I'd like to make a complaint: all of this junk with Project Zomboid has been a kick in the balls to Starbound. Staff has done a wonderful job of fracturing their player base: all of that talk about "SB is going to die! Antares must live on!" is utter crap, because opening up a Project Zomboid server has only hastened the demise of the Starbound server.
Possibly. There's nothing really to be done with SB at the moment. It's always been mainly player maintained. If people want to switch, they'll switch. If not, they'll stay. It doesn't matter which, a community is a community.
I doubt SB will die out, it's what this community's been built around after all. I just don't think there's fixing it anytime soon.
I'm sure Starbound will pick back up when Chucklefish actually decides to update it. As a person who's not a huge fan of Project Zomboid, I doubt it has anything to do with the Starbound server being a bit slow lately, RP-wise. Things are just getting stale. Hopefully the next update will change that.
The crashes are returning, this time on the Mawl. Last time the main hubs were crashing and rendered it impossible to RP in them led to the biggest decline in active userbase in a long while. I fear this current focus in PZ will mean this issue will never be solved.
The issues with the crashing are something we can't do a whole lot about. ILC was banned due to being suspected as the cause, and that's really the best solution we can come up with at this time. If you see anyone using the mod, it's as simple as reporting them, really.
Nothing that we know of just yet. The theory was that ILC was the cause, and that if everyone had it uninstalled, planets that had yet to be affected by it would be safe. So, either people are still using ILC, or the issue is unrelated. It's difficult to know.
Here's my prediction. In a few days the server will hit a lull as the current hub is crashing non-stop. Average players will continue to drop and turn to private planets to do private rp. A new colony will show up, which will be public. It will work wonders for up to a month until crashes start to happen all over again, whereas private planets are strangely intact, even those built with ILC. Rollbacks continue to do no good to stop the crashes. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, a new server for another game opens for the Antares community and fragments the dwindling player count even more. In time, folks will lose interest as servers fragment more and more and finding other players becomes harder and harder, causing them to move on to other things. Antares slowly loses more and more players as the main reason we are here, Starbound RP, continues to be assailed by these crashes that do not affect any other rival servers and cannot be solved in any way. Unless something is done that stops the public hubs from crashing.
It could be griefing, but nothing shows up in the logs about it and I don't know who would waste their time targeting us in particular.
Yet only colonies publically announced and given co-ordinates are corrupted, and only after a certain period of time passes. Private planets built entirely with ILC are immune. Strangely enough, older public planets before crashes started to appear are fine to this day. Regarding griefing... there are a thousand reasons. Jealousy, hatred, a rush of power, self amusement... or a mix of everything.
And if things continue as they are, and all things point towards it currently, the entire community will suffer more than it already is suffering. I don't know what it is, as I am not one in position to see for myself, but this whole "be patient and play PZ" strategy is not a viable solution.
Rather than letting the community die down because all we have is Starbound, which is currently experiencing these issues, Project Zomboid was introduced as a medium for RP to keep players interested. We are not forgetting about this issue or ignoring the fact that we're experiencing these crashes; we simply have no way to fix them. If you can provide an answer to why we're experiencing them, or even better, a solution to them, by all means, go ahead. But telling us that we should focus entirely on Starbound because it's experiencing these issues, which will inevitably cause players to get tired and leave, is rather pointless because we have no fix. Again, I am no fan of Project Zomboid, but I can appreciate the fact that it's the best solution we've got to a dwindling player count for our community.
Someone really has to make a Shakespearean tragedy play about this server. Or a similarly tragic documentary.
I cannot on the basis that I have no access to mod tools or even knowledge on how to properly examine a Starbound server. What I have is reasoning and deduction, and what I see as a player indicates an elaborate griefing method on popular, recent colonies, especially if my predictions come true. How it happens is beyond me because, like I said, I do not have the know-how to check the server proper. And what I am saying is this is all a band-aid approach that will not solve in the long run because people came for Starbound, not Project Zomboid. Most of the players come from our top sites on Starbound RP. With no fix the players will stop pouring energy into colonies with an expiration date and just leave, like many have. Starbound is experiencing these issues for a long time and there is no answer in the horizon without a fix. Giving up and attempting this strategy of "let us wait and pray it fixes itself" will doom the community. Sorry for being the one to say it.
Kazyyk needs to make an official announcement on the front page. ILC was banned quietly and i've encountered people using it because they had no idea it was banned. ILC was just silently added to the banned mods list and if you read the list before ILC was added you could easily miss knowing ILC is banned.
As someone who does have access to the server logs and who has spent more than enough time looking through them to try and determine the cause of these crashes, I can assure you that there is nothing that shows up. Players are disconnected and that's all the logs tell us. I was and still am convinced that these issues may be due to griefing, but we have no hard evidence that it is and even worse, we don't know how it's being done. I can assure you that we have not given up. There is a massive difference between giving up and exhausting all other options.
