And in no way a simulation...hmmmm.
Obsidian Ant's "Powerplay Rant"
- Thread starter Tar Stone
- Start date
And in no way a simulation...hmmmm.
Agreed in full. I worry more and more with each update that we will never get the game we were promised and paid for. Most of all, it scares me because FD have a history of reneging on promises (offline only) and false advertising.
It was a rant. As such, like any rant, it's not a rehersed, structured argument. It's an emotionally driven set of thoughts and first impression compared haphazardly to previously built up expectations.
...I certainly will use some of the point raised to improve my videos (and make them much shorter!)
If I might make a constructive criticism as a viewer:
It's not the length that's the problem. I've happily watched hour long discussions on YouTube of various gaming matters. The problem is more or less 20 to 25 minutes of it are spent repeatedly back and forth over the same definitions; ironically, something which you wanted to avoid focussing on.
I understand the motive, but regardless of the internet's mentality to default to the 'straw man' or 'argumentum ad hominem', you must state your case as you see it, as clearly as possible, without appologising or defending terms that are pretty standard interpretations to any rational gamer.
I'll gladly watch another 40 minutes of you discussing any aspect of Elite: Dangerous and going into details about specific points of its design, but that wasn't the main body of this video.
If you're going to post even a rant for others to share, it's still a good idea to compose, structure and edit the content before publishing so it gets thepoint across effectively.
I hope you don't mind the input, and I look forward to your next video.
I see what your saying but you are taking it to an extreme. people want an open world that is fun to explore. staring at the same empty place in space to travel to a far away station isn't exploring it is a time sink, though it does have a purpose for pirates to be able to get their prey, someone trying to turn in vouchers or merits it has 0 purpose other than to take up time. people are mad when trading gets less effective because now the grind is even longer. in its current state elite has many functions that are timesinks, especially the ones that are intended to have the greatest effect on the galaxy (powerplay) I agree with ant the timesinks are one of elites worst properties.
At least one can say - it makes for some really unexpected twists
(they keep surprising us... with the good, the bad & the ugly... has its merits sometimes)
Cue Ennio Morricone...
Short of Skynet, COLOSSUS, HAL 9000, The Monolith, etc all rolled into one, there is not an AI anywhere that could make emergent play viable. A dedicated human game master, following each player (for once, a full time paid job) could not do it, because the GM's would soon create Paranoia to punish all the conflicting players (because they are gamers, they want TPK's). And, would cost a trillion dollars themselves to pay.
Obsidian Ant has created a wonderful, well thought out, critique of Power Play. The only fallacies in the video were that he believed a a game designer, and that emergent game play was possible.
Obsidian Ant has created a wonderful, well thought out, critique of Power Play. The only fallacies in the video were that he believed a a game designer, and that emergent game play was possible.
Rafe Zetter
Banned
I must have missed something ... I assumed DB was the one driving dev choices.... so if DB isn't the guy behind the wheel of E: D then who is? and why?
Is FDev working on something MORE important than E: D? The game that has changed the fortunes financially and developmentally of FDev as a company? FDev could not command the tens of millions it has made from E: D from a publishing house as a game dev budget and be allowed to be "hands free" in their choices; neither Frontier nor DB has ever commanded that much Kudos. So they went to KS, and it was US the fans, who gave them that money and freedom, based on what was said in the vids posted like above.
And now we are the ones being pushed to accept compromises in a complete reversal of how a game is normally developed and directions taken therein (the money ppl usually make the choices a dev house has to comply with).
Whether they know it or even acknowledge this as truth, E: D is Frontiers breakthrough game, as a company. The rollercoaster sims while good, never made mainstream sales numbers (in the same way the Wing Commander series and others of it's peers did), and Frontiers other projects haven't "made" their name either. E: D is the game by which Frontier will be judged as either having blossomed into a mainstream game provider able to make gamers drool at the mere announcement they are making another game - the sort of excitement Bethesda / Valve / John Romero and others used to command; or merely seen as a game dev just a notch or two up from an indie niche software house like inXile (who are doing a sterling job so far with Tides of Numenera, and who have yet to make me feel let down by what they are doing with my money - if you liked Planescape Torment by Black Isle, check it out, it's a followup.. of sorts).
