A Message To Elite Dangerous Developers

Eldragon

E
That's a lot of words, and I need to read it again to digest it all. But from what I gathered I agree with the OP. This game is a crazy grind and not at all newbie friendly. There are a hundred different small things FDev could do to make the game more newbie friendly.

And poor OP is going to get roasted by insufferable grognards.
 

Heavenly-Hammer

Heavenly-Hammer
Well OP, I'd like to say that I read *most* of your OP. Not all of it because...respect my time! lol .... but I did make an effort.

A lot of your concerns have been echoed many times before and many players hope that the next season "QoL" improvements will address many of those things. It's also true that using something like Netflix in my Vive is superior to the options that I've seen for my Rift. If I find something better, I'll let you know. Otherwise, keep an eye on the VR forum. I also agree that being allied with a primary faction that a local system claims allegiance to should count for something by default. Even if it's just 1 step above Neutral, it's better than starting off like a complete unknown.

Yes, it's true that a lot of activities start to feel mind-numbing the more you do them. It's also true that the game *does not* respect the players real life time. Timers that count down in real world time tend to be very problematic.

Try this for media consumption:

https://github.com/LorenzCK/OnTopReplica

it's awesomesocks.

As for your 100+ hours worth of loss...as they say in my fraternity,

"failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."

As you said, you let that money you were saving with burn a hole in your pocket and your rushed your purchase. One thing I always tell new players is to HAVE A BUDGET. Use the ship configuration websites to know what your budget target is for an all D-grade ship + 2x buyback and don't buy until you hit that number. EVER. PERIOD. Because you could be on the other end of a story like this. I'm my 1800 or so hours, I've never found myself in your place specifically because I refused to let excitement cloud my rational judgment. My fleet stands at 33 ships after 2.5 years. I sold 3 ships along the way: my first Cobra, Vulture and Clipper. I bought them all back later. Always have a fall-back ship. Always use your less expensive ship until you can cover a couple of buy backs in your more expensive ship(s).

You taking the most risky kind of mission (insta-splosion on scan) is like...comedic levels of poor judgment. I get you were probably tired but taking a risky mission in a ship you're completely new to the characteristics of (ie when to boost to go into the mail slot at your fastest speed), for which limited upgrades mean limited ability to boost/survive/escape...I mean...

You know what it reminds me of? Life, the recently released horror movie. Did you see it? It frustrated the hell out of me because it was in practice a collection of very smart people engaging in ever more confounding levels of stupidity, each moment of ridiculousness topped by the next sequence. I almost turned off the movie because I can't accept that smart people could be that stupid, over and over again. Like watching scientists stick their head in an egg sack in an Aliens movie. Your story reminds me of them. You knew better. You've been told better and read horror stories just like the one you wrote, but choose to not only take the risk, but to take one of the top 3 most dangerous jobs available. You have to respect the dangers in the game.

As for proceeding from here, if you want to make all the money you lost back just get yourself over to Quince and use the quasi-exploit that seemingly everyone else is using. I assume people are still making $50m-$100m/hour or something like that and getting faction military rank for their trouble.

If you want to play it honestly AND want to make money without being bored...you might need to wait until 3.0 QoL updates or something. Quince looks like your best option if you just want to get back on your feet and go back to progressing. Just a matter of how you feel about all of your wealth coming from Quince.
 

metascrawl

metascrawl
I speed-read your post, slowing down where I found myself interested the most. Some your ideas for improving the game are fair enough, and in line with what I and lot of others think.

What I don't agree with is your assumption that your experience of the game is everyone's experience, or even most people's. I too have a busy life and limited time to play. I'm working over 50 hours this week and have no time to play at all. But I've never had a problem with mission timers. I've never lost hours of progress due to been killed without rebuy. I've failed very few missions. And progress to me has never seemed like a grind.

I think part of the problem is that you're fixated on flying one of the most expensive ships in the game and don't think you can have fun without your Beluga. You could have bought an Orca couldn't you? And then you'd have had money for rebuy and a pretty cool passenger ship. I've been playing for 360 hours (or thereabouts) and I'm quite content to have an A rated, engineered Python as my biggest ship. One day I'll have an Anaconda, but I'm not going to grind towards it. I'm going to have fun playing the game and I'll get there when I get there. The most expensive ships are supposed to take a long, long time to get. The game isn't forcing you to fly a ship you can't afford, and if you can't have any fun in ships you can afford, I don't know what to tell you.

This game is flawed, deeply so. Few people would deny that. And you have given a pretty accurate account of some of the worst flaws, along with some other stuff I personally don't agree with you about. But I do think that if you have so many problems with the game that it takes nearly 13,000 words (longer than my postgraduate thesis) to document them all, it might simply be that the game is not for you.
 

Teh Smoo

T
You're completely right about missions. Combat uses all the guns. Hauling bulk uses all the cargo space you care to fill. Yet missions has a dozen or two dozen randomized errands to almost as many destinations. Even if you have a Big-3 ship, you don't use it at capacity.


