Wiping, To Keep You Fresh

Yes, wipes are somewhat annoying, yes it superficially sucks to loose your progress, but I've got a small inkling as to how challenging software development can be. Far be it from me to add to that challenge by applying arbitrary expectations to preserve my game progress for a product that is in a clear beta at this point. At the same time, the game is fun to play, to the point where having to start over makes me wax nostalgic towards the early days of Minecraft, when Survival was called indef. Starting over helps to hone, familiarize yourself with the experience, rather than making the early game something to get past to enjoy.

My only (minor) gripe would be the need to manually delete my locally stored files in order to delete a character and truly start over, but at most it's a minor annoyance.

 

I moved my pilot goggles to my new character and started fresh. Immediately got nailed by a meteor!

 

Most games I have ever looked at on steam's early access are about as complete as this or less so.

 

I got 1 question tho, they talked about 1 last whipe was this the last whipe or the last whipe Will be a complete whipe?

//Math

 

Complete wipe

 

Thanks for clearing that up was one a 2 way road to build or not to build.

//Math

 

We're not paying to test. We paid as a pre-order no different than if you'd walk into Game stop and pre-order Madden. We just happen to get a beta test key and invite to be a part of development as a pre-order bonus.

 

That's a sign of good luck, kind of like a bird pooping on your head, except this kills you

 

Why are you spelling "wipe" with an h?

 

Just to ensure this doesn't start some sort of snide flame war, I agree with the premise of what you're saying.

My issue comes down to the way developers are treating games these days. In past years, particularly before mid-2005, releasing a game as a purchasable product while it was still severely limited in its playability would have been unthinkable. Companies thought, and rightfully so, that releasing a game in a half finished state for a profit would cost them more business than it would game them. As most people who are fairly unfamiliar with gaming development (which I am not) would come to expect, there would necessarily have to be hiccups along the way to bring about the game.

Take a game like DotA 2 for example. It was probably one of the longest betas I have ever participated in, but at no point was my player account 'wiped' simply because it would have been easier for Valve to continue development with clean slates as opposed to allowing players to keep levels/items/etc. This is an example of a beta that was executed with the minimal impact possible and has allowed DotA 2 to again supersede its competition despite the long beta.

The same needs to be true of game development today, especially when the money is fronted for the product. There is no more sure-fire way to lose a player base than assuming that their customers will be satisfied with whatever schedule they decide to update on with no input. In my opinion, wipes should always be avoided if possible (as mentioned before particularly because of the nature of the game). I thought it was brilliant they introduced changes that required a new character but didn't delete the old one. Those types of changes are the ones I feel should be done as often as possible.

 

Given that I go back to the late 80s when it comes to video games (my first console system was an Atari 2600) and I've beta tested games professionally, I can see what you're getting at. Prior to, say, the advent of MMOs, the idea of releasing a public beta of a game was kinda unthinkable. I'm not sure where the trend started, but eventually someone realized that there's a lot of people out there who would jump on a chance to get something new before it was technically released, and thus began the idea of a public beta.

There's a difference between games of the early 90s, which were scrupulously tested in-house and released only when complete, recieving one or two patches to fix glaring issues after the fact and possibly an expansion, and games of today, that are provided to the public in an incomplete beta state allowing for player feedback and changes to hopefully produce a better game and save money on an in-house testing team, and expanded with many small expansions labelled DLC. That difference being that, at its best, the modern game is intended to be more flexible and able to change greatly. At its worst, it's a blatant cashgrab.

I feel the DotA 2 beta is a bad example. Anything earned on your acount has no bearing upon the game as a whole. Whenever you start a match in DotA, all you have is your character, your starting money, and your skills - everything else must be earned in the course of the match. About the only thing you keep from match to match that directly affects gameplay is your courier. There were no wipes of that information because there was no need for wipes - if, say, a gamebreaking bug occurred, a person's level, leaderboard status, earned riot points etc. didn't matter.

That's significantly different from Starbound, where everything earned in game is kept from session to session, and has a direct bearing on the game. Let me give you a somewhat extreme example to illustrate the point; If someone finds a legendary gun that inflicts 10,000 damage a shot, has a fire rate of 10, and consumes only 2 energy a shot due to a bug in item generation, and that gun is never wiped, They're probably going to continue to use it. And as you might expect, it's going to trivialize content until they stop using it. That's going to skew whatever feedback they give to the devs. They're probably going to complain about the game being too easy, when in reality they don't know how easy or hard it is because they don't experience the game's actual difficulty. As this game, unlike DotA, is not always-online, the devs have no way to know that this guy's using a bugged weapon unless he tells them. If they assume good faith, and take him seriously, and adjust the game based on his recommendations, it's going to make things more difficult, potentially unplayably so, for everyone else.

Now, admittedly, this is a somewhat extreme example - it's one guy, with a very obviously bugged weapon, giving feedback that would probably be seen as patently ridiculous to everyone else. He'd probably be shouted down. But these things can happen - a friend of mine, who I play Starbound with, found a weapon in T2 that was scaled for T6. He then proceeded to have basically no trouble with the rest of the game up until that point, then was shocked by the difficulty once his ubersword was no longer one-shotting things. Items like these need to be periodically wiped once the bugs that cause them are squashed, otherwise, players continue to use them and give feedback based on their use of them. And that leads to garbage-in, garbage-out situations.

I'll agree with you that wipes should only be used as-necessary, and only strictly as-necessary. Despite the amount of complaints you've been seeing, Chucklefish has been very good about not wiping without genuine need thus far, and using partial wipes instead of full ones. Thus far, there has only been one full wipe (which accompanied the combat overhaul, to get rid of any legacy levelled weapons and armor), and one universe wipe (which occurred with the latest update - it did not delete characters and inventories, only game worlds.) No other updates have included a wipe - Chucklefish has merely suggested that you create a new character, as otherwise you may miss out on newly-added content and recipes and features.

My advice to CF, is that once an update is ready, and a wipe might be involved, give players 24 hours of notice or something, and explain just what will be wiped or not, and more importantly why. For whatever crazy reason, a lot fo people who lost stuff with the latest update assume that the wipe served no purpose, and was just the result of Chucklefish being malicious. This is not the case, and both BRAWW and others have been very good about explaining the reasons, but if they'd been explained prior to the fact instead of afterward, we might have avoided a lot of grief.

Something to consider.

 

I don't mind the wipes as much, but a having an explanation would be lovely. It would A allow us to just get over it quickly, and B understand WHY its happening. I get the world data thing still what urked me was I had 12 sets of seeds I stored in chests to finally organize my inventory before the wipe. Ironically thats the ONLY time I spent organizing my crap. Part of me find its funny.. Part of me wishes there was a Heads up so I could have been a bit more prepared.

 

I believe wipes are important to keep unbalanced content at bay, and i do believe wipes are necessary especially going from beta to release, during beta however, i think they should be avoided whenever possible.
If older saves are no longer compatible with the new updated client, thats an acceptable wipe, but i don't believe balance changes should wipe saves until beta turns into release.

People can choose not to allow pre-balance items on their servers, and can start new characters if they wish to experience the game as it should be at that time.
I consider wipes for these reasons "Optional" because people can choose to wipe their own saves, so i believe wipes should be avoided whenever possible, the final wipe will remove the unbalanced items, so that should be the only "Required" wipe.

 

Yes, you should always wipe.

Wait, what?