A New Approach

Listen,

As a 24 year old man who's had this game for 6 years now, I can say with full faith that I am tired of survival. There is a time and place for a Survival game, but as someone who's time is spread thin by work, girlfriend, friends, and the constant endless entropy of my own body, I have to spread out my time in a way that works- as well as satisfies- before i have to drag my corpse out of bed to work in the morning. I always hit up my friend and we get hyped for the new space engineers update, only to play it for a few minutes and find myself bored, and repeat the process every update. I dont have an endless well of creativity to tap into, and neither does my friend. and the moments i am feeling particularly creative, theres no real satisfaction because A. the time it takes to feel well established takes days on end, and B. the only consistant servers i can rely on are the ones we make ourselves, and the ones we Do join that are public are shaky at best and quickly forgotten.

So here is my I D E A

A new Gamemode

a mix of survival and creative mode, made to appeal to people who like quick and dirty.

Seperate 2 teams, and designate a set space (in space) for each, protected from damage.

set a creative period from maybe 15- 45 minutes depending on the intended builds for the match.

as well as that, set parameters. Engineers THRIVE on parameters. give the server host the ability to set which blocks are allowed, how many blocks are allowed per engineer, color pallet choice per each team, etc. initially have the engineers only allowed to work on their own project, but can group up through a UI option, separated from the usual group section and specific to this gamemode.

players can ready up, and once they do they are put into a section to test out their ship. a separated survival section where they can battle their own teammates who have also readied up, so they can test their own ships effectiveness without betraying it to the other team. they can be killed, and once they are their ship will remain until they respawn, which then would delete the ship they last occupied, which will respawn with them, to minimize on server load. and if you feel like it you could unready and tweak your ship till you're happy.

Once everyone readies up, you spawn in the battlefield with a decent amount of space between both teams and a general direction the enemy is in. ship remnants stay in the battlefield and become part of it as the game goes on, and as the remaining player count goes down so does the size of the playable combat zone (inb4 fortnite). when you die you have the choice to spectate or to continue working on your ship in advance of the next round. once the match is over, you'll run through a few more rounds to get some more life out of your build, and then the game moves on with a new battlefield and new ship parameters.

This doesnt just apply to Combat gameplay, you can also have missions, like "Who can mine the most of any given ore" or "who can complete the most planetary deliveries" OR "race across the lunar surface". this would encourage creativity as well as a chance to see how other people approach ship building. you can actually work with a team of people you joined in a game with rather than spend 30 minutes loading into a server where the nearest player is 100km's away and wants nothing to do with you.

You guys would have to revamp your approach to mission creation, make it a little bit looser and a little bit more flexible with some basic parameters you can set per each game as opposed to programming and all this jazz. or you would have to make some simple game modes of your own to get the ball rolling. Because I will tell you right now, that you are committing a lot of well intentioned effort in the wrong direction.

you have given the player an almost infinite amount of space to play in, yet an incredibly finite amount of players you can really play with at any given moment and no actual goal to achieve. i mean, Jesus Christ, i would rather bang a flying 3D cube in space against another 3D cube piloted by another player thrown in the same pen as me, than join a server after downloading 100+ mods where i stagnate, and the only interaction i have with anyone else is through text log like they are my pen pal. And after all that effort of joining into a server and establishing myself in a virtually infinite world of your design, why am i playing with a list of people i could count on my fingers?

If you guys want to have some player retention instead of 30+ servers that arent very full, you have to make the game more engaging and more satisfying for those who have less time than others. im tired of surviving. I have to do that every single day.