Foreword
First off, let me say that I really loved this game. I started off in XBOX Public Preview (beta test) and played solidly until around July of this year. If you look at the number of bug reports, suggestions, etc., that I have posted here and also sent to Frontier, then you will see that I've done all that I could reasonably have been expected to do in order to help Frontier improve this game (from my perspective).
Secondly, while my opinions are just my own, and do not reflect the entire community, on the other hand, I know for a fact that I'm not alone in these views. I pretty confident that, for awhile there, I was one of the most vocal XBOX players in terms of suggestions and feedback, which means most people (probably 95% or more) don't bother to post here. They just quit, and you'll never hear from them, because there are too many other great games and life is too busy.
Thirdly, I'm not posting this here to garner a bunch of debate or "me too" posts. This is not a referendum; it is simply my way of telling the developers why I quit this game and have not been able to convince myself to come back yet (despite really wanting to, and actually trying to!). That said, I'll be surprised if nobody tries to tear down my points or voice their support, since it's clear from the past that threads like this can result in changes that some people don't like.
Fourthly, I commend Frontier for having the best customer support, community engagement, and transparency about game issues, out of any games company I've ever been a customer or beta tester with. Patch notes are always extremely detailed, which is very rare and very appreciated. I would not be taking the time out of my day to write this if I did not think that FD would ever read it or care what it said.
Fifthly, I'm a developer too. I understand how things like Agile and Scrum work. I know Frontier has an internal issues list a mile long, and every issue gets assigned a priority level according to predefined criteria. Every software company has such criteria, and it seems pretty safe to say that, with the exception of issues that have caused a huge, vocal outcry, as long as Elite Dangerous has existed, Frontier has generally prioritized fixing show-stopper bugs and adding cool new features over fine-tuning and adding depth to the existing features (like power play, star system exploration, engineers, planetary surface exploration, missions) with a few notable exceptions.
So please, take this feedback with the appropriate grains of salt—but also, please respect that my opinions are informed from having extensively participated in these forums, talked to fellow streamers and online players, and seen how other games approach things. So, I feel you should take the following criticisms as representative of a non-trivial sub-section of players, many or most of whom never come to these forums.
80/20 Rule
My criticisms and feature requests that follow focus on the fine-tuning of existing features to alleviate major bottlenecks of the play-time/reward equation in Elite Dangerous. I have carefully formulated these requests according to my own educated guesses about what would require the least amount of developer time but would provide the largest increase in player satisfaction by removing certain pain points.
While I do respect Frontier's choice of development priorities, I believe there is an entire category of issues they have vastly under-prioritized, leading to significant player attrition that could have been avoided with relatively minimal effort compared to the amount of developer time spent on new features, combat balance, and bug-fixes.
My goal in this post, then, is not only to persuade Frontier to make certain changes (detailed in the sections below), but also, to fundamentally adjust the pre-existing criteria they use to prioritize game issues in the development queue, in the direction of fine-tuning things more often. I believe this would require no more than a 20% loss to developer time spent on other categories, but would improve player retention by 80% or more—and I'll explain why below.
The Play-Time/Reward Equation, The Boredom/Fun Equation, and the Player Attrition Equation
The general play-time/reward equation is as follows.
Let T = time spent playing, Tx = time spent on game task X (where X = surface exploration or combat etc.), T# = gameplay session/period #, B = base rate of benefit gain, Bx = base rate of benefit of type X (where X = credits, rep, rank, materials, etc.), C = base cost rate, including risk, Cx = cost if type X, P(A) = likelihood of player attrition, F = fitness level of a given player-character or player sub-population, Fx = fitness level with respect to activity type X (e.g. exploration, combat, smuggling, powerplay missions, etc.), R = total net reward rate for gameplay, Rx = net reward of type X for gameplay, S = space available to absorb benefit (e.g. inventory space, rank space, etc.); Sx = space for reward type X.
Reward rate equation:
R = ( F ( B * (S - B > 0) - C ) )
How fast your character gains reward from your gameplay is determined by how long you play, times how strong your character is over baseline F, times the base rate of benefit gain, times the base cost in terms of risk factors and materials cost (for things like ammo etc.).
Boredom/fun equation:
Z = (L * H) / ( G * Q * N)
Where Z = player boredom factor (zzz), G = game content, Q = perceived quality, N = newness/nostalgia value of features, L = the degree to which features are locked away from players, H = the degree to which the game is too hard for a player. Note: Z is purely the subjective enjoyment of old and new features alike that exists totally independent from the discrete/measurable in-game rewards that characters receive. Much of my own enjoyment of Elite Dangerous stems from it having a low Z factor due to great graphics and music, intricate controls, and challenging but not impossibly hard gameplay.
