TheBeesKnees

I haven't played in ~a year, but afaik yes! The benefits of selfhosted servers. I think there were 3-4 servers going strong on the weekends. Unfortunately, a lot of those players were the... worst kind. Hyper competitive, 10k hours, surrender the second something goes wrong types. (Edit- this might have been because my own ELO was super high, so different levels might vary)

Still amazing to see any activity this long!

My understanding of the situation was one of the creators/founders/idk said they don't want to do anything more with guns. Hence why subnautica has no "real" weapons and no NS3. This was a long time ago with some old tweet(?). I don't know if a community-funded thing would get support from the original creators.

The whole ordeal with the game engine is so.. ironic. They opt'd for it because they wanted the infestation to spread dynamically and it wouldnt work with existing engines... so one whole custom game engine later... the infestation feature they desperately wanted was scrapped anyways.

At least it benefited from being easy to mod... the modders are the real MVPs. Kept the game alive with everything from performance, to matchmaking, to balancing.

I'd absolutely support a crowdfunded ""NS3"".. but I don't know if that's feasible without the official company's sign off? Like it couldn't just copy the core gameloop/aliens because of copyright? I can't imagine it feeling the same without Skulks, Gorges, Lerks, Fades, Onos. The way they traverse the map and fill a niche would be hard to beat.

Let me preface by saying NS/NS2 are my all-time favorite games

NS2 had a terrible launch.* It was unstable, terrible performance, limited to no tutorials, and no match matching system. The game has an intense learning curve, and players who had thousands of hours from NS1 / Early Access. It's also a game where cooperative play was imperative, so the matches really stink for everyone when teams are unbalanced / one guy curbstomps the other team.

It did eventually address those things, but much of it came too late. I so desperately want NS3 to bring it new life... but that doesn't ever seem to be coming. I want more games where I get to be the alien/creature/monster!

My desperation hit an all-time high when I started making a game in Godot... ;-;

*To be fair, they also needed to launch ASAP because they needed the money to stay afoat

but it takes literally no effort to use it.

In written text form? Absolutely. It's easy to adjust sentences/correct details before hitting submit.

Verbal conversations? I don't think it's fair to say it takes no effort... maybe it's from ADHD, but simply using they/them reliably took an embarrassingly long amount of time. Neopronouns are a whole different challenge for my ADHD-autopilot'd mouth that's already struggling with forming coherent sentences.

Of course I'm not saying we shouldn't respect their preferences...I just wanted to add my perspective on the 'no effort' part.

If this was the expectation, then it should have been a checklist and/or had N/A available. I don't think your data for this section will be accurate since myself/others replying did not use it this way.

I used "disagree" as "I am using a non-self hosted service for this," the middle as "N/A" and the agree as "I am hosting a service for this"...