Elite Dangerous | System Colonisation Beta Details & Feedback

[toemaus]

After building around a dozen stations now, here’s my feedback:

1. We need to know exactly how influences work. Right now everyone is making guesses, and with FDev not having that feature sorted yet, it’s going to lead to everyone having to do a lot of rework, or worse, having systems they’ve built that become essentially useless.
2. Planetary station bugs need to be fixed.
3. This is overwhelming your servers and the playability and stability of the game is absolutely terrible. Not Star Citizen terrible, but getting darn close
4. Where is the documentation? What little official documentation exists is nowhere near complete
5. Consider expanding influence past the local body, perhaps to adjacent planets or moons within a certain distance?
6. The process of materials gathering and delivery is a little too grindy, IMHO. Perhaps larger cargo ships?
7. There aren’t enough Trailblazer ships to keep up with demand. Deploy more of these please! That was a great idea and works well if you can get a decent FC slot
8. Be more transparent. I’m fine being a participant in a beta, but at least let us know what’s going on, acknowledge the bugs and server overloads and communicate what you’re doing about it. That would go along way towards increasing customer satisfaction.
9. While I’m sure others will disagree, I for one would be happy to pay a subscription fee if that’s what it takes to get more dev resources committed to ensuring a stable gameplay experience.

 

[PilotB]

If Colony markets don't start behaving predictably like NPC markets. We're going to need a galmap filter to remove colonies so we can actually use the economic filters. It's not fun to show up to a colony 300ly away to find out it's got 3 items and none of them are the one you need.

 

[Nosrik]

Xenia_K said: What makes me really angry is the quite arrogant manner in which FDev refuses ANY communication and feedback, specifically when we are doing THEIR job - which Beta-testing is!

On top of that, the way the Frontier Issue Tracker is designed feels really repulsive/hostile towards players. Requiring that a ticket must be voted by others players in order to be viewed by Frontier is a very inefficient way to report bugs and other problems. Multiple tickets get made for adressing the same issues, and issues which effect only a minority of players are condemned to never be voted enough to have Frontier's attention.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I'm pausing construction at this time. I'm not willing to put in a large effort, until I can be surer of what the results will be.

 

[Mersozz]

I'm pausing construction at this time. I'm not willing to put in a large effort, until I can be surer of what the results will be.

I can understand your frustration.

Thus far, my most successful system has been a criminal outpost plus a pirate base (orbital).

I deliberately chose a garbage system since it seemed to make sense for a criminal outpost to be located in a system like that.

The pirate installation spawns a lot of wanted vessels which are great for bounty hunting, among other things.

The criminal outpost produces contraband.

They were both relatively quick to create.

Beyond that, I’m now sticking with lower cost options and will fill out systems once the mechanics are fixed and/or better documented.

 

[Greasetrap42]

Feedback:

 

[Tsanjuro]

Edit notice: it's now been reported by FDev to be an error/bug and will be reverted.

Old post:
The amount of time & resources it takes to build anything will not be worth it if the playerbase's trust is eroded by changes like this.

The innate influence of most (not all) planet types feels so arbitrary and heavy-handed. Instead, it might have been better for certain economy influences from built facilities to get a significant bonus, based on the planet type.

With the way this currently railroads the potential for most systems, I feel engagement with the colonization system is going to take a hit as you have taken away the design freedom we had before.

 

[Galactic Fork]

Feedback:

View attachment 425022

It's the screen after that that gives you the total required, weirdly. But for the Orbis, it's 6.

 

[Freyar]

Overview of Trailblazers Experience
(Week 4)

Current Progress and Objectives
To better contextualize where I am.


This week has been incredibly slow. I have an outstanding build to complete for a new primary port, which I can normally finish in 3-4 days but I've been finding my enthusiasm starting to drain. Having come to find out my primary port and primary ports on secondary systems are entirely useless in the current state of things has really put a damper on wanting to do more and the only thing I can do is grab more space to hopefully have usable configurations later.


