It is good that you clear your save on death. Let's not force it on others. This is just a game anyway.
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A big (fixable) problem: the player is not supposed to die
- Thread starter Ian Doncaster
- Start date
It is good that you clear your save on death. Let's not force it on others. This is just a game anyway.
I'm sorry but I can't see anywhere that I am forcing my views on anyone else.
I think Jaiotu sums up my position very well:
It was a "pie in the sky" comment. I'm totally aware that how I choose to play Elite is not the way the majority of the community does and that I certainly don't speak for the community. I immerse for myself
I choose to wipe my game save when I get destroyed because I genuinely enjoy the uphill struggle. I'm fully aware that the majority of the people playing Elite: Dangerous would never play again if getting destroyed meant loosing all their stuff and progress. Someday, hopefully many, many, many years from now when Frontier closes the door on Elite Dangerous maybe they'll do as they promised and release the code to the community and I'll be able to enjoy my own private galaxy where permadeath and the ability to go broke are implemented.
I wouldn't wish that on the community as it would bankrupt Frontier with the number of people who would pull their support.
This.
There needs to be a reasonably high degree of risk vs reward in this game and I think the balance is just fine as it is. No risk = would turn ED in to no fun, boring meaningless arcade game. If it went that way I would be uninstalling it the same day.
And the death penalty in ED is actually already quite moderate compared to other space games out there. Try losing a decently fitted supercapital or a freighter full of commodities in EVE Online for example by comparison, that would cost you tens of billions of credits which would set you back many months of game time to replace if you were to lose such a ship.
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I don't really agree that just because there is penalty to death that the player isn't supposed to die. Losing something from time to time is part of it and given how much income has increased while the death penalty has stayed the same I don't think we need to nerf it more, its a bit too much on the light side currently in my opinion.
Death should be a risk we face in Elite frequently. But rewards should be far better balanced, losing hours of progress when dying is disheartening.
Die doing a 100k assassination mission? Succeed doing 20 of them to break even, wait for a week for the next lucrative cg hauling stuff (if lucky), do another sothis smuggling run or start trading. Not everyone likes the activities that have bigger rewards in the game..
Die doing a 100k assassination mission? Succeed doing 20 of them to break even, wait for a week for the next lucrative cg hauling stuff (if lucky), do another sothis smuggling run or start trading. Not everyone likes the activities that have bigger rewards in the game..
That's not what I'm saying - I'm saying the player isn't as the game is now supposed to die, therefore the penalty for death can't be balanced properly: it's either irrelevant (because it's so rare anything short of full permadeath is a negligible consequence to a multi-billionaire) or it's excessive, with no middle ground.
People have made triple Elite with no rebuys: the game does not have player death (or even any sort of failure) as something which is expected to happen (see all the people on this thread who voluntarily play permadeath and are not spending most of their time in a Freewinder)
When they introduced tough AIs in 2.1 it changed the game - the player was now supposed to fail every so often - and what happened? There was a huge storm of protest, they refunded every rebuy from 2.1.0 and 2.1.01 (despite most just being caused by inexperience against tough foes, not the rare plasma multicannon bug), and have since dialled the AI back - even the Elite ones - significantly (and made getting an invincible engineered ship even easier, too).
This is my very first post because when I saw this I just had to register to ask: Is this a joke? How much of a carebear can somebody be? Do you think pillows should be banned so pillow fights won't hurt anyone?
Players don't die.. the ship gets destroyed and they get ejected in their escape pods and returned to their last place of docking. The OP is a bunch of whining in my opinion. The major joy in this game for me has always been to try to not get my ship blown up, and I've gotten quite good at that over time. I don't understand the entire reasoning behind the OP and that's why I will indeed read it backward, as the OP already expected people to do. But this is just my opinion. With the current upgrades from engineers the NPC's are balanced. It has become necessary to have upgrades to balance with the improvements in the AI. I kill an Elite Anaconda in about 30 seconds with my upgraded Anaconda, and in my opinion that means that the NPCs are not strong enough and should be upgraded as well. There is almost no risk anymore once you use all the possibilities the game offers. The engineering has even been nerfed so that you need only 1 of each material to get an upgrade. It's easy as peasy, and the OP simply needs to adapt, go with the changes. You know the old saying, "if you don't go with the changes, and say 'by God, I will not change', you might as well die right now"
verminstar
Banned
At the point where it was suggested explorers have some sorta backup...we already do, it's called solo mode and common sense.
