- Joined
- Sep 14, 2017
- Messages
- 666
- Reaction score
- 928
I am probably one of the more active Veterans left... I still log in every few days for a few minutes to add some details to my homebase here and there then logout out of boredom and play cheezy flash games because even that shit is more fun. Pre-update, I played an 3-5 hours pretty much every day because there was always something worth doing. Starmade has been my favorite game for years, so it is hard to walk away from, but also hard to stay since its not really a game right now.for what its worth, a lot of us havn't even "left" and never planned too, there's like a handful of people making dramatic exit threads for a variety of (sometimes pretty laughable) reasons and some maybe reading a bit much into that as some kind of "pvper movement", for whatever reason. Of those that really have moved on, not many really have seemed to care enough to mention it.
That said, no 2.0 patch so far has really been worth my time to play online much, because 1; i can't find people with half working scanning systems (still no navigation data feed) 2; i can't build how i want (a lot of decorative/exposed systems and relatively compact/utilitarian guts, look in my CC for an idea), 3; i can't shoot people (or anybodys 2.0 creations for that matter, AI is just broken against anything with new systems in online play as of .334), let alone stop them from just jumping away, beyond building a ship, mining endlessly, and fighting a bunch of isanths, there's pretty much nothing to do that isn't hampered by bugs or broken mechanics.
So myself, probably a lot of other "bitter vets", just dont really have much to do in the current patch beyond figure out what just doesn't work & be disappointed about it. Which didn't take long for a lot of people.
Fucking this.
Less people available to test your game when you cannot afford professional testers = Lower quality product.
To top it all off, almost all of the veteran "minmaxxers" have been driven off the game, this is close to a deathblow as these "minmaxxers" were the only people who were pushing the game to its absolute limits and finding the bugs and balance issues as they did so.
To give you an idea on how bad this is for Schine, allow me to tell you a little story of a man named Veilith.
So back in the days of TAW and other servers around at the time, pretty much every factions vessel were nowhere near what near as effective as they could not have been, along comes Veilith who was probably one of the only people who was pushing the limits of the game at the time and next thing you know he has 12k mass ships massacring a fleet consisting of several 100k vessels from factions who at the time were considered the more powerful forum factions.
Veilith was labelled many things such as a hacker, exploiter and toxic by many people for this, much like how some portions of the community labelled the minmaxers that have packed up from this game after 2.0 as toxic. So Veilith starts sharing his knowledge with others, suddenly we have people like Zyrr, Az1, Non and many others who are pushing the limits and discovering new ways to push the limits of the game day after day. Its safe to say that this "meta revolution" would not have occurred if Veilith kept his mouth shut and kept his methods to himself.
Now translate this into StarMade testing and you see the issues, it was the meta players who got long time exploits patched, it was the meta players who discovered and publicised the spaghetti meta and caused Schine to do something about it, although their solution was terrible at best, its safe to say that if these minmaxers didn't start talking about it Schine would not have even known of the spaghetti meta existing in the first place. Schine themselves have admitted on record that they barley play the game themselves, their lead tester Lancake can be quoted saying he has not played this game outside of testing reported bugs for over 2 years!
So now these players have been driven off, which becomes a significant problem in the long term for Schine as what is left doesnt seem to be interested in minmaxxing and the game isnt gaining any new players who might be willing minmax it. The end result? Balance issues that nobody knows exist, exploits that remain undiscovered and unreported and much more making it into the final release of this game (if that ever happens)
Its a matter of common sense to see what happens when gamebreaking issues are left undiscovered and making it into the final release because nobody has bothered to seek these issues out.
These two quotes actually touch on the BIG reason why Schine's lack of communication is a problem. If Schema did more to interact with the community and talk with us about HOW to fix problems, then openly reporting bugs would be more of a thing. I know multiple exploits that I don't report because I've seen enough of how he handles them to know ahead of time that his solutions will be it regardless of if it hurts the game in other areas.This is a very selective truth, and an important issue in the entire outcry against 2.0 coming specifically from this particular clique.
Some long-term exploits were reported, yes. Some. Meanwhile, they actively used and shared some other bugs (such as laminate armor) to exploited as "tech" used to dominate PvP. And I know because you all invited me to your Discord because I am very pro PvP, and when I stopped playing over the Summer (cause Summer) I still saw all the tech and the attitude was distinctly not "hey look - rail dockers set up like this can cause multiple layers of armor to exist in the same location at the same time - I'm reporting that on phab" it was more like (paraphrasing) "yeah, I am putting 5 layers of clipped laminate armor around my aux power so there's no way it can get popped by a missile with the way clipped laminate interferes with the raytracing calcs. Next battle this new ship will be awesome."
That is not "meta." Used in that way, "meta" player is basically a euphemism for a player who actively seeks out and exploits bugs to dominate MP servers for lulz... oh, and sometimes even reports them when they are too well known to be useful, or legitimately game breaking.
In a good faith dialogue, when someone responds to a rambling WoT ('How to I know there's gold in them hills? Well let me tell you a little story about a man named Jeb...") with a civil request for clarification about one specific point not clearly supported, most earnest people will take a few seconds to respond briefly - at least once - with a tl;dr summary in case they had not come through as clearly as they had intended.
It's an interesting response to tell the person "if you read" (directly implying that they didn't or can't read, rather than admitting that it is humanly possible that an important point may have been somewhat unclear) while never actually clarifyng how, for example, a fun story about Veilith teaching someone how to effectively exploit bugs in MP (some of which were reported) somehow invalidates the fact of a game being in Alpha as proper cause for a major overhaul after years of testing.
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I agree. I agreed when you first made that point. It is a good point. I was only referring specifically and explicitly to people saying they were leaving based on what has happened to the community and drama over 2.0.
Except not at all when they explicitly state they haven't played at all in a while and are leaving entirely because some people are waging a perpetual drama campaign here.
Using the Laminar armor example: it would be characteristic of Schine to try to "fix" that bug by removing doors and force fields instead of fixing damage propagation between entities... so if you value doors more than you care about laminar armor, then why would you take the risk of reporting it?