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

Really? I find it more fascinating that there are still people going on about the missed release estimates. What exactly is the point, anymore? Chucklefish have admitted their error. They will be avoiding it happening again. It seems that they have learned from their mistake, so why go on about it?

I agree with you here. Yes, you will learn more from constructive criticism about your mistakes than from yes men. But as I said, CF have changed their behaviour - they have listened to this. Going on and on about it is just beating a dead horse.

I am not just blindly defending CF. I have seen the problems that they have had. I'm perfectly willing to agree that they have made their share of blunders. But how about a little give and take? Let's drop the old issues which have been addressed. I don't mean forget them, but at this point, I don't think that there's anyone in the whole world who would be unaware of CF's track record with release dates.

 

im getting tired telling people that refunds are imposable
just look at my past posts or something =/

 

Well i'm not speaking about the release date alone.

And people hit on Chucklefish because Chucklefish still wasn't able to reassure them, that they'll deliver what they promised. It's all about broken promises and destroyed trust. Taking peoples money whitout delivering something means you sell something in trust. And that's directly going toward your idea of give and take.
People gave Chucklefish allready more than they deserved by giving them money long before they got anything. Giving them the benefit of a doubt, long before getting anything. But Chucklefish dropped a lot of bricks and now people no longer have a doubt from which chucklefish could benefit. And it's hard to regain this lost trust, and Chucklefish was at least in the last few months dropping that brick with some of Tiys answers, as were moderators and molly.
See how moderators in this forum letting a thread go one which basically is taking a piss on the Steam community. See how it's still "Yeah the community did misunderstood / demand [...]" in a lot of interaction between Chucklefish and Starbound. And if you think this is whining. No it's not. It's pointing out an error and telling them to change in this regards.

The advice i give over and over again is to speak with people. Adress their underlying fears in a polite manner and give out informations to people, so that they can make more informed guesses about what is going to happen. If you take a look at what Tiy said would be in the game (terrarforming, starbases, vehicles) if you take a look on how many mock-ups where flying around when the game was sold, you simply can realize that people are angry because they had false informations. And the sad part is that you can still find a lot of this bad informations on either the steam shop site or on their homepage.
I mean honestly if Omni tells you the pre-order phase has ended when there's still a big button labelled "pre-order" on the homepage, then somethings, wrong.

Yeah, i don't trust anyone in legal matters who isn't a lawyer for these matters. And let me tell you, if you take a look at typical contract jurisdication, there's a contract completly ontouched from Steams user agreement between a lot of people and Chucklefish. And it's completly untouched because Chucklefish also dropped the brick in that respect.
But hell, why speaing about law. We could speak about any compensation for dissatisfied customers. Oh yeah... nothing Chucklefish really cares about...

 

right of the steam website

 

I don't think that there is anything more that CF can do to regain the trust of those people. There is only so much that you can do or say in such a situation, and if that isn't enough, then there's nowhere else to go.

People gave CF money of their own free will, hopefully mostly because they liked the vision that CF painted as the future game. Whether CF deserve that money or not rather depends on whether they can deliver on that vision. We're not at the end of the journey yet, so I think it's premature to judge things at this point.

Yes, some of the communication has been troublesome, to say the least. Tiy could use some public relations advice. But I think that they have at least tried to address criticisms. They haven't always succeeded, but I'm willing to acknowledge the attempts, and I think that some of the more vocal critics should as well. The moderation? I think it's been fairly decent lately. Izzabelle in particular strikes me as someone who is really trying to keep things fair. There has been some spotty moderation in the past, but again, I think that this is one of the criticisms that they are trying to address.

I haven't seen anything untoward, though I'll grant that I could have missed something.

As I said above, we're not at the end of the journey yet. It's too early to say whether we have been given false information about what's in the game, unless we've been told that any of that won't be in the game? I haven't heard anything like that.

I would have thought that pre-order would cover any exchange prior to full release, myself. Maybe it's a Valve disconnect thing that CF have to say. Who knows.

 

Most of my complaints deal with them breaking existing features/functions that I personally enjoy. At least, they appear to be broken in the nightly builds. I can only hope they change things around before the next patch or I might be throwing in the towel like apparently a ton of other people have. The purpose of games is entertainment and fun. If the developers change the game in a way that it no longer provides that, then they have created a failure at least, with me. Though I certainly know I'm not alone in my complaints. I mean, from what I saw, the vast majority of the votes on the Getting bummed out lately, thread, basically were people either completely no longer play and just read the forums, or they gave up entirely and moved on.

 

Words have a meaning and are important in legal documents. So go ahead and read the underlined words and release it hasn't to do shit with Chucklefish. Not to mention that some people didn't even enter an agreement with Steam.
So you should really stop telling people things you don't know much about. The subject is quite problematic. And it's not as if companies can compensate without being legally forced.

