In this episode, we recap the latest news of Star Atlas from the past week.
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Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, this is Matt with Intergalactic Herald. Welcome to my Star Atlas Week in Review podcast. This is podcast number 58. All articles and videos mentioned here can be found at intergalacticherald. com. Please look for News Recap 107. So first kind of a quick introduction of what I’ll be discussing today.
[00:00:19] One would be the Surge UE5 showroom technical test that had happened last weekend, though I guess there is potentially another one today. I’m recording this on Saturday. The Star Atlas economic team released their quarterly economic report. AFIA had a great new article about the kind of new economic paradigm changes in Star Atlas.
[00:00:40] Starbase was delayed, so I’ll talk about that. And then just wrap it up with some of my thoughts in the Star Atlas, blockchain gaming and other things. So before I get started on the bulk of the content, just a couple things on my two Star Atlas projects. One is my merch store, intergalacticgear.
[00:00:58] com. If you actually go to that, I’m looking for people to, um, fill out the merch survey kind of tell me what kind of merch Star Atlas merchandise you’re interested in. So please go to intergalacticgear. com and fill that out. And also I am still on the back burner trying to build a paid Star Atlas community, kind of a non guild guild for Star Atlas gamers who don’t want to get into a guild, but yet still want to chat with other people.
[00:01:23] But Find the main star house discord just a little too chaotic trying to keep up with things, especially if you can’t check it on a frequent basis. So if you go to intergalactic coalition. com you can sign an interest survey there. And once you get enough people interested we’ll go ahead and try to get that rolling.
[00:01:39] So Okay, so let’s go ahead and get into the bulk of the content from the past week. The first thing that happened last Saturday was the Surge. So Surge is a specific game play style for the UE show, UE5 showroom. It’s being billed as faction versus faction versus faction. So you just pick a faction and then you have, in effect, the two competitors.
[00:02:02] So it’s a Again, I want to say first person shooter, but that’s a style. It’s a shooter. You go around trying to kill the other component or other team collecting things. And then if you return those back to some of these I don’t know what you call them, points, specific points, rally points points get added.
[00:02:20] And then when the time frame of the session is over, the faction with the most points When’s that thing? These are just technical tests. In fact Yeah, I guess two weeks ago they tried one and it didn’t even work. This one at least worked. Most of the information I got was from a video from beyond the horizon who was playing it.
[00:02:38] I think he said at some points he saw like 170 people in it but didn’t mention it was incredibly laggy. Which I think the team acknowledged later, but again, that’s a technical test. That’s why they’re doing these things So just watching this video. I have to admit it was pretty cool Nevertheless, even if it was only 170 people and it was laggy, but again, totally fine We got to do tests.
[00:03:01] You got to have real world situations, especially given the International component or parts of the Star Atlas community. So I think all that was was great. And, and I don’t know, I guess, I guess it’s just a building upon the bot thing they were doing on one of the other places. But I think it’s the idea that the people you’re playing against aren’t bots adds obviously to the enjoyment of most online gaming.
[00:03:30] So definitely see the potential. And again, this is kind of a slight take on the traditional deathmatch free for all. Obviously Star Atlas is focusing on the factions as being a major court, not coordination, but a grouping perspective. And so that, that feels good that there’s a a shooter game coming that also fits into those faction things.
[00:03:51] Last weekend, late, I think on Friday, the economics team published their economics report. I did go through it, but it was a week ago and I promptly forgotten everything. So I’m not saying it was boring, not saying it wasn’t useful. It just doesn’t I guess stick in your mind unless you’re really into economics or an economist.
[00:04:10] But I am very thankful that there is these kind of things within this starless ecosystem because it really does show that there’s, there are People way smarter than me on economics, looking at these things, looking at trends, treating this as a true economy, not just, you know, Hey, we’ve got a game.
[00:04:29] We’re trying to make money. And oh, by the way, there’s this economic thing. So I think as, as Star Atlas hopefully continues to develop its economy and other things like that having these as a ongoing cadence of quarterly reports, I think is, is an excellent thing and very glad to see that Star Atlas is doing this going further.