Probability of attrition equation:
P(A) = (R1 * T1 / R1 * T2) * (Z2/Z1)
Where R1 * T1 is the total Reward gained from older gameplay sessions and R * T2 is the total reward
gained from newer sessions. Z2/Z1 is the degree to which the game has become less or more boring. If P(A) is less than one then players perceive there is still a carrot on a stick and it keeps getting bigger; if it is greater than one then players see the carrot shrinking.
Generally, the faster the reward begins to decrease from gameplay session to gameplay session, unless some compelling new content is accessible to a player, then players are likely to just say "I'm done with this game."
I contend that Elite suffers from serious imbalances in these equations, but in a way that would be easily fixable, as I will detail below.
Identity Crisis
Different groups of players have different needs and wants. Elite Dangerous players in general tend to be divided between those who want an extreme high-difficulty, high-risk, cutthroat, multiplayer PVP experience, and those who want a medium difficulty, medium-risk, PVE or solo experience.
While Elite will obviously never cater to low-difficulty, casual players like No Man's Sky did, FD might take notice that even NMS finally broke up the game into three modes that vary widely on difficulty, to appease some hardcore survival game types that Hello Games had marketed to early on.
Because the problem with the P(A) equation is how subjective its factors are. Some players enjoy "gitting gud", while others just want to explore and be left alone. How can you keep everyone happy if there is only one difficulty setting for a game?
The games that I've played which had the most flexible, player-configurable difficulty settings were the old Madden and NCAA American Football games from the early 2000s. You could tweak many different sliders to completely customize not only the behavior of NPCs, but also the strength of your custom team and the likelihood of certain kinds of penalties being called by the refs—all this on top of five main difficulty settings ranging from "you can't lose" to "you will lose". Plus, you got to decide everything from uniform colors down to the weather. The result was that you had no one to blame but yourself if you lost a game, and no one to complain to, either. If you started to get bored, you could tweak things for a challenge, and vice-versa.
Another example of flexible difficulty settings are computer chess games. There is almost always an overall difficulty, and then a play-style slider (from defensive to aggressive). More advanced games also give you control over specific openings and strategies the AI might use.
Conversely, Elite gives players no control over the various hidden aspects of how NPCs behave. Enemy ships spawn with a random difficulty setting which is, rather inexplicably, tied to the player's current combat skill rating (harmless, dangerous, elite, etc.). However the player's skill rating doesn't take into account their current ship's load-out, leading to situations where activities like trading become less rewarding over time due to the game ratcheting up the difficulty level on you based on factors that the NPCs attacking you could not possibly have known.
This method of dynamically determined difficulty essentially serves as a form of punishment (rather than reward) for long-term players. The more experienced your character gets, the harder the NPCs get, increasing the fitness requirement for your character to get the same reward, in turn reducing the rate of reward R for a given activity. Worse, when you gear up for maximum fitness, the game still usually just spawns weak, crappy NPCs that have low reward. It waits until you have invested lots of time into gathering cargo before it spawns an Elite-difficulty enemy to hunt you down, then imbues that enemy with magical hax0r superpowers.
The result is a frustrating progression that punishes players the more they play. If it's based on the feedback of a select few players who get their primary jollies out of surviving extreme difficulty and not from actually seeing an increase between time spent playing and amount of in-game reward gained, then you've selected out all the players who find this to be a turn-off.
These sorts of dynamically determined factors also lead to lots of wasted developer time, as programmers must spend time trying to come up with the ideal "balance" to keep everyone happy. Of course, "balance" is the wrong word for this. The correct way to describe it is to call it "the least unfavorable imbalance for the most vocal players". The squeaky wheel gets the grease—even if the other three wheels fall off silently. It would be better to let players adjust balance themselves for their own instances, then group players into instances by similarity of difficulty preference.
What Madden and chess games realized is that you cannot possibly hope to satisfy both groups of players (novices and grandmasters alike). However, since MMORPGs are based on a shared world where NPCs are shared by players, this is why MMORPGs traditionally divide players up according to server types: one for PVE-only, possibly with certain select PVP zones, and another server for hardcore PVPers. But Elite didn't do that; it doesn't vary PVE difficulty and forces players to decide that for themselves based on what type of system they go to and what type of missions they undertake.
The problem with this approach is that it increases the L factor in the P(A) equation instead of lowering the H factor. What you've essentially done is to lock many players out of much of the game content by hiding it behind a difficulty gate that many players will never get past. The worst part is that it is completely nonsensical for NPCs to restrict missions from people when the only criteria for payment is that the mission gets completed. I mean... why should these clowns care what my rank is, so long as I can complete the mission?
