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What’s the problem?

Professor Cynical, a well-known NMS Youtuber, has recently released guides on how to grief in NMS. He’s doing this for ad revenue, and ignoring the chorus of civilized space voices – from the Galactic Hub, to UN42, to Ultimate Feud Company, to Interstellar Index – telling him that this video is a terrible idea.

This video is causing smaller civilizations to go completely private, hiding their locations from the public for fear of being griefed. Events which people worked for months on are being postponed, for fears that the event bases will be ruined due to this video. That sucks, and is against the spirit of the NMS community.

The Galactic Hub, however, will not be taking any such measures: I’ve gotten many malicious bases removed and a handful base griefers permanently banned from NMS. If anyone plays stupid games in our space, I’ll insure they win the appropriate stupid prizes.

If you are subscribed to his channel, the Galactic Hub would strongly encourage you to unsubscribe, so the community’s displeasure with his actions can be made clear.

Frequently Asked Questions / Clarification

• Isn’t he just telling people how to protect against griefers?

You can make a video saying “If there’s a griefing base on your base, click this button to report it” without also providing a step-by-step guide on how to actually grief someone.

In the past, Professor Cynical has also been responsible for instructing people on how to get your Minotaur into the Anomaly to kill people on Permadeath. There’s an established history to suggest he does not care about NMS or the community – he only cares about profiting off of the community.

• But what about his video specifically covering how to protect your base?

His second video claims to provide a method for “defending” your base. If he had actually spoken to any members of the community, instead of ignoring them while trying to profit off of them, anyone in civilized space could’ve told him this method doesn’t work.

He suggests putting bases around the outer boundaries of your base. Besides the fact that this is incredibly tedious, it betrays his poor understanding of multiplayer mechanics. Every player is only allowed to have 1 base per planet, unless you’re in a group / squad with people. Most griefers will not join your group before attempting to grief your base. Thus, his purported “defense” is entirely useless. He provided a step-by-step guide on how to grief, and a non-functional method to defend against that griefing.

• Isn’t this a good way to bring the problem to Hello Games’ attention?

No. Despite Professor Cynical presenting this as new information, this is a feature – not a bug – which has been used in cooperative projects in No Man’s Sky for at least 4 years.

However, people have occasionally used it for griefing on-and-off over those 4 years. Both myself and Hello Games were once featured in a Kotaku article covering controversy surrounding a repeat-offending base griefer. (Hello Games banned the griefer permanently.) Hello Games is clearly already aware of this feature, and the ways in which it’s sometimes misused – if they were willing or able to fix it, they presumably already would have done so.

In the last few years, HG has also been much better about responding to in-game base reports. There have even been cases where HG has removed a base in fewer than 24 hours.

We don’t want it ‘fixed’, because it’s used for good much more often than it’s used for bad. However, uploading it in the context of a step-by-step guide on how to “steal bases” increases the chances that it’s used for malicious purposes.

This is not “raising awareness” for anything. Everyone is already aware – except, potentially, the trolls which his videos are designed to cater to.

• Did anyone try asking him nicely first?

Yes. Representatives from many civilizations, including the famously-kind-and-tolerant Lillihop from NMSCafe / UN42, tried reaching out to him first. People tried, first nicely then firmly, to explain to him how his actions would cause harm.

He ignored everyone, blocking major community leaders from his channel despite them being generally civil in their opposition, and refusing to engage in any discussion about the topic.

According to him, his videos on Youtube are “real life efforts” and “many late nights of editing”. On the other hand, the bases he put at risk for a few cents in ad revenue – which people spend hours and hours on to create, which many people agree are (at least sometimes) a form of art, which people create for free just for the joy and for sharing – are just “pixels on a screen”. According to Professor Cynical, we’re all just “obsessed” for taking issue with his guide on ruining bases.

He then went on to complain about how people are trying to “cancel him” and “destroy his hard work”… in response to a video where he provided step-by-step instructions on how to destroy peoples’ hard work (bases).

If you ask me, that’s not called “cancel culture”, that’s called “the consequences of your actions.”

Like a lot of people, I’ve played NMS since launch. Occasionally, I’d go away for a bit and then return to it to see the new updates. I’ve also gotten friends into the game and helped them along the way. I’ve always kept my main save. There’s something about the continuity of my one character who has been across the stars several times over and collected odds and ends from places I will never see again.

Today, I had an interesting idea. Along my journey I’ve left bases. Some of them were more fleshed out homes that I used for long periods of time. Others were cobbled together out of necessity for the tasks at hand. I decided to go through and destroy all but two bases. I am taking the time to deconstruct each base piece by piece, and it’s quite amazing how many vivid memories resurface as I do this. I could tell you what was going on in my life during each base’s construction. One that I will never destroy was built with a close friend, and I found a hidden message terminal that I left near a mine shaft that congratulated him on the birth of his firstborn son. We had been playing the game a lot since he was home with his expectant wife, and that was the last time that we played before he stepped into fatherhood.

I think a big part of No Man’s Sky is how therapeutic it can be. I’ve escaped a lot of bad days by logging in and exploring the stars. I have found it extremely peaceful to return those locations to their natural state and revisit a few parts of my recent life while I’m at it.

I typically wouldn’t see myself as the person to make a sappy post about No Man’s Sky, but I must say that it is truly amazing how each floorboard and each wall captured some sort of memory.

Have you ever went back to those dusty locations in your saves?