Wiping, To Keep You Fresh

So today marked another update, and a wipe.

Update looks great.... I know... I know... expect wipes... but seriously, any chance of 24h email notification so we could possibly save items to the character?

Many hours of hording approx. 30 chests, a couple planetary compounds in my home planet bunch... dang...

Well everything is now sparkly clean, upside, way more room on my ship again...

 

Not to be rude, but i wish people would stop complaining about wipes.
It is much easier and time saving to do a wiping update, developing wise. It is hard to update the game in a way where no wipe occures.

If you really want to make sure, no unexpected wipe hits you :
-goto to you game library
-goto starbound
-right click
-choose "Preferences"
-goto tab "Updates"
-switch from "Keep this game up todate" to "Don´t update this game"

Like this you get your time preparing your character/save and reading wether there is any bugs or wipes and then choose for yourself when to update the game.

 

Oh well, if there would just have been SOME kind of warning that this could happen!
I don't want to be an asshole, but mate, just move on. There is much more Starbound on the horizon, let your old stuff go. You will get better.

Oh, and don't build stuff you can't afford to lose in beta stage one. Should be a no-brainer.

 

lol, I get it, and I do understand, my post was mostly meant to be humorous. Wipes, still well frankly, suck.

 

Should always wipe. Should always get rid of that smelly stuff. Helpful advise from old uncle Q

 

Ah ok, it is always sad to loose your things. I can understand that. But even if meant to be humorous, it spams the forums (there are many complaining about the wipes) and you are playing with fire (i assume you have seen all those flame wars here ).
Aside from that, i hope you took my advice for disabling automated updates.

Have a great day mate.

 

A wipe an update, keeps the alien proctologist away...

 

I think a big part of it is to clean out old items that are using different systems can be cleaned from the system. They are talking about minimizing wipes now though. Maybe they can target item classes more specifically.

 

Personally, I hope character and everything DO get wiped every major update/ every time its necessary.

If from now Until release we don't get anymore wipes, I'll be bored, and I'm pretty sure lots of other people will too. Hitting "endgame" now with not much else to do (from what I hear, I spend most of my time running around, not at endgame) will only make those people even more bored, when new content comes out and they have instant access to it and steamroll it right off the bat.

Plus if I have to create a new character/universes anyway to experience what's new what's the point in even keeping the outdated character?

 

I don't really mind the wipes, because most things that are important I keep on my character anyway, like Steel and what-not.

My only question is "Why?". Other games manage to update without entirely wiping the save data. Why can't Starbound do the same?

It's baffling to me.

Inb4; "It's to keep the experience 'Fresh'". No, that's a rubbish reason.

 

Because other game's most likely aren't this early in a stage of development. Values are being changed, mechanics are being tweaked, changing one thing impacts another. Changing one thing can make characters existing with old information OP, completely useless, or bug ridden crash dummies,

Wipes are/should be a healthy part of every game's open beta development.

 

Wipes are entirely necessary for a game that's being concurrently developed and tested.

When new stuff is implemented, having legacy items/environments/materials/other content hanging around from previous versions skews data mining and feedback. This leads to incorrect assumptions and conclusions based on that information, and in turn, bad decisions made based on those assumptions and conclusions.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Wiping to obtain a clean slate prevents any leftovers from affecting the current situation, and allows clear information to be drawn from it. In many cases, it's mechanically necessary, such as today's universe wipe. In order to implement the new planet type (asteroid fields), the entire universe needed to be wiped and re-generated, otherwise any already-generated starsystems would lack whatever asteroid fields needed to be included.

When you participate in a beta, you accept the need for periodic wipes, and the loss of your stuff when they happen. That's just the way these things go, and there's no use in getting upset about it. The only way to avoid wipes for sure is to wait until the beta is over and play the final release version.

Yes, getting wiped sucks, but it's not the end of the universe. If you can earn it once, you can earn it again - Starbound is not so prohibitively difficult or RNG-happy of a game that there's no possible way to replace the stuff you had prior to the wipe.

 

Because the game is in Alpha.

