at the moment, starsonata just seems boring and pointless now and theres like 0 growth that i have seen.

does the new SP system have anything to do with it?

why is the growth of SS so small?

it just seems SS is dying in a way, and feels so empty now, this isnt exactly what i remember with C1.

only things that changed that i have seen is, oly, new SP system, and overall t21 content. (and ofc, C2)

i know theres alot of bugs, but much of them seem minor annoyances, some people say its because of balance issues and lack of advertisement, but i dont know.

thoughts?

Oh its the SP system. But they wont admit to it.

Probably that or the fact that there is no "amazing" gear at the lower techs that are stronger than any other. It's worth noting that people would like a challenge that gets them decent gear or special gear that only can be gotten by missions. For now the best thing that a new player thinks they can get is the Zobitan's Beam. It does low damage and does not help with killing Urqa AI alone. There needs to be gear that helps the player get enough dps to basically kill all of the nexus ai very easily.

If it were the SP system, that would be the best possible thing for the SS administration, seeing as it would take 5 minutes to fix. You really think Jeff wouldn't take 5 minutes to make his game a run-away success?

The real reason why SS isn't growing is it's being crushed under the near-inexorable foot of fortune. Most indie games go under, and SS in looking more and more like no exception.

No the only reason why they wont do that 5 min fix is since they want the current SP system to Force new player to have to hit more content which is alot more of a grind which was never needed for the c1 players.

There is a number of things hurting the game. I can't really say them all because some are complex or i just don't feel like making a wall of text.

I would say the SP system is not helping though.

The shortest answer we could hope for. If you want a more comprehension report and are willing to read quite a lot, ask S_S, I and a few others like Spatzz.

Culmination of factors, where the SP system comes in is that they are trying to force you to remain in an area of the game that has content ranging from none to shitty for longer periods of time without the playerbase to support it. Larger games can force those types of grinds because you're at least not alone and there are other people to play and interact with, and an excess of content is usually available. SS as said before has no content at those levels worth doing and maybe 5 legitimately low level players in the whole game.

So, the SP system, combined with the game being a complete shit hole until tech 20, makes playing it at all rather pointless unless you are already on or past t20.

Of course that's not really the only thing, the game has un-engaging gameplay, no lore to speak of, no class diversity, no clear upgrades within tech levels, no in depth tier system. Right now SS is the skeleton of a good game waiting to be filled with a body, it literally only fulfills the bare essentials of being a playable game, and granted that has gotten it this far, but it's starting to crash hard.

there will always be things hurting the game. thats part of the problem with indie games .

As far as the growth goes, it depend on how you look at it. There has been a constant decrease in "end game players" due to well, the fact they reached the end game heh. As far as the global population goes, its a very slight constant increase, but its increasing.

Heres a little graph for the quantity of unique ip addresses connecting to the game server per month.

I heard Guild Wars 2 had a unique way of killing the grind/making lower levels useful and enjoy their experience. I could be wrong, but seems like an interesting mechanism.

All i know is the new player base is pretty retarded lol.

So about 25 new people per month and assuming 10-15 of those people don't stick around... just lol

That graph is a little bit misleading. It shows IP's popping in, but the things is that no matter what you do, the total number will ALWAYS increase. You need to make a graph of IP's that log in, and compare those IP's to the IP's that show up next month.

Then connect all the IP's to an account, specifically p2p accounts. And you will see that the total number of p2p IP's are dropping.

this graph is the number of unique ip logging in during that month, not cumulative (july is from july 01 to july 31, sept is from sept 01 to sept 30 etc).

And yes the growth is pretty minimal, but its a growth none the less. the number of those who stay / quit etc is meaningless since it would reflect in the following month. The increase is 15-25 but thats an increase after factoring those who never came back and whatnot