It's not the game - it's you.

[McDosy]

Originally Posted by STINKFISH Indeed 33 pages of informed, factual, intelligent, negative and largely constructive criticism of the game - by a majority of posters who see the good in the game, but are justifiably concerned that the direction the game is taking is not inline with today's standards of MMO gaming....

Originally Posted by McDosy
There are no 'standards of MMO gaming'. You can dip your toe in that pool fully, a bit, or not at all.

This game is not an MMO.

Originally Posted by Ignition
Its listed as a MMO.

Originally Posted by McDosy
I never said they didn't. I said it wasn't. ....
...I don't agree with FDev throwing buzzwords like that into their marketing.



Thank you Sirs. This concludes nicely.

Wow. That's your conclusion? Quote me out of context? I didn't say it wasn't, right up until I pointed out that it actually isn't in the bit between the ... and the other ... or your "quote".

Just...wow. Utterly contemptible.

OK. Well, you "win", I guess. That's not a competition I'm going to try and beat you at. A triumphant new low.

 

[Jex =TE=]

I approached the game with a completely open mind to begin with; I didn't go into it expecting or wanting to find a grindy and shallow experience but that is what I got. I don't seek a grind, I avoid it whenever I can and I couldn't give a toss about credits or what ship I'm using. The trouble is the game is a grind no matter what you do, there's not enough to it to elevate it beyond boring, simplistic, grindy mechanics.

Exploration - horizons could potentially add a lot to make it legitimately interesting and rewarding but so far it's just been press the jump button a lot and point your ship at stars and currently Horizons doesn't offer much more; USS on dead, barren, planets and that's about it. It could be really rewarding, but I don't see enough difference between one explorer's wall of screenshots and another's. If there were more exotic stuff to see, more variety in the game to reward your curiosity then exploration would be its own reward and wouldn't be a grind.

Combat - I like combat; I don't see enough people to do much pvp but even though the NPCs are thick I still enjoy shooting them up. It's just a shame that the context for all combat is so limited. Bounty hunting could have a lot more depth, it could actually involve hunting. Instead you point your ship at other ships in a RES and farm them for bounties. Or you wait for ships to spawn in supercruise, point your ship at them and if they're wanted, interdict. There could be depth to hunting, but there is no hunting. Conflict Zones are just funny; rock up to this patch of space where a load of people are having a barney and then opt in for a spot of no-consequences of war. In any case without a better context for combat you very quickly become aware that whether it's in SC or in a RES or in a CZ you're just farming dumb NPCs. A grind.

Trading - Christ; I don't even think I need to explain this one. But anyways, if there were sufficient in-game tools to figure out your own trade routes I can see how that might appeal to some but as the ingame tools are lacking (for trading as much as every other facet of the game) it seems instead people use external tools to just find the most profitable A-B route and grind it out to oblivion.

Smuggling - if docking undetected and evading scans involved a skillset beyond "BOOST AS MUCH AS YOU CAN" I could see smuggling being a really great way of spending your time, requiring well thought out ship loadouts, and I could see it being exciting. But really it's no different to trading except you do want to dock fast, but that's it.

Mining - Point ship at rock and hold fire button. Granted mining is probably never going to be full on balls to the wall action but I'm sure there's more you could do to make it more interesting and engaging and less passive.

Even if you mix it up and do all of those things; you're just swapping one grindy shallow activity for another, you're still doing grindy shallow activities and that has nothing to do with how you approach the game or what you put into it. I can invent a narrative tapestry to go along with any of those but no matter how I dress it up the actual minute to minute gameplay is...well....boring.

The core mechanics of the game need work and the game needs to provide players with more tools to allow for more and better interactions with each other and with the game.

Good post. The game is a set of very simple mini games that offer little challenge and are ultimately meaningless in a galaxy of RNG where nothing is connected. In fact, it's so badly done that it's also immersion breaking. Saying "use your imagination" is meaningless since everyone has a different meaning of it. I'll use my imagination on games that are worth my time that engross me, challenge me and give me enough intellectual stimulus to want to play it. Right now, ED has none of that.

