Discussion Open Letter to Frontier Developments

[Winterwalker]

I like the idea of third party tools.

Me too, actually because they're "third party" .. it amazes me what people come up with.

The ship building site is most useful indeed. If some of these tools were brought into and integrated with the games menus it would for me make the E.D game richer and more involved.

An official cockpit (apps) shell could be very cool if FD want to make use of third party code assistance. I'd love to be able to bring up a nominated windows folder from a ship panel switch, opening a standard (pixels x pixels) frame for these tools to operate in, full screen mode. Though I realise borderless works, I just don't like to minimise my cockpit view (in case of Thargs / and planetary collision!).

I really like the idea of automatic ship logs, knowing where I have been and the ability to make notes, or to sift through some trading data now and then, or research a virtual ship build in outfitting prior to purchasing.
All these things would be a nice interesting addition to the game.

Not sure about "automated" .. but a way to organise information, as I want it organised, works best for me. This might evolve over time or I might prioritise different information, depending on what I'm doing at the time. Shared methods for organising info is a good way for people to develop "literature" skills (not just coding ones).

+1 to the OP .. as mentioned above, the fact these tools exist is a major plus, that increases my fascination for ED:H further still.

 

[Darian]

I think third party tools offer what frontier should have added from day one.

ItCOULD be even an nice game in the game
your ships computer loggs all trade data (market prices) automatically when you land in a station.

Then you can use that collectet data to sift through with search queries to find interesting trade routes.

Doing that all with pen and paper in an game the size of ED is nuts.

Since i startet playing i visited over 1200 systhems, many with multiple stations i visited so say 1600 data sets.

Doing all that with pen and paper or transderring it by hand onto exxel is plain nuts.

Sifting through that data with pen and paper or self written search routines or what ever even more so.

It is an high tech year 3300 game, skills that make sense there should be used!

Your trading success should be linked to be able to ask your trading computer the right questions!

My aim in elite is and was always to be the trampfreighter who travels from systhem to systhem, looks to sell items he has for an good price and buying cheap, then go to another sythem in an rather random fashion looking for deals (preferrable from agriculture to high tech and then some mining systhem, somethign like that)

But that is in elite dangerous rather not so much an good choice because you are rather limited in tradegoods that make sense to carry in an ship, and wheat, sorry is not an good choice until we have the LYNX bulk freighter!

Commodities that make real sense for an trader are how many? 8 or so! (if at all)

To make trading really immersive and interesting we need an ingame tool that collects data and allows us to query it with distances and danger (white dwarfs anyone) in mind, make decisions about the best route to take and so on.

and market who is sensitive to demand and supply, stations using up things in demand and restocking someway random what is produced depending on what is delivered (an high tech station should produce more and cheaper if you feed it raw materials needed!

This way people could even push markets, it would make sense to create long haul routes to trade on and earn more for intelligently feeding the markets you visit!

Right now it does not make sense to leave the route i have pretty much because the time spend searching for that elusive high gain route that will dry up fast more often than not takes so much time i am loosing credits while searchign and not running the soso trade route that i have right now wich is rather stable.

Loading up food stuffs from an agri world and delivering it to an high tech world is rather meh regarding income.

There are no factions i could ally myself with to have an real advantage in trading.

So as an trader i rely on third party tools to not drown in paper notes on my desk or switching screens every few seconds.

The way it is trading is by design rather frustrating and not at all immersive, it is more an chore than an interesting past time

(I did grow up in an household that was all about trade and that was way more fascinating as an job than Elite Dangerous ever managed to be, consider that dear gamedesigners)

As long frontier considers trading and so on "done" we depend on third party tools and Frontier left an important part of ED pretty much somethign that works in an rudimentary fashion, somethign that could be immersive and really fun.

there is right now really nothing to it than collecting data and run it through an third party tool to find your routes, in other words Frontier left something unfinished and rudimentary and depends on third parties to pick up the slack.

Maybe Frontier should stop adding more shiny to the game and start on looking into making it a game that has more than pewpew, somethign that needs strategy and building factions, something that needs more than a twitchy triggerfinger.

