Playing Nightly makes me worried

The game will have a mission system with actual areas you play through and bosses you fight. They aren't in yet. There's a prototype of a couple of them in-game, but the missions that include them aren't available. They'll also have a dynamic quest system and a trade system, both of which aren't in yet, that'll offer alternate means of progression for gear/resource advancement than straight mining.

They've lowered mineral costs for starter stuff (climbing rope is also cheap now and worth it), made the underground more spacious and easier to move about (pretty much eliminated blind digging, unless you forget your torches), and added a starter dungeon that includes enough materials to get you past the early game without mining--sans the end of tutorial mission requirement. I can knock that out pretty easy inside the first hour of gameplay though. Upper tier materials all spawn on the same planets now too, so it's actually pretty easy to knock out your higher gear requirements relative to stable. Especially with the upgraded MM that can smash massive swathes of cobblestone like a pick goes through sand.

Just make sure you're packing your spelunking gear--which conveniently is also dungeon-clearing and planet-traversing gear, so it's the same kit you're stocking regardless of what you do.

I made a post in this thread too about the ore dropping, and voiced similar complaints. People are saying it's in there to prevent "death warping", but all it does is encourage quitting/reloading the game. When you 'save and quit' and restart, you're back in your ship with all your mined loot. Even bypasses the pixel penalty. That's always been in there though, not sure why anyone ever suicided to get out of the caves.

 

I do not see it as an issue, atm, as I am able to recover my ores, the ore placement is more plentiful now as well. I do wonder if there will be anything done about the pause feature since people keep bringing it up. It certainly is something the devs must have noticed.

 

Personally, dropping ores and bars on normal doesn't bother me that much, but I can easily understand why it would bother a lot of others though. I'd rather have CF keep the difficulty options as basic as possible rather than having a massive list of check boxes or a bunch of "gray area" difficulties that aren't really necessary. To me, dropping ores and bars on death is more of a balancing issue than a difficulty one. For example, if they made it so that pixels were only used for buying items and made it so monsters didn't drop pixels, they would become much more valuable. Of course, you would need to have some more useful and diverse merchants, but it would turn dying into "Oh great, I have to go back and get my ores!" to "Oh great, now I won't be able to buy that really cool sword!" The progression paths would also tie into this since in order for the player to get money, they would either need to loot it from chests/boxes, sell things they found while exploring, grow crops and sell those, or earn rent money from npcs who live in their structures. Ore and bar drops wouldn't even be necessary since pixels would be enough of a loss due to their new value. From there, they can just keep the item drops for hardcore mode like they originally intended.

 

so it's not that you have a problem with the game, you just want game where there is no penalties and no real hazards... which isn't much of a game at all, but I'm sure it will happen that a creative mode will be available upon release or at least one from modders to patch in.[DOUBLEPOST=1415912194][/DOUBLEPOST]

Dude, caveins happen go to a desert planet or one with a lot of gravel. The rest I do agree with, though why wall in creatures? part of the fun is in the fight. I doubt it will change that creatures can be walled so if you are doing that it will never be a challenge. I'm looking forward to all the other things being added back in, like warmth and hunger. I'm sure during balancing and as creatures evolve we will see more challenges. plus with the shielded dungeons where you cant add or break blocks, there are lots of amazing things happening to balance out the exploits like walling every enemy you see.

 

Why the hell do people automatically assume that because we do not want ridiculous death penalties forced upon us that we wish to be immortal with no risk at all? This kind of assumption is one of the reasons why heated arguments happen. I believe I can speak for most of the people who have my train of thought on this concept. We want to have to be able to eat, we want to have to fight and defend ourselves, we want to have to collect materials and build things, and have to earn stuff in order to advance. We do not want everything handed to us like in creative mode. Having to earn your things, and not wanting to lose what you earned does NOT equal creative mode, or even 'easy' mode. It's common sense to want to be able to hang on to crap you earned or found legitimately in the game, especially if you have a lot of it. I for example am a bit of a hoarder, I like to carry around 1000 of every kind of bar in the game so I can be prepared. My ship however is packed with food, weapons, costumes and so on. If I fell into a random chasm died, and then crashed afterwards or something, that would equal dozens of hours of mining work lost. And in my understanding most people walk around with at least a few bars/ores/coal for 'on the fly' construction of things. It's pretty damned unreasonable to force people even on the lowest difficulty to entirely change their style of play just because they want to throw in a mandatory punishment on everyone to stop exploitation of a suicide to get to ship thing. Punishing everyone for the crimes of the few is like throwing everyone in jail for 10 years on their 18th birthday because they might commit a crime and it's better to get the punishment out of the way or something.

 

I want to underline what @Tymon said. As a passionate builder, I spent hours collecting materials and on architectural development. I have to collect all the soft bricks myself, as there is no way to produce them in the stable version. Creating something nice can take a lot of time; still, the mode is rewarding. If I collect materials for one hour, I mostly can work with it for a rather long time if I plan my things correctly.