[00:04:48] On the same topic of economics, AFIA though I think it was written by Flankracker, put out a great article, and again, you could find the link to that in my article. News recap, if you go to intergalacticherald. com, look for news recap number 107 or of course obviously you can go to AFIA’s website.
[00:05:05] It was kind of talking about some of the economic paradigm shifts that are occurring coming out of the, the more passive moving into more of the active way to things. One of the biggest takeaways and it was, I guess this is why it’s great when people kind of synthesize a whole bunch of things and bring it together was that going forward.
[00:05:24] And this is more of the active as opposed to the passive that you really have to do things to get LP, which is now loyalty points. And again, just to name it, it’s just more of you do actions, you gain something, but then those LP are exchanged for Atlas. And again, I won’t the article goes over all the ins and outs that it’s you know, again, it’s a greater read than I could state.
[00:05:46] But it was more of, again, this thought that for now, now we have, you know, Actions resulting in an outcome and then that outcome can be converted into Atlas. So in addition to the other mechanics we have, which are the resources that we need to do things and then more resources in order to craft things, to be able to do things, ultimately, all of those things now level are building upon that.
[00:06:11] Doing all these things gets you the loyalty points, the LP, and then that’s how you now get the Atlas, as opposed to getting to the passive way we had been doing it before with the Faction Fleet or Score. So, and then another thing the article brought up that was kind of insightful was, again, that this is now the first time we’ve really had, even though it’s indirect a multiplier component.
[00:06:31] Again most of this relates to how Starbase is going to work, because that’s the only. Part with the economy that it’s all faction based and the Atlas is distributed per faction. So you are really one working together as a team because again, there’s no combat, but you’re really indirectly competing.
[00:06:48] Well, I mean, back up, you are in a faction, but you are competing against your people in your faction because each faction gets the same amount of Atlas awarded a day. So it’s not really inner faction. No, sorry. I didn’t say that right. Okay. It’s not between factions, it’s within your own faction, but nevertheless you are doing some multiplayer type of actions.
[00:07:09] So again great read very insightful, the amount of information that was there. So, let’s see, it’s August 6th back on August 2nd, so on Tuesday the new version of Sage called StarBased was supposed to be released. However, it was due to Solana transaction issues. It was released the next day just started releasing.
[00:07:31] listening to the Atlas Brew that occurred on Wednesday, and they went into a little more in depth, and I guess there was a post in the Discord, that basically Star Atlas, the team itself, could not upload the not sure the right term, but the gaming components, because those two live on chain. They’re programs, I guess they were saying.
[00:07:48] They couldn’t upload their programs even because of all the Solana transaction issues. So they had to wait a day before they were able to do that. So, I mean, it was live. I’ll get into that. More of the star star based things there, but just kind of related to this releasing I actually admit, I was kind of surprised that they pretty much stayed with their original goal of announcing you know, they announced it in a number of places and then they, they stuck to it.
[00:08:15] They had to release it a day later because physically they couldn’t get it uploaded. And I don’t know, I’ve been pretty upfront on this kind of delays and announcing things that don’t occur and putting dates on things, but. After a couple of podcasts ago when I kind of brought up again the, I guess we’ll call it the company, um, communication company line.
[00:08:36] I don’t know what you say, not mission statement. But again, this is early alpha, excuse me, early access pre alpha. I guess if you kind of keep putting everything within that framework, I mean, why wouldn’t you release it or try to release it, even if it doesn’t work? Because again, it came out the next day.
[00:08:51] Metaverse Explorer don’t know which exact day, I think a couple days later, he put out a video and when he was just trying to log in OG, OCG Thor put out his video, he was confused by the character creation. So again, these are all initial bugs that you know, things that whatever reason didn’t, didn’t come up before they released.
[00:09:13] So I guess, you know, and again, now it’s a few days later and I guess it’s out there. But if, if you’re working toward a goal. And the goal is to keep working toward the goal, then yeah, you ship it. If your goal is to release a finished product that people can interact with that is quote unquote free of bugs, then you wouldn’t release it.
[00:09:37] So I think we have to, before we jump to any like, Oh, that failed. It doesn’t work. That really have to go back and say, well, but let’s think of what they’re trying to do. And it sure feels like the goal of Star Atlas is to, is to release things, whether they’re fully complete or not is not the point.
