Great New Article About Elite Dangerous

[Boomer Kay]

I think we both can agree however on this:
It wouldn't hurt to have PvP (aka aggressive play, killing players in systems) influence the BGS directly.
If i am correct, currently the security rating of a system and the BGS are affected by killing NPCs,
but not by killing players.

Some pages back i suggested implementing an "affiliation" with a minor faction to players,
regarding the current reputation in a given system with the minor factions.
This way the server could track a playerkill as a ship-loss to that minor faction.
However a player kill should be worth more, than killing an NPC given the increased difficulty.

Yea. So you can team up with your buddies and kill each other's sidewindes to flip a system? (Bragging about having 8 reddit accounts does not mark someone as upright, playing the way it's meant to be played citizen ;p .. )
Yes, you could add a ton more artificial checks to counter the cheese. You could also simply not implement it for exactly the same result.
Told ya it's "smart people ruining the game" *) for the rest of us and proving every mechanic exploitable before the first line of code is written.
I'm so glad I'm not really smart. Haven't managed to find that fabled robigo yet.

*) and I coined that phrase some weeks before this article and sdc claiming to have some smart people on their team analyzing stuff so intellectual property is mine hrhr

 

[Sole Hunter]

Every single thing I did in wolfberg I did in open as did many others I saw it was certainly not only done by players playing in solo or Möbius. I saw many others there. Answer me this if you will. If you care so little for your NPC faction why have it put in in the 1st place? Seems a little selfish if you do not care as it takes a spot for those who do.
Regardless of how you got in Möbius you deliberately broke it's rules so your point is moot imo

ask frontier nobody knew we had a faction.

 

[Julio Montega]

Yea. So you can team up with your buddies and kill each other's sidewindes to flip a system? (Bragging about having 8 reddit accounts does not mark someone as upright, playing the way it's meant to be played citizen ;p .. )
Yes, you could add a ton more artificial checks to counter the cheese. You could also simply not implement it for exactly the same result.
Told ya it's "smart people ruining the game" for the rest of us and proving every mechanic exploitable before the first line of code is written.
I'm so glad I'm not really smart. Haven't managed to find that fabled robigo yet.

To be fair and frank, every system can be exploited.
Yes, stuff can be staged and manipulated, but will it be worth it?
You'd have to PvE or hardcore PvP to really tie with a certain minor faction,
starting to become a juicy target.

Currently these thoughts might be an issue, yet the crime and punishment is going to be changed,
and we see about how that factors into this equation.
It still is a solution that can work,
if people decide to abuse and exploit a system, it is their choice,
a bad choice, but a choice.

Down with Robigo!

 

[Boomer Kay]

To be fair and frank, every system can be exploited.
Yes, stuff can be staged and manipulated, but will it be worth it?
You'd have to PvE or hardcore PvP to really tie with a certain minor faction,
starting to become a juicy target.

Currently these thoughts might be an issue, yet the crime and punishment is going to be changed,
and we see about how that factors into this equation.
It still is a solution that can work,
if people decide to abuse and exploit a system, it is their choice,
a bad choice, but a choice.

Down with Robigo!

Exactly, that's why as a playerbase you have at one point to decide, what the game really is.
I don't think your idea is supposed to turn ED into a game where there's hundreds of commanders shooting their buddies in sidewinders, because that's the fastest way to gain influence. It will not change the balance of things anyway. You only have 18 buddies to shoot while opposing a force of 200? You lose, end of story.

People decide to make their own meta-game instead of playing the game? Whatever, but don't blame the game for an individual's lack of interest in the game (or actually any game that does not put that individual automatically on the top of some pyramid where it could not dream of climbing itself) or try to rebalance everything based on the flawed assumption that there's only some magic 18 players worth anything.

And I do not really care all that much about Robigo. It has no negative impact on my personal game (it might get some, if they ever decide to implement a player economy and all that cheesed riches start circulating, then the game turns into a 2 class society - those they play by the spirit and those that cheese). Neither has 17 draconis or any other cheesy way of doing stuff.

