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[Something Evil]

Got a lava pit? You can open a trapdoor and send stuff in. Kill it dead. Or just trap it in a plain old pit and throw a grenade in. Minecraft doesn't have a lot of specialized gadgets to activate with redstone, any machines you build are all your own design from a small selection of components, mostly various flavors of opening/closing doors.

Worst thing is, currently Starbound can do that, but exclusively with mods.
The base game lacks anything that can be used as a trapdoor with any reasonable efficiency, and also lacks any way to move fluid. Functionalities both added by mods iirc.

Terraria had at least basic world-affecting wire-work in from very early on, and I think I agree that the distinct lack of player-made/placed traps is another part of the deliberate attempts on the part of CF to (for some ungodly reason) make the game have MMO levels of grind. That's the heart of it: options are good. Limiting player creativity to make it conform to the dev's vision of the game might fly when you're doing an artsy linear story, but sure as hell not when it's suppose to be an open-world sandbox. 

That's the worst thing; it's not even "MMO" levels of grind, it's EVERQUEST levels of grind. In most current MMOs, at least you have some level of involvement via a damage ability rotation, various utility/defensive abilities, and even the palleteswaps du jour can spring nasty surprises via hitherto-unseen ability types, like Big Attacks, CC, damage reflection, stealth/camouflage, using the entire skillset and loadout of PvP-optimized players for uncommon, high-risk high-reward encounters etc.
Starbound consists mostly of jumping around like a spaz to avoid blood vomit or bullets while retaliating with ranged weapons, or CCing something to death with the ministun of a mele attack. If push comes to shove you can just wall the thing into a cage made of dirt and plink away at it with your 3dmg gun.

The other problem with the grind is that it doesn't DO anything. I will admit that I don't know too much about Terraria's current balance state, but back when I last played, you got better armor to survive more hits, not to not get OHK'd (possible exception being just after the transition to hardmode). It was why you could legitimately skip tiers sometimes.
Getting appropriate-tier armor in Starbound merely allows you to survive.
Worst still, simple currency grinding in Terraria was legitimately lucrative; get enough money and buy a minishark, and nothing will pose a problem for quite some time. Starbound has you grind for money to not die, via its armor upgrades, and if you do manage to find a skyship, don't expect the gun to be worth a damn two or three tiers higher.

[Shadowlord]

As well making a "Only talk about the game" topic utterly failed.

Mind you it failed because people trolled it to death... but whatever. (To admit, I thought no one would flat out use it because the game is too early in development and that the complaints on the toxic environment stopping meaningful discussion were fallacious... not troll it and thus prove that maybe they have a point and that it is unfixable because even making a "no dev talk" topic is only met with open hostility....)

Ehh if things don't improve I'll make another in a month's time.

So you think that the discussion here isn't stifling gameplay discussion, but that Starbound is "too early in development," and according to other people apparently progressing at a snail's pace, and because of it nobody is discussing gameplay.

So therefore you made a thread specifically to discuss something which wasn't being discussed, and which you didn't think would be discussed even in a dedicated thread? And you were proved right - nobody discussed gameplay in it! Congratulations!

But now you plan to re-create the same thread in a month, dedicated to a nonexistant discussion, after proving that said thread wouldn't be used?

Why?

(Of course people are discussing gameplay in this thread - the normal thread - now . The whole second thread thing seems pointless to me.)

As for gameplay, I only played for... 3 hours total. Reasons include "There was going to be a wipe" and "This is ridiculously grindy" and "I keep getting killed and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it" and "I could be playing anything fun instead!"

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Actually, I played for about 34 hours but most of that time was before the wipes and I think the starbound guys may have kneecapped themselves by releasing it in such an unfinished state, and people like me now just don't have the enthusiasm because all those save files where everything was interesting and fresh is gone but even now NO, NO I'M NOT GOING TO ENTER A RANT.
Anyway, all the features that make me want to play it aren't in yet, with all those combat systems and farming for money would be a... Yhea, I think we've all talked about this to death.

