Feeling Dirty - Soiled my game experience - Guardian site reset grind

[Ydiss]

Why? It's not like the galaxy isn't large or populous enough to survive the actual demographic and logistical effects of the cumulative efforts of a few tens of thousands of regular players.

Persistence, to the extent that if an area was not resupplied in game, via the same mechanisms that govern our CMDR's interactions with it, that it would never be resupplied, would be ideal. Falling that some simulated and plausible resupply rate would be acceptable.

But the comment you directly quoted wasn't suggesting a system that "plausibly resupplied". I was saying we need things to "respawn" in a multiplayer game and that to suggest otherwise is nonsense and I don't think you are saying that. So I don't get your "why?" here.

At any rate, the "why" is you need to resupply content so another player can enjoy it, at a bare minimum requirement (but also, it's absolutely fine for a single player in solo to enjoy the same missions more than once as well). I was proposing the extreme alternative and suggesting it can't ever happen. If I'm reading your second paragraph right, you're suggesting that the game resupply resources when the BGS allows it. That's still a respawn system. It's just another one. And, I mean... how would you implement it?

Just think about it for a minute. How do you store the states of all of the thousands of locations players enter into and impact? When does it stop being proc-gen, then?

Proc-gen has a lack of player-impacted persistence for good reason. The state of a location is only stored so long as the instance remains open (and this is only stored on the host PC, not some server somewhere). The alternative, which I'm sure you'd love, is very, very complicated compared for a game like Elite, right?. Possible? I suppose, sure. But you have to ask why FD didn't do it this way and there would be more than one reason (technically problematic). I mean, think about it. You spend any time in a system and "do stuff" and eventually a huge portion of the missions in that system would dry up and no longer exist, due to players "doing" that content. And every single one of those impacts would need to be stored by a server somewhere. Thousands of changes. Every second of every day. And then...

You'd need to manage all of that data as the BGS ticks.

Sorry mate, I know what you think is best here and I reckon a game that attempted to achieve such a dynamic state would be very interesting but Elite is so, so far away from what you're suggesting here I'm surprised you think the question "why" was justified. So many reasons why, is the answer.

We have a peer to peer instance based MP game set in a procgen world with missions that send you to the same locations repeatedly where states change only at set periods and all in 100% predictable fashion. You absolutely need content to respawn with that design. How it does it is up for debate (as I said, you might suggest the settlement "respawns" after a short period of time and that is how most games do it but how does that work for other players? How is it stored when this is a peer to peer game?) but what you're suggesting isn't even close to the same game as what we have with Elite. The entire structure of the game would need to change for that.

And for what? So settlements become useless as content if one player happens to take the stuff from there? Restorations can only be done once per settlement, no matter how many players want to do it? Massacres can only be done once per settlement, for the entire player-base? How does that work if one player takes a mission and another takes it in solo but the first guy got there first? Does the solo guy turn up and find nothing to do?

Think about it for a moment. Why would they do it that way?

Remember, it's just a game and multiplayer games with shared spaces need respawning content to work. Right now, Elite has very inconsistent ways that this happens (and some are just very poorly implemented, like materials vanishing but everything else respawning, unless you arbitrarily reset the instance by leaving and returning in 2 minutes). One issue of mine is with that. I really didn't think we needed to start having a theoretical discussion about Elite being an entirely different game and I really didn't think my largely rhetorical statement about MP games needing content to respawn would be challenged and needed to be defended. But, this is the Elite forum so I should have guessed someone would have found issue with that largely obvious statement

 

[Morbad]

I was saying we need things to "respawn" in a multiplayer game and that to suggest otherwise is nonsense and I don't think you are saying that. So I don't get your "why?" here.

I was saying that we don't need things to respawn, at least not at the level we interact with.

Just think about it for a minute. How do you store the states of all of the thousands of locations players enter into and impact? When does it stop being proc-gen, then?

Proc-gen has a lack of player-impacted persistence for good reason.

Procedural generation isn't at all incompatible with persistence.

The state of a location is only stored so long as the instance remains open (and this is only stored on the host PC, not some server somewhere). The alternative, which I'm sure you'd love, is very, very complicated compared for a game like Elite, right?