 

[Julio Montega]

Exactly, that's why as a playerbase you have at one point to decide, what the game really is.
I don't think your idea is supposed to turn ED into a game where there's hundreds of commanders shooting their buddies in sidewinders, because that's the fastest way to gain influence. It will not change the balance of things anyway. You only have 18 buddies to shoot while opposing a force of 200? You lose, end of story.

People decide to make their own meta-game instead of playing the game? Whatever, but don't blame the game for an individual's lack of interest in the game (or actually any game that does not put that individual automatically on the top of some pyramid where it could not dream of climbing yourself) or try to rebalance everything based on the flawed assumption that there's only some magic 18 players worth anything.

I think you are hinting towards the "isle limit" of 18 players is a problem.
To circumvent that the P2P structure would need to go away,
but the P2P has an argument to it that i don't want to miss:

Player positioning relay

While other players seem to jump around due to bandwith or roundtrip time issues,
no single player "lagged", like you see it in client-server system with hundreds of players,
into a static object, like a station to my knowledge, because of a lost package on his positioning.

The representation of a system with high player activity is affected by the limit,
it is only natural to ask for a most immersive experience seeing everyone and interacting with
everyone in a system when you choose to multiplay.
Yet i think with the current technology, playability is a key element.

While i'd love to see everything that happens in the system i am in,
i don't think a server could really handle all the stuff going on.
A key element of playability however is,
that every playstyle impacts the game.
The BGS is a very big part of that,
random encounters (U.S.S. stuff) are a part of it
and so on.

We should get a means of interaction by PvP affecting the verse.
We should get a means of affecting economy by piracy, on the term of cut supplies etc.

I am no fan of the common MMO problems like zergs,
i'd like to have multiple engagements on smaller scale,
maybe a larger battle as an event being crucial to the outcome
of a conflict.

To achieve that, a multitude of tasks to influence has to be retained.

I am no fan of blunt game mechanics either,
currently you don't have to think alot to be successful,
you can simply get going into a schedule.
That is a bad thing too, i'd like more changing variables affecting gameplay
heavily.

Example:
To affect the influence of a faction in a war you can deliver weapons
and kill ships of other factions as example.
Nothing changes over the whole war.
Lugh was more interesting, but only because player factions
brought in a change of battlefields, starting tactical warfare,
guerilla strikes and shadow ops, yet all was interacted with by the
same old mechanics.

No special missions came out, nothing to really partake in, rather than
kill ships, deliver stuff or form PvP wing vs wing combat for lolz and lore.
Please correct me if i am wrong here, in fact i want to be wrong
and see options i missed out.

 

[Riktar]

The PVP folks are frequently heard saying "If you don't want your ship to get destroyed, get better <at PVP>". The PVE folks respond in kind by saying "If you don't want your player faction to get destroyed, get better <at PVE>".
.
Wolfberg wasn't stolen, it was abandoned. We merely took a neglected piece of real estate from a player faction and turned it over to an AI faction because the AI faction was infinitely more worthy of controlling it. Now when you fly around Wolfberg, you don't run into dog poo. Wolfberg is now CLEAN!

+1
The hypocrisy of justifying actions by the same reason or point you later (and sometimes in the same breath!!) state are something you "don't care" about is staggering

See, this is a complete misrepresentation. The ONLY way you can counter BGS gameplay is with BGS gameplay... in short PvE. The ONLY thing that having BGS players in open does is allow you to shoot.them which has close to ZERO bgs impact in the long run. "We can't counter BGS in solo/group" actually means "we have no intereset in BGS play, we just want to shoot players and we think if we can stop them enjoying being in solo/group they'll come to open so we can shoot them".

If you want to counter BGS play you HAVE to do PvE, and it makes no difference which mode you're in.

That would involve thinking beyond the end of your trigger. Good luck with getting that accomplished or understood by those who do things simply for the lulz.

They decided to be jerks, players pushed back, they got all butt hurt and then pretended being a faction and having a faction base wasn't really important to them in the first place. And it all 'wasn't fair' in some ill defined but self-serving manner.

