As someone who is interested in the Thargoid stuffs, I’m beginning to be rather disillusioned how it has been left to fester and basically turned into a box ticking simulator by the “WaR WinNeR” crowd. No offense to them as people, and Frontier is partly to blame for letting it devolve into such a poor state to begin with, but in which world do you fight a war against a significantly older and more advanced species - A - without having to make any kind of strategic choices of which systems to defend preemptively or ignore outright if necessary, and - B - by pulling pieces of skin off of their ships repeatedly until they just decide to leave?
Yet when a rebalance occurred to cut some of that down, it was immediately met with a lot of complaining from the “war samplers”. But instead of the complaint being focused on the poor design of the alert state especially, it was “Why did you nerf this and make systems harder to clear so it is not guaranteed we can always stop the alien force from gaining any territory and invading human-populated systems?”. With some of the known sensible suggestions of making combat favorable in controls again(if it hasn’t been, but who’s going to test it?).
But letting the people who enjoy invasions have fun so you can continue “winning the war” that you’re so convinced you know where Frontier wants it to go that you refuse letting them balance their creation if they decide to? Mind-boggling.
Thanks for listening to my rant about the state of the “war” Box Ticking Simulator 9000, which I could go to even greater lengths in elaborating. It was good in the first few months, then suddenly a dev decided to add tissue sampling as a high reward low risk/effort(bar time investment, which should not be the primary judging factor for its efficiency) and it became an utter joke of a system.
I’d like to be positive about it, but when I see the above, I’m not exactly filled with a warm fuzzy feeling. I just get annoyed at how stupid it is.
It suffers from the same mechanics as powerplay, no win state overall is visible.
In powerplay it was meant to be that powers could rise and fall, weak powers would be destroyed, new powers could arise, but that never happened. Powerplay is also basically just ticking boxes (or filling buckets) and repeated ad nauseum. Ok, in theory, the Thargoid war will end one day, but until then, FD will keep the Thargoids attacking new places until they no longer want the war to continue, and then the players will "win". They could keep this war going for years (eg: players push Thargoids back, FD have a new "fleet" turn up to attack new places, again and again), or they could end it next week and say to the players "Congrats, you beat the thargoids!"... and then what?
It seems like there is no defined win state, like with powerplay. A point where players can definitively say "we did it", until FD decide the players have done it.
A lack of player agency.
I mean, let's say all players got totally fed up with the Thargoid war and just ignored it. Would FD really let the whole bubble burn? I'm skeptical. What if player numbers fell to the point where players simply couldn't fend off the Thargoids any longer? Would FD let the Thargoids win? Or what if there was a sudden increase in players doing Thargoid stuff and overnight all Thargoids buckets are filled and humanity has won (or would have won if it was RL)? But FD aren't prepared to finish the war, they want to continue it... would they let it end or would they just pump the numbers?
Plus there is nothing really exciting people can say they did with regards to their involvement in the Thargoid war. I mean, ask someone what they did. "Oh, i killed 100 a week for the last year! That was my contribution." Oh great, keep it up, for another year or two until FD decide the war will end.
Now, i'm not saying FD are working without constraints here. After all, its an online game and the developer has to keep events going for long enough for people participate and they need to have ways to measure success, etc. But it just seems like its just dragging on and on and on, and there is nothing really that will affect anything in the long run. Thargoids defeated? Ok, what's changed? Congrats, people now have anti-thargoid weaponry that's good for... erm, killing Thargoids that are no longer there.
I suppose its why i could never get into Community Goals, Powerplay, and the Thargoid stuff. In the long run, there isn't much point to them.
Just my feelings. I'm not saying i have a solution to any of this.
) would be to give up on the most difficult defences first (since none of them are engineer-level importance) and save the easy ones. Then in six weeks time your "hold the line" job is easier rather than harder. Can't be done in practice because the harder defences go to Invasion and then attract more people, and then get saved for next time after all. So that's one bright spot...
