Alas, no fun stories about mining and getting rich tonight. I went mining for an hour to learn the ropes when the jank came to beat me down with the “It’s an alpha” stick.
I was driving my 1/3rd full ROC Miner into the cargo bay of my ship (it’s a large flatbed elevator you lower and drive onto). As the cargo bay was being raised, the ROC started doing the dreaded happy dance, fell through the elevator and then vanished (I’m guessing it got buried somewhere).
Even better, when I tried to retrieve the vehicle from a platform on the moon, I got the HAL treatment:
Usual fix is: travel to a different planet / moon to move the vehicle in the system. I got no time for that right now. :/
So yeah. SC is still SC. I do have to share something awesome I saw tonight though.
Another commander was letting me fly his Freelancer Max (the double size, space truck version of the Freelancer) when I came upon this gigantic cruise ship near a landing pad:
Oh lord. I’m thinking about what a convoluted mess the bankruptcy process – should it happen – would be. This entire operation seems designed to be a complete labyrinth of different investors/ownership stakes and corporate beings… and various cost centers, subsidiary entities, and subcontractors. And all of that is before whales start bringing class actions to get creditor status to get those fractions of pennies on the dollar.
Things falling through floors happens all the damn time in this game and it really pisses me off, especially as it’s such a ballache to get your ship back - if you even can. It’s usually the point at which I end my quarterly check on the game.
Yep. That or parts of a station not spawning and suddenly you fall in space. Though I mostly see that from streamers. I’ve had to watch my step before stepping into an elevator that wasn’t there.
Lifting a vehicle in the Connie cargo bay is definitely the most egregious example for me though. I’m not sure I even have a 50% chance to succeed. Which makes it a very poor way to try and make money in game.
So mining turns out to be quite a fun and profitable mini game. I think I was mining Hadanite for 90’ or so tonight. It’s a matter of flying around, scanning for nodes, landing and mining them with the buggy. The mining itself is about managing power allocated to the mining laser. Keep it in the green zone of the arc to the right and you are shiny. If you don’t, the rock can explode, damaging you and sending bits flying all over the place.
Being a MISC ship, it looks plain and industrial inside. Parts of it, like the giant cargo bay you can watch from above and the mess hall have a cool Firefly vibe.
But then the owner left the game, kindly leaving the ship unlocked for me to fly around (it accelerates, turns and brakes like a lethargic koala). And when I started exploring it all alone, the shiny Firefly vibe quickly turned into something a lot less reassuring.
I briefly considered hitting the self destruct button and jumping into one of those.
Unfortunately, my joy ride ended when I jumped down a passageway without my suit on and ended up on an exposed gangway near the fuel tanks. I promptly suffocated. For all I know, the ghost ship is still sailing slowly away from Arial. Silent. Empty.
I finally had epiphany - this thing is apparently to be a “life simulator” of some sort, and Real Life is full of tedium and inconvenience. So I’d call it a success so far!
This game isn’t my cup of tea and I have gladly been reading the thread to see the train wreck in motion, but I have to admit I enjoy reading stories about people who are playing the game and sharing their good times.
Yeah there genuinely are some good times to be had, to be fair. It’s just that it’s still far from any kind of complete game and what we do have is riddled with bugs. That’s why I only check in every few months or so.
That’s what these people want. That’s why they’re spending time creating a system where you can go buy hamburgers or have pets. They are making nothing short of a sci-fi life sim. And more power to them if they can keep getting people to give money. At this point I don’t believe there are any victims - you know exactly what you’re doing when you invest money into this game.
The other formerly large kickstarted endeavor from around SC 2010-12ish beginning was Lord British’s Shroud of the Avatar ($20ish million, so an order of magnitude smaller than SC, but still pretty big). It followed the same trajectory - everything had to be “real” or “going back to the roots of RPGs”, so nothing could be easy.
Obscure, text-based quest system, check! No useable in game maps, check! No easy way to travel, check! Most everything has to be made by other players, so no easy way to get items you need, check!
It all adds up to boredom and frustration for actual people, but for the devoted people who want a full time job in their online game, they really go for it. And for Shroud of the Avatar, it resulted in literally less than 100 people playing on average (the folks who by and large paid tens of thousands of dollars to this inanity to become reality), even after rolling a lot of this crap back . SC sounds like it is on a similar path in certain respects.
