Devs don't do requests. If they will disagree with you, they will disagree with you.
Why does it take so long to fix game issues?
- Thread starter Audaxxx
- Start date
Devs don't do requests. If they will disagree with you, they will disagree with you.
My point is that I don't recall any player feedback however polite & detailed to be implemented other than audio Galnet which was posted in Youtube.
Well, if both don't work then why even bother to have a feedback sub-forum?
Sole Hunter
Banned
they are busy playing Jurassic park.
You're still doing the same amount of total grind here, you're just breaking it up into smaller pieces. That does help with burnout but doesn't change the fact that it's still grind.
I only did this once, took my Courier which I enjoy flying, stacked the missions as one does, and had some fun doing it. Got to the required rank, then did some more because I was actually enjoying getting interdicted by larger ships in my little speedster. Had this wonderful little image of an irate NPC Anaconda pilot shaking his fist at me every time I beat his interdictionThe rest of the time, I have not worried about rank, it just comes naturally as I do missions and the like. This could be because I am not focused on getting some uber ship to show my manhood err skill. Yep I will never own one of the big four
That is a large part of the game that you're missing by not flying one of the big 4 ships. In practice it isn't economical to fly a large ship all the time as the income potential vs. rebuy costs is generally much better for medium ships (especially the Python) but flying those large ships is a main draw for many players.
I'm referring here specifically to metallic meteorites which average maybe 1-2 spawns every hour on most planets. Depending on whether you get a single high-grade metallic meteorite or three lower-grade metallic meteorites will determine how much grade 5 mats you get but typically it's around 2-4 drops giving 6-12 units of grade 5 mats per meteorite. That averages out to around 24 grade 5 mats per hour. This assumes you're driving on a part of the planet that spawns metallic meteorites and you know how to use the wave scanner or you will get far lower than this on average. This is made up somewhat by getting some grade 5 mat drops from lower-grade rocks (i.e., bronzite chondrite, mesosiderite and the occasional outcrop) meaning you can still find it without metallic metorities but the rate is far slower.
If you want to test this yourself, go and grind the 156 Technetium needed to unlock all of the shock cannons. It is a minimum of 6 hours driving around searching for mats assuming you're consistently getting 24 Technetium per hour which is by no means guaranteed. In many cases it can take far longer. That is just one of the mats needed for those blueprints.
I took the same approach, I started out just unlocking the FSD booster, then figured I might as well unlock some of the Guardian weapons as well, then I decided to get the module reinforcements and I finally unlocked all of the Guardian tech. I didn't mind the guardian structure puzzles but I did find it extremely tedious gathering enough Epsilon data from the obelisks. I actually found I had to go to the ruin sites instead of the structure sites to get enough obelisks to scan somewhat efficiently as the Epsilon data was such a rare drop.
That is basically saying don't play the game. If I can't progress, if I can't fly a large ship with the weapons and modifications I want, then why am I even playing? I also disagree that it's only necessary for PVP, I play exclusively in Open but my ships and mods are geared almost exclusively towards PVE.
The issue here is that making the grind enjoyable is FD's job. It's literally what we pay them for, to design a game that we actually enjoy playing. I have no problem with grind if it's incorporated into the core gameplay and if the gameplay itself is well-designed and enjoyable. In fact that's exactly how games like Battlefield and World of Warships handle grind. You definitely have grind in both of those games but it's nearly indistinguishable from the core gameplay which is designed to be fun and engaging. Other than spending time leveling a specific weapon or ship that might be a sub-par choice you don't really need to do any activities you dislike, you are simply playing the game. There are also plenty of XP boosters and other ways to make the grind go faster or skip over parts of it entirely if you really want. That isn't the case with Elite, if you aren't willing to spend 6 hours driving the SRV around to grind enough Technetium you aren't going to unlock those shock cannons.
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Much of my grind was "strategic" in the sense that I was preparing for future content that was being developed. Much of that content was then delivered during Horizons in a sub-par, minimum viable product form instead. When I heard about SLFs I started the grind to get an Anaconda, since I knew I'd need a large ship to enjoy SLF gameplay. Then we got a ludicrous SLF pilot grind where the pilots start out as incompetent potatoes that can't hit anything, require an average of 12 hours to train to Dangerous rank, take up to 10% of your income and 50% of your rank progression and after all of these drawbacks they still die instantly on ship destruction. I have two Deadly SLF pilots who have earned a total of 1.5 billion credits so far (750 million credits each) and I rarely use them because the game is too buggy and unstable to risk them in most combat situations. FD has created an otherwise enjoyable game feature with the SLF gameplay but has attached such a ridiculous grind cost to using it that it discourages players from playing that part of the game.