 

[Jex =TE=]

I like the game, wouldn't play it if i didn't.
But i don't think i ever played a game that i make sure i have my phone, or tablet with me.
I'm in an exploration kinda mood and i am a few thousand from home base.

If you want to really explore a system and scan the planets, well, it takes time. A lotta time, a lotta supercruise time. A whole lotta twitter and surfing the web time.
My imagination only goes so far when aimed at a location 30000 away or more, and nothing to do but wait out the travel time till you can scan.

What would be a great thing here is the ability to walk around your ship which is coming at some point but that's not enough. I want to be able to affect repairs to my ship by pulling up panels and stuff - think car mechanic simulator. So over the course of your trip things would degrade. This would need repairs which you bought at the last station before deep space. You're limited in what you have but this would give you something to do in the meantime on those long SC's. Add a cabin that you can customise to your liking where maybe you can watch videos from or listen to music it would open up your ship to a much more living entity.

Add to this a well thought out exploration mechanic that doesn't involve pointing at things and the potential for exploration opens a whole new world.

 

[NeilF]

If you don't like the game, your life values are wrong.

...there's just to much wrong with this IMHO I don't even know where to begin...

To make it short, it's suggesting someone is just so enamoured with an idea, they can't look at the outcome objectively.

I've said this before, and I think it applies here. I think a lot of people are in love with the "idea of Elite," so almost tolerate its short comings to the extent they dare not speak objectively of the short comings/problems.


It was a good start, but it's not as deep and interesting as what I pictured during the Kickstarter sales pitch. We're now a year+ on and much the "placeholder" mechanics/content now seem to actually be the final mechanics/content

 

[GoodGorilla]

Oh how I love this game. I love how BGS doesn't work and how power play is critically flawed with 5c. It's truly a marvelous alpha game. It should be spectacular when it's ready.

 

[Darian]

ED is a great game that makes me mad because it could be so much more IF frontier stops to add MECHANICS but starts to add CONTENT.
Yes there is a lot you can do but it is worth doing a few times only, and that is the point.
It is like a tree with many short branches, no matter what way you go you are at its end soon.

Immersion happens with the clutter, the small things that make it look real (reality is always a little but smudged at the edges, that is why computer games have such trouble to not look sterile)

Ships, modules, gameplay are technical fine but lack in diversion, there are things noone uses because there is clearly only one solution that makes sense, not many that are an near approxiamete to do it right.

And games are living from it, that you never have the one perfect solution (like building a ship) but many that are near perfect.

And that allows the players skill to shine by overcoming theese "flaws" and that is where the fun is.

In rpg games you have the cleric, the warrior, the paladin, all have weaknesses and strength and you can build on that by changing the stats, and you have to use the right strategy for the weakness you open in one side while adding power to the other.

ED lacks that.

Not much to say about missions, they are more or less fetch carry and deliver with a little bit of assassination thrown in, but again not much need for tactics and planning.

Maybe i played to many games but ED does feel for me to easy.

 

[SnowyNI]

43 pages and not a peep from "those that care" or "don't" as the case may be.

Guess they're all away playing CQC (Caecus, Queritor, Cariosus,).

It speaks volumes.

Any want their armour polished? only 30 pieces of silver!

 

[KING5TON]

I'm pretty sure it's the game.
If it was me then I'd have similar problems with all the games I've ever played instead of just this one.
I mean I've got like nearly 600 games in steam + origin + uplay + other, not to mention 100+ Xbox 360, PS3 games sat on my shelves plus like 30 odd years of gaming on consoles and computers of some sort since my original ZX81 which probably means I've play untold thousands of games over the years.
I don't see this problem with those games, just this one.
So logically it's not me, it's the game.

Wait, maybe it's because I kickstarted this one, maybe that's it......*checks other kickstarted games* Nope they're OK, it's still this game that I have the problem with so it's the game, not me.

 

[McDosy]

If a part of your post is completely baseless and flies in the face of common knowledge that can be easily garnered by looking at how games are developed and how companies act to ensure long term revenue, yes. I'm going to ignore that part of your post. Replying to it would do nothing but drag down the conversation as a whole and add nothing to the topic.

