Balance is a two edged sword. Sure, you don't want singular dominant strategies, especially in a multiplayer environment, but in many modern games I get the impression that all my decisions as a player are completely irrelevant, because the magic of careful balancing will make sure that every immediate advantage/disadvantage will be countered by some precisely equivalent disadvantage/advantage somewhere down the road. If the answer to the question has no consequence, why even bother asking?

tldr; Good overall balance means momentary imbalance!

Extra Credits covers this. What you actually want in an overall well balanced game is occasional contextual imbalance. Cue someone mentioning "Rock, Paper, Scissors" here. That game is perfectly balanced, but in any given iteration, all the power is with the winner. Another example: Chess. The moment your opponent promotes his queen, in the context of that particular game, things are massively skewed against you -- which is immensely satisfying for your opponent.

If answering the question has immediate consequence for the situation you are in, then the task of the devs is to give the player the tools to see if they can improvise their way out of the pickle they are in, or exploit the advantage they have stumbled onto.

It was never meant to be multiplayer in real time afaik... just that you would see the impact of other players in the world... however confused the marketing became

That is not true. It was said that you could run into other players and interact with them in real time, but that it would be exceedingly rare due to the size of the galaxy. Well, happened on day 1 and, nope, not true.

Now it was never supposed to have a large focus on multiplayer, but they also mentioned things like a galactic economy, big space battles, a faction system... all BS.

>you could run into other players ... it would be exceedingly rare

This should've tripped everyone's BS detectors. Why would a studio do the huge work to add a multiplayer mode if it would be so rarely seen?

It _did_ trip a lot of BS detectors.

The sound was drowned out by the overwhelmingly non-technical consumers of the game's PR. It's the modern day version of selling snake oil.

Technology progresses, but human nature doesn't.

And much of the expectant player base didn't want to hear anything negative. Reddit was a complete echo chamber, praising the devs in every post. I suppose it's still an echo chamber, but the conversation has... drifted the other way.

yeah, i think this was a mistake made under obvious pressure.

you are right about a lot of the claims seeming to be straight up BS, but it was all understandable imo. people had unrealistic expectations because the devs didn't take care to manage them well.

there are space battles, and there are things you could call factions and economy, they are just woefully underpar compared to expectation and marketting material.

I think it was more than community hype. Sean, for whatever reason, made claims that turned out to be objectively false.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Games/comments...

My game is just as vast, practically speaking, and it has 70 client multiplayer, worst case. (That is, all directly interacting in the same spot. If 1000 clients were in the same star-system instance, but not interacting, that would be fine.)