Don't travel the bubble in open mode if yer worried about losing data. If ye do die and lose the lot, then ye really only have yerself to blame fer being in open in the first place. This is where solo becomes the logical choice.
Not gonna make it into another solo versus open debate but like I said...common sense. This is why some of us have researched very quiet and remote docking points on the edge of the bubble, with a very short distance between the jump in point and the station. More the distance, the more some psychotic npc has the chance to ruin yer day, so rule of thumb is "spitting distance"
Little things...details prepared long before yer even close to "civilization" (tongue firmly in cheek) If there are explorers who fail to take the most basic precautions on returning to...that place, then they have nobody to blame but themselves for their losses. Live by the moral that everyone in this game will kill you on sight while laughing, and ye soon learn to tread very lightly and nobody will even be aware of ye being there at all. Ye make it any easier than that, then ye take away half the fun.
Anyone can jump into a ship and go into the black...but getting back in one piece from the other side of the universe, and cashing in the data is the thing that makes the difference between the men and the boys. No suicide insta travel mode...ye get back the same way ye left ^^
Don't travel the bubble in open mode if yer worried about losing data. If ye do die and lose the lot, then ye really only have yerself to blame fer being in open in the first place. This is where solo becomes the logical choice.
Not gonna make it into another solo versus open debate but like I said...common sense. This is why some of us have researched very quiet and remote docking points on the edge of the bubble, with a very short distance between the jump in point and the station. More the distance, the more some psychotic npc has the chance to ruin yer day, so rule of thumb is "spitting distance"
Little things...details prepared long before yer even close to "civilization" (tongue firmly in cheek) If there are explorers who fail to take the most basic precautions on returning to...that place, then they have nobody to blame but themselves for their losses. Live by the moral that everyone in this game will kill you on sight while laughing, and ye soon learn to tread very lightly and nobody will even be aware of ye being there at all. Ye make it any easier than that, then ye take away half the fun.
Anyone can jump into a ship and go into the black...but getting back in one piece from the other side of the universe, and cashing in the data is the thing that makes the difference between the men and the boys. No suicide insta travel mode...ye get back the same way ye left ^^
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I still think explorers should have the option of releasing data bouys on death, or being able to a limited number of hide data caches in systems, that could be collected on death, to help mitigate the 'loss of everything' problem.
I'm certainly not in favour of removing death completely - but would love to see the introduction of flyable escape pods (but then that leads to people wanting to destroy or scoop pods - humans are evil).
Let them spawn a private data beacon to pick up -> pirating explorers becomes a thing, dying is much less of a penalty.
That I think is the problem - explorers currently face zero danger (the exceptionally rare contact binary aside) - and apart from the accumulation of tiredness, recklessness and carelessness (which do add up, of course), it's entirely straightforward to go on months-long trips without taking any damage at all.
(I would say "don't take cargo back to the bubble" is more crucial than "solo mode", for the explorer who doesn't want trouble - dangerous players are exceptionally rare, especially in random frontier systems; NPC pirates who'll kill you for that one small data cache actually exist and are marginally rarer in Open)
If there was anything out there which could actually kill an explorer, the penalties for dying would be way too severe.