Have I missed anything?

Nope. you pretty much nailed it.

 

[Noob]

ask frontier nobody knew we had a faction.

Wait, wait... now you're with the dogs? Back in Wolfberg thread you acted like an independent observer [haha]

So please, what is it? Are you in or out? Knew or didn't knew? Cared or haven't cared? Make up your mind already. (and I will find your own post to state otherwise)

 

[Boomer Kay]

We should get a means of interaction by PvP affecting the verse.
We should get a means of affecting economy by piracy, on the term of cut supplies etc.

It's not EvE.
But I wrote like half a year ago or somesuch that the one thing that might get me into PvP again are Combat Zone like, but "strategic" large scale (maybe more than 16 or 18 per side .. doesn't really feel all that epic with so few people) battles that cannot be "open" or "random" (you have to pick a side somewhere along the way f.ex. and not flop around at your whim for your personal gains .. that's not how an army works, unless you want to be court martialed).
It would make a whole lot more sense to decide civil wars or wars triggered by the BGS like that - or at least have both options (regular CZs and PvP CZs), but put a much higher impact on the player side of things.

However, they would require their own rulesets and those have to be chosen carefully just to ensure that everyone is playing the same game, because when it comes to direct player vs. player interaction and getting the competitive edge, small cheesy things that might not make all that much of a difference now are suddenly at the core of gameplay experience.

 

[Riktar]

I think we both can agree however on this:
It wouldn't hurt to have PvP (aka aggressive play, killing players in systems) influence the BGS directly.
If i am correct, currently the security rating of a system and the BGS are affected by killing NPCs,
but not by killing players.

Some pages back i suggested implementing an "affiliation" with a minor faction to players,
regarding the current reputation in a given system with the minor factions.
This way the server could track a playerkill as a ship-loss to that minor faction.
However a player kill should be worth more, than killing an NPC given the increased difficulty.

Interesting idea. Would you agree that killing a "player" would be worth more but with the following included:

Killing player ships that rank below you will have a proportionately negative impact on you and your faction. This would include ship size as well as ranking. IE: an Elite Anaconda that kills a harmless sidewinder would have a 10 fold decrease in ranking compared to equal ranking between contestants. Same applies to number of ships in the battle. A wing of 4 ships that stomp on a single ship would quadruple the impact.

Of course for those players who genuinely want the glory and honor of Pvp against a worthy foe, taking on a higher ranked opponent (let's use the sidewinder vs Anaconda scenario) would see a 10 fold increase in ranking.

 

[Noob]

Interesting idea. Would you agree that killing a "player" would be worth more but with the following included:

Killing player ships that rank below you will have a proportionately negative impact on you and your faction. This would include ship size as well as ranking. IE: an Elite Anaconda that kills a harmless sidewinder would have a 10 fold decrease in ranking compared to equal ranking between contestants. Same applies to number of ships in the battle. A wing of 4 ships that stomp on a single ship would quadruple the impact.

Of course for those players who genuinely want the glory and honor of Pvp against a worthy foe, taking on a higher ranked opponent (let's use the sidewinder vs Anaconda scenario) would see a 10 fold increase in ranking.

I would like that very much. THAT would solve the question of "what will bring you into Open, I need more victims".

 

[Julio Montega]

It's not EvE.
But I wrote like half a year ago or somesuch that the one thing that might get me into PvP again are Combat Zone like, but "strategic" large scale (maybe more than 16 or 18 per side .. doesn't really feel all that epic with so few people) battles that cannot be "open" or "random" (you have to pick a side somewhere along the way f.ex. and not flop around at your whim for your personal gains .. that's not how an army works, unless you want to be court martialed).
It would make a whole lot more sense to decide civil wars or wars triggered by the BGS like that - or at least have both options (regular CZs and PvP CZs), but put a much higher impact on the player side of things.

However, they would require their own rulesets and those have to be chosen carefully just to ensure that everyone is playing the same game, because when it comes to direct player vs. player interaction and getting the competitive edge, small cheesy things that might not make all that much of a difference now are suddenly at the core of gameplay experience.

