The Elite Dangerous ingame reputation system thread

[Alexander the Grape]

It's really not that punishing. Especially since you're only losing a benefit. In any case, it's not even that difficult.

Getting to a decent rank (say rank 4) doesn't take that long. 1500 merits is what, 100 enemy ships destroyed? Say you play 5 days a week, so that's 20 ships a day. I can easily kill 20 ships in an hour. Playing for an hour a day isn't too much to ask for a 5,000,000 credits weekly wage+faction perks and bonuses, surely? And that's excluding power commodities altogether

 

[Twigster]

You get one merit per kill. That's regardless of what you've just killed, so you're looking at needing 1500 kills a week to make L4. Now that's not so bad if those kills actually count for something, but at ten credits a go it's actually costing more in fuel and ammo to get them than you can make. What's the point of that? At least make it similar to a normal warzone or else what's the appeal for players like me who only get an hour or two occasionally during the week to try and do anything?

 

[Arindor]

PP still sounds like FD are alienating and punishing the casual ED gamer if stuff like this keeps being mentioned. Very disheartening indeed, if I knew when I became a PB'er this would happen, I would have saved my money for something better ... <sigh>

 

[Jason S]

If it is suited only really for hard core players that is ok by me.

I would hope though they bring out things in the future also for casual players and lone wolf players.

The game world should be big enough to cater for all types so long as FD
decide to bring features and content for all types and not focus too much on a subset of the player base.

We will see.

 

[mojonaut]

i believe the most exciting part of elite dangerous is the future prospect of the planetary landing expansion and other expansions such as ship interiors and space station interiors.

and therin lies the problem: believing in future prospects.

With FD it's always jam tomorrow, what we have today is sh*t but tomorrow will be better.

Except:

Wings was going to make things better

Powerplay was going to make things better

Walking around your cockpit will make things better

Planetary Landings will make things better.

Each update is steadily making things worse, the dumbing down for Consoles is slowly but surely creeping in.

 

[Flappers]

There are arguments for both sides.

Thing is, I do agree that a decay is neccessary because of the people who grind it out to the top and reap in 50 mill credits a week.

But the way it's handled is punishing casual players and players who have just started.

So the question isn't should or shouldn't they keep it.... the question is, how do they adjust it, so that casual players are able to rank up, while players with high ratings have to keep an upkeep.

There should be compromise to both sides, not simply just one or the other.

Personally, I feel that the baseline rating should be at 3. Once you hit rating of 3 you can stay there.
Anything above gets decayed back down to 3.

That way, it adds incentive for people to get involved with their power, and get to that rating. Once there, it allows casual players, and new players alike a fighting chance to hit that rating 5.

 

[clavain]

More likley artists an the like. Always layoffs after big push - can only reassign so many bodies an never need as many bodies as when developing.

It was the entire Halifax, Nova Scotia office, which included developers, as well as the 13 in Cambridge.

 

[Ikari]

I think the merit degrade needs to go and ranks should be permanent but non transferable so if you defect its back to the bottom with no merits.

The weekly credit payouts need to be balanced with a base of 100,000cr and a cap of 5mil per week. Offer better payouts on merit "bonds" and offer a payout for the data transfer missions. Give rank 5 and all the ranks far better rewards like 25% off ships and mod's in all exploited system or something like a "kill licence" that allows them to undermine without getting bounties for the top tiers, hell even a faction specific paint job!

The ranks would of course have to be harder to attain offering better rewards and more incentive but people would no longer feel they could never obtain x-reward bit like working up to that Python,Conda,T9 you want.

 

[viper1701]

There are plenty of ways to fix this easily.

For example you could imagine a system where you keep your ranking and merits. But needs to "show dedication" to get your weekly reward.

For example let's say you're a really dedicated player and manage to reach 4 stars. The week after to keep your weekly reward you'll need a fix number of merits to get your rewards.

This would fix almost all issues :

Dormant players would not become insanely rich by doing nothing after they reach a rank.
BUT : dormant players going back to the game after a month break will still have his ranking and just have to go at it again to reactivate his reward.

It's a frankly simple solution, ho and by the way I'm not inventing anything. It's how most airline companies reward system work, separating status miles & Regular Miles

 

[Mack]

I'm working on it I have a plan to get Ed Lewis and/or Michael Brookes drunk in the spa at LaveCon and spill the beans

After the initial launch, I did think of attended Lavecon, but slowly my love of the game is being eroded by the direction some things are going, and the instabilities introduced.

