose 12 farmers and no runner/horse because it's StarMade​

But the chances need to be equal (=what you can build)​

 

[Keptick]

Ideally wouldn't you want people that can build AND know how the game works? Apart from balance to a certain degree the council has no direct influence on what features get implemented when.

In addition I'd like to say that the previous council, especially Comr4de and me, lobbied hard for things that would stimulate PvP (like deep core planet mining installations), along with fixes to glaring issues with the current PvP model. However, apart from config changes, the focus of development was unfortunately not on gameplay at the time, so not much could be done about it.

The current phase of development will now be focused more on gameplay aspects, so hopefully the next council will be able to help more in that aspect!

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Master_Artificer got it right. The only reason I'm running myself is because I had more than enough of more fancy blocks. I'm gonna share my views below, but as always I'm ready for discussion.
(btw. I'm fit to be both a councilman and a counsellor as I'm a psychology major :P)

I think there should be 2 major focus points, and neither of them is giving new fancy blocks to builders:

1. Finish the partially implemented features.
Should be self-explanatory. We have customizable waves, but the difficulty is randomly chosen, not based in any way on the triggering ship's size or capabilities, even despite we already have ship stats visible to server and other clients. We have shipyards, but they still don't fully work as intended. We have NPCs but they are currently utterly useless. We theoretically even have the option to spawn in wild hostile creatures, but only the most oldschool derelicts are equipped with spawners.

2. Work on the immersion and incentive to play
Ships gathering dust sucks. Zero immersion sucks. One good direction the game's taking is the in-progress rework of the sound system and sound library. I know space is supposed to be silent, but your ship isn't. Those of you who have Elite or Star Citizen or Space Engineers, try play it with sound turned off. Not nearly as cool, is it?
Make the universe look alive. Space is big, vast and empty, but to make it interesting, it has to be populated. By NPCs, by travelling Trading Guild convoys occasionally running into a pirate fleet fighting for their lives, planetary starports with merchants to trade with or get quests from - some of those may even involve trespassing into another (randomly chosen faction ID) player faction's territory, and there we have the much needed conflict.
Building should be one aspect of the game, not its entirety. A game attracts players only if it manages to keep being interesting, and always give an answer to the most often asked question in sandbox games:"
"Now what?"

 

[SkylordLuke]

you guys are delusional.
You think the test Council didnt suggest/relay gameplay suggestings to Schine??
99% of THE suggestions that we got and relayed were gameplay related suggestions.

The hard truth is,the council HAS NO say on what features will/can get implemented.
We just did our best to help Schine guys recognize what needs to be changed(fixed/improved and to
give the general idea of the direction the whole community wants to go.

So whoever gets elected,will do just as good or even less good as the current test council did.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

A game that lost connection to its community, is doomed. Plenty of abandoned examples lying around in cyberspace.

 

[NeonSturm]

keptick
Ideally the council would always know one councillor which:

• knows everything about the topic (any topic).
  
• knows enough of all topics to know everything related to a question (any question).

Matt_Bradock "Building should be one aspect of the game, not its entirety. A game that lost connection to its community, is doomed. Plenty of abandoned examples lying around in cyberspace."

True. You should also be encouraged to visit other player's builds and give feedback.

There definitively needs to be a modding API. The only thing that stops SM from fading away to a dozen of hard-core-players is community content/videos and it being too big of a task to make a fork of it ground-up.

​

SkylordLuke "So whoever gets elected,will do just as good or even less good as the current test council did."

I never saw the council responsible for actions.

But for maintaining a list, tree, wiki or something alike of community suggestions (removing doubles, using best and most complete explanation of the topic) and development team responses.​

 

[SkylordLuke]

Also,this whole past year was intended to provide the framework for future gameplay features.
To flesh out the building part of the game,and to have everything ready for the big influx of new features.

So 2016,as we saw in dev blogs,is the year of the gameplay features.. all the suggestions that were relayed from the community,will start getting implemented.
So when I see posts where people complain about the lack of gameplay features.. they simply dont understand that it was impossible to implement them without the basics we got during the 2015.

 

[NeonSturm]

So 2016,as we saw in dev blogs,is the year of the gameplay features.. all the suggestions that were relayed from the community,will start getting implemented.
So when I see posts where people complain about the lack of gameplay features.. they simply dont understand that it was impossible to implement them without the basics we got during the 2015.

It is the same as:

When you drive a street with 4 red amps and 6 green, you might remember 2 or 3 green amps and 4 red, believing the amps are mostly red.
​

Background changes don't help if nobody sees the amount of work done.