Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mictlantecuhtli]

It's a shame the official forums are just for sucking up, maybe we'd have an acceptable replacement area for complaints about a retail video game.

[Vorthon]

I'm all for complaints being aired, but when they start being the same basic thing repeated over and over, page after page, it gets irksome. :I

[Mictlantecuhtli]

That's the nature of a forum.

There was 500 pages of discussion about the unfinished game and the fun people were having until it got dull, likely due to progress coming to a halt.

[SirAaronIII]

Nope, you still have to delete them manually, unless I'm mistaken.

Darn, that is pretty lame along with lack of key remapping. Too bad, I guess.

I mean there must be a reason why the Novakids are not already in the game.

It's been a very long time. What is the stated reason Novakids weren't in the first few releases, anyway? Were they a stretch goal or something? Personally my guess is that it'd jack up the nice, even character creation race choices. It's all symmetric until they throw in a seventh race.

Also Tiy made a Reddit post about why they chose not to announce anything about Bartwe's departure:

It's very unusual to make staff changes public, largely because it's a very personal matter for the people involved and as such we decided to allow Bartwe to announce it in his own time. Which he did.

They also purportedly signed on another 2 programmers and 2 artists unannounced. While I have no idea if not announcing staff changes is a common business thing, I think that when you're a (seemingly) small indie company, telling people one of your programmers left and you got another two to help pick up the slack sounds like a good idea to me.

(Disclaimer: I have next to no business sense and have barely been following Starbound since at least 2 years ago please don't shoot me)

[Neonivek]

It was a stretch goal.

It is why I think the Novakids are not actually written into the plot at all.

[Sergarr]

It was a stretch goal.

It is why I think the Novakids are not actually written into the plot at all.

Aaaand that's why stretch goals are stupid: they instantly break the game-world immersion. Like DLCs, actually.

[Something Evil]

It was a stretch goal.

It is why I think the Novakids are not actually written into the plot at all.

Aaaand that's why stretch goals are stupid: they instantly break the game-world immersion. Like DLCs, actually.

Not really; the stretch goals for Total Annihilation were integrated fairly smoothly, iirc; and those were mostly mechanical, gameplay stretch goals at that, so they'd be even more difficult to integrate neatly than just art assets and narrative.

Also Tiy made a Reddit post about why they chose not to announce anything about Bartwe's departure:

It's very unusual to make staff changes public, largely because it's a very personal matter for the people involved and as such we decided to allow Bartwe to announce it in his own time. Which he did.

They also purportedly signed on another 2 programmers and 2 artists unannounced. While I have no idea if not announcing staff changes is a common business thing, I think that when you're a (seemingly) small indie company, telling people one of your programmers left and you got another two to help pick up the slack sounds like a good idea to me.

(Disclaimer: I have next to no business sense and have barely been following Starbound since at least 2 years ago please don't shoot me)

It is, actually, standard industry practice to announce team changes extremely soon after they're made. For instance, when Blizz axed the dude that made Warlocks interesting and (arguabily too) powerful for running off at the mouth, the announcement was made immediately. Likewise, when the Halo composer got the axe, that was also made public extremely quickly.

Chucklefish just seem to like having control of information to an alarming degree.

[Darkmere]

It was a stretch goal.

It is why I think the Novakids are not actually written into the plot at all.

Aaaand that's why stretch goals are stupid: they instantly break the game-world immersion. Like DLCs, actually.

I'm all for harsh criticism and I know they're taking their time about it... but I don't think it's fair to judge the finished product (if we ever get one) against the alpha (which is most certainly all we have). I don't think even 1/3 of the lore is even in the game yet, even for the established races.

[Solifuge]

It's tough to figure out how to be a company. With indie teams, you often don't have polished business/management types around to create codes of conduct, and keep your staff in line. Small teams police themselves and their own behavior... and when your staff/moderators are young and immature (and basically Trolls), they're going to riff off of each other and have a good old time at the expense of their users... and go on blithely unaware of the professional implications of creating a hostile relationship with their only source of financial support.

This basically sums up my thoughts:

If some AAA company had pulled even half of this they'd be piled with scorn (can you imagine the backlash if Bioware openly mocked and banned people over the Mass Effect ending drama? and that was loads worse than this). Yet... indie somehow gets a free pass or something.

But yeah, there's nothing new in the game and I think we've long since run out of the hype over promises. People kinda deserve to know what they're getting into if they come to this thread when considering the game, and since their forums clearly aren't the place for such criticism, people deserve to vent here as long as it's respectful.

I'd add that the way they handle their community shows an attitude of Entitlement; they don't realize that their success was built pretty much entirely on the shoulders of Terraria and Minecraft, and on the trust of their users in the promises they made. Frankly, I don't think they deserve the success they've had so far based on their own merits and work. And if they antagonize those users directly, and fail to make significant progress on their promises... it's not hard to see what will happen to them long-term. They're going to have to figure out things like Professionalism as they go... or maybe they won't, who knows. In any case, it's hard for me to feel good about funding them right now. They're not comporting themselves in a way I agree with, even if I haven't been one of the people directly antagonized by them.

