I lost everything.

I got into Space Engineers several years ago in college, and made some really

good memories with my friends whom I didn't see anymore in person. We used to

play on the really early builds and make stuff together.

I haven't played in a while now, but I keep up with the updates and figured I

would take a look now that multiplayer is much more stable. I started up the

game and...I have nothing. Everything I ever made, alone or with friends (I

always hosted the MP games) is gone.

I've done my research and discovered that Space Engineer saves all user files

under User/AppData. The answer is that I deleted it all when I reinstalled

Windows a while ago, and the save files were lost since they are not in the

industry standard location of User/My Documents/My Games or User/Saved Games.

Guys, this is not okay! Any computer savvy person can tell you that

reinstalling Windows OS every 2 years is a standard practice for many people,

and AppData is NOT the normal place for users' save files. I am heartbroken

over this loss: hundreds, probably thousands of collective hours of work just

wiped away because of this unusual choice. As a programmer myself, I know

that some standards are sloppy and seem pointless (this one in particular,

so many games can't decide between Users/My Documents and

User/My Documents/My Games that it's ridiculous) but that isn't the point of

the standard; the point is to protect people from making mistakes and losing

files. I know how it feels to want to make your code clean and organized,

and I know how powerful that desire can be but in this case, your decision

to keep all the files together in AppData is irresponsible, supporting your

own sense of code aesthetics to the detriment of the user base.

I hope I've made my case without coming across as insulting; I spend a fair

amount of time talking to engineers this way. I still think this game is

fantastic and your team are continually making groundbreaking steps forward

in the realm of multiplayer code architecture that deserve a lot more attention

than you guys get. The entire debacle with Atlas happened because somebody

thought what you do is easy, and they showed the whole world just how hard it

really is. I'm just so thoroughly frustrated at my saves being lost for such

a painful reason as a snowflake-special file location in one game out of the

hundreds that I own.