The epic fail of Beyond

[crushdepth]

Oh wait, you want instant gratification! Or, you are not using your imagination! Or, you are simply too entitled (is that possible?). Or, you want someone to hold your hand. Errr... Sorry, had to beat the other standard excuses when some dares to express negative thoughts.

Yeah, I too want to continue to enjoy the game. But it's tough. And the devs need to hear honest feedback and not just the butt kissing part.

I am perfectly happy with the current state of the game. Nothing needs to be improved.

My other hobby is train spotting.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

I am perfectly happy with the current state of the game. Nothing needs to be improved.

My other hobby is train spotting.

Is that PvE trainspotting, or PvP? Either way, I bet you can only do it in Solo.

 

[babelfisch]

i love ppl in denial. this thread got 35 pages in 12 days, but some fanboys still think the game is fine as it is.

before beyond announcement: the game is fine as it is, if you dont like it to bad, maybe the game isnt for you.

after beyond announcement: the game is not fine but it will be after beyond, if you dont like beyond to bad, maybe the game isnt for you.


ill keep eating my popcorn and see how it playes out, new CONTENT was promised on the beyond announcement, and no, i dont consider new mining limpets or a new laser colour new content.

Nobody ever said that the game is perfect. People are just saying that it isn't utterly broken and an epic fail and that it probably won't be dead soon either. Did it come to your mind that this thread has so many pages because so many people disagree with OP? And they are not just fanboys but also people who just don't want to paint fences.

 

[babelfisch]

I thought instances with an infinite amount of enemies spawning and acting like fish in a barrel was instant gratification.
How people can actually believe it is bounty hunting....

why even include a wake scanner when bounty hunting is an arcade mini game.

Finally something I can agree with. I would prefer a dedicated thread with some solid suggestions rather than a post on page 36 of a random thread though...

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

If there's 1,277,000 ish owners of ED on Steam and steam says there's around 8k players on average playing at the moment, that's only like 7% of owners playing at any one time.

So that would say 93% of Steam ED owners don't play ED that often or at all anymore.

Doesn't mean 93% of the player base is permanently lost, just means that only 7% still like it enough to play regularly

Using concurrent players as a means to count the player base is just completely flawed. Why do people keep peddling these rubbish statistics.

I thought instances with an infinite amount of enemies spawning and acting like fish in a barrel was instant gratification.
How people can actually believe it is bounty hunting....

why even include a wake scanner when bounty hunting is an arcade mini game.

Completely agree with this. I have wanted a complete rehash of the bounty hunting and res sites for a long time.

 

[Stinja]

... blah blah player base...

I'll just add, that a bunch of people do buy games (especially in the Steam sales) and never play them, or fire it up like once.
I've got mates who bought Elite and never played it, or myself I bought Total War: Warhammer, and only played like one tutorial (must get back to that...)

Want some interesting stats from the PS4 side? While it may not relate to PCmasterRacers, looking at trophies earned:
- 49.2% bought a new ship
- 46.0% landed on a planet
- 36.1% cashed in a bounty
- 36.0% sold data on a celestial body
- 18.2% signed up to a PP faction (and personally I signed up, got the trophy, and quit immediately )
- 14.9% sold 250T of cargo
- 11.3% participated in a CG
- 5.3% cashed in 100K of combat bonds
- 4.7% formed a wing of 4

These are pretty basic actions in-game.

So it says to me half the players never even leave the sidewinder, and as for what they do... not CZs or trading, and roughly 1/3rd ever killed a NPC pirate or went exploring. As a guess most are not doing more than fire it up a couple of times, and move onto the next game.
Anyway interesting

 

[Achilles7]

I agree with those that say Elite won't die any time soon; this is due to the loyal player-base built up over 30 yrs...unfortunately this is also the same reason that the development is so slow. A good proportion of players are just glad to be pottering around in a cool spaceship with nice graphics & a pretty good flight model ie going forward, they habitually settle for any old rubbish palmed off as interesting new gameplay!

I am perfectly happy with the current state of the game. Nothing needs to be improved.

My other hobby is train spotting.

...& watching cricket, presumably?

I was very good at cricket, hence I was in my school & county teams up to the age of 16; I liked actually playing, but watching the game is simply coma-inducing. While waiting to bat one day, I noticed a bunch of dorks in the - albeit small - crowd, filling out those stats sheets as each ball was bowled - for a COUNTY school game!!! I have no words to sum up my contempt...but I guess a few of those guys are among us - now enjoying the BGS, travel time, bounty farming, exploration, power play, ship transfer times, materials collection, trading (I could go on, but I'm boring myself now!)

 

[Ceitidh]

What on earth are you talking about offliners. I do not want the game offline and have never asked for it be offline and enjoy playing the game with friends so please stop making stuff up about me you pathetic individual.

For the record I'm probably the closest thing I've met to anyone I could describe as an "offliner". I really wanted ED to be an offline, single-player game, or at least have that option. And I was really cheesed off when they dropped the plan to implement it.

