An open letter to the Starbound community.

Well we finally did it. We got Molly to lock a thread.

*Stern look around classroom*.

Actually mostly I'm looking at myself because, well, it's always the best place to start laying blame. I can't get a mind control device out and control all of your minds (yet, it's still in the pre-beta stage) but I can control my own actions, and let's be frank, I haven't been. I've been more flamey than a petrol can on a barbecue.

Enough about me and on to my main point.

Now it'd be easy to point the finger of blame for the recent flamewar at the group of people I and others have generally started to call the beta-nowers or similar titles, but take note of the line

(emphasis mine).

A war has two sides. A flamewar will die pretty quickly if you don't give it fuel. Don't let your annoyance get to you, like I have in the past. I responded immaturely and the fact that those I was responding to were often appearing to act even more immaturely is no excuse. I broke these rules:

I haven't been the only one to break these rules when responding to people from the beta-now and the updates-daily camps. So I'm basically asking everyone who is on the opposite side of those debates (as in those in the beta-when-it's-ready and posts-when-the-devs-find-time camps) to do the same as I plan to do.

Next time you see someone post questions about beta outside of the designated thread or see someone being insulting and annoying please do these things (which I've put in a box for you):

So there we are. I hope that this becomes a popular course of action. I hope that the combination of a few wrist-slaps by moderators for breaking the rules and the rest of the community ignoring them will mean that the daily updates will become about daily updates again and not descend into another flamewar.

This post has been mainly about how to respond if you're not a beta-nower and are annoyed by them. However if you are in the Beta-now camp and regularly post about it in the wrong place then please take notice of the first box. I didn't make that up. That's part of the forum and IRC rules.

On the whole this has been the most exuberant and fun gaming community I have had the privilege to be a part of. Let's make sure it stays that way and doesn't descend into bickering.

Peace and cake.

Spiro

Edit: PS Let me know if I've posted this in the wrong place. There were a few different places I could have posted it and I picked here.

 

Everyone's susceptible to a bit of Flame baiting Spiro
Its how people handle it that is the problem.

And if this was referring to yesterdays incident, I think you slapped yourself on the wrists enough times already!

 

INB4 someone starts saying that it's the developer's fault for not "giving information as often as promised".

I kid. I like this forum. There are ocasions when certain arguments that make me go *sigh* and close the tab, but I like the speculation (unless it's about of the date of the beta release or "what are the devs REALLY doing"...), and the suggestion threads are filled with awesome. This is going to be a great game, and waiting for it has been like eating a great slice of cake. Everytime we get a taste, we want more and get very angry when we don't get it.

I know that this is more of an optimistic view, but I like to think all this commotion is nothing more than appreciation and desire for Starbound.

 

Nothing I disagree with there. Possibly also worth linking to Molly's chill out thread which is essentially saying the same thing in a more general way.

 

Sadly when I see flame threads I kinda act like a bit of a white knight, its way too tempting to hop on and defend the devs.

 

Sometimes even the glorious me gets irritated! SOMETIMES! But I like to think my cheeky commentary makes up for the occasional moments when people get turned into trees.

That you made this thread shows you're an A-Okay person. Keep truckin on that A-Okay train and you too shall be a hunky dory Planeteer!

 

You are now Frank.
You type out a sentence explaining how you cannot find anything wrong with the user named Spiro's post, and actually find it quite helpful. Furthermore, you decide to drop something at the bottom about how you sometimes white knight without even taking the other person's good points into consideration just because you get annoyed with the whole "Where's Beta" mentality.
You then hit post.

 

no you're frank

 

Well, as much as I like the idea of hunting people down which have an individual opinion (but ofc insulting people is childish..), if we start to report everybody who talks about beta and those people get "punished"... well what will the reaction of the community be? "CF are dictators" etc. This will make things worse.

Just handle it like grown ups, let them talk. You know, you don't have to be a brave white knight who fights for people who actually don't want to fight. That is called professionalism: consumer is king, be friendly, smile and ignore. Don't let people provoke you (this is especially important for the devs/moderators). Phil Fish should have known that...

