There is an ignore button to solve your problem.
Lower your Expectations for ED
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
No, the ignore button doesn't solve much at all, as you still see all the other responses to idiotic posts..
Damn, that's true. I'm out of ideas then, short of just not getting bothered by the troublesome opinions.
Yes, that's probably the better option!
Best course of action, it is true.
Well maybe. But players such as myself that had much respect for you in the past will lose that respect as your posts decline. You seriously think that turning yourself into an anti-ED spokes person for a game we all know you have enjoyed and dumped tons of hours into will do anything much other than make you seem like a bitter person that over-played a game by several hundred hours?
Mmm. Yes. Ban the dissenters. Only positive posts about how awesome everything in ED is and how it has no problems at all. No criticism of its broken and abandoned features, or Frontier's insistence on putting more effort into ARX cosmetics than they do into fixing simple bugs.
Duck clearly does like this game. So do I. Sometimes I joke about how it's trash, but it's a great little space sim. But this entire thread has been about lowering expectations, and I think the last ten years is evidence enough that this is probably a good idea.
How many great ideas and hopes have Frontier flaunted that have driven expectations up for features that were never delivered? How many excellent community suggestions over the years have gone no further than a popular thread on these forums with zero notice for the dev team? Making a suggestion here is essentially shouting into a void; nobody is listening, because nobody cares. The "Suggestion" section is an absolute joke, and you all know it.
So if bitter vets have gripes, I'm not surprised. It's hard to stay positive when you've sat through a decade of half-truths, half-baked features, and being ignored.
I'm in mixed minds about what Elite was and what Elite is.
The truth is is that it is Elite - you can call me Sherlock. However, my love of the game growing up, then backing the game and the first few years I really loved it.
When I backed the game, it was Elite I wanted to play - nothing else. What I am looking for now is a new space game that will offer me a different slant - walking around ships, earth-like worlds, other things. Elite to me now is only Elite in name, if that makes sense? Certainly if you'd asked me 10 years ago where I thought this game would be, I wouldn't have for a moment have thought it would have had the EDO release issues and current state of the game. Seeing how EDO went, I am not optimistic - so have no expectations - for where the game will be in another few years. I think the company now is limited to what they can churn out.
However, since we're near 10 years from the game being backed, my love of this game - as it is now - is dwindling. Don't get me wrong - it will never die (my love of the game) until I do. Perhaps the 'dwindling' is in part due to the fact I've played it so much!?
The latest Odyssey 'journey' has dampened my enthusiasm. Whatever the reason, I get the personal feeling that the company is fire-fighting a complete mess. TBH, I wouldn't be surprised - perhaps bolting on an FPS to a space SIM was a big ask and the API is now completely fried and a jumbled mess. No reason to think otherwise.
One thing I cannot stand is that my player character is DUMB. AND unfit.
I've roamed the galaxy, spent many, many hours of playing done loads of activities and I'm not much better than when I started. If you stand me next to a new harmless penniless aimless commander and we run a race, we stop at the same time. If we get into a fist fight, it's 50/50 who will win. I've played different games where your statistics increase as you gain experience; in Elite, experience is nothing more than a title. You can get to Elite combat pilot without being any good at combat. It will just take longer.
It will never happen but I wish they'd have bolted on skill trees in the early days. Stamina, fitness, jumping height, gun focused skills, HTH combat, ship repair bonuses, all that shebang - on top of the suits and schematics.
That said, sometimes I take a while off the game, come back and love it for a short while.
For me what the OP says resonates a great deal. Then again, with 10 years experience of this game, I know that most have moved on.
Really glad others are still enjoying it though. Long may it continue...
The truth is is that it is Elite - you can call me Sherlock. However, my love of the game growing up, then backing the game and the first few years I really loved it.
When I backed the game, it was Elite I wanted to play - nothing else. What I am looking for now is a new space game that will offer me a different slant - walking around ships, earth-like worlds, other things. Elite to me now is only Elite in name, if that makes sense? Certainly if you'd asked me 10 years ago where I thought this game would be, I wouldn't have for a moment have thought it would have had the EDO release issues and current state of the game. Seeing how EDO went, I am not optimistic - so have no expectations - for where the game will be in another few years. I think the company now is limited to what they can churn out.
However, since we're near 10 years from the game being backed, my love of this game - as it is now - is dwindling. Don't get me wrong - it will never die (my love of the game) until I do. Perhaps the 'dwindling' is in part due to the fact I've played it so much!?
The latest Odyssey 'journey' has dampened my enthusiasm. Whatever the reason, I get the personal feeling that the company is fire-fighting a complete mess. TBH, I wouldn't be surprised - perhaps bolting on an FPS to a space SIM was a big ask and the API is now completely fried and a jumbled mess. No reason to think otherwise.
One thing I cannot stand is that my player character is DUMB. AND unfit.
I've roamed the galaxy, spent many, many hours of playing done loads of activities and I'm not much better than when I started. If you stand me next to a new harmless penniless aimless commander and we run a race, we stop at the same time. If we get into a fist fight, it's 50/50 who will win. I've played different games where your statistics increase as you gain experience; in Elite, experience is nothing more than a title. You can get to Elite combat pilot without being any good at combat. It will just take longer.