 

[Chris M Fortune]

Galnet is a news network, there could be ships getting the news to every system, CQC is just another game mode, you don't get to fight in your ASP, it's just like a simulator like Arena commander in Star Citizen, chat and other stuff is part of the game.

There reason why I think trade routes should not be on the website is cause it spoils the game and tell you where to go to make easy money, people should learn trade routes by playing the game and communicate with other people, not having a website tell you where to go to make money, that's lazy and gamebreaking, it's like a cheat

Apart from calling it "a cheat" I almost agree with you. I would like to see tools that allow me to review where I have been (already discovered myself) so I can plan actions according to information that is complete rather than notes jotted down or incomplete memories. It is unimportant to me if this is in game or on a website but it would be a very useful way to expand my fun in the game as I spend a lot of time travelling around and rarely stay in a system for more than a few days. I dont want anyone to tell me anything I haven't already experience in game, I just want a fluid and simple way to incorporate that in game knowledge that I have already learned into the game.

 

[wolverine2710]

They aren't , in stories covered by lore they play rather interesting role. There's considerable delay of information traveling trough human space and writers play around it rather well. Regarding trading and other data it is obvious gameplay device so players would have to seek information themselves or trough other channels, or take a risk to follow trade routes. As I said before, it is game rewarding risk/decision making and if you want just press buttons and become richer automatically, maybe it is not that game then to play.

Wrt to lore Its probably not set in stone and lore can and sometimes has to be retconned.Can't find it back but after FD mentioned that the "missing" would play a significant part in Horizons, someone did some digging in the lore and the books. It could have been Andrew (not sure) The missing did not have FTL and the conclusion was that they probably could not have travelled beyond the current civilization bubble and that some things have to be retconned. Sometimes its hard/impossible to keep the lore intact.....

 

[Koban]

honestly don't like having to use a website to find stuff to advantage me, the only one type of website I like are wiki explaining game mechanics and ships' features, maybe how to craft a particular object, other than that, I prefer discovering stuff myself

Nobody denies you that way of playing the game. But you deny other players to play it differently.
I don't get that pen&paper faction. In the 80s, when the first Elite came out, there just wasn't the internet. There was no other way than playing it like that. And more than that many players were what, 16, 20 years old? You were in school with plenty of spare time to invest in a game. How many of you have kids today or work 10 hours a day ? How enjoyable is it to spend days to look for certain modules until you pick up with actual playing again?

And I don't want to know how many of you traders play in group mode with 2 or 3 friends or even solo mode to avoid the threat of real player piracy. Because NPCs can't be considered a real threat to a player.
So you avoid risk. How immersive is that?
In the gge of internet we have price comparison pages to find the best price for PC Hardware, Clothing, flights, Hotels etc, but in the age of advanced space flight and planet colonization this is all gone? Please...

 

[Robbeh]

They aren't , in stories covered by lore they play rather interesting role. There's considerable delay of information traveling trough human space and writers play around it rather well. Regarding trading and other data it is obvious gameplay device so players would have to seek information themselves or trough other channels, or take a risk to follow trade routes. As I said before, it is game rewarding risk/decision making and if you want just press buttons and become richer automatically, maybe it is not that game then to play.

They may exist in out of game stories but they are directly contradicted by features that are already in the actual game itself. The current method of having to use out of game tools or even a pen and paper in real life is even more immersion breaking in my opinion as it quite literally takes you out of the game.
Anyway this is quickly going off track from the actual topic so best left for another thread.

+1 to more API support to allow the community to create the tools and features that FD currently doesn't have the time and/or inclination to implement themselves.

 

[Exeider]

Prices should not be shared trough any kind of official API in my opinion, players should learn and discover trade routes themselves. Said that, I am not against players sharing that information, I just don't think FD have to encourage it. Other usages of API is cool in my book. I don't expect FD to concentrate on this yet though.

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Please don't tell me "I would write this down anyway" . If you want cheat in a game which is based heavily on finding stuff out yourself...well...maybe it is really wrong game to play then.

Holy cow that is remarkably short sighted? and the fact that you consider it cheating is, i don't know, flabbergasting???

