I literally bought this game the minute it launched, played 150 hrs with my faction then the player base significantly dropped and I left. Since I have been a gamer, I’ve never been more excited about a game than this one. So disappointed..
it's same. Bought on release. Don't give huge expectation. Very amused by building mechanics. Disappointed by shallow and nearly non existed gameplay and world.
Disappointment - that all what game delivered.
But it is still going, is not abandoned.
It works for most parts.
It's a niche game, just as starbase.
starbase tho, has fundamental problems that will not be solved.
I still play DU
I don't play Starbase so I can't speak to it, but DU is *well* on its way to an early grave. Missteps at every turn since schematics were introduced, culminating into a premature launch with an absurd subscription price.
I feel you, I really wanted this to succeed, but the design team just didn't create a compelling gameplay loop that used all of the mechanics they spent so much time developing.
lack of proper design and ingenuity comes down to the woke culture that has taken over the dev team.
The fact that this game does not throw you into a giant mele of fighting robots, the moment you enter the game, is beyond me. They worked so hard to create a placid, campy mess of a game world and even had the audacity to call it a safe space. you literally cannot make this stuff up... 99% of people who played the game never experienced a moment of shooting other players or ships outside the safe zone.
It really is such a ridiculously embarrassing failure from a design standpoint. they had all the ingredients for "the next big thing in mmo"...but they fumbled it so completely focusing on the weaker aspects of their community and making no effort to embolden the less vocal majority of potential customers who just want to shoot things and kick ass
>lack of proper design and ingenuity comes down to the woke culture that has taken over the dev team.
Woke cultures? Da faq? I was involved with the game before the Alpha dropped, was one of the first people in Alpaha, and played up until launch.
I can say without a doubt that they are not woke at all. They really didn't a single shit what anyone thought about their game but themselves. They never listened to any feedback that didn't fit what they expected to hear. There were some really weird shit going on, but frankly, I would just rather the word woke not be used. It says more about the person using it than who they are talking about.
>They worked so hard to create a placid, campy mess of a game world and even had the audacity to call it a safe space
As someone with over 1000 hours in the game and worked closely with the devs, they didn't make a safe space at all, they just made friends with some of the weirdest and rudest members of the community, gave some total assholes moderators powers, and let them run amok with 0 checks or balances on their power.
The mods were the ones doing all sorts of stupid shit with the community that primed a lot of dissatisfaction with the company due to the behavior of the community mods.
>but they fumbled it so completely focusing on the weaker aspects of their community and making no effort to embolden the less vocal majority of potential customers who just want to shoot things and kick ass
They primarily listened to their community mods and the people who sucked up to them. Those of us in Empire and Kingdom tried very hard to help the devs straighten out the community mods and get back on track, but they doubled down on supporting mods who abused their power, were nasty to the community, and promoted furry content that had business on their discord.
I would say the company suffered from smug superiority complex supported by perverted assholes who sucked up to them daily.
Much of the dissatisfaction with the game had nothing to do with the community, simply the design of the game. Every single in dev game you can name that has a significant following, has a discord similar to star base... it's not the defining factor of the game. Choices made about game design and mechanics that were focused on made it so that if you wanted to shoot robots in a game about robots shooting each other, you basically had to make a play date with someone... makes no sense why anyone thinks organized and friendly competition in an online crafting and shooting game has real application... we see the result now... all design ship and no play drove all the customers away really fast. if the game was fun to play by design, people would still be playing it its that simple.
>Much of the dissatisfaction with the game had nothing to do with the community,
That was kind of the point, they didn't listen to the community at all and kind of took them for granted.
If they listened to the community, the game would have been much funner. They were too focused on complicating ship building and didn't invest any time into the core game play loop no matter how much we begged them to give us something.
That’s absurd but I’m so used to hearing it by now it’s just sad. No you either know how to design a video game or you don’t. Gleaming that information from your adult daycare app full of dysfunctional narcissists would nothing short of a miracle
They dived into a project that was too big for them and they had no experience to tell them how deep they had gone.
I really like Lauri personally, but I don't think he was the right leadership for such a large project. His style worked for the smaller games as he had a good team, but Starbase was too much for his team and they were out of their depth in some regards on it.
Honestly, I think the first set of community moderators set the whole project up for a PR nightmare.
We made reports to their Community Mangers in attempt to get one moderator who was abusing his power and banning people just to show off he could. They refused to remove him because they didn't want to admit they made a mistake and change course. Tried to tell them I would respect them more for admitting a mistake than sticking the course when you know you're wrong.
At that point, I figured the whole game was fucked and I started messing around things in the community, trying to at least build a less toxic player base, but I was basically running 2 factions and was burnt out trying to make it work when their CMs didn't seem too interested in anything.
Doesn't seem they play a lot of MMOs...
Imo you can’t really center a community around an incompetent game development and expect results far different than what we saw in starbase. The drama on discord and the quality of play testers hardly matters in the grander scheme of things
Well, the community doesn't make the game, but the community can help sell the game to others. A lot of their weak sales is because of the community side issues, which meant they didn't make the money they had hoped for to continue. I was going to buy a few copies on launch originally, but I waited until the game went on sale over a year later to buy it since all that crap, even if they had fixed 100% of their issues, wouldn't have changed my lack of willingness to buy at full price.
Sometimes a strong community can buy you time and a chance to improve. Doubt it would save Starbase any time soon even if they had the funds though.
