(most people who throw around the words "freedom of speech" and "censorship" have no clue at all what it actually means. Don't have to - this is the internet, dammit!)
Last edited:
Another disappointment
- Thread starter Mark julian
- Start date
- Status
At KickStarter time Frontier spent quite a lot of effort marketing what they didn’t have.
You can sell a vision for the future. They had ideas and a plan that was appropriate for the Kickstarter venue. They also put the work in to have stuff to demo because they could anticipate a return if the Kickstarter was successful. Of course not everything panned out, but optimism is expected here.
Now we have an established product in it's twilight years. Expectations have to be tempered. They've got Thargoids and a few new ships; with the latter coming a sometime indeterminate point this year. Thargoids are what's in stock now.
Someone obviously didn't see the last livestream.
Such a game, it has such gameplay. The Thargoids are many years old.
The Thargoid invasion was fun for me. I earned money for a carrier, learned to fight the Thargoids solo, and joined a team and squadron for the first time.
Someone has been flying around the outskirts of the galaxy all these two years and has not met the Thargoids. Everyone had a choice.
I'd like more small alien civilizations. This content can be made good.
Players, for years: "Frontier brings out placeholder minimum features, and then doesn't flesh them out so when people don't go for the placeholder because it's not very good yet it just stays that way forever"
Frontier: <spends several consecutive releases developing a single feature well beyond its earlier "placeholder" implementation from several years ago>
Players: "Frontier spend far too long developing single features"
The majority of players don't do Powerplay, so why are Frontier bothering to rework that.
The majority of players don't fly most of the existing ships, so why are Frontier bothering with new ones.
The majority of players don't do long-range exploration, so why should Frontier provide anything for those
The majority of players probably won't interact with whatever the mystery new feature is either (unless it's something so intrusive as to be unavoidable, which would probably be even more unpopular) so Frontier shouldn't bother with that either.
What the majority of players do and what the majority of 1000+-hour veteran players making up most of the forum do is also going to be incredibly different, of course. The Thargoid content is absolutely pointed at long-term veteran players rather than new ones - after all, "there's not much content to challenge a max-engineered ship" has been a common complaint for a while - so of course it won't be of interest to a majority of players. If Frontier were focused on "greatest good for the greatest number of players" they'd be going all in on tutorial and early-game improvements and completely ignore the "what do you do after 1000 hours?" question [1] as basically irrelevant. That might be a good move overall but it wouldn't be popular here.
Player activity measures (it doesn't really matter if you use Steam, Squadron leaderboards, EDDN sends, or whatever, the trends are basically all in the same direction) dropped off massively after Odyssey to a low baseline. Since then, there's been three things where they've recovered temporarily for more than a week or so.
- the Colonia Bridge CGs (early 2022): medium-term and medium-sized boost
- Update 13 after the Proteus Wave, leading into Update 14 with the start of the Thargoid war: long-term and large boost, taking several months to go back to its previous trough
- the increase in activity after January's livestream: so far, medium boost, how long it lasts remains to be seen.
As for reviews? Reviews for Elite Dangerous on Steam have been stable in the 70-80% positive region for quite some time; the Odyssey expansion's recent reviews have been too small in number to really say much about but have been above 70% positive in aggregate since the start of the year and above 60% positive in aggregate since the start of the Thargoid war. There's certainly been no drop-off in review scores there since the start of the focus on Thargoid-related content.
Sure, Odyssey hasn't cancelled out the huge backlog of negative reviews it got in its first three months, and probably never will, but it's hard to argue that that was because the original Odyssey release had "too many Thargoids".
[1] Play something else, obviously. The majority of player numbers - perhaps not player activity - are going to be made up of 10s or 100s of hours players who'll have some fun and move on - like people normally do with computer games - and that's okay. Perhaps the next release should cater to those players more rather than us? But I don't think we'd like that.
Frontier: <spends several consecutive releases developing a single feature well beyond its earlier "placeholder" implementation from several years ago>
Players: "Frontier spend far too long developing single features"
That's true but you could say that about absolutely any feature - most players will be doing something else.
The majority of players don't do Powerplay, so why are Frontier bothering to rework that.
The majority of players don't fly most of the existing ships, so why are Frontier bothering with new ones.
The majority of players don't do long-range exploration, so why should Frontier provide anything for those
The majority of players probably won't interact with whatever the mystery new feature is either (unless it's something so intrusive as to be unavoidable, which would probably be even more unpopular) so Frontier shouldn't bother with that either.
What the majority of players do and what the majority of 1000+-hour veteran players making up most of the forum do is also going to be incredibly different, of course. The Thargoid content is absolutely pointed at long-term veteran players rather than new ones - after all, "there's not much content to challenge a max-engineered ship" has been a common complaint for a while - so of course it won't be of interest to a majority of players. If Frontier were focused on "greatest good for the greatest number of players" they'd be going all in on tutorial and early-game improvements and completely ignore the "what do you do after 1000 hours?" question [1] as basically irrelevant. That might be a good move overall but it wouldn't be popular here.
"As a result" is really not a justifable conclusion when it comes to the player numbers.
Player activity measures (it doesn't really matter if you use Steam, Squadron leaderboards, EDDN sends, or whatever, the trends are basically all in the same direction) dropped off massively after Odyssey to a low baseline. Since then, there's been three things where they've recovered temporarily for more than a week or so.
- the Colonia Bridge CGs (early 2022): medium-term and medium-sized boost
- Update 13 after the Proteus Wave, leading into Update 14 with the start of the Thargoid war: long-term and large boost, taking several months to go back to its previous trough
- the increase in activity after January's livestream: so far, medium boost, how long it lasts remains to be seen.
