Steam and negative reviews V2

They were wrong, what do you want them to do?

 

Fellow starbounders, this topic contains interesting opinions and facts. This lead to an insightful discussion and I hope it remains active a bit more. Let's please try to keep on topic and avoid personal brawls.

It does not help to throw in old promises and criticize CF for not keeping them. The state of the game is what it is now. We can only try to make it better from here. It does not matter if they said once "full release in 2013". With my opening post I brought the ideas for the discussion of the near future of SB...

 

• lol... you argued semantics. I said nothing about the weather system, which if you were following the minor updates you'd know that the weather effects weren't all added at the same time as the weather system. Your entire argument is without merit.
• Sure... some mistakes are warranted, and yes the community does need to forgive, but this is not one of those situations because Chucklefish has had more than their fair shake.
• According to Chucklefish that is one of the main reasons they are trying to stay small. Yes, adding people is like throwing money at a problem, it doesn't always work / produce the results you want or need, but not willing to change out of fear or denial is ridiculous and lame. They have added some new people, which is good, but the amount of 'results' or 'fruits of their labor' is still severely behind schedule to the point where they should consider a stop-gap update.
• You keep trying to draw senseless parallels. I know we aren't their boss, but we do have the right to speak our mind and if need be tell people to NOT BUY because of how we have been treated or what decisions they made, thanks to them accepting our payment in the form of a pre-order.

Wrong again... a pre-order is not a donation with a reward. A pre-order is exactly what it says it is, an order made pre-retail. The fact that you think a pre-order is a donation with reward doesn't change what it actually is.

 

Devs? Nothing. As i said, i kindly asked you, not to flock everyone together, because as you said EA customers knew that they buying into, but some folks who bought pre-order didn't.

 

@mwpow3ll
@Maxwell Demonic
@SeaMichelle

Good news -- you three get to walk away from this thread for a bit (mostly Max and Mw). Cool your jets, rethink what you want to say -- come back with some understanding of the other side's point of view. Reiterate your points without any tension.

 

I completely disagree with the fact that most Steam reviews are 'trolling' or 'out for Chucklefish' or anything of the sort.
Sure, there's the usual joke review here and there like the one Izzabelle mentioned a page or two ago, but people try to be honest and criticize games fairly in general.
Let's take the top rated Starbound review on Steam:
At first glance you can see that it's not the work of some lone troll out for Chucklefish considering 716 of 931 people (77%) found the review helpful.
I suppose it goes off on a tangent concerning the censoring that has been going on both on this forum and Steam itself, but it does point out Starbound's faults along with the developer's faults, as long as you can overlook the use of the word 'fuck' here and there.

Now, let's look at Edge of Space, another somewhat similar game that is also Early Access:
434 of 588 people (74%) found the top review helpful, the reviews are generally positive, and these are listed as the game's core strengths:

I suppose this is where Chucklefish have taken some wrong steps, as there have been some issues with censoring, some controversies(horse, Bartwe, etc.), and most important of all the lack of updates.
This, along with the lack of involvement of modders in the development process(I can remember at least one instance where a modder signed an NDA and then him and his work went completely ignored) makes the game's backers and fans feel insignificant. I suppose the fact that (opinion alert) the game in its current state isn't that fun and is lacking in things to do past the first couple of hours or so when compared with other early access games has only further hindered people's opinions of the game.

All it takes is looking at other games and seeing that Steam reviews are far from a joke, and in general are actually thought-out reviews.
In any case, I can only hope that this new update pays off and Starbound finally starts shaping up to be the game that it has the potential to be.

 

Did you forget that when Starbound first came out, it was filled with overwhelming positive reviews? The negative review only comes now as REFLECTION OF STATE OF THE GAME.

And there are games out there with overwhelming positive reviews. Why can't Starbound be like them and get positive reviews from their users? Because instead of blaming customers for the soo called "flamming" by the fan boy's term, Starbound should probably think about where it all went wrong. An example would be Path of Exile by GGG. Their players and customers loved them because they did well on communication, letting the player know their plan and what is coming up next. Chucklefish doesn't have a plan as we know of. Of course, I love Starbound as a game, what I dislike is the lack of progress from the developers. An average company would have the game nearly finished with the amount of time they are given.

