Never at Vasco Sapien levels, but I used to bemoan the lack of a Viper MKIV ship kit, until one day out in the black in my trusty Viper MKIV it dawned on me there is no need to alter an already perfect ship.
Pay2Win made it to Elite
- Thread starter Einar Donarsson
- Start date
Don't forget the pies!!
Wholesome and rich with luxurious gravy. Just like grandma made.
If you're flying a fully engineered Cutter with an effective 25,000+ MJ of shields versus absolute damage (and more elsewhere) even before SCBs are taken into consideration, plus several thousand hull HP under that, the main thing I have difficulty imagining is how you ever find out what its rebuy costs in the first place.
It could only grow if enough players buy the ships in the first place, but if Frontier have any sense they won’t break something that works, let’s hope so.
I’ve had fun with reverb torps in the past ;-)
Hey frontier, adding early access for a in game ship that requires your premium currency is an incredibly scummy move. I have happily purchased a ton of cosmetics over the years but this decision instantly pushes me away from my favorite game of all time. Not only is this a terrible idea for player / developer relations, your going to create friction between players when inevitably make this purchase and are then scolded in game by the rest of the community. Elites development had been rocky, but personally have still enjoyed the game immensely... please don't go down this path. Was waiting for the new ship to go on a new exploration trip, was going to stream it and have a merry time... but now that idea is out the window
I lost my prismatic cutter with reactive armor and other very expensive parts in the very first battle against a Hydra. I almost got the , though, almost...
On the other hand, I have a free Courier and a free Vulture hull from holyday events. While not zero rebuy, I can reduce it noticably by putting in CG pre-engineered multicannons or Azimuth modplasmas, CG FSD drive, Sirius heat sink launcher (if needed) and buy the modules I have to buy from LYR, Edmund Mahon (-20% on HRP-s) ans Zachary Hudson (-20% on weapons) systems to bring the Vulture rebuy below 1,000,000 cr including reactive armor. After all, a Vulture ganks paper planes just as well as an FDL would
The point is, FDev are a commercial company, they hardly generate any revenues from ED, having chosen for far too few paid seasons/DLC (should have been strictly annual - and while we are at it, successful in terms of game play desired by the community) and running the servers, doing bug fixing and possibly even a bit of development likely costs more money than they earn with it. And that is effectively a given, not to be expected to change substantially.
So tell me, which company trying to earn money and pay their bills can afford to continue investing in a product they released a decade ago, which can only be expected to produce losses year over year? If this was my company, I would be looking to change this course of action - one way or another. But I would not consider it acceptable management to just let it continue as is.
ED should have been a life service game, with subscription fees and a proper roadmap with meaningful additions paid from this revenue stream. This was the big flaw in the entire concept of ED, creating a life service game based on a one-time admission fee with very few occasional DLC's. This isn't viable.
Star dive!
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
perhaps... but for instance i must be pushing 3000 hrs in the game by now........ but due to playing the game my own way and not grinding / exploiting anything i am still a long long way off unlocking either the cutter or the federal corvette.
Can you not see how potentially selling these on the store for cash (ok arx but same difference) doesn't somewhat pull the rug out of the motivation to unlock "properly".
ok this is probably a me problem....... fair enough, in which case why have progression in games at all? why not just launch all games with a level select from the get go, remove all unlock requirements and give complete rosters of fully equipped vehicles in car games
give the highest end loot in RPGs (infact funnily enough i started monster hunter world yesterday as it happens and that is exactly what they have done.
i wondered why i was invincible, it turns out the copy of my game came with some ubermensch gear. next time i play i will be dumping that in my chest but its very existance does make me wonder what is the point looking for a slightly better sword when i have one 10x better that i can use without earning. to me that is a really stupid design.
equivalent in elite....... why faff about looking for materials for that G5 drive when i can just get one in a ship off the store?.
IF the issue is that Frontier think there is too much grinding putting players off getting to parts of the game, well, they are the people with the levers to increase or decrease the grind, and there are lots of examples of games where you know the game is balanced such that players rather than do the grind are instead encouraged to pay cash.
Last edited:
Sad day, but I saw it was inevitable right from the start. There was no way that the game could keep on going for ever powered by new sales. Eventually something would have to give. I wish they could find a better way. I did my part, I bought loads of ARX and pimped my rides, but it wasn't enough. They went P2W. And now, there's no inccentive for them to fix the engineering grind, as they have decided to sell us the solution to that problem.
This is information they publish in their investor briefings: broadly, the current pace of development is roughly break-even (marginally on the profitable side) with the current pace of new game purchases and cosmetic sales. That's better than anything they do that isn't a management sim, but substantially worse than their own-IP management sims.
Certainly trying to improve the rate of income is going to be a priority; equally, they do still have some room to cut back on development and bug fixing before needing to close the game if income falls further.
The thing is, that wasn't the actual plan.
Horizons took two years (three if you count needing to fix Engineering again in Beyond) when it was supposed to take one (or maybe 15 months or so)
Beyond was supposed to take a year but it's a good thing they did it for free because two of its headline features didn't make it into that year (one delayed another 18 months, the other finally showed up in Odyssey).
