Playing Nightly makes me worried

Stop giving me comparisons to linear progressions. That is not even slightly what I am advocating.
My issue is this:
Player 3 doesn't care what the game says to do, he just wants to have fun. Fun for them in exploring. Player 3 never happens upon a life support system, and his crippled in his game compared to player 2, for no more reason than he got unlucky.
Only happening by chance and not happening to everyone is /exactly/ the issue I have with it. It creates an uneven experience across the player base. Some people will get lucky and be thrilled. Some people will be unlucky and get frustrated with the game. Some people will get lucky and then get annoyed that the game was too easy (if the luck is finding a weapon significantly more powerful than normal, for instance, or even just finding that the leap forward cheapened the experience). Some people will be unlucky and never know any better.
Randomness in a game can be useful. It can add interest and unpredictability to a game. They key is to keep the randomness /out of the difficulty of the game/. I don't want a game that is going to arbitrarily be harder to do chance. I don't want a game that will be extra easy out of chance. At the extreme, you have your success or failure determined by chance independently of what you do, but even at lesser cases, randomness in the difficulty can really mess things up for people and hamper the overall satisfaction of the game. Random weapons as loot can work great, as their power can be held in line with where you should be in the game, and can offer unexpected bonuses, without actually screwing with the challenge of the game.

 

That is your opinion and it also ignores the basis that all three players had the opportunity to do a quest, buy or build one of the units. Player 3 and 2 had the same options and 2 got lucky while player 3 did not. Player 3 is at fault if they are upset because they had the opportunity (and probably still do) to do what player 1 is going to do. This is referred to as 'risk vs reward' where someone, usually through logical and intelligent deduction, will determine whether they wish to risk their time and look for a part that should be listed as rare or completely unlisted as a surprise, one that all three players had the opportunity to get. In fact I reject that player 3 is upset since it would likely not even be to his knowledge that the option of finding the part even exists. One cannot be upset due to a lack of an option, only that an option existed and passed and even if it did exist and pass it would still be their own fault.

 

I know everyone expects that every game should be "play it how you want" but that's not the case. You can't expect every game company to anticipate how every player might want to play their game. it's their job to make a game compelling enough to get the attention of the majority of players (see Bell Curves). If you fall outside of the standard deviation, it's not their fault. Moreover, we don't even know what they're going to add before it's done. There is a ton of speculation and no hard evidence one way or another on this thread. People don't like certain aspects of the patch (which has been the case since they went Early Access), but everyone is judging based on half of the data set. You don't eat a pie and comment on it before they've baked it. Sure progression looks super linear (and the gate mechanics probably wont change), but how you acquire those objects will most likely have some pretty substantial variability.

That's just my two cents on the matter.

 