More hot air. Subscriptions being a universal way to boost your income is not “common knowledge” anywhere outside of your imagination. It’s fraught with danger and there have been very few recent success stories. If you didn’t get on that boat years ago, like EVE and WoW, it appears you’ll struggle to get on it now.

Lord of the Rings, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online – all launched with subscription models, married to marketing pushes FDev could only dream of, all quickly switched to F2P. I’d ask you to explain that, but I know you can’t. Your thinking is ten years out of date!

How would you feel about the game going F2P? That would be going with current trends on how games are developed and how companies act to ensure long term revenue.

It would still be a risk, and as I keep on saying, FDev are the ones with the telemetry on what sort of players they actually have.

 

[InMemoriamSirocco]

You know all it took to access menus in E2F? A couple of mouse clicks or f button presses. Now I'm taking twenty five minutes, ending in weeping and criminal damage when I throw the PC out the window into the roof of a parked panda car just trying to ask the <Ahem> station to let me launch.

Manoeuvring in E2F just required holding down the right mouse button and steering with the mouse. Now you need to bankrupt your<Ahem> on a HOTAS. Combat? Piece of <Ahem> in E2F! You just pause the game, find the enemy, lock onto it as a target and engage the auto-pilot, firing lasers when he's in the gun-sight.

No need to have to<Ahem> around consciously flying the damn thing from jump-exit to target, as the auto-pilot did it for you. Docking also done by the AP. No need to wait until you can already do everything you don't want to, so you can afford a poxy docking computer, like in ED.

The galactic map was so simple even a dribbling imbecile (which I think I'm not far off being) could use it. You start right over the "top" of the galaxy and could zoom in or out to make smaller or more major system appear. Centre on one using the arrow keys and it became your jump target. In this game you start off at some neck-wrung angle in some backwater star system that's the equivalent of Aching<Ahem> Indiana and the act of manipulating the map is ridiculously un-simple and furiously and nonsensically complicated.

E2F was simpler and more straightforward in every single way. I played it for about three years and was worth billions of credits and had a fully upgraded Panther clipper. In this I can't even fly the goddamn Sidewinder out of the station.

I will freely admit I must be crap. But the difference in accessibility, learning curve and beginner-friendliness that exists between ED and E2F is not in any way close. E2F was learnable and relatively quickly. This, in comparison, is a disorganised, festering mess. Much like my brain.

I didn't want to be a whiner. I wanted to love this game. Fact is, I don't even know if it's good or bad for myself, because I've never been able to learn it.

Classic example of my difficulty right here: I try to do the launching tutorial. I successfully get the station to put my ship out of the hanger into the dock. The game instructs me to press something or other to begin the pre-flight check. I press it and I get instead a screen that shows the different commands different keys use. There appear to be about forty of these in different combinations, instead of the four or five I could use on E2F. The game doesn't tell me what else to do. No instructions at all are given. All I have is what looks like a four panel menu and the mouse cursor won't move outside of a three inch by three inch box in the middle, and so is useless for doing anything.

So I try a tutorial video. There are tons of them on YouTube, after all. These are equally useless and there is always some smug<Ahem> giving instruction to do things which aren't shown on the video. Each individual instruction requires, I am guessing, three or four button movements. NONE of these are explained in any way that is useful to me as an eternal noob. They just assume that you already know what they are drivelling on about, which, if you do, why the hell would you be watching a video for noobs?<Ahem>....

I'm sure some of you are thinking I must be trolling. That nobody who could get their head around E2F could be this stupid. But I'm honestly not. I really AM having this much difficulty.

Thank you for speaking out. I am sure you are going to get a lot of heat from fanboys, but I personally am grateful to you for being a prime example of the players that we really need proper tutorials for.

I, too, played E2F and agree with every point you make. It was a hell of a lot easier and much more intuitive.

 

[RadgeGadgie]

Apparently Width+1 X Depth-1 = ED

I'm mid thirties, degree educated and have a technical job yet I find the control menu is an absolute mess and barely fit for purpose.

There is too much trail blazing and not enough trail maintenance. FD really need to start weeding that trail before it starts to crumble.

What he said.