That is just one example of a feature that I invested large amounts of time and effort in only to find that effort was not worthwhile after spending dozens or even hundreds of gameplay hours. I also spent large amounts of time Engineering only to find that FD dramatically inflated the blueprints with Beyond to the point that the massive effort I put into the prior Engineering system was almost completely devalued. The same was true when I did the Naval rank grind that is now far easier to accomplish and at one point it was so fast that players were getting the rank for a Corvette or Cutter in a single weekend when it took me dozens of hours. There are many other examples of time that was spent doing activities that FD either nerfed, never properly developed or turned out to be so buggy that they aren't worth using. If I had known this in advance I not only wouldn't have spent 2500 hours playing the game, I probably wouldn't have installed it in the first place knowing how it would turn out.
The only activity I don't regret doing was my trip to SagA, which was ironically the most boring activity I could have chosen to do, but I went into that trip with the purpose of comparing properties for the Earth-like and Ammonia worlds I discovered to see how accurate the stellar forge is in terms of planetary properties. Since I have a science background I was able to look at those in quite a bit of detail and I learned a lot about the limitations of the stellar forge but that was a very specific purpose that made the trip particularly worthwhile for me. There was also the challenge of going to SagA before we had Engineering and long-distance route plotting which was also worthwhile. This was an example of a task that was worth doing despite the grind since it was a player-driven activity and not something that FD required for some sort of game progression.
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I hadn't heard about the middleware. That actually makes some sense. I (personally) know how hard it is to evict middleware from a codebase. (Damn near impossible.)
One place that automated tests could conceivably improve is the mission system. That should be a fairly discrete subsystem. It's also one of the systems with obvious and consistent bugs. Any potential changes could be verified as not producing undesired extremes. I'm sure it would require significant refactoring, but I think it would payback the effort hugely, in player satisfaction.
Not really. That's just a hack. For example, say I'd like my HUD to be green, without affecting the enemy/neutral/good radar colors (red/yellow/green) or the faces I see in the comms area. That's not currently possible.
That's quite common. I'm a software developer and I almost never run the same version as the users: 1) I use the most up-to-date code, while the users are months behind. 2) I run instrumented "debug" code, which will report various issues and provides diagnostics, and runs MUCH slower than the "release" code.
Fair enough. It is a feature request, which customers have been complaining about for years. Console users cannot even use the PC configuration hack to change HUD colors. It's poor form, to ignore one of your users' most frequent requests for literally years.
There are plenty of indications that (at least some of) the code is of poor quality: For example, the mission generation system; as soon as 1 thing is fixed, it seems like 2 other things are broken; it produces non-sensical rewards, both high and low. The game still crashes, as recently as last night. It's not my system, which is rock-solid-stable otherwise. The only crashes I see are when I'm in Outfitting or in the Shipyard.
Granted, ED is a collection of (probably) huge codebases, to handle UI, client side sim, server side sim, the "stellar forge", etc., but to me, it looks like they should have a lot more automated tests, which would reduce a lot of the reoccurring problems.
Achilles7
Banned
You've managed to miss the point...fanboys (for want of a better term) are not inherently a bad thing - in fact, believe it or not I consider myself to be one - it is the act of seeking to irritate & goad a commenter into a further heightened emotional response for having an opinion, that really irks me. Critical rants are often triggered by one event that has infuriated the author (be it lost time, credits, general inconvenience with the mechanics) & tends to open up the floodgates on every tiny issue they dislike in the game. These criticisms are also often emotional in nature allowing said player to let off some steam born of heat of the moment frustration...but that doesn't necessarily make the complaints less valid. Some posters then feed off this emotion - you know who you are - which is how most point-scoring arguments start, devolving into derogatory comments & ad hominems.