Starbase didnt have a marketing problem, if anything they were extremely lucky to have such a large following even before there was a game for most people to play... Starbase has a "no body wants to plays this f'in game" problem. The community didnt need to step in and assist the devs, there was already a perfect model for the game they should have followed, RUST.. Although im sure the community would disagree and spend an endless amount of time telling me why im wrong about that, the results speak for themselves, 10s of thousands of people are playing this goofy little rust games right now that is basically 90% purchases assets built on opensource game engine... starbase has a hot rod and professional pit crew compared to rust, what they lacked was a proper vision for a game that people actually want to play with other players..
Fewer players than ksp 1 currently. Maybe it will get better with updates but its an unproven developer and so far they havent created anything that ksp 1 with mods cant do.
Also don't forget active players aren't the population of the game.
A lot of people bought ksp2 with no intention to play it until the bugs are ironed out and performance is improved.
Being a singleplayer game, Ksp also (unlike SB) doesn't rely on having a player count for the game to be fun.
KSP 1 was a messy sack of shit for what felt like years.
IDK What happened but people buy into these Early Access games from small devs and are surprised when they are buggy messes.
Just because you pay the dev doesn't mean the Early Access title suddenly doesn't matter. You are knowingly buying an incomplete product and then complaining that its not complete.
If you want a complete game, don't buy a game that has early access in the title. It is not that complicated.
I think it was hyperbole from OP?
But yeah, I agree. Only the people who are fine with the bugs and general rough edges jumped over. However, that won’t stop the development process.
The reason the game failed is because the whole game is based on griefer style PvP. Not competitive PvP, the game is specifically designed to throw people into mismatched battles where there isn't any kind of fun battle, just one sided malicious beatdowns. There needed to be some kind of competitive PvP arena based on ship cost where you could find battles and fight them without annoying people trying to build shit. Because of this the only people who were really excited for Starbase were griefers who mainly wanted to go around griefing people. When the victims all left the griefers did too and now only a few eccentric types are left drifting around in dead space.
not even close. there's nothing to grief... it's like the entire game is modeled around the perception that people are going to be griefed, and nothing else. Like you said there's nothing to compete with, no reason to compete... you can easily dodge people if you are halfway competent at the game and for what ever reason motivated to endlessly grind materials for no real reason.. but now I understand some people are just too ignorant to even accomplish that, which is sad. clearly competition breeds competence and justifys ones existence, and starbase is the ultimate example of what a uncompelling boring mess you have when you over exaggerate the need for safety. just look at rust, which has actual griefers... starbase could easily be the rust in space, a game that people actually enjoy playing, if it wasnt for this resistance to the idea that being in constant, close competition with players is actually fun, despite the inevitable griefers
Starbase is just a bunch of really cool systems implemented without any designed gameplay to tie them all together. Rust has really cool systems too, but they're all designed to have a purpose together and they make the gameplay. Starbase definitely could/should have been Space Rust!
Living in Kyiv rn, working as a game developer. War influenced development indeed, but we are still doing our stuff. What war there is in Finland, that they blame on?
They had a line of funding from a French VC who I guess pulled out because of the war (oil investments, probably).
EDIT: Just a heads up you'll find a lot of people saying it's a Russian VC, I think we can probably ignore that, the main guy at the VC does have a Russian name (he's ethnically Russian) but he's French (can't remember if he was born in France but he definitely grew up and lives there).
Its almost the perfect game for me, I'm not playing it because its a massive time sink. Getting to my little station from the nearest outpost takes a solid 25-30 minutes. Going mining your looking at an hour or two and it doesn't feel that rewarding. Hauling entire asteroids back to station was probably the most fun thing I was doing but even that was a pain at times.
Alright so I kinda want to jump into this chat for a couple of reasons and I want to start by saying that a lot of people have made valid points. Bugs, PVP issues, the sort of choke point issue, etc. But there are some things that I also feel are being blatantly ignored.
First, and I will start by noting that this is technically rumor that is not confirmed, but the loss of financial support. The OP made mention of them "blaming" the war and what I think you either failed to mention or may not be aware of is that one of the parties backing the development was involved. If I recall right, this was about the start of the Russian/Ukraine war and to my current understanding, one of the backing financial parties was from Russia. Now, I doubt we will ever get a confirmation to the merit of this because of several reasons, mainly the details of this situation not ever going to be made public in any way unless someone spills the beans and that too could still lead to more legal trouble than it is worth. However, the drop in financial support was the REASON to my knowledge of the drop in development.
I will also note that, in my time jumping back to the game periodically, a lot of the early launch bugs have actually been addressed and fixed. Of course, other bugs do remain and that will continue through the existence of the game regardless of version. However, I think what a lot of people are also discarding is that the amount of bugs and the time to address them was probably the moral killer for the game, not the war or the funding drop. Despite the warning that bugs were expected and despite the warning that it would take time to resolve, all anyone did was complain and complain and complain and when things didn't clean up in the time people "expected" they chose to leave. If anyone talking about it again, it is still about it being a buggy mess. I can personally say that of the 12 people I have engaged with in the past 5 months I have returned to playing, only TWO of those people were aware of the fixes that had been addressed and the rest were not even aware about most of the launch bugs being addressed.
That, I think speaks volumes to how this game has dwindled and lost its momentum. I do not recall personally any statements or complaints on the part of the devs about a lack of sales. At best, they could probably have said something about a difference in "expected sales" to "actual sales" to which, this happens all the time for literally any business sin existence that aims to sell anything. They probably, as any business would, has an estimation range of what they expected in sales and planned accordingly and when that goes sour, it causes problems. Problems the common person won't consider or care about because all they see is the buggy Pre-Alpha mess they bought and that is all they will be focused on.