 

[Insane4un]

I played and still playing elite for more than 2000 hours. I can for sure say that it is truth. It's not a game at all. The problem is always in YOU.

 

[RadgeGadgie]

Thank you for speaking out. I am sure you are going to get a lot of heat from fanboys, but I personally am grateful to you for being a prime example of the players that we really need proper tutorials for.

I, too, played E2F and agree with every point you make. It was a hell of a lot easier and much more intuitive.

Blimey, someone who agrees with me. Mate, I should have you stuffed and mounted.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

More hot air. Subscriptions being a universal way to boost your income is not “common knowledge” anywhere outside of your imagination. It’s fraught with danger and there have been very few recent success stories. If you didn’t get on that boat years ago, like EVE and WoW, it appears you’ll struggle to get on it now.

Lord of the Rings, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online – all launched with subscription models, married to marketing pushes FDev could only dream of, all quickly switched to F2P. I’d ask you to explain that, but I know you can’t. Your thinking is ten years out of date!

How would you feel about the game going F2P? That would be going with current trends on how games are developed and how companies act to ensure long term revenue.

It would still be a risk, and as I keep on saying, FDev are the ones with the telemetry on what sort of players they actually have.

I can explain it, because your thought process is short term.

There's been very few recent success stories because there have been very few recent P2P launches. However, every last one of them has been a success.

SWTOR went F2P because they rode the name to marketing glory without putting content in the game to keep players engaged. After 3 months everyone had done everything there was to do in the game. There was no reason to keep playing. However, during their first year SWTOR made enough money to dump a huge amount of resources into making content and switched to F2P to draw players back. It worked, they're Scrooge McDucking in their swimming pools of microtransaction cash now.

And they've added so much content to the game that people are praising it for being one of the only MMO's out there worth playing for the story alone. No easy feat in a game genre that's notorious for it's lack of interesting plot.

LOTRO launched as a WoW clone back when WoW was still an indomitable market force that wouldn't see any signs of slowing it's unprecedented growth for years to come. They stepped in front of a runaway locomotive and didn't move. That's their own fault for not accurately judging the competition, not the business model's.

ESO had a F2P model built in it since early Beta that was left in the background to take over. It was never intended to be a permanent subscription model game. They had premium currency and all of the quirks that go with it (faster travel if you pay, more storage if you pay, etc...) from Day 1. The early subscription model was just taxing fanboys because they knew they could do it, and people would thank them for it. This was done to earn back all of the money they had spent on the most expensive MMO ever created to date because investors were scared, and it worked. ESO started making a profit in 6 months, before they even dropped the subscription model facade.

I'd love a F2P ED. We already have cosmetic microtransactions in a premium priced game. Everything is there.

Kind of like Guild Wars 2, or are you going to tell me that game is somehow bankrupt too?

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/10/23/guild-wars-2-hits-7-million-players-as-expansion-launches

Hmm... Doesn't look like they use P2P servers and they're doing just fine.....

 

[RadgeGadgie]

I played and still playing elite for more than 2000 hours. I can for sure say that it is truth. It's not a game at all. The problem is always in YOU.

It reminds me, in a way, of pilot selection during the early days of the Second World War. Everyone wanted to fly Spitfires in the RAF. Of those who volunteered for selection, a tiny fraction made it to fighters. Some were good enough to get put on bombers. A few scraped through simply to be wireless operators or bomb-aimers or navigators in bomber crews. Most were failed and returned to other jobs that mere mortals could do.

This game is like that. Most can do it, in some form or to some standard, and good for them. But this game is too full of fluff, is too complicated and too full or meaningless, overcomplicated drivel drivel (I'm thinking of suing, as I thought I'd put a trademark on that) for us lesser mortals to get our heads around, but by the time we found that out we'd already been bilked out of our £40 or whatever it was. In a way I regret it isn't a subscription game, because I don't have the satisfaction of unsubbing and telling them exactly why I did it.