Player 3 has every right to be upset that they took exactly the same actions as player 2 and had a drastically different outcome.
Player 3 may even be player 2 on a second run through, who finds that the strategy that worked great last time is failing them. Cohesion of the play experience doesn't just apply across different players, but also between different runs by the same person.
There have been many, many times where the RNG screwed me in a game, and it is not fun. Your progression via exploration should not rely on you getting lucky; If the life support system that player 2 found is an item that can be purchased, then you have to look at its value in relation to the rest of the loot table. if everyone is finding 1 dollar prizes here and there, and you find a thousand dollar prize, it ceases to be "Oh, I found something better than normal", and simply overwhelms to relevance of other things. Randomness in a game needs to be carefully balanced, and ensure that the lucky players are not put too far ahead, nor that the unlucky players end up too far behind.
Even across methods of acquiring the object, if one method will yield you the item in 1 hour, and another takes 24 hours, the latter is not really a viable approach. It is a form of imbalance in the game and it doesn't work well. Having that type of variance within a method is also bad, if not even worse. With the first method, at least that is a aspect of the game the player can realize and take advantage of. Even if it makes one the right answer, the player has the option of picking the right answer. If its within a method, the player doesn't even have that choice. They have randomness.
starbound already had issues with this random progression. I don't know if it is still in the game or not, but earlier we had to find a good brain to summon one of the bosses, which meant killing creatures with a specific weapon until you got a superior brain rather than the normal junky brains. Some people didn't have any issue with the system, as they found the item they needed fairly quickly and moved on. Others found it horrible, as they got unlucky and it took them a really long time. The first group had trouble understanding why the second group was upset; after all, they didn't have trouble with it. The second group did nothing wrong, but they received a subpar playing experience. There is even a subset of the second group that got truly screwed; they land on the far tail of the bell curve, and had to go many times as long as most of the second group.
The entire schema works against player agency and choice. It takes their success from the result of their actions and decision and moves it into the realm of pure chance. This is something game should work very hard to avoid.
Imagine random progression advancement in other games. You are playing starcraft, then suddenly for no reason, your starting base gets 10000 of every resource added. You are playing sonic, and you randomly get all of the chaos emeralds. You are playing minecraft, and you find a temple with 30 diamonds and 8 ender eyes. you move from "sweet, I found a bonus" to "my progression has been dictated by chance".
It can even screw up your perception of effort vs reward for the player within the run. "Man, I was able to get so much done with that one dungeon crawl, now I have gone through 10 dungeons and still haven't made as much progress, why am I wasting my time?" The inverse is immediately annoying; I just went through all of the effort of getting this reward, and its worthless. The large boost is, at best, momentarily exciting, and is liable to lessen the experience afterwards.
Say that the leap forward in the progression is finding a next tier suit of armor. It probably is exciting to find it. It is probably even fun to run around and be much tougher than expected. For a while. Being overpowered gets old fast. Many games take advantage of this; they offer temporary powerups, which give you that "yeah, I'm awesome!" rush, but disappear before it can get old. Going back to the armor example, you may end up bored because the challenge of the game has been thrown off. Then, as you continue, you armor becomes the expected level, and the challenge realigns. However, you are in a more advanced state of the game, and the challenge is higher, and expects more skill from you. However, you didn't spend the last x amount of the game gaining skill like it expected, you spend it cruising through with your extra power, and you are worse off than you would be otherwise. The dynamics of the game get thrown off, and it can hamper the overall experience.

 

I have a feeling this would not go over as well near as you might think.

I'm against this. I'm for multiple options, but not when one of them plays the recipient like a sucker.

 

This is only the case if the player is not properly educated on the possibilities and with a well made game the player should not be able to obtain that item in the tutorial and there should be some kind of offered education that will inform the player of both possibilities and the risk involved. At this point it is up to the player to weigh the possibilities intelligently and not throw themselves into one task just because they like the idea.

This is your opinion.

I agree the game should be balanced.

I agree, pigeonholing players into one option was a bad idea as far as progression goes.

This is a strawman. At no point did I state that the player would be slingshotted from tutorial to end game. In fact, the life support system should not even be essential as far as mainline progression goes. Also last time I checked it is entirely possible in minecraft to find exceptional items in chests. It should also be noted that at no point did I ever even mention something that would make the character more powerful. Just because someone gains access to the dark yogurt sector of shazzar'bola doesn't mean they've even got the tools to survive there. (Which I would say that surviving against enemies that one shot you is laughable with the current block placement system, but that's another story entirely)

Starbound is stochastic by nature. Progression by mining? Ore placement is random. Progression by buying? Pixel amounts vary. The only portion here that is not an immeasurable value is the quest system and even that will likely vary due to everyone being located in different parts of the universe. It is illogical to feel cheated by something you have no control over when you didn't have control in the first place. No matter what you do you're going to be swimming in chance. There's already random drops from mobs and random chest drops. I am merely suggesting the improvement of more openness through less restrictive progression.

And who is that exactly?