Ground and Orbital Support Settlements, Infrastructure and Economies (Pt. 2)

After being told time and time again that ground facilities and "immediate locale" were supposed to influence my primary ports, finding out today that my primary port was built in SLOT1 rather than SLOT0 has been devastating to my morale with colonization. The lack of documentation was bad enough, but now that I'm finding out that two of my 2.8 ports are useless is infuriating and draining.


Bugs, But Not The Flower Kind (Pt. 2)

These bugs have got to get sorted out now. With fundamental breakages in the system there's zero reason outside of making it a simple land grab to go out and build these ports.

• Stations are not deployed in selected slots.
  • This is critical since stations must be in SLOT0 in orbit around a body that has ground slots.
• BGS Continues to Halt
  • I still can't get my PMF to take control of my system. The BGS has been stalled for over 11 days now.
• Station build requirements when on the SCS does NOT match the amount reported in the system map.
• Stations do not get economy influence unless they are built in SLOT0.
  • Two of my primary ports, that I didn't get to select where they are built, are impacted by this.
• Stations are not being online'd as expected due to extended maintenance time.

I have much less to say this week. I am a little frustrated with the declaration that this beta was "complete" and that the only thing to be tweaked was the balance/numbers. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was silly to believe that since it was a brand new system, but this is what FDEV had said was happening.

Additionally, I am seriously concerned about data cleanliness. If this stuff doesn't work and we are writing permanent changes to the galaxy, then we're writing bad data to production. There's a youtube video about deploying to production.. it was supposed to be a meme, not a suggestion.

Overview of Trailblazers Experience
(Week 5)

Current Progress and Objectives
To better contextualize where I am.


I ended up not spending all that much time focused on the Trailblazer's update. Between work responsibilities and my motivation to complete these primary ports tanking, I'm having a hard time wanting to log in. The third primary port I've been working on has basically gone stagnant for a week (but should be completed today), and I still can't see any movement on BGS or economies with my stations.

Frustration Heading Towards Apathy

I am frustrated that Frontier seems to be not commenting on these issues we have. Last I heard was "We're looking at expanding influence for economies on stations" which is great, but.. what am I supposed to do with what I have now?

Every single gameplay loop I've been trying to engage with, save for the claims process and building that initial port, is broken.

• I can't properly plan and manage my systems and starport economies.
• I can't build a planetary port because those markets are entirely bugged (or at least Frontier can't comment if the behavior is intentional).
• I can't influence the minor factions in my systems while it's a good time to do so (low pop = easier manipulation) because the Background Simulation has now been halted for three weeks.
• There's still no documentation on how this is supposed to work, so we have to test, in production, with permanent changes to the bubble.

​

All these problems are highly discouraging me from developing these systems more. Trailblazers released five and a half weeks ago (February 26th). The broken experiences I've had for three weeks since my first primary port was completed has not improved, even though we're on "Update 2" for Trailblazers.

I'm hearing some discussion related to the Thursday Tick™ not completing on time and claims release problems, but nothing on process or economy problems.

When Frontier said this was a "Live Beta" and that it was "feature complete", that "it won't mechanically change", and all that was to be changed were balance related things, it didn't make much sense. Sure a lot of the difficulties we're seeing are related to traffic such as the explosion in growth of the bubble, etc. But core systems if this update could have caught a big part of these moment-to-moment issues like economy seperate from the production environment. Hell, Frontier had a test for the Corsair and that's a ship in comparison to such a wide-reaching system.

This reminds me of the frustrations that led to the BEYOND season and the silence we had after Odyssey. Communication was the biggest thing, and I know community teams and all aren't able to say anything about it unless Frontier actually wants to say it (I love the community team, and appreciate the difficulty of their position), so this a business-level problem that keeps coming back over and over. This is the reason I stopped playing Elite for a year or two. New feature comes out, it's broken and has broken other features. This idea of expansion is cool.. but it's being squandered in favor of having released too early... for.. what reason?