Imbalance Example: Mining
Upper-level mining missions are restricted from players until they reach a certain level of Trade rank (such as Elite). However, the best way to attain this level of Trade Rank is NEVER MINE ANYTHING EVER but just grind out commodity trading! That leads to the following reward imbalance before reaching Elite rank:
Trading: R1 = Rt1 + Um1 = ( Ft ( Bt - Ct ) )
Mining: R2 = Rt2 + Um2 = ( Fm ( Bm - Cm ) )
R1 > R2
Um1 > Um2
Ct < Cm
Bt > Bm
Ft > Fm
Where Um# is the progress towards being able to unlock the best mining missions and best mining ships. So, ironically, if you focus purely on trading, then you can get the best ship for mining and unlock the best missions for mining much faster than if you do mining early in the game.
That is idiotic especially since the cost to do mining Cm is much higher than the cost to do trading (greater risk of pirates, time consuming ship setup, reduced capacity inventory). A ship good at trading can be much more survivable than a ship kitted out for mining due to mining equipment taking up extra slots needed for defensive measures. And, it makes no sense why an NPC would prefer to give a mining contract to an Elite Trader who has never mined a day in his life, over a player who spent hundreds of hours mining yet is nowhere near Elite due to the fact that mining is so unproductive (which is further exacerbated by not having access to those missions!).
These kinds of low-reward, high-time-investment activities are the key reason why Elite loses players.
To put it another way:
Zm = (Lm * Hm) / ( Gm * Qm * Nm)
Mining's long term boringness is higher as a result of the mining missions being locked out and mining being a relatively more difficult activity. Combine that with the quality of mining content and the frequency with which FD throws even a tiny bone in that direction, and you risk losing any player who tried this activity for very long.
What could save these players who like mining? Just a few new missions and higher reward prices here and there. But, what does FD do? They made the lower tier mining missions harder to find and harder to "pile up", reducing the reward rate for mining! Yet they added no new content except for a completely worthless amount of engineer materials given by asteroids and some new ores that aren't any more profitable than the old ones and therefore don't add any variety to the actual gameplay.
Imbalance Example: Space Exploration
Once again we see a low R, high Z activity that FD could improve with relatively minimal effort.
Exploring space should be this game's crowning glory: the universe is unimaginably large and the graphics and rendering of the solar systems are so beautiful that the sheer quality of this alone can serve as its own motivation for quite awhile.
However:
Ze = (Le * He) / ( Ge * Qe * Ne)
Clearly Ge (exploration content) is huge given the size of the galaxy, and we saw a huge boost with Horizons and planetary landings. The Qe (quality level) of this content is also excellent. It's hard to call it difficult so He is pretty low. Thus, I did not find exploration boring at first, and it quickly became my favorite part of the game.
However, the Ne (novelty factor) wears off after awhile. Pretty soon, you have seen everything there is to see. Both planetary landing content and space exploration become extremely repetitive. The only new exploration content has come in the form of extremely rare things that are incredibly difficult to find, and a couple of extremely difficult puzzles that cannot even be solved within the game but require the use of external software (and even then were nearly impossible). There are still no interesting storylines or randomly generated quests for average players to find out in the void. The vast majority of explorers will never find a mystery to solve or an item of extremely high value. And if you do pick up some of those worthless exploration data caches, all you've accomplished is to notify the psychic pirates that you should be killed on sight for the crime of having 23,032 credits worth of useless crap (and reduced your jump range).
But worst of all, the existing rewards also suck compared to anything else in the game. Landing on planets and shooting meteors quickly fills up your materials inventory, which is used in such an insanely complex set of recipes that no one can track it without keeping a very elaborate spreadsheet, further consuming time and raising the boredom factor for most players.
Reward equation for exploring:
Re = ( Fe ( Bse + Bge * (Smat - Bmat > 0) - Ce ) )
Smat is your inventory for storing materials found during exploration of a planet's surface. Once the Bmat (yield of loot) saturates the storage space, the benefit for ground exploration Bge drops to zero.
The only use for these ground-based materials for exploration is for longer jump ranges (through upgrades to the ship that increases fitness for exploration Fe) and jumponium fuel. But generally, jumponium is ONLY useful for reaching hard-to-get-to systems or traversing sparse regions, because the time required to gather it far outweighs its benefit for normal exploration. Since 99% of engineer upgrades are only useful for combat and other non-exploration-related things, if you're an explorer then you're really discouraged from actually exploring planet surfaces. This should be the opposite!!
