The Powerplay discussion thread.
- Thread starter Matt
- Start date
Excellent point.
Fair point, but the whole premise is flawed to me. Before it was released I posted my concern that it would simply orchestrate group grind, with the team doing the most amount winning. And that's basically all it is
There's little/no intelligence, simply the Power that gets the most points by doing the most grind ultimately does better.And ultimately has the player experience really improve from PP? It's just dug the game's heals in all the harder into this strange grind-is-good approach?
Anyway, it is what it is now. I suspect ultimately we'll see a few groups of people it appeals to, who will beaver away building up points to win here or there, while the vaste majority of people will be turned off by the orchestrated grind and generally not really bother with it to a real degree. The only thing that might save it IMHO is if deep meaningful and interesting missions become part of PP.
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It has for me. Quite fun shooting off to undermine some guy/gal interdicting some ships then come back and transport those reports somewhere as an extra few things to do. Then look at the the status and see how powers are changing. Maybe when they flesh it out more it'll be better, could add missions related to it. It aint perfect but what the hell.
Sigh..ah well guess I'm easily pleased it seems.
Reading these forums I sometimes wonder if I should feel ashamed for enjoying the game in my own little way and being enthusiastic.
Well that would be grand aye.
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I think this is what's most stupid about this whole situation. We've a totally simple fix for this, which should have been the way it was done in the first place. Stop the dumping of major amounts of cargo around stations and in CZs. That was all they had to do. There was absolutely no need whatsoever for this blanket ban on the whole smegging universe. We don't need different iterations of this utterly simple fix suggested over and over again in this thread. We don't need to give FD ideas on how to fix this, because it's bloody simple. I fly an armoured trader. I sacrifice cargo space for defense, because I've always been of the opinion that this shouldn't be space truck simulator with absolutely no risk. I'm not averse to pvp, I've flown the CZs many times, but I don't want to play the pirate. I want to be the piratee. That was supposed to be the whole bloody point of this game I thought. Trading your way through the big dangerous black. But what pirate is gonna want to interdict a 'conda trader, risk getting themselves blown up for 20 tonnes? Or a python? There's no point whatsoever in pulling over such large ships anymore. Not unless you wanna just troll them, blowing them up for no reason. C'mon FD, fix this stupid situation, it was a hamfisted attempt to fix something with no thought given to consequences at all.
This is elite for me too now. I can only stomach around an hour at a time these days before I'm thoroughly bored.
Its a pitty I now find elite to be more of a chore than a game!
There's just nothing exciting about It any more.
If you can't find something to do, then you have no motivation. That is not a gameplay problem. People want things to be easier for them. It doesn't work that way. You think the game sucks now, imagine the game where everyone owns an anaconda, no one does any trading cause its boring and the only missions given out are easy ones where you run 1 item to another dock and get paid millions.... You want to play that game?
Limits are for people without imagination and ingenuity.
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another great idea.
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another great fix.
Ask pilot to drop 20 tonnes, pick up 20 tonnes, ask them to drop 20 more. Is this so hard? Nothing is really "broken". It was arguably a quick fix to a problem that could've been looked at further, but we wouldn't be in this situation if people didn't abuse it and lag the hell out of station undocks by spewing containers at them....
Just saying, you reap what you sew. I'm sure you will get a different solution to the problem in the near future but I feel there's a lot of crocodile tears here I can't have sympathy for.
Just saying, you reap what you sew. I'm sure you will get a different solution to the problem in the near future but I feel there's a lot of crocodile tears here I can't have sympathy for.
Achilles7
Banned
PP should have been the last piece of the jigsaw, not arbitrarily inserted mid development (I hope this is mid development!!!!)...a metaphorical dark matter if you will, binding the game together..what worries me is the obvious effort that went into it was prioritised so poorly, when the content of the basic gameplay needed addressing first.
Nobody is going to stay around for that long just to get robbed. People have the option of legitimately logging out after 15s of waiting, and they will use it as soon as the pirate is busy scooping the first batch of cargo. Pirates will never see more than 20t of cargo.
And pirates aren't really interested in making things even less convenient for the trader by holding them up longer than necessary.
Non-sense and borderline flame baiting. Pirates don't spam-drop cargo containers near stations to create lag fests. And yet pirates are the ones being impacted by this change the most. So Tell us exactly, how did I and everybody else in this thread, sow this, and why should we be the ones to reap it?
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I don't know. I think we need to keep coming up with novel alternative solutions!
- Make every cargo canister request docking clearance, land at a docking pad, sell itself, and donate the money to charity.
- After 17 seconds, have all the jettisoned cargo canisters fly close to each other, and form a giant robot, which then forms a blazing sword, and a head, and attacks you.
- When you dump a cargo canister, have it follow you everywhere you go, smashing into your canopy glass, while shouting "SORRY!" loudly in a Mr Gumby voice. Wearing a knotted handkerchief hat.
- Turn all cargo canisters into cute puppies, to melt the hearts of cargo-spammers and make them sad about what they did.
Quite. I have just got back from 57 days exploring, and I am enjoying PP. Power Play is just one more thing to do. Trade a bit, BH a bit and then PP a bit.