Notice how this wasn't posted right after Thursday's tick? Yeah, that's because I forgot, which tells me apathy is settling in.

 

[Greasetrap42]

Not very obvious, but I found it. Kinda crappy. Definitively not obvious.

 

[PilotB]

I can't influence the minor factions in my systems while it's a good time to do so (low pop = easier manipulation) because the Background Simulation has now been halted for three weeks.

When you can influence it. Influence changes are so rapid that you need to hope you're the only one involved as someone can casually swing past and tilt the system hard with little effort.

 

[Freyar]

When you can influence it. Influence changes are so rapid that you need to hope you're the only one involved as someone can casually swing past and tilt the system hard with little effort.

I watch traffic reports. There's FA happening in the system I'm actively trying to flip AND they've been pending election for three weeks.

 

[PilotB]

I watch traffic reports. There's FA happening in the system I'm actively trying to flip AND they've been pending election for three weeks.

Just out of interest does that faction have other pending elections? The BGS has been very strange but my war is currently on schedule without strange delays. So I wonder if one of the factions is being blocked by the one at a time restriction. They're so easy to move it's trivial to get many systems accidentally over to war and election. There's definitely issues with the currant balancing for it.

 

[matttj2]

Since the Thursday maintenance period my Coriolis (built before the understanding around inheriting planetary economy) which is orbiting a non-landable planet has stopped selling ANYTHING in the market. Not even poo.

I’ve plenty (like 14 or so) of other outposts, installations, settlements, and hubs in the system to allow it to inherit an economy if FDev have tweaked things, but right now it’s got nuthin’.

Anyone else seen this occur?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Anyone else seen this occur?

Does it buy anything either?

If not, I think there are at least two separate bugs which can cause that
- one which just causes the market setup to fail, while leaving it otherwise functional
- and another which causes the station population addition to fail, so the station supply and demand factors all get multiplied by the zero for the population

If it buys normally but doesn't sell anything, that's more unusual.

 

[Zaphod Beeblebrox IV]

Another observation, you cannot locate the Trailblazers. They are not findable by any filter available on the galmap.

 

[Michael Ryan]

Guys, maybe give them weekends in peace. It is just a game and beta feature. I have still a lot of fun with that, even with bugs. I don't see any imapct of this changes as well. We created here so many messages than find most important things are unreal.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

Guys, maybe give them weekends in peace. It is just a game and beta feature. I have still a lot of fun with that, even with bugs. I don't see any imapct of this changes as well. We created here so many messages than find most important things are unreal.

Right now, RL is unreal, so for the game world to be unreal...

 

[mkizub]

Guys, maybe give them weekends in peace. It is just a game and beta feature. I have still a lot of fun with that, even with bugs. I don't see any imapct of this changes as well. We created here so many messages than find most important things are unreal.

The problem is not that we urge them to work 7/24. The problem is that they keep silence about what they consider to be problems and how they are going to solve them. The way they 'solved' problem of orphan stations (orbiting non-landable planets) is more than eloquent.

 

[disorganise]

Where did you get the amounts from?

From system map. In truth, I was already in Klikis collecting when I had the thought to add an extraction orbital and wondered if I could do it remotely - I could, so I did, and added the resulting commodities needed to my list. Aside from anything else, the amount of material shown in the 'choose the thing to build' window has too much scrolling involved to be worthwhile transcribing - the system map list is easier to work with.

It is just a game and beta feature.

Not really a beta though is it? It's like the Odyssey launch - beta quality launched as final product. If it were truly beta then it'd be in a parallel game world with all progress being wiped at the end. There are no roll backs, and no way for any of us to enjoy the game without colonisation (Odyssey - can't count legacy) - ergo, it is not really a beta. Beta's are always opt-in and there's always a way to opt back out.