I've read all the posts and I can see why these white knights are so hated, one thread and I think I can name them all !
It feels like someone is doing their job wrong
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You make it sound like that is a bad thing? Pre-orders/Seasons are never good for consumers. It may have been needed to give FD some initial financial headroom, but since that is clearly not an issue anymore I dont see any reason why the relation between FD and us should be any different than that: they work on stuff, and we buy it after we know if its any good.
I think its not a problem of pre-sales per se, its rather a problem that in my humble (yes, really) opinion only 2.0 Horizons and, to part, 2.1 Rngineers delivered. Like said, pre 2.2 / 2.3 I was almost adamant that I would buy S3 blindly. Had I known LEPs were offered at that time I would surely buy one just on the hype of planetary landings alone. Now seeing unexplainable delays (given the amount of possible available workforce) and really bizarre direction decisions, we can only wonder what happened. Were 2.2 / 2.3 delivered in quick succession, and done before the end of 2016 I think there would be less dissent and many people would forgive the bolt-on nature getting positively hyped for S3. But that ship has sailed, and we have 2.3 in April 2017. What's taking so long? Console ports? Workforce dillution to other projects? Smelly codebase? IDK... Not buying S3 until I see it.
As for a leadership change... Not knowing the internal reasons its hard to say. But Sandro has earned a few "yellow cards", or "strikes" on livestreams and via forums (outlined in previous post). So I'd say its high time to start designing, instead of kinda idling. Also getting to know the product he is designing better (as a matter of fact he should be an expert at all things mechanics / gameplay related at this point) would be a nice start. It only requires playing the game not from a high-horse dev account... Horizons outcome should be last (wake-up) call, I think. Brookes went kinda silent recently so I am unsure of his influence atm.
As for a leadership change... Not knowing the internal reasons its hard to say. But Sandro has earned a few "yellow cards", or "strikes" on livestreams and via forums (outlined in previous post). So I'd say its high time to start designing, instead of kinda idling. Also getting to know the product he is designing better (as a matter of fact he should be an expert at all things mechanics / gameplay related at this point) would be a nice start. It only requires playing the game not from a high-horse dev account... Horizons outcome should be last (wake-up) call, I think. Brookes went kinda silent recently so I am unsure of his influence atm.
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Well written.
Frontier Revenue Increases to £36m
News just in. These numbers shows that they don't seem to "struggle" financially at the moment. Whether some of that cash will go towards Elite, only Braben knows. But its really sad that some of us are digging as deep as to company financial records to ensure ourselves that the game is going strong. Which coincides with the title of the OP quite nicely I may add.
News just in. These numbers shows that they don't seem to "struggle" financially at the moment. Whether some of that cash will go towards Elite, only Braben knows. But its really sad that some of us are digging as deep as to company financial records to ensure ourselves that the game is going strong. Which coincides with the title of the OP quite nicely I may add.
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To paraphrase The Dude-"like, that's just your opinion, man". Personally I think Season 2 has blown Season 1 out of the water. It has certainly added much more stuff of value. Just 'cause you don't like it, really means nothing.
Let's play a game, shall we?
"Just because you like it doesn't mean it doesn't have glaring issues and didn't squander the success of the first season."
I can agree with that.
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Well, Alex Brentnall (sp?) has been the one taking on the job of asking players for questions before every live stream, assembling them by category, and passing them on to Fdev. I imagine the guy has already been contemplating a better way of avoiding asking the same questions over and over and quickly listing the items that are basically "on the big to-do list, no ETA no guarantees" that it seems many people don't like hearing (even though it's the honest truth).
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I'm not directly defending them, but things like "clear and harmful" is entirely your subjective view. See, I have a character flaw, where when I see a statement that's full of hubris, I like to directly confront it and point all all the holes it's got.
Powerplay is certainly a sort of "endgame" activity, but Engineers, SLFs (why, oh, why no ship-launchable Eagle!), ship transfers, and Multicrew certainly are not. And I even like most of those things. Multicrew was quite a bit of fun for me the other day, despite the bugs; it also was surprisingly profitable (though that might be because I'm already advanced a bit in combat rank) despite the fact I was mostly fooling around, trying out the controls, messing with turrets and using the docking sequence with SLFs and things like that.