Or worse yet, if the direction E: D takes is even further away from the scenarios spoken of by both DB himself and mentioned in the DDF, Frontier may find themselves hoisted by their own petard (blown up by your own bomb), seen as yet another dev unable to deliver as "promised" and should they ever go back to kickstarter and hold out their collective caps; only find 2 brass farthings and a bottlecap because there's no trust that what they do with the money will be good.
Someone above mentioned how this may also generate a general feeling of mistrust with kickstarter projects of this size as a whole. Well for me that's already happened too. InXile got my money before FDev rained a golden shower on E: D in gamma (but again so far i'm not disappointed) and in all probability no-other KS project will again. That's not to say I won't ever buy a game created by a KS program, but that will give me the choice of buying into a KNOWN quantity rather than giving someone a chunk of money for an unknown product.
He probably has to explain everything twice because half the people on this forum don't even know what half the words mean in any context.
Kind of like the people who cry GRIEFER to someone who just killed them in perfectly legit PvP - they have no idea what they are talking about.
38 Min IS TOO long, but overall - good message. It's grindplay 1.3
Rafe Zetter
Banned
Ahem. Few days ago I re-started my ancient (alpha test) WoT account which I haven't touched ever since ED has been released - it's a blast
I will keep an eye on ED and these forums, though, because I also expect that the game will grow in the future. If it doesn't... oh, well. Past six months were interesting. Sometimes. Kind of.
This and other similar posts are disconcerting, because it could be the herald of a pattern of events, a path if you will that I've seen a dozen times, and it doesn't lead to Xanadu.
It's been 7 months now and people are publicly saying in statements like this "I'm leaving", the *I want to make a public statement* part being the important factor. Now of course this happens all the time, but the difference is these posts are not from the "gimmie an iWin button" players but are being posted by players who are usually ardent and loyal fans.
I've seen this pattern before in the player base of: Age of Conan, SWTor, Warhammer Online, the failed Neocron 1 and the never to appear relaunch, Matrix online, Hellgate London and who can forget what happened to Tabula Rasa, which has echoes here of DB & co not providing the vision spoken of. Every time I have seen this behaviour trend occur it's led to bad things for the game, at best managing to stay afloat by going F2P, at worst shutting down once more people see even the ardent "harcore" playerbase is abandoning ship.
E: D can't go F2P, not simply because of a developers choice, but because there's nowhere near enough stuff to keep a F2P playerbase amused.
I was recently reminded of something I thought forgotten - something that happened in the gaming industry years ago - there was an MMO called Vanguard: Saga of Hero's. The games dev's wanted to have a game world that you didn't just play but immersed yourself in, where things you did made a difference, and that you could play for almost endless hours developing a toon; where levelling up wouldn't take days or even weeks or months, but possibly years as you might your own RL persona; something even more *second life* than "Second Life".
Sound familiar?
The game reality when launched was far short of what was laid out - many blamed the games primary creator for not being around for most of the crucial design choices "afk manager" was a phrase used a lot.
Now this also has echo's of what seems to have happened in E: D. Powerplay hasn't followed the direction DB laid out in the vid blogs, someone said above they thought that DB should be the creative head - which can lead one only to surmise he doesn't think DB IS the guy in charge, and if he's thought it, others have too; the consequences of which, if true, are obvious.
I've been under the impression Michael Brookes was at the helm for ages? I thought David Braben was looking after the company matters, and just overseeing progress of this as it is their flagship product.
Rafe Zetter
Banned
Further integration? There's none to begin with. PP is a minigame separate from the whole. Ignoring it has no effect on anything.
Integration to the simulation would mean if all but a handful of players ignored PP, those handful that participated would have the powers of a God. They would decide what systems expanded, and which factions rose or fell.