It will never happen but I wish they'd have bolted on skill trees in the early days. Stamina, fitness, jumping height, gun focused skills, HTH combat, ship repair bonuses, all that shebang - on top of the suits and schematics.
That said, sometimes I take a while off the game, come back and love it for a short while.
For me what the OP says resonates a great deal. Then again, with 10 years experience of this game, I know that most have moved on.
Really glad others are still enjoying it though. Long may it continue...
That bitterness is self made. Never buy into a promise, buy into the status quo. Or don't. Invest you passion (and possibly money) into something you like right now, not something you might like if this or that feature would be added or altered.
If you buy into a promise and put all your high hopes on it, chances are you are guaranteed to be disappointed. And if you are, just walk I way. I said it multiple times, if ED stops giving me anything and I don't enjoy it anymore, I will walk away from it and you won't see me here anymore. Life is too short to hang onto what if's and carry grievances over a frikkin' computer game.
If you enjoy something - if it's the focus of your hobby, or your hobby itself - you can't help but be invested in it to some degree. Telling people that negative opinions are invalid because they should just walk away isn't my cup of tea. I prefer discussion and debate.
I am not telling people their negative opinions are invalid. My point is that if you have negative opinions or feelings about your hobby it is time to re-evaluate if it is worth doing it. If it is not and it is causing you grief, you are wasting your life and you should walk away. And yes, I know what I am talking about from personal experience.
During the pandemic, I gave up a hobby that was very near and dear to my heart for over 30 years and where I had invested tens of thousands of currency units into over those years. During the forced break of the pandemic I realized that the lingering negative feelings towards parts of it were doing me more harm than good and I didn't really want to do it anymore the way it was. So quit and I walked away. And while I miss the fun parts from time to time, I do feel much better because I don't carry that negativity with me anymore.
Don't waste your time with something you don't like anymore.
So you agree that sticking around a game forum for 6+ years after stopping playing, or complaining about game features one has no 1st hand experience with is constructive and good for both game and forum members?
I wouldn't know, I've only been playing since 2017, so had no foundation of hopes dashed, nor a 'vision' of what this game should be.
But, it is certain that if I decide to not play again, the forum won't be graced with me spewing bitterness & discontent, like Jilted John, I won't be here. Why would I frequent a forum for a game I don't play? Mad, yes & proud to be, a grown-up spoilt child, no...
Well, yes. There are some problems with multiplayer and AI. It's difficult already to design AI that's advanced enough at decision-making to be an entertaining(!) match for players in a single player game, and add to that that multiplayer games could even have a wider range (in terms of skill) of players playing them. As you yourself noted, you are judging the AI against yourself: one that offers an entertaining challenge to one person could easily turn three others away. So it's a difficult act to balance.
Anyway, I believe most multiplayer games these days don't feature advanced bots because they don't see a need to: the people who would challenge themselves against those would be just as likely to go fight against other players. So why spend time on making good AI if the majority of people wouldn't enjoy playing against those?
Or, put another way: suppose we had possible bot skill choices go from 1 to 5, and the majority of players would choose 3 anyway. Then if a developer were to come in and would add better AI on top, extending it to 1 to 10, only those people would appreciate it who found 5 to be too weak for their tastes already. For the majority who enjoys 3, they might not like it if they are told that their level of play equals 3 out of 10 instead of 3 out of 5. The work that was done ended up improving the experience of only a smaller subset of players, and slightly worsening it for the largest subset. That's a scenario developers would generally want to avoid.
If memory serves, a similar problem happened somewhat early on in ED too. Prompted by frequent player complaints about how terrible NPC ships behaved in station traffic, a developer was tasked with improving their flight, and after successfully doing that, she was directed to work on combat too. That went on for some time, but in the end, enemy ships had gotten too good for too many people that the AI was dumbed down from its best. After all, even then, players could encounter Elite-ranked NPCs easily enough: with today's fast rank progressions, it would be even more so.
I think a lot of it could well have to do with the fact that in a space sim MMO, clients have to go with full six degrees of freedom. That can quickly add a lot of complexity to the code, you can't make some handy optimization tricks that you normally could. After all, in your average MMORPG, the only coordinates you usually need for characters are them running around on x and z of the terrain, changing their y height above the terrain if they press jump, and usually, what angle they are looking at. (For the purposes of enemy players or NPCs backstabbing the character.) So that's a lot less to consider and communicate between clients and servers than what you get with six that change all the time. Obviously the latter is not impossible, but it is certainly more costly, and you have to factor that in. For making a new MMO game, the expected costs are going to be crucial.
Add to this that introducing realistic scales complicates things a lot more: practically, you have to design your engine to do this. See: Star Citizen trying to shoehorn larger scales (yet still not realistic 1:1) into a licensed engine and still having spectacular bugs after so many years. But then, No Man's Sky run their own engine, and they still opted for lower scales too.