On earn rate? That's on you, man. You're doing the equivalent of working part-time ingame, and complaining that you can't buy sports cars. Get your butt to the lucrative things, and hammer them into the ground, then use the money to do anything else. Do the road to riches.


Don't fly without rebuy. I don't care what your excuse is. Game doesn't care what your excuse is. You messed up. Fly a smaller ship until you can afford a bigger one, and that INCLUDES hull, modules, and ability to replace it all SEVERAL times.

And yeah, some of the things are weird. NPCs should fly at 75% throttle unless they're trying to grab you outta SC.
 

Heavenly-Hammer

Heavenly-Hammer
vindelanos said:
TL;DR - OP wants to fly big ships now.
Click to expand...
?

The OP spent over 100 hours earning his Beluga. His issue was (a) how long it takes for people with real things to do in life and (b) how dry, bland and tasteless a lot of the missions and their variety are. After which he went into a long-worded analysis of other mechanisms he feels are problematic, most of which get voiced monthly in one form or another here. Thin mission variety. Repetitiveness. Mission completion being locked into real life time and mission branches within them that further disrespect the time of the player. So on and so forth. Then he spent time talking about features that could be improved, again most of which are voiced here regularly.
 

tafkabb

T
Pages and pages of people saying, inaccurately, "WALL OF TEXT OMG" is a lot more annoying and time wasting than a well-thought out, well-formatted and considered - if a little long - thread about some legitimate concerns.

Hat Man, a lot of people around here will argue that money, and a lot of it, is far too easy to come by in the early stages of the game. And it is, if you know where to look. Most of your complaints have merit and I'll let others work through those with you, but if you wing up with some helpful, knowledgeable players, you can be back in a Beluga within a week.
 

VR jefranklin18

VR jefranklin18
I'll be honest, I did not read all your post in detail but I picked up you were unhappy with the credit grind. I am not rich in game, played since launch and have 350mill cash although I do take regular basis from the game. However, to amass fortunes relatively quickly, I pick up trading CGs on a semi regular basis. With a large enough ship, you can hit the higher percentages quite quickly. This gives you a payout plus whatever trading profit you make.
 

TomS

TomS
Hat Man said:
I've heard this before.

Given that the last exploit grind practically bored me to death... I don't know if they're even worth it.
Click to expand...

It seems like the whole game bores you to death, perhaps you should quit and start a novel...
 

Salem Jansen

S
I'm not a violent person but some of the replies here make me want to take an aluminum bat to certain member's computers, tablets, and phones and tell them to come back when they've experienced enough life to progress past the mental maturity of a six-year-old.

To OP: Literally all of these things are good points FDev will HOPEFULLY be focusing on during "season" 3.0 (i say hopefully because they've backed out on some promising changes to ship balance before. they don't seem to like rocking the boat too much) as they appear to be aware of it. There are... Decisions that you could have made to improve your credit gain (like, not doing missions for profit. At all. Until you're at least dangerous/ranger/broker) but I don't expect anyone relatively new to the game to even know of these things, unless they spend lots of time out on third party sites... And that's not fun.

Another HUGE thing Elite needs to do is conveyance-- at least using in game means to better explain mechanics. The BGS is really fun but you literally cannot learn how to work it from the game itself, at least not in any meaningful way.

OP, if you need a buddy to do more of the game with, I'll be ready to help you. Just send a PM. I'm fairly active, but it... Depends a lot on timezones
 

Hat Man

H
TomS said:
It seems like the whole game bores you to death, perhaps you should quit and start a novel...
Click to expand...

... wut?

I'm pretty sure exploits aren't intentional given the regularity with which the devs try to patch them out. There's nothing wrong with wanting to avoid them to play the game properly. I hate them. They are grindy in ANY game that has them, not just ED. They're also pretty unavoidable in coding. In any other game I avoid them because I'd rather play the rest of the game instead. I buy games to progress through them naturally, not rush to the end.

... This is the only game I've ever resorted to using one before... Because it seems like that much more worth doing than just playing the rest of the game. The rest of the game, particularly ANYTHING related to earning money to progress, is almost as boring as grinding on an exploit... Exploits aren't as popular in games that have decent gameplay... But they seem to be insanely popular here, with the regularity people recommend Quince to me. What does that say about the way the rest of the game handles? Quince ought to be like any other exploit, a little known hack that only a few know about or are even interested in doing... Instead it's become a g meme, because that's how taken advantage of it is. That's how much people, even you it seems, DON'T want to play the rest of the game.

Also, I like writing fictions, I have a few unfinished novels knocking around on my hard drive... Writing those is genuinely something I could better be doing with my time... Which is sad. A game should make you feel like it's a good use of your time... This one just doesn't.

And given how many people I've run into who share that sentiment, you really shouldn't be shrugging off criticisms of the game with a snarky "well go write a book", because you know what, I JUST G MIGHT. If you honestly want this game to do well, you'd seriously analyze what needs improving in it, and what will appeal to the maximum number of gamers possible.

Salem Jansen said:
I'm not a violent person but some of the replies here make me want to take an aluminum bat to certain member's computers, tablets, and phones and tell them to come back when they've experienced enough life to progress past the mental maturity of a six-year-old.

