I think it's great that people complain and whine about Starbound..

it just means that people have an interest and actually care about the game. The moment people stop complaining then there's a real problem.

I notice some people tend to take any criticism of the game and it's development process personally. However I'd like to point out that some forms of criticism and even complaining are beneficial for the developers as they are alerted to the feelings and thoughts of the players.

In regards to some of the complainers keep in mind too that CF has responded and took action based on some of the criticism. That's one of the good things about indie developers, they're more likely to take suggestions from their fanbase.


I expect this thread will get locked or flamed. But based on some of the mud throwing I've read about, I just wanted to speak up as a person who stands in the middle of these little online skirmishes. Clearly as a fan of the game I want it like yesterday, but at the same time I know it's going to take a bit to get the final product completed. I'm just hoping it happens before 2015.

 

When it's constructive it's great, when people make conspiracy theories and take everything as a personal insult that's not so great.

 

Agreed, I think accusations of stealing or fraud are just silly. However I do get the feeling CF is a bit overwhelmed on the developing side.

For what it's worth I'll offer my 2 cents on how the game could be potentially developed. I don't think it's practical to create an entire galaxy with procedural generation. There are just far too many factors to contend with. In my opinion I think it would be faster to create maybe a smaller number of "static" planets spread across a few galaxies and maybe add some procedural generation to certain areas of the game. For example galaxy 1 might contain 3 static planets that contain multiple biomes and defined enemies per biome (similar to Terraria). There could be bosses and missions related to that planet that may need to be completed before moving on to the next planet. In addition to the static planets perhaps there could be procedurally generated planets, space stations, etc.. Again this is just my own humble opinion. I think procedural generation is a great thing for games, but it appears to be a difficult thing to implement. Especially when you want to create a universe with a lot of variety and consistently interesting content.[DOUBLEPOST=1408979412][/DOUBLEPOST]It's been a bit since I've last played SB (back in January) so perhaps some of these issues I noticed may have changed. Some of the things I hope to see changed:

1. Very little diversity on the planets - I hate to keep bringing up Terraria, but I think it's a valid point of reference for many people. With Terraria clearly the world being played in was huge, with many enemy and biome types. Coming from that experience to SB's version of a world the game felt a little flat. There was not much diversity either above or below ground in terrain. biomes or in enemy and friendly npcs. However the potential appears to be greater than Terraria but not yet fully developed. So it's not a major complaint, since it will likely change (I hope) in future updates.

2. Very little diversity between planets - Even though the game boasts nearly an infinite amount of planets, they all "felt" very much the same. After seeing 3-5 planets I felt no desire to really continue on. There was not enough diversity to fuel my desire to continue exploring the rest of the galaxy.

3. Building bases - This might be just a personal thing for me or maybe I don't have all the details. But it seems that extravagant base building seems a little pointless. If the point of the game is to continually move from world to world, why spend hours building a base that you'll soon leave behind. Of course this could easily be a moot point if there is a planet in the game that is big enough to constantly provide challenges, diversity and requires frequent return visits to.

Overall this game has the potential to be something truly incredible and I hope to see it fully realized soon.

 

If there is no one complaining about a product, it means that no one is using said product.

For many people, if something is not in front of them (available as a Stable update downloading now), then they do not believe it will exist later. They see announcements and trailers as mere words, with no action to back them up. This isn't because they think the devs are snake oil salesmen, but simply that they cannot imagine something that is not materialized in front of them. I think it's unfortunate in this case, but doesn't mean they are bad people and does not infer anything about their intelligence.

Procedural generation is tough. But, from Day 1, you're either all-in, or you're all-out. You can't start with procedural generation and then stop, switching to static generation. That's simply not how it works. Also, imagine that you want a million planets. And you want each of those million planets to have small slices of Terraria worlds (different biomes, monsters, treasure, environments). Are you going to handcraft each and every one of those million planets? That's going to take forever. At that point, just say "There are 10 planets in the game, each is a Terraria but at a different level, T1-T10", because you'll never finish making more planets...

The devs are shooting for the moon, and I think they're on right track to hit the mark, or get very close to it. Since this is procedural generation, it isn't as good/nice/detailed as handcrafted, but there will be much more quantity. Different combinations, etc.

Yes, it's harder, but sometimes...you have to take the hard way. It isn't a switch, where you can say "If we always pick the easy way, the game will be just as awesome, AND it will be done sooner!" I think the people that believe that haven't tried doing long and complex projects. I also think a lot of people would not be happy with the result if this was just "10 Terraria worlds with different items."