 

[DubbleTwice]

Agree. Starting to get less happy.

 

[ffr]

For those here disappointed with the quality of ED, l have a question. Why did you think ED would be any more fit for purpose than Frontier's previous space sim?

http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/archive/b5090002.jpg

Or the one before that?

http://www.pdf-archive.com/2015/02/...ugs-fe2-amiga-format-issue-057-march-1994.pdf

Seriously.

 

[GJ51]

I have to agree with this.i have defended FD cause they ve been good so far but since powerplay came out the game is so buggy that for the first time since launch i have actually considered to stop playing it

Rather than debate all the fine points, I think your post highlights the major issue.

I signed up for PB2 last September. I've put in a lot of hours in the last 10 months doing all the ranks and getting allied status in all 3 factions and recently achieving Elite Trader.

Since 1.3 release, I just monitor the forums for any sign of encouragement that things are improving and it''s time for me to jump back in the cockpit.

Losing motivation to play at all... maybe just burned out, but 1.3 certainly isn't making me want to jump in and play more. Maybe I'll feel more like it in a week or two.

 

[Genus]

For those here disappointed with the quality of ED, l have a question. Why did you think ED would be any more fit for purpose than Frontier's previous space sim?

http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/archive/b5090002.jpg

Or the one before that?

http://www.pdf-archive.com/2015/02/...ugs-fe2-amiga-format-issue-057-march-1994.pdf

Seriously.

Good memory.

 

[Rall]

For those here disappointed with the quality of ED, l have a question. Why did you think ED would be any more fit for purpose than Frontier's previous space sim?

http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/archive/b5090002.jpg

Or the one before that?

http://www.pdf-archive.com/2015/02/...ugs-fe2-amiga-format-issue-057-march-1994.pdf

Seriously.

I gave up on the Amiga version, they where a nightmare, the later PC release was pretty good though.

Now, do need we mention Aliens: Colonial Marines, or is it still too soon.

Personally I'm STILL not over the Diakatana release, and don't get me started on Battlecruiser 3000AD...

 

[Rall]

I was really surprised with they announced 1.3 release, I was sure it needed at least another week in beta. I agree that Friday release was a big mistake.

The sad reality is Frontier is actually one of the better companies for release day and post release support. As the software complexity increases quality control is slipping behind.

It could be worse, much worse. It could be an EA, Bethesda or Ubisoft release.

 

[StarTux]

In the IT I work in we call Friday's read-only for a good reason .

Honestly I think they should have have reset the beta server and named it gamma, and open it up to everyone for a week or so. That way it would have gotten hammered out even, but I suspect the rush may have been caused by E3.

Despite the crashes, I was still able to complete the missions without too many issues, but it was still annoying.

- - - Updated - - -

I was really surprised with they announced 1.3 release, I was sure it needed at least another week in beta. I agree that Friday release was a big mistake.

The sad reality is Frontier is actually one of the better companies for release day and post release support. As the software complexity increases quality control is slipping behind.

It could be worse, much worse. It could be an EA, Bethesda or Ubisoft release.

Yes, it could have been much worse and there is a lot I am liking in the game right now, for one I just noticed some NPC asking me to follow him when I entered SC after accepting a mission, I didn't this time, but perhaps its the mission branching starting to show?

 

[n13L5]

Seriously

Stop allowing your marketing and newsletters to dictate release cycles (Yes, you need to market the releases - but you don't have a good enough history of low-issues releases to let marketing dictate the day you push stuff out - where is the project manager or product owner's say on this?!?).

Stop releasing major patches on a Friday - even if you have staff available, it's also the busiest time of the week for your players and in some cases the only time people can play.

Stop releasing major releases out of Beta until you are sure there are no major bugs. Up until Friday, and continuing today, people are still advising of bugs.

---

I like a few here have been here a while, and your CC is decreasing amongst us. You only have to look on here, reddit and I'm sure on Steam to see many unhappy people (and you don't have enough resource to put out the fires). Of course there are people who thing you can do no wrong, and they are entitled to their opinion - but keep on this path and even they will not be able to white knight soon enough.

Many of us, who are experienced software developers (myself 15+ years) have said it's a bad idea to release on a Friday - yet you continue to. And every time we see major issues in the first few days. It's like you're extending the beta cycle, except on productions severs.