Yes, I agree that I can sail pretty close to the wind in these respects too, but the target of my ire is the attitude of other posters, not their opinions per se. This is the difference between us; you enjoy winding up those with a contrary opinion because someone has bad-mouthed your favourite game, whereas I never attack someone for an opposing view about elements of the game. For example, Eagleboy goes about defending the game the right way most of the time imo, by simply giving his view on a mechanic, decision etc & not resorting to comments about mental ages, how the said commenter is acting like a baby or serial whiner accusations or triggering words like 'Bazmeson' etc etc. Another cmdr, Marc Hicks has come up with some of the best suggestions for missions I've seen in the forums. He has moved away from the reactionary antagonism that he used to employ defending Elite; for me, he has now become one of the 'fanboys' I respect the most for his consistently good ideas & criticism where it is warranted.
I'm not really in the mood for a protracted argument with you...but dial-down the way you respond to differing opinions & let's see if we all can't work together to put pressure on Frontier to make the game even better because that is the one area about which we all have a consensus. As you have conceded the game has its faults but I, & most saliently, the vehement critical contributors - many of whom have been playing since the beginning!! - love the game too...that is why they get so passionate in both negative & positive terms about Elite.
I do.
In fact, almost everything they added to the game was requested at some point the forums, starting with the addition of super cruise and ending with an overhaul to the engineers.
Yep and don't we sometimes wish we could take some of those suggestions back, or at least suggest a better way of doing it like C&P and PowerPlay lol
I follow a very simple rule I'm nice to nice people. As for pressurizing FDEV I don't see the point, we are end users and we can give feedback. But trying to force their hand is odd from my perspective as it's an MMO there a lot more players and contradictory viewpoints than they can ever accommodate, and I'm not arrogant enough to think my view is the only right one. So I do what I like and ignore the stuff I'm not into as with all other games, without demanding other peoples content gets cut. I think one of the major reasons the games as good as it is because they went their own way and ignored a lot of player demands and industry clichés, at the same time they do listen for example engineers V2.
Bazmeson has become a forum meme because he was so unusual in that he decided it wasn't for him and just left. The fact that was unusual shows there's an issue with people who seemingly can't move on.
If memory serves, Powerplay was never asked for by us plebs in the first place. It was something FDEV worked on unannounced and sprang on the game
If memory serves, Powerplay was never asked for by us plebs in the first place. It was something FDEV worked on unannounced and sprang on the game
Actually Powerplay was partly described in the DDF, just completely different and without the fancy name...
If memory serves, Powerplay was never asked for by us plebs in the first place. It was something FDEV worked on unannounced and sprang on the game
Meta game was hinted in DDF but it was all very vague and there wasn't much player enthusiasm for it.
Some really great answers here explaining why this might be, thanks to those that have provided good info. Also some really useless comments so thanks for those also (that was sarcasm by the way).
Good news, the latest patch notes are up https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/444089-Update-3-2/page2
Looks good and can't wait to play thanks Fdev but still so many bugs not being fixed. It seems like maybe they can't keep up with all the new bugs being introduced due to new content taking priority. It would be really nice to see some more emphasis put on fixing everything and if that means directing some resources toward improving code and diagnosis tools/automated tests then bite the bullet and get it done. I'm not saying stop releasing content altogether as that's what brings in the $$$$ but spend some on improving code and bugfixing capability. If the game is going to survive in the future then it really needs bringing up to date with modern practices and maybe then we'd also get those much requested hud improvements.
Good news, the latest patch notes are up https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/444089-Update-3-2/page2
Looks good and can't wait to play thanks Fdev but still so many bugs not being fixed. It seems like maybe they can't keep up with all the new bugs being introduced due to new content taking priority. It would be really nice to see some more emphasis put on fixing everything and if that means directing some resources toward improving code and diagnosis tools/automated tests then bite the bullet and get it done. I'm not saying stop releasing content altogether as that's what brings in the $$$$ but spend some on improving code and bugfixing capability. If the game is going to survive in the future then it really needs bringing up to date with modern practices and maybe then we'd also get those much requested hud improvements.
Was that before the release?
SuperCruise was.
SuperCruise came about prior to release. Frontier said 'So - we're going to jump between instances in the game', the DDF Forumites said 'NO! That loses the spirit of travelling in space present in the previous games', Frontier said 'OK. We hear you. We'll have a bit of a think', then came back with the proposal for SuperCruise. The original SC proposal was for sub-light speed travel (i.e. less than 1c), which obviously got dropped given the scale of some of the systems.