To OP: Literally all of these things are good points FDev will HOPEFULLY be focusing on during "season" 3.0 (i say hopefully because they've backed out on some promising changes to ship balance before. they don't seem to like rocking the boat too much) as they appear to be aware of it. There are... Decisions that you could have made to improve your credit gain (like, not doing missions for profit. At all. Until you're at least dangerous/ranger/broker) but I don't expect anyone relatively new to the game to even know of these things, unless they spend lots of time out on third party sites... And that's not fun.

Another HUGE thing Elite needs to do is conveyance-- at least using in game means to better explain mechanics. The BGS is really fun but you literally cannot learn how to work it from the game itself, at least not in any meaningful way.

OP, if you need a buddy to do more of the game with, I'll be ready to help you. Just send a PM. I'm fairly active, but it... Depends a lot on timezones
Click to expand...

I'll PM you sometime, as I'd like to play MP more often. That being said, as I mentioned in the OP, I seem to have serious disconnection issues with ED servers that make open play and private play nearly impossible for me.

Either way, thanks for the offer.
 

Rafe Zetter

Banned
Rafe Zetter
ALSO read every word.

Zambrick arrived here yet?

and I thought I was wordy.

FDev, please pay attention to OP's post, agree with most of it, even though I have experience of none of it. The very fact he took so long to write it shows the earnest hope you will. (but then again hundreds of players have written millions of words along similar lines and most of those have been ignored)

Both the Elite AND Frontier games DIDN'T throw you out hyperspace so close to and pointing at the primary. Elite you arrived enough distance away you could J (jump) several times to get close enough to scoop. My guess is it dropped you somewhere close to the centre point 'tween primary and planet. Frontier you were dropped a LONG WAY away from the Primary, somewhere near the systems edge iirc. Going to Earth from someplace else I clearly remember you had to autopilot and use the time compression to get there after arriving in system, PAST JUPITER AND SATURN (hard to miss).

Now that you've mentioned it, I can't understand the logic behind putting you so close to the primary star, presumably whomever is responsible for placing the warp jump exit beacon in this imaginary universe could put it anyplace they like,? You can't convince me that if the warp exit point is not using a beacon to pull you out, that it's more naturally occuring like a wormhole that EVERY SINGLE ONE, just happens to exit next to the primary.

Can't use "gravity well" either as the reason a warp ends, because there are lots of orbital bodies that *mass lock* you away from the primary.

A great deal of the rest of the issues ED Has are down to FDev's either bad code, badly designed code, badly thought out design or just badly implemented with too little thought to realism.

You are correct in saying this game (or the designers, take your pick) has no real sense of WHICH genre it is trying to be, and thus failing to get significant portions of it right, or to mesh properly or even beleiveable according to reasonable logic.

The specific part about "do you want us to explore or expand into these billions of stars" pretty much hit the nail on the head for me, I've said before FDev has designed a game with "the entire milky way", and used it as the main selling point of why you should play THIS game instead of others.....


AND GIVEN THE PLAYERS EXACTLY ZERO REASONS WHY THEY SHOULD BOTHER WITH ANYTHING OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE. For most players these billions of stars might as well not exist at all, they won't go there for any meaningful amount of time, I'd hazard quite a few won't even bother going to look at the particularly interesting bits.

It's like being taken to a warehouse the size of Russia (including siberia) packed full of boxes and saying "you can pick as many boxes as you like and keep what's inside"

"oh and by the way, the boxes over there just by the door are the only ones with anything in them, the rest are all empty, but feel free to browse."

Zambrick will be along shortly to tell me I have no rights to be alive or post this and call me lots of colourful adjectives.
 
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Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Hat Man said:
At this point, you are no doubt about to point out that I was reckless with my financing... Fair enough... But that only opens one giant can of worms of problems I have with this game.

The grind... IT'S UNREAL. I got lucky twice in this game, that gave me 2 big growth spurts. The first was the decoding ruins community event. After a good 20 hours of grinding that gave me about 10 million credits, I was able to buy an ASP Explorer with a bunch of goodies.

... That sucked... 20 hours of scanning... and scanning... and scanning... But it was the best choice as, with my ranks limiting what missions I could take on, it was the most lucrative thing out there.
Click to expand...

You make a lot of good points and suggestions, thanks for that! The above part however hightlights a hidden problem: You dont seem to be aware of all the options. For example, CGs alone are a very easy source of income. The latest trade CG got you 10 million credits if you brought about 150t of cargo. Thats one or two trips in a T6, or about 15 minutes. The bounty hunter CG of two weeks ago got me 7.5 million for one hour of bounty hunting in a small ship. These opportunities are in-game every week, and broadcasted via the message board. That alone gives you a solid 10-20 million every week for a few hours spend, including getting to and from the CG. You can do it at any point in the week, and spread it over multiple sessions.

20 million credits for 10 hours of (IMHO) boring work is not good. That is true. But the good news is there are loads of options for way more credits if you want.
 
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