Explorers should be the ones who can milk the most benefit out of exploration, yet the game basically punishes you for exploring relative to the hefty rewards doled out for destroying property, committing crimes, and being a glorified truck driver. You're more likely to find something rare and valuable in the bubble than in deep space.
Further, the income from scanning stellar bodies Bse does not change based on your exploration rank and you don't unlock any special missions. So, unlike how all the other professions progress, you gain no financial benefit from having higher exploration ranks AFAIK. The pay always sucks and discourages spending ANY time on ground forays unless you absolutely have to. This reward structure basically discourages you from exploring over-all; once you've seen your 100th Earthlike planet that you can't land on and your 1000th neutron star, etc., it just gets really old unless you're OCD or just *can't* get bored of exploring.
This relegated exploration to the select few who don't do it for the money and honestly can't get bored of it. But what about all the players who quit because there just wasn't much depth or reward to exploration? It's sad to say that even No Man's Sky planet surface exploration is vastly more entertaining and diverse. Coming back to Elite I just want to get out of my SRV and walk around sometimes, especially in very steep areas where repelling would make much more sense.
Worse the very few ground-based cool things that you can find, like barnacles, don't even show up on ship's radar. Unknown probes are nearly impossible to find. And none of it spawns unless you're in a very specific region of space.
Then there's the fact that the best exploration ship (in terms of jump range) is the worst one in terms of turn radius. This sucks! The Anaconda is very poorly adapted for exploration aside from its jump range: all the extra cargo space and weapons bays go totally wasted, but kills the turn radius. Since turn radius is the #1 key to fast exploration profits, that makes Anaconda a very annoying compromise, especially with its low-viz cockpit and inaccessible observation deck.
You could very easily fix this by making Anaconda's turn radius depend upon its total mass INCLUDING CARGO and not just its size! With no cargo why shouldn't it be able to turn very fast? Or better yet, make a top-tier exploration ship like a pro version of the ASP with a clear glass dome of a cockpit. and Anaconda-level jump range.
And for the sake of Jimmony Cricket, increase Exploration Data payouts by 500-1000%. Right now it sucks compared to anything else.
Missions that Punishing Players for Having Lives
Another big annoyance is missions that end while you're not even playing, costing you more rep than you would have gained for completing them.
Some of us have lives. If I quit a game and come back, I should not be able to open my save, only to discover that all of my missions have failed because I got called into work unexpectedly on my day off. That's just a slap in the face. No other games do this! It's ridiculous, and makes me never want to play the game or take on missions.
RNG on Engineers Upgrades
Removing the "hidden button" that let you get better odds was a slap in the face. Having RNG at all was an even bigger one. This kind of thing leads players to quit because it makes the rate of Benefit indeterminate when you are grinding.
I.e., players HATE to spend a ton of time on some boring grind, which has no financial or rank reward whatsoever, only to then lose all that play-time to a bad dice roll when the RNG screws them.
When players are grinding for upgrades is especially the time when benefits should be guaranteed, if you want to minimize attrition. Personally I never even did any of the engineers upgrades because the concept of driving around on moons shooting sparsely-placed rocks for hours and hours just so I can get some crappy dice-rolls is the least attractive thing I've ever considered doing in a video game.
I know some small set of players is willing to chase that carrot so they can "git gud", but players like that are not the ones you were at risk of losing in the first place. Anyone who loved this game enough to play that terrible content was not going to quit if the content was less terrible. But you would have saved large sections of the player base, such as myself.
The Price of Death Is Too High
Given that there's no type of combat simulator and many players could hit elite in exploration and trading without much combat experience, I think the game would be far more enjoyable if the "death price" capped out at 1 mil or so.
Every player who complains that players don't want to get pirated in PVE: well, if I knew that insurance buy-back costs would not take me 40 hours of exploration to make up, then I'd be a lot more open to the idea of being cannon fodder for whatever player or NPC decides to blow up my ship due to having some occupied escape pods or limpets in it or whatever. But you cannot even eject all your cargo without also ejecting limpets, so you cannot recover easily.
Conclusion
Generally, Elite seems to be greatly tilted towards certain activities over others. With each release, players are almost always able to quickly identify whatever "the new meta" is, i.e., how to maximize R in the shortest period of time. The result is a scenario where normal gameplay is exponentially less rewarding than constant meta exploitation. This leads to highly increased player attrition. I hope you fix this soon, so I can come back to the game.
Note: I did a bunch more editing to this post but the crappy forum software deleted my changes because it logged me out while I was writing. Then when I hit submit, it made me login, and after that took me to a blank white page. When I went back to this submission entry page, all the text was cleared out! I may go back and clarify later but am out of time for now.
