The State of Starcrapflict

Game Discussion Miscellaneous
1

So with the brand new release of destroyers, most everyone is very hyped, and more players are coming back to Star Conflict.  Lots of money is also being made by the devs with all the destroyers being built, I am sure.  And that is awesome!  If the devs come up with a good design that everyone likes, they deserve a reward.  But having what is arguably a good addition to star conflict will not fix the dirt hole Star Conflict is entrenched in.  

 

What is wrong with Star Conflict?  Well for starters, the Russian bias is extremely awful.  I have started playing again for about 2 weeks in a row, and have gotten back into competitive game modes such as dreadnoughts, leagues, and tourneys.  All these game modes are extremely fun, when not facing Russian based teams.  “Well you just need to get gud”.  Here is the thing, how are you supposed to “Get gud” when you get disconnected at least once every round?  How are you supposed to combat against players who have almost half a second longer to react than you do?  How do you fly a ship that doesn’t go where you tell it to?  The answer is you can’t.  And I’m not saying that servers need to be overhauled so that ping to Russia is just as good as Russian players get (I know that won’t happen, even though i’m sure improvements could be made without too much expenditure). EVERY SINGLE TIME my squad has qued up for a competitive game mode, WITH SERVER REGION SET TO EU or US, we always face Russian squads on Russian servers.  Even during US prime time in regular pvp, if there is a member of SRS, Nova, DESU, or any other notorious Russian corp we will fight on Russian server regardless of the fact that the rest of the people are not Russian players.  The Russian players also seem to know we struggle on their servers because they all decide to bring interceptors with high speed and turn rate, making them near impossible to hit.

 

This Russian bias is not even the full scope of the problem with this game either.  The devs of Star Conflict have some serious management issues.  I’m not just saying this out of the blue either.  I’m basing all this off of experiences from players and testers.  Even some of the non RU testers, no offence, seem to be yes-men or have only their personal interests in mind when they provide feedback.  That is why some classes and ships are significantly better than others in PVP (posi LRFS, gauss sparks, ect)

 

What interaction is there between the devs and the members of their game?  I can’t remember the last time I even saw the devs in the game playing their game.  Another note to add is, it seems like the developers are solely after money at this point, introducing destroyers to get money and not put any effort into fixing some of the serious problems.  It seems like they are only relying on new flashy content being pushed out with little care, and relying on the visual appeal that their designers have striven hard to work on.

 

Also, there is little to no advertisement for SC here in the US, and I’m sure most of the EU is the same.  There are plenty of players on the US and EU side of the game that have made videos promoting SC, stream it, and even organize events for the game.  Why isn’t this being utilized to bring in the vast market of gamers into SC?

 

The non Russian forum (this one) is also pretty much dead.  I haven’t seen any real activity, or variety in members, in awhile.  Why is this?  A good bit of it is due to the fact that most players have just given up on trying to communicate with the devs.  Even if the devs were to take the opinion of its non Russian player base seriously (or even slightly at all), the feedback given has to be relayed to the by the middlemen (forum mods or whatever).  The forum moderators, in the past, have been pretty subpar into dealing with this forum’s members.  

 

I’m just telling it how I see it with this post.  This post probably won’t have any effect, but its worth trying one last time at least right?  

 

Note: I probably won’t be actively following this post as I have more important college things to do.  Hopefully the message will make it to the devs. 

2

Only thing i have for Russian bias is dread times, lately i have been getting US servers vs rus league teams. I have been the only US player in a game and gotten a US server. IDK if the devs added something to their code, (arctic.makeOP()) but i’m happy with it. 

 

Testers are yes men imo. If you look at past patches, it’s been obvious. Lately the patches have been good though. 

 

The devs are pretty interactive. doomb0t is the most interactive (my fav dev) but he needs to play more SC. I offered to teach him mah mad skillz but he is never on at the right times. (speaking of which doomb0t, you need to play dreads with us soon)

 

Advertising sucks, it’s undeniable. Rus advertising sucks too from what i hear.

