Final call for Dev's to change something!

[eggyboffer]

After many discussions on global chat, and the fact that this game is Stagnant now, I'm making one final call out before i cancel my memberships and quit playing myself, Following a lot of veterans that have done the same recently. We are tired of it and i'm hoping one final call might change something.

For the last month if not longer, We have been complaining to GM's about the state of the game, And more importantly, The state of the drop rate. This game is largely focused on cryonite, and as we have just had a global booster for 150% cryonite you would think this would be amazing. But as with the previous global booster at Halloween, It seemed that the booster meant that the drop rate was decreased. It was bad before, With 2 of us grinding on R5 we were lucky if we hit 30k an hour. During this event, the best day for grinding I've had is 50k a hour (thats 10 MU drops in an hour!). So lets look at the figures there. Using a TC ship for example, its 3 million to build one ship. So at 50k an hour thats 60 hours to build one ship. At 3 hours play time a day, thats 20 days to build one ship. Playing 3 or 4 times a week thats more than a month to build a single ship. Thats not acceptable? And you wonder why most people get to TC and quit.

Secondly, People have been making suggestions, Comments, Support tickets for ages about things that would make the game better, and the Devs don't care. They don't respond to us, They ignore us, They literally couldnt care less about this game. If you guys really cared then show us? Post a road map for what you plan on doing with the game for the year? Post a update a month on the progress your making towards updates? RESPOND to us when we post suggestions in forums and in game? People are quitting because you guys just don't care.

Thirdly, Advertising and driving new players into the game. Your players actually go the effort of making a trailer for you, and you don't even use it for advertising. You post it on a Facebook page that 90% of the people who like that page are players who already play. Go advertise your game around, make a banner... Drive in new players. The more players you drive in the more money you make. And the more money you make, the more devs you can hire to increase the amount of updates you can launch... Instead of leaving us waiting years for any form of update..

I know im fighting a lost cause, and that you guys really don't care about this game, But im hoping i get at least some form of Dev response to this post and you do something to change the way you see this game and treat the players that pay your wages.

 

[Vesperion]

I can only repeat myself about my experience with the Droprates over the years of PG from day 1 until now.

At the start of the game the Droprate was roughly every 2nd/3rd Unit droped a cryo

Somewhere in the mids of Mizar time to Sols Release Split introduced the "penalty for hunting lower units with higher tech". The droprate was still roughly 2nd/3rd (~66%) unit drops a cryo BUT the higher your level in compare to the units level the harder the penalty that reduced the worth of an cryo by x% (if i remember it correctly hunting with a full gold Mizar in gemini the penalty was already 75% so that you basicly gained Vega cryos from them).

Split removed this pretty quick cus obviously a lot of players complained cus it destroyed the purpose of farming in lower systems for cryos.

At some point (i think with the releas of Sol) Split then reintroduced the penalty system but with the reduced dropchance the higher your tech is in compare to the planet you hunt on. Here is where i noticed a major change in the droprates cus from nearly 1 day to another the rate did drop immensly so that every 6th/7th unit droped an Cryo instead (~33%) and since that it stayed more or less that way without any more changes that i have noticed.

I must admit however that i didn´t make any "farming experiments" during global Cryo times with a ship of the system/tech level that should create the optimal droprates though cus i don´t have much time atm for those at hand and normaly i do these farming tests for a couple of hours (4 hours straight to get a more valuable result) and not with Harv farming cus it´s to dull for me .

 

[Fission]

Secondly, People have been making suggestions, Comments, Support tickets for ages about things that would make the game better, and the Devs don't care. They don't respond to us, They ignore us, They literally couldnt care less about this game. If you guys really cared then show us? Post a road map for what you plan on doing with the game for the year? Post a update a month on the progress your making towards updates? RESPOND to us when we post suggestions in forums and in game? People are quitting because you guys just don't care.

