All CQC needs is AI bots and the ability to just have 'closed CQC' with invited people. Its beyond me why they dont let someone work on that.
What Happend to the Dream?
- Thread starter Sidey
- Start date
All CQC needs is AI bots and the ability to just have 'closed CQC' with invited people. Its beyond me why they dont let someone work on that.
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
indeed.... i would say elite caters to the 2 extremes of "exploration" in ED.
there is stuff for the hardcore folk, stuff that really 1 person on their own is unlikely to fathom
then there is stuff for those who just want to see nice things, they can use google to go to the places found by those in the above category.
but there is not that much of a half way house (in my experience at least).
even in deep space, usses are all rather predictable, it would be nice to get a uss which has a ship, scan that and it have data file which we DONT need a maths degree to decrypt, that gives up co-ordinates to somewhere, and maybe i need some sort of ship scanner like the one in the SRV to scan the surface from space before flying down ... etc etc etc
just some game created bread crumbs, and even if they are only persistant on our machines, and even if only for a limited time span, and even if it isnt really all that ingenius of me to follow said bread crumbs it would at least make me feel like i hunted something out, rather than doing what i always go, go to google type "ED alien wreck sites" or "ED hyperdiction areas" or "ED alien forests" etc etc etc
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That and a way to enter into the game via the main game instead of having to log out all the time.
Exactly. Why not have a 'distress signal received' chance in deep space, which will lead you to a wreck on a planet, or a ship in space where the crew needs to be rescued? Use the chained-mission system to add some other stuff to it. There is a lot of 'basic' stuff they can do by combining the mechanics already in-game to exploration.
Actually, I wasn't worried about my time at all. I do spend my time calmly on the forums, sipping whiskey, and reading the posts (both funny and serious) regarding this simulator (I think its wrong to classify it as a "video game"). Some of my comments are quick replies, others I take more time with.
My post that you are referring to was a satirical look at the first responses to the OP, which were nothing regarding the piece, but complaining about its length with comments like "wall of text" and "TL;DR" and asking for the author to summarize his statements (like we now need Cliff Notes for anything over a small paragraph). Frankly, I believe the first 2 pages of responses were mainly commenting on the length of the OP. Then others (obviously not me) started debating about the length of time it would take to read the article, doing actual word counts and using reference articles regarding reading comprehension times. All of that because some fellow commander posted his opinion regarding this simulator, a post that is really no longer than a high school essay.
Hence, my post that you are referencing.
This line alone should have told you that I was not complaining about the reading time.
The one thing about satire is that it is very basic. You either get it, or you don't.
Now, let us get back to spending our time on the forum. We're BFFs now!
Yep. I can come up with something straightaway. USS's out in the black should be stupidly rare, so when they do turn up they should be worthwhile. So as Mad mikes example we enter the USS and it is an abandoned wreck of a ship. We scan the logs and it points us in the direction of nearby planet. We scan the planets and get an anomoly come up on our scanners in an rough area. We land on planet in the area and deploy our SRV and hunt the area. We come across an occupied escape pod, we pick it up, if we have a cabin the occupant becomes a passenger whom can be transported back home for a price. Or you can keep them in cryo and sell him/her on the black market when you get back. It's that sort of thing that is missing from the game at the moment.
In a USS recently I came upon a transport ship moaning that it was out of fuel and begging me for enough to get to the nearest station. I felt bad that I could do nothing as I had no fuel limpets. (But really, how many pilots routinely carry those?) I RPd that I was returning to the station to report his position. A bit more game mechanics would flesh this out well. What about a mission to go get fuel limpets and return - on return I would need a "mission target detected" indication to find him again. Juicy rewards of course
That actually should go more generally. USS should be split in three types:
1) Regular USS, like we have now.
2) Mission USS, like we have now.
3) Special USS. These should be announced by the ship computer, may be anywhere in the system and should be definitely worth it. Trigger multi-chain mission, lead to big payouts etc.
The current USS system is fine at its core: you need an instance in normal space, you need to see it in SC, and there needs to be a way to transition at will. But because USS are so ubiquitous and not-overly rewarding that they become stale. 'special/rare' USS that could be 1000s of LS away but offer more interesting/worthwhile scenarios would be a good start.
