You Should Play Wildgate
Much ado about player numbers. I want to cut through some of the steam and say: you should play Wildgate. You should not do this to "save the game" or some other altruistic reason. The reason you should play it is: it is really, really, fun.
However, there are a couple things you need to get right to maximize your fun:
## \#1: Play with voice chat enabled, with people who have voice chat enabled.
The difference is night and day. What is unmanageable chaos becomes chill and fun. You can learn by watching/listening to others, and have fun talking to people.
Don't have friends to play with? [Join the Discord](https://discord.gg/playwildgate). There is a `<continent>-looking-for-crew` channel appropriate to you. You can join another crew---they will have a voice channel like `Ship 1` (or `2`, `3`, etc). They will ask you to paste your "friend code" in the chat. [I made a couple screenshots showing how to get it](https://imgur.com/a/cbC8Eyw). They will invite you to the party, and you're off to the races.
The people I have met have generally been quite chill. We have successfully installed Sal Bomb Traps, stolen entropy cannons, and escaped with the artifact. We have also lost the artifact by exiting the wrong portal from the monolith (oops!), taken ~30 damage at the beginning of the fight b/c we forgot to keep shields up, and left ship doors open, causing *us* to have guns stolen. It happens! But it is *emotionally* much, much better because I connect these things (success or failure) with voices and names, rather than `xxxNOOb<thegreatest>69xxx` who is silent all game and then types `bad team` in chat at the end. Don't do that to yourself! Play with VC enabled, with other people who do.
## \#2: Get outside the ship: you're in the Marines as much as the Navy
One of my mistakes when I started playing was to overly focus on the "crewing the ship" aspect of the game. There is a lot to do on the ship! But Wildgate is not a pure ship-vs-ship game, and approaching it that way is a path to frustration. My friends and I would be dutifully running around our ship, manning the guns and repairing stuff, only for a door to open and for an enemy boarder to come in and kill us all, then kill us again on respawn. We felt helpless; our voice chat got quiet and frustrated.
What I know now, that I didn't then, is how important and nuanced the *personal* scale of the game is. Prospectors are very powerful (as in they can do a lot), and quite fragile (as in they can die easily). A lot of the game is decided at the prospector level.
Past me would have said, "yeah, no kidding a lot of the game is at the prospector level! It's just degenerate boarding all the way down!" But past me would have had too narrow a view, focused on the ship interior. It is actually really hard to defend the interior of a ship if the outside is not safe---your movement options are limited, it's hard to get cover from all possible doors, and even windows can be broken and be a quick death.
Remember the opening scene of Dark Knight Rises? Look how [insanely hard to defend](https://youtu.be/rurhk1hadp8?t=155), from an FPS standpoint, an enclosed room is, when attackers can shoot inwards.
So, the area outside your ship is really tactically valuable, actually.
- It's valuable because if the enemy gets control over it, they can shoot/grenade in at you, and that sucks - It's valuable because it's easier to defend than *inside* your ship, because it doesn't give the enemy cover on their approach - it's valuable because you're protected by your ship's shields - it's valuable because you can shoot down enemy ship weapon shots like macro and bomb shots (quads if you're good) - it's valuable because you can shoot enemy ships with Double Whammy from it - it's valuable because you can repair things (bombs, but also hardpoints/guns/glass) from it - it's valuable because enemies need to get close to put Drill Charges on your ship systems - it's valuable because it's a staging area for any boarding raids *you* do on enemy ships---that don't even need to be raids to kill, they might just be Drill Charge drops
What I hope comes through in this is that there is a lot of stuff you can do that isn't sitting in your ship complaining about boarders, but also isn't "just being better" at close-up twitch-reflex Thunder-Dash/melee combat and spawncamping enemies on their ship.
So: don't be afraid to get out of your ship! And don't think "getting out of your ship" has to be "yeeting onto the enemy ship with murder in your mind." There's a *lot* of room for nuance between those two things.
If you do these two things, I think you'll have a much easier time finding the fun.