That depends entirely on how much detail is kept. I wasn't suggesting every spec of dust be tracked and restored every time a new instance was created in an area. Changes of some detail (inventories, general positions and state of larger assets, etc) do not require a lot of data/bandwidth, even multiplied by hundreds of thousands of stations and settlements. If you can keep a list of market stocks, bounties, and influence contributions, you can keep a list of what containers have what, which NPCs are still alive, and which doors are busted.

How is it stored when this is a peer to peer game?

The same way it is now. Each client updates the state of what they change to the central servers, which is then propagated and referenced any time anyone interacts with that asset. Peer-to-peer instancing is not an obstacle to this and this is not what clients are even used for in this game. Clients hosting a peer-to-peer instance do real-time, near synchronous, position tracking and updates of CMDRs and NPCs (as well as run the NPC AI scripting locally), which is far more bandwidth and computationally intensive than keeping a rough list of basic state of a settlement and updating it only when changes are made and only fast enough so most people will encounter mostly the same stuff.

And for what? So settlements become useless as content if one player happens to take the stuff from there? Restorations can only be done once per settlement, no matter how many players want to do it? Massacres can only be done once per settlement, for the entire player-base? How does that work if one player takes a mission and another takes it in solo but the first guy got there first? Does the solo guy turn up and find nothing to do?

Exploration of a looted settlement isn't necessarily useless content, especially if the details cannot be predicted beforehand, but ones that always provide what's expected in a functionally post-scarcity setting probably are.

Restorations can be done whenever there is a disabled settlement, which might well happen semi-frequently for contested areas. Most every mission to disable a settlement would create one to enable a settlement. Even if they were one-offs, there are likely thousands of settlements in need of restoration at any given time.

Each mission should also be unique. Someone takes the contract and it's not open for anyone else. Sufficiently populated systems could easily justify a mission board that generates (based on system state, traffic, trade supply/demand, etc) hundreds, if not thousands, of missions per day.

The Solo guy would see the same stuff everyone else does. Of course, if the game had an offline mode, there wouldn't be much need for Solo.

Think about it for a moment.

I've thought about it for quite a bit longer than that.

multiplayer games with shared spaces need respawning content to work.

I vehemently disagree.

Theme park games need respawning content, but I've always felt that Elite was more of a sandbox.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

We have a peer to peer instance based MP game set in a procgen world with missions that send you to the same locations repeatedly where states change only at set periods and all in 100% predictable fashion. You absolutely need content to respawn with that design. How it does it is up for debate (as I said, you might suggest the settlement "respawns" after a short period of time and that is how most games do it but how does that work for other players? How is it stored when this is a peer to peer game?) but what you're suggesting isn't even close to the same game as what we have with Elite. The entire structure of the game would need to change for that.

It's not a peer to peer game. It uses peer-to-peer instancing, but many elements (matchmaking, missions, etc.) are handled by dedicated servers.

If someone pops a core asteroid (in a procedurally generated ring) every other player who comes across it in the next few weeks will see it as already cracked. The game is already perfectly capable of handling persistent environments.

 

[Jack Winter]

Maybe I should revise my statement about relogging.

Maybe the problem is somewhat that aimlessly playing the game gives little progress with for instance the engineers. I played a few years and slowly ranked up with the superpowers, amassed wealth, and ships. Still whenever I went to try out the engineers I was always missing mats. Back then I didn't know so I wasn't scanning ships/wakes or much other stuff, I didn't bring limpets to ship combat and I mostly ignored POIs, I also didn't do any mining.

Then I got frustrated and decided to unlock all the engineers and fill up on mats.. This unfortunately led to google, youtube, etc. So bring on the relog, the worst being relog to desktop at HGEs... That is really bad gameplay and a soul sucking tedium.. Frontier's fault for the design, and/or mine for actually doing it?