First off, let me say that I really loved this game. I started off in XBOX Public Preview (beta test) and played solidly until around July of this year. If you look at the number of bug reports, suggestions, etc., that I have posted here and also sent to Frontier, then you will see that I've done all that I could reasonably have been expected to do in order to help Frontier improve this game (from my perspective).
Secondly, while my opinions are just my own, and do not reflect the entire community, on the other hand, I know for a fact that I'm not alone in these views. I pretty confident that, for awhile there, I was one of the most vocal XBOX players in terms of suggestions and feedback, which means most people (probably 95% or more) don't bother to post here. They just quit, and you'll never hear from them, because there are too many other great games and life is too busy.
Thirdly, I'm not posting this here to garner a bunch of debate or "me too" posts. This is not a referendum; it is simply my way of telling the developers why I quit this game and have not been able to convince myself to come back yet (despite really wanting to, and actually trying to!). That said, I'll be surprised if nobody tries to tear down my points or voice their support, since it's clear from the past that threads like this can result in changes that some people don't like.
Fourthly, I commend Frontier for having the best customer support, community engagement, and transparency about game issues, out of any games company I've ever been a customer or beta tester with. Patch notes are always extremely detailed, which is very rare and very appreciated. I would not be taking the time out of my day to write this if I did not think that FD would ever read it or care what it said.
Fifthly, I'm a developer too. I understand how things like Agile and Scrum work. I know Frontier has an internal issues list a mile long, and every issue gets assigned a priority level according to predefined criteria. Every software company has such criteria, and it seems pretty safe to say that, with the exception of issues that have caused a huge, vocal outcry, as long as Elite Dangerous has existed, Frontier has generally prioritized fixing show-stopper bugs and adding cool new features over fine-tuning and adding depth to the existing features (like power play, star system exploration, engineers, planetary surface exploration, missions) with a few notable exceptions.
So please, take this feedback with the appropriate grains of salt—but also, please respect that my opinions are informed from having extensively participated in these forums, talked to fellow streamers and online players, and seen how other games approach things. So, I feel you should take the following criticisms as representative of a non-trivial sub-section of players, many or most of whom never come to these forums.
80/20 Rule
My criticisms and feature requests that follow focus on the fine-tuning of existing features to alleviate major bottlenecks of the play-time/reward equation in Elite Dangerous. I have carefully formulated these requests according to my own educated guesses about what would require the least amount of developer time but would provide the largest increase in player satisfaction by removing certain pain points.
While I do respect Frontier's choice of development priorities, I believe there is an entire category of issues they have vastly under-prioritized, leading to significant player attrition that could have been avoided with relatively minimal effort compared to the amount of developer time spent on new features, combat balance, and bug-fixes.
My goal in this post, then, is not only to persuade Frontier to make certain changes (detailed in the sections below), but also, to fundamentally adjust the pre-existing criteria they use to prioritize game issues in the development queue, in the direction of fine-tuning things more often. I believe this would require no more than a 20% loss to developer time spent on other categories, but would improve player retention by 80% or more—and I'll explain why below.
The Play-Time/Reward Equation, The Boredom/Fun Equation, and the Player Attrition Equation
The general play-time/reward equation is as follows.
Let T = time spent playing, Tx = time spent on game task X (where X = surface exploration or combat etc.), T# = gameplay session/period #, B = base rate of benefit gain, Bx = base rate of benefit of type X (where X = credits, rep, rank, materials, etc.), C = base cost rate, including risk, Cx = cost if type X, P(A) = likelihood of player attrition, F = fitness level of a given player-character or player sub-population, Fx = fitness level with respect to activity type X (e.g. exploration, combat, smuggling, powerplay missions, etc.), R = total net reward rate for gameplay, Rx = net reward of type X for gameplay, S = space available to absorb benefit (e.g. inventory space, rank space, etc.); Sx = space for reward type X.
Reward rate equation:
R = ( F ( B * (S - B > 0) - C ) )
How fast your character gains reward from your gameplay is determined by how long you play, times how strong your character is over baseline F, times the base rate of benefit gain, times the base cost in terms of risk factors and materials cost (for things like ammo etc.).
Boredom/fun equation:
Z = (L * H) / ( G * Q * N)
Where Z = player boredom factor (zzz), G = game content, Q = perceived quality, N = newness/nostalgia value of features, L = the degree to which features are locked away from players, H = the degree to which the game is too hard for a player. Note: Z is purely the subjective enjoyment of old and new features alike that exists totally independent from the discrete/measurable in-game rewards that characters receive. Much of my own enjoyment of Elite Dangerous stems from it having a low Z factor due to great graphics and music, intricate controls, and challenging but not impossibly hard gameplay.