But those music mods are amazing, I love sitting there on a self built ragtag stage, single player, happily listening to my character playing those thousands of songs on those dozens of instruments, for hours at a time.

[Neonivek]

So you think that the discussion here isn't stifling gameplay discussion, but that Starbound is "too early in development," and according to other people apparently progressing at a snail's pace, and because of it nobody is discussing gameplay.

So therefore you made a thread specifically to discuss something which wasn't being discussed, and which you didn't think would be discussed even in a dedicated thread? And you were proved right - nobody discussed gameplay in it! Congratulations!

But now you plan to re-create the same thread in a month, dedicated to a nonexistant discussion, after proving that said thread wouldn't be used?

Why?

On the contrary counter to my expectations the thread was being used. People attempted a discussion. It is just that the hostility and toxic environment from this thread migrated to the other and shut it down.

So now I don't have expectations. I am going to do it again so that the people who wanted to have discussions can have them. Hopefully without interference.

[Retropunch]

So you think that the discussion here isn't stifling gameplay discussion, but that Starbound is "too early in development," and according to other people apparently progressing at a snail's pace, and because of it nobody is discussing gameplay.

So therefore you made a thread specifically to discuss something which wasn't being discussed, and which you didn't think would be discussed even in a dedicated thread? And you were proved right - nobody discussed gameplay in it! Congratulations!

But now you plan to re-create the same thread in a month, dedicated to a nonexistant discussion, after proving that said thread wouldn't be used?

Why?

On the contrary counter to my expectations the thread was being used. People attempted a discussion. It is just that the hostility and toxic environment from this thread migrated to the other and shut it down.

So now I don't have expectations. I am going to do it again so that the people who wanted to have discussions can have them. Hopefully without interference.

Please don't. If people want to talk about Starbound they can do it here. Granted, there's a lot of stuff about game development, but that's because it's a game in development! If you look at most other game threads on this forum that are still in early-ish development they're mainly about the development itself, as that's the thing that's most interesting to people on this forum.

Even so, there's been plenty of gameplay chatter as well on this thread so what you're trying to prove simply isn't the case.

[Greenbane]

I played Starbound in multiplayer with a friend for over 40 hours, but quit due to wipes season and vowed to return once the game had matured enough. That was over six months ago, and unfortunately, it seems there hasn't been all that much evolution. I always got the impression Chucklefish was too susceptible to the raging masses, leading them to release Starbound early, change certain mechanics according to the community's fickle whim, integrate mods officially (sigh) and ultimately have little clue where to go from there. By now, it seems they have no idea what they're doing: they raised like four million dollars yet development appears to have slowed down to a crawl and frankly it doesn't look like they have a plan to stick to when the community gets angry.

I really want to see Starbound developed to its full potential, and I hope Chucklefish has the backbone to see development through the flames of the community without burning up.

And without said masses leading the devs to hate their own game. That's certain death for any project.

[Something Evil]

To be fair, integrating mod functionality into the base client is something a lot of companies do, and many modders are happy to have them do so.
WoW's greatest UI feature improvements came from integrating things like Quest Helper, Weakauras, Holly, Oqueue etc. The same can be said about Minecraft.

Also, the mechanics they changed were moronic; they still are, but less so. The 10 tier system doesn't work well, and the centile one certainly didn't. The boss fights, the UFO in particular, were derp and broken; thankfully now they're merely dull and they have stated they're trying to work on making enemies more engaging. Eventually. If they can get around to it. Maybe.

I do have to admit that they seem to have no clue whatsoever what to focus on, starting on some project or other, then switching tasks the moment something else shiny catches their attention.

Lastly, they don't have a plan to stick to when the community gets angry because their plan seems to be making the community angry in the first place. Hopefully they'll mature out of it. Or not, and go the way of Wild Games Studios.

[Greenbane]

Lastly, they don't have a plan to stick to when the community gets angry because their plan seems to be making the community angry in the first place.

