Two weeks ago I put up a player survey to gauge interest in a possible future Starcom game.
So far, I've received over 600 responses. Most of the players who left comments expressed enthusiastic interest in either another game or DLC. The general vibe I got was similar to the responses after Nexus: more of the same, don't change too much.
One of the specific questions I asked was about the mission/quest guidance system which a challenge during Starcom: Unknown Space, particularly during Early Access. One of the most complaints was from players who found themselves stuck with no obvious way to progress the game.
According to the survey, two-thirds of players thought could have used a bit more guidance in one or two places, but otherwise was good. 28% felt there was just the right amount of guidance. 4% of players thought there was way too little guidance, and 2% thought there was too much. It's possible the "too little" camp might be under-represented in the data because players who became too frustrated might be less likely to complete the survey:
My hunch is that the Early Access builds through Ganymede had way too little guidance across a lot of missions, the first few Kepler builds had enough guidance for most missions, except a few spots in the late game which had seen less testing, and the post-launch updates mostly resolved those.
In terms of feature request ranking, the most popular were "more side-quests / exploration" closely followed by "longer main storyline", then more weapons and ship systems, followed some distance behind by "base building" then the improving "crew/skill system". "Items / Trade" and "Spheres of Influence" had more middling interest. Interestingly, "procedural universe / endless mode" was the most polarized response: It was tied with "more weapons / ship systems" for people who ranked it as their first choice, but just as many people ranked it as their last choice:
Multiple choice rankings are useful for getting a sense of player feelings at a glance, but for a better understanding of what players would like to see, I need to read through the free form comments. Not everyone fills out this field, but most do, so there's a lot to read and I've only gotten through maybe a quarter so far. This is giving more detail into what players meant with their rankings, as well as requests for changes/features I didn't list. Plus, quite a few players used the field to express their overall appreciation of the games, which is always nice.
I'm going to take a few days offline next week, and plan to print out the freeform comments to review. If you haven't yet, feel free to complete the player survey:
Player Survey