So it doesn't have that option. Fine. I can deal, cheesed off or not. I'd sooner play ED in online solo, or even open if one day forced into it, than not get to play it at all.

I don't know how this squares with Tullius' perception of this supposed "offliner" movement, but I've not met anyone yet whose desire for an offline mode leads them to want the game shut down entirely.

 

[CMDR Asuradice]

I'll just add, that a bunch of people do buy games (especially in the Steam sales) and never play them, or fire it up like once.
I've got mates who bought Elite and never played it, or myself I bought Total War: Warhammer, and only played like one tutorial (must get back to that...)

Want some interesting stats from the PS4 side? While it may not relate to PCmasterRacers, looking at trophies earned:
- 49.2% bought a new ship
- 46.0% landed on a planet
- 36.1% cashed in a bounty
- 36.0% sold data on a celestial body
- 18.2% signed up to a PP faction (and personally I signed up, got the trophy, and quit immediately )
- 14.9% sold 250T of cargo
- 11.3% participated in a CG
- 5.3% cashed in 100K of combat bonds
- 4.7% formed a wing of 4

These are pretty basic actions in-game.

So it says to me half the players never even leave the sidewinder, and as for what they do... not CZs or trading, and roughly 1/3rd ever killed a NPC pirate or went exploring. As a guess most are not doing more than fire it up a couple of times, and move onto the next game.
Anyway interesting

That is interesting, and it makes a good point. I have loads of great games on Steam that I bought and have either never played or only played for a few minutes to an hour, doesn't mean the games are bad, just means that I was either too busy or had too many other games to play.

ED is one of very few games I still play regularly 3 years later though. That is a much better metric for me as to whether I find it a worthwhile use of my free time, which is really all a game is anyway.

If you don't find it a worthwhile use of your time then do something about it, go do/play something else or come on here to give constructive feedback to try and improve it.

In my experience anyone who complains about the same thing more than once without actually doing something about it is getting more fulfillment from complaining about the thing than they are actually bothered by it.

 

[Crank Larson]

And the devs need to hear honest feedback and not just the butt kissing part.

As happens in the Focused Feedback section of the forums, you mean?

 

[B1rdy]

Finally something I can agree with. I would prefer a dedicated thread with some solid suggestions rather than a post on page 36 of a random thread though...

The need for such a thread per se shows the state of this game. It shouldn´t be pointed out to anyone, who calls himself "game developer", that the current RESs and CZs game mechanics are place holders or 1980s style game mechanics. It is like needing to point out to your car mechanic, that one of your tires are flat -it should be obvious to him.

Btw. I wonder how it is reviewed at FDev taking a technically modernized version of an 80s game as a basis for expansion in an online environment. It seems like taking a car from the 1940s, create it with recent technology and then running it at a 24h race against most recent racing cars, while trying improve and develop basic things at the same time. What I want to say is, it is at least a very uncomfortable starting point. This is backed by the delays we have seen, the quality and execution of each major update and the statements of Sandro Sammarco.

 

[Ceitidh]

Btw. I wonder how it is reviewed at FDev taking a technically modernized version of an 80s game as a basis for expansion in an online environment.

This is curiously worded. ED certainly uses the game style of the original Elite as its foundation. But in what way is that game style or genre restricted to the 1980s?

I mean, I could understand this comment if ED was still using wireframe graphics or something, but otherwise how is it conceptually incompatible with modern gaming? I mean, you might equally argue that Call of Duty is basically just Operation Wolf, but millions of people still enjoy playing it today; and as far as I can tell every game Nintendo releases is just a tweaked Super Mario, but people still lap them up.

How does a game concept become restricted to a particular time period?

 

[Lightspeed]

I'll just add, that a bunch of people do buy games (especially in the Steam sales) and never play them, or fire it up like once.
I've got mates who bought Elite and never played it, or myself I bought Total War: Warhammer, and only played like one tutorial (must get back to that...)

Want some interesting stats from the PS4 side? While it may not relate to PCmasterRacers, looking at trophies earned:
- 49.2% bought a new ship
- 46.0% landed on a planet
- 36.1% cashed in a bounty
- 36.0% sold data on a celestial body
- 18.2% signed up to a PP faction (and personally I signed up, got the trophy, and quit immediately )
- 14.9% sold 250T of cargo
- 11.3% participated in a CG
- 5.3% cashed in 100K of combat bonds
- 4.7% formed a wing of 4

These are pretty basic actions in-game.

So it says to me half the players never even leave the sidewinder, and as for what they do... not CZs or trading, and roughly 1/3rd ever killed a NPC pirate or went exploring. As a guess most are not doing more than fire it up a couple of times, and move onto the next game.
Anyway interesting

So from this we can conclude that about half bought a new ship and most of them managed to land on a planet. However, only 36% have cashed in a bounty or sold data on a celestial body, so presumably 13% are still stuck on that planet !

I wonder which one? Could be some customers there for Fuel Rats.

But seriously, +1 OP for pulling out that data, interesting indeed

 

[Marcus Tullius]

This is curiously worded. ED certainly uses the game style of the original Elite as its foundation. But in what way is that game style or genre restricted to the 1980s?