But this isn't the current reality. Systems that had over 10,000 expansion points... didn't expand, and yet at least 1 system not only didn't expand, but swapped faction control; leading players to think either the game engine chooses which system expands by random choice not by a leaderboard of points, OR that someone at FDev is in control of what happens. Making the whole "the game reacts to player actions" a LIE.
Rafe Zetter
Banned
Errm, it's "pedant".. A person who is "pedantic" is a pedant.
Sorry about that.
*lifts rock; a nice rock, with swirly bits and sparkles; a rock for a better class of pedant, in a nice neighborhood* and crawls back under.
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This is a very well thought out post and i really hope that the reason for the pp mechanics was not intended but an oversight. +1 for this post Rafe Zetter
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To oversimplify things a bit, none of powerplay would be needed if they'd simply made the background sim work. Instead we now have an ugly wrapper around a non-functional system. That's why it all feels so empty to so many people; because it is empty. Because the background sim is useless.
Well, that's really it isn't it. What everyone is kind of waiting for. What's the game actually going to end up being like to try and play.
For now, if you ignore USW singles and PP, about the only thing that's changed in the past 6 months is CG was done well and is still kicking pretty good. The meta game with ships is still a mixed bag if PvP is your thing. The BckrdSim has taken a vacation from publicity because the threads are already at Britannica length. With no real results to cheer about.
So taken all in, you get what you get, and you don't throw a fit. I bought the game, it's great, and I hope it continues to evolve. The current Mission, Rank, and PP mechanics are not all that though. Heck, imho, Exploring and CG is about the only thing worth anything right now. I'm not pledging to anyone
For now, if you ignore USW singles and PP, about the only thing that's changed in the past 6 months is CG was done well and is still kicking pretty good. The meta game with ships is still a mixed bag if PvP is your thing. The BckrdSim has taken a vacation from publicity because the threads are already at Britannica length. With no real results to cheer about.
So taken all in, you get what you get, and you don't throw a fit. I bought the game, it's great, and I hope it continues to evolve. The current Mission, Rank, and PP mechanics are not all that though. Heck, imho, Exploring and CG is about the only thing worth anything right now. I'm not pledging to anyone
This is the main problem I have with the whole game at the moment. The supercruise game doesn't connect to the RES game, The RES game doesn't connect to the trading at stations game, the influence at station game doesn't have any connection to powerplay, the powerplay game doesn't connect to the conflict zone game. These separate elements are good, but they need to come together.
Rafe Zetter
Banned
(offtopic) did anyone read that and start hearing "the shin bone's connected to the, thigh bone..." song or was that just me?
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I think it's probably worse than that even. Some of these disparate games don't make sense in the context of one another. On top of that, the individual games themselves aren't particularly well developed either. Conflict zones seem to have no strategic dimension - they're the 3301 equivalent of saying "let's meet on the playing field at 5 and have a scrap" - and cannot be "won" or influenced in any shape or form. They're ED's equivalent of a deathmatch mode, when what we need is something more akin to "assault" or "rush" with defined objectives for each team. RES are random waypoints for miners to flock to for no discernible reason. Where is the infrastructure, the corporate interest? Why aren't there mining barges and regular visits by traders to truck refined minerals back to stations? Why would any miner visit an arbitrary sign posted location within a huge area when he could drop out of SC at any random point and suffer far less risk of interception? And let's not get on to exploration, because that's another thread in itself.
PP is perfectly fine as a concept, but currently has two major problems:
1) The way it's implemented.
2) More fundamental aspects of the game need serious love and attention. It is way too soon for meta gaming. The game the meta game builds on isn't anywhere near interesting or complete enough.
EDIT: And, whilst I'm not taking a formal "break", I have re-activated my SWTOR sub. Last night, for the first time in a while, I gamed and didn't touch Elite. There is nothing I'm compelled to return to the game to do at the moment. If RES get sorted, I might come back and grind some more creds to outfit my Python then I have a decent stable of ships at the ready if future release satisfy my need for content and better gameplay and I decide to play more.
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