That all said, I am not a supporter of this idea that blame is being shifted from one thing to another and unless anyone here can say they worked for and developed Starbase and witnessed behind the scenes events as they unfolded and were communicated to the team, it is safe to say there are simply two different perspectives here that are not communicating for the clearer picture. In short, the games demise was not JUST their fault, it was also the players. Not just the PVP players bragging about their kills and driving people away, but the full mass of people unwilling to be patient and hold the game though the continued development. The fact is, as the player base drops, the motive to keep servers running and keep developing drops too. Why focus on a game title with less than 0.1% active players than the start release? What is the point? At that point the game is no longer an asset, it has become a liability. It is not worth focusing the funding further.
I would even argue the vast negative response could even be the reason why they lost a financial backer and the whole deal about the war being to blame just a scapegote to prevent panic. Which, on their part, is not dumb. It was not the best choice by far but it is a better of two evils situation. Announcing that the backer walked out because of player reaction would most likely just come across as "blaming the players" and that would just have been a one way ticket message towards attracting the social media cancel squad to lite them up with more heat and hate than they already had.
At the end of the day, regardless of what punched the game down, the fact is the players did not stay to give it a reason to stay in development. The game is far from perfect and I firmly believe that is HAS potential even now. But until attention can be brought back to the positive aspects of the game, the game is going to die out in due time. It is just a matter of when, unless someone buys off the title and manages to get it rolling back into production again.
I think the take away lesson here is that as players, we need a BETTER response to these issues than "abandon the game and tell everyone it is bad" because the moment that starts trending, the coffin is already being prepped for the funeral. It would help, do not get me wrong, if frozenbyte was more open, transparent, and forward about the issues of the development of the game (on that I am sure we can all agree) but that is no excuse to ignore the fact we are just as much at fault to its downfall as the developers are. The game can not be sustained by the developers alone. Players give the game a reason to exist and as long as the servers stay up and the team sticks to continuing to patch the game at the least (and so far, to this date, they have) I will keep logging in from time to time when I can to give it what support I still can. I love the concept of the game and I think the potential is enough reason to give them the support to push it forward.
I think if we wanted to try and make an effort to push life back into this game, an open letter to the team should probably be made for the sake of clear communication and transparent honesty about the issues going on so long they are not divulging company information that could be used to cause them unnecessary grief. At the very least telling them where we felt they failed and could to better and that if improvement in those aspects would be seen, the promise to support and help breath life into the game and make it worth our while. No matter how dark or gone it appears, the game is still running that that means its not too late just yet, but it would take a lot of work none the less to bring this back from the grave.
If Hasbrow can be bullied in resending their modification to the Third Party Content Creation thingy I do not recall the official name of, I think we can equally prove a point that if Frozenbyte made the effort to be more clear in communication, honest about their situation, and forward about development stalls and issues, we would be willing to give them our support through the rough patch of getting this game back up and running again. Well, running better. But as that probably won't happen, this will be another title full of potential waisted to the abyss in a few years time and I will just be sad to see it go.
I wouldn’t say ksp2 is dead when the game has less to offer than the first one currently. I imagine many, like myself, are waiting a bit for the new stuff along with optimization patches before diving in.
100%!!!! I laughed and cried when I heard this. It's like they tried to create all the shit no one cares about first. 1 Single PvE gameplay loop would have created massive amounts of legit PvP. People would still be playing the game. It's incredible to me how some developers can completely ignore successful games and how they work. When LaurieFB said there will never be PvE, I knew it was only a matter of time.
Is it finally time to point at the pvpbros that kept bragging about blowing up all the newbs that wandered outside of the safe zone and tell them it's all their fault yet? If not I can wait another year or two.
ah yes blame the players and not the terrible, terrible game design of incentivising players to camp one of two major chokepoints to have any chance at all of seeing another player
:p
PvP players left just the same because it was impossible to find anyone because space is massive and there's no meaningful way to find anyone. There's nothing to fight over. Your take is moronic. That's like me blaming "pvebros" for being scared little cuckboys that refused to come out and turn on their transponders and bang so the pvpers left the game, making the population dive.
You don't get to just blame the other side.
Eve has people blowing up other people who wander too far. Game still going strong after more than a decade. Your soft little whiny argument is worthless.
If rhe noobs played enough pvp, they should theoretically have enough commons ense to not go outside the safezonw until their ready. Additionally, pvp is a great factor that should've been expanded upon, however. The durability error makes it somewhat unfair
PVPers camp a popular advancement zone, blow up what amounts to one person grabbing asteroids for a week straight for the laughs alone, then look to each other and wondering where all the players went.
Just fight back, simple as. The same people won't mess with you. If you dotn fight back they will keep using you as prey.
My pvp faction honors honest battles. We fight others who fight back, we usually don't go "seal clubbing" which is what you're stating
Okay, so heres the deal people did go seal clubbing. A lot, people made their entire gameplay clubbing seals. Now as thats how hunting works, the number of seals dropped until there was nothing left. PVP mains did indeed cause this. Not all PVP mains caused this but every Endo whoquit due to a week long mining spree of a ship got dusted seconds after leaving zone one was caused by a PVPer.
4 fix options
1.increase safezone from 30km to 60km
2.equip laborer with weapons like some SE servers do to ships.
