Awful Pixel System

My point is that throwing your corpses at enemies should never be a viable tactic to progress. Death should always have a cost.

 

And it does, to a point. That is the point of the deposit system. In order to remove the death penalty you must sacrifice 40% of all of you current money. That's a pretty hefty cost if you ask me. Let's not forget that if you turn it back into pixels it is free game for the death penalty or deposit tax again if you don't spend it all immediately.

 

On the plus side, I'm not dieing as much...

 

(Skipped a few pages ot posts, sorry if I repeat things.)

I sort think they need ot fix the difficulty before working on the death penalties that much. I am all for punishing deaths because it then makes it less about dying over and over just to plow through something (although the forced default planet landing area is one in itself since it's lots of backtracking at times). If they make it that you can store pixels for free, that becomes cheap deaths; carry no money? Then dying won't mean anything against a boss with friends. I refuse to think pride alone is punishment enough.

That said, wasn't there supposed to be some difficulty settings? That way casual can play casual, and mediumcore can play mediumcore, and hardcore can play hardcore, etc.

In a nutshell: working ond eath penatly whent he difficulty isn't balanced yet is only going to make it harder to gauge if the penalty is too much or not enough imo, no matter if you like hardcore death penalties or just want casual fun.

 

If I had to guess, I'd assume the devs are trying to see what each type of player wants from the game before setting the standards for casual, medium, and hardcore. In fact in looking through a lot of threads you can see the differences between the three.

 

It may also be that they are hoping that it will all organically fall into place given the ability to easily mod the game. It wasn't long until after the original thread was posted that someone came up with the idea of crafting an item from pixels to safely store them. It could well end up the devs don't need to do anything as players will just be able to choose what mods they want to use and the devs can balance as they see fit.

 

I don't know. I hate to bring up Terraria, but that game's death penalty was basically non-existent if you just put your gold away. But that didn't detract from how enjoyable the game was. I don't see the reason to make the death penalty such a huge focus. There's some weird movement in the Starbound community that seems to think that this game, with its cheerful pixel graphics and blushing poop monsters, is supposed to be the definitive hardcore sandbox experience and I don't get it at all.

Then again, with Tiy throwing around bogus numbers like 40% pixel loss for deposits, maybe they're not too far off. This game has a long way to go before release, but I fear if difficulty isn't properly addressed soon, we may be headed a long way in the wrong direction.

 

If you die once, you lose 30%. If you die twice, the amount you've lost totals up to around 41%.

Since the Pixel compression cost if 40%, that means it is worth it if you expect to die more than twice.

If you only die once, then it's slightly in favor of not using the compressor.

The funny part is, this applies to how many times you die EVER in the entire game, so players should use the compressor quickly and frequently. The real disadvantage is that players will have to carry both a refinery and the voxels with them to purchase things from shops they find, or they need to return home and try to get back to the shop safely while carrying the pixels.

Other people might hate me for saying this, but I agree. As a hardcore gamer, I don't need EVERY game I play to be that hard. Starbound just feels like it should be relatively easy, with some difficult super tip-top endgame content. The early- and mid-game shouldn't be so brutal.

 

Now do you mean the devs using the ideas from mods in the game with balancing tweaks, cause if so I'm okay with that. I'm not to keen on needing to mod in a ton of features I want, mainly cause more mods tend to make games less stable.

 

I think 40% is far to steep, maybe 20%

 

This. This 1000x. Unless you're a godly player, you should always carry around the compressor and store blocks every time you can. Most people won't though, and will probably leave it on their ship. Still, it would change the death system to the following:

Before:
If you die, we hurt your wallet massively.

After:
We reward you for surviving long enough to use the compressor! Now you get to hang on to some of what you gained.

