Is the lack of real content why FD have sacrificed galactic scale?

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I am really hoping this possible alien encounter will make some of the factions wake up and unify. There is too much infighting within the fed, Emp, and Alliance alone. They seem to only want to hurt themselves as well as the other factions. None of them seem ambitious. PP needs some work before I go back to it. Right now I quit my PP because I got tired of getting jumped and destroyed inside the no fire zone outside of space stations. They gotta make it more fun than that. I imagine they will soon though.
 
Instant ship transfers will not increase how fast we travel throughout the Galaxy at all. It will still take us 100,000 years or so to explore them all.

So if you are implying that in about One Hundred thousand years instant ship delivery might have at least a tiny impact on the Milky Way, then I might have to agree.

However I dont think any of you will be around to find out if it does indeed impact the game.

Its shocking how narrow of a field of view people have sometimes. Our galaxy is vast and the 20 minutes inside the bubble difference that it will take means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention colonizing other locations. You still have to make the initial trip and the very same people who wont make the trip now wont make it in the future.

Who said that exploration is going to be faster? lol.
 
Just for the record:

Despite my outspoken criticism of Insta Transfer and subsequent hissy fits where I've done the forum equivalent of throwing myself on the floor crying hysterically whilst drumming my fists and feet and occasionally looking up to see if the devs were paying attention to my tear and mucus stained outbursts...I've found myself wanting to come slinking back and slide into the cockpit of my ship and fire up those thrusters...just one more time...

Yes, I'm pathetic and lack resolve. *sniffle*

They got you hooked on the good stuff. ;)

I've resolved myself just to avoid it as much as possible and not use it myself. Maybe they'll find a more preferred way of implementing it; maybe they won't.

When we feel strongly about something, it can be easy to overreact. I'm sure I've been guilty of this myself at times. Hope no one at Frontier takes any of this too personally. On the other hand, people do get more than a little out of line sometimes. I think the threatening hatemongers tend to stand out and are on a different level than those that just feel passionately about the game.

Not sure if I really needed to say any of this or if it's just me rambling due to the head cold I got.

You guys still seem very cool over there at Frontier for as much as I could understand and know any of you personally. Even though it's obvious, it's easy to forget that you're people too, if that makes sense. We don't know the constraints and the decisions you have to make, so it's too easy to jump to the wrong sort of conclusions if there's a feature or something we think is wonky.

Take anything I have to say with a grain or two of salt or sugar as you might prefer.

Cheers. I'm going to go look for some more medicine.
 
Who said that exploration is going to be faster? lol.

Yeah, you still need a station with a shipyard. I don't think that includes outposts, right? Some planetary bases have them though.

The rest is directed at the general community:
But that does mean that even if you get instant transfer you may have quite a few jumps to make to get to that CZ location you and your friends want to be at.

Kind of ironic really since if you and your friends are 500 ly away from each other you'll still need to find a shipyard close enough to get your short range combat ship. That will still mean plenty of jumps. I guess that would be okay if you planned ahead of time.

I would find it funny if after all the adamant insistence that only instant transfer is good enough, proponents find its not all they imagined!

To quote Spock: "After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."
 
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I think a lot of the sacrifices are to keep coding to a minimum.
They probably knew early on that the DDF ideas would be too much for them.

The initial 1:1 scale galaxy was great for the Kickstarter backers.
Shame about the game play mechanisms within it, even more so now.

This isn't the way it is meant to be.
This is the way they have made it.
 
