Maybe waiting would have been better

eh

 

I'm no cyber-sociologist (I just play one online) but it seems to go even deeper than that. I'm starting to recognize an entire sub-culture meme (the actual definition) where some people actually appear to actively and deliberately want to believe something is going to fail. It's as if certain individuals, in a desperate attempt to connect with anybody about anything turn to the easy power of the Dark Side and start acting all bat-shit crazy just to fit in. It's misplaced first-world righteous indignation gone viral.

About a 15 dollar game. And one that's really not all that bad as is.

 

Extra Credit just released a new video recently having to do with Early Access games on Steam, and a lot of what we're seeing here is covered in said video.

And I agree with the guy: Early Access is an awesome idea with troubling consequences. It is a double-edged sword. Gets devs money they need quicker, but it has expenses (bad publicity, player burnout, bad word-of-mouth, etc).

I think a lot of what was said in this video has a lot to do with Starbound's problems mentioned in the OP.

Hopefully CF can turn this around; I'd hate to see anything bad happen to this game as a result.

Also, something I feel EC left out with that video, is the fact that EVERYBODY is doing Early Access these days. He touched on it briefly but didn't go into the point in-depth: If it were just a couple games, then people could make exceptions and go "Oh, that game? Just wait, it'll be out full." .....but now that EVERYBODY is doing it, then it is a "oh, another early access game...".

 

The I34 version was not a leak however Tiy has stated that the fake they were working on the game was leaked WAY before he wanted it to be. The reason for the beta was CF had ran out of the funds they had saved up to work on the game due to it taking way more then the year or two they though and they had 2 choices: Ask the community for funding and work on the game full time or get jobs and work on the game in their off-time at a much more reduced pace (the non-starbound work would take up the bulk of the day). Thus the pre-order was born but Tiy had issues with people paying for a game and going empty handed till it is finished and decided a beta would be a good compremise. However Tiy seems to be a prefecctionist and wanted a beta that was more then just "here are 3 biomes and 10 items we have fully coded into the game, don't try to space travel, that is still broken" which lead to the great beta wait.

Hope that explains things.

 

LOL, Many people (*cough*, *cough* me included) predicted this exact scenario......a very vocal minority and CF missing posted dates forced there hand and they released the Beta too early. They would have been better served to NOT release the beta and have this vocal minority to move on to another game to complain about. But, no need to rehash the past.....If I never play Starbound again I surely got my 15 bucks worth in spades. I haven't played in a while either.....but I will be back on as soon as the content patch goes in. If CF next game interests me, I will be in line for it as well. I don't mind waiting for a great experience. Simple Fact - Live life everyday as your last on Earth, you will not miss a video game.

 

If game would not have been released last year i would be disappointed. BUT, if CF told us about reasons behind it - moving to London, i would be OK with it. BUT would CF had enough money to move to London if they didn't release game into EA? Nobody, besides CF, knows.

 

I'm awaiting these next update that adds all these fancy features. I've heard that after that, we don't have to worry about ships/chars deleting, and it'll be smooth sailing.

 

Actually they promised a while ago that there would be no more character wipes.

 

No more character wipes, but there is a planned ship/universe wipe...I think.

 

I think the real issue is that Starbound just has terrible PR and a toxic community. I remember before there was any real news of a beta (around late 2012 - early 2013) people were either viciously attacking one another or there was a constant stream of passive-aggressive posts and threads about why there should or shouldn't be a beta, with the Mods do little to nothing to stop it. I guess what I'm getting at is that I always find it odd that people seem to be surprised or confused when it comes to the community in general being rather terrible when it's been like this for about two years now, so that same attitude bleeding into the Steam forums shouldn't be anymore surprising.

 

And while there may not be more forced character wipes, I'm pretty sure it will be recommended, as you probably won't be able to experience a lot of the new features unless you start a fresh character.

Far as pros and cons to Early Access. Everyone has pretty much said it. You get the money to develop full-time at the expensive of potential burnout. And it's really not fair. Hard to blame CF because people weren't able to comprehend what "Early Access" meant, or able to process the very clear and concise information on the CF website about the stages of Beta. Those are the ones that are in full blow-up mode.

What I'm hoping, and I'm sure we'll see, is that when full release hits it will bring in a whole new audience and fan-base. There are hundreds of thousands of people who NEVER buy Early Access games. I know plenty myself who are every bit as excited for the game, but don't want Early Access. When the full release comes and a new audience comes in who can make initial judgements based on the finished product, I think you'll see a lot of good publicity, and that in turn will reignite some of the Early Access people who became a little jaded.

But bottom line, if this big game-changing update really does change the entire feel of Starbound, it'll get new life and new legs. People will forget about the old beta.

 

BETA NAOW PLZ!1!!!

This community is rather hostile at times and definitely takes the game (and it's devs) way too seriously from time to time. The big problem is the community, external to this site and Reddit, feels neglected. I can't quite understand why people would immediately go to the steam forums for information and not the official forums. So many of the steam users refuse to look outside of steam for news. By the time they get mad enough to leave the steam forums and make an account here, they lose their minds in a post and get banned. They're so jaded coming in that all they can do is spew toxic crap everywhere. I don't wholly blame them for the issue. The Devs could go there and post news, but it's not solely on them to inform the steam community.

 

Another issue is that for a long while the only place to get any recent news was to go to Reddit. That just caused even more problems as people felt like that forums were being ignored simply because Tiy and/or the other Devs preferred using Reddit. It also didn't help that on a number of occasions Molly stated that she was going to make a thread that compiled the information being posted on other sites, but of course it never happened. All in all, I think everyone is to blame for the current situations, bad and/or mismanagement of PR mixed with hostile and/or frustrated customers topped with aggressive, selective, or just plain bad moderators screwed everything up.

 

On this forum, I've never seen the moderators brazenly flaunt their abilities and use them for misdeeds. I've seen them punish people for being jerks, but never anything that wasn't pretty much deserved.

 

I've seen a number of instances where moderators blatantly ignore the breaking of rules simply because their friends were the ones to do it (and yes, the posts were being reported), I've also seen them continue to harass a group of people after being told to stop by that group (some were even planing to leave the forums because of it), then there are the more recent instances where they abused the "red text of warnings/bans" in order to call people idiots. It may not be Gamefaqs level of abuse but it is abuse none the less.

 

We're also only seeing one side of it, we have no idea who or what is being reported and for what reasons. There is a significant amount of stuff going on behind the scenes of every forum and us (on the outside) aren't aware of a fair bit of it.

 

What has been seen cannot be unseen...

 

O_O that's why your avatar's eyes are so wide... Mind blown.

Seriously though, the mods/admins/molly see a lot more about situations than regular forum users.

 

You say that like it's a good thing =P

Please note, I do NOT mean this to imply that it is bad that moderators see situations or anything negative about the current, past, future, or potential alternate reality group of moderators. I just meant it as a joke, and "Poor mods, they have to look at all of the crap we spew at them"

 

Transparency isn't always as glorious as people seem to think. Sometimes subtlety and discretion are required and that's impossible to do when everyone can see everything that's happening.

Unfortunately without full transparency people start making up their own idea of what happened and then conspiracies theories happen.