RTS is a niche. therefore the playerbase is always going to be smaller initially. Im going to go out on a limb here so bear with me while i make many baseless assumptions... The other "beta tests" you've been involved with? im gonna guess the majority were AAA titles and most likely FPS or RPGs? if so theres a whole seperate mechanic involved - how did you know about those betas? most likely there was some form of media or word of mouth telling you how awesome said game was going to be. PA hasnt got that yet, as like you say we are much earlier in the production cycle than that other type of beta (which has basically just replaced the playable demo from 10 years ago - the majority of those players in the beta arent providing any feedback to devs and even in they were its too late to make anything but minor changes.)
The player base is probably much larger than you see online most of the time, many of us play against the AI, and some only play to test new features then don't play much until a patch/update comes out then they play and test the patches new features/updates. Me personally i don't play at the moment, not because of any game issues but because im learning to modify the game. I spend most of my time changing code and seeing how much my changes change/fix/break things .. lol Early release gives me extra time to learn more about the game and its modding potential so in my opinion Early release as early as it was a good idea.
I seriously do not see where all this worry comes from. The reason i say this, is because cubeworld had a period where the servers weren't accessible, and even with a large playerbase, they seemed like it was smaller than it was, when people really were waiting for servers. Now, i don't want that to happen here, when there is nothing to worry about. It would be trivial for them to make a better ui, minimap, and balance, but doing that to an unfinished game wastes time amending it later when they add stuff, when they could do it after adding features and stability. I'm sure if they expected players to dislike this or not understand, they would release older more stable patches, waste time with early user friendliness like minimaps and ui, and when things like this happen roll back patches or pull the game offline for fixing. These are good pr moves, but better for the game to note issues and move on without the exaggerated panic.
I bought this game together with some of my friends. Currently I'm am the only one actively participating on the forum. It's not that they don't like the game, they just aren't the testing type. They would much rather wait till we are in the balancing fase before participating. (My friends bought the "Cosmic" and the "Galactic" versions, so you can say they aren't supportive.)
From personal observations, a LOT of people are waiting for a new patch at the moment and playing other games while they do so.
I guess so but still. We will see at release. I hope they wait with release till all features including stretchgoals are done. If they can wait that long and have enough financial reserves.
Well let's put it this way, they're still hiring new people. That gives me a significant degree of confidence.
There are many people that may argument "I bought this game to support the developers", but in the end they do want to actually play the game. While the game is currently playable enough to test, it isn't much of a "game" yet. Currently we've been going from a rough 450 users at peak hours with a slow decline to 175. The same happened in the alpha on a smaller scale. People eventually are done with testing the current iteration of the game, they just wait until there's something more to test. We'll see, as long as this game will be released at the right time the game will probably turn out alright. The right time is whenever this game is ready to receive somewhat good first impressions from both users and reviewers.
As someone noted, we have indeed hired a few new folks to help us get the project to the finishing line. Also, a new update should release in the next couple of days. If I'm not mistaken, there's been about 1000 check-ins between this version and the one you guys are playing, so yeah, you're going to see some changes!
which end emits the nanites ????? ---edited--- oh, i want mine to look like KNights PUMA fan art model
