What are your thoughts on Progress of the game thus far.

What are players thoughts on the progress of the game so far. As it stands now we are almost 6 months into alpha. How do you feel about the changes made in game since the start, what are changes you wish the devs would implement, and what are your thoughts for the future of the game.

In the last month whenever the people in my company get on to play the servers are empty or nearly so. This is almost always on prime playing times like 7-10 pm est on Friday or sat nights. To me this is a great concern as it means there are not enough people on to test any mechanics in the game. Many of the people in my company who were considering getting in on beta are backing off as they feel the direction of this game is taking it nowhere. We all had high hopes for game when alpha was released as the devs were constantly working on smoothing the game play and making it a better all round game. However, recently it feels like they are more concerned with the visuals and game mechanics that make it harder to get players on the servers, than in making the game more appealing for groups to get on and play. While we understand this is alpha and game mechanics will need to be tested creating conditions where servers are empty does not allow them to be tested. Our greatest fear with this current heading is that when the kickstarter funds have been exhausted the development of the game will cease.

Like or hate it this my companies opinion on the game as it stand at this time.

Hi there!

Thank you for sharing your concerns.

Allow me to try and give you a few details in an effort to restore your faith in the project. :)

While servers are somewhat empty often they are also active consistently every weekend.

This is enough of a test activity currently needed for the alpha as long as you guys help us out with bug reports, etc. (Thank you to everyone who tests!). Just 8 hours ago we were able to test the new server optimizations introduced in update 83 and it looks to be quite a massive amount of extra performance the optimizations have been able to squeeze out of the servers (several hundred percent).

In regards to your fear of development stopping; not going to happen. We are nowhere near that point. What you currently see is us exploiting the luxury we have being a crowdfunded project and thus not forced to rush something out to the masses on early access. We feel this is the best possible use of the backer money (even though that means the small alpha test base is only big enough to test and not to play 24/7) as a failed early access release will hurt the game seriously in the long run and thus making it harder for us to achieve the vision our backers originally bought into. If your fear/prediction was right you would have seen us release on Steam ages ago in an effort to get more of an income to survive.

- Trusty

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Originally Posted by TrustyJam

Hi there!

In regards to your fear of development stopping; not going to happen. We are nowhere near that point. .... If your fear/prediction was right you would have seen us release on Steam ages ago in an effort to get more of an income to survive.

- Trusty

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• We've seen the regular updates/patches on steam (we also realise some are for testing) and that's a very good thing that people see that there are things that being worked on.

• A release to soon would surely be a problem, on the other hand people might lose interest (so yes it's a good thing to release in modules -> like the skirmish)
  Speaking of interest : do you give acces to the game to streamers ? (multiple languages) to give gamers a sneak preview ?

• From your post we can assume there is not yet a difficulty in the financial department ? For most kickstarters programs goals are set for the amount of money that get raised (this is a bit different).

I've seen the number of 'pledgers' slowly going up, so we can only applaud that.

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Originally Posted by Redleader

• We've seen the regular updates/patches on steam (we also realise some are for testing) and that's a very good thing that people see that there are things that being worked on.

• A release to soon would surely be a problem, on the other hand people might lose interest (so yes it's a good thing to release in modules -> like the skirmish)
  Speaking of interest : do you give acces to the game to streamers ? (multiple languages) to give gamers a sneak preview ?

• From your post we can assume there is not yet a difficulty in the financial department ? For most kickstarters programs goals are set for the amount of money that get raised (this is a bit different).

I've seen the number of 'pledgers' slowly going up, so we can only applaud that.

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We have given out a few keys to youtubers/streamers, yes - not a whole lot though and only when contacted by them. We have yet to ramp up our marketing (this will start around the early access launch).

Most Kickstarted games are either far smaller in scope/attention to detail, etc. etc. far further in development, have a hidden investor or somehow able to develop cheaper/quicker than we've been able to (that would require the majority of their devs being located outside the western world). In reality, I strongly suspect most of them is not gathering anywhere near the money required to finish their games (even though Kickstarter states this). The funds kickstarts them, yes, but it doesn't get them across the finish line with a released game (not talking early access here). Support after the Kickstarter campaign ends (like continued crowdfunding campaigns such as ours, early access releases, etc) does.

In short, everyone is looking to realize their funding target. To set an actual real "this is what we need to completely finish our game" funding target would most often mean millions and not hundreds of thousands of dollars thus making funding pretty much impossible (unless you're one of the very lucky/truly great projects). :)

- Trusty

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Originally Posted by TrustyJam

To set an actual real "this is what we need to completely finish our game" funding target would most often mean millions and not hundreds of thousands of dollars thus making funding pretty much impossible (unless you're one of the very lucky/truly great projects). :)

- Trusty

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If we look at 'Star Citizen' what we could easily call the greatest crowdfunding succes, imho : they where very ambitious (lots of achievement goals) and they started out with an engine that wasn't the best choice for their 'persistent universe'. (they'll get there eventually, the only strange thing is they keep releasing ships)

So if I get this right, you see what resources you get and what you can make of it ?

Money isn't the primary factor for a game to be succesfull, it sure helps.
If if game is made with people who love what they do, you can tell :)