I know people hate the EvE comparison but really, where would EvE be without EvEmon(skill planner) or EFT(The fitting tool), it is a natural progression that as a game grows, it's community gets more inventive, and tools such as this come into existence. It is the mark of a good development team for a long term project like this to encourage this and not curtail it or limit it, otherwise you're liable to kill the flow of creativity and enthusiasm, thus killing your game.

The very purpose of making this a long term project is that this game will evolve as time goes alone, it MUST or it will die (Evolve or Die). And during that time, it will if not already develop a spirit of it's own, the community will invent and be part of this process. To think the developers can control this, when EVERY other development team in history has never controlled it is insane. And all those other teams did various forms of reactions to it, some tries to wrangle it and it bit them in the face, some went with it and the zen of it rewarded them for their trust.

The community is another function of the game, it is the group that makes things happen NOT the devs, because we play it, and more over we live in it, the irony is that the people who play the game are often more in touch with the essence of the game then the actual developers, yes I know that seems to not make sense, but as someone who has both played and worked for the company that made the game, I can tell you that developers don't live and breathe the game the same way as you do. For you it's game, and a place you immerse yourself, for them it's a job, a career that they love but ultimately a job they do.

It's like asking Star Trek actors about highly specific questions about the shows, the characters they played, and most of them don't think about it that way, and are NOT connected to them in the way you think, save for a few people (Nimoy)

When it comes to long term game develop projects that this is trying to be, the essence of emergent game play and community contribution to that development is GOING to happen. On that time scale the odds of it happening are almost a guarantee. And it should be encouraged not curtailed.

the fact that people such as yourself refuse to acknowledge that THIS ISN'T ELITE(1984) and never was going to be, I don't care what the devs said on the kickstarter page, I knew it when I read it that it wasn't and SHOULDN'T be restricted to being just another Elite game. and if not, well to paraphrase yourself: "well...maybe it is really wrong game (for you) to play then."

This game is an MMO, even though the devs have it HIGHLY instanced, and I hope in the future that will change.
This game is more then just a Singleplayer, Space Sim, where finding things out yourself is the main motivation, and knowledge of things on the internet is akin to a "Strategy Guide"

The fact that the devs have stated that they plan on a larger player based groups (read: guilds) means they are acknowledging the scale of what it is they have created and are now going with the flow of it instead of resisting it, creating a proper API and adding information to it is the way to go, because large scale organization which seems is where we are heading is going to depend on it to happen. Now exactly what form that will take, again that's the zeitgeist of the community, and can be guessed but not truly determined till it actually happens. But I think the devs should give the community tools to allow them to keep guiding the spirit of the game as they already are. And I think the fact that the devs are not resisting it are showing they are trusting the community more.

In that same light, the community needs to be willing and understand when that happens, WE will share in the blame if things go south, no buck passing to the devs after the fact. So just keep that in mind. "With great power comes great responsibility"

/soapbox

 

[{SAS}Stalker]

Galnet is a news network, there could be ships getting the news to every system, CQC is just another game mode, you don't get to fight in your ASP, it's just like a simulator like Arena commander in Star Citizen, chat and other stuff is part of the game.

There reason why I think trade routes should not be on the website is cause it spoils the game and tell you where to go to make easy money, people should learn trade routes by playing the game and communicate with other people, not having a website tell you where to go to make money, that's lazy and gamebreaking, it's like a cheat

Are you suggesting a courier updates my Galnet news panel when I'm in Sag A. Ive never seen this happen and surely by the time they find me its out of date unless there are literally billions of pilots setting off every hour to random systems to update cmdrs on board news panel?

 

[Garbarrage]

OMG, Spoiler sites, if a large part of the community can't play without them then there is a huge issue, gamers becoming too lazy to find traderoutes the old way ? How is it possible they are even sharing that data? Doesn't it completely spoil the game if everything is already on a website?

To be fair, that data should be available in-game. We're talking about a civilization with FTL communication, and where trading is the basis of the economy. It's crazy that this stuff isn't available in game.