[00:09:56] And, and I guess, again, this all makes sense. It just needs to be properly communicated. And I think like on something like the surge one, that’s very clear that that’s a and, and they’re not. They’re not even happy with the tests, but again, they’re tests. Everybody knows that. And if we take that same kind of thing, if in the end we just sort of treat everything that comes out of Staris as being unstable, and I want to use the word unstable more than bugs or beta or pre alpha early access That they really don’t know if it works because there’s only so much testing can do internally and again I’m not saying that unstable is a negative term.
[00:10:37] It’s more of they’re just gonna be unstable and you’re running on top of a platform in this case Solana that is Having problems. So it there’s no reason to think you’ve released a hundred percent it bug free product It’s gonna be there anyways, so I guess Communication is important and I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer as time has gone on that this is the, the cadence and the, the, the goal that it’s early alpha or pre alpha, that’s going to be unstable, it’s going to be beta.
[00:11:10] They’re trying to test everything. They haven’t prom they haven’t communicated that, hey, this is great, this is awesome, we want everybody to get into it. So, you know, any of the past comments like, oh, you know, this is affecting economically, That’s unfortunately, you’ve made a wrong assumption. They never said it was going to work.
[00:11:28] So so in the end, I guess I’m still glad they’re, they’re building things, building things, things are coming out, seeing progress, but it’s still kind of hard to get too excited about actually engaging because well, one sometimes can’t but it does show that there is forward progress, things are getting incrementally better and I shouldn’t say better, they’re getting incrementally more.
[00:11:53] complex in the sense now we have this LP on top of the resources, you know, you can see if you step back how all of this is a progression of layering on more and more things. So hopefully someday again, Solana gets better, the products that come out from Star Atlas get better. I guess this is a small aside criticism, and again, I’m not a hundred percent sure, but just in watching the, you know, The Atlas Brew, and I think the Metaverse Explorers thing.
[00:12:21] Seeing how these XP things are there, and they seem like they’re progression, and they seem like they’re tied to the wallet. I just would really like it that we don’t have to keep changing these game ideas where we have to remove everything. I think some people were saying, where’s my ships? And it’s because they just assume they automatically transfer over from labs and didn’t Didn’t get the messages that you actually had to remove all your resources and your ships now again.
[00:12:44] They gave a two week overlap So again, that’s just people weren’t either listening or again We could could chalk that up to bad communication, but I’m not really sure it was bad communication I think people just aren’t engaged which again right or wrong, but anyways So again to summarize glad starbase exists.
[00:13:04] It’s intriguing the Indirect multiplayer, definitely the new economic changes are there. The idea of these one day epochs where you earn LP, which you then can cash in for different amounts of Atlas, depending upon things, the complexity and the, the strategy involved is definitely ramping up.
[00:13:23] It’s just unfortunate that because of Solana and bugs on the product itself, eh, you know, may or may not be really engaging right now. So. Moving on the Atlas Brew occurred actually only halfway listening through it, just the way my morning schedule worked out but they are doing a demo of Starbase, and so they were going over a lot of different things, so I think combining that with some of the other videos that are starting to come out from content creators is a great place to get started, so highly recommend that, or, worst case do listen to Beth’s three minute three T L D R Tuland and Reed videos, which are great to get a quick recap of the Atlas Bureau.
[00:14:03] So final kind of section to sort of my plans going forward. So my STARBASE plans, I am tempted to try it out on Sunday, but now that I’ve listened to a few things, it’s not as urgent, but I think my more pressing problem actually is I’ve been trying to re refresh or refuel, whatever, whatever the term is for my fleet that is in score and my faction claims and nothing seems to be working.
[00:14:27] So if I can’t even claim stuff or resupply stuff, I’m not even sure how the un, what is it? Undock? No. Leave the disband, I can’t remember what the terms were. All those are sage commands, but whatever you have to do to get your stuff out of score, if those commands would even work. So I, I may not even have a ship to take into star base, so it, it may not may not even work out.
