Met a guy at school who plays PA....here's what he thinks about the game

fourms are where the angry people go to complain or where the most die hard fan is who wants every bit of info they can get and enjoys interacting with others who are part of a certain thing.

Aside from naval, that's pretty much the position I'm in.

I think it is a mistake to look at forum rumbling and think there is some systemic discontent with the game. Obviously there is some selection bias here. People who care less are less likely to want to participate on the forums.

Uber is doing almost everything right with PA in my opinion. That doesn't stop me from criticizing where I believe it appropriate, or offering suggestions for how to improve the game.

The thing everyone seems to be forgetting is that Uber has made some serious tracks with PA in terms of how incredibly rapidly this went from idea to fully functional engine and playable game. The Kickstarter was funded in September of 2012, and the game was made completely from scratch.

We literally had a fully playable game only a year after production began, from scratch. I'm not sure that's totally unprecedented, but it is pretty damn incredible.

It should be no surprise to anyone that we have a paucity of units and features after such a rapid development. Things like adding units and adding features and such is a relatively straightforward, ongoing process. And I must say this engine is a pleasure to work with from a modding perspective, which means this engine probably has incredible longevity.

Everything is going pretty much according to plan, as far as I can tell, even exceeding expectations. But people are (understandably) impatient. I share that desire to have a content-rich, complete, polished game, but let's be reasonable here, Uber's progress so far has been nothing short of remarkable.

+1

We did Quake 2 (our school PCs couldn't run Quake 3 due to the lack of a software renderer and no OpenGL support) and Total Annihilation. Oh glorious times.

I appreciate this testament to unbiased positive opinion for PA.

Unfortunately, there does infact seem to be systematic discontent for uber and PA from gamers who find it more convenient to have a pet hate, than find out about actual reality. And the sad thing is that the misconception is spreading due to these same people.

You just don't see it anymore on the forums because well, why would they check the forums now?

Take this for example from only a few days ago. It reached frontpage and then got the wrong kind of publicity.
http://imgur.com/gallery/B5JCM

a lot of the lab machines at my universitie's computing science department are i7 linux machines, so they could actually run PA.

Maybe I'll suggest it for the end of semester lan party.

maybe get them to use one of the big servers to host some monster games...

I almost maxed out my credit card doing it. And that was with my employee discount. At least I didnt get into credit card debt like I did when I bought my gaming laptop a while ago.

Yeah, its university. Everyone brings a laptop, but all the lab computers have 8gigs of RAM and i7s in them. So one could probably get away with playing PA on them.(Everyone already plays League and Starcraft2 on them.)

So nice to hear somthing good +1's all round....

wish we were allowed to play games at school, maybe I woudn't have screwed it up so badly...

Then again maybe not

Well, I stopped playing PA during the Alpha as the game was changing so much under my feet (at about the time that the mex 'disappeared' IIRC). I came back to it just after release and was blown away by how much better the game was, how polished it had become etc. I wouldn't say it's finished, but I've definitely gotten my money's worth.

Also, 1600W PSU for a PC? I am having the ph34r.

That happened to me about a month into alpha, but I played a game every now and then as it went through beta/gamma.

Also, yeah man. Ultimate powerrrr!!!!

Gonna be brutally honest, man. You wasted your money. There is almost nothing that computer cannot do (aside from dividing by zero), but unless you have some type of major video editing or model rendering job, you don't need nearly that much power. I could probably spend half the total worth and still get the same gameplay you do, you just get way more frames than I would, which only expands beyond the scope of human vision. Waste.

It's an absolute godlike computer though, extremely good specs, so I hope you actually put that beast to work. All that potential.. yet nothing to do. Money is basically always more important put elsewhere. Realistically, I'd probably spend that getting two or three pcs so I can host a lan with friends.
Also, there is no such thing as a disposable income. That's called a waste of resources, but I digress.

Still sort of wish I had one.

I'm torn on this one. This is exactly the sort of thing you mean when you say ignorance is bliss. It truly is. I would love to play the game without knowledge about the offline debacle, asteroids, unit cannon, naval, etc. It's just not viable. Talk about accepting something without knowing it could be way better.

I really envy that. And then I definitely do not. I totally want to enjoy it the same way he does without a care in the world, but it's this very thing that I hate. If every gamer was like that, Uber wouldn't feel any need to push more than the game's release 1.0 state. Other companies would release half-baked games that could be way better, but they don't need to care because their playerbase is ok with garbage in a shiny box. I hate that vision, and it's caused by those who are ok with things being bad, unfinished, or worthless.

Good on him for finding enjoyment in the game when I cannot. I do hope there's not many of him, but wish him even more hours of fun. Kinda similar to how kids see everything before they grow up, you know? I know that feeling. It's a nice feeling, but it won't help you get anything productive done. xD

I'm not saying Uber's made garbage in a box with PA, that's simply not true. It's the idea of accepting something without caring that the item doesn't have to be bad. Presuming there's some type of "good" to compare it to, anyway. Given enough people who think like that, like they say, "This is why we can't have nice things".

PA SERVER.

Do you really need that much power for a PA server? Pretty sure Uber's servers run games on a single core (single thread?), and they're halfass debatable decent, so maybe three or four would be alright. 8 core 16 thread? Come on.

Also, Dual GTX 980s won't do anything for a server. At all. Don't need the superpower PSU to power them either.

Everything else is pretty gravy, though, won't lie.

actually by with the current state of the code, you need tons more.

you need them if that's your only computer and you'll be playing on it as well as hosting the server on it. which is also my case. and PA can most definitely use that much graphic horsepower. Sadly still no support for dual GPU.

as for the cores. a server uses up to six of them but with more work it'll probably use more. so don't you worry, it's a hell of a good bet.

Actually no, because the server won't care about the usage of your graphics card at all. It does not use a graphics card in the first place. Like all cloud servers it runs on do not even have one.

how about a little proofread there?

I read it multiple times and my point still is: You don't need dual gpu's to play PA. So you also don't need dual gpu's to play PA with the server on your computer, as the server doesn't care anyway. Dual CPU would be a better choice.

@cola_colin I'm still quite certain you missed this bit.