Wow, I come back to see all this ridiculous FUD about RNG.
Since when is fog-of-war RNG? Uncertainty and RNG are two completely different things. Do you seriously not know the difference? <face-palm>
Firstly, I doubt you have any idea about 'fog-of-war' outside of gaming. But we'll go along with your premise for a laugh.
In your game world, fog of war relates to areas unseen or unexplored. The player makes an educated guess as to where to go next or simply randomly picks a direction or action. Notice the 'random' in there. Uncertainty is state of not knowing what the result will be of the guesstimated or random action. In either case, the board or play area will be revealed. Let's take an example; To make my decision a guesstimate or a complete random on, I as the player, evaluate the knowns and the unknown. If I go west there may be a mob. Ok, From experience, what kind of mob, how difficult a mob? In normal game universe, there evaluations can be guesstimated to a pretty high degree based on previous events or action or both. Frontier don't do 'normal' they randomly create the mov based on nothing more then you moved. Further, they then randomly create it's armour and stats.
Most players expect that at a certain stage, the mobs will have a limited stat range and so, give a basis of equality for the upcoming fight. By making the entire thing random, they cut down on code and dev time, but produce a complete random mob, or none at all. The mob may or may not be in the level range of the player. And this form of randomness regurgitates throughout their development process. Cheap mechanics to save money.
Most other MMO are based around exponential curves. mobs are created within a range of the players abilities and stats. Given that Elite is a multiplayer universe, they should have created certain zones that players know are below or above their level/ship/abilities. But again, due the nature of their ad-hoc design of the game, that cannot be done. Instead of thinking the game world through, they based everything on 'procedural generation' and a BGS. Both of those, should have been built after the foundation, that being the 'how the game will work'. By not doing that, they were forcing the players and worse, themselves into a disjointed, unbalanced game world. One from which they cannot escape. They further exacerbated that, by adding Horizons engineers. That created a game world that made the players almost invincible to the mobs. To combat that, and their lack of any decent AI, the added engineering to mobs, and all of it random. That then left the playing field completely whacko. We have some players using engineering and others who don't even have horizons, having to compete against engineered mobs. They they [frontier] discovered that in addition to the weak AI, players could still beat the mobs. So lacking any other better ideas, they started breaking the game they had created to compensate. Weapons became ineffective and module damage was removed. The AI became dumber while the load outs became stronger. And this is across the board. It's a bit like a player in WestFall being interdicted by mobs from Burning Steppes.
Frontier simply do not know how to build an MMO. For sure, they can build a game world that is graphically astounding, and add to it pretty icons, but underneath all the makeup is a hag. It's ugly, it's creaking, it can barely move for all the wrinkles in its design.
And the problem they [frontier] face is they cannot go back, so they have to keep adding the makeup.
Random has its uses. But those uses should be limited and used sparingly. The player at any given time should be able to compete but have a range of risks. A player buying the game at Christmas this year, and getting not their Sidewinder has no noobie areas. They see mining is a thing, and off they go to mine and earn credits to buy their flashy Anaconda. And mining makes that easy (not complaining), but, as soon as they leave the ring with their precious diamonds, they get an Elite mob shoved up their bottom.
Fog Of War, relates to the dust and dirt created by artillery shelling and the dense fog it created. One which soldier had to run through from heir fox-holes, to engage the enemy. Amidst the artillery pounding and the whizzing bullets they charged, into something they could not see, so they fired blindly and hoped. If fog-of-war is to be used in ration to anything Frontier, it is best suited to their design approach. They ran in blindly and are still firing, hoping to hit something.
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