The developers of these 3rd party tools, have not only provided players with a useful tool, but also freed up FD developer time, as they no longer need to create these tools. And in doing so, have shown the strength of the community in all working together to help create this game.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

To be fair, that data should be available in-game. We're talking about a civilization with FTL communication, and where trading is the basis of the economy. It's crazy that this stuff isn't available in game.

The developers of these 3rd party tools, have not only provided players with a useful tool, but also freed up FD developer time, as they no longer need to create these tools. And in doing so, have shown the strength of the community in all working together to help create this game.

There's no FTL communication except for few very expensive cases. And no, showing trading data is not creating game, it is destroying purpose of this game.

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Holy cow that is remarkably short sighted? and the fact that you consider it cheating is, i don't know, flabbergasting???

Game's intent is to reward risk. If you don't take risk gather trade data yourself, there's no other reason for this game to exist really.

 

[Coruin]

The way the tools work at the moment is good and solid way. It isn't "real time auto-update" of all known stations. Someone has to get there and get the data. More options (albeit restricted) for the api would be nice gesture and it will most likely free up some workforce at FD to put it into other parts of the game (before someone starts yelling "there is no content in the game"...a point of view I don't share at all).

Prices should not be shared trough any kind of official API in my opinion, players should learn and discover trade routes themselves. Said that, I am not against players sharing that information, I just don't think FD have to encourage it. Other usages of API is cool in my book. I don't expect FD to concentrate on this yet though.

Keep in mind that the trade data is only updated if someone actually visits the requested station. Even if you rely on any of the trading tools, chances are high, that the data may either not yet exist or be very old, if you are in a region only a few people call there "home". I once visited a station with data stored in a tool that was like half a year old...

 

[Cmdr Thrudd]

Pecisk I agree with you in many cases but in the case of the in game trade tools they're simply inadequate. Defending this point isn't helping the game. We've still got the same problems with the trade system we had in alpha. The map doesn't give players the information they need and the game doesn't remember stuff they've discovered. Out of game tools fill the need players have and if they're not going to improve the in game tools at least the devs should facilitate the communities efforts. Third party developers put in 1000's of hours creating and supporting the community because we all want a better game.

 

[Robbeh]

There's no FTL communication except for few very expensive cases. And no, showing trading data is not creating game, it is destroying purpose of this game.

Instant player to player communication? Check
System status updates for powerplay in the galaxy map? Check
CQC access anywhere in the galaxy? Check
Galnet newsfeeds update anywhere in the galaxy? Check

This is going by the lore/rules set by the game. If you prefer the lore in the storybooks then perhaps this isn't the game for you.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Pecisk I agree with you in many cases but in the case of the in game trade tools they're simply inadequate. Defending this point isn't helping the game. We've still got the same problems with the trade system we had in alpha. The map doesn't give players the information they need and the game doesn't remember stuff they've discovered. Out of game tools fill the need players have and if they're not going to improve the in game tools at least the devs should facilitate the communities efforts. Third party developers put in 1000's of hours creating and supporting the community because we all want a better game.

I don't see looking up where I can safely net 2k profit/per ton a "better game". However I can agree that I want to see Commander's Journal and equal data API in game (cool if both), which would allow collate trade data for personal usage.

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Instant player to player communication? Check
System status updates for powerplay in the galaxy map? Check
CQC access anywhere in the galaxy? Check
Galnet newsfeeds update anywhere in the galaxy? Check

This is going by the lore/rules set by the game. If you prefer the lore in the storybooks then perhaps this isn't the game for you.

Official lore is there's no FTL. Don't like it, don't play it

 

[Garbarrage]

There's no FTL communication except for few very expensive cases. And no, showing trading data is not creating game, it is destroying purpose of this game.

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Game's intent is to reward risk. If you don't take risk gather trade data yourself, there's no other reason for this game to exist really.

Read the books. There's ftl communication in Elite lore.

In the recent book by ED Exec Producer Michael Brookes, Elite:Legacy, there are three types of comms.

