SAND: Raiders of Sophie

[b]I've played SAND nearly every day since Early Access launched and have 500+ hours in it. I really want to recommend it. I just can't right now.[/b] [b]TL;DR:[/b] SAND's trampler combat can be fantastic, but the game is struggling to retain enough players for its core PvP to work reliably. A rebound to 16.4K players quickly fell back to roughly 5K-6K peaks, and those players are fragmented across as many as 72 matchmaking pools. Combined with persistent server, hit-registration, balance and cheating problems, I worry the population is declining faster than the developers can fix what's driving people away. For now, I'd wait. [h2]GAME[/h2] [b]The concept is great. The implementation is not.[/b] SAND has something genuinely unique here. Building ridiculous tramplers with friends, hunting other crews, trading cannon fire, repairing while under fire, boarding the enemy ship and somehow dragging what's left back to extraction can be fantastic. [h3]Gameplay / PvP[/h3] Trampler-to-trampler PvP is easily the best part of the game. It has balance problems, but that's normal Early Access stuff and isn't where most of my concern is. The surrounding gameplay loop is much weaker. You loot, extract, grind the tech tree, improve your trampler and repeat. That works when it's building toward meaningful fights, but some progression is poorly thought out enough that rewards are basically obsolete by the time you unlock them. Small-arms PvP is much rougher. Hit registration is a significant problem, especially when latency gets involved, and for some players it can make certain weapons nearly unusable. The shotgun is a great example: it's one of the strongest conventional weapons when it works, but hits can fail to register often enough that some people avoid using it altogether. Then there are impact grenades. They're so far ahead of normal small-arms options that some players basically use them as their primary PvP weapon. They explode on impact, can be thrown far and fast, and can be spammed quickly enough to feel like they're coming out of a machine gun. [h3]Population / Matchmaking[/h3] This is probably the biggest threat to SAND right now. The fall from SAND's ~41.7K launch peak isn't what concerns me. Multiplayer games lose players after launch. What happened afterward is much harder to dismiss. July still averaged roughly 14.9K concurrent players, but August fell to about 7.2K. SAND then rebounded as high as 16.4K, only to fall back to roughly 5K-6K daily peaks within about two weeks. [b]The game has shown that it can get a meaningful number of people to come back. It has not shown that it can keep them.[/b] SAND also divides players across 9 regions, 2 game modes and 4 group sizes: 72 nominal matchmaking pools. The population obviously isn't divided evenly, but a 5,000-player Steam count translates into a much smaller pool for any particular queue. I've waited 15+ minutes on US East during peak hours just to get one other team, sometimes not even a full one. I've joined Voyage as the only crew there. Even patch days, when you'd expect one of the strongest temporary rebounds, have still produced peak-hour lobbies that were effectively dead. Low population also means newer players can end up against people with hundreds of hours, endgame equipment and heavily developed tramplers because there aren't enough players to separate everyone reliably. The result is a feedback loop: population falls, matchmaking gets worse, more people leave, and matchmaking gets worse again. [h3]Voyage Servers[/h3] The player list shows people who have been in the server, not necessarily who is still there. A server can look populated even though most left hours ago, and you may actually be there with one other crew or nobody at all. Voyage also continues to suffer crashes that wipe session progress. You keep what you entered with, but anything earned during the session can disappear, and there's no way to know whether the server you just joined has hours left or is about to die. [h3]Cheating / Enforcement[/h3] Some of the cheats SAND has been vulnerable to go well beyond the normal cat-and-mouse problem every PvP game has. At one point, cheaters could remotely loot players and tramplers from across the server, effectively erasing hours of someone else's progress without even needing to fight them. I've personally dealt with fly/noclip exploits, trampler theft, remote looting and absurd amounts of duped orbital/EMP spam. The devs DID eventually fix or mitigate most of the worst movement and remote-looting exploits, and they deserve credit for that. But cheating, especially duping, has repeatedly been handled reactively, with new methods becoming widespread before the team catches up. Reporting and enforcement have also felt too slow and reactive for a high-stakes PvP game. [b]Communication:[/b] Material gameplay changes have been left out of patch notes, while known issues, workarounds, development direction and upcoming changes are often buried in Discord pins, staff replies or normal English chat instead of somewhere obvious and maintained. [hr][/hr] [h2]DISCORD / COMMUNITY[/h2] Normally I wouldn't include a game's Discord in a Steam review, but SAND relies on it heavily for LFG, community coordination, support, known issues, workarounds and a lot of the communication about where the game is going. I've repeatedly seen vague or improvised directives, sarcasm, condescension and staff getting personally involved in arguments they should probably just be moderating. That can make ordinary disagreements unnecessarily adversarial, with staff contributing to the escalation and then largely treating the community member's reaction as the conduct problem. I was eventually permanently banned after months of being heavily involved in discussions about the game and its problems. Whatever you think of that decision, the practical result is that I also lost access to SAND's main LFG/community ecosystem and a significant amount of practical game information that has accumulated inside Discord. More concerning is that I'm not the only long-term player reaching this point. Some of the people who have held on through months of bugs, cheating and population decline are now simply deciding they've had enough and moving on. Community moderation doesn't explain SAND's population problem by itself, but unnecessarily alienating some of the remaining highly engaged players certainly doesn't help. Important player tools and game information shouldn't depend this heavily on remaining in good standing with a Discord moderation team. [hr][/hr] I've never thought chanting "dead game" or "dead servers" was useful. SAND isn't dead. I bought an Early Access game. I don't care that it's unfinished. Balance, progression and bugs can all be fixed. What worries me is whether the game can retain enough players for the developers to get that chance. It has already shown that thousands of people are willing to come back. It hasn't shown that it can keep them. And this isn't just something I'm seeing in my own experience. A lot of SAND's current Most Helpful Steam reviews raise the same kinds of concerns: population and matchmaking, new-player mismatches, cheating, server problems, teaming, and frustration with the way the community is being managed. For a game whose best feature depends on having enough other crews around to fight, that's a serious problem. [b]I genuinely worry SAND will lose the population it needs to work before the developers have time to fix the problems driving people away. For now, I'd save your money and your sanity.[/b]