Multiplayer doesn't actually exist - Change my mind

[Troubleshooter]

16 players at a time, in a solar system sized map, with draw distances measured in tiny chunks. Everything is a hiding place, and everyone hides perpetually.
There's so little interaction that other than people playing cooperatively in the same faction, you will almost never see another player.

People avoid contact to the extent they wont even salvage a static wreck with weeks worth of resources to just sitting there for the taking. Even when notified to come-and-get-it.

Offers for PCU trading are frequent. Everyone wants more PCU to build with, and then avoid contact at all costs even harder. The PCU limits don't seem to make players happy, and given the constant lag on the servers, they really can't be increased without risking the server stability.

Last, I submit that SPLITSIE himself highlighted the limitations of the Keen servers. He played cautious for days, hiding and avoiding contact. Then, I believe he realized it wasn't terribly compelling game play, ran into the PCU limit on his craft, and drafted his co-star into the server just to provide some minor relief from the standard "multi-player experience"

Then he even drafted other players into his series just to have SOME content, because otherwise NO ONE is doing anything outside of their faction.

Multi-player doesn't exist. On line play is a sort of shared-single-player experience, where everyone is perpetually hiding and trying to get more PCU rather than engaging in some emergent storytelling or anything like that.

The multi-player forum is full of people looking for players, the server list is full of empty servers, and the KEEN servers rarely reach capacity... Seems like there's a serious disconnect in the community.

[piddlefoot]

The real problem is that the game was originally designed around being a SP game only, it was never really designed for MP play.
MP was added, and thus that brought heaps of issues with it because the game was never designed to run in that environment.
Game design never took into account MP when the game was first designed.

The game was a focus on physics in its first iterations.

There was no story, no MP and hardly any blocks etc.

The game, unless redesigned , loosing some features that people really like, like walking in moving ships, will never perform much better than it does now, and to be fair KEEN has optimised the game already because it used to be far worse in MP than it is current day.

But the performance problems in MP SE has, are an inherent problem of the games design.

The game runs EVERYTHING in one playfield or instance.
That is very bad for performance for MP games, its not even great for a SP voxel game because you can build and overload the sim speed, slowing it down.
It makes cross server connections, pretty much impossible and then puts the game into the realm of needing a super computer to run the damned server if you want hundreds in the server.

Getting over 100 in a server in this genre is fast becoming the norm. The standard to aim for.

SE will never do that with any real success.
Thats a pretty huge failing for a game trying to be a MP game in this genre.

I figured all this out years ago, it shouldnt take long to figure that out if you read about how the game engine works and what the game was in its earliest patches, if they still exist, as KEEN did abandon one forum and start a new one, which got rid of a heap of grief about the abandonment of MinerWars, the game used to develop SEs engine..You should all read about it, its fascinating.

[DragoF1sh]

Depends on the server and the community playing the server. In the survival server I play, I used to run a trade station and many players would peacefully stop by to trade resources and participate in weekly events. In PVP servers, people will hide because it takes time to be ready for combat. They will try to stay far away to prevent sabotage and don't have any reason to interact with others, however this can be mitigated by introducing events, capture points, resource caches, and removing basically all hiding places and making areas specifically for basing. The reason why most servers have low amounts of player interaction is because there are such a small amount of players, on a map that is too big, and there is next to no reason to interact with other players. You can easily change that by being the event player on your server. Make some events and invite everyone and include prizes. Have a cargo raid with boxes of uranium or have a race with some rovers. It only takes 1 player to make the entire server interact more from what Iv'e seen.

[♔ןoן♔ sardukar]

Originally posted by DragoF1sh:

Depends on the server and the community playing the server. In the survival server I play, I used to run a trade station and many players would peacefully stop by to trade resources and participate in weekly events. In PVP servers, people will hide because it takes time to be ready for combat. They will try to stay far away to prevent sabotage and don't have any reason to interact with others, however this can be mitigated by introducing events, capture points, resource caches, and removing basically all hiding places and making areas specifically for basing. The reason why most servers have low amounts of player interaction is because there are such a small amount of players, on a map that is too big, and there is next to no reason to interact with other players. You can easily change that by being the event player on your server. Make some events and invite everyone and include prizes. Have a cargo raid with boxes of uranium or have a race with some rovers. It only takes 1 player to make the entire server interact more from what Iv'e seen.

Yeah sure, but i fell into the same trap.

It should not be up to the playerbase to make a game enjoyable. Excluding mods to a certain degree.

[EmberStar]

Originally posted by ♔ןoן♔ sardukar:

Originally posted by Xpain:

I think that the problem is a poor optimized MP game, everything has become more a more grinding, refineries slow, ships way too fragile, resources scarce ( I mean here Uranium) all of this in a huge solar system with less than 20 players, The servers are very limited because the lag, any change in the PCU or the number of players and everything got frozen to a stand still. grinding for a week to make a combat ship that could be piece of scrap in 20 seconds.