Powerplay and Engineers are both items that I, admittedly, would try to re-do from the ground up if the opportunity presented itself.
Talk to Drew Wagar, then? Or write some galnet articles?
I too think there's a lot of lore and fluff that's missing from in-game, and I fully expect a future season of content to include almost nothing *but* the addition of this stuff to the game, but that's something I think can safely be held off til much later.
And we've already gotten some rather impressive improvements with the tutorials, if you want a taste of how some of that lore-fluff experience might be like....
It hasn't *burnt down* and it's not been 'focusing on combat'. Frankly there's a lot of work to be done as far as balancing combat goes, too.
*according to what you personally might have wanted, and surely taking into account the technical limitations, workloads, progression in the development pipeline, and so on....
I definitely don't like the sound of "minus SLF/Exporation overhaul", "minus Multicrew". And I think atmospheric landings *need* to come first before aliens we can interact with, that's almost a given.
I disagree - I think such major events would be severely limited by not having other parts of the game fleshed out first.
Just the fact we currently can have overpowered superships by virtue of Engineeering (which are exponentially better than anything not Engineered) breaks all kinds of things wherever a story-focused conflict is involved. And I think that's something Fdev is aware of, and why in the future we should expect a full, comprehensive balance overhaul, likely including something similar to the curve of diminishing returns on shield boosters.
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Usually.
Similar to what happened to this guy in a Turkish prison act like a "bad machine"...he want against the damage controlling fanboi groaine.
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These are employees being paid to do a job, like all jobs if you don't like it there is a door.
I hear you and you sound like you know your stuff considering your line of work.....we all want something different and it's difficult to balance everyones needs/wants and stay true to their vision.
However, FD chose to make this game, they garnered quite a lot of money from the community to build it via kickstarter and they have a well resourced team of devs to build it. They also created this forum I presume to engage with and get feedback from the community. I really don't see the issue.
What I do see however is FD hurling content both good and bad at us in the hope that somehow it all makes for a good gaming experience. It's really hit and miss. Example. Horizons, creating planets to land on and then be able to drive around on them is an astounding technical achievement and it works brilliantly, the landing, the glide phase to disguise the transition, the planet surface, different terrains, how the buggy feels on ice compared to rock....terrestrial bases, POI, resources....amazing.
Now lets look at the gameplay and how you interact with this feature. There are hundreds of millions of planets you can land on, you can drive around them, you can shoot rocks and collect resources but that is about it. Once you've driven around a few of these planets for a while you realise that there is nothing more to it than that. On the planets in and around the bubble you can go to a base and take on some missions picking up cargo, shooting skimmers, checking some of the POIs but again, once you've done that a few times you realise that's all there is, it's incredibly one dimensional.
Just that one feature is a huge missed opportunity IMO. We have these wonderful terrains and not much to do on them, we can't mine them, we can't build on them, we can't analyse them or interact with them other than driving on their surface and occasionally shooting at something, usually a rock. FD built the sandbox but didn't provide many tools for us to shape the sand.
What I would like to see (and I don't think I'm alone in this) is for FD to take some of these features and develop them further rather than releasing another new feature that is an astounding technical achievement but holds little actual gameplay value and doesn't tie into the rest of the game.
Ah, I hear you cry, but that's what FD are doing, they are developing these features, well yes and no. The Engineers and Guardians releases gave us a reason to go to the planets, to collect the resources to engineer our ships or see the alien ruins but it hasn't added anything to the gameplay or interaction with that environment whatsoever.....it's still a series of huge empty spaces with not a lot to do in them.
I do land on planets occasionally these days but only because certain parts of the game, a mission I've taken or an engineer require me to do so in order to progress that part of the game. It's not something I'd really choose to do yet it's such an amazing feature of the game it should be a gameplay choice, I should want to go down there because it's a great experience.
That is just one example...I could give other examples but I won't.
FD are clearly a very bright and creative collective and I would implore them to stop for a moment and look at some of what they have produced, go back to it and develop it further. Give us the tools to actually interact with these wonderful environments.....but that's just me, and we circle back around to your comment that everyone wants something different
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I've done similar work on the Business/Corporate development work.
