Normally no end of game since there is creation of novelties by Frontier in parallel
The credits per hour and the 'end game'
- Thread starter KellyR
- Start date
You know that's players doing that?
No. The players pirate and cause a menace. No one says the station has to close their commodity market. Well, no one but Frontier Developments. And it is totally unrealistic. They close their commodity market during an appeal for goods to try to stop the piracy. But guess what? They are just playing into those miscreants' hands. I could see them closing everything else except contacts, refueling and the storage department of the shipyard. I could even see them closing the transfer department of the shipyard. But NOT the commodity market when an appeal for goods is underway.
Were it a faction I represent that had appealed for goods, the conversation would go something like this.
Me: You closed your commodity market? Are you insane?
Station Manager: Piracy is rife, Ma'am. We had to do something.
Me: Agreed. But closing the commodity market after agreeing to be the host station for this appeal is not one of them. I want that commodity market opened back up. We NEED those goods.
SM: Sorry, Ma'am, no can do.
Me: Then you are in breach of contract. If that commodity market is not open within one hour, this appeal will be canceled and I will be speaking to our attorneys about litigation to recover our losses. Good day, sir.
And then they would find themselves in a lawsuit. Cutting off your nose to spite your face is not the way to solve problems.
Great funny post! You obviously, totally, do not get "simulators". Elite is essentially an arcade game so I can understand why FSX looks very foreign to you.
Great funny post! You obviously, totally, do not get "simulators". Elite is essentially an arcade game so I can understand why FSX looks very foreign to you.
Elite Dangerous is a far cry from an an arcade game. It's more detailed than FSX although in flight mechanics, it is more ardady than FSX. But in FSX you have only a few things to do. Complex things, but basically, write your flight plan, submit it, start engine, request take off, taxi to runway, take off, fly to destination dealing with handovers, request clearance, land, move to specified parking spot, and kill engine. And you're done except maybe for building cockpits in your chosen physical location.
Elite Dangerous however, while the actual flight controls are simpler, is far more complex. There are sub-professions within the profession of a space pilot. There's the complex matter of deciding your load out; fitting it is easy, but getting the optimal load out is not. Then you have to equip based on the sub-profession you are engaging upon. You have to know how to maintain optimal speed without overshooting. You need to learn the tricks to get the best turning performance out of your ship during combat. You need to know how to get through the mail slot. You have to know how to run if you are interdicted in a freighter.
FSX is a game of flying. Elite Dangerous is an alternate life some 1300 now, there or thereabouts.
Great funny post! You obviously, totally, do not get "simulators". Elite is essentially an arcade game so I can understand why FSX looks very foreign to you.
FSX stopped looking "foreign" to me thouands of hours ago.
The fact remains, games like FSX are all about the minutiae of flying an aircraft. There's very little (ignoring mod's) to actually do aside from flying the plane - and FSX does manage to keep people entertained.
ED is obviously a different experience but the point is that, regardless of whether you're happy flying an Eagle, a Keelback or a Corvette, there's plenty of entertainment to be had.
An incredible role playing game.
It's both and neither. Were I forced to say what it is, I would have to say, "Do you have a couple of hours? There is no simple pat explanation of what it is." So is it an arcade game? "Yes and no." Well, is it a simulation? "Yes and no." Elite Dangerous is one of those rare instances where there is no set answer without some detailed explanation. And I think I gave that detailed explanation in my previous post.
Yeah I wish they did that too. Flying the space ship is a major part of what I enjoy in this game. They could make 3 separate control modes like "Arcade", "Advanced", and "Realistic" - like what other sims do. FA off does that to some degree but it's still not as involved as a more realistic model would be.
I agree with that, except it is a point of view of somebody who already had a large amount of experience with the game, knows what the different activities involve, what activities they enjoy, and what ships/loadouts are suited to those activities. One of the best advices I've heard not long after I started playing ED was "try everything" (from a Yamiks' video I think). But that may be tricky to achieve for a new player.
A player who just started playing would have no idea what the potential activities might even be. They only get a bare idea of their options from the mission boards. On top of that they would not have combat/exploration/trade rank to get good payouts from the missions, therefore buying different ships for different activities is not very viable without hours upon hours of doing same mundane missions over and over. I think it's easy to see how people find things grindy. And as some people here already mentioned, even normal missions do not pay enough to easily afford multiple ships so you can experiment to find out what you want to do (took me about 100 hours to get fully a kitted Asp X at first).
If I started a new game with the knowledge I have now I would achieve everything much quicker - because I know what ships I want, what missions give most profit, which missions I like better than others, what pirate ships I can fight without being destroyed, etc. But to get to this point I actually did a lot of grinding because I didn't see other options, or they were too expensive.
