How I feel about Starbound.

Before I start I want to make this perfectly clear, I'm not affiliated with Starbound, the staff, the developers or ANYTHING... Not even myself. I play the game, my siblings play the game, hell my mom plays the game, we got the four pack. We enjoy it, I'm just going to give some insights based on research I did, and the complaints that I've seen. (Even though most of those complaints fall around changes in content whether removed or not.) I also want to put it forth this is my OPINION.

Hey everyone. I'm a new user on this forum, well fairly new anyways. Seen a lot of threads disliking changes in Starbound from beta to stable. I want to discuss this at length and share my personal opinion with those that are willing to try to see it from another perspective. I can understand why people are frustrated- even though I haven't played since beta, I hardly know what's been removed or kept in I want to say I still understand. There was stuff there in the game people liked, a lot of people are confused, saddened, angry not sure where the game is going, what direction it's taking from here. Why they removed features.

I want to and will do my best at shedding some light on this using logical steps of thought, to try and figure out just why things are going this way and to explain my reasoning and why I believe Starbound is going to be better than ever as more updates are released, and content is added possibly even re-added later down the road.

My first point needs to go over how big the game was.
If you're unaware, the game was getting really big. Bloated even with content. Most people would say. "Well that doesn't sound bad." Well it is, and it isn't. It isn't because you get more content. (Obviously.) It IS bad however because it means that so many more variables can go wrong when creating a truly stable build for final release. The number of crashes back in the beta unstable were so many just due to how many features and crosscheck errors from Lau that actually fixing the issues was getting to be tedious. ChuckleFish wasn't as big as it is now. (And it's not MUCH bigger in my opinion.) In terms of staff and the number of people developing certain games. Which brings me to my next point.

My second point is the amount of Staff Chucklefish has, and had.
They may have tried biting off more than they could chew. Pretty simply put I believe that the game grew bigger than the amount of people developing it with everything being added and it needed to be cleaned so there was less game crashes and less memory leaking issues in the future. Even the first stable release had its issues right? Can you imagine if they tried doing that with ALL the content they had at the time? I don't know about you (personally.) I however don't think I would have enjoyed a game that would have instantly exploded upon opening it. They wanted to release a STABLE, no major crashes, most bugs and things sprayed and crushed underfoot. In my opinion for what we got in terms of content. They did a pretty damn good job. I'm almost 70 hours into the game and still enjoying it. I've beat the main story mode but for what the game offers, there's still more things to do even without mods.

This third point addresses more towards what I meant when I said "cleaned."
When you have a lot of content the game gets bogged down and even if you fix one thing on the outside it can be considered a band-aid on the inside in the programming. Everything can be all good to go everything seems alright but if you keep putting band-aids on a bigger issue, which I believe Starbound had hidden beneath its code. You'd have a lot of things failing to deliver at the quality you want them to. As a very, very inexperienced programmer I can't tell you how many times I've tried fixing codes I've written for RPG Maker games (Ruby script), a little python and a handful of C programming of different degrees (+,++, and #) I just toy with as a hobby, dabble in the code and have to go back and completely rewrite. From scratch. You could bring up the point. "But Pie, these people were/are experienced programmers, they don't have the excuse you do." For those that have this argument I want to bring up the fact that we're only human and we make mistakes. Coding can be VERY difficult even for people that are really good at it, these developers have sunk hours of time into fixing things to make the game run as smoothly as possible and at the end of the day they had to pull a bunch of features and rebuild things to make them more optimal. I personally feel that's a good thing.

If you're still with me at this point, I appreciate it. I've got a couple more points to make and I hope you'll read them.

My fourth point goes more towards those features and towards the people that are complaining about the removal/changes in the game. Change is scary, but change is GROWTH. Change is moving forward, change is taking what you have and making it something else. I know for a fact a lot of people were disappointed not to see X feature, or that Y was changed because the developers. The people that brought you this game- with without whom you wouldn't have been able to play it period I must stress. Decided on a change, they have that complete freedom to do that. People that bought the game early KNEW what they were getting into, or at least should have. Betas are always subject to change, I'm pretty sure Steam even warns people. "Hey, this game is in "early access" so the content you're paying for is subject to change" etc etc. A lot of people probably knew this and still bought the game and enjoyed it. For 100's of hours and these people are miffed because 15 dollars, even if we divided that into 100 hours it comes out to about 15 cents an hour for entertainment. You're telling me that you're complaining about a game that lost features, when you only paid 15 cents for a continually evolving game, a continually updating game. Continued playing it and made the value even more worth those 15 dollars. If you played 200+ that's like saying you paid 7.5 cents an hour for entertainment. That's pretty good value if I do say so myself. Even I who have only put about 70 hours as I mentioned previously am still getting a pretty damn good value. 21 cents an hour for entertainment so far, and it keeps getting lower every day I play it.

I want to address this firmly. The features MIGHT come back. I have no idea if they will. I have no idea if they won't be something different that addresses things people want. All I know is that WE, as the fan base need to chill out and give developers some breathing room. Most of us that have even played more than 15+ hours of Starbound have gotten more than our money's worth. I've paid more for greater disappointments (I'm looking at you Pikmin 1(Pikmin 2 was beast)), for buggier games. (I'm looking at you Skyrim(I love Skyrim as an FYI but it's buggy as heck.)) Yet I've been satisfied for the most part with my play through. (I have some qualms but again, I'm waiting to see where the game goes.)

My fifth and final thing I'm discussing is to relieve any tensions my arguments/opinions/anything you think I've stated and taken or misconstrued as passive aggressive, or happened to think was directed right at you.
I honestly don't know anyone here... Okay I know a couple people from Terraria Forums. I have absolutely no right to call any one particular person out and I don't really have that kind of capacity I love a good majority of people and am a total optimist and a lot of my views expressed here were/are me being optimistic because I've had fun in this game and want that to continue being the case as updates are added and the game AND community grows intertwined, together, knitted by the bond that player plays, developer says, everyone stays. We all have fun for days. Can we do that? Please, is it so much to ask that we give the developers time, that we be patient and say. "Alright, you know- you've given us entertainment to BEGIN WITH, so the route you're probably going will give us at least or MORE entertainment as we get further along."

Do I agree that players have a right to be mad? Not really, do I feel like the developers should have given more warning when things changed over. A small message maybe? But honestly as I said further up my post; I find that there was more than enough warning being as it was in Beta/Early Access. Period, as a person playing the game you could have put in 5 minutes to learn what that means before buying the game. You're free to dislike the devs for taking features out, you're free to dislike me for seeing a brighter road that might just be hogwash in the end. That's fine, your opinion, more power to you. This is my opinion though, please respect that as equally as I sympathize to the loss of features you enjoyed, or the game you feel this isn't compared to how it was.

Thank you very much for your time. Thank you developers for making this game, thank you moderators for keeping this forum clean and healthy and thriving despite people who feel their opinions are fact. LIKE ME AHAHA!!!
Instinct for life >;D

Edit: Real quick before people read this. 1. I'm going to bed so I'll respond promptly tomorrow after moving preparations. and 2. If you want to address a point just type something like 1), 2) etc. It's just easier and takes up less room than quoting in my opinion.