The Future of PA

I'm 100% for an expansion pack for exactly these reasons. Question is: can the community get over it's extreme, kickstarter-led sense of entitlement to rally behind such a pack? I foresee at least a third of the community throwing a fit if any new features are marketed as a separate purchase. I don't think Uber should listen to them, as we're now in the territory of needing a marketing hail mary to save this game.

ehh, I am just throwing stuff at the wall here people

I think the dev should really do a "free expansion" to get reevaluated reviews

A great idea, but my cynical assessment of Uber at this moment would be no way in hell they have the funds to do that. This game isn't exactly doing blockbuster sales anymore and the HR kickstarter was a total failure. I guess they could have banked a lot from the initial alpha sale boom, but somehow I suspect most of those funds are gone now. But I could be wrong about that, I don't think anyone really knows.

Paid expansion LOL.

It must be tough being a game development company. All you need is a few bad ideas and the whole company goes bust. I really hope they find a way to make enough money out of this game to continue development.

I think scathis mentioned at some point that the kickstarter money ran out during the beta phase. Since then they've been living on sales. As that money source dries up development dries up, unless they can figure out another source of funding.

Usually its not the developer that pays for the development of the game, but the publisher. That is why the publisher gets to decide what gets done, and also why they are so conservative.

A paid expansion? A good idea imo, though a noted they need to cross off the final ks commitments (or at least clearly address their status) before hand. Also the expansion needs to add something to pa outside the scope of the ks to be acceptable imo.

An additional race and a traditional sp campaign spring to mind as good candidates for this...

I feel they can get over it if Uber doesn't release the expansion before at least one or two more rounds of further content patches and if the expansion adds considerable improvements.
So I think a good schedule from today on would be:

• release save/load for GW
• release save/load chronocam stuff
• make some improvements to GW, I hear there are a lot of small issues with it that could be resolved at least
• fix bugs and the most of the "small" things that make many of the last features they added feel not 100% complete (see my rant below)
• announce expansion pack. The expansion should contain solutions to the major problems people see with the game. The biggest point that comes to mind (well to my mind right now for reasons) here is the missing minimap, or more abstract: A solution for the massive disorientation that especially new players face when they start playing the game. Also ofc tons and tons of other small improvements that can be made. There are probably a few more big issues the game has. For example the whole scale of the game could be reworked a bit. Make units smaller and planet terrain seem bigger, etc. All these things that made masses of people leave PA. Fix them. On top of that add a bunch of new units that make sense for the balance and add variety in gameplay.
• Shortly before release of the expansion pack release the planetary documentary. Get any games news site report on it "an insight video on one of the biggest game kickstarters, blablabla, oh btw they soon will release an expansion to that game as well..."
• Release the expansion in a polished state. Ensure all features it adds feel complete. Have the reviewers rejoice and people give PA a 2nd chance. "SupCom vanilla was meh, but SupCom:FA was great.... PA was meh, but PA: <insert cool shorthand for cool expansion pack here, maybe have it community voted?> was great".
• Profit!

So now a rant that I have on my mind since a while:
I feel Uber isn't very good at judging where to stop when developing a feature.

Example: the ladder. Yey we got a ladder! But wait ... we can only see the top 10 players. We cannot see win/loss stats. We cannot see our ranked points. We cannot see the rank or league of players we play against. We cannot get points from beating players below us (or maybe we can? Nobody knows exactly because we cannot see the points), so the top players best just play one game a week to stay where they are. Basically the major feature "ladder" was added and then the small bits that get players to play were forgotten.

Example: the system editor. Surely a big feature that is really great. But wait.... we cannot control the planet height map and I time and time again see people who lose all their work because the editor bugs and save does not work.

Example: wreckages. The game has wreckage support since ancient times. But for some reason it was decided to stop developing on it half way and never come back.

There is probably more. Yes ofc there needs to be a line where development on a feature stops at least for now. But I feel Uber very often draws this line a little too early. This leaves players with the new feature they wanted for so long, but the new feature has one or two issues that make it no fun to use.
Adding one new feature at a time is a great concept, but please make sure the features added are fully working and feel "complete" before you start working on a new feature.

Are you kidding? the community here isn't entitled at all, you should see some of the COD/BF/LoL community.

No, real question is will uber tread carefully with their vocabulary this time?

Great post and I agree, on both the timeline and the rant. I suspect that the constant jumping from goal to goal has a lot to do with Uber trying to develop this game on a shoestring budget. The end result is a game with a lot of potential features, but also a ton of bugs, that just doesn't feel very polished at any level. Maybe if the HR kickstarter had not failed things would be different. I imagine since the layoffs the team of people left doing actual hands on asset and code work is very small. In the end I think if Uber had promised less in the Kickstarter and focused just on getting the core multi-planet mechanic super robust, polished, and fun the story would have been very different. Instead we've got a tiny dev team trying to hit a huge span of goals that are often not in synergy with each other, or even contribute more bugs to be destroyed. Right now it seems like the team is so small they are generating more bugs than they can fix with each new patch.

I don't much care to compare with the rest of the wider gaming community. One way or another, I feel pretty strongly that the community here has had an extremely strong sense of entitlement in terms of features and access. You clearly disagree but I would point towards the multiple drama bombs and the people who made a career out of trolling the shyte out of uber as evidence that the kickstarter model breeds fans who feel they are literally owed everything and anything less is a war crime. Is this true for gamers in general? Yes. But I think it has been particularly sharp here. Take that for what you will, it's my opinion and experience.

I could not agree more!

That schedule is what I roughly had in mind when writing the OP... I believe it is the most reasonable way to go about saving PA from extintion.

If they were to make an expansion pack, it would be wise to first send the physical goods first.

The physical goods are in production and slowly gather in their storage place. Uber is waiting on them just like we are.

I don't think the dev team actually is "tiny". Yes there were layoffs after the HR disaster. The HR team was layed off. The PA team lost of a bunch of people to the HR team, but at the same time they did also hire jables.
I don't think the PA team is that small. For example the lack of forums activity from chargrove made some people consider he was layed off as well. If you read the UI code you can find a comment mentioning his name that was added maybe a few weeks ago.

I didn't see where anyone replied to this idea. It bothers me that people feel like this. Get a mic and join a voice chat. You don't have be a clan member. I am tired of playing with "randoms" on a shared team. So I just started playing non-shared if I can't find anyone to join me on voice chat.

You can learn by playing along side others and hearing their take on strategies while seeing it in action. Team games are my favorite and it's disappointing that players just don't make an effort to connect through voice more or look into the other aspects of the community.

Edit:

I try to raise awareness and/or get more people into using voice chat. This is largely an issue of people being people though, but hopefully more of the knowledgeable people of the community will reach out and try to invite more players to use their voice chat servers.

This don't remove the fact that a few thousand backers are waiting for their goodies since more than two years (or 7 months if you start counting from the release date...).
This is a bull that must be taken by the horns before wandering into a new era of joy and bugfixness !

So what's Uber supposed to do? Stop working on code and convert the company into a production place for physical goodies?

Actually i'm in the Realm and nearly always played on voice chat with other Realmers. So I don't see how your argument applies to my statement at all.

Is there any idea what Uber plans for Pa?