I have to admit, im ok with a few things. Im a dad and husband, i only get 2-4 hours a night. So things like transporting your ship is a huge help to me. Its not realistic but... Its not a mechanic that needs to be. I love this game but its things like, your ship stays where u left it, that make me wanna play black ops for the night cause itll take me 30 minutes to fly to this station to get my cobra(just as an example). Mechanics that dont need to be realistic... Come on... Not a big deal. It still takes you forever to fly where you need to go. Just saying from a point of view of someone who cant play all day
 
I have to admit, im ok with a few things. Im a dad and husband, i only get 2-4 hours a night. So things like transporting your ship is a huge help to me. Its not realistic but... Its not a mechanic that needs to be. I love this game but its things like, your ship stays where u left it, that make me wanna play black ops for the night cause itll take me 30 minutes to fly to this station to get my cobra(just as an example). Mechanics that dont need to be realistic... Come on... Not a big deal. It still takes you forever to fly where you need to go. Just saying from a point of view of someone who cant play all day

Too bad there aren't two versions of Elite Dangerous, one with all game play in a single system so travel wouldn't be an issue and the current version.

A single system version could be a prequel of sorts and confined to Sol before FSDs with hyperspace capability.

Wanted to add that I don't have much time to play either but I've been finding myself playing Destiny that playing Elite.

I love Elite Dangerous though and I think the arguments come down to wanting the game to go in two different directions. Some people want ED to be easily accessible, like Destiny, you jump in, get on with your game play and get out. Other people, me included, don't want ED to be inaccessible but we don't want it to just be a series of mini games, we want more realism not less. There are plenty of accessible games like Destiny, COD, etc. elite Dangerous should be a bit different. But I guess if FD doesn't cater to players that want to pop in and pop out they might not make money.
 
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Thing is, im ok with everything but leaving ships behind at stations. Adding module and ship transport is the only thing i wanted. Well i wish their was storage at stations as well, for cargo or whatever. Like how games have chests to hold ur goods in. I like how big it is tho, i like the realism. Makes me feel proud to play
 
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I think a lot of the sacrifices are to keep coding to a minimum.
They probably knew early on that the DDF ideas would be too much for them.

The initial 1:1 scale galaxy was great for the Kickstarter backers.
Shame about the game play mechanisms within it, even more so now.

This isn't the way it is meant to be.
This is the way they have made it.

Yes the instant transfer must require only a few lines of code. This is just a reference to an object with properties
 
Yes the instant transfer must require only a few lines of code. This is just a reference to an object with properties
I suspect you are correct on this. Someone else posted that Sandro mentioned stateless transfers. Basically the transfer would be done client side and the client would just need to update the ship's location on the server.

I'm sure there were plenty of discussions about this at FD and in the end it came down to it being a simple QoL addition that had been asked for. The current solution was simple and easy to implement. I'm sure they never expected the size of the backlash.
 
I suspect you are correct on this. Someone else posted that Sandro mentioned stateless transfers. Basically the transfer would be done client side and the client would just need to update the ship's location on the server.

I'm sure there were plenty of discussions about this at FD and in the end it came down to it being a simple QoL addition that had been asked for. The current solution was simple and easy to implement. I'm sure they never expected the size of the backlash.

Apparently the passenger transport uses the existing of goods transport. It is the modern programming, to make something new with the former
 
I think a lot of the sacrifices are to keep coding to a minimum.
They probably knew early on that the DDF ideas would be too much for them.

The initial 1:1 scale galaxy was great for the Kickstarter backers.
Shame about the game play mechanisms within it, even more so now.

This isn't the way it is meant to be.
This is the way they have made it.

Yes because I am sure that's the only reason and absolutely no coding has gone into the game to get it to this point.

I really don't think you understand how game development actually works.

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Apparently the passenger transport uses the existing of goods transport. It is the modern programming, to make something new with the former

No it's just being effiecent, why would frontier go about coding a completely new system when they have an existing one they can already use. That never makes sense in game development.

That's always been the case in game development. Besides this is v1 of passenger missions I am sure it will get fleshed out over time.
 
I'm sure there were plenty of discussions about this at FD and in the end it came down to it being a simple QoL addition that had been asked for. The current solution was simple and easy to implement. I'm sure they never expected the size of the backlash.