However, I'm doing that because I want to test my limits, and it's my own choice to collect 10k soft brick, sand stone and so on to fulfill my "wishes". Even if I criticise it in some way - it SHOULD be easier to produce soft brick and normal brick stone, instead destroying Apex cities or searching for mini village underground biomes - it's not like the game forces me to do so. I don't want a creative mode; I want to produce, to manage and to build it myself with the tools the game gives me.

If we take this example, it perfectly fits in the case of the ore question. Collecting ores is - like building - one aspect of the game. It's not like we are forced to gain 1000 gold bars and put them into a safe. But the aspect that you may search for hours for ores (yes, it can take long, if you find something interesting under the surface, like an underground biome or simply want to "explore") and than die tragically... happened to all of us. Losing some pixels - well, I can live with that. But losing the stuff I actually searched for all the time? No way.

If CF follows this route, it paradoxically punishes the player when he wants to progress. In my personal opinion, that's a bad gameplay design. A developer should give the player choices, tools and maybe a tip how he may challenge the current situation. But punishing him to make a progress longer, not smarter - is grind. Grind has nothing to do with fun, it has nothing to do with challenge, it's simply bad and stupid. If I would lose all my ores I collected in - let's say - two hours, it's not like I would feel challenged. I would feel bad. And I won't think "Oh, cool, how hard and rewarding this game is, I have to be more careful" and be motivated to search once again diamonds and other stuff. I would rather think "Well, enough Starbound for me for some time".

Like @Calris mentioned, you are wasting time. Time is the most prescious ressource in my (and maybe your?) life. No one can give you time back. And I "wasted" enough time on Starbound,* and I won't accept that now CF even shows me the finger after such a situation. Because that's what the developer does, if he doesn't gives us a choice to decide if we want to lose our stuff or not. If this would've been the case from the start, I may have never played Starbound for so long as I did.

But well, I have the feeling that this is the developer's baby and that we have nothing to say in this situation. A feeling, which I had for a long time and becomes stronger every day. It makes me sad.
What me makes even sadder, are people who look at others with arrogance, only if they don't have the same opinion like them. I don't consider myself a gamer who wants immortal mode, creative mode or these stupid achievement systems which every game has today. But I certainly have my motives and also some valid points why I argue against this mindless decision.

___________
*But in contrast to lose ores after death, it was an entertaining experience. At least for the most time.

 

Losing this replensible resource that is storable and available on many different planets is no big deal.

But losing that replenishable resource that is storable and available on many different planets is a utter tragedy.

I don't see much of a difference here. Ore and pixels are both resources that can be found on many different planets. Both require farming to attain vast quantities of them, both have access to building blocks that are not dropped once made, and both can be storable, preventing the reclaimable drop from occurring on your person.

 

Ahem. Your opinion is not that of the more casual majority.

 

Citation needed.

 

Then perhaps a casual difficulty would suit better for you. There's nothing wrong with playing on an easier difficulty. And it would work well with multiplayer servers , assuming the server side characters becomes a thing(which it should).


All I am saying is that the two are so similar in nature getting mad over one and not the other is confusing. It is an occurrence that is preventable and reclaimable under the player's own power.

I don't care for calling myself hardcore or casual. But don't tell me that the difference between the two hinges on the usage of boxes.

 

You constantly emphasize 'reclaimable' as if it is some sort of guaranteed thing. Crashes=Ore is gone. If you are at the bottom of the map=Ore is gone. If you are in multiplayer and get disconnected or the server crashes or something=ore is gone in certain cases (If you are visiting someone else's planet and don't have the coordinates as one example). There's plenty of situations where your ore is just gone and can't be retrieved. period. And plus, your ore is only really reclaimable if you can even find your way back. with falling sand/gravel, in some of the deeper areas, without a map on a very large planet, it could be difficult if not next to impossible to find out where you were when you died if you fell into a massive chasm or something. Time spent to reclaim that ore is not reclaimable on crash. And even if it is reclaimable, going through huge sections of already mined out tunnels just to get back to where you were, then, going all the way back just to store your ore safely. Can you say 'boring, tedious, monotonous and most importantly, it does absolutely nothing to really make the game more interesting or even fun?' If anything, forcing you to go all the way back to where you died makes the game far less interesting.

 

I agree with you wholeheartedly when it comes to teleporters. The angriest I've gotten with this game was because of an accidental death. I had around a couple hundred each of Iron and coal, and copper. I got lucky finding a tunnel with a large abundance of ores. Had my computer lag on me and I ended up walking off a cliff to my death. Ended up going back down only to find the ores were completely gone, and I lost about 2-3 hours worth of ores and progress. Had to try not to throw things around my room. And I'm an overly calm person most of the time.
Ended up having the lag death issue happen a second time shortly after.
Also implementing a teleporter would also allow in the suggestion of letting people choose their spawn point. I know a lot of others want that added into the game as well.