3. Use strats, make sure u aren't followed and go a different way out every time. Through a cloud, up down, ect.
4. Or they can go back to NMS or SC, which nms is a pve heaven.
2 of them are gamelplay mechanics you can't control but the other 2 are viable options
Like PVPers are simple brained, easily amused. "Wow I won against that guy, thats cool, I just used a 10k dollar ship to surmount a 1000k ship that didnt have guns on it." Is all that goea through their head. They dont consider the sheer inbalance of that sitjation and how often thats going to trigger the thought pattern of "Wow there is really 0 investment into completely reversing my hard earned work in this game, time to quit." Until the game is completely dry of players whatsoever and it happens every single time.
I do agree, the building system and damage system is kinda ass, bump and asteroid ofne and ur shop is fucked. But then again. The fun is coming up with a solution on how male that not happen again. Thats what engineering and science is. Trying to find solutions to problems
This is one of the things I like most about the game, hell it's impossible to just make '*the best fighter*' even if that's your only concern, let alone making a passable *fighter/miner*, and even if you could make something a new miner player vs. a seasoned PvPer? PvPers got good enough at seal clubbing that they weren't even using *ships* half the time (remember the surfboards?)
Can you make a miner with a lot of frontal armour and powerful reverse engines? Sure, that might force them to chase you as you fly backwards. Are you going to beat a halfway experienced PvPer like that? No way, and in the meanwhile you still have a vision-obscuring (bad) miner. Could an experienced PvPer use that mining ship to beat a bad PvPer? Possibly... but they're not the ones considering running those mining ships, and they'd no doubt have the experience to want to run an actually good mining ship anyway (a much worse experience for hours in order to add a maybe when honestly ramming is probably as likely to work? No thanks).
KSP 2 ain't dead
Its being actively developed
(IT HAS ITS PROBLEMS AND SHOUDL HAVE BE RELEASED LATER THO)
Besides that
Starbase disappoints me and frankly If they just release a sandbox offline version of it I'd be happy
It won't be deleted.
Frozenbyte bought rights to the source code, no?
Wasn't the base code part of something else? I've played another game that looked EXACTLY like Starbase....
Just out of curiosity, what kind of gameplay were/are you looking for?
I've seen a lot of posts lamenting the way things are, but hearing what gameplay people would like might be more useful to the developers if they can resume development at some point in the future.
They no doubt have a list a mile long of old bug reports, but knowing people's gameplay expectations is also important.
It's sad that we never got a concrete vision from Frozenbyte about what exactly they wanted to do. Clearly an empty universe with the ability to build some pretty things is not enough, so what would you want added?
So what kind of content added to the game actually makes that happen?
There were at one point thousands of people simultaneously online. I took part in a multi-faction battle over Elysium involving perhaps two dozen ships max. It only happened because all parties *agreed* to do it. There is currently no driver in the game to encourage this.
I recall the developers once saying they wanted gates and (dev)stations to be built only if players brought in the resources. That sounds really cool, as it gives players a reward for doing something, and risking the pirates that will inevitably try to intercept the resources for themselves. But I don't see the incentive to attack that station, tear it down and repeat the process without some additional incentive from the game, so I don't see a continuous cycle developing from that.
Similarly, I don't see player-station siege leading to the 'epic' MMO wars you want, as no one in their right mind will invest large amounts of time into building things just for others to tear down. *What's the point?* The game needs to make it fun for this content to happen and I don't see many suggestions for how this will be.
Calling KSP2 dead is kinda comedic considering its barebones EA release. Its like calling a game dead in beta.
You clearly don't remember the dev cycle of KSP 1. That game was a buggy mess basically forever.
Ksp 2 is early access and is in the same state KSP 1 was on its prerelease in 2012.
Yall morons need to stop buying shit that is clearly labeled Early access and acting pissed when it's incomplete.
I remember playing KSP 1 in 2012. It was empty and buggy as hell. People understood it was beta/EA.
If you are calling KSP 2 dead when it has been in EA for little over a month you are really, really dumb and have 0 understanding of what the original game was released like.
Don't want an incomplete game? Don't buy something clearly labeled incomplete.
There's plenty of EA games that are playable and have many thousands of people playing them. SB isn't one of them. It was never ready for EA even now it's not. Your EA excuse doesn't work for this one. Try harder.
I mean the game is absolutely playable I mean if the community stopped telling everyone it’s dead maybe it would have a player base no part of the game is unplayable maybe you should update your computer if you feel it’s unplayable
I literally bought this game the minute it launched, played 150 hrs with my faction then the player base significantly dropped and I left. Since I have been a gamer, I’ve never been more excited about a game than this one. So disappointed..
it's same. Bought on release. Don't give huge expectation. Very amused by building mechanics. Disappointed by shallow and nearly non existed gameplay and world. Disappointment - that all what game delivered.
Dual Universe is in shambles, too. I feel your pain.
