The conversation we should all be part of

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

So I think there is increasingly a need for a conversation to be had amongst gamers, not just for Atlas, but across gaming, about Early Access. And @#$% it, since Atlas is the most high profile EA out there right now and (most importantly) it's the one I'm playing, there's no time like now, and no place like here to have it. I think the conversation that gamers need to have, and need to communicate clearly to the game development industry, is what are our minimum expectations for a game going into Early Access?

I have been through several Early Access experiences now, and two things strike me equally about the process with regards to players. 1) Many players do not understand, accept, or make allowances for the EA process as compared to a finished game. These players do not have proper expectations, which leads very predictably to anger when their expectations do not remotely match reality. 2) Many players who fully expect the EA process to be a bumpy one exhibit a tendency to dismiss any and all complaints coming from others with the catchall "It's EA." Both of these things are problematic. The first one has been covered ad naseum in other discussions, but the second I want to examine more closely, because any reasonable person examining the landscape of gaming today can see that EA has not been purely a win for gamers, with all shinning light and rosy outlooks. EA to date has it's good points and it's bad, but there is a clear need here, and that is the need to create some definition of what is minimally acceptable as a level of game development BEFORE entering the EA process. There is a simple reason for this. Beta testers are either paid or far more often unpaid, but they don't pay to be beta testers. The difference between beta testers and EA players is that the latter have paid to be there. This means they have a right to expect a minimally playable product, even if it is one still being developed. The truth of this is shown in the fact steam is currently offering refunds for Atlas for many players beyond their usual standard of 2 hours, primarily because those players could not reasonably have been deemed to be offered a playable game.

Given that charging players to be beta testers works very much to a game developers advantage, while paying for a game in a not playable state is very much not to the players advantage, we should not reasonably expect developers to self impose limitations upon minimum thresholds before pushing a title to EA. Personally, I believe one of the core initial mistakes made here with Atlas has been pushing to EA too quickly, and I strongly suspect the likely reason for doing so was to get Atlas onto the market during the peak consumer spending month of December. From a revenue generation standpoint, this makes a lot of sense, even if from a development standpoint it would have been better to wait another 3 or 6 months or whatever. I think that the record level of refunds and negative reviews that GrapesCard™ is facing because of this decision right now is good for players and good for the industry, because it is demonstrating to all developers that there can be very real negative consequences for pushing your game to EA too early.

But let's stop and think about this for a moment as gamers. Do we really want our only option to hold game developers accountable for the product they offer as EA to be refunding and negative reviewing after the fact? Would it not save time, money and energy for ALL parties concerned, players, developers, and heck even Steam itself, if there were clear expectations of minimum levels of development in place coming from players, since after all, we are the final arbiters of the products worth? To give a clearer understanding of what I'm talking about, I'll use two specific examples from Atlas of where I think game development was an obvious failure and "it's EA" is not an acceptable excuse.

1.  The extreme level of creature overspawning. C'mon Wildshot™, are you really gonna say with a straight face that after 3 plus years of developing Ark, that you didn't have any better idea than this of what constitutes appropriate levels of creature spawns in your game world? Really? Yes it's EA, yes we understand things will need to be tweaked, but we did actually pay money for this, and if you can't come up with a better default out of the gate than what you have, with Ark's development as a baseline to work from, that's just piss poor. Try again.

2.  The land claim debacle. This is especially egregious for anyone familiar with the ongoing saga of pillar spam on Ark official pve servers. How in the name of Keith Richard's beard could you not have come up with a better approach than what we have after having that experience to learn from? Saying "it's EA" just doesn't cut it here, because you've had a directly correlational issue from your other game from which to learn and improve upon. The troubling thing is this one thing more than any other suggests you're not learning from experience, and that's a dangerous thing for a development studio to have as a flaw.

Now that I've laid out the conversation as I see it, I'd like to ask those posting to do two things please:

1. Refrain from using non helpful pejorative labels such as white knight, fanboy, hater, kid, etc when discussing this. These labels do little but provide an excuse to dismiss those you disagree with without having to actually address any points they may be making. They do not move a conversation forward, and this conversation, I believe strongly, we all have a stake in.

2. Try to avoid having the conversation get lost in the morass of details or sidetracked. This is not a thread to debate the land claim system or creature spawns or other specific aspects, but to talk about what sort of expectations we should set as players for developers.

I know this was a long post, thank you for taking the time to read it, and thanks to all that contribute constructively in advance.

 

[peter 25]

sorry TLTR; needed (i know i also sometimes get too long and do not have it  )

[Winter Thorne 696]

I agree.  Some of the issues (performance and bugs) fall under EA, some are just incomprehensible design decisions.

I don't have any problem with them working through things like server and network tuning, but things like obvious overspawns and the bizarre rules for claiming, especially on PvE aren't EA type issues.  Some of those even continue to be made.  They DID make a change to claims -  now you can still hold as many as you want, but there's a 3 hour timer.  Sheesh,   bad decision with the number you can claim AND a bad decision on the timer.  They deserve all the rants they can get about that.

Some people are justified in yelling about some of the EA issues too though.  When your server has been down for 8 hours and some dev posts, "Ok, the maintenance is done, all the servers are back up!", people have to get their attention somehow.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

12 minutes ago, peter said:

sorry TLTR; needed (i know i also sometimes get too long and do not have it  )

sorry but TL DR doesn't really work for this post. The issue is a little too nuanced and involved to sum up in a sentence. Not everything can be or should be.