Why the fans are upset about Starbound

You're using a number of fallacies in your argument. The idea that because there are more important/large problems in the world, things we care about should be ignored, is a known and common logical fallacy. You're also ignoring a good chunk of the point of the thread, and instead making an emotional, impassioned reply that addresses absolutely none of the opening post, or indeed the actual discussion in the thread.

Also...

I did fund the game. As did many others. Our money allowed the developers to turn it into a full-time job rather than something done in their spare time, and Bart further clarified that our money has vastly improved the quality of the game they're making, though that improvement has not increased the speed of its' release, as they promised. If none of that sounds like funding to you, then I have no idea what is.

 

Sure having bad news for me and then putting .... was not a threat at all. Also read my response to understand the joke was not directed at you.

So all kickstarter projects give detailed information on how money is used?

 

Well the pre-orders made it that they can have more LUXURY and the people are the ones responcible for that.
Did they not stoped working 2 job's to make there dream game?
Do they not have more programers to not be strest as much..
And bekos of the funds they now they can make a better starbound
and more games in future..

For them it did make a big difrence
as ppl trusted in them and as you can see many people are less and less happy about that desision

Gratzz on your LUXURY !!

 

So its okay for people to use illogical consistences to argue, but the moment I do it.
I am just being retarded.

I feel attacked alright.

 

Yeah go thru all my messages and see if I ever questioned your mentality using a now bigoted term. Funny enough you're the illogical one.

 

See now your attacking me again.
Is there no end to your tyranny?

 

One: this is not a kickstarter project, though it could be argued that it is a kickstarter-style project.
Two: The actions of other companies do not dictate the actions of this one. The fans-- or backers, or pre-order customers, or whatever you want to call them-- do. I can guarantee you in a Mississippi minute that if people started largely pulling their preorders, or otherwise negatively impacting the outcome of the pre-order campaign, things would change very very quickly. That is a fact.

Threads like this exist not because people feel the devs should be at their beck and call, but because there are important questions they feel should be addressed, and talking about it is infinitely preferable to canceling a preorder about it.

 

No no, wait...
You said "I have some bad news for you"
And Serenity answered: "I knew it was cancer", like "I HAVE CANCER"

That's not an attack on you, no matter how "open" you interpret it
relax, no drama pls

 

I don't have to now, he just openly attacked me and admitted to it.

 

I have this nagging feeling from this thread that many people had no experience with actual creative process. You can't really put estimates on that. I remember when I was writing my BA I had this awful crisis moment. The number of pages just kept growing (Bad thing when you are working under a certain limit. It was supposed to be 40 pages max, the finished thing was 53 pages but there was no actual end in view as more and more issues arose. I can imagine that devs are experiencing that on a daily basis. They add something and some problem crops up. They fix that and another problem is caused by a fix. That's why I have this huge problem with blaming anyone for delays in creative process. You cannot foresee how exactly the whole thing is happen. You have some idea, but instead of a neat thing you get problem following a problem. And then polishing comes.

 

Your opinions may differ, but there are better ways to communicate it than this. How about we all take a deep breath and cuddle a kitten.

 

I think the major concern I have grasped from this thread is the fear that the beta will not be out by the end of the year and that they won't let us know that.
In the "Threads about the release of Beta" thread, I have read that at some point Tiy said Beta Release will still be 2013 but full release will maybe be early 2014, implying that full release could still be within 2013, but he doesn't have a definitive answer.
I do not have any links to him saying this though so I don't know how long ago it was.
I think it would ease a lot of concern if Tiy could consult with the team and provide an update, say on the home page, stating the current state of whether the Beta will be out this year and whether the Release will be, essentially refreshing the estimated release dates.

 

Not always, but in a case like this where part of the money is being used to fund/publish other projects before one's own is finished will invariably raise questions. Especially if one of the promises and reasons the pre-order was opened is now officially a deception from CF's side.

Q. What if you don't get enough preorders, will the game be unfinished?
A. No, the Starbound is going to make it out in 2013 no matter what. But by preordering you help it get here even faster.

This is the reason why people demand clarification and ask for more insight as to where our money and investment is flowing. We don't need detailed, to-the-date reports and balances of the account, but rather somewhat specific information as to whether or not our money is being used to further develop Starbound or not.

 

Honestly, the same could be said of your OP post. It seems like you're bringing up new info about the general dissatisfaction with the timliness of the release. And you're compounding that issue with a perceived lack of communication from the team. Neither of these are ground-breaking complaints. Nor are they doing service to the community or the progress of the game. As has been stated many times in the thread already: the team is more than communicative about the project. Just because you haven't seen their messages to the community doesn't mean they are ignoring us. And you've gotten a response in this thread, hopefully you're satisfied. But can you see how someone else will start up another thread a week from now with your same complaint, simply because they didn't read through literally thousands of posts?

What's the point of this sort of thread, other than to stir up bad feelings toward the developers?

 

I think what might help a lot of people is a very clear, overall 'narrative' to the information Chucklefish releases on the main site. One of the points I brought up early in the thread is that the information is very disjointed, or from split sources, or otherwise segmented off and hard to see as part of a cohesive whole. It would be a lot better to have updates and communication that talk about things on the whole as well, rather than what they did today. Monthly looks back could help with that, as could a constant line of communication besides the daily updates. Maybe make an FAQ post once in a while to address questions that have popped up a lot.