Thirdly, Advertising and driving new players into the game. Your players actually go the effort of making a trailer for you, and you don't even use it for advertising. You post it on a Facebook page that 90% of the people who like that page are players who already play. Go advertise your game around, make a banner... Drive in new players. The more players you drive in the more money you make. And the more money you make, the more devs you can hire to increase the amount of updates you can launch... Instead of leaving us waiting years for any form of update..

I know im fighting a lost cause, and that you guys really don't care about this game, But im hoping i get at least some form of Dev response to this post and you do something to change the way you see this game and treat the players that pay your wages.

1. There is a Road Map and a section where devs post their progress towards updates. It is called Dev Shack, and you can see they post stuff regularly. We love to see your suggestions and ideas, and some of them, are already in the game, but taking ALL the ideas is not that easy, even some of them are concepts totally different from each other. Also, when a idea is placed, it can take time till it can be placed into the road map or discussed about how to introduce and design it.

2. The advertising of the game was already discussed for long time... Its not that easy, even less for such small team. When companies create little banners or trailers, there is a lot of steps behind regarding to merchandising, users analisis, posibilities, design, funds, etc.

3. Devs care about the game, as us, the GM team, do aswell, but there are some real limitations when it comes to deploying updates and creating all the new content. If they didnt care, they wouldn't be creating updates and content for the game.

 

[eggyboffer]

Secondly, People have been making suggestions, Comments, Support tickets for ages about things that would make the game better, and the Devs don't care. They don't respond to us, They ignore us, They literally couldnt care less about this game. If you guys really cared then show us? Post a road map for what you plan on doing with the game for the year? Post a update a month on the progress your making towards updates? RESPOND to us when we post suggestions in forums and in game? People are quitting because you guys just don't care.

Thirdly, Advertising and driving new players into the game. Your players actually go the effort of making a trailer for you, and you don't even use it for advertising. You post it on a Facebook page that 90% of the people who like that page are players who already play. Go advertise your game around, make a banner... Drive in new players. The more players you drive in the more money you make. And the more money you make, the more devs you can hire to increase the amount of updates you can launch... Instead of leaving us waiting years for any form of update..

I know im fighting a lost cause, and that you guys really don't care about this game, But im hoping i get at least some form of Dev response to this post and you do something to change the way you see this game and treat the players that pay your wages.

1. There is a Road Map and a section where devs post their progress towards updates. It is called Dev Shack, and you can see they post stuff regularly. We love to see your suggestions and ideas, and some of them, are already in the game, but taking ALL the ideas is not that easy, even some of them are concepts totally different from each other. Also, when a idea is placed, it can take time till it can be placed into the road map or discussed about how to introduce and design it.

2. The advertising of the game was already discussed for long time... Its not that easy, even less for such small team. When companies create little banners or trailers, there is a lot of steps behind regarding to merchandising, users analisis, posibilities, design, funds, etc.

3. Devs care about the game, as us, the GM team, do aswell, but there are some real limitations when it comes to deploying updates and creating all the new content. If they didnt care, they wouldn't be creating updates and content for the game.

Ok so firstly, 1 post a year (See attached) Does not qualify as a "road map" Nor does it qualify as progress towards updates. Progress towards updates would be every month saying what they are going to work on that month. This is what we mean when we say we dont know whats going on with the game. The last post was made 3 months ago now, and were eagerly awaiting that, But weve heard no updates on details or anything? Just that post and left for us to guess when its coming out? People wont wait around for a update that could take 6 years to come out? Weve had that before.

Secondly, Advertising is a major part of a game! How does a game grow if they aren't driving in new players? Do you not realise that more players = More people potentially buying gold = More income for the company = More money to put into development and wages = ability to hire more developers to the team = More players staying and joining the game because updates are more frequent? That's like opening a store and just hoping everyone gonna know about it... Your never gonna succeed.

