Madness in Chuckleland

Preemptive sorry for anyone I offend, I've been meaning to make a thread about everything for a while since I've been with this game since it first was released in early December. If this gets closed or deleted, so be it.

I bought Starbound when it was released with high hopes and, at first, they were completely warranted. The game was something completely different and although half done, it was still so much fun! To this day, I have 631 Hours logged and don't regret a single second of playing it. I'd like to think I experience every possible facet of the game, meeting people in the community that I could have never imagined I'd meet and making friendships that will last for a long, long time.

With that said, I also am very doubtful in the continued success of Starbound and as of recently, am saddened to see where its fallen. The reddit, for example, used to not have anything on the front page with anything lower than 150 or 200 upvotes and was a legitimate challenge to get on. It was filled with original content and was fun to look at. Now, threads asking for help with installing the game rule along with posts by the AutoModerator. The reddit is a parallel of almost every section of the community, whether its modding, servers, roleplaying, ect. and thats really saddening.

Theres been a ton of reasons for the continued death of the game. A lot of people say its because of the lack of updates and I tend to agree with that. Although there has been a steady stream of "updates", they more like tiny and aesthetic updates that are good for late beta or post release. I was told there was going to be a story that would blow me away, I could beat the game without harming a single person, there'd be massive amounts of npc's who'd give quests, be interactable, and that there'd be massive cities but at this time, none of that exists.

The most disappointing face is that the game went from rivaling TF2 and Dota 2 for daily amount of players to becoming a niche for people who want to roleplay things, most of the time it being ERP *shudders*. I want to reiterate, I WANT to love this game and am a decently big part of the community so I felt it was about time that SOMEONE said something before all the old members leave and are replaced by people spouting garbage about how they hate the devs.

I don't exactly know what should be done to fix this, nobody does! But changes need to be made in the staff, in policy, and in the starbound team. I've ran a server and can say that the software is still bugged as hell and has yet to be addressed. I've made mods and can say that .pak's are still really annoying and a proper tool has yet to be made. I'm not talking out of my ass when I say, theres vital things that are wrong and I haven't seen much change to make it easier to defend Chucklefish and its dev team when people talk shit.

To put the game's timeline in perspective, we're still in the beta 1 stage when the full release was supposed to have happened by now IIRC. The worst part is the only difference between todays version and the beta released almost a year ago is an overhauled combat system, .paks, a few new monsters and a few dozen new items, and a fleshed out modding API with some cool ways to use lua to do things. Of course I'm overlooking a few major things here and there but still, I shouldn't be able to list the updates made to a game that was competing with Dota and TF2.

I know I'm leaving out a couple more bits as to what I wanted to say and will probably say them in the comments, but thats the gist of everything I wanted to say. (and probably how a ton of others feel too)

tl;dr: Shits fucked bruh and it needs to change ASAP.

Post Opinions and thoughts if you want, just no flaming or anything not allowed.

 

I agree mostly,but im content with waiting as long as it takes.Even if it never gets updated again it was relatively cheap (unless you paid more or donated for an item ingame).When it does get done i think it will be a really good game.

 

Pretty sure there have been a bunch of threads like this in the past and they alllll ended up in flames and broken dreams

 

Yeah but its fun to leave an opinions.Plus it helps people who are new know how to game is coming along.

 

HERE WE GO

 

lol call back, still it's better to have these discussions then 5 duplicate threads about favorite races and how to delete characters. I as most of you am fine with waiting. So many game franchises I like take forever to make new games. Also waited ten years for a new godzilla movie and it was great.

 

Meh, most of us aren't fine with waiting. Its like Duke Nukem Forever: Indie Edition. I've been waiting and waiting and waiting with no delivery of anything significant enough to give me reason to keep playing. I love playing indie games but it feel like Starbound has been given up on mostly and the dev's are in the endgame phase of development. I've been asking for simple bug fixes for server admins and tools for modding to make it easier since February when I quit playing and it was said it was coming in the next few updates. Its now October and none of these issues have been addressed even though I was told they were. It doesn't help that some of us are afraid to voice our concerns because of the Chucklefish circle jerk that ensues and the bans that happen when anyone criticizes how they run their shit.

Theres no real reason to pretend like theres no problem when I've seen A LOT people I'm good friends with leave the forums because of their hate for the staff, when entire clans stop playing Starbound and leave because of the same exact reason. Honestly, if I wasn't friends with a ton of people on here, I'd doubt I'd still be on the forums just because of some of the shit I've seen. Its fucked up when everyone hates this game because of the amount of broken promises, lies, and excessive use of douchy rhetoric Jiu Jitsu.

Meh.