Nowadays I'm smarter and my alt is far better off for scanning things, mining, and bringing limpets to combat and POIs. He went out relatively early just to unlock the guardian FSD booster and made contact with Farseer and a few others. He's doing pretty well just playing like that without really needing G5 of everything and relogging. If I find a HGE not too far away I'll take a detour, but I won't fly 40.000ls to relog to desktop at it... In retrospect it would have been nice if the game held your hand and set you on the path of engineering, maybe with missions or some other mechanism.

Regarding relogging I guess it's a double edged sword. Per se I have nothing against leaving and coming back to a CZ to rerun the map. Also not with raiding the same settlement again and again. But there is something that feels wrong to me about relogging without taking the mission item, the HGE relog, etc.

I don't know how Frontier's code looks and what's possible, but it seems to me that if they remembered the state of the last map a player had run they could probably quite easily put an end to some of the most frequent relogging. Of course it would also be very nice if the loot tables were rebalanced to make relogging less of a need.

As regards the Guardian stuff. IMO they are a nice way for a new player to detour the normal engineers and get some half decent gear without all the mat gathering and unlocking that goes with the normal engineers. The sites are also atmospheric and really cool. At least as long as one doesn't set as a goal to go out once and to unlock all the guardian gear in one go, and then proceed to relog. The last time I went out to get some guardian weapons I made a mini trip out of it. Travel around and see different guardian sites, do some normal exploration and some xeno biology. IIRC, I also did some brain trees. It was a nice little trip that way.

I think I'd agree that the loot drops should be more evenly balanced so at the end of a guardian session you shouldn't have a big deficiency in any one of the mats that you are trying to acquire..

 

[MVBanks]

It's funny - how many kinds of relogging we have in this game?
First - simplest relogging to main menu.
Second - Stronger relogging to desktop.
Third - Flying to SC and back.
Fourth - no relogging (with Megaship Datalink or Thargoid Uplink Devices)
Anything else?

 

[Jack Winter]

Let's not forget having to relog because the instance is broken in some way.

 

[Factabulous]

Just spent the afternoon on a little light mat gathering - visited a Famine for some wake scanning, killed some pirates and did some missions. No relogging sadly, seems I play it wrong

 

[MVBanks]

I spent afternoon with simple relogging at Minor Wreckage with two crashed skimmers, to collect SDPs which I don't need, and I decided to have 150, but until now only 145.
I'm playing wrong!

 

[Chaparral]

Within 3 months of the Starfiled drop, I predict a massive decrease in the materials required to engineer modules in this game, and possibly a mechanic to purchase engineering materials or engineered modules 6 months after the drop.

It is absolutely possible to have a sandbox WITHOUT the materials gathering loops deployed as they are in this game. I'm not saying easier, I am saying more skill based with fewer loops required.

I wonder if the relog mechanic is somehow intentional. By some internal metric at FDEV, if they can show the X number of independent log ins are still occurring, then Y manager/investor is happy. This causes Z developer to design these painful loops.

 

[MVBanks]

And finally - 150! Damn grind!!!!

In fact, I secretly (and naively) hope that, after U16, during the ax restoration missions, it will be possible to upload SDPs, AX Combat Logs and Xeno-Defence Protocols to the Security Data Port, and that then the settlement itself will shoot revenants, and I'll just drive around and collect Tactical Core Chips, which I also don't need.

Sometimes I find it convenient to make a game Theater of the Absurd, just like that, for no reason. Whether it's right or not - I don't even care. And to all those who declare themselves competent to say what is right and what is wrong, I send the first stanza of a legendary song:

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain?
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

 

[Fizzatron]

Frontier's fault for the design, and/or mine for actually doing it?

Honestly, yours for doing it. It's always a player choice, including mine when I did the Davs Hope loop once, though thinking about it, I also mode switched to refresh passenger boards to fill up quicker for Smeaton runs. Though now, I don't think that's possible and Davs Hope was kept interesting by turning it into an SRV race.

However, there are always options to not have to do it and while I'll say I'm not averse to relogging as a matter of convenience I try to avoid it and found that isn't actually hard to do. I managed to get all he HGE's I needed in one play session by finding a system that had all the correct variables to spawn the signal sources, and when there was a lull there was another reasonably close system that I could go to that spawned more. I engineered quite a few ships to G5 due to it. No relogging.