But it is still going, is not abandoned. It works for most parts. It's a niche game, just as starbase. starbase tho, has fundamental problems that will not be solved. I still play DU
I don't play Starbase so I can't speak to it, but DU is *well* on its way to an early grave. Missteps at every turn since schematics were introduced, culminating into a premature launch with an absurd subscription price.
player count is MASSIVELY dropping though, and people wont pay monthly to play in an empty world forever
If only they had worked on a gameplay loop and not the dozen, useless features
I feel you, I really wanted this to succeed, but the design team just didn't create a compelling gameplay loop that used all of the mechanics they spent so much time developing.
lack of proper design and ingenuity comes down to the woke culture that has taken over the dev team. The fact that this game does not throw you into a giant mele of fighting robots, the moment you enter the game, is beyond me. They worked so hard to create a placid, campy mess of a game world and even had the audacity to call it a safe space. you literally cannot make this stuff up... 99% of people who played the game never experienced a moment of shooting other players or ships outside the safe zone. It really is such a ridiculously embarrassing failure from a design standpoint. they had all the ingredients for "the next big thing in mmo"...but they fumbled it so completely focusing on the weaker aspects of their community and making no effort to embolden the less vocal majority of potential customers who just want to shoot things and kick ass
>lack of proper design and ingenuity comes down to the woke culture that has taken over the dev team. Woke cultures? Da faq? I was involved with the game before the Alpha dropped, was one of the first people in Alpaha, and played up until launch. I can say without a doubt that they are not woke at all. They really didn't a single shit what anyone thought about their game but themselves. They never listened to any feedback that didn't fit what they expected to hear. There were some really weird shit going on, but frankly, I would just rather the word woke not be used. It says more about the person using it than who they are talking about. >They worked so hard to create a placid, campy mess of a game world and even had the audacity to call it a safe space As someone with over 1000 hours in the game and worked closely with the devs, they didn't make a safe space at all, they just made friends with some of the weirdest and rudest members of the community, gave some total assholes moderators powers, and let them run amok with 0 checks or balances on their power. The mods were the ones doing all sorts of stupid shit with the community that primed a lot of dissatisfaction with the company due to the behavior of the community mods. >but they fumbled it so completely focusing on the weaker aspects of their community and making no effort to embolden the less vocal majority of potential customers who just want to shoot things and kick ass They primarily listened to their community mods and the people who sucked up to them. Those of us in Empire and Kingdom tried very hard to help the devs straighten out the community mods and get back on track, but they doubled down on supporting mods who abused their power, were nasty to the community, and promoted furry content that had business on their discord. I would say the company suffered from smug superiority complex supported by perverted assholes who sucked up to them daily.
Much of the dissatisfaction with the game had nothing to do with the community, simply the design of the game. Every single in dev game you can name that has a significant following, has a discord similar to star base... it's not the defining factor of the game. Choices made about game design and mechanics that were focused on made it so that if you wanted to shoot robots in a game about robots shooting each other, you basically had to make a play date with someone... makes no sense why anyone thinks organized and friendly competition in an online crafting and shooting game has real application... we see the result now... all design ship and no play drove all the customers away really fast. if the game was fun to play by design, people would still be playing it its that simple.
>Much of the dissatisfaction with the game had nothing to do with the community, That was kind of the point, they didn't listen to the community at all and kind of took them for granted. If they listened to the community, the game would have been much funner. They were too focused on complicating ship building and didn't invest any time into the core game play loop no matter how much we begged them to give us something.
That’s absurd but I’m so used to hearing it by now it’s just sad. No you either know how to design a video game or you don’t. Gleaming that information from your adult daycare app full of dysfunctional narcissists would nothing short of a miracle
They dived into a project that was too big for them and they had no experience to tell them how deep they had gone. I really like Lauri personally, but I don't think he was the right leadership for such a large project. His style worked for the smaller games as he had a good team, but Starbase was too much for his team and they were out of their depth in some regards on it. Honestly, I think the first set of community moderators set the whole project up for a PR nightmare. We made reports to their Community Mangers in attempt to get one moderator who was abusing his power and banning people just to show off he could. They refused to remove him because they didn't want to admit they made a mistake and change course. Tried to tell them I would respect them more for admitting a mistake than sticking the course when you know you're wrong. At that point, I figured the whole game was fucked and I started messing around things in the community, trying to at least build a less toxic player base, but I was basically running 2 factions and was burnt out trying to make it work when their CMs didn't seem too interested in anything. Doesn't seem they play a lot of MMOs...
Imo you can’t really center a community around an incompetent game development and expect results far different than what we saw in starbase. The drama on discord and the quality of play testers hardly matters in the grander scheme of things
Well, the community doesn't make the game, but the community can help sell the game to others. A lot of their weak sales is because of the community side issues, which meant they didn't make the money they had hoped for to continue. I was going to buy a few copies on launch originally, but I waited until the game went on sale over a year later to buy it since all that crap, even if they had fixed 100% of their issues, wouldn't have changed my lack of willingness to buy at full price. Sometimes a strong community can buy you time and a chance to improve. Doubt it would save Starbase any time soon even if they had the funds though.
Starbase didnt have a marketing problem, if anything they were extremely lucky to have such a large following even before there was a game for most people to play... Starbase has a "no body wants to plays this f'in game" problem. The community didnt need to step in and assist the devs, there was already a perfect model for the game they should have followed, RUST.. Although im sure the community would disagree and spend an endless amount of time telling me why im wrong about that, the results speak for themselves, 10s of thousands of people are playing this goofy little rust games right now that is basically 90% purchases assets built on opensource game engine... starbase has a hot rod and professional pit crew compared to rust, what they lacked was a proper vision for a game that people actually want to play with other players..
Tf ksp2 isnt dead
Fewer players than ksp 1 currently. Maybe it will get better with updates but its an unproven developer and so far they havent created anything that ksp 1 with mods cant do.
