I have recently restarted playing after a long break. Saw the galaxy has been regenerated at one point last year, but found some forum posts mentioning another galaxy regeneration is unlikely to happen again (not 100% excluded though).
I remember there was also some discussion a long time ago that tiers/medals will be reset when the game exits the “Early Access” phase and all participants will be given a corresponding amount of keys as a boost, to have a small advantage over the players who weren’t in the Early Access. Is this still valid?
I’m not asking when the game will exit the phase, just curious if the progress (medals/tiers/keys) will be kept or wiped out when this happens.
It’s been denied because players have made IAPs, which cannot be refunded, so resetting would lead to a lot of unhappy people according to IA.
Forgot where that post was though, might have to look for it again.
Thankfully, most likely nothing will reset when Early Access ends. iA isn’t confident enough to say that this is guaranteed, though.
Support website:
Accounts which have one or more purchases associated with them are never reset, even if they become inactive.
Some account progress might be lost if it ever becomes necessary to roll back to an earlier snapshot of the game database, but even in such cases, we’ll take extra care to preserve all purchases.
All of your account data is kept on the game’s servers. The only thing you save locally is a small token (which tells the servers which data is yours). This consumes CPU time (because your account data needs to be indexed and searched), storage space (on the disk and the database), and network bandwidth (because it must be transmitted to other players). All of these things come both at a technical and an economic cost. This makes it necessary to periodically clear out inactive accounts. Typically this happens after 6-12 months of inactivity, but under certain circumstances the period could be shorter (if you have only played for a few minutes total, for example).
Accounts which have a purchase associated with them will never be reset.
The only reason you can lose an account is being inactive for 6-12 months (currently, only the 12-month mark is enforced) and did not make a purchase.
Man, keys/tier/medals can be very necessary for someone. For example: Keys for a ship, when some player wants to save up for a new ship, they have to play missions to save up. Medals can be for bragging, but not everyone can have that
I don’t know how we would live without keys and medals.
About the tiers, I don’t want to say anything about that
Another controversial take of mine:
Reset SHOULD happen at the end of early access.
Early Access is supposed to be for testing and experimenting. Anybody who thought that your progress would carry over should rethink his life choices. Nowadays a new player must compete with players who have nearly 4 years of progress. Resetting was a good choice, but unfortunately it’s not possible.
Because IA fked it up with Steam release. Now, if it was only steam release it would still be possible, but IA also introduced microtransaction for keys and that may actually be a reason for a potential lawsuit if the keys are taken from players.
There’s also a case of players that explored the whole galaxy and kept their medals as some kind of reward for making it in EA. That’s dumb as only 3 medals should carry over after the EA ends: idea, bug and ea participation medal.
So the only way a reset would be possible now is to make a reset but give every player their net keys back. And also reset all the medals except those 3.
Yeah, that was the initial plan back then, to have only these 3 medals carried over and the net keys, but reset everything else. But it seems that it has changed? (or I might have misunderstood the thing I marked as a solution).
You choose your own competition. The game can be all-casual games if you really wanted it.
Also you don’t need this much time to get decent stuff.
The longer you play the more usable items you’ll have, but ultimately you can only use a set amount of items in missions/competitions anyway. In other words, having more than enough vs having enough items is kinda the same thing when the flight has started.
Also, as someone who’s lost years worth of game data at this point: Just giving them part of your progress back isn’t going to be enough. It won’t be fun as it used to be, as huge projects and plans are being cancelled, and motivation to keep going follow suit, even if the reset happens worldwide.
(There’s more but I can’t think of them rn)
Plus there’s that whole deal with IAP players.
I think you did. But I also don’t remember if we heard any newer statements about that and IA changes his opinion very often.
In leaderboard challenges? You don’t even see what place you are in unless it’s top 10 when the competition ends.
10 different spaceships, all weapons on max, legendary spaceship parts, whole set of environment resistances, all wormholes explored and enough keys to just keep buying stuff without worrying.
EA is for testing. If you have fun then great for you, but it was always said there would be a reset and players generally agreed with that.
What huge projects and plans? Also why would you make them in EA phase?
If you give them their keys back they don’t lose anything. They still have what they paid for.
This doesn’t make sense at all. In real life, there always have to be a few brave people that volunteer to test a vaccine, and there are consequences for success and failure (not a good example to apply to gaming, but I’m trying to prove that letting people keep their Early Access progress is valid).
I don’t think iA ever “wanted” to reset players’ progress unless absolutely necessary, it’s just that he’s not confident enough because it is his first online game ever programmed, so iA said that. Although the game has been released for almost 4 years, you can max out in 3 months if you really want to. That is enough time for new players to catch up, and at the same time doesn’t make sense to wipe out progress of veterans.
At this point, “Early Access” is just a disclaimer before the main menu (Early Access banner has gone long ago), it no longer makes much difference practically, but iA hasn’t quite finished with everything related to the game yet to go to full release.
Also doesn’t make sense, there are values created to the keys purchased that are invaluable and you can’t simply refund them.
Basically, you can refund items as it stands physically, but not the value it meant for players who’ve made it themselves, is what I’m trying to say.
Players always have a major attachment to … practically anything they’ve ever been a part of.
Removing it from them always and I mean always, cause major backlash.
It’s why changes that effected the game in a major way (which changes how things work completely) always sparks controversy. And no matter how big your game gets, you’re not going to escape from this fact.
Some popular examples of this:
Minecraft 1.9 Combat Update changed combat entirely, all players who have ever been a part of the old combat system protested, and the majority of them never updated, even till now.
Also: Minecraft 1.19.1 (aka 1.19.84) Chat Report officially killed unmonitored chat - one of the major things that has always been in the game since the very beginning, indirectly promoting mods that circumvented this system, so much so that the entire community is now running on those mods.
(The post that stated this system stays on Reddit gets over 1900 downvotes as of right now, and is rising still)
Resetting all progress from a game definitely falls into this category.
Usually, when companies make bad decisions like this, it’s because of a few rotten apples that cause legal troubles for companies (being fined). Companies are usually unprepared for this, so they usually make a rushed decision and then leave it there just to deal with the penalties, even if that means enraging the community (like YouTube being fined by COPPA for “invading” kids’ privacy, forcing them to make flawed rules about the kids’ videos just to avoid the fines, even if that means much less interaction and more restrictions in kids’ videos).
Currently, the only type of chat possible in CIU is multiplayer chat, but if the community grows more and more kids playing are harmed by other grown-up players for toxicity, and if some of them report to the authorities, iA could actually be fined, because the game does not have an age requirement and iA does not usually moderate the multiplayer chat unless players specifically report it, and one person cannot deal with it all if somehow the CIU difficulty grows to about 100 million players rather than 70k players. In this case, for example, if iA is fined, a possible solution would be to remove the chat entirely, but that will lead to backlash from players. But I would still appreciate it if iA just says directly “I have to do that to avoid being fined” rather than avoiding the question like Mojang or YouTube and COPPA did.