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WebDog posted:I got there reasonably quick by stacking VIP passengers, which still net a nice 1 - 3 million but at the cost of taking up a whole cabin. You also can do donation missions. But I get the feeling the party is over, I'm not getting any bulk passenger missions. Well since the change that meant that no matter what you do you will be interdicted by pirates even in high sec space - I stopped playing and put the oculous away
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Oct 2, 2017 12:33
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clone on the phone posted:You're not wrong. Yeah. It's not that it couldn't be a good game either, there are a bunch of things that could have been done just off the top of my head to give a proper sense of progression and give people a sense of accomplishment and ownership. The game is lacking for a sense of space sim realism, it's lacking a proper economy and it's lacking some core gameplay features to provide entertainment and structure to something that cannot be describes as a sandbox. It falls between all the chairs. The only saving grace is that it's the best and mostly only game in town for free-form space sim goodness.
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Oct 2, 2017 12:35
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TheresaJayne posted:Well since the change that meant that no matter what you do you will be interdicted by pirates even in high sec space - I stopped playing and put the oculous away
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Oct 2, 2017 13:17
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WebDog posted:Well the good news is interdictions have been fixed and are no longer nearly impossible to break out of. With two billion in my account I've boarded the Gnosis for shits and giggles. well the last time i played i undocked from lave and was ganked at the station entrance losing a large hauler and a cargo bay full of rares (i was doing the rare loop) The thing is he started shooting at me in the station, the station guns were firing on him and he rammed my ship which went "Collision Warning" to You have been killed instantly
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Oct 2, 2017 13:41
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Breetai posted:I think that the recent patch has kinda broke me and prompted me to uninstall the game. Yup. 100% that. The progression used to be broken at the Viper before they added the Vulture as a reasonably priced upgrade. Imagine that gap - going from a Viper to an Anaconda (because there was no FDL either). But now it's just slightly shifted it. Vulture -> FDL is still a giant leap and payouts simply don't scale at all, while rebuy does. It's not like progression is some unsolvable problem. Freelancer did it. Void Destroyer is doing it (by simply making bounty payouts a percentage of the cost of the target's ship + a scaling mission bonus and generally rewarding the player proportionally for everything they do). DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 14:10
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Breetai posted:Words A lot of us have been saying this since before horizons. I'm hesitantly hopeful that 'reworking core mechanics' in the next patch(es) will improve the game and design choices, as there is definitely a long lived game in there with potential. If not I'll come back in a few expansions and ooo and ahhh over the new stuff they've added, I've certainly got my money's worth it's just frustrating because it could be so much more. Is multi crew dead or are people still using it? Mr. Crow fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 14:17
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Mr. Crow posted:Is multi crew dead or are people still using it? A day before they added the new options (that subsequently broke) I tried to join a ship, any ship, that might be going into thargoid land. Not a single one was available for any of the chosen roles.
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Oct 2, 2017 14:33
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DatonKallandor posted:It's not like progression is some unsolvable problem. The first problem to solve is that FDev doesn't see the progression as a problem. They desperately need to hire an experienced UX and Gameplay designer. Mr. Crow posted:Is multi crew dead or are people still using it? Pretty much dead. They nerfed payouts for crew, and since the designers like to keep everyone money starved (See 1 page back in thread), that kind of killed it. They also have some issues where crew members can aggro NPC ships and get the ship destroyed, so you have no reason to invite strangers onto your ship. FDev and the forum grognards of course sees both of these issues as a Good Thing. Eldragon fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 14:35
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I agree that the next patch is kind of what decides the future of the game. How they tidy up what they've added thus far will be a big indicator of what the final product looks like. If instead they add new flashy features and give lip service to a few bugs and make things even grindier, which they will probably do, it'll be the death knell.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:09
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Grinding in and of itself isn't necessarily the worst thing (see every MMO game ever), it's just that the gameplay loops here are far too shallow to offset it. In general though I would agree with you that this dev team isn't capable of balancing that, so we'll see.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:26
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Breetai posted:I think that the recent patch has kinda broke me and prompted me to uninstall the game. Couldn't you just store the engineered component and then get yourself blown up until you run out of rebuy money and start back in the Sidewinder? You'd still have that module for when you can use it and keep your rank, right?