Yep that would be a great addition,
but even if the isle size is a limiting factor i guess that adding NPCs
would be possible, since they operate on predetermined scripts.
So you could have a 6 v 6 player zone with additional NPCs to fit the role
of regular combat pilots/mercs.

I'm all up for immersive missions, strikeforces, convoys and raids as such.
The current implementation of the above mentioned mechanic are CZs,
but they are stale.
Staging them could be more interesting, giving goals to each side of the conflict to
complete, like "disable the cap-ship engines to call in bombers",
than "escort bombers to strike critical systems", etc.

And yes, it is not Eve,
i am not asking for Eve.
I am asking for the mechanics behind the scenes becoming more complex,
reactive and engaging.

Interesting idea. Would you agree that killing a "player" would be worth more but with the following included:

Killing player ships that rank below you will have a proportionately negative impact on you and your faction. This would include ship size as well as ranking. IE: an Elite Anaconda that kills a harmless sidewinder would have a 10 fold decrease in ranking compared to equal ranking between contestants. Same applies to number of ships in the battle. A wing of 4 ships that stomp on a single ship would quadruple the impact.

Of course for those players who genuinely want the glory and honor of Pvp against a worthy foe, taking on a higher ranked opponent (let's use the sidewinder vs Anaconda scenario) would see a 10 fold increase in ranking.

You suggest the increase in influence being somewhat tied to player performance
and equipment, like the gain in rank for combat is based on your ship and the target,
plus your current rank and the target rank?

Example:
Player in Eagle rated expert kills an elite NPC anaconda,
gaining a big rank-gain.

I support this wholeheartedly!

 

[Riktar]

You suggest the increase in influence being somewhat tied to player performance
and equipment, like the gain in rank for combat is based on your ship and the target,
plus your current rank and the target rank?

Example:
Player in Eagle rated expert kills an elite NPC anaconda,
gaining a big rank-gain.

I support this wholeheartedly!

Your example is pretty much the same as mine so yes, that is what I am saying.

With that out of the way,,,,,

If you are thinking that a player who gained his ranking in open against humans is "better" than the same player who gained his ranking against npc's you would be correct in that regard. And this would make for some "eye opening" moments in the game.

But it would also (hopefully) reduce the number of "for the lulz" attacks by bored "low brow" type players.

 

[frostypaw]

But you don't have a faction, you aren't a faction. A faction has goals and motives in-game. In-game characters can't tell who's a human player and who isn't. In-game factions need a base, something you apparently don't care about showing how much this is about the game.

You're trying to force your ''ways'' of playing the game, we don't share or enjoy that. You talk about consquences yet you don't even understand why we kill people. Why should I bother explaining myself to somebody who think we abuse new players is beyond me.

No, quite the opposite.

You are abusing the fact you can tell who's a human player and who is new for easy kills - you're not working within the game and that's just a fact you'll continue to ignore as long as you get a laugh out of people getting hurt.

The saddest thing is you think this makes you good at the game.... I've been playing a tiny amount of time in comparison and according to your proudly displayed stats I've matched you at everything but killing, and we know that doesn't count as you've not been after any challenges.

So dress it up with whatever excuses you like, your actions prove you're talking from the exhaust ports. You're not upset because we're trying to force anything on you - you're upset because you can't force Frontier Dev to make the game more how you like it.

Why would they make it into something that upsets so many people? Easier to delete and refund the few players ruining it for everyone else.

 

[Sandmann]

I think we both can agree however on this:
It wouldn't hurt to have PvP (aka aggressive play, killing players in systems) influence the BGS directly.
If i am correct, currently the security rating of a system and the BGS are affected by killing NPCs,
but not by killing players.

If there were a sensible way to incorporate it it then sure. Problem is that it all works off "influence" which is measured from one faction vs another... doesn't matter if it's a courier delivery, or a donation, or killing npc pirates, or whatever. Players don't actually have factions (except for the 7 still people playing powerplay I guess) so it'd take a big re-write of the BGS (or as you suggested giving players factions, but then they've have to be able to change them if they wanted, and that'd stop them being independent, yada yada yada huge ongoing dramas).