In a USS recently I came upon a transport ship moaning that it was out of fuel and begging me for enough to get to the nearest station. I felt bad that I could do nothing as I had no fuel limpets. (But really, how many pilots routinely carry those?) I RPd that I was returning to the station to report his position. A bit more game mechanics would flesh this out well. What about a mission to go get fuel limpets and return - on return I would need a "mission target detected" indication to find him again. Juicy rewards of course
And there lies the rub, or RNG hell, because if you went to a station and purchased fuel limpets plus a controller then returned, the ship in distress would no longer exist; having been spawned randomly.
but just 1 little underline to this.. i would hope there would be a bigger chance of that escape pod being a bit more than just a generic one like we get everywhere.
right now we are limited, but, it could still be a wealthy land owner who offers you a lot of cash as a thank you
or perhaps friends with an engineer and as a thank you if you speak with (insert engineer here) will give you 2 G5 modifications as a thank you
or is a really good SLF pilot ***** (hopefully one day expandable to more options if we get more crew or npc wingmates)*** who will offer to sign up to you for a discount, even cheaper than if you had trained one up from harmless to their level
(or such is the way of it it COULD just be a random jo.. but its the *chance* of it being a bit more exciting i want..
Yep, agreed. I would also like the regular USS's to be a bit rarer as well. There doesn't need to be that many in your SC flight, just make them worth it looking at.
The problem is how USS has been tied to Engineers. 'low lvl' mats are often low-lvl because they are so easily scooped from common USS. When you make them less common, it will force people to 'grind USS' longer to get them. I am already not that keen on the 'high-grade USS' stuff, and making normal USS more rare would push it in that region. I wouldn't be opposed to making all USS more rare and meaningful, but then we'll have to figure out a way to make the relevant mats and data more common/attainable in other ways.
and it would be nice to search for them as well, rather than just wait for them to spawn on you..... really when you think about it, USSes have nothing to do with exploring or searching abotu them, its just waiting for them to spawn around you once you are in the rough vicinity.
far better imo that when you do your system wide trump on entering a system (or scanning the nav beacon) the USSes for that region are painted in, and then we use something like the srv scanner to then find them out.
if ever we get ships crew a science officer could improve this significantly, depending on their quality would depend on how many were picked up.basically "hide" the RNG a bit better.
i have never seen a game so brazen about everything just being non persistant random chance. most games go out of their way to hide this.
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Fully agree. RNG in that sense is perfectly fine and good. What we have now is not where it should be. But to be fair, I can see the game heading in that direction at the moment. They have just got chained missions going properly in 2.4 when it drops. So the next step would be to start improving how and where we get missions.
With chained-missions being spawnable in space, how about: after grabbing the escape pod, the person in it gives you a mission to find a black box. This leads you to the coords of the crashed ship, which you can fix using the new repair limpets. If you do so you get a larger reward than if you only bring him back in his pod. If you dump him back into space there is a small chance he'll survives one way or the other, and sends out an assassin once you get back to the bubble.
Seriously, we need more assassins send against us. Whenever I load a few tons of biowaste in my ship I suddenly become the most desired target in the galaxy, but if I do deplorable stuff or kill thousands of people noone holds a grudge.
That would be cool. We could still get the odd random one, but have it mixed in with that as well would be good.
With chained-missions being spawnable in space, how about: after grabbing the escape pod, the person in it gives you a mission to find a black box. This leads you to the coords of the crashed ship, which you can fix using the new repair limpets. If you do so you get a larger reward than if you only bring him back in his pod. If you dump him back into space there is a small chance he'll survives one way or the other, and sends out an assassin once you get back to the bubble.
Seriously, we need more assassins send against us. Whenever I load a few tons of biowaste in my ship I suddenly become the most desired target in the galaxy, but if I do deplorable stuff or kill thousands of people noone holds a grudge.
Chained missions can really open the game up to so many possibilities. I just hope they continue to develop them after 2.4.
Im really not to sure what to classify this post as. Small part rant, small part nostalgia...
I apologise in advance for this essay.
Due to popular demand heres the tl:dr
RP/Imagination/playergroups - Either give us story and RP at the player-level (as opposed to galaxy wide story arcs) or give us the full sandbox and multiplayer tools to RP the stuff ourselves and have our own narrative.
Power Creep and Engineers - Engineers have destroyed balance in PvP and late game ships have become very easy to obtain.
AI and combat feel - PvE engagements should be more meaningful with each kill being a task in itself, rather than shooting supposedly elite NPCs down left right and centre, balance rewards to reflect this.
PvP and community - We've needed C&P for ages, my personal preference is implementing some kind of EVE like system where in chunks of space if you attack someone you get proptly owned by system security.
Dev game focus - Would wish that the devs would try and fix the current features and sort out placeholders like signal sources that have been around for ages.