So Frontier must either reduce the penalties for explorers dying, or ensure that deep space continues to contain no threats whatsoever. The latter option hardly seems satisfactory long-term
Make fuel scooping dangerous, make close binaries nasty even if you don't land right between them, make the various stellar remnants (black holes especially) really risky to get close enough for a scan ... all of these and more could be included if exploration was designed - in terms of how much you could gain and how much you could lose - to have failure happen occasionally. Have reaching distant stars be more than an exercise in not falling asleep at the wheel. I'd love to see all that happen - but I know if it did with the penalty for explorer death as is, that Frontier would be pressured into reverting it all even faster than they nerfed the 2.1 AIs.
There is more issues with non dying characters: how are you going to make exploration actually dangerous (making people actually crash into a star, being burned when flying through a solar flare, black hole death, you know all the amazing way you could interact/ die in space and make interesting and proper risk and reward mechanics) if you have to explain how a player survived crashing into stellar bodies or a black hole ? Even a data beacon would be a tricky thing to implement with that limitation, there is no teleporting out of that situation, and its unlikely you would have strong enough thrusters of any kind, which would mean you would have to implement some kind of one off micro witch drives into the lore which would further complicate things. It´s a nightmare for the gamedesigners.
The problem with ideas to sort out the games "difficulty" and "challenge" is that they never take into account player base skill spectrum. i.e. the player base skill is a big spectrum from the uber combat gods at the top (who have a propensity to call everyone below them "carebears") and the poor sods with crap hand eye coordination at the bottom (who call everyone who kills them a "griefer").
There is NO way a game can cater for that wide spectrum of skills unless it incorporates some way to customise the difficulty.
NO one individual on the forums can speak for anyone else but themselves regarding the games "challenge" and "difficulty".
Two things for me personally (as an explorer) would greatly improve the game, keep as many people as happy as possible and would bring me back to the game:
1) difficulty slider that incorporates bonuses for credits and influence when above 100%, and an equal "nerf" of credits and influence when below 100%.
2) "black box" for explorers. Blow up in deep space and a black box will be dropped with all data. So an explorer can return to the system and get the data back. in NO way does this let people suicide and return to the bubble, as they will have to travel to wherever they blew up and ALL the way back to cash it in. It's just a little safety net for those who HATE to see progress wiped out. This would enable FD (as OP suggests) to "spice" things up a bit for explorers and give Us a few more interesting and dangerous things to do and see.
I havn't played the game for yonks, but if FD did those 2 things I would be back in an instant. If I was up for a challenge I'd increase the difficulty, but the next day I may be in a mood for a chill, so drop the difficulty (and suffer the nerf to credits and influence (if I was bothered with it (which I'm not!)). It's all about flexibility and player choice, we live in a society that espouses QOL and choice etc. Yet computer games just seem to be going in the opposite direction, with limited choices and restrictions.
There is NO way a game can cater for that wide spectrum of skills unless it incorporates some way to customise the difficulty.
NO one individual on the forums can speak for anyone else but themselves regarding the games "challenge" and "difficulty".
Two things for me personally (as an explorer) would greatly improve the game, keep as many people as happy as possible and would bring me back to the game:
1) difficulty slider that incorporates bonuses for credits and influence when above 100%, and an equal "nerf" of credits and influence when below 100%.
2) "black box" for explorers. Blow up in deep space and a black box will be dropped with all data. So an explorer can return to the system and get the data back. in NO way does this let people suicide and return to the bubble, as they will have to travel to wherever they blew up and ALL the way back to cash it in. It's just a little safety net for those who HATE to see progress wiped out. This would enable FD (as OP suggests) to "spice" things up a bit for explorers and give Us a few more interesting and dangerous things to do and see.
I havn't played the game for yonks, but if FD did those 2 things I would be back in an instant. If I was up for a challenge I'd increase the difficulty, but the next day I may be in a mood for a chill, so drop the difficulty (and suffer the nerf to credits and influence (if I was bothered with it (which I'm not!)). It's all about flexibility and player choice, we live in a society that espouses QOL and choice etc. Yet computer games just seem to be going in the opposite direction, with limited choices and restrictions.
verminstar
Banned
Contrary to what others wish to believe, I would actually be hopeful of a few more risks out here...though more in the way of environmental risks rather than fill the black with more zombie npc which would just make it boring and untenable.