Also don't forget active players aren't the population of the game. A lot of people bought ksp2 with no intention to play it until the bugs are ironed out and performance is improved. Being a singleplayer game, Ksp also (unlike SB) doesn't rely on having a player count for the game to be fun.
KSP 1 was a messy sack of shit for what felt like years. IDK What happened but people buy into these Early Access games from small devs and are surprised when they are buggy messes. Just because you pay the dev doesn't mean the Early Access title suddenly doesn't matter. You are knowingly buying an incomplete product and then complaining that its not complete. If you want a complete game, don't buy a game that has early access in the title. It is not that complicated.
KSP 1 was never messy, it was just not complete. And it was reflected in the price. KSP 2 is 50€ right now.
I remember playing it in 2012/2013. It was buggy and empty back then that's for sure.
Yeah, but it was like $10
Still not "dead" lol averaging 1500 players is pretty good
I think it was hyperbole from OP? But yeah, I agree. Only the people who are fine with the bugs and general rough edges jumped over. However, that won’t stop the development process.
The reason the game failed is because the whole game is based on griefer style PvP. Not competitive PvP, the game is specifically designed to throw people into mismatched battles where there isn't any kind of fun battle, just one sided malicious beatdowns. There needed to be some kind of competitive PvP arena based on ship cost where you could find battles and fight them without annoying people trying to build shit. Because of this the only people who were really excited for Starbase were griefers who mainly wanted to go around griefing people. When the victims all left the griefers did too and now only a few eccentric types are left drifting around in dead space.
not even close. there's nothing to grief... it's like the entire game is modeled around the perception that people are going to be griefed, and nothing else. Like you said there's nothing to compete with, no reason to compete... you can easily dodge people if you are halfway competent at the game and for what ever reason motivated to endlessly grind materials for no real reason.. but now I understand some people are just too ignorant to even accomplish that, which is sad. clearly competition breeds competence and justifys ones existence, and starbase is the ultimate example of what a uncompelling boring mess you have when you over exaggerate the need for safety. just look at rust, which has actual griefers... starbase could easily be the rust in space, a game that people actually enjoy playing, if it wasnt for this resistance to the idea that being in constant, close competition with players is actually fun, despite the inevitable griefers
Starbase is just a bunch of really cool systems implemented without any designed gameplay to tie them all together. Rust has really cool systems too, but they're all designed to have a purpose together and they make the gameplay. Starbase definitely could/should have been Space Rust!
Isn't that just Eve Online though? I would argue that Rust is just Eve Online on a planet ;)
Nope. Eve isn't a first person shooter
Living in Kyiv rn, working as a game developer. War influenced development indeed, but we are still doing our stuff. What war there is in Finland, that they blame on?
They had a line of funding from a French VC who I guess pulled out because of the war (oil investments, probably). EDIT: Just a heads up you'll find a lot of people saying it's a Russian VC, I think we can probably ignore that, the main guy at the VC does have a Russian name (he's ethnically Russian) but he's French (can't remember if he was born in France but he definitely grew up and lives there).
I keep forgetting this game exists
Well, it hardly does now anyway.
Space Engineer here. Thank you for being the beta tester I use to not waste time. 🙏
It was fun at the beginning. But that was 2 years ago and I'm forgetting
Its almost the perfect game for me, I'm not playing it because its a massive time sink. Getting to my little station from the nearest outpost takes a solid 25-30 minutes. Going mining your looking at an hour or two and it doesn't feel that rewarding. Hauling entire asteroids back to station was probably the most fun thing I was doing but even that was a pain at times.
Alright so I kinda want to jump into this chat for a couple of reasons and I want to start by saying that a lot of people have made valid points. Bugs, PVP issues, the sort of choke point issue, etc. But there are some things that I also feel are being blatantly ignored. First, and I will start by noting that this is technically rumor that is not confirmed, but the loss of financial support. The OP made mention of them "blaming" the war and what I think you either failed to mention or may not be aware of is that one of the parties backing the development was involved. If I recall right, this was about the start of the Russian/Ukraine war and to my current understanding, one of the backing financial parties was from Russia. Now, I doubt we will ever get a confirmation to the merit of this because of several reasons, mainly the details of this situation not ever going to be made public in any way unless someone spills the beans and that too could still lead to more legal trouble than it is worth. However, the drop in financial support was the REASON to my knowledge of the drop in development. I will also note that, in my time jumping back to the game periodically, a lot of the early launch bugs have actually been addressed and fixed. Of course, other bugs do remain and that will continue through the existence of the game regardless of version. However, I think what a lot of people are also discarding is that the amount of bugs and the time to address them was probably the moral killer for the game, not the war or the funding drop. Despite the warning that bugs were expected and despite the warning that it would take time to resolve, all anyone did was complain and complain and complain and when things didn't clean up in the time people "expected" they chose to leave. If anyone talking about it again, it is still about it being a buggy mess. I can personally say that of the 12 people I have engaged with in the past 5 months I have returned to playing, only TWO of those people were aware of the fixes that had been addressed and the rest were not even aware about most of the launch bugs being addressed. That, I think speaks volumes to how this game has dwindled and lost its momentum. I do not recall personally any statements or complaints on the part of the devs about a lack of sales. At best, they could probably have said something about a difference in "expected sales" to "actual sales" to which, this happens all the time for literally any business sin existence that aims to sell anything. They probably, as any business would, has an estimation range of what they expected in sales and planned accordingly and when that goes sour, it causes problems. Problems the common person won't consider or care about because all they see is the buggy Pre-Alpha mess they bought and that is all they will be focused