Michael Brooks stated (thread) that in fact he preferred instant transfers. Apparently Sandy was on the time delay side of the argument. When the senior producer steps in (MB) you can bet that's to reign in designer (Sandy's) ambitions from a financial and delivery point of view, not the designer's one. In terms of the OP, this would be a bit ironic because a slightly more thought out ship transfer system could have created content imo, certainly more 'life' in the reality of the game. I'd have advocated alternate transfer companies myself, with different characteristics of cost vs speed and more. And while you can understand Frontier wanting to be careful how they spend their money and how quickly, you'd hope the ambition to be there for something fuller.

I disagree with the OP that there's no real content. There's already quite a few contexts in which you can play the game .. say independently, for local faction (system flipping), major faction navy rankings, powers (such as they are), community goals, alien artefacts being examples of story lines to follow. Of course there are the standard careers and there is the emergent stuff too (even though it might not look like it, anyone creating ship loadout data, even screenshots of interesting planets is contributing to this). That's real content, however I think it's true that ever more options are always desirable.

For me it's a question of reaching a critical mass of content elements (in this procedural style of story design). Every time a new mecahnic goes in, the numbers of permutations (posible combinations) increase for example, you might be into alien meta alloys .. so you could camp outside an engineer requesting these materials, to supply them to Commanders in your Power OR having a certain Naval Rank OR if they are a miner OR if they fly a small ship etc. If the galaxy seems 'lacking content' it may be that two or three more mechanics that add to possible permutations are needed because (as these elements MULTIPLY to create new combo's) eventually there will be enough combinations that it becomes very difficult to exhaust them.
 
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There is never going to be enough content as long as the game is a slave to the BGS and PP. Every time something is added or removed the effects on those systems have to be accounted for. It's a hindrance to fun as far as I'm concerned.
 
There is never going to be enough content as long as the game is a slave to the BGS and PP. Every time something is added or removed the effects on those systems have to be accounted for. It's a hindrance to fun as far as I'm concerned.

BGS though is really the only way, to handle the creation of events in the procedural galaxy. There are roughly 20,000 inhabited systems around the bubble as I understand it. That's a heck of a lot of authoring, to inject events individually?
 
It does seem that the scale of the Galaxy has lead to this knee-jerk solution. There is a valid issue that they're trying to address. The feeling of realistic galactic scale and its science based approach is the USP for the Elite franchise and why we are attracted to it. However, the lack of content has meant too much tedium for many players. I totally get that.


The issue is that there isn't enough to do in local areas. There are different careers to pursue and we switch between them to keep things interesting. Each career needs a ship tailored to the role and so we end up with at least 4 or 5 ships. The development process has been focused on making the game enjoyable and interesting and so they have introduced various activities such as landing on planets, powerplay, engineers etc, all of which I mostly ignored. Wings added a way to team up with your friends and have fun. The issue then is that you're light years away from your friends and so are your ships. So here we are with teleportation and the loss of that special USP.


This has come to pass, in my opinion, because the development team have been looking for alternatives instead of addressing the actual problem. Lack of local content. I've always believed that this would come in time, now I'm not so sure.


They need to get a team together to review how this works. I'd like to see hubs for activity spread around the bubble. I'd like to see faction allegiances mean something, allied with one means that you are a target for another (yes like powerplay but in the main game). Pirating would cease to be random and allegiances would mean better prices or access to this that or the other. I'd like to see factions control regions of space and for that mean something. Perhaps each hub could have a story arc of some sort. Federation and Imperial space should be practically mutually exclusive. Accessible but hostile if you cross the border.


The point is that player groups would base themselves in these hubs until they're finished and move/defect to another. They would then never be too far apart and be able to team up in a few jumps for that fun. The universe would remain large, rich and exciting. I think this is what we all signed up for at the beginning.

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EDIT - In the past I have always been supportive of FD and very patient with the development process trusting them to keep to the principles of Elite. It is with the arrival of ship teleportation that I am finally forced to change tack.

EDIT - This post is not about the rights and wrongs of ship teleportation please use the two threadnaughts.