Thirdly, Limitations such as the small team? Read above, That's solved that issue. More money coming in = ability to hire more developers to work on the game. Secondly, The devs do nothing to show they care? The only people who speak to the players about our issues are GM's, would be amazing for devs to come out and speak to us about our issues with the game. Again, happy players = More people staying in the game = More money constantly coming in. I know of 6 players this month that quit because of the developers ignoring the players. Whats going to happen when more paying players decide they are sick of it and quit? Oh well its ok, we have new players coming in that are starting to paaaa.. oh wait sorry we dont even attempt to grow the game... we have no new players

 

[Vesperion]

1. There is a Road Map and a section where devs post their progress towards updates. It is called Dev Shack, and you can see they post stuff regularly. We love to see your suggestions and ideas, and some of them, are already in the game, but taking ALL the ideas is not that easy, even some of them are concepts totally different from each other. Also, when a idea is placed, it can take time till it can be placed into the road map or discussed about how to introduce and design it.[...]

I hardly agree with saying that the Dev Shack is an actuall Roadmap per/se cus it doesn´t show the bigger screen of the plans that Split has for the game and more just the "current part they are working on". Atm it´s pretty obvious that the Devs did TC part 1 then part 2 and now work on part 3 BUT the focus is a bit to much on just a single part imo and doesn´t really show that the Devs work on any other aspects of the game with this limited view.

Next to that if they have something to show it´s mostly stuff that is about to come and then Highway is active for a while again to "show the great things that are yet to come" but again nothing that shows anything that maybe is worked on next by eventually.

A Roadmap imo shows something a bit more then just 1 part at a time or a part that is pretty obvious what will come next (increase of Level Cap, more Mission, new Tech, new planet etc.) cus this should be a common thing and not really part of an Roadmap. The Coregame is clear that we will get sronger if an bigger Update is on it´s way so it doesn´t needs to be mentioned that much.

If we take the CQ rework this is what is/was worth to be mentioned a bit more cus CQ is more or less an side activity that should keep the PvPlers active cus of the reward but since the last infos about what is planed the radio went silent again after all the excitement that Highway started (last thing that Highway posted about the CQ rework was on 17th of October and after that in November he showed the 2 new items that will come with part 3).

Nowadays communication AND transperancy is worth way more for the community then "getting surprised" a small glimps here, a little respond there actually showing that the Devs read and think about suggestions/feedback/ideas that might have an bigger impact on the game would show such a thing but most of the time we only see the GMs/CMs jump into the line while the Devs seem to hide behind you as cover. I mean alone the gigantic Post of Rajaa should be worth that an Dev responds to it if some ideas might be possible to implement but.... nothing in that sort so it feels like the Devs don´t care about the Community and what they suggest.

In terms of the Roadmap i have seen some that actually fit with the theme of the game and even for PG it would be possible to make an creative Roadmap where we have a Starsystem with planets that represents a certain part of the dev road (Core game (Story, Missions, Tech), PvP (CQ), Events, etc.) and when we select them we would zoom in and then see what is currently in work/planed and how the status of that part is.

Split might be a small Team but then again Split tries to develop 2 games at the same time with this small team.

 

[eggyboffer]

1. There is a Road Map and a section where devs post their progress towards updates. It is called Dev Shack, and you can see they post stuff regularly. We love to see your suggestions and ideas, and some of them, are already in the game, but taking ALL the ideas is not that easy, even some of them are concepts totally different from each other. Also, when a idea is placed, it can take time till it can be placed into the road map or discussed about how to introduce and design it.[...]

I hardly agree with saying that the Dev Shack is an actuall Roadmap per/se cus it doesn´t show the bigger screen of the plans that Split has for the game and more just the "current part they are working on". Atm it´s pretty obvious that the Devs did TC part 1 then part 2 and now work on part 3 BUT the focus is a bit to much on just a single part imo and doesn´t really show that the Devs work on any other aspects of the game with this limited view.

Next to that if they have something to show it´s mostly stuff that is about to come and then Highway is active for a while again to "show the great things that are yet to come" but again nothing that shows anything that maybe is worked on next by eventually.

A Roadmap imo shows something a bit more then just 1 part at a time or a part that is pretty obvious what will come next (increase of Level Cap, more Mission, new Tech, new planet etc.) cus this should be a common thing and not really part of an Roadmap. The Coregame is clear that we will get sronger if an bigger Update is on it´s way so it doesn´t needs to be mentioned that much.