I havent played E
But I think that FD have made some design decisions that have just made a bit of a mess of things. Im positive that they had a rationale for these, but we've seen it before and personally i've never liked where it led.
RP/Imagination/Player Groups
The biggest mistake (and I say this as a predominantly solo player) is the lack of ingame tools for corporations/clans whatever. Now as an original Elite and FE player I fully understand the idea of the elite experience being "you all alone in a galaxy which tries to kill you" so I get why initially the decision was made to try and keep that single pilot vs universe feeling, and I guess they reasoned that corps/clans would massively change that aspect of the game. (Which is true, it would). However, whilst elite has lots of potential for emergant game play, there are no cues to help a person RP, aside from their imagination. ED never bothered making any bespoke missions (they existed in the first alpha of the game for the mastopholese mining corp, and I think that if they had kept that style that alone would be enough to keep me playing), granted its a lot more writing work, but good games are not built on coding alone. So without the RP hook of bespoke missions, this is something that player groups can fill in. If you belong to a player group there is always an idea, some goal, some thing that you're trying to do (if you have the tools for player group bases, wars what-have-you).
So we lack any in-game herding mechanics. That's fine - you don't need them. We can herd together all we like - there are Wings, Voice Comms, Text, and plenty of out-of-game means to communicate to larger groups of people. Any actual Role Play is merely the exchange of information - telling an interactive story and participating. We've role-played for decades with little more than pencil and paper, and sometimes not even that. It only requires a bit of imagination to make it work.
Having neither of the two creates some weird disonance, basically the BGS is working so your actions have an effect on the macros scale of the universe (a small effect but an effect nontheless), powerplay is another layer on the macro scale which allows for galaxy wide story telling, we have the thargoids and the arc showing their arrival, again macro level. We have the CG's and again individual pilots can see their efforts doing something (sometimes) on a macro level again. However there is nothing on a personal level, and this is where the "imagination" stuff comes in. Some people have great imagination and can quite happily link their actions to that larger outcome, for these E
With the right story teller, even something as mundane as a 4t cargo run of biowaste can be an epic adventure.
Power Creep and Engineers
This here is a classic, and it happens everywhere. It even happens in films, and series. Good examples are Marvel films. The heroes are powerful, the supervillains are really powerful that you need some kind of special power to beat them, so in the sequal, well the supervillain needs to be even more powerful than the one before, so the heroes need to band together and get some even greater special powers to beat them, and so on and so forth. Other good examples are DBZ, the enemies and the heroes just get more and more powerful each story arc.
The same thing happens in a lot of games, we gain resources, we use the resources, we get more powerful ships, now we all run around in Anacondas and we've hit the ceiling, so along comes engineers, this raises the ceiling again (in a horrible grindy RNG way, but whatever) so off everyone goes again, and their ships become even more powerful, so we need more powerful enemies, so now the enemy ships have engineered modules, but the community doesnt like that, so we just increase the number of enemy ships that we destroy. So the NPCs arent a challenge for a proper engineered PvE ship, so along come the thargoids, we'll probably need some new even more powerful weapons to defeat them.
In the mean time, that part of the game is getting further and further away from the new players who are coming in, and so the only solution is to allow them to reach that content faster, so we make missions pay out greater amounts of money etc. Strange how even though the E
This type of (admittedly classic) solution to end game or game ceiling problems is what has caused all this issue. E
Also known as "Now What Syndrome" - this is a side effect of Roll Play over Role Play - that is, you've min/maxed everything to the extreme, and nothing is a challenge any longer. It often happens in classic table-top RPG's to long-standing seasoned characters and there is only one thing for it short of a full-blown restart - the only way to break an arms-race, power-gaming, one-upmanship deadlock is not to try. Instead of searching for a bigger, badder, stronger enemy, you have to challenge these sorts of characters is new ways - challenge their thought processes, challenge their social views. In one such campaign that I ran for a bit over 4 years, one of our players had laid claim to a kingdom, had armies at his command, and there was little anyone could offer in terms of physical challenge to him - but when civil unrest began in the kingdom, when his loyal subject became divided among themselves, when even a Royal Decree could not resolve the issue, and force of arms could not make people get along - well, our little campaign lasted another two years after that, which included one of the bloodiest civil wars any kingdom had ever seen - all over which temple door should be used to enter and which to exit.
For the first week I started playing, combat was my bane. I did everything I could to avoid it, as I was simply terrible. Then I got better.
I keep getting better.
Now I bounty hunt in a Beluga.
I keep getting better.
I also get very bored with combat very quickly.
Doesn't matter if I'm winning or losing, it just gets old for me.