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Oct 2, 2017 15:49
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Multicrew gets use as a way to have a bud pop into your ship for shootytimes but that only accounts for very specific situations where the host is bounty hunting, fighting a war, or doing some sort of killing objective. It is really useful for those things and honestly a fuckton of fun. It's just a very limited use case. Dropping into random ships is pretty much a doa feature.
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Oct 2, 2017 16:07
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FWIW I like to pop open my exploraconda out in the black if I feel like chatting, but the only people I've had are giant newbs probably looking at the feature for the first and only time. At least the one guy was honestly interested in exploring and amazed at how far out we were and got to see a neutron jump. That was cool! Then he was insanely bummed to learn that he could contribute nothing and got no rewards for my scans. 
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Oct 2, 2017 16:16
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The progression problem in Elite is that the only way they have of measuring player experience is by credits, but when credits=xp you have to make the grind impossible so people don't hit the end-game too quickly by poopsocking. They also frequently lose sight of the difference between "realism" and "immersion." You can see this in decisions like the ship-transfer timer, which serves no gameplay purpose except to make the player wait arbitrarily. While the grogs would say it adds ~realism~ what it actually does is pull me out of the game and ruins my immersion as I suddenly realize I am staring at a timer on my computer to move my imaginary spaceship ones and zeros to a different part of the server's memory.
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Oct 2, 2017 16:43
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Let's just remember that the original design for ship transfer was instant and cheap. One of the few times they had it correct from the start. Then Frontier forums happened. vvvThere's also having allied capital ship in your zone letting you make the crazy amount of tens of thousands of credits per hour by using turrets and fighting with a cool capital ship on your side. They immediately changed it so there's no reason to ever be in a capital ship zone if the capital ship is on your side. Because you don't want people to be in zones with one of your best art and sound assets, you want them to actively avoid it like the plague. DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 16:51
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DatonKallandor posted:Let's just remember that the original design for ship transfer was instant and cheap. One of the few times they had it correct from the start. My favorite walkback was the SRV fuel. Originally they were electric and didn't have a fuel limit at all, they could run forever. Even Sandro himself said requiring fuel for SRVs was silly. The SRV now runs on gunpowder.
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Oct 2, 2017 17:20
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I find it really bizarre when people talk about Elite as if it's an MMO, using terms like xp and progression. I have had a lot of money for quite some time, and the main ship I fly is my FAS. I have a couple of anacondas for extremely specific functions and an ASPX which I use whenever I need to go long distances I suppose, but they're not very fun or interesting beyond that except the first time you fly them. I actually find large ships rather limiting. Small ships are generally a lot more fun to actually do things in, and there isn't much that really requires the bigger ones. Not to say Frontier doesn't do a lot of dumb things, of course, but I think bolting on a whole load of MMO mechanics would just make the game even worse.
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Oct 2, 2017 18:23
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..btt posted:Not to say Frontier doesn't do a lot of dumb things, of course, but I think bolting on a whole load of MMO mechanics would just make the game even worse. Bad news: They already did that. There are rep grinds and RNG loot mechanics (engineers) and arbitrary unlock requirements (Go 5000KLY out for no reason). They're incongruous with a lot of facts about the game (Small ships being great, the fact that this game is NOT massively multiplayer and barely multiplayer at all) but they're there.
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Oct 2, 2017 19:00
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Elite is Microsoft Flight Simulator in space with some window dressing. No more no less.
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Oct 2, 2017 19:30
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:Elite is Microsoft Flight Simulator in space with some window dressing. No more no less. Nah, I didn't have to grind for anything at all in FSX, and with VATSIM it was even multiplayer.
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Oct 2, 2017 19:33
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Sixto Lezcano posted:arbitrary unlock requirements (Go 5000KLY out for no reason). Now that's a bit unfair, there is a reason: That engineer only wants to work with people who have proven to be somewhat interested in being explorers. Likewise the other unlocks are neither arbitrary nor do they exist for no reason. They're tedious and sometimes like some sort of sadistic torture (say, the ones where you have to mine stuff for hours, that's probably really horrible for people who don't like mining), but they do have reasons. It's just we don't tend to like those reasons. 