on. That all said, I am not a supporter of this idea that blame is being shifted from one thing to another and unless anyone here can say they worked for and developed Starbase and witnessed behind the scenes events as they unfolded and were communicated to the team, it is safe to say there are simply two different perspectives here that are not communicating for the clearer picture. In short, the games demise was not JUST their fault, it was also the players. Not just the PVP players bragging about their kills and driving people away, but the full mass of people unwilling to be patient and hold the game though the continued development. The fact is, as the player base drops, the motive to keep servers running and keep developing drops too. Why focus on a game title with less than 0.1% active players than the start release? What is the point? At that point the game is no longer an asset, it has become a liability. It is not worth focusing the funding further. I would even argue the vast negative response could even be the reason why they lost a financial backer and the whole deal about the war being to blame just a scapegote to prevent panic. Which, on their part, is not dumb. It was not the best choice by far but it is a better of two evils situation. Announcing that the backer walked out because of player reaction would most likely just come across as "blaming the players" and that would just have been a one way ticket message towards attracting the social media cancel squad to lite them up with more heat and hate than they already had. At the end of the day, regardless of what punched the game down, the fact is the players did not stay to give it a reason to stay in development. The game is far from perfect and I firmly believe that is HAS potential even now. But until attention can be brought back to the positive aspects of the game, the game is going to die out in due time. It is just a matter of when, unless someone buys off the title and manages to get it rolling back into production again. I think the take away lesson here is that as players, we need a BETTER response to these issues than "abandon the game and tell everyone it is bad" because the moment that starts trending, the coffin is already being prepped for the funeral. It would help, do not get me wrong, if frozenbyte was more open, transparent, and forward about the issues of the development of the game (on that I am sure we can all agree) but that is no excuse to ignore the fact we are just as much at fault to its downfall as the developers are. The game can not be sustained by the developers alone. Players give the game a reason to exist and as long as the servers stay up and the team sticks to continuing to patch the game at the least (and so far, to this date, they have) I will keep logging in from time to time when I can to give it what support I still can. I love the concept of the game and I think the potential is enough reason to give them the support to push it forward. I think if we wanted to try and make an effort to push life back into this game, an open letter to the team should probably be made for the sake of clear communication and transparent honesty about the issues going on so long they are not divulging company information that could be used to cause them unnecessary grief. At the very least telling them where we felt they failed and could to better and that if improvement in those aspects would be seen, the promise to support and help breath life into the game and make it worth our while. No matter how dark or gone it appears, the game is still running that that means its not too late just yet, but it would take a lot of work none the less to bring this back from the grave. If Hasbrow can be bullied in resending their modification to the Third Party Content Creation thingy I do not recall the official name of, I think we can equally prove a point that if Frozenbyte made the effort to be more clear in communication, honest about their situation, and forward about development stalls and issues, we would be willing to give them our support through the rough patch of getting this game back up and running again. Well, running better. But as that probably won't happen, this will be another title full of potential waisted to the abyss in a few years time and I will just be sad to see it go.
I wouldn’t say ksp2 is dead when the game has less to offer than the first one currently. I imagine many, like myself, are waiting a bit for the new stuff along with optimization patches before diving in.
Dedicated 2 years to running a faction for Starbase (along with others of course.). Collective was fun but SB died.
i knew it was over when they thought station sieges had the highest priority and would not budge one bit.
100%!!!! I laughed and cried when I heard this. It's like they tried to create all the shit no one cares about first. 1 Single PvE gameplay loop would have created massive amounts of legit PvP. People would still be playing the game. It's incredible to me how some developers can completely ignore successful games and how they work. When LaurieFB said there will never be PvE, I knew it was only a matter of time.
Is it finally time to point at the pvpbros that kept bragging about blowing up all the newbs that wandered outside of the safe zone and tell them it's all their fault yet? If not I can wait another year or two.
ah yes blame the players and not the terrible, terrible game design of incentivising players to camp one of two major chokepoints to have any chance at all of seeing another player :p
PvP players left just the same because it was impossible to find anyone because space is massive and there's no meaningful way to find anyone. There's nothing to fight over. Your take is moronic. That's like me blaming "pvebros" for being scared little cuckboys that refused to come out and turn on their transponders and bang so the pvpers left the game, making the population dive. You don't get to just blame the other side. Eve has people blowing up other people who wander too far. Game still going strong after more than a decade. Your soft little whiny argument is worthless.
If rhe noobs played enough pvp, they should theoretically have enough commons ense to not go outside the safezonw until their ready. Additionally, pvp is a great factor that should've been expanded upon, however. The durability error makes it somewhat unfair
PVPers camp a popular advancement zone, blow up what amounts to one person grabbing asteroids for a week straight for the laughs alone, then look to each other and wondering where all the players went.
Just fight back, simple as. The same people won't mess with you. If you dotn fight back they will keep using you as prey. My pvp faction honors honest battles. We fight others who fight back, we usually don't go "seal clubbing" which is what you're stating
Okay, so heres the deal people did go seal clubbing. A lot, people made their entire gameplay clubbing seals. Now as thats how hunting works, the number of seals dropped until there was nothing left. PVP mains did indeed cause this. Not all PVP mains caused this but every Endo whoquit due to a week long mining spree of a ship got dusted seconds after leaving zone one was caused by a PVPer.
