What the heck is Broo Tarquin going to do with 50 tons of tea? Who drinks that much tea??
Elite, The "Grind" and External Perspective
- Thread starter shadragon
- Start date
What the heck is Broo Tarquin going to do with 50 tons of tea? Who drinks that much tea??
I'm actually slightly surprised that none of them have yet demanded a shrubbery...
Only Qwent (Allied with Sirius), Selene Jean (Mine 500t of anything) and Palin (Travel 5000ly from start) come to mind, all of them can be done on a weekend within 2-3 hours a day and have to be done only once unless you reset your save.
That's barely a grind.
the british!!
I look forward to listening to the humble musings of EA's execs about Randy Pitchford in the future and won't bear any of their current missteps in mind. What wise, smart people.
In my case... I wanted to visit Colonia. I wanted to see what was happening out there, what there was to do there and all of that, see what all the excitement was about. So I started a grind to improve my hyperspace drive, to make the journey a bit more bearable. I started the trip a couple of times, but gave up each time of the mindless boredom of jump/scoop/jump for hours upon hours. An entire area of the game, one that is/was actively promoted in GalNet and it was locked behind a mindless grind of 550 jumps.
It's not like there's no in-game way of dealing with this. I mean I see passenger missions to colonia on the boards. Why can't I place my own advert on the board. Have my body shipped back to the core worlds. Even if it means I couldn't log into my account for a week in RL time; that would be better than the mindless grind-wall. I can already transfer my ship.. why can't I transfer it with me inside?
The point here is that Elite is a game with lots of extremely interesting things in it, a story to take part in, things to see and do. The problem is that to be able to take part you're blocked by a grind wall. Even the whole Thargoid story is locked behind the grind wall of getting resistant cargo racks. I believe it might be easier to obtain nowadays, and that's a good thing.
What makes ED unique, to me, is that so much of the stuff I love to do, and would love to take part in, is hidden behind things I don't like as much, or at all.
Now I know there are players that love just those aspects I dislike, and that despise some of the things that I love. I just wish mechanics could be added that allowed people to more easily get to the bits they enjoy the most.
If you can't hear the forum echoes, it's called "engineering".
For example: "I want to engage in natural PvP but have to spend weeks modifying a new ship via dull, repetitive and unreliable activities to do so".
No. The grind is a verb. Its when a player repeats a specific action to unlock something at an optimal speed. The grind is a choice. Always is, always will be.
Borderlands is absolutely my favorite game franchise of all times. Those games were never a grind! I always enjoyed playing the game in the never ending quest to get new and interesting weapons. Weapons and their capabilities were randomly generated so they had "Zillions" of different weapons you could earn, own, and play with.
Similarly, I used to play ED so I could earn new ships, weapons, and modules. I haven't touched the game for weeks now since the 2.4.02 patch nerf because of "Whats the point?" syndrome. (Now I just troll the forums waiting for some reason to rejoin the game...)
After almost a Year of playing ED almost every day, the game has little left to keep my interest. If I can't play to earn new ships and modules in a reasonable time frame then I'm just not interested in doing the exact same things over and over. If ED offered something more deep and interesting, then this might not be the case. But it doesn't. Pitchford was spot on in his "play vs grind" and the solution being just not playing (grinding).
Similarly, I used to play ED so I could earn new ships, weapons, and modules. I haven't touched the game for weeks now since the 2.4.02 patch nerf because of "Whats the point?" syndrome. (Now I just troll the forums waiting for some reason to rejoin the game...)
After almost a Year of playing ED almost every day, the game has little left to keep my interest. If I can't play to earn new ships and modules in a reasonable time frame then I'm just not interested in doing the exact same things over and over. If ED offered something more deep and interesting, then this might not be the case. But it doesn't. Pitchford was spot on in his "play vs grind" and the solution being just not playing (grinding).
I also instantly go to ad hominems when I am confronted with rational arguments opposing whiny positions. I mean, if 'if you dont like a game, dont play it.' were to be accepted as the common sense it is, you'd have grinded your 2000+ posts complaining year after year for nothing!
The grind to get the CR racks is: 1) Land, 2) Install cargo racks. Thats how it was way before there was a point to them. Not sure if you are confusing them with something else? :S
grind is also defined by a very trivial repetitive and boring task. tehre is no challange in jumping 550 system far. All it does is wasting a load of time to participate in a small part of what the game offers. And there is no nongrindy way to return. When the grind is a choice then without grind you are basically locked out form major parts of the game, because a laod of features are behind varios forms of grind. We are not talking about WoW where that ONE specific flight mount is hidden behind the huge grind (doing th exact same quest every day). We talk about rather pvp essential features when it comes to engineers, because then the improvement is basically vital or you can just forget about that PvP exists.