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Oct 2, 2017 20:30
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Yeah the unlock of getting up to dangerous rank in combat for custom scanners makes no sense logically. It's frustrating as there's just enough old schoolness that is oddly compelling that is then blunted by lazy design compounded by listening to people who think game design from 1984 is the tits. Puttying in the feedback gaps between hard and soft players leads to the weird imbalance we have and the massive backtracking on things like engineers. It's clear they assume people will just Google answers and fail to provide feedback for basic actions. I.e finding trade data for goods. Look at the X games as a better example, granted modding helps that game. But there are other half baked ideas like fed/imp ranks that tie in poorly into general game progression as the scaling goes so far off a cliff that you're forced to grind as it's impossible to do it passively. Oh and the UX needs work on crap like outfitting. Sitting there waiting to swap out a gun as it loads then animates is a bore. I kind of hope Thargoids do a scorched earth in the game so the Devs could use it as an in universe excuse to redraw all the mechanics. Sure they'll lose the hardcore fans but gain a more consistent playerbase. When big updates are repelling not attracting players, you're in trouble.
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Oct 2, 2017 21:47
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WebDog posted:Look at the X games as a better example, granted modding helps that game. While the X-games do a lot of things right, they also show that adding a single player campaign isn't necessarily good. At least when I last played them (which was Terran Conflict) the single player campaign was a laughably bad tacked on campaign with crazy difficulty spikes, terrible dialogue and requests that were pretty opaque and needing grinding to actually achieve if you didn't do things right. And it was ignored by a lot of the players too, iirc. If it's got better in the recent games though, my bad. Edit: a great example of how opaque Elite is was early game when I kept getting killed every time I tried to go into a station. It took me ages to figure out it was because I'd abandoned my third or so mission to transport goods, but because that left the goods in my cargo hold, I now counted as a smuggler so got killed every time I was scanned in a system I kept trying to go to. But the game didn't clearly tell me this (or at least, not anywhere I noticed as a new player), so I thought it was some weird random pirate or bug and kept trying over and over. Danger - Octopus! fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 21:53
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What I think would be a nice quality of life improvement would be for the Shipyard to not be filled with ships filled with modules, but for empty hulled ships. Your "stored modules" are actually not just loose modules, but also all the modules you have in your current ship plus ships in the shipyard. Then you just select the modules you want as your loadout and they are pulled from storage automatically when you retrieve the ship. This means if you have a 5A Frame Shift Drive with the most amazing rolled engineer Increased Range that you want to use in multiple ships, you don't have to faff about getting Ship A, putting module into storage and buying a place holder module for Ship A, then retrieving Ship B and replacing its placeholder module with the stored good one. Repeat for the other dozen well-engineer modules you want to pull from the other ships. It is nothing we can't do already, except it is a loving pain in the rear end to go through all your module slots and do them all one by one. It isn't like we can fly two ships at once so what is the difference if I have 4 ships all that use the same engineered 5A FSD and overcharged multicannons with experimental effects etc? Of course, saved loadouts mean you can quickly switch between Exploraconda, Rheair Canada Passengeraconda, and Combat Anaconda without having to go through every individual module and swapping it. That means we need to add a timer where for every module that is swapped out, you have to wait 1 real life minute for the valet to do it.
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Oct 2, 2017 22:15
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I think singleplayer campaign content even of the same iffy quality as the X series would be a vast inprovement. The voiced training missions and that campaign for voice attack looked like really promising proofs of concept. Post-Horizons I think getting some form of legitimate handcrafted content is what will make or break the game's longevity.
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Oct 2, 2017 22:17
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So is this Rhea poo poo over now? Edit: Just checked and with one board flip have a load of about 75m credits. Less Fat Luke fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 23:20
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I just posted that and lost my ship while taking off through the mailslot, LOL.
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Oct 2, 2017 23:35
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I backed the game at Premium Beta level during the KS, and stopped playing about a year and a half ago because it seemed that combat was the only thing that FD cared about developing, which is not really my thing. As a PB backer, I get all future updates for no extra cost, so FD's plan to revisit core gameplay with 3.x is my last remaining hope that ED will one day be a game that keeps me interested. Also, the original Executive Producer has now been put in charge of loving up Frontier's new Jurassic Park game instead, so maybe the new EP will have a better idea of what makes a game fun (hint - a grind is not a grind when it's enjoyable, and RNG is lazy game design). I made the mistake of assuming that 'an updated version of Elite' meant updating the gameplay to today's possibilities, rather than just the audio and gfx.