As much as we want this to be the final version of the game, or even the Beta version, it's not. We're here as testers... albeit some of us (all of us?) are paying to test instead of being paid to test...

 

This is what all the apologist numbskulls can't seem to get through their heads.

Doesn't matter if it's beta. Doesn't matter if it's beta, alpha, or whatever. Because it's Beta Alpha Delta. ...Hah, see what I did there? Bad? Er, whatever, to the point:

There's how you want things to be as a developer, and what you're willing to put up with as a fan. Then there's reality, where everyone else exists. You can go "HAY GAIS, IT'S BETA, YU SHUD CALM DOWN" all you want and it's not going to change the fact that having your character wiped constantly sucks. Even for the people legitimately beta testing. But it's more than that: Betas aren't betas anymore and they haven't been for a very long time, in this age of "Open Betas" and "Early Access" you have to adjust your game plan dramatically because talking points aren't going to stop people's perceptions from being damaged if your method of developing doesn't gel with the massive amount of people who are going to be jumping on your game early.

No, you don't need to put out a finish product- However- you do need to have a mostly stable and functioning product, which was NOT the case in the older age of betas. This is why we've seen things like hot fixes, and why they're working on a new system that doesn't require wipes. The devs here have proven they're pretty good at wising up about things and rapidly adapting to things that go against their original plans, so I'd appreciate if the community would stop smacking its head against faulty concepts while the devs are busy trying to do everything they can to ensure their game is widely successful. It isn't productive for either party.

 

Or, you could plan to do some real testing and put up a big long post explaining exactly what testers should expect during beta.

I do agree it is good they are looking for alternatives, but just because every game out there seems to be doing fake beta tests as marketing gimmicks, they don't all have to be that way.

 

Are you paying attention to anything?

Don't you realize the entire reason I made my post, the entire reason this THREAD EXISTS, is because that doesn't work.

Once again, reality is not ideal. Game development, like many other pursuits, is like this: You learn to roll with the punches if you want to succeed.

 

To be quite frank, I've felt for a long time that developers have been getting away with making half-baked attempts at completing a game then releasing it precisely as a marketing gimmick. Though I'll be the first to admit that part of it is effective, none of us are copacetic with having to deal with constant wipes, the problem is compounded by the fact that this type of game demands extensive time investment in order to achieve its final objectives. I think it would behoove Chucklefish to spend a lot of time determining what will and will not be wipe worthy and do everything possible to avoid it. I felt it was a very good choice in the last update where they gave the player the option of keeping a current character OR starting a new one to get all of the changes applied.

 

So what happens when you make a large change to a core game mechanic, but let people keep their characters and worlds? My fear would be that your test base is now going to be scattered all across the spectrum of builds and that reported bugs no longer apply to the current build with new characters/universe (or would be caused by the discrepancy itself). That digging through these false bugs would be more time consuming during your development than just dealing with the complaints over character wipes.

Again, I like that they are looking for other ways now. I just hope it does not make the development harder on them in the long run.

 

Everything they need to do now is going to benefit them in the long run.

Consider that this game is going to receive potentially game changing patches after launch. It's been confirmed that we will receive updates well after the game goes final. Designing a system that dynamically updates things in such a way that anything you haven't touched yet receives said update status, and items or statistics can be retroactively altered, is going to free up what they can and can't get away with in the long run. One of the most important things you can take away from any amount of development experience is that you ALWAYS make sure that when you're developing NOW doesn't get in the way of what you might want to add LATER, meaning time taken to ensure flexibility in the long run is usually development time well spent. Anyone here who's followed game development any amount of real time can probably reference some example of a game development team struggling due to a failure to do this, the effects of this are pretty noticeable.

Also, something else to consider is that the more adaptable the underlying system is to changes, the much more flexible the game is going to be to mod. People can and will eventually develop massive mods that greatly alter how world generation works.

 

I don't care about the wipes and all but I don't know why they kept the characters if they are gonna wipe everything else that matters with my character so now I have my character with some items and gear for end tier but whats the point when my beautiful home and items i didnt know was gonna be wiped is gone. I fine with wipes but they should have deleted the characters too.