If we take the CQ rework this is what is/was worth to be mentioned a bit more cus CQ is more or less an side activity that should keep the PvPlers active cus of the reward but since the last infos about what is planed the radio went silent again after all the excitement that Highway started (last thing that Highway posted about the CQ rework was on 17th of October and after that in November he showed the 2 new items that will come with part 3).

Nowadays communication AND transperancy is worth way more for the community then "getting surprised" a small glimps here, a little respond there actually showing that the Devs read and think about suggestions/feedback/ideas that might have an bigger impact on the game would show such a thing but most of the time we only see the GMs/CMs jump into the line while the Devs seem to hide behind you as cover. I mean alone the gigantic Post of Rajaa should be worth that an Dev responds to it if some ideas might be possible to implement but.... nothing in that sort so it feels like the Devs don´t care about the Community and what they suggest.

In terms of the Roadmap i have seen some that actually fit with the theme of the game and even for PG it would be possible to make an creative Roadmap where we have a Starsystem with planets that represents a certain part of the dev road (Core game (Story, Missions, Tech), PvP (CQ), Events, etc.) and when we select them we would zoom in and then see what is currently in work/planed and how the status of that part is.

Split might be a small Team but then again Split tries to develop 2 games at the same time with this small team.

I honestly dont think ive got anything else to add to that, you summed everything im trying to say out and hit the nail on the head. Were not wanting anything major, were just wanting what you would expect of a dev team. Once a month a dev to come out and say were working on this to be released by this date, or this month weve worked on this and worked further to implement this!

If the dev team is that small they shouldnt take on more than one game, that just stretches their team to far and you get things like this happening where communitys get bored of being ignored and quit. Now a days most people literally log into pirate galaxy to speak to their friends. Most people just chat on discord now and dont even log in because they are so bored of the game.

Thats not how a game should be!

 

[Rajaa]

Hey , you are not right about a thing! You said we don't login and chat on discord. It is true to some point , but hey , i login to be afk in orbit!

 

[0ptimus Prime]

I have to agree that the devs have largely left this game to rot. Most changes they’ve made in recent years have been more successful in driving players away from the game than enticing them to stay.

The horrible decryption system for example, which is nothing but an artificial bottleneck put in place by the devs in an attempt to slow player progress so that players will not complete TC content as fast.

The fact that all drops are now personal, INCLUDING IN SQUAD is abysmal. Don’t get me wrong, the concept was fine for players outside of squad, but why should I have to shoot everything other players in my squad shoot in order to see drops from my own squad??

That doesn’t help anyone. That kills motivation to help people find tech, especially golds in lower systems because everything often dies in one or two shots so unless we gimp ourselves and go with weaker tech and make ourselves less efficient so that we can all hit everything at least once, there’s no point in trying to shoot together or grind together in lower systems.

The armor changes, especially to parsec class ships was another change I heard about that drove many players away from the game, many players I personally knew and flew with. Granted they apparently later buffed the armor back up a little bit but the damage was already done. It’s depressing to click around my buddies list and look at all the clans full of 0 warscore week after week.

If devs want to start bringing players back to this game they need to not only start producing more and better content for it, including putting some effort into seasonal events and not bringing out the exact same stale piddle year after year, but also REVERT some of these asinine mechanics like the decryption and personal drops in squad systems they put into place.

This post is in no way meant to bash the devs, but rather to provide constructive criticism about what makes, not only myself, but many other players, not want to play this game. I want to have fun playing this game. And I want the friends I’ve made here to come back and enjoy it too, like the good old days. But that won’t happen with the devs current path. I’m hoping they will see that we don’t like the way the game is going and make changes to try to bring their players, and customers, back to PG.

 

[Vesperion]

The fact that all drops are now personal, INCLUDING IN SQUAD is abysmal. Don’t get me wrong, the concept was fine for players outside of squad, but why should I have to shoot everything other players in my squad shoot in order to see drops from my own squad??