 

lets go off of the stochastic aspect. I agree, it is. However, ore and pixels come in a flow. There are so many instances of "I have a chance to get a resource" that the overall behavior becomes highly predictable. Having the progression be predictable despite being random is what makes that work. However, high magnitude rewards completely screw that over. Say I have a 50% chance of getting $1, 25% of getting $5, a 20% chance of getting $10, 4% chance of getting $25, and 1% chance of getting $1000.
On average, I expect to get $50 in 1s, $125 in 5's, $200 in 10;s, $100 dollars in 25's, and $1000 in the 1000. that is $475 in normal loot, without too much variance in how much comes in, that is swamped by the rare jackpot, which makes all of the other rewards seem like a waste of your time, and even together they don't matter nearly as much. However, that windfall is rare enough to be highly unpredictable. 1% of people will find it first thing, and 1% of the people will require 458 attempts. Even if all the life support system does for you is "I don't have to spend $1000 worth of resources to buy/craft it", this one outlier is worth more than you would have found searching for twice as long otherwise. Making it more common just means such things will dominate the reward scape even more, and makes normal rewards seem even more worthless. Making it less common just makes it even more fickle, with a smaller number of people getting lucky and a larger number not ever seeing it.
However, if this is letting you access the dark yogurt sector as well, it is potentially even more powerful. If you would normally suffocate before accomplishing anything useful, then having the life support system lets you start (cautiously) mining there, potentially earning more pixels than you would get on a safer planet, with the potential to find even more powerful loot. Now you are not only $1000 ahead of where you are expected to be currently, you are pulling in resources faster. And why? Did you overcome some challenge that other people failed at? Did you execute a brilliant strategy to earn more? No, you got lucky. Even if you are now using that luck to execute a new strategy of dealing with this harder planet, you are doing so because you were luckier than the other guy. If he has exactly the same strategy, you can end up lightyears ahead of him due to sheer luck. This item takes a nice, clean, predictably random system and makes it arbitrary.

In minecraft, you can find some significant items in chests. But they aren't very significant. Find some diamonds? You normally find diamonds by exploration anyways, this is just another way to get it. You are likely to find few diamonds randomly than you would from finding a single vein. There are saddles in the chests, but the issue there is mainly that you can't get them otherwise, despite them logically being a few pieces of leather and maybe string, both easy to get. However, when you really get into items that must be found randomly, you are at enchanting, which is the worst aspect of the entire game. It is the one place where I start putting up mob grinders to get XP because you have to enchant so many, many things if you are trying to get something specific. It seriously harmed player agency and screwed up the dynamics of late game vanilla. Granted, this is more about the inability to deliberately obtain things than the perils of giving out too good of a reward.

 

Perhaps I'm not writing things right. I am not trying to imply that a jackpot for progression should be added at all. My point is that progression bottlenecks and pigeon holes at parts. I'm implying that the current system of progression is quite linear and it would benefit from a little bit of 'openness'. My objective was to diversify options along the progression path and has little to do with the finding of x item randomly.

The point I'm trying to make is that currently everything relies on mining to progress. This is literal in almost every way save for the luck of the draw in chests and containers; No one seems to like luck so why should we rely on that right? But what other way is reliable? Mining doesn't really bother me even with dropping ore on death, but the idea is that it bothers me that it will always be mining. I can kill monsters or 'wanted' targets for pixels to buy the ore and parts can I? Is there a quest I can work for to get it? Why not look for pieces of it as an alternative? Am I missing something here where there are alternatives to building along the progression path?

As far as stumbling upon a life support system I was under the impression that it's importance, and this is why I used it as an example, was minor. After all, what is the reason that it's so important? To visit planets without oxygen and asteroid fields right? Now here's a really great question. Why is that so imperative? It's because you have to at some point mine moon rock. But why? I can understand the core fragments but past that there really isn't much point to be mining unless you're trying to do upgrading to stuff. Heck I went through the nightly build and got stuck because there wasn't even a moon in the sector and FTL stuff isn't even there yet.

I think what I'm trying to say is that everything is mining and that gets boring after a while. Anything but mining would be better in my opinion and that's the way I feel. Starbound is pretty great and will continue to improve but there's only so much mining I can do before I start mining my own brains out. Again Starbound plays smooth, cool interface, still being worked on, yadda yadda.

