Planning to sell an expansion over an incomplete game is wrong!

[Arexac]

Before any torch carrying fly boys yelling, know that i love Elite games and i have big gratitude for the Developers who made this game. What i'm going to explain is how i feel right now with the game's current situation.

"Planing to sell an expansion over an incomplete game is wrong!" this idea is keep bugging me since i heard it from David. As the players who are now playing the game know that game is incomplete (if i have to give a rate it will be %50). I'm 38 years old and playing this game from the first elite, i have a good history with the game and knows its game mechanics, so when i bought the game , my first impression is "Thats it, this is what Elite should be", then after playing from 01.01.2015 to this date 21.05.2015, realizing that there are tons of incomplete things in the game that has made previous Elite games awesome and planing to sell us those game abilities with money, this is not just.

What they are planing to sell us with money why we should against these :

1 - Planetary landing - This ability has in 2mb Floppy version of the game and this ability is expected when they are making this game from the start, game released and we dont have it

2- Ship Boarding - This should not be an expansion ability, for just selling your "FPS Playing Style" you cant force us buying it.You should do this "Ship Boarding" with "Hired NPC Marines", we do not need to see them in action or be there actually. Voiced Text Briefing and statistical Text information can do the job. The Marines' Experience effects the success rate and those Marines who survived the mission get experience and improve the future Mission Successes.


What should be in the game since it released "Day One" :

1 - The Missions : As we know that they will fix the missions with "Power Play" , they said they will scale the missions with the player's progress (Combat Rating . Explore Rating and Trade Rating + Faction Rating (System Controlling Faction and Sub Factions Rating). So they have waited nearly 6 months to implement this and made us kill the "Resource Extraction NPCs + NAV Point NPCs + UUN NPCs over and over and over and over, with no variety and plus to this "You have rewarded 16.000 Credits from mission delivery", are you kidding me!! 16.000 credits for killing 20 pirate (worth of 1.000.000 Credit) and you are rewarding me 16.000 credit for completing the mission. Now after 6 Months you are saying we'll fix this , you had fixed it before you release the game because this is not a "BUG" , this is the game future which it has supposed to be at the first release.

2 - Wings : Yes the famous "Wings Update", "UPDATE", hmm, Fix me if i'm wrong but you have planned this game as a Space Sim MMORPG right? cause game interactions effecting game universe and the players in it and player to player actions effecting game mechanics, so this game is designed to be played Multiplayer (even our data stored online, including saves). So how come you havent thought this "Wings Ability" from the start, i'm seriously wondering , if your answer is "We had to release the game at "Christmas Sale Madness" to earn money front, then you fooled us with it because you sold game at your website with the tag of "Elite : Dangerous is Released" you havent wrote there " Elite Dangerous is Released with %50 Complete" or "Elite Dangerous ***BETA*** Released" there will be no other answer to this cause the game is half baked right now and this proves it.

3 - Trading : Again this obvious game future has been broken from the start and they said they'll fix it at "Power Play" , but we dont know how they are going to do it. Probably most of you have played X- Beyond the Frontier game series, that game represents best trading mechanic at the game sector. So how could be a good economy;

Basic Structure of an Economy

1. Raw Resources
2. Raw Resources ---> Refined Resources
3. Refined Resources ---> Industrial Goods
4. Industrial Goods ----> Luxury Goods / Tech Goods / Agri-Cultural Goods etc etc etc

So for this structure to work there will be limited or time limited resources be needed. So this will give birth to Supply - Demand mechanic. Well what we have right now is "Unlimited Resources + Refined Goods + Industrial Goods+ etc,etc,etc" we players or NPCs have no control over these. What i mean by this,

Forexample; Lets say "Station X" needs "Cobalt Ore" , so what does "Station X" need to do

1. Need to send its own Ore Mining Ships to Asteroid Belts / send its Tradeships to other sectors to get "Cobalt Ore" / Players needs to feed the station with the Cobalt Ore
2. Those ships needs to dock to the station and supply it with the "Cobalt Ore" needed
3. After Processing "Cobalt ore" to a "Good" then list it at its sell order
4. If the "Cobalt Ore" stock starting to drop from "Surplus" then the price of the "Goods" go up

So what does this do good to us;

1. If Station supply chain broken "Mining ships / Trade Ships" destroyed at the process then prices go up (Pirating Opportunity + Piracy for Manupulating the System Economy by the Traders)
2. So when you want to buy "X Good" you'll see that its production is very low (right now the production is based on time , no matter what heppens it is producing goods from out of nowhere, like a god), or you'll see no produced "goods" because the supply has broken
3. This fragile trade system has been accomplished by 2 games 1 - X Beyond The Frontier Series , 2 - Eve Online. If you want dynamic economy you have to deliver the leashes of the economy (%80) to the players (%20 for basic items that is coming from the planets (medicine, grain etc etc) , you can deliver that %10 of that %20 to players when you implement Planetary Landing and the Living Cities to the game)