That doesn’t help anyone. That kills motivation to help people find tech, especially golds in lower systems because everything often dies in one or two shots so unless we gimp ourselves and go with weaker tech and make ourselves less efficient so that we can all hit everything at least once, there’s no point in trying to shoot together or grind together in lower systems.

I only can and will quote a part from my post about the BP and Squad Overhaul:
https://forum.pirategalaxy.com/viewtopic.php?f=253&t=42607#p198120

[...]And last but not least i would add an option for the squadleader if the squad has Passive Share or Active Share. Passive Share is basicly if the player is not shooting the same unit cus he is either afk or shoots on another place that he can see the drops from others and also recieves Cryonite (kinde like the old Squad mechanic).

Active Share on the other hand is the current Squad and drop system where you only can see/recieve the drop if you hit the unit at least once what can be pretty tedious if you wanna help a player to get the top tech of the Planet/System.
[...]

Like i said already the Ideas are right in front of the devs on a silver tablet they just need to grab those and turn they into something.

Rajaa´s Megapost:
https://forum.pirategalaxy.com/viewtopic.php?f=253&t=42589#p198036
(Cus he links here to my Daily/Weekly/Mission post i will not add the link here)

Collection Overhaul:
https://forum.pirategalaxy.com/viewtopic.php?f=253&t=42999#p200520

Change in the Jump mechanic if a planet is out of JS range:
https://forum.pirategalaxy.com/viewtopic.php?f=253&t=42439

And this are just 5 Links from the whole feedback area where i think that some have great ideas in them that can be used and "sold" as QoL updates that are done step by step if an major update would be to risky. I mean even Dino Storm has for some weird reason Daily Missions and PG never recieved them so far.

 

[0ptimus Prime]

Yes, Vesperion. I completely agree with you. And you have suggested many good QoL changes that would improve this game tremendously. I only wish that the devs would listen.

 

[eggyboffer]

Loving all the responses and of course, they are all great suggestions, but as i expected, in 2 days of this post being up, weve had 1 response from a GM. The devs have just passed by it and wont respond. What a great development team!

 

[Rajaa]

Loving all the responses and of course, they are all great suggestions, but as i expected, in 2 days of this post being up, weve had 1 response from a GM. The devs have just passed by it and wont respond. What a great development team!

It's not pretty much problem we get an update per month how progress with next update is processing.
The thing that would be smart to do is that devs should discuss potential ideas with players.
For example:
| 1. Vesperion: Daily/Weekly/Monthly missions.. Mechanics.. Benefits..
2. Dev team: We think that would be good because.. We think that wouldn't fit at current mechanics/not fit because.. |
We never asked to update all at once or change course of one update, just some discussion about ideas we got to. There are a lot smart and experienced players among community who had good ideas, altough we never knew if any of their ideas got considered. That's why, even if we are not testers or something for new updates, we could share our ideas and put in discussion for new updates.
About advertising part, sadly i will have to agree, we as players cannot manage to advertise much on reddit, other apps.. Games base on advertisements, if there is no enough of that, no matter how many updates come out in game, if there are not enough players to play them. I hope that'll be pretty much possible in future after Tau Ceti is finished and PvP overhaul Part 2 is rebalanced, then Lagrange singularity certainly should get in plans. All we can do is to give our opinions, and share that we care for this game, and will continue to, after all, this game has incredible and unique name unlike other ones and of course potential.

 

[Fission]

Loving all the responses and of course, they are all great suggestions, but as i expected, in 2 days of this post being up, weve had 1 response from a GM. The devs have just passed by it and wont respond. What a great development team!

Hello,

Devs are in holidays as they said in the Support webpage, so any respone in forum, or tickets might delay. Its usual that game companies have their holidays during christmas times.

 

[Vesperion]

Loving all the responses and of course, they are all great suggestions, but as i expected, in 2 days of this post being up, weve had 1 response from a GM. The devs have just passed by it and wont respond. What a great development team!

Hello,

Devs are in holidays as they said in the Support webpage, so any respone in forum, or tickets might delay. Its usual that game companies have their holidays during christmas times.