I mean, I could understand this comment if ED was still using wireframe graphics or something, but otherwise how is it conceptually incompatible with modern gaming? I mean, you might equally argue that Call of Duty is basically just Operation Wolf, but millions of people still enjoy playing it today; and as far as I can tell every game Nintendo releases is just a tweaked Super Mario, but people still lap them up.

How does a game concept become restricted to a particular time period?

ED is conceptually incompatible with modern games in so many layers that it will be wall of text to enumerate them.
If I have to describe it in one sentence it will be: ED is a multiplayer game, initially designed as a singleplayer one, created by very professional engineers under authority of totally incompetent in terms of multiplayer designers.

 

[Soon(TM)]

Well, to be fair, the math does say that at any given time on average only 7% of the owners are playing. That's all it says. Now, is it the same 7% or an ever changing 7% rotating through? We don't know. BUT given the niche-y-ness of this game I'd bet the 7% is likely made up of at least 60-70% of the same players if not more.

So perhaps it's simply better to say that it doesn't appear to be a good number of owners play Elite when one looks at other titles when looking at the ratios on SteamSpy: http://steamspy.com/

Note a title like "They Are Billions" where about 400k own the game and 300k play the game. Impressive. And Elite certainly isn't anywhere near the top of any of the most played, most popular charts because it really isn't that popular. It's nichey, very nichey.

If the goal of Beyond is to improve this then they have a high bar to jump over.

Well said.

People on this forum love to disregard steam and the steam spy stats but the truth will always be that Steam is the single largest game distribution platform on PC, to think that Frontier developments, a relatively small company can sell more copies of this game from its own site than from steam is ludicrous.

It's clear that the majority of sales for this game went through Steam, so to try and disregard the numbers makes no sense unless your in denial.

 

[Ceitidh]

ED is conceptually incompatible with modern games in so many layers that it will be wall of text to enumerate them.
If I have to describe it in one sentence it will be: ED is a multiplayer game, initially designed as a singleplayer one, created by very professional engineers under authority of totally incompetent in terms of multiplayer designers.

Whether or not any of that is true, none of it supports the comment you made about Elite Dangerous being incompatible with the 1980s game it's based on. A sudden change in focus from single-player to multiplayer would damage any game's development - but that's not what we have here. ED was, for better or worse (I'd say worse), designed from the ground up to be primarily a multiplayer game, with the single-player mode mooted as a concession (to people like me) and later dropped. And nothing about the original Elite's concept or realisation would preclude ED's multiplayer focus. The only effects it has are in lore (no more Stardreamer to make time pass subjectively more quickly), and in exposing the player to others who may not share their approach to the game.

But even those effects don't make the modern, multiplayer concept of the game incompatible with the earlier game it's based on.

As for the professionalism of the developers and designers, that's beyond my ability to judge. I know the game has much I like and quite a bit I don't. But again, I see nothing that suggests any of ED's problems are to do with it being based on an older game.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

ED is conceptually incompatible with modern games in so many layers that it will be wall of text to enumerate them.
If I have to describe it in one sentence it will be: ED is a multiplayer game, initially designed as a singleplayer one, created by very professional engineers under authority of totally incompetent in terms of multiplayer designers.

You don't like it. That's long and short of it.

Multiplayer is just a mechanic. It doesn't imply there are features you expect to appear. No need to declare it is somehow weird not to follow your lead and design game you like. People like different things and it is ok to accept that and move on.

 

[zuadao]

Nobody ever said that the game is perfect. People are just saying that it isn't utterly broken and an epic fail and that it probably won't be dead soon either. Did it come to your mind that this thread has so many pages because so many people disagree with OP? And they are not just fanboys but also people who just don't want to paint fences.

no ppl have sayd the game was perfect even before the beyond announcement. no game is perfect, theres allways room for improvement, and although i dont agree with the op saying it will be a big fail he does have a point.

ppl in this thread sayng its a troll thread, that because others think the game is dull but they dont then the problem is the other ppls fault. dudes wake up, they are bringing us beyond because the game is in fact dull. it lacks basic game mechanics. ppl who think its fun to be on a 2 hour journey in supercruise are ruining the game, devs take feedback and think all is fine due to some mindless dudes who think playing with a joystick is enough.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Oh, absolutely agree that "back to basics" and fixing the core game is the right move. The question I have is are they gonna do it right, or half-baked yet again.

Given the vast range of ways people want the game to be fixed, I'm pretty sure the answer will be 'both' (and also 'epic fail'), depending on what people are hoping will be implemented.

 

[Sylveria]

Given the vast range of ways people want the game to be fixed, I'm pretty sure the answer will be 'both' (and also 'epic fail'), depending on what people are hoping will be implemented.

Completely agree here. And with all the hype and speculation of upcoming changes, I know quite a few people are about to be in for a rude awakening and already anticipate seeing their flamethreads trying to burn down the forums.

Torches and pitchforks!