And I've said it before and I'll say it again, no matter your opinion on ore drops, everyone I've spoken to on the issue so far, regardless of what side of the argument they're on, has agreed they'd be COMPLETELY fine with it being an optional thing people can toggle on or off when creating their character. Same with the hunger bar system.

 

There's some good stuff in the nightly builds. The new mission structure looks fun. There's still the stumbling block of no processor, and no way to repair the FTL drive right now, which is preventing a new stable build from being build. In my opinion this should be top priority right now. With more than half a year since the last stable build, people are rightfully worried that this game is going to suffer feature creep until it dies.

It's great that you want to put all these cool things in. Can we get the game to a stable, running update first please? I'm not saying your next version has to be 1.0. But get the game to a point where people can progress to the top tier without using any admin commands, make sure it's stable, update the stable build and THEN continue working on other parts of the game. Balance, missions, new biomes, etc. Every now and then you need to stop adding new stuff, make sure what you've got now works, push a new stable build, and then move on. Or you're going to lose people.

With the state of the game now... well. I've dropped the nightly again, as it's too frustrating to try to test. I'm going back to a game that has been actually fun to progress in. I'll check back in again in a few months.

 

They've already lost people. I know of at least 10 people that are on steam that uninstalled the game and have no intentions of installing it again even after the patch/next update. The huge gap in updates, along with the aforementioned problems that they saw in the nightly builds made them just give up. The problem is that adding more and more and more and more to a test build not actually meant for regular gameplay is making them lose even more people's interest as time goes on. It's almost the middle of november now... it's been what? 7? 8? months since the last actual stable update? I understand taking your time, I understand wanting to fine tune and so on... but adding new stuff in, equals more stuff that can break, equals your next 'stable' build is pushed back further. So I definitely have to agree, that they need to release a stable build soon or I might end up joining the 'Uninstall it and don't look back' crowd too.

 

I have this strange feeling that once is all said and done, the game will be released. On that day, there will be reviews, new visitors to the page on steam, and the results will be out. Once the dust clears, it will either flop, or the renewed life will clear up some of the disappointment; and even for those who have uninstalled will have the choice to come back or not.

I'd also like to bring up Minecraft. Even on peaceful, death can clear out your inventory. For other playstiles, there's mods for that. I found Minecraft lacking in challenge, so I imposed as much difficulty as possible. There are mods out there, however, that make even normal mode quite easy Chances are good, based on the work--whether you agree with the direction or not--that this game will be released, and the full version will likely bring enough of a community to bear to do that much.

Either that, or as stated, it flops, and nothing is gained by worrying about it now. If it isn't going the way you want, then your going to uninstall anyway. If your liking it and continue to "keep the faith", then your probably going to play the nightlies for longer. At least until you become dissatisfied yourself.

I know, it is a neutral stance, but when something is as but a toddler, barely walking with no clear future in sight; it's hard to see what will become of it.

Personally, I like dropping ores. The one thing I did to make life sickeningly easy some times would be to get the ores I need and kill myself, go back to the ship with a basically free pass. I enjoy having some reason to try to survive, because everything else isn't much of a challenge for me.

Updates; yeah a bit slow. Not going neutral there, it has been a bit of a lengthy lull.

 

Alright. But I hope you don't support making ore dropping mandatory for all characters. Because that's just not fair for new players who are just starting out.

 

Change makes us all afraid, there are going to be some good changes and some bad ones depending on how you feel about certain thing in the game, but knowing Chucklefish, the ratio of good to bad in my opinion will be 9.9:0.1
Every game has it's pros and cons and some people just need to accept that a game can't be everything they desire.
Take Terraria for example, I love the game to bits, but once all of the bosses are defeated and you're pretty much an Over powered, no-purpose warrior/mage/summoner/ranger there's not much else to do.
The thing I love the most about Starbound is that it's so focused on bringing joy for hours upon days that they manage to keep me hooked long over what anyone would consider healthy, and I really do like and appreciate that.
That's obviously not their soul focus but I'm sure it's an essential one for how successful the game has become. I really do trust the Developers into advancing this game on wards and keeping me happy with it all, even if there'll be those little bits I won't like.

So you know, thanks Chucklefish!

 

I've noticed that a lot of people complain about the mining aspect of the game, calling it "grind-y" and boring.

Unfortunately, that's part of the way Starbound works. It's a resource gathering game, so of course there's going to be mining. I don't think there's a way around this in a game that lists resource gathering as one of the major gameplay feature. If you don't like mining, I don't think Starbound is the kind of game you're looking for

 

Have to agree, it's like some people expect this game to spawn everything in for you, part of the point of Starbound is that you're stranded and you need to be independent and fix your own problems by gathering the things you need.