Well the truth is they might or might not be able to do more.
People fear they don't plan on delivering all what was promised. If they still plan on doing so, then they might at least help a good portion by more or better communication. People didn't ask for some plan update, to get an ETA, but to get an overall idea what they still want to add. As i said before in another thread. An update planned feature list might be quite helpful for a lot of people.

It's no final judgement. But it's the current judgement of seemingly quite a lot of people. I don't think everyone who's now asking for a refund wouldn't come back if the game was finished and had every feature they promised.

Yes it all comes down to PR problems. But people have to realize that PR is really important.
Currently we're in a situation where Tiys last bigger answers on reddit either said that they're not planning on doing what (people think) was promised or that he's really really bad in wording what he's saying. And either way, it's a sign of real problems in customer/community management. And without being good in that, you won't be able to handle early access titles in a good way. Therefore i'm repeating over and over again that they need to improve on that. And that Molly should get some help, if she can't be on every party and do all of that.

You basically just have to read the first or first two pages of the thread about how the Steam community will react.
There are quite a few posts who paint the steam community as a toxic hell hole. And while the Steam forums are highly critical and not always completly logical, one has to see this community also as a fanbase. And that's something your normally shouldn't want as community manager.

No the journey hasn't ended. But the whole discussion around 1.0, has damaged Chucklefishs reputation quite badly. The whole discussion was really bad, because it's no where helping people regaining trust if you openly debate what finished means, what the 'full release' (not final, but full in terms of the version one actually bought) means and how there's only one person deciding what it actually menas.
Again, just to make the point, it would have been a lot better to declare what the real plans are in terms of features one had promised but won't be in the next releases and might never actually be and what definately is coming. Because honestly, no one believes in an endless development of a game. People will believe you, when you tell them you're planning to suppoert the game for 2 or 3 more years, but beyond that it's just to vague.

 

How do you know they deliberately did that?

 

I don't, its a matter of perspective. If they didn't deliberately do that then they had to have actually thought the game was almost complete mid 2013. And in order for that to be true you would have to set the bar pretty low for their planning and programming aptitude.

And pretty low is putting that very kindly.

 

Is it that, or was much of the original schedule changed in response to the feedback of the community?

To me this game originally took the Terraria inspiration a bit far. Pickaxes in a sci-fi game are a bit incongruous. Recent dev blogs show that they are changing the progression system to be more science-based. That is a good thing. The longer the game is in development, the more likely it is to incorporate a lot of the things we want to see. That some of the mechanics are being reworked necessitates a re-doing of the original estimates.

I don't think that shows ineptitude. Inexperience in developing a game is a fair charge, but not a damning one.

 

The schedule only started changing drastically after beta was dropped due to player feedback which is great and all. But it still doesn't explain why the game was marketed nearly complete when it clearly was not.

Agreed.

Perhaps, but I wanted to see a lot of the things advertised in blogs etc as well. And marketing a product as almost complete then releasing a framework instead is not good practice and should not be accepted in any industry, saying that "we are delaying it so we can better meet customer needs" does not make it any more ok.

Inexperience in developing a game is fine, and something I take no issue with. I take issue with taking money under false pretense then spitting in the face of their community when people get understandably annoyed about it. Saying that it seems they are currently working on mending broken bridges so props for that.

edit: And honestly, it looks like we are arguing entirely different things here. At the point CF started taking pre-orders there was very little in the way of gameplay footage and as such, little that fans could provide in terms of constructive feedback. Saying that they changed their entire schedule in response to player feedback during this time is very unlikely.

 

About what "feedback from community" we are talking about in "mid 2013", before game were ever released? If you're speaking about feedback from internal testing some ppl around here took part in, it even more of a reason to change release date in mid 2013.

 

at the end of that it says
"Please review Section 3 of the Steam Subscriber Agreement for more information."
in witch you get this

the keys that chucklefish give you are gotten in this way

and inorder to make and account you have to agree to it

the EU part is olny for people in the EU and olny applys to preporders but it doent count in this sence cus the beta is out and playable

also the EU part is the "local law" thing you highlighted before and as you can see doent apply

just give up, im right silly

 

So like I said earlier publishing is more than just "hey look what's here". And there's no way you can comment on who did what from the CF staff unless you were privy to those communications.

 

well seeing that every anoucment in the news section thats about a new published game is written by Mollygoes
its safe to say it was her lol

 

Whining makes games, it's a fact.

 

i think half life 2 ep3 prooves that wrong

 

Touché.
Although, with the new release of Source 2 we might be seeing it in the not so distant future...Pretty please.

 

So because she wrote an announcement that means she handles all the publishing duties for CF? Why do you keep making these assumptions based on nothing?

 

I though she was the PR manager for this company?! Or something changed?