It’s time once again* to celebrate the inclusion of sadistic features into the gameplay of Elite Dangerous.
Don’t we all feel the need to cringe, swear, groan or whimper at the game on occasion. This competition is to discover the features that the developers have designed purely to wring the most frustration or salt out of us players.
First some competition ground rules:
The competition entries:
I’ll make a poll for voting soon™
Don’t we all feel the need to cringe, swear, groan or whimper at the game on occasion. This competition is to discover the features that the developers have designed purely to wring the most frustration or salt out of us players.
First some competition ground rules:
- A feature has to involve some level of sadism to count. Merely bad design isn’t enough, unless there is a degree of cruelty to players involved.
- No specific naming of developers. Some of these features took a lot of teamwork to get just the right level of sadism.
- This isn’t the place to discuss these features. Most of these have multiple threads doing this to death already. So keep it about the competition.
- Try and keep it light hearted. I know some of these sadistic masterpieces have taken their toll in salt, but let’s share a giggle – even if it’s a tad hysterical.
- Existing or past features only. Promises of sadism yet to come isn’t enough to count.
- Unintentional features (AKA bugs) are perfectly valid
- I’ll add new features or rules as the whim takes me. Though I am open to bribery.
The competition entries:
- NPC stalkers – everyone remember the NPCs that would follow you across the galaxy messaging “Oh good I found you. You were a hard one to track down”. This was a masterpiece of sadism
- The docking computer – there have been plenty of threads about players losing their ships to the docking computer. It is a nicely cruel touch to take up a module space for the privilege of a docking computer slamming you into the side of a station. There have also been some subtle, yet sadistic, twists to the docking computer – remember when every NPC was left several metres from the pad waiting for the station to destroy them.
- The speeding limit – the station controllers must love turning their guns on a hapless CMDR when a shieldless hauler manages to splat himself all over your shields. Some CMDRs find this feature so much of a giggle that they base their gameplay on it.
- Ramming authority ships – wasn’t this feature fun? Every trip in or out of a station involved a small amount of fear whether a cop would ram you. As a nice added touch, you would often get fined for the privilege.
- Refinery game crash – remember when the refinery would crash the game back to the menu. Normally a bug like this wouldn’t count, but the fact that it only ever seemed to happen when you had just found a 56% painite roid shows that this must have involved some truly sadistic programming.
- Mission updates – this one is so cruel, that I’ve decided to split it into the three different update types:
- Mission update – instant interdiction – don’t you just love it when just as you open the message to read it, the NPC who wasn’t in SC a second ago suddenly interdicts you?
- Mission update changed destination – don’t we all love having to change our destination, often to a far distant star. For a real giggle, some players have been redirected to Hutton Orbital. As an extra twist to the curlies, this one can even catch you seconds before you hand a mission in.
- Mission update – 0H:0M – this one is timed to perfection. You have no idea how many seconds you have been given to deliver the goods, but you can be certain it is going to fail just before you get there.
- Rare goods spawns – so what that you are the only CMDR to come 600Kls to this station this week, we are only going to offer you 1 ton every ten minutes.
- Frame wake scans – how often have you just about completed a wake scan, only to have it vanish? This is simple, yet cruel.
- The SRV scanner – this is a masterwork of sadistic design. It’s so hard to figure out that some players have grown to like it.
- Engineer commodities – one of my favourites. The cruelty in this feature is many layered and occasionally subtle. We need to take some commodities for any worthwhile upgrade, but the ones that can be purchased are usually the other side of the bubble from the engineer that wants them. Some commodities are only available via very rare missions. Just having one ton of these commodities causes every NPC in the galaxy to attack you, even though the commodities are nearly worthless. As a nice added touch, we are completely unable to store these commodities.
- Marco Quent – not only is Marco the most useless of all the engineers, but he has the hardest requirement to unlock: Modular terminals – so cruel I was tempted to add them as a competing feature all on their own. Marco also needs a permit to even get to his system. But we only want to meet Marco so that we can get the introduction to the Professor.
- Chain interdictions – just escaped an interdiction, no problem we have another NPC lined up behind you already. As a bonus, this feature ensures that every NPC you have avoided, and sometimes even killed, will instantly appear when you are interdicted.
- NPC plasma beam weapons – there were some lovely sadistic touches to NPCs with the 2.1.0 upgrade, but the one we will always remember with fondness is NPCs who used plasma weapons that fired at the same rate as a beam laser – about 10 shots per second. As an added touch, these NPCs were completely immune to the heat this weapon should have generated.
- Interdiction tunnel flipping 180 - or spazzing in every possible direction in under a second. This has been in the game since the beginning it seems, and we've gotten so used to it happening every time, to the point where our instant reaction to every single interdicion is to hit X to throttle all the way back and give up. The only winning move is to not play the minigame.
- Type-9 Heavy. 1000 ton hull ship that is masslocked by a Python, because "gameplay reasons". As if trying to wrestle the thing in the right direction while in flight and SC wasn't bad enough, we're going to make sure you can't low-wake when interdicted. But that's not enough, let's make it really slow so you can't outrun anything or have a decent amount of shields fitting to the size of ship it is. If you want decent shields you have to sacrifice cargo space which means the point of the ship is partially lost.
- Mission Givers Portraits - There isn't worse. Let's face it, it is a real torture to see those hideous faces every time you open the board. On top of it, it has trouble loading and lags like hell even on top 4960x cpu with 980 ti. Not to mention there's only about 6-8 base model with minor changes (so minor we can't even say if they are different than the previous one you saw 100ly away).
- The New Ship Outfitting - Frontier gave us an improved outfitter, giving information players have long wished for. Yet, they made sure to make it as ugly as possible as well as unresponsive and asking for the player to click and click and keep clicking to outfit a new vessel. Sadistic at it's best : awesome new features that you cannot have without suffering.
- The Mission Board : Unable to update mission list - Once again, a marvelous sadistic feature from Frontier. One of the main aspect of the game, mission running, involve using the mission board to get those said mission at first. Yet, Frontier coded some delay so people would need to wait 5... 10... 15... 20... 30 seconds... to receive that pure sadistic message again and again : Unable to update mission list.
- The Imperial Cutter barely fits on the landing pad - for extra fun there is all kinds of junk all around it to bump into. No you can't use 3rd person view of any kind to make it easier.
- Hunt down deserters in sector X
Says you can find them at beacons, signals, and res sites.
Sector has no res sites, beacons turn up empty and so do signals after hours (literally) of looking. - PP NPCs that spawn everywhere you go - Couple that with the fact that factions aligned to the same superpower will attack you. Oh ya, it's even bad juju to defend yourself against them.
I’ll make a poll for voting soon™
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