For comparison, here's a bit about Valve's community policy, to illustrate what a professional company behaves like.

[coolio678]

It was a stretch goal.

It is why I think the Novakids are not actually written into the plot at all.

What ever happened to the animated intros, speaking of lore. I remember seeing a clip of the human intro, but I have yet to have one played when I start a new character. I guess they could just be saving the intros for when quests and stories are a little more fleshed out.

[Something Evil]

It's kind of debatable whether or not the success they've had is earned if you separate their disastrous PR from their actual developed content.

On the one hand, they've taken a lot of things from Terraria and improved upon them, the ease of construction being a primary factor. The monster part mashup could also lead to some very interesting things should they decide to play around with multiple monster sizes, and multi component setups. Why are most things quadrupeds, with the rare hexapod? Why not chain together torsos, have multiple heads or arms etc. Give them specific animations. Link abilities to monster types in some way, because, seriously, the scrawny half meter mouse-thing using Body Slam and taking out half your health with appropriate-tier armor is at the very least incongruous.

On the other, they seem to have also forgotten so much, again from Terraria. The UI functionality is as low, if not lower due to several new features, than Terraria's when it launched, and they now have the benefit of hindsight. I'm merely going to mention the random desync that even happens in singleplayer, since I don't know how easy something like that is to fix, nor what could be causing it. The actual combat would feel less janky if that were resolved as well.

They do seem to legitimately want to make an entertaining game, considering all the toys they're working on, and they are still reportedly working on it, unlike vaporware like Towns, or software that's of laughably poor quality on release and examples of which we can all list from the top of our heads.
The problem is what exactly they are working on; there doesn't seem to be a deadline for some feature that doesn't get delayed or tossed out entirely; without actually being there it's hard to say whether they actually know what they're doing but are overly optimistic on their workloads, or they're disorganized, or inept, or are losing a focus due to feature creep, all of which are worrying prospects.

[Kaitol]

Having personally read through the forums Horsehead thread myself, I think I can speak with a fairly informed opinion and say that a few specific people seem to be intent on blowing things out of proportion. On both sides. Nor have I seen any hint of mods banning all dissenting opinions, as there is plenty of dissent all around on nearly every page, even people directly criticizing the developers and calling them trolls, and the mods seem to only have deleted posts with large images, or that were too aggressive.

Furthermore, all of this vitriol aimed at the devs seems to be because of one image of a horse blowing a raspberry, which nobody even knows if it was intended to poke fun at players who didn't like the horse, and one sentance: "Also we have decided because of the positive feedback about the glitch AI that we should make every ship AI a different animal, all with boobs." And the devs putting on horsemasks. Given the lack of knowledge as to why they did those things, saying it was intended as mocking is conjecture.

I think some people are getting worked up over a simple bit of humor they took waaaaay too seriously. And at least one person has a personal axe to grind.

Just putting this out there, but I'm fairly certain Chucklefish is not made entirely out of self-centered jerks with god-complexes. They're people, who are certainly flawed, as everyone is, and certainly have made and will make mistakes, as everyone does. But I'm also certain they're reasonably decent people as well.

[Darkmere]

I'm not sure if I'm part of the ones conflating things or not, but in case:

I've never said they were bad people... just that they needed better PR and to actually put out meaningful content updates. I have been accused of "just looking for something to pick apart" or "finding some problem with everything" by others (guess where? hint: it wasn't here), and the only way I can think of that people GET that from what I said is "anything bad about CF is the the devil trolling! no u!"

[Flying Dice]

Nobody who's got any sense of proportion cares about the horsehead. The issue is that the folks at CF apparently don't understand how to deal with PR issues like this, given that it's been massively mishandled. Regardless of whether or not they initially intended to troll the userbase, that's what they turned it in to, which is both unprofessional and rather disappointingly juvenile.

Soli got it in one: this is not how a good, user-friendly company behaves, and it's not healthy for the users or the company if people apologize and cover for them. Yeah, certain individuals were deliberately pushing them hard, but the fact that they reacted the way they did (by turning it into a spectacle and causing it to affect a broader group) shows more of the same. It's all well and good to act like a fool (not really, but we'll call it that) when you're representing yourself and not beholden to anyone, but that's most certainly not the case here.

[Arbinire]

Nobody who's got any sense of proportion cares about the horsehead. The issue is that the folks at CF apparently don't understand how to deal with PR issues like this, given that it's been massively mishandled. Regardless of whether or not they initially intended to troll the userbase, that's what they turned it in to, which is both unprofessional and rather disappointingly juvenile.

Soli got it in one: this is not how a good, user-friendly company behaves, and it's not healthy for the users or the company if people apologize and cover for them. Yeah, certain individuals were deliberately pushing them hard, but the fact that they reacted the way they did (by turning it into a spectacle and causing it to affect a broader group) shows more of the same. It's all well and good to act like a fool (not really, but we'll call it that) when you're representing yourself and not beholden to anyone, but that's most certainly not the case here.

This sums it up.  And it wouldn't have reached this point with this one instance if this were the first case of it happening, but it isn't.