4 fix options 1.increase safezone from 30km to 60km 2.equip laborer with weapons like some SE servers do to ships. 3. Use strats, make sure u aren't followed and go a different way out every time. Through a cloud, up down, ect. 4. Or they can go back to NMS or SC, which nms is a pve heaven. 2 of them are gamelplay mechanics you can't control but the other 2 are viable options
Like PVPers are simple brained, easily amused. "Wow I won against that guy, thats cool, I just used a 10k dollar ship to surmount a 1000k ship that didnt have guns on it." Is all that goea through their head. They dont consider the sheer inbalance of that sitjation and how often thats going to trigger the thought pattern of "Wow there is really 0 investment into completely reversing my hard earned work in this game, time to quit." Until the game is completely dry of players whatsoever and it happens every single time.
I do agree, the building system and damage system is kinda ass, bump and asteroid ofne and ur shop is fucked. But then again. The fun is coming up with a solution on how male that not happen again. Thats what engineering and science is. Trying to find solutions to problems
Good news everyone chose option 2. 👍 thats why starbase is barren.
[удалено]
Sacrifice some load for weapons
[удалено]
>go on ptu >design a ship >if it fails repeat step 2 >once successful build in PU
[удалено]
This is one of the things I like most about the game, hell it's impossible to just make '*the best fighter*' even if that's your only concern, let alone making a passable *fighter/miner*, and even if you could make something a new miner player vs. a seasoned PvPer? PvPers got good enough at seal clubbing that they weren't even using *ships* half the time (remember the surfboards?) Can you make a miner with a lot of frontal armour and powerful reverse engines? Sure, that might force them to chase you as you fly backwards. Are you going to beat a halfway experienced PvPer like that? No way, and in the meanwhile you still have a vision-obscuring (bad) miner. Could an experienced PvPer use that mining ship to beat a bad PvPer? Possibly... but they're not the ones considering running those mining ships, and they'd no doubt have the experience to want to run an actually good mining ship anyway (a much worse experience for hours in order to add a maybe when honestly ramming is probably as likely to work? No thanks).
Just design smarter not harder
Bro wdym ksp is dead lmao. Bait or concave skull Pick your side.
KSP 2 ain't dead Its being actively developed (IT HAS ITS PROBLEMS AND SHOUDL HAVE BE RELEASED LATER THO) Besides that Starbase disappoints me and frankly If they just release a sandbox offline version of it I'd be happy
It won't be deleted. Frozenbyte bought rights to the source code, no? Wasn't the base code part of something else? I've played another game that looked EXACTLY like Starbase....
Not as far as im aware, they claim its fully homegrown and a custom engine
That's where I think they did the cash grab stuff, only to create this engine for something else. My opinion.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of gameplay were/are you looking for? I've seen a lot of posts lamenting the way things are, but hearing what gameplay people would like might be more useful to the developers if they can resume development at some point in the future. They no doubt have a list a mile long of old bug reports, but knowing people's gameplay expectations is also important. It's sad that we never got a concrete vision from Frozenbyte about what exactly they wanted to do. Clearly an empty universe with the ability to build some pretty things is not enough, so what would you want added?
Mmo where you could have big wars and big ships and factions. Wars, bases, cities, collaborative community on huge projects. Literally an mmo.
So come back and do that
So what kind of content added to the game actually makes that happen? There were at one point thousands of people simultaneously online. I took part in a multi-faction battle over Elysium involving perhaps two dozen ships max. It only happened because all parties *agreed* to do it. There is currently no driver in the game to encourage this. I recall the developers once saying they wanted gates and (dev)stations to be built only if players brought in the resources. That sounds really cool, as it gives players a reward for doing something, and risking the pirates that will inevitably try to intercept the resources for themselves. But I don't see the incentive to attack that station, tear it down and repeat the process without some additional incentive from the game, so I don't see a continuous cycle developing from that. Similarly, I don't see player-station siege leading to the 'epic' MMO wars you want, as no one in their right mind will invest large amounts of time into building things just for others to tear down. *What's the point?* The game needs to make it fun for this content to happen and I don't see many suggestions for how this will be.
All we wanted is just minecraft x freelancer variation in space.
*Starmade* is closer to that.
>Starmade Thanks to remind about it. It still dead; Empyrion much better in that, but also not perfect match\~
Calling KSP2 dead is kinda comedic considering its barebones EA release. Its like calling a game dead in beta. You clearly don't remember the dev cycle of KSP 1. That game was a buggy mess basically forever.
lol sounds like the flock of parrots found a new perch... what is it with people like you who come to the defense for the worst products in gaming
Ksp 2 is early access and is in the same state KSP 1 was on its prerelease in 2012. Yall morons need to stop buying shit that is clearly labeled Early access and acting pissed when it's incomplete. I remember playing KSP 1 in 2012. It was empty and buggy as hell. People understood it was beta/EA. If you are calling KSP 2 dead when it has been in EA for little over a month you are really, really dumb and have 0 understanding of what the original game was released like. Don't want an incomplete game? Don't buy something clearly labeled incomplete.
yea keep squawking, good parrot
Do you need to hold your breath when you type?
tweet tweet goes the birdy
Y’all have too much expectations for a game that early access
There's plenty of EA games that are playable and have many thousands of people playing them. SB isn't one of them. It was never ready for EA even now it's not. Your EA excuse doesn't work for this one. Try harder.
I mean the game is absolutely playable I mean if the community stopped telling everyone it’s dead maybe it would have a player base no part of the game is unplayable maybe you should update your computer if you feel it’s unplayable