Feedback and Bugs - Recent multiplayer experiences on official keen NA server

Dan B shared this feedback 3 years ago
Submitted

I left this in the comments of one of your recent updates, but it is lengthy, so I felt it warranted a more formal submission.


"Hear me and my 2500 hours, for I have written a novel for you:

If you bundle whatever this is with the previous DLCs at a discount, I'll probably buy it. Here's a bit of feedback. I love this game. Been playing it since 2016. I believe in your team, too.

That said, lots of things still need fixing. This feedback is up-to-date with my current multiplayer experiences.


Things that feel bad:


-Using jump drives. The list of gps coordinates in the jump drive control panel isn't searchable or alphabetized like the actual GPS coordinates menu. This makes it hard and frustrating to find the destination you want, especially since buying datapads from the npc stations tends to load you up with a lot of new destinations all the time. Absolutely needs fixing. I would also like to see small ships get jump drives in some form, albeit less powerful to keep it balanced. If you feel ambitious, it would be nice if jump drives were reworked to function better when more of them are used at once. It sucks to have to load a whole tab of ship controls with different jump drives in order to make consecutive jumps. Why not pool all the energy together and just let us use it until the stored power runs out, and limit the distance based on the remaining power stored collectively by the jump drives? It would be a huge improvement as well if we could enter in the exact distance for blind jumps instead of trying to ballpark a percentage based on our maximum. Just let us input the distance in kilometers.


-NPC station bugs and QoL. When accepting hauling contracts, it is bizarre that the game doesn't tell us what faction we'll be delivering to, or whether it is in gravity, prior to our accepting it. I once took a 30,000km+ hauling contract all the way to its destination for about about an hour, only to be turned away at the door because I had become enemies with the client npc by trading with the competition. Players are bound to damage their rep by accepting hauling contracts they can't fulfill, so we should also know if we'll need a ship that can make planetfall before we accept it. Furthermore, wouldn't it make more sense to give us the labelled coordinates for that station in addition to the "deliver here" blip? Hauling aside, I also noticed that once I finally got 500+ rep with a faction, the prices from that faction actually INCREASED across the board instead of giving me a discount. This felt supremely unrewarding for all the effort it took, especially considering the enemies I had to make along the way.


-Datapads. There is a bug that prevents me from seeing all the datapads I've purchased from NPCs whenever I buy more than 6 at a time. It only shows me the first 6, until I log out and log back in. Concerning the gps coordinates we receive from the datapads, if we rename any of the coordinates we get, they will be duplicated if we ever log them from a datapad again. I like that it can detect if we have the exact entry already and not duplicate it, so could you change it so that only the coordinates need to match but not the name? Once we have a lot of stations logged to the same faction, renaming them is key to keeping them organized, and it just sucks that we have to choose between organizing our GPS and not having multiple of the same entry. It gets very messy, and you don't know it's happening until it's too late and you have to make that choice. I myself jumped around the system making note of where each station was and renaming them accordingly, only to have to delete all those entries when I realized what a mess it was making of the GPS menu that I was actually just trying to organize.


-Safe zone will not allow assemblers to build components under any circumstances. Personally I also think it's dangerous to have them set to "whitelist" by default. I jumped to another player and parked next to their station before converting to a station myself and activating it. Then he tells me it threw him into space. I was lucky that it did not do the same to any of his grids, or I'd have just made enemies with someone I just wanted to trade with.


-Contract block (and possibly Store block) requires a cargo container set to "share with all" in order to function. I don't see why it can't just draw from our private inventory as long as it has the same owner. If I make the listing, then of course that block should be allowed to deposit and withdraw acquisitions and sales, and without me having to stash a secret shared cargo somewhere in the walls of my station so it can't be burgled. Bad first experience led to frustrating exchange with another player that took way too long to sort out.


-Max ship speed. 100m/s is too slow, double it. At the very least you could give us a slider in our world settings and call the higher end of it "experimental".


-Keen Official Dedicated Servers. 10,000 PCU is too low, double it.


-PCU trading. This is really easy to exploit, and anyone not doing so is at a sharp disadvantage. Disallow PCU trading, but give server admins the option of re-enabling it at their own discretion. Extremely short-sighted implementation guys.


-Landing gear. It's too weak. I recently tried to make a "cargo drop" grid, basically just a large cargo container with parachutes and a landing gear. What I found was that no matter how many parachutes I built, they wouldn't slow a fully loaded container down enough to stop it from crushing the landing gear and damaging the container. Given this was in the thin mars atmosphere, but gravity is weaker there too. Landing gears are meant to stop a whole ship, they should be able to brace one container without snapping off.


-Tiny remnant voxels. Sometimes when drilling, an itty bitty piece of a voxel will be missed and suddenly your cockpit explodes when it whizzes through your ship with its infinite mass. I wish that anything too small to easily notice would just disappear when it's separated from the rest of the voxel. Realistically it would just be a small rock at that point and bounce right off.


-Ore volumes. I noticed when drilling for uranium that the volume I get is WAY less than the volume I drill. It's like I can fit an entire asteroid in my drills even on realistic settings. Just looking for consistency here, that's all.


-Consistency of mass. It makes sense for ingots to have less mass than the ore they're made from, but the change in mass from ingot to component is all over the place. Shouldn't the mass of components be more or less equal to the sum of the ingots they're made from? It doesn't strictly need a re-balance, it's just a little weird.


I THINK that about covers all the things that left me feeling sour. Now I'll list a few new things I'd like to see in future updates:


-Star map. This would be a gui, or possibly an option for the projector blocks, that would allow us to see GPS coordinates and celestial bodies in a virtual 3d space. Trying to visualize the system from the perspective of a person in a space suit is impossible. It's just a sphere of hud blips. This would let the world actually start to take shape without us having to pop on over to Geogebra for a few hours yes I did this don't judge me.


-More armor blocks. ALL the armor blocks. More windows too. I want to make huge glass domes. It's just a shape, how hard can it be to make some more shapes? The more shapes we get the cooler our ships are and the better your game looks. Don't believe me, ask the fellas at LEGO.


-NPC mobs. Bodies walking around emoting at you and welding things. Pirates coming after you with rifles or building warheads on your grids. Wildlife that doesn't bite. Something to fill the emptiness of the star system other than us players. Even if it's just a graphical element with no interaction like a flock of birds or some insects in the dirt. Or BEEEEES. Yeah how about swarms of bees that vibe-check you if your visor is up?


-BUILD INFO. So many of the crucial details about each block are completely hidden from players, it's no wonder most people can't build a decent ship. They need to know how much mass a block has, whether or not it's airtight, how much power it might need, and an idea of how long it will take to weld it, and how much HP it will have. They need to know how strong their thrusters are under various conditions. They need MATH. Path to the math.


-Again, small ship jump drive. I'm hoping that's what I see in the picture.


-That bathroom with the doorway should probably have a door to go with it. Just sayin'.


That's all for now thanks everyone and stay safe."

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