[00:14:50] I may not, may not even spend the time. So we’ll kind of see. I, I might be tempted to try one ship and just see if I can remove, and if I can’t, then I’ll just. Not even try to do anything. So anyways, but the final two things I was kind of thinking about this early in the week, but I think it still holds true.
[00:15:07] I was kind of thinking again to myself, why is some of the star atlases gameplay on the blockchain? So for example, um, well move or You know, move ship from one star base to another, or any place within the sage. Why is that on the blockchain? Why does that need to be recorded? Now, I totally like the idea of ownership of assets being on the blockchain.
[00:15:29] Cause again, that opens up that, that seems like a natural difference from previous video game constructs where the blockchain now allows us to have basically identity control. So our wallet is our identity and our identity owns. Anything. And two people can come to an agreement through a marketplace that thing has value that widget and they decide to exchange it through an escrow service.
[00:15:55] I met a third person. I mean, that’s, that’s an incredible dynamic. But how many times do you do that? I mean, I get some people are using that as their game, but still, I mean, the tradition or the, the typical person wants to buy an asset in star Alice and then use that asset, they’re not going to be selling, buying and selling ships all the time, but they are going to be.
[00:16:17] Transferring resources. They are going to be, um, creating a fleet of ships. They’re going to be docking, undocking, moving, mining crafting, all of these things that to me don’t have anything to do with the ownership of the asset. I mean, I already have the asset now as a caveat or thing, there is all this talk about a prior profile and all this other stuff, but that doesn’t still take away the fact that’s more of how much interaction is the, you know, Person have to do with the blockchain.
[00:16:45] They’re still being dealt with on the blockchain. And given the problems that Solana is having and the inability for the starless team to really have too much impact on Solana, because again, it’s like saying I’m a factory and I’m building things, but I rely upon the public utility district for electricity.
[00:17:04] And if there’s no electricity, my factory can’t run. You go and tell the public utility district, I need power and they usually respond, but. Solana just says, yeah, it’s congested. And so it’s like, I mean, I get it. And maybe it is, maybe using my public utility district, they have to build another, you know, hydroelectric plan or a coal fire plan or nuclear plan or something just to generate more electricity.
[00:17:28] And they didn’t realize the demand will be there or something. I don’t know. Maybe my analogy breaks down, but there to me seems to be so many parts that don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, seem necessary, like they’re just unnecessary overhead. I mean, there’s, if I’m not, again, I’m not really sure I understand this, but when we like click to do something, there’s an interaction with the blockchain, but it’s really not interaction with the blockchains.
[00:17:52] These RPC servers, and I guess those aren’t Star Atlas, but then there’s the Starcom server, which sounds like it is Star Atlas. So there’s this whole set of technological pieces behind the scene and all those pieces aren’t necessarily the blockchain either. Again, I’m not a blockchain expert. I don’t know what I’m saying, but if you were a traditional video game and you were looking at capacity issues or performance issues, you control servers, you know, you’ve bought whatever, you know, again, thinking of the call of duty or the halos, you know, they all have online infrastructure.
[00:18:29] And if there’s a problem, they need to fix that infrastructure. But the developers have basically full control over that same infrastructure. So I don’t know, I guess I just still wonder why are every single thing in star Atlas on the blockchain? I don’t know. Maybe there’s a reason I get the ownership of assets.
[00:18:48] You know, it could be ships. It could be Atlas. It could be the R4s, the other things. But I mean, just the command of crafting, I, I don’t know. And again, maybe it’s, that’s the way they do. Cause again, they were having problems uploading the program. So I guess the programs live on the blockchain, but again, I don’t know what the benefit is.
[00:19:08] So again, It doesn’t really matter, the team has made these decisions to build the Sway, so there it is. And then the final thought, just on that same idea, and I was I don’t know, I think I was reading something about this upcoming Bitcoin halving. Again, I haven’t really followed it, but it was something built into the Bitcoin code that after a while it gets Less rewards or harder.
[00:19:30] I can’t remember which it is until everything is released, but it made it so that the miners who are getting reward basically get half that reward going forward. And again, I don’t understand economic theory and all that kind of stuff, but got me thinking. Bitcoin’s like, Oh yeah, it’s decentralized, all this, but isn’t it?