4 - Combat : At last we have come to most exciting and fragile system of the game. The combat is mostly predictable , what i mean;lets have an example of a Viper NPC Pirate and you have a Cobra. As players we know that Viper can out manuver the Cobra, but out gunned against Cobra, if Cobra catch the Viper from the back then its over, realy?, no! , because Viper and all of the ships, i mean ALL ,counting Anaconda, doing this manuver;

• As soon as all ships which has lost its shield starts to turn around you in circles, no matter the size, no matter the guns it has, doing maniacly this move. Have you ever seen an Elite Anaconda from up close, no?, when it choose to attack you it fires 2 x Plasma Cannons (if it gets you 90 Degree of its Crosshair), 2 x Plasma Cannon can take down ASP, Cobra , Viper ......small size of everything and the rest of his Beams and Pulses and Multicannons, it is a one hell of a Flying Castle, but.......... with all this fire power what is it doing when shields down?..........Guesses?.. no? It starts to Circleeeeeeeeee, the god damn Circleeeeeeeeeeee, it can kill with all his weapons in 10 sec but it chooses to Circleeeeeee. This stupid combat behaviour has to change, there is tons of combat moves you can give to that Anaconda or to any ship in the game but you have given one Script and that is "If shields down, do Circle" command. I suggest to good ED Developers to play the "Wing Commander" game series, you'll see what i mean by manuvers + NPC Wing Play (one busying you with manuvers and other one hunting you from the back, by busying i mean intentionaly doing it not escaping from you)

5- Items: Why you hate us, seriously, I am sure you have intentionaly created most of the items for to make us paranoid. What am i talking about? This;

1. All weapons "Weapon System Capacitor Usage" "BARSSSSSSSSSS" / "BLOCKSSSSSSS" some has 2 bars, some has 3 , 4 , 5 .................., "BARS" / "BLOCKS" arent a measure!!! kWh and Jule is a measure for energy usage and those measures needs numbers , not blocks. Why i'm saying ;because right now my Pulse Laser E3 Describtion saying 4 BARS and i dont know how much of that A7 Class Power Distribution (61.000 kWh) (Recharge 6.100 kWh) compansate that 4 BARRRRRRRRSSSS. So what we players do we buy highest Power Distributor, then we buy weapons and go out the station , leave the firing range 10km, then start activating weapons by group, 2x Pulse Shooot Shoooott Shoott , ok Stable, now 3x Pulse shoot shoot , hmm going down in 20 sec. Why are we doing this, because 6.100 kWh / 4 BARS means nothing, gives you nothing. But you are definitely know what that 4 BARS means, because you have created them, so my question is why dont you give the exact numbers instead of BARS / BLOCKS to us.

Note : If you have done this for 14 year old Play Station / Xbox Kids , then tell their families to teach their children basic maths forexp: 1 Block + 1 Block = 2 Blocks

These are my thoughts about the game as a fan of the game. I'll edit if i come up with things i want to share with you.

Have a nice day.

 

[streki]

TLDR: I am detecting a high pitched whining sound though.

 

[K-Rose]

I don't think you quite understand the scale of the effort that has been put into this game... It's unfortunate that this game hasn't met your expectations but alas it goes that way sometimes.

 

[Matzov]

I bought a music album the other day. I thought at least 3 or 4 of the songs were shallow and not to my taste. I should get their next album for free.

 

[Rubellen]

Thumbs up. I have been playing the game since pre beta - still loving it and worth every cent I put in it - but your points do make sense. + rep for you and I hope the game will be going the direction you are pointing in!

 

[CMDR Brock Samson]

It was always meant to be a work in progress, it still is, it will be for years to come.
Nothing wrong about it.ED is not your run-of-the-mill action-adventure that you play for 20 hours and uninstall.

 

[Joe Spivey]

Yup. As soon as a thread starts, "Before any torch carrying fly boys yelling...", you know the poster KNOWS he is wrong from the get go. Aaaaaand, yup. He's wrong.

 

[Tiamat]

What should be in the game since it released "Day One" :

I stopped reading at that bit as you are making a very bad assumption. FD are a small team, had a fairly low budget and a 2 year development cycle. That is absolutely nothing in game development timeframes. It took Ubisoft, who have huge development teams all over the world and literally all the money over 3 years to produce AC: Unity and look what happened there.

Anybody that is expecting the level of detail you are given the staff and timeframe FD had is living in a dream world. A good comparison is Star Citizen. Any backer of that game can tell you that having far more money and a similar time to develop yet there is practically nothing to SC at this time. They have an arena with I think 4 maps and a hanger to show for 80 million and 2 years work. ED is worlds apart.

No dev team could have done what you are asking for and to date I am still amazed at just how much FD did actually deliver. Is it a complete game? No because development has not stopped and they are going to keep adding to the game. If isn't "complete" until FD turn the lights off. They delivered the bare bones and continue to add to that free of charge. Things like the FPS and landings are going to be very big addons that are going to require a lot of work so FD decided to make them paid as the need to fund that development somehow. We are going to get a lot more for free before that happens and can you name me more than one other developer who does that after shipping a game? CD Projekt is the only one that I can think of.

 

[Ydiss]

That depends really. If you think this then you think Eve and wow were complete when they launched, despite having dozens of paid for expansions.

Oh and monthly subscriptions.