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Oct 3, 2017 00:17
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Ponzi posted:I backed the game at Premium Beta level during the KS, and stopped playing about a year and a half ago because it seemed that combat was the only thing that FD cared about developing, which is not really my thing. I was after single player but tee hee hee Same on the super-backer thing, I get all the updates forever for Elite so I don't lose anything besides my initial money I put down.
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Oct 3, 2017 04:54
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Even if you do grind out a corvette and A-rate everything and then engineer every single system (I have  ) there's nothing worth using it on — the risk of loss outweighs any possible money you'd make.
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Oct 3, 2017 05:14
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..btt posted:I find it really bizarre when people talk about Elite as if it's an MMO, using terms like xp and progression. I have had a lot of money for quite some time, and the main ship I fly is my FAS. I have a couple of anacondas for extremely specific functions and an ASPX which I use whenever I need to go long distances I suppose, but they're not very fun or interesting beyond that except the first time you fly them. I actually find large ships rather limiting. Small ships are generally a lot more fun to actually do things in, and there isn't much that really requires the bigger ones. I can't imagine why.  But that touches on why they make the grind so involved: the grind is pointless once you realize that the  endgame content is the same stuff you can do in a sidewinder, just with a bigger ship that turns slower.  General Battuta posted:Even if you do grind out a corvette and A-rate everything and then engineer every single system (I have The trick is to grind so much cash you no longer care about losing the corvette!  Nostalgia4Infinity posted:Elite is Microsoft Flight Simulator in space with some window dressing. No more no less. If Flight Simulator had some kind of non-consensual co-op mode? Still a fun game. 
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Oct 3, 2017 05:25
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Yeah, I know Frontier has referred to the game as an MMO, I don't exclude them from my statement. I've played a lot of MMOs, and all of them had one thing in common - lots of other players. A quality Elite does not appear to share unless you go out of your way to find it, and even then there's no "massively" about it. Then again, I don't think the term roguelike should be applied to games unless they're actually like rogue, so perhaps it's my failing for taking genre definitions at face value.
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Oct 3, 2017 10:06
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Many MMOs have severely limited player numbers. Lots of them do that thing where you've got a central city with loads of players in it, but when you go off on actual missions you're down to 4-10 players total. MMO is just a poorly-defined term in general.
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Oct 3, 2017 14:04
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Libluini posted:Now that's a bit unfair, there is a reason: That engineer only wants to work with people who have proven to be somewhat interested in being explorers. Likewise the other unlocks are neither arbitrary nor do they exist for no reason. They're tedious and sometimes like some sort of sadistic torture (say, the ones where you have to mine stuff for hours, that's probably really horrible for people who don't like mining), but they do have reasons. It's just we don't tend to like those reasons. Then why is he the guy with the best thrusters which are only useful for combat?
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Oct 3, 2017 14:47
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General Battuta posted:Even if you do grind out a corvette and A-rate everything and then engineer every single system (I have lol how bad are you at this game? i've never come close to losing my Corvette in combat
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Oct 3, 2017 14:57
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:lol how bad are you at this game? i've never come close to losing my Corvette in combat How exciting
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Oct 3, 2017 14:57
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Gort posted:Many MMOs have severely limited player numbers. Lots of them do that thing where you've got a central city with loads of players in it, but when you go off on actual missions you're down to 4-10 players total. I once read an article that an overwhelming amount of actual gameplay was done solo, and that essentially a lot of MMOs were single player games with occasional multiplayer content but with an ever present chatroom and people to look at your cool armor/mount/etc. Take that with a grain of salt because it wasn't like a scientific study, but with that view you could argue Elite is already an MMO in how a lot of people play it.
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Oct 3, 2017 14:59
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Gort posted:How exciting 'kay
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Oct 3, 2017 15:01
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Dabir posted:Then why is he the guy with the best thrusters which are only useful for combat? Because he is an rear end in a top hat
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Oct 3, 2017 15:31
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WebDog posted:Sure they'll lose the hardcore fans but gain a more consistent playerbase. Where are the hardcore bunch going to go, back to the 80s? Elites the only space sim in town.
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Oct 3, 2017 15:32
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