This is a matter of balance (to which should be addressed especially with the current state of the matter manipulator and blocking monsters in still), and players should be punished sufficiently for dying and rewarded for surviving in a higher level sector. You can't use this as a point because it contradicts your theory on hard work and skill. A skilled player surviving in a difficult sector and being rewarded is just what you want. As far as the 'lucky to be there' aspect I think I covered that in my previous entry.

 

I took the time to play the current Nightly, and I have a few impressions of my own to make.

1) Having experienced ore drops on death myself, I can safely say that I fall into the category of players who dislike the mechanic, and for reasons people have already stated. It's a mechanic shoehorned in to deal with a portion of the playerbase that decided that climbing back up to the surface legitimately was too much work and that suicide was the best idea ever when a safer alternative exists. Namely, saving and quitting. Toss in the fact that we now have to go near the planet's core to get core fragments, and there's a solid risk of losing potentially hours worth of mining. I know that people have brought up counter-arguments for this, but to me it sounds less like common sense and more a condescending parade of 'U died? git gud scrub.' This is a poorly-implemented mechanic designed to punish players abusing the system without actually resolving the reason why it was getting abused to begin with, which is irritating a fair few people (and while I can't come up with the exact number of people who don't like the mechanic, I'd love to see someone pull up the exact number of people who do like it) and given the fact that the Starbound devs have bitten off more than they can chew at the moment, it's going to draw complaints and ire.

Plus you lose ship fuel too, as it's classified as ore. I should point out that making it so it's possible to lose coal at the moment is an incredibly irksome mechanic since you both need large amounts of it for your ship early on, and large amounts to make torches just to explore the underground as the Lantern on a Stick does not throw enough light to make underground exploration even remotely safe. It's true that it can be accessed easily just by surface skimming, but it's still irritating when you need hundreds of units to actually do anything.

Something like being able to create a relatively inexpensive material teleporter that ships your load to your ship mid-dig would balance this mechanic out, for example. Or add in a crafting station that can have ores/bars stored on it so we don't have to haul around ores or bars every time we have to make something. Or heck, give us the ability to just buy them once we hit the Outpost. I know that there's plans to make it so people can take different paths through the cosmos. The last point here is that it seems to try and bleed in Hardcore difficulty a little in a ham-fisted way.

2) The devs have a LOT of ground to cover and only so many hands to do it. As others have said they are doing a lot of work behind the scenes and the nightlies are going to see a lot of poorly-implemented features and adding new things in is inevitably going to break other things. Things like the previously working tree system that is now extremely difficult to actually work with and limits mining underground where the actual ores are because we can't get at the wood to make torches easily, and while the starting mine dungeon is available it's not hard to run out of torches after a while. They promised a lot and it's taking them time to deliver, and while their priorities clearly aren't our priorities, they're obviously still trying. As of current they're shoehorning us into mining because that's likely what's the least work to deal with since it was already implemented as a core mechanic. I should point out that it is highly unlikely that we'll have to be shoehorned like this forever since they're already working on and implementing missions. Who's to say that the Lvl 0 Garden planets might not have quests to get Core Fragments from an NPC in a later build?

Think of it this way: It took one year each to create and balance out each of the nine classes in TF2. We're pretty much forced into playing one class because the other classes don't exist yet, yet it's clear the mechanics are making room for the other classes yet to be implemented. I mean, look at the Outpost. The four vendors there are just glorified storage containers at the moment.

3) The starting environment looks incredibly newbie-unfriendly as some people have noted, and since you can't explore other worlds for tech to mitigate things like accidentally falling to your death, skim the surface for more than coal to prepare for the underground, and the only combat-related source of materials on the starting world is a mine that's relatively finite in what it coughs up, people literally can't prepare for the underground like a more established character can. Granted, this is still more a byproduct of the game not being fully fleshed out yet than genuine dev apathy. Unrefined wood is hard to get a hold of due to the borked tree collision mechanics, there's little in the way of ores near the surface (which is both unfriendly AND unrealistic if the worlds are untouched or relatively untouched), and you're more or less stuck with your civilian clothes and a cruddy starter weapon. (Admittedly locating and killing the mine miniboss is both easy and nets you a weapon that's better than what you start out with. If they don't mess with this, I'd say it's honestly a good way to go about letting people kill monsters more easily.)