 

All legitimate Starbound owners are also Steam users (save for the development staff, who have all the starbounds)... um, "can't we all just get along?"

When I look into a new game on Steam, I not only read the game info on the sales page, both positive and negative reviews, but I often check into the forums on Steam, too. Often, something that a critic or negative opinion brings to light can actually help sell me a game. While someones positive opinion or experience can cause me to pass up the buy. Steam helped me in making the decision to purchase Starbound at the time (in December), not dissuade me against it.

Negative reviews and posts can be useful.

I have purchased more than one game that only looked good, but turned out to be a bad fit for me. Now, I try to be more informed and do more research before I buy games. I try to get as much data as I can from other sources, including official websites. I'd rather have a few more great games, than a bunch more "meh" or bad games I can't return.

I can't say (from a personal standpoint) what happened before Starbound was on Steam.

 

This has been my beef the entire time. Everyone defending Chucklefish keeps saying give them time that they're entitled to learn from their mistakes, but they've had time.

They've had almost 4 years and almost 1.5 years with 4 million plus dollars in revenue, and the state of the game is still woefully behind...

At one point Molly and Tiy said they were only expecting 250k or some such from pre-orders. Ok, well, if you expected only 250k and still felt comfortable promising a 2013 release date, what should you have been able to do with 4 million minimum?

That's 16 times more money than they expected and they still can't deliver...

 

So you'll just have to keep waiting. Shit happens and they're working on it.

 

Well, I might as well go throw up a trash review on Steam then, right?

 

It doesn't matter if most of the reviews on the steam page are "troll" reviews. If I go into a store page and see a bunch of negative reviews for a game, I avoid it like the plague. It would be nice to see some deadlines.

 

I'm not a dev -- so don't take this as scripture or holy writ or something

But as I understand it -- the game is "technically" complete, while missing just a few bridges in progression and lore. Which could have been resolved with a lore codex and a few more bosses solidifying the gaps in the tiers as they currently are -- for example -- in tier 1 going to tier 2. But the devs, listening to their community, decided even more needed to be part of the game. So after adding and adding -- the community spoke up and said "enough adding! make progress toward completing the game as a whole" which is what they're doing now.

 

You see this is the problem because a community doesn't know anything about what they really want and making a game by a democratic committee composed of 'The Community' is the best way to just waste all your time and money running in a circle, and then the very people that forced you to run that circle will blame you for doing it, and anyway it should have been an ellipses.

 

If the current stable game is considered "technically" complete, I'd like to know how that's possible when you can't even sell items in-game among a hundred other things not in place...

 

Because technically complete means not everything is in but it's very very close. If it had everything, then she wouldn't have needed to use 'technically'. This is the reason words exist and have different meanings.

 

You better be wrong, because if the game is "almost complete" is totally not the droid we were looking for as gameplay is just empty. In connection with Tiy post on steam forum, about, among other things, always having a good and sound plan for SB development it looks horrible. Yeah, SB right now is almost feature complite against "About SB section" but each feature is in the embryo state.

 

This is a great thread full of great people.
Especially you Magmarashi, you are Very "Great"

 

You can start. You can play; explore, build, fight. You can progress (tiers). And you can engage in a story (lore books). Some minor adjustments with NPCs, a couple of lore books -- and a handful of bosses (including a final boss) -- and CF could have said "there you go, enjoy". So I'm glad we didn't get thrown under the bus on that one. And it definitely could have been much much worse than that. We could have gotten the Fez II treatment.

Pretty much.

I'm not wrong since I'm not actually right. I'm just saying -- you could have a really really mundane game on your hands if the devs really wanted it to be that way.

Anyways. Overall I think the negative reviews are just blah. Some are deserved, some are just there because someone was upset, some are there because they think it'll actually get an update faster. Whatever the context -- the whole that is the Steam Negative Reviews are severely lacking in prominent information that a negative review (especially a negative review) should have.

 

No... you can't call a game complete, technically complete, or even joke about it being technically complete, when the sole method of a character being able to stimulate or simulate stimulating an economy via selling isn't even implemented.

If Chucklefish comes out tomorrow and says, "we will not support selling items to NPCs in game." then you can say for this issue alone it's technically complete.