 

This forum is dead because idiotic trolls swarm most threads. Call me a conspiracy theorist but you don’t notice the trolls as much on NASA and OWL threads…

 

not too late to try again, honestly, the devs seem like good ppl, though often times blind. They definitely don’t play the game enough, i think that part of their job requirement should be to play one hour of t3, t4, and t5 each week. You can’t develop a game well when you hardly play it. 

3

After my experiences today, I am sad to say that I fully agree with you TESLA. It is very hard not to be negative right now. My only consolation is seeing that there were 1269 people in Star Conflict on Steam tonight, which is more than double what there were before Christmas. It’s just a shame that very soon we will see that sink again, since the devs have no idea how to make the most of this. They are too focussed on getting money in the short term from “neodium bundles”, since it is almost impossible to find neodium in Open Space (I searched for two whole hours, with a spatial scanner and did not find a single plate or ore…). They have no long term ambitions for the game, as is visible from the lack of investment into dreadnoughts and the more social aspects of the game, such as squadding in PVP (easy solution of taking them out instead of fixing the matchmaker) and general corp life. As i have said before, there are what, maybe four non Russian corps in the game right now? Do you really find this satisfactory, developers?

 

And as TESLA said, this forum is pretty much dead. Rarely any new faces, interesting discussions, useful debates on the game or having a laugh. Bug reports are handled late, and not effectively (sorry skula, but it’s the truth), complaints are too easily dismissed, good suggestions rarely receive an answer, or just a “No” comment (it’s a joke, but it is also serious) and are rarely followed up on. There is a live stream on the new content, and guess what? We are told about it by someone who went to the russian forums for info. And the stream itsself is in Russian, no subtitles, and not even the slightest effort to translate important points. Why does your lead public relation figure as it seems, Lezort, not speak English? Where is Aliskosan? (oh yeah, she’s on Crossout now…)

 

And the rest of your points are all valid also TESLA and are things I have been noticing as well.

 

I feel cheated, disregarded and simply disgusted with the way this is going.

 

Have fun with your new content, people who have been online every day over the holidays or who have money to throw at the devs (please use heavy coins, not notes). Because I will definitely not be giving any money for this

4

 

 

thought you stopped playing

5

thought you stopped playing

I said until i can find good ping. I found it :) 

6

I have to disagree for the most part.

 

I do agree that there does seem to be a RU bias but that might just be a bias on my part, I accept that it is a predominantly RU game and living EU region I don’t have too many problems. I could just as easily complain about ping when I pvp in US prime time.

 

As for interaction and short term gains that where I have to start disagreeing. Its easy to see how hard it is to interact with aforementioned trolls when the complaints roll in over some bad games that s1 got. ‘This is op and that’s broken’, they get an answer that’s not what they wanted and don’t ever accept it or at the very least stop trolling. Prime example of this is the complaints about destroyerballs before they were even released and now its ‘I don’t have one instantly’ on day one of release. Pay or grind, those have always been the options in the game, went out to grind and turns out that u will find what u need for them and likely long before T4/5 comes along.

 

The big counter complaint here has always been that I don’t have the time to do random task, fair enough. That’s something that perhaps needs tweaking, like some neodium in high rank kit salvage or something, but even then its a resource with such limited use that balancing that would be difficult, an entirely different discussion. Or alternatively spend the GS, never used to be able to win it in the game and nobody should have everything in game really easily. Ms Frost missions gave me exactly enough for 1 destroyer in R8, now in a position of saving for ships that do not exist yet.

 

Anyhow I got sidetracked new year has always been the traditional time for the game to release new content and I don’t want to be cynical about the motivation behind it now. Perhaps now is the time for advertising that I do agree with however this comes only after the recent rank changes to stop the ‘pros’ farming in the levelling path. Also if/when dreads get fixed to prevent the current bs. One of the new sectors was taken by two corps fighting it out as SIX didn’t show. I can see how it would be hard to justify resources for bringing new players into an environment like that.

 

Ill tell it how I see it. People are not on this forum because of the negativity and trolls, it certainly kept me away for a while. It has become fashionable to make some declaration of an intent to leave or whatever ppl are whining about these days. I’m glad of the high activity in the game recently and hope it continues. The game has always changed even after beta. There are three player focused issues for thought above and that is the reason for many an unpopular change. Actually move on, find the next thing to abuse, or come up with a counter. Those are the only legitimate options available, complaining achieves nothing.