As for reviews? Reviews for Elite Dangerous on Steam have been stable in the 70-80% positive region for quite some time; the Odyssey expansion's recent reviews have been too small in number to really say much about but have been above 70% positive in aggregate since the start of the year and above 60% positive in aggregate since the start of the Thargoid war. There's certainly been no drop-off in review scores there since the start of the focus on Thargoid-related content.
Sure, Odyssey hasn't cancelled out the huge backlog of negative reviews it got in its first three months, and probably never will, but it's hard to argue that that was because the original Odyssey release had "too many Thargoids".
[1] Play something else, obviously. The majority of player numbers - perhaps not player activity - are going to be made up of 10s or 100s of hours players who'll have some fun and move on - like people normally do with computer games - and that's okay. Perhaps the next release should cater to those players more rather than us? But I don't think we'd like that.
I am not under the impression that the majority of replies in this thread (or elsewhere) are by people who believe that nothing's wrong. I, for one, see a lot of things wrong in the game, from bugs to unfortunate design decisions. But what do you expect me to say after I read this OP rant that's clearly uninformed and not helpful at all? For the love of space, if you have some criticism, make it constructive and be nice to people. Especially to people who made a game we clearly feel so passionate about that we keep on discussing it 10 years after it first came out.
I did that once on some moon in the Formidine Rift, but this bug has been fixed.
Bloggers create a lot of negative hype. They want a lot of “quick content”, and not on the weekend.
But you need to remember that “fast content” is not suitable for most players. We simply don't have that much free time.
ED is the best "slow content" on Steam. Okay, a lot of grinding, but the war with the Thargoids largely solved this problem.
I hope that update 19 is not about building bases, but about landing on planets with an atmosphere. This is what I want most.
Good.
The game is produced by people of course there will be things wrong with it some of them will be bugs and other errors others will be that some of the decisions about what is or should be in the game are not what we would have made.
Not going near that can of worms.
Frontier have said what Update 19 should be and it's neither of those: it's planned to contain the Powerplay rewrite
(see https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/2024-year-ahead)
The "new feature" won't be until Update 20 at the earliest (and might be somewhat later than that, depending on how many updates the Powerplay rewrite takes to stabilise and polish, how many unexpected delays they hit developing the new feature, and so on).
and yet we will surely hear plenty of "Where is base building? FDEV promised base building for U19! Terrible update!!!!!11!!!" when the patch notes for U19 drop...
NEW FEATURE
Last but not least we are working on a brand-new feature for Elite Dangerous which we currently hope to release before the end of the year.Though I'm sure we'll see a lot more saying it was a promise.
(source https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/2024-year-ahead )
So there are some flaws/missing elements/bugs/features in the game. For me, the good outweighs the bad and I am not inclined to grab my cobwebbed and dusty pitchfork and head off with the mob to storm and burn to the ground the FDev castle.
About the only thing that does increase my blood pressure is non consensual PvP and open v solo issues. Are these things going to be addressed? No. But I can live with the status quo and not keep raising the issue. If someone else raises the issues again I will chip in though.
The thargoid content has dominated the past few years and will for longer, but I have had little interest. I can continue playing how I want and generally ignore it (apart from the lucrative CGs)
Steve
About the only thing that does increase my blood pressure is non consensual PvP and open v solo issues. Are these things going to be addressed? No. But I can live with the status quo and not keep raising the issue. If someone else raises the issues again I will chip in though.
The thargoid content has dominated the past few years and will for longer, but I have had little interest. I can continue playing how I want and generally ignore it (apart from the lucrative CGs)
Steve
We regret to inform you that the powerplay 2.0 update is just all the PP faction leaders getting 'goided so PP is now about AX and hauling merits.
Not interested in PP either, so unless something is added to grab my interest I can ignore that as well.
Steve
this post isd exactly what i think
i finished my elite rank a week ago in ground combat and when i was farming mats i make markers all around the bubble for biological findings.
Now im went to happy hunting all these plants to bring my exobiology the last step to elite.
Yesterday i accidently jump through an trargoid controlled system with my unarmed dolphin and was hyperdicted two times.
gladly i escaped (i had a field neutraliser on board).
so yes, you can avoid the thargoid stuff and can still do what you want
Just downloaded the update, and tbh its quality seems surprisingly good so far.
Unless there are some less obvious bugs I haven't seen yet, it might even turn out to be the least buggy update I've ever seen.
Well, it has literally zero content I could care about, but at least it did not break EDHM.
Unless there are some less obvious bugs I haven't seen yet, it might even turn out to be the least buggy update I've ever seen.
Well, it has literally zero content I could care about, but at least it did not break EDHM.
Last edited:
Why? Because your opinion is better informed than theirs?
To you, maybe
Really?
So perfectly understand the forum doesn't have that privelige? (as the majority here appear to know)
ETA: I learned the hard way, naturally!
Last edited:
I can assure you that 100% of people that I know also don't care about thargoids. They don't even know what ED is.
If you are referring to an in-game player group, there is a very good chance you have allied yourself with like-minded people. Self-made stats based on personal experiences mean nothing, particularly on anonymous internet forums. Good for drama, that's it.
I'm not a big follower of the Thargoid war. I haven't participated.... too busy doing other things in the game. I would like to see other non-thargoid content added to the game but I don't expect it to be tailored to my personal preferences. And I am happy to pay for it... I don't expect significant updates for free.
U18 is just that... a free update. From the update notes it appears to heavily focused on bug fixes. And its free.
- Status