Right now the optimum for me is having several ships each suited to a different purpose so I can vary my gameplay. But for me it took a lot of grind and trial and error to get to this point.
I'd describe it as a galaxy simulator with flight sim elements.
So it's the DM's fault?
There's an end game?
It's because there's no reason to care about anything happening in the game world, there's only earning credits for the sake of earning them. People grind out their credits and then say, "okay, where's the game now?" only to realize that collecting credits IS the game. That's why people get so upset about it.
You choose one of the handful of methods of obtaining money and just do it until you get bored. Player actions don't really exist in any kind of tangible context. There's no persistence or greater purpose to anything the player does, none of it feels like it makes any difference to anything in the game world.
And before you say "I want to save the galaxy," no, I don't. I just want the things I do to matter to something other than my credit balance. Take a look at this old dev diary:
[video=youtube;5uKD1ap5hsI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uKD1ap5hsI[/video]
Notice how nothing remotely like this exists in the game. There's no persistence to events or player actions, no purpose to having done anything, no reason to play with the sand in the sand box, and no incentive to get personally invested in anything "going on" in the game world. There's only choosing your preferred method of obtaining credits and repeating it until you get bored of doing the same thing over and over for no reason.
That's why people complain about the "grind," because there is no point to anything except earning credits. There literally is only the grind, and just because you're grinding slowly and inefficiently, it doesn't mean you're not grinding, too.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/401608-Who-s-brave-Total-worth-hrs-played
There was quite a lot of 'I was brought up in a shoebox' pride in low figures too, quite a spread really. Different people play in different ways.
I think reaching Trade Elite (the first billion) should be a challenge (not too hard, not too easy) but after that it really doesn't matter to me what someone else earns. Roughly a third of my total assets is from trading, a third from exploration, the last from Combat. Trade was the most profitable per hour but I prefer to explore, which I don't do for the money, it's what I do with the money
. in terms of buying power I can match any single ship anyone in the game can afford, and we can only fly one ship at a time so the playing field is level imo. They enjoy what they do, I enjoy what I do.After a certain amount, it just doesn't matter any more.
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Actually in my opinion the game STARTS when you stop worrying about money. Engineering a fleet is a huge task. (bigger now that the engineers slurp up a million materials a module.) Flying around, doing what you LIKE doing is REALLY FUN, vs. trying to have fun and realizing you should be busy making money instead.
I have four Anacondas, two cutters, and a corvette. I get to fly around and play the way I want to now because it's nice to make money, but not critical moment to moment. Trust me, the game isn't about money, it gets better when money gets out of your way and stops you from being able to play around with ship builds and fly the way you want.
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this is all again only about if you are casual or hardcore player, its about the journey for you, but if people need money for rebuys cause they actively do PvP, that's when you start hating yourself for playing this game. Try to be more objective and not take everyone like they have same mindset like you. That's why they are changing engineers now in beta.
all in all, money dont scale up with your skill, that's where problem is, you just have to amplify your grinding or you wont keep up with 2milion shield generator repair cost on cutter
all in all, money dont scale up with your skill, that's where problem is, you just have to amplify your grinding or you wont keep up with 2milion shield generator repair cost on cutter
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Quick follow-up response:
Here's one site's definition of an arcade game: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1903/arcade-game
PC- or console games are sometimes referred to as arcade games if they share the same qualities as real arcade games such as the following:
- Intuitive and simple controls with simple physics
- Short levels which become increasingly difficult as the game progresses
- A focus on gameplay rather than on content or story
Elite definitely meets the arcade description description based on #1 (gameplay, push button fly/shoot) and #3 (no story, limited gameplay content). It's missing #2 short levels - maybe they'll come after Beyond? Start by expanding the buggy base-racing we have today.
Here's another from our friends at Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcade_game
The focus of arcade action games is on the user's reflexes, and the games usually feature very little puzzle-solving, complex thinking, or strategy skills. Games with complex thinking are called strategy video games or puzzle video games.
No one can say Elite is based around puzzle solving, complex thinking or strategy skills. Elite today is about user reflexes - PvP / PvE combat - which is what the dev's spend the majority of their time working on. Look at this beta with PvP/combat focused changes and pretty textures for roids. Even a new combat oriented ship. And the GUI changes themselves seem to be more for improving the console experience.
It's essentially an arcade game by definition. Not sure why folks would be upset with saying that. Does it mean something negative to say you like arcade games?
Back OT: the credits/hour has never been balanced. Right from release the income and expenses have been changed to extremes over and over, and here we are in year four with the same problem. It's pretty obvious when many players flock to a current high credit making opportunity, and say they are having fun with the higher reward, that something is severely wrong with the game. Smeaton could have been fixed with a simple adjustment to larger passenger quantities which would have limited the higher rewards to bigger ships balancing their risk/reward use.