I don't think it's quite so blunt. My impression is they budged whenever there was significant rage and did stuff to try and placate the masses, only to realize they were pleasing a crowd to anger another. By now they must be frustrated the community's angry no matter what they do. It shows. But they missed the point: listening to the community is important, but only to a certain extent. You need to have a plan, stick to it despite people raging and make your game on your terms, knowing you can't please everyone. It's something I said six months ago when I was active in their forums, before the toxicity drove me away.

It seems to me they caved too easily when they should've stayed the course, letting the amorphous community lead them nowhere. They allowed their objective to be swayed from making their game to pleasing the crowds, and that's a dead end I hope they somehow manage to pull back from.

[Neonivek]

The reason why Chucklefish "caved in" was pretty much because they sold it on the basis of people being able to play it early.

[Something Evil]

There is, admittedly, some truth to that. It constantly happens to Blizzard as well in regards to WoW, but after a while they've learned to separate legitimate grievances from the constant droning of countless manchildren than will complain, for instance, that they won't benefit from a catch-up mechanism they don't need.

Aside from the infernal mess of the horsehead AI, which they brought upon themselves, I can't recall having seen much in the realm of "they changed it, now it sucks", though. Could you give more specific examples as to what you mean?

And, as I've said, they don't have a plan. They don't seem to set goals for themselves, in the realm of "This feature needs to be done by X date, give or take.", and then they go do it, finish it, push it into a release build, then work on something else. Everyone seems to be doing their own thing, which wouldn't be entirely bad if it weren't an ideal way to get bogged down by feature creep.

[Neonivek]

Right now I think Chucklefish is trying to please an unpleasable fanbase.

Mostly because their game is WAAAAY too early in alpha for the meaty updates, but everyone wants the meaty updates.

I mean... they are still working on basic features like how the game recognizes dungeons.

[Something Evil]

Saying that the game is too early in alpha for large content updates is absurd. Hell, to go back to my previous examples, WoW didn't have instanced PvP when it launched, but they then added it; conversely, Minecraft continued adding on palpable updates, some not even mechanical in nature, at all stages in development.
It's never too early or too late to add updates if you can make them in the first place. Hell, the large content updates for Terraria, Path of Exile, TF2 etc cause a renewal of interest and shift units or cement and increase player retention.

The problem is that they're not seeming to be intent on pushing systems out the door, and are just working on whatever they want to at the time.

Another issue is them falling into the same problem that Duke Nukem had to some extent. After all the hype and all the waiting no single thing they release will appease the playerbase.
Conversely, though, if they DO start releasing consistent updates with feature-complete systems, people will stop whining. They've tried doing that with the nightly builds to show players that they're not blowing all their revenue on cocaine and Thai prostitutes, but the problem with that is the other extreme: the changes are so minute from build to build as to be unnoticeable.

[Neonivek]

Saying that the game is too early in alpha for large content updates is absurd. Hell, to go back to my previous examples, WoW didn't have instanced PvP when it launched, but they then added it;

Starbound isn't "launched" it basically has a macaroni and glue alpha set up so people can do things. It isn't a full game released too early and thus needs to be patched up like WoW was.

As well Minecraft... well Minecraft remained static almost forever for well over a year with the updates being rather minimal... and even when they gave a large update, it changed very little.

Terraria had its basic systems set up when it was released.

Starbound is still working on base content... such as "How world generation works" and "basic combat". To admit I WISH Terraria reworked their combat... heck I wish Starbound reworked their weapon combat (Honestly no combat moves or anything like that? just wild swinging... uuugh)

Side Note: I know I cannot blame Starbound for following a trend... but is ANYONE tired of the wild swing combat games do?

[Mattk50]

What alternative to wild swing combat in a 2d platformer type game like starbound is even possible?

[Greenbane]

The reason why Chucklefish "caved in" was pretty much because they sold it on the basis of people being able to play it early.

Actually, that was the first cave-in.

They released Starbound ahead of time, in whatever form, because the community was raging for something playable. Even though the devs were under no obligation to comply at the time.