I don't play MUCH in Open. I've been there a few times here and there, but it is not my preferred arena. I don't much engage in PVP either, outside of the occasional arranged duel or some plain old screwing around. However, Player-to-Player trade, beyond what we already have here, I'll be blunt, will very likely never happen. Frontier does not want a ten-minute old commander to be an auto-billionaire, or haven't you noticed the lengths they have gone through to curtail every fast-money making method that has been turned up and posted about here? We can jettison cargo and allow someone else to pick it up. That's likely to be as much player-to-player trade as we ever get, and I'm just fine with that.
Players dropping materials, however, is an open invitation to a degree of maligned behavior - and there's really no need to encourage it. Materials are plentiful enough without this.
There is no possible way that a game company could encourage certain behavior by offering really basic ingame features. Given that logic, any multiplayer game with the ability to trade between players, even Mincecraft, would suffer from said behavior. Since this is clearly not the case I don't see a reason to finally encourage player-to-player interactions besides shooting them over and over again near an anarchy station for the lulz. This is baiscally the only thing we could do before multicrew happened but even now, palyer-to-player interactions are dry and plain simple.
I was intentionally being brief, as I can and have, written huge walls of text on these matters, and simply did not want to turn this into an 18 page post.
You can refer to this regarding my take on Engineers:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/353680-The-(Re)Engineers?highlight=(Re)Engineers
I've had the same volumes to say about Power Play, the BGS and missions as well.
This post is better, I like reading longer and detailed posts.
I do not have any direct evidence to support this, only what I have been told by quite a few other players as well as my own experience. It does strongly appear that your ship's canopy's durability is directly linked to the grade of Life Support module installed. E-grade Life Support, weak canopy. D-grade, slightly less weak. An A-grade Life Support appears to provide a much more durable canopy. I'd recommend testing this with a friendly player to draw your own conclusion.
That said, I am not opposed to being able to further modify ship's non-modular systems, Canopy included.
Believe me whe n isay, they are completely unconnected. 'We' have tested it several times. It has around 40 hitpoints (depending on what ship you fly and its armor hardness) compared to a G5 Armored PP, which has like 300. As both are counted as internal modules, weapons like cannons quickly destroy it with one or two shots.
Just checking, and not really singling you out personally, but the way you've written this, seems to me to carry the tone of personal experience.
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Likewise, I feel I'm rather adept at it - I've shaken FdL's in a Type-9, and do have a good bit of fun with other players, out in Anarchy space playing Interdiction Tag in both matched and unmatched ships. It's pointless, but fun.
I can see how some might like this, personally I don't need it, I just look at the information already on-screen. But on the flip side, I have my own pet QoL improvement I've wanted for quite some time: a [ ] Lights indicator just under [ ] Cargo Scoop, so to each their own here.
Well in the case of interdictions it is more than jus ta QoL. It's making sure that everyone got the same chanes in that minigame so the chances of being interdicted or beign able to escape are the same and are not determined by the mood swings of that escape vector that turns faster than your own ship. If that happens once you basically lost and have to pray you can submit before you lose to the 100-0 force-play-game. With NPC interdictions the game allows you to stay away from the vector when it is exceeding your SC manouverbility and doesn't add it to the progress of the NPC. It waits until you are back to the vector but this doesn't apply to PvP interdictions.
Finally, something we do agree on! I wouldn't even mind if they were limited in capacity to reconstruct, or required materials to "reload" when depleted.
Yes it sounds good, just get rid of these cargo draining -single-use-only crap that technically are worse than today's satellite probes.
Oh! The Debris! Ok, yeah, it's rather generic. Sometimes you might find some with some sparking wires, or last night I found an anaconda husk still burning. So it appears there IS some variety to this, but yeah, most is the same grey bits and pieces.
Exactly.
Blasphemy! WinAmp is one of the best media players out there. It's free, ad-free, has a great playlist editor, is completely skinnable, uses near no resources, and has fantastic options. It's phenomenally better than the useless "Windows Media Player" you already have. I can assure you, 100%, if I make a software recommendation, it's good stuff. I loathe junkware, and both Spotify and YouTube are HORRIBLE wastes of bandwidth. Nothing against either - but the sheer volume of bandwidth these consume is staggering, and may well be the cause of a number of your performance-related issues (rubberbanding, mis-instancing, and other "netcode" related issues). I'd strongly recommend a little testing to see for yourself.
As for how I know about the bandwidth consumption of both Spotify and YouTube - professionally, I am a network administrator with a managed services company. I routinely review corporate utilization reports to address issues like "slow internet" or "poor network performance", and these two consistently number among some of the worst offenders, per user, often making up 60% or more of individual traffic. They're just not very well optimized. If I remember, I can pull some utilization graphs when I'm in the office to support this.
And I'm not saying there's anything really wrong with either of these - they're both fine for what they are, just that their optimization leaves a lot to be desired. Even Netflix has better utilization. And if you're telling me YouTube has fewer ads that Spotify.. I can only say "wow", because YouTube is a huge mess of endless ads - including ads you can't skip.
I highly assume that I should be able to run Elite with a 50 MB/s down and 10 MB/s upstream MORE THAN GOOD. These issues appear at any time, with any programm running in the background and are clearly not related to YouTube or Spotify. Sure, I am not that dumb and play Elite while uploading a video but when I can play ANY multiplayer game wit ha ping of below 100 m/s while listening to YT then it *should* be possible to play Elite with a ping of 100 m/s WITHOUT YouTube or whatnot ... but no. If my friend is located on the other side of the globe then the ping easily jumps up to 3000 m/s, rubberbanding occurs, ghost rams take place and basically anything I have written in the netcoding part. I can assure you that there is no bandwidth heavy traffic in the background while testing this. We have agreed to stop duellign eachother since it's unplayable and 80% of the outcome is determined by latency. This is a case where the netcode of Elite has failed so much that two players are simply not ABLE to properly play the game together (or against eachother). For comparison: If I play with friends around the globe via servers the ping usually caps at 350 m/s which would be godlike for Elite. 350 m/s is unacceptable for a shooter but for Elite it would be okay and probably wipe out most of the issues. However, we have 3000 m/s whic his a disaster. Sure they have claimed they are unexperienced with netcode but that's no reason to present us with such crap and refuse to learn and/or hire 3rd party companies to finally provide a basic and working platform to work on. Also, I don't want another software on my PC. I doubt WinAMP can browse music, suggest me new tracks or browse playlists of other users online or share some tracks with others as of copy-pasta a link or streaming it. Can it? Or does it lack the social part?