To make the War worth fighting for, the reset has to go, And This Is Why.

[Disemboweled Ego]

Irony being, back in the day (1980s), games wiped your progress: 3 lives then high score; start again. Elite changed that - no 3 lives/high score; you explode your progress isn't wiped. So not sure any "rule" of game design" can really be discerned, unless its a "currently some/most games do X and this does Y".

There are reasons and justifications for that and some games certainly got the balance extremely wrong. The example I've used was having both a limited lives system and a timer system that gives you a hard game over even if you have lives being extremely punishing.

Elite Dangerous in 2022 isn't subject to the limitations that made those designs a good idea back in the 80s and it doesn't have a good enough justification for how the reset makes the gameplay better.

The games that do have periodic resets or resets as part of the gameplay loop in the modern era don't do it in a way that feels arbitrary - its a deliberate part of the design that enhances the experience. It's extremely unclear how that works in Elite.

There's also very few games that associate resets with negative motivation successfully - usually you gain strength or knowledge between attempts and start the next run either at the same place or better off than the last one.

 

[deleteduser]

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[Disemboweled Ego]

Game mechanics = Game mechanics... and literally nothing else.

Game mechanics are metaphors which are literally something else.

 

[deleteduser]

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[zimms]

The real irony being that some of the most vocal 'reset' critics .... have wiped their own accounts multiple times.

"but muh progress"

Source?

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

a game mechanic is not a metaphor... it's an ingame inter/action/reaction loop. Its an actual thing.

Stripping it all away to pure abstraction isn't really possible, even if you try, a triangle becomes a spaceship and the missing slice on a circle becomes an open mouth on a head. Without direction it might not be the same things that emerge for everyone, but those things are inseparable from play. For every game mechanic a corresponding metaphor has to arise in your head along with all the messy stuff with comes with that.

This is why discussing game design is fun. Trying to figure out and explain what bar and the reset represent because it has to make sense on that level or there's something similar to cognitive dissonance going on.

 

[deleteduser]

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[EnragedMollusk]

Games that continually maintain your progress when you die are so boring. The mechanic was designed for young kids/button mashers who at their young age don’t have the capacity for failure. They are great games to play with your young nephews and nieces at Christmas, no knowledge needed just mash those buttons. Kids love seeing Uncle/Aunt fail and die while not loosing any progress in their game.

Elite Dangerous maintains your progress when you die. When you die, you pay a small insurance fee and you get your ships, most of your money, and experience back.

 

[Jpotter]

I don't want to play a game that has no challenge and you cannot lose. Throwing away the reset presents us with a known scenario - the Thargoids are here but we cannot lose and will deal with them as we please.
Hurrah! - we may as well celebrate now because we've already won.

That seems pointless vs. a reset.

They either reset it at an interval or the Thargoids need a way to PUSH THE PROGRESS BACK...... otherwise we've already won and there really is no point to participate.

 

[ChasingSol]

So many saying the reset is fine or a usual game mechanic can't see the forest for the trees.

A reset is fine. But performing an undocumented reset after thousands of players spent thousands of hours of gameplay targeted at a single system, and then it was all gone and for nothing. This isn't the same as a roguelike where a single player dies and goes back to the beginning. It isn't like tennis between 2 people. Literal thousands of hours were put in to playing the game and a single day before the server tick Frontier tells us that it will all mean nothing if we don't push the bar across the final line.

That's what people are upset about. The defenders can equivocate all the examples they like but there's absolute validity in the community being blindsided by this. Frontier has alienated a significant amount of the playerbase, including incredibly valuable returning and new players that the game so desperately needs. The community was excited and now it's not because Frontier did a surprise rug pull and said "too bad, that's how it is".

It's not about pushing a win button. It's about respecting the players time.

 

[deleteduser]

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[ChasingSol]

Where was it documented that there would be a complete progress wipe, other than Bruce's post the day before it happened? It's still not documented in game. Is there some documentation that you're privvy to that the rest of the player base is not?

 

[EnragedMollusk]

I can't believe some people are defending this reset. This is not how war works. When the Nazis invaded France, they didn't wake up on the eighth day only to find all their equipment and troops and progress reset to where they were before they crossed the border into France. The reset is totally nonsensical. And no, no one expects 100% true to life realism in a video game, but for god's sake, having thousands of players' efforts erased for a weird, nonsensical game mechanic is absolutely terrible game design.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

... all of wich is entirely beside the point I made. Game Mechanics are not comparable to vehicle safety belt technology, violent criminality.... or indeed, anything else.

I maintain that game mechanics have to allude to something else to make sense and connect, having imagery or icons to go along with things helps you get there. They don't always compare directly in a strictly logical sense, but making that stuff up and trying to make it work is an important part of play too. It's what brains do, look for patterns and try to apply them to reduce cognitive load, there's no escape from it.

You can play blind tetris without seeing the board because you intuitively understand how the geometry and filling space works and can memorize all the pieces on the board (and it's an actual challenge mode in some variants), but tetris in 4 dimensions is not something you can as easily pick up because the metaphor for something in the real world isn't there and you have to fall back on your previous knowledge of other tetris mechanics that remain to try to feel it out and make sense of it. It's hard to find examples of (non puzzle) games that do something so completely out there and disconnected from what we can understand intuitively like that.

 

[Jabo Zerstorer]

I can't believe some people are defending this reset. This is not how war works. When the Nazis invaded France, they didn't wake up on the eighth day only to find all their equipment and troops and progress reset to where they were before they crossed the border into France. The reset is totally nonsensical. And no, no one expects 100% true to life realism in a video game, but for god's sake, having thousands of players' efforts erased for a weird, nonsensical game mechanic is absolutely terrible game design.

This is a terrible comparison.

 

[deleteduser]

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[Jack Winter]

That still states Wakata as an expected loss..

 

[deleteduser]

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[deleteduser]

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[Jabo Zerstorer]

That still states Wakata as an expected loss..

I think that's just a poor UI. I hope so anyway. I think Wakata Station should be safe now. It'd only be lost if the Thargoids won this week in the System.

The BGS uses the same system too.