I really do get the point about combining tiredness and carelessness...last time I had to go back to the city, it was because I forgot the check the gravity of a planet I was landing on (about 4g) and went for a hard landing...lost 55% of my hull and then the SRV on the same bloody planet. Half a dozen ELW scans with none of them bookmarked...hard choices made took me most of a week to get back. Suicide is a choice that lesser explorers would consider imho. Those who want zero risk and zero effort will take the easy way back...I'll take the long way back holding my head high as I do, because when I cash that data in, I know I'll be punching the air in jubilation and happy as a pig in the brown stuff that I made it back and will now have my name up in neon lights until the game plug is pulled. To me, that's an achievement worth working for.
But yeah...make deep space dangerous. Make black holes suicide to approach...make damage on binaries way worse than it is currently...and I say this from the perspective that I don't use heat sinks. Put unpredictable volcanoes and geysers on planets and moons which could kill yer SRV instantly. Etc, etc etc...there's so much that could be done without ever putting a single npc or alien into the mix.
Exploration should by rights, be one of the most daunting and riskiest careers to undertake. To make it out should be an achievement on it's own...to make it back should be an even bigger achievement. In days of old, how many went out to explore and never came back? Did it stop them? No because fortune favors the brave after all ^^
Not to put too fine a point on it, your entire post is coming across as why players should never, ever die.
Well, speaking personally, I would not miss the 'multiplayer' part too much if Frontier announced tomorrow that they were patching out Open mode.
Maybe because such threads are implying or outright stating that 'X shouldn't kill me', and the response is 'well, yeah, X shouldn't kill you - if you're competent at doing X. Maybe you're not.'
Maybe this is where you need to express yourself clearer - player death (or as close as this game gets to it) is very much part of the game design. This game doesn't make it a proper permadeath by having an escape pod which ejects you when your ship is destroyed, allowing you to use insurance to claim your ship back, for a cost in credits, or respawn in the starting Sidewinder, but it is a 'death'. This simple fact negates these supposed problems.
Nope. Traders and explorers have good reasons for considering having non-combat internals, but there is nothing forcing them to do so. I can't speak for exploration, but my experience in trading is that you can easily turn a decent profit, even on occasions where I've run with no weapons to maximise jump distance and replaced my shield with another cargohold to maximise profit, leaving me even more vulnerable to ship destruction than a more sensible trader. Your Palladium example is actually not a good one, as that works out at, what, 12% profit, or thereabouts? A better one would be, say, Medical Diagnostic Equipment. You might have to fly a bit of a long route to do it, but you can buy those for about 2k per tonne and sell for about 7k per tonne, a 250% profit. More moderate length routes might restrict that to only a 100-150% profit. And that's leaving aside long-distance rare trading, which can get into really silly percentages of profit.
So, with explorers, you run a risk of losing a lot of valuable data by having your ship destroyed - but, if that doesn't happen, you get a huge payday. Seems balanced to me.
If you know of an actual cheat or exploit, report it to Frontier. Otherwise, you are basically moaning about players succesfully making money in this game.
It's called 'risk v reward'.
I really hope this isn't a serious suggestion. It would utterly trivialise the game.
Not really much different from suggestion 1.
Well, a much better law enforcement/security system is something that Frontier want to implement, but I don't see the issue with ship rebuy costs at all.
As I pointed out above, even without rare trading, you can get profits into triple-figure percentages if you know what you are doing. I don't really think that needs buffed. I do find it interesting, though, that you're saying pirate threat needs to be increased when the very supposed issue that you're complaining about above is the vulnerability of traders.
I can kinda see why you'd want this, but there's a major problem. The whole point of exploration is going out into the black to areas where no-one has ever been before and discover what's there - so who dropped the comms relays?
Except the problem is, if you do this, you're basically punishing success.
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