 

When you look at other voxel games or terraia you see a big point of monster hunting is that it means something. There was even an extra credits video that talked about one game that instead of dropping class specific items, they dropped orbs that could make any class's items and people actually liked that way less, even when it was the better deal. Starbound is like that with the money system and 3d printer. I played one game called castle miner z where monester might only drop ore and while still rather boring and uniteresting, it was more fun than just money

Going back and restarting tier 1 before tier x was balanced and fun...Sort of left people without a good stable endgame to keep them occupied and busy. I really have no idea why that was done. It seemed like what the game needed the most was endgame content, not tier 1 grind. But instead what we've gotten is a tier that is so grindy we try to get out of as quickly as possible. The money system as it is, is bad, so bad that you are making players start to drop things like ores and making sand destroy ores. Theres no good money sink that players of any play style would enjoy.

And the plan is npc housing which will give players money for doing a one time thing, forever?

It seems like such a poor choice that I cannot wrap my head around it. And the pixel compressor no one wants to use is suppose to be the main money sink? And its a game about exploring, but with the 3d printer you only ever need to find something once and need never explore for that thing again.

There seems to be so many logic holes like that. Restarting tier 1 before tier x racial armors had the racial differences, did little to change the feeling that the characters are merely reskins.

 

What was initially pushed as the beta was full of placeholders. There isn't much they could do at that point when every other post was "Give beta noaw plz!". So they pushed a half finished, incomplete project without any real form of progression, without a direction. Now they have ideas and direction, which results in taking something people are comfortable with and jumbling it up to make a (hopefully) far superior game. While changes of this scale seem like a bad thing, the game they're making in the nightlies is closer to their vision and that in the end is what matters. No one told Leonardo da Vinci that the Mona Lisa was going in the wrong direction by taking a cursory glance at basic, blank canvas it would eventually be pained on. Give them time to make what they envision, and once it's solid, give it the full once-over. If you still don't like it, then give feedback.

I think this game would have been far more solid to begin with if:

1. The community had been a little more patient in the beginning.
2. They had Metadept earlier in the dev process.
3. The placeholders had been forgone for more solid structures.

It's a byproduct of the development process to come up with new and better ways to do things you've already done. I'd rather they spend the time up-front to make the system more extensible then soldiering on with systems that aren't viable for long term implementation.

On a side note, I fully support ore dropping as part of the normal difficulty, people need a reason to be careful.

 

I have trouble explaining to my friends how I can like a game, but still complain about it. That doesn't mean I like the game though. The worst part about having legitimate complaints is that even if you offer a solution, no one pays you any mind because you're bitching and people get upset that you're bitching alone regardless of your point of view and that causes conflict which in turns gets a thread locked. I don't know why people can't be civil and logical. For some reason everything has to be bitching or a personal attack to take personally.

 

I disagree with the point they should have been left alone to develop the game. This one instance where I'm glad the community voiced their opinion early on in the process. The initial leveling progression in the early beta was extremely flawed and from my understanding this had nothing to do with a rushed product but more in line with just a bad choice in character progression through the game.

 

They are absolutely capable of making mistakes and that choice to remove threat was not solely gathered from people giving feedback. I think people hounding them to push something that was incomplete was a big portion of the problem. Everything after Durasteel didn't have proper progression in the beginning, it was a matter of gather ore, use chip, gather ore, use chip, etc.

 

Without the feedback I doubt the game would have progressed to the point it's at even now. Before the actual beta released I remember updates where the dev team was spending time naming items and other work that should have been low priority. It's like painting a room before the walls are all put up. I don't mean this next statement to be harsh but I don't think CF really should have began taking pre-orders without having a better strategy for completing the game. After looking through the updates from spring of 2013 til now it appears that the team during that time had very little idea on how to develop a game of this complexity. Fortunately it seems that they may be on track now, but a few months ago when they had to completely rework certain parts of the game a lot of people, including myself were concerned about the future of the game.

One of the drawbacks to indie games is that literally anyone can go out and create a game whether they have experience or not. Sometimes this is a good thing, other times it's frustrating. Right now there are a multitude of games that are available in unfinished and pre-development stages. Many of these games are being spearheaded by people who have great concepts but no real clue as to what goes into developing a completed product. But on the flipside without people jumping into the waters there are a lot of great games that would never have seen the light of day.

 

Seems some people think that the constant complaining will ruin the game. They seem to be afraid that if they let CF get told how bad they are at this devs will start to have meltdowns and just go "You know what, I quit, this is not worth it".

Tempers seem to be playing into it. People are on edge right now and seem to become hypersensitive to people pointing out flaws.