Hm... how do i put this and not risking a ban here lol.

Fission Support is one thing while Communication is another thing. We all know that holidays are around and it will give lesser feedback for Support requests + we only see this info if we actually need anything from the support and i would say that the forum has nothing to do with support requests.

The thing is we had months of feedback/ideas/suggestions/etc. where definetly no holidays where involved at all. Reading between the lines what (we) the players (aka consumers) wanna see is key here:

We never asked to update all at once or change course of one update, just some discussion about ideas we got to. There are a lot smart and experienced players among community who had good ideas, altough we never knew if any of their ideas got considered. That's why, even if we are not testers or something for new updates, we could share our ideas and put in discussion for new updates.

Anyhows i don´t know if Beta tests are still a thing cus the last time i Beta tested anything for PG was during the Sirius development when it was in the worst possible state that had been released (the vets know the terrible Siri mechanics of old time until the devs changed it after enough negative feedback lol) BUT i bet it would give enough Pilots out there willing to use their time to actually test some new mechanics that are not progressive related (Story) and more gameplay related (Changes in the current known mechanics) and to say it in the words of Sayyadin when he still was a Dev during the Siri Testing phase:
"You as players know the game better then we do"

In it´s core this is true for any (Online)game cus mostly the devs never really come to play their game and experience it like we do cus there needs to be constand updates, fixings, balancings, etc. and mostly we as players notice those changes way more then the Devs actually might think.

All we ask for atm is an more open and transperent way of the Devs to actually "talk" with us rather then always hiding in the shadows to jump out for a few days after *insert timespan here* just to vanish then again for *insert another timespan here*.

 

[eggyboffer]

Loving all the responses and of course, they are all great suggestions, but as i expected, in 2 days of this post being up, weve had 1 response from a GM. The devs have just passed by it and wont respond. What a great development team!

Hello,

Devs are in holidays as they said in the Support webpage, so any respone in forum, or tickets might delay. Its usual that game companies have their holidays during christmas times.

It takes 10 minutes to scroll the forums and type out some replys. Everyone's entitled to holidays of course, but the whole dev team to go off for nearly a month? That's not acceptable. Imaging a store saying you know what guys, noone's coming into work for a month, sorry but were gonna take a month holiday.. There would be hell up. Splitscreen is a company and works around their revenue, they should treat us as customers and ensure that our experience is good.

 

[eggyboffer]

Devs have been back 2 days and still no reply...

 

[eggyboffer]

Loving all the responses and of course, they are all great suggestions, but as i expected, in 2 days of this post being up, weve had 1 response from a GM. The devs have just passed by it and wont respond. What a great development team!

Hello,

Devs are in holidays as they said in the Support webpage, so any respone in forum, or tickets might delay. Its usual that game companies have their holidays during christmas times.

Devs are out of holiday correct? Well wheres their response?

 

[Fra_592]

Devs are out of holiday correct? Well wheres their response?

On dev shack, as usual

 

[eggyboffer]

As I said, they dont read feedback nor do they respond or even care

 

[Rajaa]

As I said, they dont read feedback nor do they respond or even care

It is not about care or not mate. It's about possibilities. I am sure we will get some discussion about ideas after Tau Ceti system. New system is easier to balance because you need to balance just items and missions mostly, as well as visuals. Unlike tournaments and other content, it is not hard to make, but it needs rebalance in resources, because gravitons and cryonite cannot be reward for all events. We need some new fresh material in those, to be able to trade it in some market for some resources ( some ship parts, some skin, some special ship, items..). That is why new system goes first. After Tau Ceti comes PvP overhaul 2 (1st happened in 2017) then player controlled invasions (this one should be interesting considering etc. you can raid other clan property as name says).
That is why, i should tell you should calm down a little and wait, it is not time to discuss following dev shack yet. As a fellow programmer, i can say it is clearly not easy to work on 2 games at once, update by update, we will get to that PvP points, this is really epic game and i will never forget it during my life, i wish it to live long more years and to be successful.