Probability of attrition equation:
P(A) = (R1 * T1 / R1 * T2) * (Z2/Z1)
Where R1 * T1 is the total Reward gained from older gameplay sessions and R * T2 is the total reward
gained from newer sessions. Z2/Z1 is the degree to which the game has become less or more boring. If P(A) is less than one then players perceive there is still a carrot on a stick and it keeps getting bigger; if it is greater than one then players see the carrot shrinking.
Generally, the faster the reward begins to decrease from gameplay session to gameplay session, unless some compelling new content is accessible to a player, then players are likely to just say "I'm done with this game."
I contend that Elite suffers from serious imbalances in these equations, but in a way that would be easily fixable, as I will detail below.
Identity Crisis
Different groups of players have different needs and wants. Elite Dangerous players in general tend to be divided between those who want an extreme high-difficulty, high-risk, cutthroat, multiplayer PVP experience, and those who want a medium difficulty, medium-risk, PVE or solo experience.
While Elite will obviously never cater to low-difficulty, casual players like No Man's Sky did, FD might take notice that even NMS finally broke up the game into three modes that vary widely on difficulty, to appease some hardcore survival game types that Hello Games had marketed to early on.
Because the problem with the P(A) equation is how subjective its factors are. Some players enjoy "gitting gud", while others just want to explore and be left alone. How can you keep everyone happy if there is only one difficulty setting for a game?
The games that I've played which had the most flexible, player-configurable difficulty settings were the old Madden and NCAA American Football games from the early 2000s. You could tweak many different sliders to completely customize not only the behavior of NPCs, but also the strength of your custom team and the likelihood of certain kinds of penalties being called by the refs—all this on top of five main difficulty settings ranging from "you can't lose" to "you will lose". Plus, you got to decide everything from uniform colors down to the weather. The result was that you had no one to blame but yourself if you lost a game, and no one to complain to, either. If you started to get bored, you could tweak things for a challenge, and vice-versa.
Another example of flexible difficulty settings are computer chess games. There is almost always an overall difficulty, and then a play-style slider (from defensive to aggressive). More advanced games also give you control over specific openings and strategies the AI might use.
Conversely, Elite gives players no control over the various hidden aspects of how NPCs behave. Enemy ships spawn with a random difficulty setting which is, rather inexplicably, tied to the player's current combat skill rating (harmless, dangerous, elite, etc.). However the player's skill rating doesn't take into account their current ship's load-out, leading to situations where activities like trading become less rewarding over time due to the game ratcheting up the difficulty level on you based on factors that the NPCs attacking you could not possibly have known.
This method of dynamically determined difficulty essentially serves as a form of punishment (rather than reward) for long-term players. The more experienced your character gets, the harder the NPCs get, increasing the fitness requirement for your character to get the same reward, in turn reducing the rate of reward R for a given activity. Worse, when you gear up for maximum fitness, the game still usually just spawns weak, crappy NPCs that have low reward. It waits until you have invested lots of time into gathering cargo before it spawns an Elite-difficulty enemy to hunt you down, then imbues that enemy with magical hax0r superpowers.
The result is a frustrating progression that punishes players the more they play. If it's based on the feedback of a select few players who get their primary jollies out of surviving extreme difficulty and not from actually seeing an increase between time spent playing and amount of in-game reward gained, then you've selected out all the players who find this to be a turn-off.
These sorts of dynamically determined factors also lead to lots of wasted developer time, as programmers must spend time trying to come up with the ideal "balance" to keep everyone happy. Of course, "balance" is the wrong word for this. The correct way to describe it is to call it "the least unfavorable imbalance for the most vocal players". The squeaky wheel gets the grease—even if the other three wheels fall off silently. It would be better to let players adjust balance themselves for their own instances, then group players into instances by similarity of difficulty preference.
What Madden and chess games realized is that you cannot possibly hope to satisfy both groups of players (novices and grandmasters alike). However, since MMORPGs are based on a shared world where NPCs are shared by players, this is why MMORPGs traditionally divide players up according to server types: one for PVE-only, possibly with certain select PVP zones, and another server for hardcore PVPers. But Elite didn't do that; it doesn't vary PVE difficulty and forces players to decide that for themselves based on what type of system they go to and what type of missions they undertake.
The problem with this approach is that it increases the L factor in the P(A) equation instead of lowering the H factor. What you've essentially done is to lock many players out of much of the game content by hiding it behind a difficulty gate that many players will never get past. The worst part is that it is completely nonsensical for NPCs to restrict missions from people when the only criteria for payment is that the mission gets completed. I mean... why should these clowns care what my rank is, so long as I can complete the mission?