[00:19:50] But is it? I mean, these miners have to exist. And the economics, at least my vague understanding of the real world economics of mining is you’ve got to have these computers, or processing power, well I guess they’re computers, but they’re video cards or whatever. to run these complex math calculations. And that’s what helps to build the blocks on the, on the blockchain.
[00:20:15] Well, they were saying that at some point the rewards aren’t going to make sense. And so the miners will just stop mining because economically they can’t pay for their electrical power and cooling and hardware costs and all that kind of stuff. So I was thinking if the miners don’t exist because it isn’t economically feasible.
[00:20:34] Doesn’t that mean the blockchain doesn’t exist? I mean, it’s Not where it gets cheaper to run the blockchain or more distributed. It’s becoming more concentrated, which seems to be the antithesis of decentralization. So again, I could be wrong. I don’t understand all this stuff. I come from an IT background of, of, well, I wasn’t born into it.
[00:20:56] Old enough to be mainframes, but definitely client servers. And then, you know, the, the moving to the data centers of the, the Google’s and Microsoft’s of the world. So I kind of understand all of that stuff, but I, I don’t really get. This thing that, yeah, blockchain, or it exists. Well, it doesn’t exist. It, it requires all these participants and, and, and maybe that’s okay.
[00:21:20] But I was starting to realize if, again, your incentive to be a miner is that you get a reward and then something gets halved and now it’s half as much, I guess. I don’t know. There’s some theory that then that’s why the price keeps rising again. I’m not an economist. I don’t get all this junk, but if you, if the participants don’t want to maintaining the operations, then blockchain as itself doesn’t just sort of exist.
[00:21:46] It’s not like the air we breathe or water or something. It doesn’t, it isn’t just there. It requires resources. So anyways, I don’t know exactly what I’m saying, but in the end, going back to again, why are we on the blockchain? Why can’t I play my game? Because the blockchain is congested. Again, I don’t know.
[00:22:06] Gotta kind of go on a lot of faith and a lot of, well, it’ll get better type of things, and it probably will. I mean, I wouldn’t be shocked if a year from now we’re all coming back. Oh, yeah, I remember when Solana was slow. But these do seem like things that a true kind of open system would well, not be dependent upon.
[00:22:26] You should have backups because, I mean, even the idea of a electrical grid that factory could have Backup power in the form of generators that they control with diesel fuel. I mean, again, not something you’d run 24 by 7, but in the event of a power outage, you have a redundancy. There’s, there’s, maybe that’s what I’m looking for.
[00:22:43] There is no redundancy to Solana. Star Atlas has no plan, not, not a plan B, but they don’t have any way to overcome. If Solana is down or congested, their game is down or congested. So yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. Don’t know enough about this. Anyway, that’s, that’s it. That’s all I got. Just ramble, rambling thoughts on that.
[00:23:02] So, to wrap it up, again, if you’re interested in being a guest on this podcast, always looking for Starless community people, so it could be a community member who just wants to chat. Definitely need to start out as builders in the IP program. Other content creators love to have more startless employees.
[00:23:20] If you’re wanting to come on and talk about your area, definitely would love to chat with you. Kind of taking, um, beginner focus is sort of the content I like to produce. So again, love to like talk more about the economy or something or how the technical, Oh, actually that would be interesting. Ooh, that’s really interesting.
[00:23:37] You know, more about what is Starcom? What are RPCs? Yeah, that’s actually, I’d really like to know more about that. Anyways if anybody is interested in that, I’d love to have you there. You can reach out to me through my website, intergalacticherald. com. Just go to the contact page and fill that out.
[00:23:50] And then just my two Star Atlas projects, my merch store. Please go to intergalacticgear. com, fill out the merch survey. I’d love to get some feedback on what you’d be willing to, or like to see to purchase. And then if you’re interested in a community of Star Atlas gamers that aren’t affiliated with guilds, feel Please go to intergalactic coalition.
[00:24:08] com and fill out that interest survey. And that’s it. Thanks for listening. This is again, Matt with the Intergalactic Herald. Have a great week ahead.