Why all the hate on Steam?
I work with Idea Fabrik, who just acquired the game. The original Dev's pulled the Alpha from the shelves the first month of 2016 due to some serious internal drama. They promised they would release the game on a different engine, and instead of pulling all dev for the project, they released a 'Survival' based ARK clone called "Fragmented" to their Kickstarter backers as an apology and as a 'look! we did this in unreal, we can do the mmo in unreal too!'. Well... it's a year later, the devs have no prototype for an unreal version of the MMO, and people don't like the survival game much. Not only that, but they are livid about getting a Single Player Survival ARK clone instead of the MMO they poured their money into. That's why there's so much hate. If you want to see the 'real' hate, go to "Fragmented" and see the reviews.
So, the company I work with, who created the Engine that the Alpha was released through purchased the game and made me part of the dev team. We are re-launching the Alpha ASAP and working on getting the game to a 'complete' state -- which the players seem to be quite happy about. Some people are wary and there's some tension, but everyone seems to be more open minded than not.
In all honesty, they just want their game back - and I can't blame them.
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And it looks like people just needed to vent. They're already asking us to turn the servers back on