Plus I should point out that food's harder to handle at this point because instead of having two crops you only get wheat now, and the hunting weapons don't offer any greater chance of getting meat from aliens than any other combat weapon. It looks like the hunger bar is full-on disabled for the moment, but it doesn't change the fact that this has the potential to be like Minecraft, but without a steady supply of cows/pigs/chickens early on to offset the lack of an established farm.

Personally, I'm willing to wait to see where they go with this, and I should hope that they're paying attention to the mods section because that can tell them the mindset of the community with a certain level of accuracy. If mods spring up to alter, rebalance, or eliminate features they put in and are fairly popular, they should pay attention to that.

 

I am all for other options. I actively encourage and promote it. That doesn't mean that every potential option is a good one. My objection here is that "Find X randomly" was what most of your suggestions were, and that implementation of other paths is poor.

From my understanding, things like the life support system were meant to be the new gating mechanism. It lets you access the planets without atmospheres, which are higher level planets with better stuff in exchange for their increased danger. Part of that is probably better ores, part is probably better dungeons, part is probably better quests, etc. You don't make a planet harder to get to and work with without making it worthwhile, that would be a dysfunctional dynamic.

So, by all means, lets open the game up. Lets have quests and farming and hunting and exploration to flesh out different progression paths. That is exactly what the dev's have stated their goal is, we just have to wait for it all to be implented. Just don't push randomness as the alternative progression.

I am fine with taking on a higher risk to get a higher reward, the lucky to be there aspect is the part I have a problem with. I hate mechanics that say "get lucky, then you can do this" or "do this, and if you get lucky...". It undermines player agency and increases difficulty without increasing challenge.

 

Thing here is handholding is what the majority want. I remember the outrage when people stupidly teleported down to the planet without their starting tools. Back then people didn't go "oh wow that was stupid." They went, "CF HOW DARE YOU NOT TELL US TO LOOK IN OUR LOCKER FIRST!" Hand holding is what the masses want.

You average player will always blame the game or its makers first before blaming himself. That's how things are these days.

 

The point is if you don't label things and point them out, the average player these days will rarely blame himself or laugh it off. You are an exception whether you like it or not.

Trial and error is not appreciated these days. That's the sad truth. You might enjoy laughing it off if you happen to go down to a planet unprepared and die in a random way that could have been prevented if you had x item. However there are many others who will complain and make a fuss about how shitty the game is designed because they let that happen.

 

I refuse to think most gamers are that stupid, you're just reinforcing what the industry thinks and that's even more insulting than the insulting levels of hand-holding these days. It's more due to the extreme open-ended nature of the game that the quests are more acceptable for giving the players something resembling a direction. If the first thing didn't tell me to check the locker on my very first character, I probably would have skipped over it, simply because it blended in so well and looking for that rather faint (at the time) glow was something I would have missed by mistake. An in-game book detailing a few simple directions could be just as good, or maybe even an option at character creation for minimalist quest descriptions for those who like them, much like in the old Fallout. Yeah, that game had the Pip-boy show your overarching goal for each quest and that was it, you had to pay attention to all the dialogue, a good chunk of which was one-time only. Then there's one of my favorite games of all time and hearing the three most awesome words in it: "Updated my journal" was the clue to open said journal up and look at what was said I should try and do next, vague or specific.

Even so, with just how open-ended the game is and you're pretty much thrown to the wolves in other aspects, I could see the quest system as more of a way to teach new players the basics by easing them into some good ideas when starting out. "OH BUT WHEN I PLAYED GAMES WHEN I WAS YOUNGER THEY WERE SO MUCH HARDER, THEY NEVER HELD YOUR HAND AT ALL!" Yeah, I get it, I started playing Super Mario Bros on the NES when I was 5 and have been playing games for 25 years now, I've seen the evolution of games and played all the generations of games (excluding current gen, and that's console only, strapped for money means no PS4 for a while). Difficulty like in those days? Those days are gone and thank goodness for that, no more blindly stumbling about, figuring out what to do because the instruction manual sucked, or because you went in the wrong direction on an old JRPG like Breath of Fire 2 on the overworld map and suddenly you just got your ass handed to you. I doubt CF can pull off actual difficulty in this game, but I'm so spoiled by games like Dark Souls that most Indie games don't fit my definition of a challenging but ultimately fair to the player kind of difficulty.