4 days on keen server looking for uranium, thats got to be the worst grind i have ever experienced....asteroid after asteroid after asteroid....not fun.

I spent a week just looking for cobalt. Deep space start, and by the second night (and twentieth asteroid scanned by running all over it with my hand drill out) I was to the point of chasing down every Unknown Signal and *hoping* it was one of the troll kind that tries to fly away, because the hydrogen thruster type would have metal grids I could rip out in all the small thrusters. I found a Uranium asteroid and a solid ice comet in the first night, but couldn't even build a small mining ship or cargo container to do anything with either.

[Troubleshooter]

Originally posted by EmberStar:

Originally posted by ♔ןoן♔ sardukar:

4 days on keen server looking for uranium, thats got to be the worst grind i have ever experienced....asteroid after asteroid after asteroid....not fun.

I spent a week just looking for cobalt. Deep space start, and by the second night (and twentieth asteroid scanned by running all over it with my hand drill out) I was to the point of chasing down every Unknown Signal and *hoping* it was one of the troll kind that tries to fly away, because the hydrogen thruster type would have metal grids I could rip out in all the small thrusters. I found a Uranium asteroid and a solid ice comet in the first night, but couldn't even build a small mining ship or cargo container to do anything with either.

Did you ever buy that Red ship?

[EmberStar]

Originally posted by Troubleshooter:

Originally posted by EmberStar:

I spent a week just looking for cobalt. Deep space start, and by the second night (and twentieth asteroid scanned by running all over it with my hand drill out) I was to the point of chasing down every Unknown Signal and *hoping* it was one of the troll kind that tries to fly away, because the hydrogen thruster type would have metal grids I could rip out in all the small thrusters. I found a Uranium asteroid and a solid ice comet in the first night, but couldn't even build a small mining ship or cargo container to do anything with either.

Did you ever buy that Red ship?

Yes, a while ago. I've been busy and hadn't logged onto the server for a bit though, and the last time I checked all my grids had been deleted. Oops. And oh well. If I'd actually planned to leave I guess I could have given my ships to someone though. I had a pretty decent dragon's hoard of rare materials saved up.

[Troubleshooter]

Well, congrats on hitting your goal. The server I joined to try the gas station deleted my grids as well. Decided it just isn't worth my time to fight this stuff.

[Tails]

The Keen servers are at 77% of capacity right now. This is similar to what I've seen before.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2099691283

Any claims about the official servers "rarely reaching capacity" is disingenuous as there was at the time of that screenshot 2 servers you could log on to in order to reach the limit and one that had already reached the limit. One of them filled while writing this so make it 2 full servers. I've seen Keen UK 5 having free slots once, just after a reboot.

The least crowded server had 31% of the slots taken, but if you play on that one you do it consciously knowing there are options with more players available.

[piddlefoot]

Yea but so what, the max is a lousy 16 players so putting it into % was a nice sneaky way of trying to hide that fact, 30% is just a few players........

Games in this genre should be aiming for 100, or more.
With just 16 max the odds of you even running into another person in PvP are limited, you need to go hunting, hours of la la la, in a playfield with no boundaries, so players can go out so far the odds of you finding them becomes 1 in a BILLION.

Its a bit of a joke really, MP just has to many limitations in SE to ever be anything special.

So whats 77% about 10 people, oooOOO so not awesome.

Other games in this genre can host over 100 already in this genre, voxel building space exploration bla bla.

How can you call a 16 player max limit, a success for MP for a game in this genre thats supposed to bring lots of people together in a universe, it utterly fails at that.

This is before we even touch on the massive performance issues the game has after a couple of months with 16 on a server, the sim speed, the games had a heap of features trimmed or toned down just to make MP work, for example, when MP first came out there was no way to delete anything that just floated off, like blocks blown off your ship in a collision, so they would float forever, slowly dragging sim speed down over time, things like that got changed to make MP work, in its first iteration MP was hardly even playab;e, so its come a long way no question, but it will never really be anything special in MP, it just lacks far to many features to ever be anything special in that arena.

77% of an Empyrion server is 77 players.
77% of an SE server is about 10 players.
77% of an EVE server is, lol, thousands of players.
77% of Starbase is hundreds of players.
77 % of almost any other game in this genre, is more than SE 77% ratio of players.

Its one of the worst forms of MP in the entire genre, because KEEN didnt really put much design into it, the game is primarily a single player game.
So thats what you should expect, an outstanding SP, which SE definitely has, but a pretty average MP.