• Normal Ship to Ship radio comm - can be relayed by drones and Nav Beacons

• Hyperspace Comms using similar technology as the old Hyperspace drives of Elite or the newer Frame Shift Drives allowing for little delay in comm over multi-light year distances

• Point2Point Laser Comm for ship to ship or ship to station short distance line of site communication (useful when the other two types are jammed),

Also, in Drew Wager's book "Reclamation",

Spoiler

Senator Kahina broadcasts a declaration of war against the rebel reclamists before jumping to the Prism system, making all aware of her survival, before her arrival in the system.

There are several other examples in Elite lore. Needless to say, if they could do this, they could communicate data with trade prices.

We even have it in game, in the form of GalNet.

And let's not forget Radio Sidewinder

 

[Robbeh]

Official lore is there's no FTL. Don't like it, don't play it

Your still not getting it... The "official lore" is directly contradicted by the official game which we are all playing, the tools the community have already developed using the mobile API are enhancing the gameplay while still following the rules/lore established by the game itself.

This is already happening whether you like it or not, you can either accept it or continue blindy telling everyone that disagrees with you to stop playing the game - Makes no differance to me.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Your still not getting it... The "official lore" is directly contradicted by the official game which we are all playing, the tools the community have already developed using the mobile API are enhancing the gameplay while still following the rules/lore established by the game itself.

This is already happening whether you like it or not, you can either accept it or continue blindy telling everyone that disagrees with you to stop playing the game - Makes no differance to me.

Nothing is happening, lore is not changed because there are some tools directed to players which contradicts lore.

Also this discussion about lore is besides the point - game is about rewarding risk. Knowing price points before departing to station is no risk. Developers have been strongly against it in the past. Trying to argue for this change is really arguing against core point of the game. Therefore useless. Don't like it, don't play it, your choice really.

 

[Garbarrage]

Your still not getting it... The "official lore" is directly contradicted by the official game which we are all playing, the tools the community have already developed using the mobile API are enhancing the gameplay while still following the rules/lore established by the game itself.

This is already happening whether you like it or not, you can either accept it or continue blindy telling everyone that disagrees with you to stop playing the game - Makes no differance to me.

There is FTL communication in every piece of "official Elite lore" that I've read.... see post above for examples.

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Nothing is happening, lore is not changed because there are some tools directed as players which contradicts lore.

Also this discussion about lore is besides the point - game is about rewarding risk. Knowing price points before departing to station is no risk. Developers have been strongly against it in the past. Trying to argue for this change is really arguing against core point of the game. Therefore useless. Don't like it, don't play it, your choice really.

You're flat out wrong regarding the lore.

As for risk reward... the risk is in beating pirates, not in making uneducated guesses at commodity values.

Could you quote a source where FD devs are against these 3rd party tools?

 

[wolverine2710]

We are currently playing the semantics game (lore atm) and I participated as well. This is derailing the importance of this thread.

Namely where we ask FD to provide us (or let us help them) with an api or a stop gap solution where data is dumped in the client so that it can be collected and distributed (if a user choose so) by third party tools. More importantly if they can not come up with a (real/dump) API in the short term that at least the usage of the companion API (as used by EDCE, EDAPI and EDMC) is officially allowed/tolerated for the time being. If not tell us that and tell that the authors of the tools - so we can all go home. FD absolutely, totally positively for 1000% knows who the authors are and how to contact them for a cease and desist letter. Imho they are tolerating the usage of the companion API without telling us that they tolerate it. They did close the threads of the authors of the tools, sometimes moderators asked me to remove/redact a post where I mentioned those tools - to get more and badly needed data. But aside from that FD does not act against the tool authors. Also a tool of which I'm co-author of has been mentioned in the comm chatter, newsletter and is on the official community website. FD has gone through our website to see/determine if the content would be safe and sound, so to say. They must have seen the companion api tools there, they are there in plain side.

To be in compliance with the FD forum rules I'm not mentioning the urls of the tools which use the companion API. The website has been been optimized for SEO (Search engine optimization) though. Googlefu will work.

 

[SPOOKS]

Whichever way you spin this debate there are plenty of users out that work like myself and don't have the time to do stuff the "old way", third party sites are invaluable to keep up with current content and our friends, besides there is nothing stopping the hardcore gamers from not using these sites and ignore them completely.