 

I apologize for using plural when stating my opinion, I usually don;t make that mistake. At the same time I doubt you speak for everyone as well.

How did they give up on starbound if they are constanly updating on nightlies and posting news?

Starbound has been in development about a year, duke nukem took way longer and switched between developers and hardware.

The forum seems to only fill up when a new big update happens. then it dips again. It's like that always, the devs switched from multiple updates to big ones because people wanted it, and they started nightlies for those who could not wait. So I don't see the issue.

People have also been banned just for making jokes that insult no one. In fact the mods are less likely to act on some one critical then some one "circle jerking".

You can't make everyone happy even if their time frames were met people would still complain about something.

 

Yeah speaking for other people does seem a bit ignorant, lets all agree on that. However I do have to agree with Rhino that quite a few of our clan members did leave the forum because of the lack of game updates(inb4 nightly) and the poor forum moderating from time to time. That is a fact.

 

heh There's a huge difference between 8-ish months with nearly daily updates and 10 years of nothing. This is hardly the first beta I've been in that's been in testing stages for over a year, though I'd have to admit it's the first I've seen offer an early access. The other's I've been in were for much larger studios with better financial backing though. I've yet to participate in a beta where the majority of board posters are happy with the rate of updates regardless--and I've been in with games that have much larger followings than this one.

In a dollar per hours sense, I'd say I've already gotten my $15 out of it. If they shut down tomorrow, I'd be super bummed but wouldn't feel I'd wasted my money. Fairly confident in their ability to deliver though; that coming again from my experience with other companies in similar situations. These guys have been one of the better studios I've followed for keeping the community up-to-date on progress. heh Just sorta painfully green at the process, with some mistakes early on. If anything, I'd say they're in this situation now because they've given into the community too much. Their only option is to play through or give up, and they're still trudging forward.

The community will be back around once the next release hits. Game boards exist for people to ask the same support questions in perpetuity and gripe about game issues. Not much has changed for the majority of Starbound players in awhile, so not much to gripe about--other than the lack of new things to gripe about, of course. Once the next stable hits, they'll all be back to continue complaining about the rate of updates.

It'll be especially fun around here if this next update requires a world/character wipe, which I kinda expect it will. There'll be a whole different crowd we haven't heard much from in some time lighting up their torches again.

 

lol very true, would have been better if they did wipes more often and did not listen to the owners of the torches you mentioned.

 

Maybe this is the wrong place, but why were .paks even introduced? They were played up as this major change, but what problem did they solve?

 

It just looks better for each mod to be in one file instead of a folder.

So basically just to look good.

Also I suppose it was slightly more convenient than having to unzip the folders.

 

I'm unsure as to how it can be more convenient than zip, on windows at least you can open a zip archive the same as any folder. And zip at least has the benefit of giving a smaller file size.

 

Bigger updates are fine, but CF took that WAY too seriously. Going this long without a stable update is not healthy for a game, even if it is still in development phase. They SHOULD have a set package of updates to release every month or so, and maybe use the nightlies/ unstables for the community to test and report bugs before the official patch. The game was honestly really popular on release, even in its early stage, and a steady amount of actual content patches would have only boosted its popularity. Would you rather make a game that people are always playing all the time, or a game that people play for a month, stop, and wait for the next patch?

 

I can't really generalize but people play starbound still even without the updates.

 

I fully intended to speak for clans I was in where people brought this up to me and a couple other people from different sects of the community. But by the Duke reference I didn't mean time frame was similar, I meant that the manor of development is similar in that the studio (Chucklefish in this case) had promised much more than they were expecting to deliver and are currently giving a "Its done when its done" feel to it. IIRC a dev actually said that. But I'm not worried about the fair weather fans of Starbound, but the people who never left and are RIGHT NOW leaving. In the past 3 months the majority of popular, useful, nice users left the forums in favor for other forums or for nothing else because they were sick of the cocktail of problems at hand. Example of the "Update wave" not actually existing as updates have been released a few times since it went into early access. SOURCE

Like I said, the people who play starbound is dwindling. Its not like they are without money to hire another coder who knows the difference between their ass and a keyboard as AFAIK only 2 are working on it right now.

 

So far this is my favourite of this thread type for the sole reason that OP has provided sources on most of his/her claims. Props. Also I agree with pretty much everything OP's saying, besides the modding stuff because I know exactly zero things about modding.

I also have to agree with CaptThad though; I don't feel that my $15 was wasted. I just think they'd be better off with an update more often than once every six months.

 

I don't care HOW they update, I just feel like the updates need to be more meaningful. I like how its done right now so people can get bleeding edge updates and also get the mostly stable ones. Its like the Microsoft Rings sort of deal.

And thanks! c: I try not to talk out of my ass too much!