TL;DR Yeah it would probably be a good thing to at some point incorporate PvP into the BGS in some way, but it's hugely problematic and I can't see it happening any time soon.

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Exactly, that's why as a playerbase you have at one point to decide, what the game really is.

... which has been FDev's big problem, in that they're trying to be all things to all men, and refusing to categorise their game and define what's expected, what's ok, and what's not.

[edit] Just thinking about it, there IS a way that PvP can affect (directly, not in the strangled fashion cmdr goose presented) the bgs... through combat bonds. Admittedly that's not STRICTLY PvP as there's plenty of NPC's there but PvP IS possible there and it's about the only way right now that you can do PvP and have it directly bounce of the BGS.

 

[Boomer Kay]

... which has been FDev's big problem, in that they're trying to be all things to all men, and refusing to categorise their game and define what's expected, what's ok, and what's not.

It's not exactly FDev's problem. It's the player's problem.
FD offers a large choice of viable ways to play the game and treat them fairly equally so far.
In comes a tiny rogue group of people pretending to be players, because they bought a copy of the game (if that's the issue, I think I have at least 2-3 more friends or family I can "recruit" for ED to replace the non-players and I *will* personally take care that they get a proper training in the game -which will not consist of blank recommendations to stay out of open- and play according to the spirit) making the point that every other way of playing the game other than them being at their rightful spot at the top is *wrong* and has to be attacked or nerfed.
Sounds terribly reasonable (I admit I took some creative license in tl;dr their campaign motto, but that happens of you have such a confusing wall of text to explain youself. My campaign is still called "Bad player for a good cause" ...and... Remember Eravate )

 

[c64orinoco]

Blooming wonderful. Not content with trying to be the world's most backward & racist 1st world nation, Australia now breeds prime internet trolls. As if being <unpleasant> in real life isn't enough for bogans, now they're digitally <unpleasant> as well.

Where do I hand in my citizenship? It's embarrassing to be Australian.

 

[JosiahD]

Freakin' wonderful. Not content with trying to be the world's most backward & racist 1st world nation, Australia now breeds prime internet trolls. As if being 4r53holes in real life isn't enough for bogans, now they're digital 4r53holes as well.

Where do I hand in my citizenship? It's embarrassing to be Australian.

Fortunately not all of us Aussies are like that......

 

[Boomer Kay]

Where do I hand in my citizenship? It's embarrassing to be Australian.

Mate, don't take it personal. If I would have to stand up for every silly thing my nation has done over the last .. hmm.. 2 millenia, I should never have been born.

I'm german btw.

To my greek friends: sorry for sending you 50 billion Euro and expecting you to spend it mindfully.

 

[Sandmann]

Freakin' wonderful. Not content with trying to be the world's most backward & racist 1st world nation, Australia now breeds prime internet trolls. As if being 4r53holes in real life isn't enough for bogans, now they're digital 4r53holes as well.

Where do I hand in my citizenship? It's embarrassing to be Australian.

Took me a minute to get what you were on about... yes I'm as embarrassed as you but I take heart in the knowledge that the aussie git in the article is probably a relative of christopher pyne and is therefore unlikely to breed.

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It's not exactly FDev's problem. It's the player's problem.

Poorly put... perhaps I should have said "a problem that only FDev can solve but have thus far been unwilling to do so".

 

[Boomer Kay]

Poorly put... perhaps I should have said "a problem that only FDev can solve but have thus far been unwilling to do so".

Well, they will never be able to please everyone equally. So yes, at one point in time they will have to step up and say "this is Elite, not EvE or SC". (this might alienate players that jumped boat just to get "EvE or SC done 'right' ", but it might also attract an equally large number of EvE or SC players that look for a different experience - and soon they'll have the competitive edge of PC, Mac, Xbox and PS4 with a big headstart in VR support)