This is not a good thing. I know from my own groups Teamspeak tonight that this is the first time some are back in a while and they are not impressed. You are the butt of many people's jokes.

Seriously! Stop it, take stock and improve what your doing before many people just walk away from this game.

I agree with your fundamental points.

Individuals can argue how many bugs of what severety are ok or not ok, but overall, FD just doesn't understand customer satisfaction.

Matter of fact, no British company I've ever dealt with gave a hoot about customer satisfaction. It was more like "we got your money, what you gonna do about it? And we don't give a whit if you ever buy anything from us again, we'll just find new suckers.

Sorry to say this, but its such a chasm compared to American companies. Not that they're angels, but they do generally try to be angels to people who gave them money and might do so again.

As for penalizing people for having a life outside the game will go down in gaming history as one of the top 3 most wrongheaded, backwards decisions.


I'm still trying to figure out how that meeting went down where they signed off on that.


Not that reputation decay couldn't be used to achieve their two goals:

1) letting bad guys get out of the dog house without actually having to work for it (not sure I agree with that, save for those people who got hit by ridiculous escalating loitering violations or other minor things) This could be done offline or online or both. But its a totally separate bag from positive reputation.

2) And to make it harder to keep allied with all 3 factions, for example, to be fair, reputation should only decay while online. And in a smartly regulated fashion:

- If you're offline, nothing changes whatsoever. real life > game ...maybe FD will get that one day?
- If you're online but exploring outside of inhabited space, nothing changes
- If you're online and trading / questing / fighting for the Empire, your Federation and Alliance reputation will decay. No decay in Empire, until you actually start doing missions / trading / combat for the other two. Same for each faction.

- Powerplay idk, haven't tried that, don't like ladders.

 

[n13L5]

I've already written to FD around the latter aspect. I won't be writing again. The organisation is not mature and in my opinion, judging by the response, there is insufficient appetite to improve in a reasonable time frame.

Heh, they took over 5 months to resolve an issue with my account, resulting in being unable to play from December 27th 2014 to May 17th 2015. So I missed the last patches, lucky me

I must say, that CCP, developer and publisher of EVE online took years before they managed to make half stable updates. If your game is good enough, you can survive that. What bugs me here is, that they have a tendency to gloss over things, where CCP would say 'umm, sorry, that really was crappy...' which goes a long way to soothe angry customers. And it proves you are being looked at as a customer, not some dolt who wouldn't know the difference.

 

[n13L5]

And in the last 48 hours, you've quantified this? How many times have you been interdicted by police in a friendly system. For me, interdictions occur, less that 1 in 20 regardless of my rep. Fuel and repair bills? How much higher?

Please give us some real numbers and not some sky is falling doomsday predictions.

Before people start screaming about "all their hard work going into the toilet" perhaps we should quantify what is actually at stake. Until I see some numbers, based on observation and fact, I will continue to contend that 48 hours is not sufficient enough for anyone to judge the effect of rep decay other than perhaps what's printed on your right hand display in your cockpit.

I'm simply reiterating what FD has said about Allied reputation, You get discounts on fuel and repairs and you get interdicted less.

So I didn't need to quantify anything for you, it is as FD said, if we can believe them


Also, I'm not against decay in general, but penalizing people for having a life outside the game will go down in gaming history as one of the top 3 most wrongheaded, backwards decisions.


I'm still trying to figure out how that meeting went down where they signed off on that.


The way to do reputation decay:


1) letting bad guys get out of the dog house without actually having to work for it (not sure I agree with that, save for those people who got hit by ridiculous escalating loitering violations or other minor things that took a ridiculous turn) This could be done offline or online or both. But its a totally separate bag from positive reputation.

2) To "make it harder to keep allied with all 3 factions", for example, to be fair, reputation should only decay while online. And in a smartly regulated fashion:

- If you're offline, nothing changes whatsoever. real life > game ...maybe FD will get that one day?
- If you're online but exploring outside of inhabited space, nothing changes
- If you're online and trading / questing / fighting for the Empire, your Federation and Alliance reputation will decay. No decay in Empire, until you actually start doing missions / trading / combat for the other two. Same for each faction.


More work than a simplistic global decay of everything, but good solutions do take a bit work.

Don't introduce what isn't properly prepared.