You don't think it's over-complicated? In E2F all I had to was bring up the main station menu and click on "launch request". Fifteen seconds later I was out of the docking port and floating in space. In this just launching from the station is so complicated you need to file a flight plan like you're submitting a doctoral thesis. Yes, I accept I am deficient in some unidentifiable way, when compared to you, Insane4un. You can do it, I can't. But when a game is structured so that something I could do with one button press and one click in its predecessor I still cannot do after fourteen months of much wailing and gnashing of teeth in this one..... sorry, but there IS something wrong with the game. Many people, perhaps even most have been able to overcome it. And once done, they assume that the inability to do so is the fault of the player. Sorry, no it isn't. This game, gorgeous and immersive though the graphics may be, was badly programmed by a bunch of chumps who have nicked my money.

 

[Shar]

Ive finally found a problem with the game, i have a smudge on my ships windscreen and i just can not remove it, should i do a bug report.

 

[Haleks]

ED is a great game that makes me mad because it could be so much more IF frontier stops to add MECHANICS but starts to add CONTENT.

I think you got it backwards did you not?
More content isn't going to change a thing if proper game mechanics don't follow : the current game could be amazing if only there was some game-design revolution.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Ive finally found a problem with the game, i have a smudge on my ships windscreen and i just can not remove it, should i do a bug report.

No! Ask for windscreen wipers! ^^

 

[Insane4un]

It reminds me, in a way, of pilot selection during the early days of the Second World War. Everyone wanted to fly Spitfires in the RAF. Of those who volunteered for selection, a tiny fraction made it to fighters. Some were good enough to get put on bombers. A few scraped through simply to be wireless operators or bomb-aimers or navigators in bomber crews. Most were failed and returned to other jobs that mere mortals could do.

This game is like that. Most can do it, in some form or to some standard, and good for them. But this game is too full of fluff, is too complicated and too full or meaningless, overcomplicated drivel drivel (I'm thinking of suing, as I thought I'd put a trademark on that) for us lesser mortals to get our heads around, but by the time we found that out we'd already been bilked out of our £40 or whatever it was. In a way I regret it isn't a subscription game, because I don't have the satisfaction of unsubbing and telling them exactly why I did it.

You don't think it's over-complicated? In E2F all I had to was bring up the main station menu and click on "launch request". Fifteen seconds later I was out of the docking port and floating in space. In this just launching from the station is so complicated you need to file a flight plan like you're submitting a doctoral thesis. Yes, I accept I am deficient in some unidentifiable way, when compared to you, Insane4un. You can do it, I can't. But when a game is structured so that something I could do with one button press and one click in its predecessor I still cannot do after fourteen months of much wailing and gnashing of teeth in this one..... sorry, but there IS something wrong with the game. Many people, perhaps even most have been able to overcome it. And once done, they assume that the inability to do so is the fault of the player. Sorry, no it isn't. This game, gorgeous and immersive though the graphics may be, was badly programmed by a bunch of chumps who have nicked my money.

You still can refund if you ask nicely i gues. So far from what i hear.. You better to wait of No Man Sky. Not all games are good for all ppl) Some of us need something.. special.

 

[Bran Tse Mallory]

Ive finally found a problem with the game, i have a smudge on my ships windscreen and i just can not remove it, should i do a bug report.

May I suggest several rant threads first. To gain some extra support point out the obvious second hand fittings inside the ship too. No point in a perfectly good bug report not being backed up by pages upon pages of inane ranting! It seems to be the way things are done around here...

 

[McDosy]

ESO had a F2P model built in it since early Beta that was left in the background to take over. It was never intended to be a permanent subscription model game.

Why not? It's an overnight guaranteed route to maximum revenue, isn't it?

I'd love a F2P ED. We already have cosmetic microtransactions in a premium priced game. Everything is there.

Kind of like Guild Wars 2, or are you going to tell me that game is somehow bankrupt too?

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/10/23/guild-wars-2-hits-7-million-players-as-expansion-launches

Hmm... Doesn't look like they use P2P servers and they're doing just fine.....

No, GW2 looks like another F2P success story from that article. Well, that plus pay-to-play updates like ED does. In fact, they had virtually the exact same payment model as ED. Pay for the game, play for free, pay for the updates. I wouldn't be at all surprised if FDev started giving the base game away for free at some point too. It's already heavily discounted.

What does this have to do with subscriptions?