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I don't think any of us disagree with randy pitchford here, but kingston is right too, randy pitchford has no credibility left after what he pulled with aliens colonial marines.I also instantly go to ad hominems when I am confronted with rational arguments opposing whiny positions. I mean, if 'if you dont like a game, dont play it.' were to be accepted as the common sense it is, you'd have grinded your 2000+ posts complaining year after year for nothing!
Randy's argument is quite simple, yes. Don't like the game? Don't play the game. And he is right, but I think he relates to a finished product.
If Frontier threw Elite as a finsihed game over the fence a few years back without any DLCs and whatnot then his arguments would stand (they still do in a way).
But here we have a game in constant development and Frontier gathers feedback here on the forums. So after people complained about the grindy nature of this game, Frontier added even more grindy mechanics (specifically patch 2.1) afterwards.
I think that's why we have these constant discussions about grind here. Of course those people could still simply walk away, but the loyal (complaining) fan base still has hope for the future
(p.s. The arena DLC for Borderlands 1 was grindy as hell)
If Frontier threw Elite as a finsihed game over the fence a few years back without any DLCs and whatnot then his arguments would stand (they still do in a way).
But here we have a game in constant development and Frontier gathers feedback here on the forums. So after people complained about the grindy nature of this game, Frontier added even more grindy mechanics (specifically patch 2.1) afterwards.
I think that's why we have these constant discussions about grind here. Of course those people could still simply walk away, but the loyal (complaining) fan base still has hope for the future
(p.s. The arena DLC for Borderlands 1 was grindy as hell
)
IIRC, you need to unlock Palin to get them. To people who don't enjoy the exploration mechanics, the thought of making five kilo-light years worth of jumps just to get those racks is a repetitive, unenjoyable task.
Of course, the post you're replying to is incorrect about needing CR cargo racks to engage in the thargoid content. AFMUs do just as good a job keeping your ship functional while that stuff is on board, and are available at most high tech stations. This means the thargoid content is not locked behind a "grind wall." Like nearly every other complaint about the "grind" in this game, at least one alternative path to what they want to do exists.
Um, NO...
Spending resources on crap like Holo-Me is like "Putting lipstick on a pig". I guess you have to consider it some sort of "development", but not the type that really matters. Multi-crew is also a waste of resources but admittedly somewhat less so (although no use to me)...
Well, that's not a negative point per se. Lots of games have features locked behind grind walls. Look at Wow, ffxiv, gw2 and basically every mmo, you have to repeat simple tasks over and over again (Quests most likely) in order to unlock raids, high lvl dungeons etc.
Problem is those game have a huge variety of tasks you can switch from whenever you like, areas are very different both in challenges, visuals, art and mechanics so that you never really feel like you're grinding more than you'd like unless you really are focused on a single loot.
Elite can't afford a grindwall like that, not even close, because it doesn't have nearly enough variety. Every system feels the same no matter the status it's in, every planet feels the same, every target ship looks the same from afar, every station feels the same. And every activity this game offers is bound to all those things.
I can accept a pirate mission or a mining X tons of palladium mission, but all of those will require to experience jump, jump, jump, scoop, jump, supercruise, enter instance, do what I have to do, exit instance, jump, jump, jump, scoop, supercruise, dock and complete mission. Passengers? Same. Trading? Same.
It all relies on a system which is so barebones, so time consuming *and at the same time* almost completely devoid of challenges/interaction that it gets extremely boring extremely fast to many people.
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I'm listening.
and again we see bad game design.
Why was multicrew a waste of time? Well because no one plays it. And why? because the thingS you can do together aren't rewarding both of you properly. There a lot of things you cannot even do together properly, Like flying someone elses ship, driving together in the SRV's deployed from someones ship. etc. and so on. and then the question is: what is the current purpose of multicrew? there is hardly any art all. if they would finally design one feature properly and start realising this feature properly with the coders we would get somEthinG great. But all we have gotten is shallow designs which simply cannot lead to a proper result.
i emans eriously, who of you even believes that "it's tehcnically not possible to deploy 2 srv's form a ship" thingy? if they can't code that tehcnically, someone shoudl really reconsider to hire some (additional) proper coders.
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