The AI is perfectly reasonable, with the exception of some plain dumb tricks - which are either countered by a few tactics or simply avoided.
I'm not all about the combat here. I'd much rather put that sort of effort into other ventures.
PvP and community
The state as to which PvP was set up and encouraged in E
The problem is you cant fix the latter without fixing the former. Otherwise if TTK gets shorter across the board it makes it harder for player who are PvEing to get away from the PvPer. With no real consequences for performing illegal actions in the game, there is no disincentive to running around murdering people left, right and centre. The only way to give the PvErs a chance is to increase TTK so that they can actually have a chance of high-waking out. In the mean time PvP duels have become ludicrously long and boring. I think this is another area where the vision for the game has affected game decisions in a negative way. E
Since PVE combat makes up only around 5% of my total play, it shouldn't come as any surprise that PVP combat does not interest me in the slightest. The PVP community is some of the most toxic and repugnant I've ever come in contact with in any game, and I'm sure this is only a small fraction of the whole community, but it is the most obvious and vocal so it does draw the most attention. "Hey look! Festering Sores! Come See the Festering Sores!"
Sorry, I didn't want to see the Festering Sores in the first place and now that they're in my face, I'm absolutely certain I don't want to see the Festering Sores. But that's that portion of the PVP community. And if that's what they like, then that's what they like. And they'll have to get over the fact that I, like so many others, have opted out of seeing their Festering Sores.
Right back to that whole PVP thing again. Here's the thing though, Elite was not designed as, nor built to be a PVP game. It's not Elite: Space Combat, it's not Elite: Political Conquest, it's not Elite: Blow Up Your Friends.
Yes, it can be played that way, but that means largely ignoring a majority of the game. Let me clear things up with a picture.
See those little colorful things - we call them "sprinkles". PVP is a Sprinkle. Some folks are eating whole bowls full of sprinkles, and missing the rest of the sundae. Sure, you CAN eat sprinkles if you want, I suppose, but why?
Elite is a great game. Graphically, except for all the beige and the default orange HUD, it is amazing to look at.
The support for nearly anything you want to plug in and use as a controller is fantastic.
VR and SbS 3d is outstanding.
I prefer the Peer-to-Peer aspect because if someone proves to be too much of a tool, a little stateful packet inspection and a command-line entry, and their traffic is rejected at my router. It's better than Blocking. And since I don't want epic sized Star Wars Battlefront combat endlessly, it works great for me.
For me, where Elite lacks is in Organization.
So far Seasons 1 and 2 have seemed like they were developed by drawing a feature out of one of Sandro's hats.
Season 3 promises to shore up the framework that has been put in place and really flesh out the systems we already have. We'll see.
But I am pretty sure Elite will never be the game you're wanting - it will never be Call of Space Duty, or a Galaxy-sized Team Fortress. They're not going to scrap what they've built to turn Elite into a server-based PVP game, with tack-on PVE elements. It's ok to want that, but honestly, it's not happening here. Maybe a spin-off game - Elite: Non-Stop Combat will spawn off of this some time in the future - no mission boards, no trade goods, just ships and outfitting and all the blowing each other up that some people want - who knows. Epic pulled something off like that after they came out with the original Unreal - great game for it's time, and it spawned the even more popular Unreal Tournament to satisfy the blood-lust of those just wanting to shoot their friends and strangers.
Honestly, I don't think this would be a bad venue for Frontier to look into as a separate revenue stream.
Brain trees are no good to us if all we can do is look at them. We need the tools, yes, which is what I meant with scanners and mappers too - why can't we also map planets? Corporations in ED would pay for a mapped planet with a geo-map as well but these tools aren't there for us.
*looks at FDs trade report*
I think the answer is 'Frontier Development', and it turns out they were right.
"But its not about what I want! I am just a humble representative of the people, and if you dont listen to me the game is dooooomed!"
You have been saying this for a long time. Maybe it is time you acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, it is possible to do stuff that is not to your liking yet is still succesful? No, too much to ask? Okay then.
No my point does not become moot when I refer to "people" as the majority and not the niche people that like the state of this game as it is.
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CQC with bots would be a killer, now not so much.
Again: everyone and their dog claims their opinion is what the majority want. I am sure you sincerely belief it to be true. I'm also sure you truly think that any game that doesnt cater to this perceived majority will fail. But it isn't true: with every year you claim FD must really change their ways or be doomed their sales report become more and more positive. Reality simply differs from what you expected. It can happen. But maintaining over and over that reality is wrong and your assumptions are right is just silly.