Oh, and another thing: cosmetics. I think that most people assumed that cosmetics for human(oid) characters would sell much better than cosmetics for spaceships would. However, after Star Citizen, I wouldn't be so sure about this
But anyway, it's a tough pitch.Then there's the history. Elite: Dangerous didn't blow up the genre, Star Citizen has... a reputation, and later on, the game that was hyped to blow up space games, No Man's Sky, ended up getting known for its disastrous launch instead. With such prior examples, is it any wonder that there's no line of developers all trying to make the next big space MMO?
This is the kind of grind I'm talking about. Rather than have content they have grind, and for some reason, some of you will treat it like content and then not understand what people mean when they say there's a lack of content.
What's Elite V in combat now from scratch, like 100,000 Thargoid scouts over 500+ hours? I think the original Elite was 30,000, right? Did that patch adding Elite V triple the amount of combat content available? When you get Elite V, can they patch in Elite VI, VII, VIII, etc. with a bigger number required and that'll keep you going for content?
It’s a bit of a rollback from the current discussion, but as it’s relevant to the thread as a whole, yes, I disagree with it. (Not in a hostile ‘how dare you even say such a thing?!’ kind of way, I hasten to add.)
The issue with that definition is that it only describes an aspect of ED, not ED in its entirety.
I’d say the fuller versions below are better descriptions of what ED is.
“ED is a simulation of being an independent pilot starting out with some basic equipment and a small amount of money and making your way in a particular vision of the future*.”
Or
“ED is a game about being an independent pilot starting out with some basic equipment and a small amount of money and making your way in a simulation of a particular vision of the future*.”
They’re what the game is, and the simulation of space flight is specifically a simulation of space flight within that particular vision of the future, with some necessary concessions to allow it to work in practicality as a game.
The whole thing is of course only a partial simulation, with individual aspects fleshed out to a greater or lesser degree, and that I suppose brings it back the general topic of the thread, which is expectations about how FD will (or will not) progress it all.
*David Braben’s vision of the future largely.
Fair enough.
Because after a certain amount of time, the game and the forum (along with its specific community) become two different things.
Although Duck has been somewhat deliberately obtuse and unfocused when it comes to actual criticisms of ED in this thread, his contributions remain overwhelmingly relevant to whatever discussion he's in, so I can't be too critical. I'm also guilty of being a smart-alecky dissenter.
That's actually pretty good. It's pithy, but it covers all the bases. Me likey.
Then you really, really need to use the ignore button. Either that or just use some self-control and don't click on "lower your expectations" threads, none of which have been started by me. Why not just stick to all the positive threads in this forum? There are positive threads you could spend your time in, surely. Right?
That works both ways. I entered this thread when people started posting that Elite is the only true space game except for Star Citizen, which started the debate than evolved into the question "What other games compete with Elite?" which I answered. People jump into threads like these half-way and don't follow the quotes back to the beginning, so they don't see the context and just assume the worst. Ironically I've already stated a dozen times (hundreds over my lifetime here), that I don't care if people love Elite more than XYZ. That's great! Just don't tell me that it's definitively the "only" or the "best" space game out there, because that's a claim you cannot make.
If I was an anti-Elite spokesperson, I would have not defended it so passionately in the "Elite is dead without 3rd party tools!" debate just a week ago, if that.
I'm an anti-falsehood spokesperson, and sometimes that results in me defending Elite, and other times (like in this thread, if you would just follow my chain of quotes back to the beginning) that results in me defending X4 or Space Engineers or one of the other many space games out there competing with Elite.
I miss the days when people discussed the post rather than the poster, but I guess if you can't win an argument, ad-hominem attacks are a great distraction.
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Unfortunately YOU steered the thread discussion into a topic on yourself and other games that you have been regularly advertising on this site. Its one thing to draw comparisons... but the others are right. There is an obvious pattern at this point with your posts. Its fine to play other games. Most of us do. Notice this is a forum for Elite Dangerous. Not X4, and not McDonalds.
I had the greatest respect for you and your thoughts. You were a voice of reason and logic on these forums. With interesting opinions that I enjoyed reading.
The grievance I'm airing is that people continue to falsely proclaim that Elite and Star Citizen are the only two options out there for space games, disqualify all other competitors, including X4 (they brought that game up first). So I've not been airing grievances against Elite in this thread, I've been defending X4. Granted, I'm doing it in context of Elite, because it was in this context that the false claim was made.
It's time I start using this myself with these people who can't discuss a topic without resorting to ad-hominem attacks, cherry-picking from my posts to make me some villain. I guess a having a villain makes them and their cause more righteous? I dunno, better not go there.
Add "Elite fans" to the list of things to lower our expectations for, per the OP.
it is always the easy way out to call out "ad hominem!" to make oneself immune to criticism. There is a difference between criticism and ad-hominem. Nobody attacked you as a person, but people (including me) voiced their valid concern about posts like yours and a handful of others who keep putting down ED in favor of other games bordering on advertising for them. If anything, it is anti-ad-hominem. It is discussing exactly your posts, not you as a person.