Nowadays I'm smarter and my alt is far better off for scanning things, mining, and bringing limpets to combat and POIs. He went out relatively early just to unlock the guardian FSD booster and made contact with Farseer and a few others. He's doing pretty well just playing like that without really needing G5 of everything and relogging. If I find a HGE not too far away I'll take a detour, but I won't fly 40.000ls to relog to desktop at it... In retrospect it would have been nice if the game held your hand and set you on the path of engineering, maybe with missions or some other mechanism.

This is the way and needs to be the way taught by these Youtube tutorials rather than the quick hack methods. I'm not mad at them for posting them and I understand why some feel the need for them, including me at a few points, but again, I think it shows a need for a player driven solution to the problem that lets the farmers who don't mind the grind be able to profit from the players who would rather not. Open up trading for all items on Fleet Carriers; commodities, all mats, suits, weapons, ships etc.. including engineered ones and let the players set the prices. A fleet carrier owner should be able to purchase a ship and sell it on their carrier, fully outfitted and engineered if they want to. The only restriction would be to maintain the rank locking of the Imperial & Fed ships.

I'm currently enjoying a tour of the bubble trying to find some pre-engineered gear, some might find that a grind to do, but I like just playing the game so I actually enjoy seeing the different system views and cool layouts of Star Ports, and searching for this stuff is a good way to add a productive element to it. However, we see the Sharing is Caring thread which is helpful to other players when one comes across discoveries of gear that aren't what they're looking for, but I think it would be better if I could purchase that gear and put it up for sale on my fleet carrier's Pioneer store. There could even be an auction mechanic that would be pretty awesome if you ask me. It could make a fleet carrier quite the place to be when one is happening and advertised either by the Frontier calendar or by the forum, inara, or in game.

I digress a bit too much but still, I see no reason why an auction system couldn't be used to package up the mats needed for an unlock or something and then away you go to the highest bidder.

As regards the Guardian stuff. IMO they are a nice way for a new player to detour the normal engineers and get some half decent gear without all the mat gathering and unlocking that goes with the normal engineers. The sites are also atmospheric and really cool. At least as long as one doesn't set as a goal to go out once and to unlock all the guardian gear in one go, and then proceed to relog. The last time I went out to get some guardian weapons I made a mini trip out of it. Travel around and see different guardian sites, do some normal exploration and some xeno biology. IIRC, I also did some brain trees. It was a nice little trip that way.

I also did that recently to unlock the Thargoid stuff needed for the Maelstrom, I did keep going past what I needed but as soon as it was done being fun, I moved on rather than trying to power through it, which I think is a recommendation only someone who wants you to end up hating the game would knowingly make.

 

[Ydiss]

It's not a peer to peer game. It uses peer-to-peer instancing, but many elements (matchmaking, missions, etc.) are handled by dedicated servers.

This feels a little too nit-picky for me. Yes, it isn't 100% peer to peer, I know that and you know that I know that. This doesn't change my point. A lot of the game's content is controlled in a peer-to-peer environment.

If someone pops a core asteroid (in a procedurally generated ring) every other player who comes across it in the next few weeks will see it as already cracked. The game is already perfectly capable of handling persistent environments.

This is a good example of something that must be somehow stored on a database and one I'd forgotten. This is really interesting, actually, as I'd love to know the method they used to handle this logically. It's also interesting as they opted to make this work on a respawn timer, which isn't commonly used in the game.

Note, however, that I didn't claim the game wasn't capable of doing this. Of course it is; we have first discoveries, as well.

What I said is that the structure of the game would need to change if everything were to have a persistence beyond the instance players generate and I stand by that. A single core rock in an endless sea of asteroids being non-usable for a week is one thing... imagine how the game would need to work if settlements all retained their persistent state after a visit by a player and how it all ties into missions (and I went on to clarify that a bit later in my post), let alone how it would spoil the game for other players who wanted to do a mission at the same locations before the "respawn" timer occurs.

Most content in Elite is not designed like core rocks and my reasoning is still valid for the why I think that is.