You are already target to other factions if you pledge a powerplay power, why would you want to be target for doing mercenary missions ? Also if you do a mission for a faction that gets you a wanted level with another faction, they already target you in that area... No need to add further mechanics to punish players, It would be problematic to be target to factions when just doing commerce just cause 5 minutes earlier you worked as mercenary for another faction, the game already has mechanics to punish players for crossing the line too much ...

Here is an example, I did a mission for a faction to kill a guy in another high security system, I had to kill his friends as well, all were civilians without a wanted level, Police kept chasing me down and made thing rather difficult, I completed the mission with just half hull LOL with police on my tail all the time. There are already good mechanics in place that make you become a target, no need for more

Ships' transfer will be no problem and it will have a price tag depending on the ship you are moving, so NO, it won't ruin the scale, you will still have to fly to stations to be able to transfer another ship, so if the prices scale with the size of the ship and distance then there will be no issue at all simply cause people will not use it all the time cause of its cost and not just to do a mission, probably just when people want to change their home station, that's it
 
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Michael Brooks stated (thread) that in fact he preferred instant transfers, apparently Sandy was on the time delay side of the argument. When the senior producer steps in (MB) you can bet that's to reign in designer (Sandy's) ambitions from a financial and delivery point of view, not the designer's one. In terms of the OP, this would be a bit ironic because a slightly more thought out ship transfer system could have created content imo, certainly more 'life' in the reality of the game. I'd have advocated alternate transfer companies myself, with different characteristics of cost vs speed and more. And while you can understand Frontier wanting to be careful how they spend their money and how quickly, you'd hope the ambition to be there for something fuller.

I disagree with the OP that there's no real content. There's already quite a few contexts in which you can play the game .. say independently, for local faction (system flipping), major faction navy rankings, powers (such as they are), community goals, alien artefacts being examples of story lines to follow. Of course there are the standard careers and there is the emergent stuff too (even though it might not look like it, anyone creating ship loadout data, even screenshots of interesting planets is contributing to this). That's real content, however I think it's true that ever more options are always desirable.

For me it's a question of reaching a critical mass of content elements (in this procedural style of story design). Every time a new mecahnic goes in, the numbers of permutations (posible combinations) increase for example, you might be into alien meta alloys .. so you could camp outside an engineer requesting these materials, to supply them to Commanders in your Power OR having a certain Naval Rank OR if they are a miner OR if they fly a small ship etc. Soon you'll be able to launch a fighter to protect you and your customer while doing a cargo exchange. If the galaxy seems 'lacking content' it may be that two or three more mechanics that add to possible permutations are needed because (as these elements MULTIPLY to creat combo's) eventually there will be enough combinations that it becomes very difficult to exhaust them.

Thank you for this, I was about to ask the mods to close the thread. It felt like it was turning into another on Magic Teleportation.

I did read Micheal Brooks comments in that thread and it doesn't matter really whose decision it was. However, after listing to the interview on Lave Radio I was dismayed to hear such a cavalier attitude towards an aspect of the game that many of us hold dear. I urge anyone who cares for the game to listen.

I agree that there is some content there and that the framework for a more compelling and, dare I say it, immersive experience is also there but it still needs some work to bring it together. It isn't obvious either. For those of us with little time to play, it is barely noticeable. One clan is the same as another, the only concern being if you have enough reputation with them for whatever it is your after. Another issue is that it spread across the galaxy with very little to make it different. Folks feel they need to travel long distances to actually participate.

I always felt it was about a critical mass too and have been patiently waiting for that to come. It is that radio interview that has left me with my head in my hands. I'm no longer so sure and so that is why I created this thread.
 
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CMDR Pugwash;4418412 It is that radio interview that has left me with my head in my hands.[/QUOTE said:
Why?

Did you actually listen to the whole thing? What was talked about seemed perfectly reasonable to me. If you are talking about THAT Sandro comment, it is being taken out of context, and also Sandro wants a ship delay in the end.
 
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