There's absolutely no practical difference between a typical MMO expansion pack and planetary landing. It's more content. That takes a significant amount of resource to create. Significant enough that we need to pay for it.

I'm sorry but this is no different a topic to the tired argument that ED isn't finished. We know it isn't finished. FD admitted it wasn't. That's why we get major updates included in the purchase price.

Sometimes I wonder if people who think along the lines of the OP actually remember that we aren't paying a subscription. And the significance of that fact.

 

[who?]

My only concern with paid expansion packs is they have potential to split the player base (even more than Open/Solo). E.g. you're in a dogfight over a planet, and the other guy turns and runs towards the outpost on the planet, you give chase but... DENIED! you haven't bought the planetary landing expansion so can't follow him.

I've no problem with giving money to Frontier (God knows I've spent enough on Elite, a TM Warthog, TrackIR, a big USB drive to install Bootcamp & a Windows 8.1 license etc..) but I hope the paid expansions don't segregate the player base.

 

[Thasarion]

I agree with the OP that the combat is too easy. I once checked out a strong signal, and I found an allied police Anaconda facing down a dangerous NPC pirate anaconda, escorted by 6 other ships. 2 cobras, 2 eagles, and 2 sidewinders. I was able to nuke them all, but that was because they were stupid enough to let me kill one off at a time, until only the 2 Anacondas were left. As you can guess, I easily destroyed the pirate, but the police was destroyed also.

 

[SteveLaw]

No OP, we can't always have new things for free.

The only thing I got out of this post was a question*. What would happen if someone bought the expansion and boarded the ship of someone who didn't?

(*To be fair I only skimmed after the first part because I'm not interested in what the OP thinks they game should or shouldn't have launched with as he went off his own topic.)

 

[neXib]

I think the game is complete in the sense that I've almost played 180 hours of it. If that's not complete then what is the other games exactly where you only get 30 hours out of them?

Why is your opinion about the state of the game supposedly right and me and people that agree with me wrong?

 

[Janichsan]

Before any torch carrying fly boys yelling, know that i love Elite games and i have big gratitude for the Developers who made this game. What i'm going to explain is how i feel right now with the game's current situation.

"Planing to sell an expansion over an incomplete game is wrong!" this idea is keep bugging me since i heard it from David. As the players who are now playing the game know that game is incomplete (if i have to give a rate it will be %50). I'm 38 years old and playing this game from the first elite, i have a good history with the game and knows its game mechanics, so when i bought the game , my first impression is "Thats it, this is what Elite should be", then after playing from 01.01.2015 to this date 21.05.2015, realizing that there are tons of incomplete things in the game that has made previous Elite games awesome and planing to sell us those game abilities with money, this is not just.

What they are planing to sell us with money why we should against these :

1 - Planetary landing - This ability has in 2mb Floppy version of the game and this ability is expected when they are making this game from the start, game released and we dont have it

*largely incoherent rant*

For one, the paid expansion aren't close to be coming anytime soon. While I agree with you that the game was and still is somewhat incomplete, you might have noticed that they are constantly adding things to the base game. So, by the time the paid expansions will be released, there's a good chance that the base game will be complete.

Regarding the expansions you are so much against:

This ability has in 2mb Floppy version of the game…

When was the last time you have seen the planetary surfaces of the 2 MB floppy disk game?

Let me remind you what 99.9% of the planetary surface in Frontier looked like:

Exciting, isn't it? You think you could still live with something in 2015? Or would you rather have some more content? Like, what's almost again another whole game?

 

[nick_j_bacon]

After the debacle when Gametek publisher Frontier on the PC even though THEY KNEW the audio bugs crashed the game, I should get all the subsequent releases free. Seriously. It's not like this stuff is difficult to code or expensive to make....

 

[bisador]

Ok, thanks for your mind dump. Some good stuff there. Some I agree with actually, however,

If you don't like the current game and its features, don't buy the expansion. Simples.

 

[JughedJones]

I love threads that start with "Before Fanboys start yelling"


This one proceeds to tell us how planetary landings are a 2-3mb update at best.


Awesome. "Somewhere, a bridge is left unguarded."

 

[SteveLaw]

Seriously. It's not like this stuff is difficult to code or expensive to make....

Where can I buy your games?

 

[Petersen]

TLDR: I am detecting a high pitched whining sound though.

I, too, come to forums to not-read, but rather to make flippant remarks about how I came to a forum to not-read. I also like checking out books from the library and writing "TL;DR" at the bottom of the first page.


As for the OP, I kind of agree. While I have enjoyed the hell out of the game (it's nice to see a space game that gives you at least a taste of just how mind-bogglingly vast space actually is), I don't really feel like there's enough 'game' to justify the $60 price tag.

 

[TheLoneTrucker]

I didn't bother reading the wall of text but isn't the first paid DLC not until patch 2.0? Or did i miss an announcement? that's like 8 - 9 months away. And if FD does it like a lot of other games does it. The paid DLC will be an optional add on of content and not mandatory to playing the game. I.E. if it's planet landings then you have to buy the expansion to . . . land on planets. Otherwise you're stuck flying around in space and missing out on another half of the game.