Ps: Try to understand that people get a bit upset if beta is announced to be released 2013 and actually gets released Dec.31st 2013.. (worst case). This is like "haha, nice one..."

 

No, this is Patrick!

 

I have a suggestion as well. A simple one.

Be open minded. Not everyone posting questions or being critical is out to start a flame war. Forums are created for discussion. Things will get heated from time to time but without different views.. why even have a place to talk about them?

Also "camps" ? I see people with many views disagreeing but the only camps are the ones people make up in their own mind. If anything we should be a whole community regardless of views with no such thing as camps.

 

Well I'll be...
I actually didn't know you could ignore people so thanks for this, Spiro!
(No, I seriously didn't know. Thanks.)

 

Why?

If that's when it's ready, that's when it's ready. 'Beta in 2013' doesn't mean 'Beta in 2013 except for Dec 31st or any other date which might piss people off'. All other considerations aside, there is a 1 in 365 chance of Dec 31st being the date that it is ready. (Other factors included make the date exceedingly unlikely, but...)

People objecting to a Dec 31st beta release seem to be thinking that doing so would be Chucklefish deliberately delaying it to do so (for some reason) essentially to lift a middle finger (possibly to them in particular.) Nobody I've seen with such a belief has yet offered a rationale as to why CF would do something like that.

 

THERE WAS A INCEDENT!?!?!? Gosh darnit I made a meme for that specific Starbound moment

Either way I PERSONALLY haven't had any infractions and I'm surprised at that because I'm a very flamey person when it comes to pride but these things happen and the best thing we can do is just do that rather then have a whole bunch of nice Starbounders go rouge and get spoiled by the rotten banana

 

Releasing on Dec 31st means either our money did nothing to increase development time, or they gave us another false line of crap with 'We're releasing in 2013 no matter what.' It's upsetting for one reason or another. And we're not seriously thinking Chucklefish is deliberately messing with us, what we think is that Chucklefish needs to own up to their mistakes.

 

Yeah. I'd still say if you don't want to report anyone then invoking option 2 in my post would be relevant.

Also - if people are touchy enough to get annoyed at the Devs for simply invoking sensible rules and start getting vocal about it then they're likely to break enough rules to get themselves banned. Net result: Less grief, happier forum. I think only the sectors of the community that are totally unreasonable would see CF as dictators. So I don't really see a downside to losing a small section of unreasonable people from the forums.

 

Like it or not, Dec 31st 2013 is still 2013. It might be an unfortunate date in that it's at the end of 2013 rather than the beginning, but I still fail to see why it should be upsetting, if CF can't release the beta before then.

The 'money increasing development time' argument has been had elsewhere, and the idea that the money didn't speed up development is unsupportable if you consider that the lack of money would have meant that some or all of the dev team would have had to get other jobs to support themselves while working on the game part-time. part-time development is clearly less than the full-time development that they currently do.

Missing the 2013 release has nothing to do with a slowing of development. It is simply that their estimate on how long development would take missed the mark. By a lot. That's an unfortunate but pretty much unavoidable aspect of software development (see Hofstadter's law.) Had they not had the pre-order funds, and been working part-time, you could have easily expected to see development stretch into 2015 or beyond.

Edit: Incidentally CF have owned up to the fact that they misjudged how long development would take.

 

Right. Please people stop arguing over Beta in this thread.

That's PRECISELY the OPPOSITE of what I was trying to do here.

 

I can get very heated up very easily also, Majority of it is waters off a ducks back to me now, but there are a few things that get to me still. Infact I doubt there is a person alive on these forums that isn't susceptible to trolls and flame. and what the boils down to typically is when someone doesn't like another's opinion.

I think we are kinda lucky that all we get are heated debates and discussions. Nobody's thrown any actual punches yet.
Apart from the very vocal minority that have aimed abuse at the Dev's for whimsical reasons at least.