Imbalance Example: Mining
Upper-level mining missions are restricted from players until they reach a certain level of Trade rank (such as Elite). However, the best way to attain this level of Trade Rank is NEVER MINE ANYTHING EVER but just grind out commodity trading! That leads to the following reward imbalance before reaching Elite rank:
Trading: R1 = Rt1 + Um1 = ( Ft ( Bt - Ct ) )
Mining: R2 = Rt2 + Um2 = ( Fm ( Bm - Cm ) )
R1 > R2
Um1 > Um2
Ct < Cm
Bt > Bm
Ft > Fm
Where Um# is the progress towards being able to unlock the best mining missions and best mining ships. So, ironically, if you focus purely on trading, then you can get the best ship for mining and unlock the best missions for mining much faster than if you do mining early in the game.
That is idiotic especially since the cost to do mining Cm is much higher than the cost to do trading (greater risk of pirates, time consuming ship setup, reduced capacity inventory). A ship good at trading can be much more survivable than a ship kitted out for mining due to mining equipment taking up extra slots needed for defensive measures. And, it makes no sense why an NPC would prefer to give a mining contract to an Elite Trader who has never mined a day in his life, over a player who spent hundreds of hours mining yet is nowhere near Elite due to the fact that mining is so unproductive (which is further exacerbated by not having access to those missions!).
These kinds of low-reward, high-time-investment activities are the key reason why Elite loses players.
To put it another way:
Zm = (Lm * Hm) / ( Gm * Qm * Nm)
Mining's long term boringness is higher as a result of the mining missions being locked out and mining being a relatively more difficult activity. Combine that with the quality of mining content and the frequency with which FD throws even a tiny bone in that direction, and you risk losing any player who tried this activity for very long.
What could save these players who like mining? Just a few new missions and higher reward prices here and there. But, what does FD do? They made the lower tier mining missions harder to find and harder to "pile up", reducing the reward rate for mining! Yet they added no new content except for a completely worthless amount of engineer materials given by asteroids and some new ores that aren't any more profitable than the old ones and therefore don't add any variety to the actual gameplay.
Imbalance Example: Space Exploration
Once again we see a low R, high Z activity that FD could improve with relatively minimal effort.
Exploring space should be this game's crowning glory: the universe is unimaginably large and the graphics and rendering of the solar systems are so beautiful that the sheer quality of this alone can serve as its own motivation for quite awhile.
However:
Ze = (Le * He) / ( Ge * Qe * Ne)
Clearly Ge (exploration content) is huge given the size of the galaxy, and we saw a huge boost with Horizons and planetary landings. The Qe (quality level) of this content is also excellent. It's hard to call it difficult so He is pretty low. Thus, I did not find exploration boring at first, and it quickly became my favorite part of the game.
However, the Ne (novelty factor) wears off after awhile. Pretty soon, you have seen everything there is to see. Both planetary landing content and space exploration become extremely repetitive. The only new exploration content has come in the form of extremely rare things that are incredibly difficult to find, and a couple of extremely difficult puzzles that cannot even be solved within the game but require the use of external software (and even then were nearly impossible). There are still no interesting storylines or randomly generated quests for average players to find out in the void. The vast majority of explorers will never find a mystery to solve or an item of extremely high value. And if you do pick up some of those worthless exploration data caches, all you've accomplished is to notify the psychic pirates that you should be killed on sight for the crime of having 23,032 credits worth of useless crap (and reduced your jump range).
But worst of all, the existing rewards also suck compared to anything else in the game. Landing on planets and shooting meteors quickly fills up your materials inventory, which is used in such an insanely complex set of recipes that no one can track it without keeping a very elaborate spreadsheet, further consuming time and raising the boredom factor for most players.
Reward equation for exploring:
Re = ( Fe ( Bse + Bge * (Smat - Bmat > 0) - Ce ) )
Smat is your inventory for storing materials found during exploration of a planet's surface. Once the Bmat (yield of loot) saturates the storage space, the benefit for ground exploration Bge drops to zero.
The only use for these ground-based materials for exploration is for longer jump ranges (through upgrades to the ship that increases fitness for exploration Fe) and jumponium fuel. But generally, jumponium is ONLY useful for reaching hard-to-get-to systems or traversing sparse regions, because the time required to gather it far outweighs its benefit for normal exploration. Since 99% of engineer upgrades are only useful for combat and other non-exploration-related things, if you're an explorer then you're really discouraged from actually exploring planet surfaces. This should be the opposite!!