Customers aren't dumb. They know that developers don't have unlimited resources. It is the job of management to allocate those resources in a way that allows them to best suit the customers needs. Most of the time the problem is that resources are not being allocated according to the needs of the customers. Now most people immediately turn this into a "Hurr. Managers are Dumb. Like Dilbert, am I right guys?" thing, but it isn't. Now the majority of people (even managers!) are rational people. They consume information, run it through a rational process then generate an output. The problem is usually the input. Garbage In, Garbage Out applies to thought processes as well as programs. So where is this garbage coming from? Where is the disconnect? Is it just Selective Hearing from managers?
The disconnect between what customers are expecting and what managers are trying to deliver is usually being driven by a breakdown on communications. Customers are saying one thing and managers are hearing another. In the case of Frontier and Elite it is trivial to see where the problem is. It is right here on the official forums. Think about it. What percentage of the player base even knows these forums exist? What percent has registered? What percent has ever posted? What percent posts regularly? I'll wager less than .01% of the player base are active posters here. A self-selected sample of .01% is a bad sample. But it is only part of the problem.
The numbers alone would be pretty stark. We're talking increasingly tiny fractions of a percent. But this forum is dominating the feedback. And that is only part of the disconnect. This forum has very strong "encouragement" to provide a certain viewpoint and certain perspective. People who don't are attacked, trolled and ran off, often with pseudo-official sanction. So this the self selection of a tiny minority of players is further subject to adverse selection, with those who views, thoughts and ideas that are not inline with the "Ruling Clique" being run off.
The end result is that when Frontier comes to these forums they are getting feedback which is dramatically different from the feedback from the players at large. That is the source of the disconnect. And it needs to be addressed.
I think you left out being able to scan the data terminals, also a quick correction to your comments, FD have removed the skimmer missions, SO for people like my self who love hanging around on the surface of a planet, I now cant scan or do skimmers missions.
WELL DONE FDEV, YOUR BOSS SHOULD BE VERY PROUD.
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You know for a fact it isn't that easy. Besides, your flippant response to a request for civility says a lot about who you are as a person.
From my point of view it comes across that Sandro is wanting to keep everyone happy, which isn't going to happen and I think he feels the stress of it all. I think I saw Ed on a stream basically implying as such.
The 'no promises, no eta's" is growing a bit thin. I wish he would just put the cards on the table and say outright "this is the way its going and for the time being its not open for discussion". I would like them to give us some kind of roadmap as to the direction the game is going to head and some sort of timeframe for these things to happen. The hype build up to various seasons is a drag and I think quite a few will have jumped ship well before the end.
Grab the reins Sandro, as a post above mine pointed out. A vocal few on the forums are bucking the horse so much you are liable to get thrown off.
ps Mr Braben, give the workers a full day of playing their own game and get constructive feed back on how it can be improved. Take the forums out of it.
I wish you well
Dub
The 'no promises, no eta's" is growing a bit thin. I wish he would just put the cards on the table and say outright "this is the way its going and for the time being its not open for discussion". I would like them to give us some kind of roadmap as to the direction the game is going to head and some sort of timeframe for these things to happen. The hype build up to various seasons is a drag and I think quite a few will have jumped ship well before the end.
Grab the reins Sandro, as a post above mine pointed out. A vocal few on the forums are bucking the horse so much you are liable to get thrown off.
ps Mr Braben, give the workers a full day of playing their own game and get constructive feed back on how it can be improved. Take the forums out of it.
I wish you well
Dub
I think you will find, it is that easy, But in saying that, FD, should at the very least, place a more competent person in that position
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And how, exactly will that fix the ridicules amount of bugs since the intro of 2.3 ?
Oh, bull, tell me about the plethora of work available at the drop of a hat...please.
I've left plenty of jobs, it isn't easy and requires careful planning and a conscious breaking of commitment.
Brush off your monocle, perhaps.
Well if you insist.
One time I flipped the "Looking for Work" flag on LinkedIn during a boring meeting on a Tuesday.
Phone (HR) interview that afternoon, first "real" interview on Wednesday, final interview on Thursday. Job offer on Friday.
Put in my LoR the next Monday.
Anecdotal. You must be in one of those positions that has easy mobility. Congratulations, I've finally moved myself into such a position. It hasn't always been that way and it is not common.
Use real data
http://time.com/money/4053899/how-long-it-takes-to-get-hired/
6 weeks, on average.
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