 

Ill finish by saying i am not a suck up, its not perfect… at all. I want better things for teams to do at higher levels. I want little annoying bugs to be resolved. But these are the things that id rather the ‘vets’ of the game focused on rather than all the rest. Perhaps that community would be taken more seriously if every other post was not absolute drivel.

 

Or if not more seriously then at least make the job of reading walls a lot easier.

7

@TESL4

I have to say I agree on almost everything you’re saying, with the exception for your complaint about having to play on Russian servers all the time. I always check the server I’m on whenever I get a match, and to be honest, what you said about Russian servers can just as well be said about US servers. I don’t even remember the last time I had a match with or against, say, ArcTic on a Euro server, it’s always USA, USA, and some of our guys get 350-450 ping there (or I for one rarely get below 200-250 myself), too, and that goes for both skirmish and SCL. Though I do recall an SCL match vs you and the other OWL’s, albeit Europeans, on a Euro server earlier today.

 

Then again we’ve even had matches vs Russian corps in SCL on American servers, with not a single American on either of the teams, which we found odd at best. For such a small community, Americans, I have to say, are treated really well. You guys even have a third of all sectors at your disposal, even though you make - I’m just throwing numbers here - 10% of the total population?

 

 

But other than that, yeah, I agree. Communication fails, we never know what’s being worked on (other than Destroyers, which had been heavily spinned for prior to their release), we never know what’s being fixed and what it’s going to look like once it’s ‘fixed’, which often results in it being just as broken - I even made a thread a while back, in the hopes of improving it somewhat, but to little avail.

 

On the bright side, Doomb0t has been actively participating on the forum (I mean, sure, it’s mostly PR and jive talk, and we’re all aware of that, but even if 5% of the discussions with him end up on the devs’ table, that’s something), new content is being released, and as much as I think Destroyers, as they stand today, are going to be a huge problem for this game in the future, at least we can see the devs have been doing something.

 

 

Another point that I would very much like emphasised is that devs are nubs. Strangely, I’m not saying that to offend them, but this game is extremely complex and if you’ve played less than ~two/three thousand matches, chances are you’re not even aware of at least a portion of the intricacies perplexing the gameplay. And then we get some really strange or sometimes plainly stupid buffs or nerfs, or new weapons, or modules (like e.g. the most recent ECM buff, bots in SQ, ability to equip T3 items in T2, Flux Phaser, early Mass Driver, Scattergun, A1MA, matchmaker and so on, and so on). If they refuse to listen to our feedback on yet-to-be-released stuff on the pretense of ‘don’t knock it until you try it’, getting in-game experience is a must for them. Though I think any dev of any game should play their own game. Deving a game you don’t even bother to play has a negative impact on the game, and it shows.

 

ArcTic actually has it right, Doomb0t. What you should do is get a couple more devs and have a couple of sparrings with vets. Not to be hunted down, but to go on their TS and actually try to play the game the way it’s played on an advanced level, in an actual wing. I shouldn’t have any problems arranging that for you with WPK and I’m sure other corps would be eager to help you on this, too. Or just ask Deft or DESU guys, if you think you’d feel more comfortable amongs your kin - I’d recommend ESB but for the most part they’re already gone.

 

 

Sorry for another wall of text, but apparently I have too much free time…

8

I signed up to the forums last night, Had i been impatient, I would have uninstalled this game and never looked back.

 

I signed up to the forums due to some bug issues i have found with the game but was completely locked from posting or replying to anything. as i said, had i been impatient, this game would be 1 less player yet again, im sure this has happened countless times

 

 

Newb downloads Star conflict> newb plays star conflict> new finds start conflict bug> newb tries to join forums and report or get help with bug> newb is locked from forums> newb says screw this game> newb moves on never to see star conflict again…

 

you guys need to fix this

 

 

BTW this game is mostly fantastic but this is a huge issue for the devs and the players. I almost uninstalled it and removed it from steam last night. because of this