Explorers should be the ones who can milk the most benefit out of exploration, yet the game basically punishes you for exploring relative to the hefty rewards doled out for destroying property, committing crimes, and being a glorified truck driver. You're more likely to find something rare and valuable in the bubble than in deep space.
Further, the income from scanning stellar bodies Bse does not change based on your exploration rank and you don't unlock any special missions. So, unlike how all the other professions progress, you gain no financial benefit from having higher exploration ranks AFAIK. The pay always sucks and discourages spending ANY time on ground forays unless you absolutely have to. This reward structure basically discourages you from exploring over-all; once you've seen your 100th Earthlike planet that you can't land on and your 1000th neutron star, etc., it just gets really old unless you're OCD or just *can't* get bored of exploring.
This relegated exploration to the select few who don't do it for the money and honestly can't get bored of it. But what about all the players who quit because there just wasn't much depth or reward to exploration? It's sad to say that even No Man's Sky planet surface exploration is vastly more entertaining and diverse. Coming back to Elite I just want to get out of my SRV and walk around sometimes, especially in very steep areas where repelling would make much more sense.
Worse the very few ground-based cool things that you can find, like barnacles, don't even show up on ship's radar. Unknown probes are nearly impossible to find. And none of it spawns unless you're in a very specific region of space.
Then there's the fact that the best exploration ship (in terms of jump range) is the worst one in terms of turn radius. This sucks! The Anaconda is very poorly adapted for exploration aside from its jump range: all the extra cargo space and weapons bays go totally wasted, but kills the turn radius. Since turn radius is the #1 key to fast exploration profits, that makes Anaconda a very annoying compromise, especially with its low-viz cockpit and inaccessible observation deck.
You could very easily fix this by making Anaconda's turn radius depend upon its total mass INCLUDING CARGO and not just its size! With no cargo why shouldn't it be able to turn very fast? Or better yet, make a top-tier exploration ship like a pro version of the ASP with a clear glass dome of a cockpit. and Anaconda-level jump range.
And for the sake of Jimmony Cricket, increase Exploration Data payouts by 500-1000%. Right now it sucks compared to anything else.
Missions that Punishing Players for Having Lives
Another big annoyance is missions that end while you're not even playing, costing you more rep than you would have gained for completing them.
Some of us have lives. If I quit a game and come back, I should not be able to open my save, only to discover that all of my missions have failed because I got called into work unexpectedly on my day off. That's just a slap in the face. No other games do this! It's ridiculous, and makes me never want to play the game or take on missions.
RNG on Engineers Upgrades
Removing the "hidden button" that let you get better odds was a slap in the face. Having RNG at all was an even bigger one. This kind of thing leads players to quit because it makes the rate of Benefit indeterminate when you are grinding.
I.e., players HATE to spend a ton of time on some boring grind, which has no financial or rank reward whatsoever, only to then lose all that play-time to a bad dice roll when the RNG screws them.
When players are grinding for upgrades is especially the time when benefits should be guaranteed, if you want to minimize attrition. Personally I never even did any of the engineers upgrades because the concept of driving around on moons shooting sparsely-placed rocks for hours and hours just so I can get some crappy dice-rolls is the least attractive thing I've ever considered doing in a video game.
I know some small set of players is willing to chase that carrot so they can "git gud", but players like that are not the ones you were at risk of losing in the first place. Anyone who loved this game enough to play that terrible content was not going to quit if the content was less terrible. But you would have saved large sections of the player base, such as myself.
The Price of Death Is Too High
Given that there's no type of combat simulator and many players could hit elite in exploration and trading without much combat experience, I think the game would be far more enjoyable if the "death price" capped out at 1 mil or so.
Every player who complains that players don't want to get pirated in PVE: well, if I knew that insurance buy-back costs would not take me 40 hours of exploration to make up, then I'd be a lot more open to the idea of being cannon fodder for whatever player or NPC decides to blow up my ship due to having some occupied escape pods or limpets in it or whatever. But you cannot even eject all your cargo without also ejecting limpets, so you cannot recover easily.
Conclusion
Generally, Elite seems to be greatly tilted towards certain activities over others. With each release, players are almost always able to quickly identify whatever "the new meta" is, i.e., how to maximize R in the shortest period of time. The result is a scenario where normal gameplay is exponentially less rewarding than constant meta exploitation. This leads to highly increased player attrition. I hope you fix this soon, so I can come back to the game.
Note: I did a bunch more editing to this post but the crappy forum software deleted my changes because it logged me out while I was writing. Then when I hit submit, it made me login, and after that took me to a blank white page. When I went back to this submission entry page, all the text was cleared out! I may go back and clarify later but am out of time for now.