 

[Northpin]

If someone pops a core asteroid (in a procedurally generated ring) every other player who comes across it in the next few weeks will see it as already cracked. The game is already perfectly capable of handling persistent environments.

This is a good example of something that must be somehow stored on a database and one I'd forgotten. This is really interesting, actually, as I'd love to know the method they used to handle this logically. It's also interesting as they opted to make this work on a respawn timer, which isn't commonly used in the game.

There was persistence for materials too - materials in crystalline shards, brain trees and geo POIs were not respawning after a relog - at least in Legacy, no idea how it is in live) since i still didnt manage to bottom my raws stashes since split

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

@Fixitman
Oh, i know what an exploit is.
However, if people go outside the game to achieve their candy, on a user level, there's only a few things they could possibly do.
It doesn't mean they're okay with it, and maybe tolerate it, but it's not a valid way to play any game.
You are taking taking advantage of something after all.

 

[Morbad]

If someone pops a core asteroid (in a procedurally generated ring) every other player who comes across it in the next few weeks will see it as already cracked. The game is already perfectly capable of handling persistent environments.

Get rid of all these fleet carriers and they could maintain the same level of performance and propagation speed with a lot more persistence elsewhere on the same $14.99 per month AWS server plan they seem to be running the transaction servers on now...

imagine how the game would need to work if settlements all retained their persistent state after a visit by a player

Much the same as it does now, though NPC AI and settlement security would probably need to be less comically bad to keep everything from disappearing every time it was restocked.

and how it all ties into missions (and I went on to clarify that a bit later in my post), let alone how it would spoil the game for other players who wanted to do a mission at the same locations before the "respawn" timer occurs.

Content would only be spoiled from the perspective of someone who wants to feel that their character is the only actor in the entire setting, which is barely rational for a game with NPCs and not even vaguely plausible for a persistent game world (and despite major lapses here, that is Frontier's general goal with their real time tracking of events) with thousands of player characters running around.

For anyone expecting a dynamic setting populated with trillions of beings that all have better things to do than wait around, in stasis, for their character to need them, the extra level of interaction and dynamism provided through greater persistence could easily create far more content and mission opportunities than are currently present.

Keeping track of the provenance of stuff and having some sort of demographic and supply chain simulation (even if it's still heavily abstracted to make workable within the technical limitations present), using magical respawns from the aether as an absolute last resort, doesn't imply a more stagnant or more deserted setting. Quite the opposite.

I used Dav's Hope as an example for something that would not survive better persistence mechanisms. However, better persistence mechanisms would allow countless Dav's Hope type experiences, they'd just seem more organic, more plausible, and less artificially curated. It would harm the whole rapidly duplicated free stuff via non-contextual metagaming exploits thing, but I'm not quite sure what the downsides would be here either, as working supply chains would remove the need for this sort of garbage farming.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

@Morbad
If they ditched FC's, there'd be a lot of angry explorers out there.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

@Fizzatron
The ship selling thing goes against the universe as you are just a pilot who is supposed to find their own way
I'd be surprised if they let that happen, not to mention other concerns..

 

[Morbad]

@Morbad
If they ditched FC's, there'd be a lot of angry explorers out there.

Any significant change results in a lot of angry players.

Regardless, this is all pie in the sky wishful speculation. Frontier isn't going to intentionally fix/break the game's formula at this point...just some minor refinements and some interesting new bugs from time to time.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

@Morbad
Any happier thoughts in there?
Probably not...

 

[galahad2069]

I spent afternoon with simple relogging at Minor Wreckage with two crashed skimmers, to collect SDPs which I don't need, and I decided to have 150, but until now only 145.
I'm playing wrong!

I only managed to collect 1 SDP "organically" during the past couple of months iirc, so having read this thread I decided to give it a try yesterday. Visited about 8 stations omw from A to B but the very first layer of rng made me give it up after an hour or so, because I could not find any bootleg liquor missions (as a matter of fact I found one such mission in a station in Wyrd but could not accept it right away due to the lack of cargo space and by the time I reopened the mission board after outfitting, the mission had already vanished).