In my earlier years I used to enjoy role playing games (I still do occasionally but time is limited). I liken Elite to a set of role playing rules without any scenarios; Power Play is an added source book. There's nothing wrong with this in itself but FD needs to put together the equivalent of scenarios and campaigns (in the form of depth etc). Either that or there needs to be the facility for community development of scenarios (and no, I don't think that the current community goals etc achieves that properly).
Sabalias
Sabalias
Excellent straw-man. No one is asking for "that game," and no one is asking for stuff to just be "easier" (at least, no one you're talking to right now) as if that would address any of the criticisms which have been levelled at the game in this thread. Why waste your time misrepresenting other people's arguments just so you can form a coherent counterpoint?
Grinding for credits isn't difficult. It's boring. Ironically, that's part of the problem. You more or less say it yourself: the most profitable activity in the game has almost zero risk, represents almost zero challenge, and takes very little effort from the player. No one wants the same repetitive missions modified to pay out a fortune for doing something incredibly easy. People want the opportunity to earn credits doing something interesting rather than mind numbingly boring. And, in-line with that, the opportunity to earn a LOT of credits for doing something dangerous and difficult, which takes skill and practice to achieve.
All that said, you seem to be oversimplifying this issue. It isn't just about missions. It's about variety in game-play and in game scenarios. I ask everyone who says "don't look at it as a grind, just have fun doing stuff" the same question: what are you actually doing? This seems to come down to two different answers: PvP (or, stuff with other players, i.e. emergent gameplay), or I'm just flying around trying everything out, not bothered about what ship or how much money I have. You talk about motivation; well, my argument would be that the only people who can enjoy the latter are people who don't require an explicit motivation. Perhaps we can all fit into that category for a time, but after that time most people have to have something to work towards. A goal or objective or problem - a point to carry on, to kill the next pirate, to haul the next load of cargo. I would argue this sort of person constitutes the majority of gamers, and that the former variety are much less common, which incidentally is why there are a lot of threads on this forum centred around balancing professions or adding new and interesting ways to make money - without an explicit motivation provided by the game (or, one encouraged by in-game lore or back-ground story) most gamers focus on levelling and gearing up. You implicitly seem to accept this argument by raising the anaconda as an example. If gearing up isn't the objective of most players, why does it matter how easily one could afford one?
This is why we come back to game-play. A lot of people define progress by getting new and interesting gear (ships/weapons) and fleshing out their fleet. The reward is what makes the grind worthwhile. Why spend your time hauling freight back and forth, repeating the same identical task over and over again, without some sort of reward at the end? How many people do you imagine trade for fun and just throw any credits earned away by buying up gold and jettisoning it into space at the first opportunity? Some people seem to think the consumerism aspect of elite is a dirty concept, or that it doesn't really exist, but I think it's a lot more important to a lot of players than these people would like to admit.
Ultimately, even people who aren't "motivated" by any particular goal or objective would benefit from more varied, interesting content. Whatever your reasons for exploring, or trading, or fighting are, sooner or later it gets old. You might even imagine that this happens more quickly for people who aren't doing it expressly for the purpose of getting new stuff. Elite's problem - and I stress, this is just MY opinion - is that it doesn't give gamers enough things to do. The basic elements of game-play are too repetitive, not varied enough, and not complex enough and there aren't enough of them. Combat zones are flat arenas with no dynamics or variety. Every single one is the same. It is just a dogfighting deathmatch. RES are as bad - they are very simple scenarios with almost no variety, no dynamism. Nothing changes. Every single one is the same, it's just a question of how frequent spawns are. Interdicting people from SC with bounties is similarly repetitive. Once you have done it a couple of times, that's it, you've seen it all. This is what people mean when they talk about gameplay being shallow. It starts OK, but never goes anywhere. There is no depth to it, no complexity. Exploration is the worst offender. I'm a physicist, so get off on just being out there feeling like I'm visiting alien star systems and flying past alien stars and worlds, but even I got bored eventually. There is just nothing to it from a gameplay point of view. The token "point and wait" mechanic is literally the bare minimum you could get away with. They almost needn't have bothered putting it in. And the universe itself, once you get out there, is incredibly sterile, spectacular technical achievement though it is.
Ultimately, all of this speaks to the problem with PP. It is just another grind. The same game-play, the same tasks, but for a different reason: merits instead of credits, rank instead of a new ship. So, I don't think it's motivation that's the problem. Some people are motivated by PP rank, some by credits, some not at all. We all want interesting game-play mechanics to explore regardless. That's why a lot of people have been vocally dissatisfied with PP. Not because it's a terrible idea, or because they can't ignore it (they can), but because of the false hope they feel the PP update ultimately represented. It has done very little to address the fundamental shortcomings of the game. I'm more than happy to accept the whole "empty house" explanation for ED being the way it is from DB, and I'm more than happy to be patient. The problem is that PP has made a lot of people question whether that promise will ever be fulfilled. Why would you build a meta-game system like PP if you believed a lot of core game-play was lacking?
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You typify my conclusion perfectly here. Why add powerplay when so much else is missing? Do the powers that be (no pun intended) share the assessment that so much else is missing?
I like it. It adds a face to the power and control. A person who lives and talks and dies. Yeah some of this crap is boring and doesn't make alot of money. But if you are doing it for money you are doing it wrong. You don't have to pledge to anyone. But if you do You can help THEM, not yourself... THEM become more powerful and maintain there power.
I was under the impression the Powers need US, the elite independent pilots, instead of the other way around.