Adding older versions of Avorion to the beta-selection tab in steam

[huha]

With the new great update of the game a lot of players are having the returning problem of not being able to connect to servers that haven't been updated yet.
It may take a while for the mods to be updated as well so it occasionally happens that the playerbase is leaving the server for one that you actually can play on.

Adding  recent/older versions for users to select may help during the "transition phase".

I can see the problem of not giving the admins/modders a hard enough insentive to update which in return will hurt the gameplay experience long term but I also think this is outweighted by basically abandoning your game you spent the last weeks on. Because lets be honest, once you started somewhere else it's hard to return to an old galaxy.

I imagine this has been on the table in the past but haven't seen anything on the first couple of pages here.

Any thoughts?

 

 

[koonschi]

Old versions are already available through the beta selections.

[nbanyan]

This is very much needed.  Servers with mods are very dependent on specific versions of the game.  We're already on version 1.4 now, but none of the manifests are available for 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3.  I was playing on a modded server yesterday and after the update today I can't join the server because some of the mods can't load, and even after editing configs the server is running 1.2 so I still can't play.

I would be all for keeping a manifest for the last update to each version number (1.0, 1.1, 1.2, etc.) to allow people to continue playing while their server and mods update.  Especially as in the future there will be more servers that won't update until they do a full wipe because of mods that are never updated.

[nbanyan]

14 hours ago, koonschi said:

Old versions are already available through the beta selections.

Not to a useful extent, especially in regards to recent updates.  Here's the short list available in the Betas tab.  If enough recent versions were kept to allow people to continue playing while waiting for their servers and mods to update there would be entries for 1.1.3, 1.1.2, 1.1, etc.  Instead, these older repositories have been removed from steam and can't be installed even by manually installing repositories through the Steam Console.  This prevents people from being able to play the game for however long it takes for the mods and servers to update.  If they're lucky that may be 8 hours, or it may take most of a week.