Making posts in the % instead of raw numbers can be exposed just as easily.

[A Fat, Angry Serval]

Originally posted by piddlefoot:

77% of an EVE server is, lol, thousands of players.

77% of an EVE server is 77% of EVE Online's entire playerbase. EVE Online uses a single-server, multiple-instance architecture running on an IBM supercomputer.

[Troubleshooter]

If the game were designed around the number of players and lack of PVE content I wouldn't care if it was 4 player per server... but independent of the player and technical limits is the lack of care that went into the systems that players have to influence their game-play.

Think of it this way. Battle Royale games only work because every few minutes the playable area shrinks. This forces players to move together or exit the game. The novelty of a large-open map is still there, but only for a few minutes at the start of any game... and as time progresses there will be more player interaction around the remaining play area.

Space engineers doesn't have "watering holes" that encourage interaction between different types of players. Even co-op play is more or less pointless as there just isn't a challenge to collectively overcome (except maybe for preventing raids by trolls I suppose) There's no reason to work together, so every signal is deemed dangerous and to be avoided as a result.

But the endless asteroids in the vastness of space means you can safely pick out a spot and play solo until PCU limit is reached. After that... what then?

I get that sand-boxing is its own thing... you make your own goals and go about achieving them. But you can do all this in single player, without lag, or PCU limits.

It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to set a stage for player interaction either. The only reason they don't exist is that Keen doesn't want to support them. Giving your players things to do, in addition to free play, should be standard fare from a game developer.

[piddlefoot]

Yea, thanks for pointing out another reason SE fails in MP, one instance, on our home PCs or a server in a data center, what were they ever thinking........

The point of that post was about how low SE MP numbers really are, that using a % instead of a raw number attempts to hide that because the numbers are so low.

Empyrion runs on home PCs and data center servers, it can pull OVER 100 in a server, Ive seen 140 in a server in that game, the server was a dual CPU xeon with 128g RAM, SSD drives, and stupid fast internet connection.

Tell me, can SE even dream of such numbers ?

Kinda says it all, so many people on this forum bag that game, yet it blows this games MP completely away and it has more features and is far more complex in its AI and has alot more happening at any one time in every playfield, of which it can literally run dozens of instances, across your multicore CPU, utilising its cores, and even better, taking advantage of hyperthreading and doubling the thread count, so 8 cores 16 threads, giving it the ability to host over 100 in a PC, you made at home.

Thats how you do MP in this genre.

When its done right, you dont need to hide the numbers inside of a % number, you can use raw numbers, which is really much more informative.

[Dan2D3D]

Originally posted by Snow:

The Keen servers are at 77% of capacity right now. This is similar to what I've seen before.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2099691283

Any claims about the official servers "rarely reaching capacity" is disingenuous as there was at the time of that screenshot 2 servers you could log on to in order to reach the limit and one that had already reached the limit. One of them filled while writing this so make it 2 full servers. I've seen Keen UK 5 having free slots once, just after a reboot.

The least crowded server had 31% of the slots taken, but if you play on that one you do it consciously knowing there are options with more players available.

You may have a internet problem cause I see about 3000 servers and 15 Official servers

Your screenshot = 389 servers in Total + with only 6 Official servers = ??

May be a server in your country that is down ?


Edit
sorry I made some corrections

Edit 2
Oh! You may have changed the search Advanced settings!?

[piddlefoot]

Yea mine shows more than that also.
Some places I guess dont see the whole net, maybe its something to do with the junction set ups in there countries, and theres also countries that filter the net and every account etc.

[EmberStar]

Originally posted by Dan2D3D:

Originally posted by Snow:

The Keen servers are at 77% of capacity right now. This is similar to what I've seen before.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2099691283

Any claims about the official servers "rarely reaching capacity" is disingenuous as there was at the time of that screenshot 2 servers you could log on to in order to reach the limit and one that had already reached the limit. One of them filled while writing this so make it 2 full servers. I've seen Keen UK 5 having free slots once, just after a reboot.

The least crowded server had 31% of the slots taken, but if you play on that one you do it consciously knowing there are options with more players available.

You may have a internet problem cause I see about 3000 servers and 15 Official servers

Your screenshot = 389 servers in Total + with only 6 Official servers = ??

May be a server in your country that is down ?


Edit
sorry I made some corrections

Edit 2
Oh! You may have changed the search Advanced settings!?

I only ever see about four official Keen servers, but I'm pretty sure at one point I was poking through advanced settings and my game is set to filter out anything with a ping of over 250 ms. I can still reach other Keen servers directly using the Direct Connection and an IP address, so they're definitely still there.

I don't remember *changing* that setting, so maybe at some point a patch accidentally reset the default somehow?