Odyssey took three years (four if you count the year of post-release fixing of the worst issues, really needed even longer than that, of course)
The original plan had them both being one-year seasons and the much more regular income stream that would give. But they were unable to actually do the code and art that fast with the team size and budgets they had, and didn't at the time have any significant cash reserves to magic a larger budget out of.
So for an actual season a year, we'd have had to have had much smaller seasons.
Horizons A: planetary landing and engineers
Horizons B: guardians and multicrew
Horizons C: Thargoids and basic AX content
Beyond A: engineering, mining and exploration reforms somehow made gatable behind a DLC?
Beyond B: fleet carriers and the Kraits?
Odyssey A: station concourses and Apex? Hard to think what features they could have got working sufficiently early to stand alone.
Odyssey B: thin atmospheres and exobio
Odyssey C: surface settlements and CZs
...and somehow - to make it a net positive for income - had people regularly buy these at something still approaching the normal season prices?
Now, if their original plan hadn't been wildly overconfident about how fast they'd be able to develop expansions post-release (or arguably, develop the original game itself given how much wishlist stuff in the DDF never saw the light of day), sure, they'd have looked at the funding model differently and things would probably have worked out better. Or they might have decided to start with Planet Coaster instead, of course.
Well, not yet. One of the pre-built ships shown so far has no engineered modules (two tech broker ones), the other has three but only one is useful. They'd need to go a fair way further down the slippery slope for buying pre-built ships (or maybe directly pre-built modules) to be a thing, which means it's not going to happen before they put in yet another decrease in engineering difficulty later this year.
They'll get there eventually, I expect, but it'll take them a while to rollback engineering all the way to 2.1 levels at that point.
What a load of nonsense this thread has. End of the world. End of the game. All is lost! We are doomed.
All they are going to sell you some pre-engineered ships (where you can't remove the modules from that ship) and early access to some features. Which is fine by me. You don't have to take the option. You can ignore it and play in the same way.
All they are going to sell you some pre-engineered ships (where you can't remove the modules from that ship) and early access to some features. Which is fine by me. You don't have to take the option. You can ignore it and play in the same way.
That’s the marketing spin. What they are doing is delaying access to features in the live game unless you pay an ARX surcharge.
Except for the fact that in the last post they've already given details about how they're fixing the engineering grind, see https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/engineering-and-pre-built-ships for details.
If you've seen the specs of the ships they're showing as examples of the kind of thing to expect from the ship packs, well, they're hardly going to beat people who spent the time to engineer and craft their ships to how they want them. They ain't going to be winning anything with those ship builds. The only advantage I can see is the lack of a rebuy, but as soon as you start modifying that build, then you have to pay some form of rebuy. So I do feel there's a huge over-reaction going on. Paying for Catch-Up or Paying for Convenience that's true. Pay to win? Pull the other one!
Which is fair enough really. We've been extraordinarily lucky in that we've had a 'live service' game with regular updates and feature overhauls with a traditional 'pay to play' financial approach, with DLC's and such. The era of that being sustainable is clearly coming to an end. FDev have developed a new ship, and are giving it away for free to everyone that has bought the latest DLC. Can you honestly blame them for wanting to be paid for the work they've done by offering a 3 month exclusivity period? Most companies would simply put this behind a 'ship pack' like you get in racing games, buy it or don't. Sure, it's painful having to move away from such consumer beneficial format after ten years, but I cannot say I'm surprised by these moves, nor am I going to immediately condemn FDev for wanting to continue receiving money. That's just how this capitalist society we live in works, whether we like it or not. There are lines of course, but I don't think we're past them yet.
This move by Frontier is necessitated by many poor decisions that Frontier has made in respect to thus game in the past: rushed and insufficiently tested expansions and patches, poor balance decisions, permissive attitudes towards exploits, real-time timers on turning in missions, and a failure to update their tech to fully utilize next-gen (at the time) consoles. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Rather than taking the high road by making a great game, and reaping the rewards, they made a rather decent game, which is the best in its genre not by virtue of its success, but by the failure of its competitors.
Only one of those competitors has raked in ten times the revenue via predatory monetization. Frontier has long stood at the precipice of this strategy, and CIG, EA, Blizzard, and a host of other contemptuous companies are beckoning from the smokey depths below, whispering “Come join us. The money’s great! We’ve got money to burn!”
And it pains me to watch Frontier take tentative step forward.
I'd rather wait the extra three months and in the meantime spend my Arx on paint jobs and ship kits instead. While people are ultimately free to spend theirs how they want, I would also like to encourage as many others as possible to do the same. I believe the playerbase might have a window of opportunity in which to influence what kind of things are more likely to be sold for Arx.
Would you describe the Horizons expansion that way, or does the six-year gap between release and fold-in / the payment in direct cash rather than ARX mean that it doesn't count?
Conversely, would it be better if it was just released as a "ship pack" and you had to pay £X to unlock it in perpetuity with no intent to ever make it generally available?
True - though until and unless one of its present or future competitors actually succeeds at making a great space MMO, we won't actually know if better than "rather decent" is practically as opposed to theoretically possible.
I agree, It is sad but they have constantly nerfed the game, not respecting player time to a point where the grind is an annoyance, not enjoyable and so player numbers are at an all time low. Now the word is that they want you to pay to make it better. I hope they don't think this is the answer to their problems. It needs to be enjoyable and accessible to all, then they could add new paid for content like they did with odyssey.