 

Right! Sorry about that delay. Lemme get to answering these questions.

Starbound has been in development since 2011. It was officially announced in early 2012, with the intention of releasing it that summer. Being the large, ambitious project that it is, it quickly became apparent that that just...wasn't gonna happen. Given that Starbound is our first project as a company, it was easy to continue to be optimistic about our deadlines and say that we could still safely get the game out by the end of 2012, or Q1 2013. Oops!

When Q1 2013 came around and the game still wasn't in quite the state we wanted it to be in, we got pretty stressed out. The whole team had been working their butts off for over a year and lots of them were living off of savings, which they were starting to run out of. Other people were in a position where they were going to have to take a full-time job, severely limiting their time to work on Starbound. That would have been preeeetty disastrous.

People had been asking us to open up pre-orders for a long time. The idea that we might not make it to full release by the end of 2013 seemed ludicrous, and we really needed the funds to keep our team afloat. So, we decided to open up pre-orders with the promise that the full game would be out this year, confident that that was the case so long as the team could keep working full time.

Thing is, developing Starbound is weird. It's a huge project with a lot of elements to it, and almost all of the elements are there now, which means that a lot of the development process is problem solving. It's reeaally difficult to predict how long things are going to take. We're not where we wanted to be by late 2013, but I think we're very close to the stage where we'd be comfortable releasing a beta.

That's completely true, though. All of the pre-order money is going toward developing Starbound. I'm actually not sure what you're getting at here. :O

I'm not saying you think this, but there seems to be this strange idea that there's some sort of magical development machine that you stick funds into and code comes out. What "supporting development" means is allowing us to fund the team's continued work on the game. Which is exaaaactly what's happened.

If not for pre-orders being as successful as they have been, I honestly have no idea what we'd be doing right now. We're really thankful, and we've tried to repay you guys by being more communicative, but clearly there's something we're not getting quite right there.

I mean, on the one hand, it's a bit mind-boggling to me when people say we don't communicate with fans. We update people on our progress every day, we're constantly in IRC, we answer questions over e-mail, etc. We can't answer questions we don't have the answer to, though.

There's been no paranoia/internal mandate saying "DON'T ANSWER QUESTIONS", but obviously we've already had some trouble with giving release estimates we couldn't make. We don't want to answer questions when the answers to those questions aren't clear or may change.

As for one of the most recent concerns-- whether or not full release will be in 2013 or not-- the answer is no, it won't. We've said as much in a lot of places, but the team's been sort of scattered about lately and it's been disorienting. It's my fault really for not keeping the main site completely up to date (our About page is especially bad), which is something I plan to work on today.

However, you guys will be able to play the game this year. We are releasing the beta this year.

I'm also planning on updating the Roadmap this week. Y'know how I was talking about how developing Starbound is difficult/weird because it's a lot of problem-solving, balancing and implementing rather than tangible "okay, we put these assets in the game today" or "we put this many lines of code in today"? That's kind of what makes it difficult to update the Roadmap with accurate percentages.

We thought it was a really cool idea when we made it, and we were really excited to use it, but I guess we got a bit lazy on that front, honestly. We've just got a ton on our plates and we're doing the best we can to work with it.

However, like I said, I'm planning to update it this week.

We're also very conscious of the fact that the pre-order changed everything, and that we are certainly obligated to make sure our supporters know what's going on. Pre-orders have helped us develop the game faster. They've allowed the team to actually survive the rest of development instead of coding from cardboard boxes.

People are entitled to know what's going on, which is why we've tried keeping people in the loop. But, again, there are questions we can't answer because we just don't have answers, so all we can really do is keep developing and keep telling you exactly what we've accomplished each day.

The i49 demo was something we were kind of terrified about, to be honest, because we had to disable lots of things that weren't finished or polished in order to make the game playable, and even then we still had bugs and crashes. In fact, we had to fix a really server-crashing scary bug in the 10 minutes leading up to Yogscast's playthrough, and then we all sort of sat there nervously staring up at the screen, hoping nothing disastrous would happen. And...it didn't! So we were really happy about that.

But the point I'm trying to illustrate is that for as good as a lot of people think the game looked at i49, and as much as they want us to release that code to the public, it's just not quite there yet. It's playable for sure, but so many precautions had to be taken in order to show off a small amount of gameplay that it just wouldn't be an accurate reflection of what we want the game, or the beta, to be.

I really pushed for us to show off the game at i49 despite these issues because I knew that for one, overall, it'd be good publicity, and two, the response from fans would help to motivate us a whole lot during these last months of 2013.

I believe I answered all of these concerns above, but if I didn't, let me know.
As far as what month beta will be released, I just can't say yet. We'll figure it out and then we'll tell you.

 

dude, your posts used to be something that I respected as the rational voice of your side... why are you trying so hard to play victim here? Lets keep this discussion focused and light hearted.

 

The point is to address issues some in the community have and to try and resolve questions. All which are reasonable things the OP made fairly clear.

 

How come people are not allowed to speak their mind when they're critical towards something? I'm pretty sure a thread like this wouldn't have gained this much traction if it would be nothing but baseless allegations and fear mongering.

 

I'd follow you now if only I didn't do it before.