 

On the contrary I'd say that the lack of a good death penalty was a big problem with Terraria shops. Prices on late game items skyrocketed to over 1 platinum each because of how some players would accumulate massive amounts of money from playing over the course of months since they'd lose almost nothing on death. It meant that if you started the game fresh you had to grind a massive amount to be able to afford any of the stuff. Keeping a stiff penalty means that you are never going to have to face very high prices to balance the system out. You'll never have to grind for pixels, only survive for a reasonable amount of time without dying, to afford anything significant.

 

They might as well call this the Coinstar system because you're being charged money for your money.
There are far too many pixel sinks in this game and only two methods of earning them.


We need a galactic checking and savings account where we accumulate interest on deposited pixels.

 

This shouldn't be an issue with proper economic balancing. You could say the same of the refinery, that its existence means that pixel costs need to be higher to compensate. I just don't think that's true, though. Pixels shouldn't be a huge focus of the game, just like gold was never a huge focus in Terraria. Let me put away my pixels without an absurd cost attached, and let me use it to print off pretty furniture as I like to without having to explore for half an hour whenever I want a couch. It's not fun and it's tedious.

I hate to feel this way about a game, but all I can think is "give me an effing break, dude, I just want to play the game". I don't want to meticulously plan out every action. I don't want to move at a snail's pace. I want to dash gloriously over mountains to see what treasures lie in wait beyond, like the dashing space cowbro I am.

 

It would be nice if we could scan and print BLOCKS. It would make creating buildings out of rare materials a lot less time consuming, and also use up a ton of excess pixels, killing two birds with one stone. You don't have to build using the 3D printer, but it would be a nice option if you weren't doing anything else with your pixels after reaching the endgame.

I think their goal is to get you to use your pixels instead of just accumulating them.

 

Well that certainly is an option if they feel the mod fits the approach they are going for which is actually more or less how this whole deposit system started. Clearly there are going to be cases where some ideas/mods conflict with the devs' views on how the game should be balanced so they might go their own route but mods will remain an option.

As for stability, I'd not expect as much of a problem with mods in Starbound given the nature of the game's programming. Since they built the game from the ground up with modding in mind I'd imagine that even with a lot of ods the game wouldn't run very differently than if implemented in the core game. The only exception might be for extremely divergent mods or the work of an amateur programmer.

 

This. I'd really like it if I could just scan an example of a block from a dungeon and just pay for some later on instead of feeling like i need to deconstruct any dungeon I come across.

 

I think the consequences of death so far have a good enough sting without causing too much of a setback.

Death should be something to be avoided, not a revolving door.

 

God, the amount of TIME it takes to rip apart a whole dungeon. It's not time spent exploring.

 

I have a question.

How come we can't provide feedback to Chucklefish without sounding like a brat? The OP used the word garbage, put words into people's mouths, generalized and made the assumption that there is a torch mob of thousands of people who hate the Pixel system.

Quit it. I can't walk into into a "feedback" thread (quotes because I rarely see a real feedback thread, and this isn't one either) without some high and mighty person telling me how I should think, or that they somehow have a better idea. Some of the posters in this thread just outright insult the dev team, without providing any real thoughts on the matter.

We get it. Some of you aren't happy with the Pixel system. Alright. We understand. We heard you the first time. We heard you the second time. We heard you the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth time. You're acting like a kid sitting in the backseat of the car, asking "Are we there yet?"

Complaining constantly, and also wording it in an asshat fashion is just white noise. It's static.

However, a lot of you seem to fail to realize there are these things called "Opinions." Have you ever heard of them? Alright, since you haven't heard of them, here is the definition of an opinion.

o·pin·ion
əˈpinyən/
noun

1. 1.
   a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.
   "I'm writing to voice my opinion on an issue of great importance"

See that? That's an "opinion." Your "opinion" is not necessarily shared by everyone else. Quit acting like your opinion of how something should work is better than their idea. There are some flaws with the game, yes. There are a lot of flaws. The pixel system may not agree with you, that's fine. You're allowed to express that displeasure, and they might listen to you. You don't however need to act like a royal, entitled, opinionated jerk about it.

What happened to you, Starbound community? You used to be so pleasant and mature. =\