 

not rilly

critisism is a good thing

complaining and whining is a bad thing

it has happend in the past for other games
not naming anyone tho

 

The community was very patient. I'm playing a new voxel based 3d shooter in alpha that's putting out weekly updates and seeing community feedback in the week after patches. Alpha/beta are suppose to be a time of the most new content or new mechanics. Starbound seems to spend a lot of time reworking things that were useable. Minecraft put out new content every week or few months when it was mostly notch by himself and he was inventing a lot of that stuff, besides what was in infinminer.

Lets look at say nova kids, working on them now doesn't really do much for the game. Because races are largely reskins with different flavor text.

Making grinding harder doesn't fix people bored at end game or complaints about how grindy mining was in stable.

The Ship A.I. unless its expanded is largely forcing players just to do what they'd always do. Open the container and go down to mine, it just made it more grindy.

Nerfing pets right now doesn't really help the game

Breaking tier 1-10 down and starting back at tier 1 isn't really helping keep a community.

The majority of people I see think the game is grindy, so they are adding more grind. People were bored at tier X, so they've scraped people back to tier 1-3?

Like I said I can't really wrap my head around these choices. It seemed like people wanted no tiers (I don't mind tiers), but now your going to be locked in tiers doing super grindy quests for your ship?

I know I can't be the only one confused about a lot of the choices.

 

Fascinating how people still blame the community for errors of Chucklefish.
Failure to estimate releases leads uninformed customers to question and sometimes even demand releases or scream for refunds, leads inexperienced developers to make more errors. A circle which can be broken by good communication, refunds and making solid development plans.

Here's a great constructive tip for everyone, don't listen to guys who allways make up excuse for your errors, but accept that you made your responsibility and learn from it for the future. Added wisdom, don't denounce your community/fans.

 

There's a place for complaining and maybe even whining depending on the circumstances. Criticism is a little easier to ignore, complaining however tends to get attention. If the situation merits it, every person should complain or voice their opinion. The problem lies in the fact that some people tend to complain about everything

 

The problem is that "bitching" and "critical response" exist across very, very blurry line.
On one hand, sometimes people can't stop their proper criticism from going to nasty levels, with insults and, in Starbound's case, passive-agressive self victimization (ie, "I wasted my money on this" or "you tricked your loyal customers").
On the OTHER hand, nobody likes it when someone says they don't like something that you like. It's a fact, nobody likes to hear that. Some people respond to that in different ways, but generally, it catches people offguard to hear "Yeah, I really don't like <that thing you like>." As a result, some people will come up with things to "get back at" this person with a different opinion (whether they're aware of that or not). Which includes but isn't limited to insults, belittling the other person, dismissing the other person as a troll, etc etc etc.
That's just how it is, frankly. The mod team is trying its hardest to stop this stuff from sparking into arguments, but as long as opinion exists, it'll be challenged. =P

 

I agree I think some of the choices in this development cycle have been a little odd.

There's an expression that basically says "Imitate Success". I think that advice might still serve with this game, follow the route Terraria took. Even if it's a little stripped down get a good solid game together and then update as necessary . The Terraria crew really seem to do this well.

Before I was gung ho about them just releasing the final product, but now I would rather them take more time if needed to make sure the end product is a good one. I really hope they can find an experienced project manager to take the reigns and guide this game to it's completion.

 

I think that was one thing directly influenced by the community. At the time of the "what is 1.0" thought string the developer was met with many redditors chants "Novakids!!!!".. i.e Stretch goal.

Not too long after that backlash, they appear. What some of the fans wanted, but not that important to the game for many of us. They listen and responded to that specific choral demand (sorry, feedback!).

I think it's fair to say progression needs more attention than another race. That's artists and writers who could be working on progression items. Either way none of this is "whining". That word makes me think of a greedy dog begging for a scrap.

 

It is taking them ages to do proper updates, and I think it's largely to do with other commitments for the dev team. I hate how the mods on this forum criticize and delete any post that raises the issue of them not doing enough, but at the same time my grandma was in the League of German Maidens, and I've read Lord of the Flies, so I appreciate how quickly you can turn children into fascists. I just struggle to understand how they can make an almost complete beta in just over a year, yet it takes nearly two years to implement the most basic changes that were promised when we first bought the game. The reality is, it's not good enough. Chucklfish now seem to consider themselves publishers rather than developers, while I could give two f**ks about all the sh**ty indie games they wanna publish., and am only interested in their ability to finish the only decent game they've ever made.

 

You do understand the difference between publishing and developing right?