You don't want the players to be without direction when starting out and then expect them to try and figure out what you want them to do, no one should have to try and figure out the logic of a developer, that's what made the old adventure games so mind-numbingly stupid when you sat down and thought about the solutions to some of those puzzles. I certainly don't want CF to go in the opposite direction and be all "PROTIP: Shoot the Cyberdemon until it dies" level of weird straight-forwardness either, I want CF to respect the intelligence of gamers these days.

It's like reading the more unreasonable complaints about Deus Ex: Human Revolution's use of gold highlights to well, highlight objects you can interact with before the game's press demo was leaked, like they forgot that in the original Deus Ex, you had this kind of four-cornered box-line appear over anything you could interact with when you moused over it. They both serve the exact same purpose in the exact same manner, but the only difference is on how they look.

 

I wish I could agree with this, but unfortunately you are in fact asking for a walkthrough in your game, and prefer one compared to open endedness.

At least that is what developers will see, and they will see it because you aren't being clear with what you really want. To them, the safer option is to go the masses; you know, the ones that already watched the whole thing on YouTube? Or that expect others to do so before playing with them?

"The industry thinks gamers are that stupid" sadly does have proof and precedence from other gamers. I've seen the complaints, the pettiness, and the results when those complaints get addressed to an extreme. The game gets boring and safe, walled off with yellow tape. So I hope the progression system of starbound isn't so restrictive once you start moving, as I think it would take away from the players' ability to travel to far and wide places for different experiences.

 

The problem with removing all gating mechanisms is that due to the nature of a the game, if you can survive on a high level planet /briefly/, you can likely find something of a much higher power level than where you are at, such that even if you have to bail out to return to easier sectors, you will have something that makes you too strong. It is possible to design things to work against that, but the types of things that requires would likely make the game worse overall.
You could have some level based system, so accessing higher level stuff doesn't help until you are that level, but that is just another gating mechanism and goes against a natural progression like equipment can give you.
You could make sure that there isn't anything sequence breaking accessible near the surface, which likely means that the surfaces of the planets would be rather boring. You would also have to make sure delving into the depths of the planet is actually dangerous enough to keep out underequiped players. Doing that in a game with block placement and removal is hard, and will drastically shift how spelunking and mining works, perhaps for the worse.
The basic fact is, any mechanic that discourages people from sequence skipping to more advanced planets will be a form of gating, and if the game allows sequence skipping it works against players moving through the progression of the game. The progression is not a bad thing. It is core to a game like this.
Look at a game like metroid. Its open world, but you can't go through these doors until you have this weapon, you can't go into this area without dying until you have this suit, you can't get into this area until you can roll into a ball. Those limitations are what makes the game great, its the structure that makes metroidvania games work. Fighting to obtain items to access new worlds is a great mechanic. This doesn't mean the game will be linear or restrictive. There are going to be many worlds at different levels, with their own properties and advantages. There will be many routes through the worlds, many tactics and strategies and methods to earn your progression. Having some clear goalposts to reach along the way is a good thing.

 

Either exploring higher level worlds will give you better stuff, in which case it needs limits, or it won't, in which case why bother.
I did say that keeping high level stuff away from the surface would help, but that just makes the surfaces boring. If you do other things like "You can't (feasibly) mine through this rock until you have this tier equipment", then that equipment becomes your gating mechanism instead. If we want a progression in the game, there is going be be /something/ making it infeasible to work with those planets right off the bat. There is going to be some form of gating mechanism. "You need to get the oxygen tank to survive on airless worlds" seems like a great way to do it to me. "open world" shouldn't mean "I don't care about the dangers of the environments". Needing equipment to feasibly deal with hostile environments is a perfectly good design pattern.