Some of the community shares some of the blame.
News Important Community Update (01/03)
- Thread starter Will Flanagan
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Some of the community shares some of the blame.
I think we pretty much are on the same page and i would probably agree if it wasnt of the company's track record so far. I dont think i am disrespectful when i say broken promices, deadlines lost again and again, game is full of unfinished or abandoned stuff, full of bugs that takes long to fix if ever, old bugs reintroduced, feedback sections pretty much mostly ignored, content cancelled or pushed back for months or years, radio silence for too long and then announcements of other announcements and the list goes on and on. Seriously guys what do you expect to witness from now on? Calm people that hug each other singing kumbaya?
Edit: and sorry but i cannot accept that the company is not sharing with all of us info of the development proccess, because of some peoples insults. Sorry but its the most silly thing i have ever heard. First of all its not fair to punish everyone for the sake of the few, and second, if some people are insulting then ban or delete posts, including me. I for one believe that this situation pretty much is very convinient for them to justify their crappy communication.
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rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
I'd suggest that if you don't enjoy ED as it is now, you should probably just move on.
FD's track record of poor and often confusing, misleading, and even often later reversed communications, not to mention questionable decisions that often lead to community rages, is legendary. Anyone who isn't aware of this simply hasn't been around very long.
And NO - it's not the Community's fault.
I enjoy playing ED. Despite the questionable design twists and turns often spending time and energy into things either poorly done or of no interest to myself or other players, ED has made progress and is still the best option in the genre. There may be some competitors trying to gain ground, but I don't yet see a better option that tempts me to "jump ship" yet.
The 2020 update is more of a communication to lower expectations and defuse unwarranted anticipation, rather than generate enthusiasm.
We don't even have anything but raw speculation regarding content - so basically it's a non-announcement other than "don't expect anything major for more than a year."
If anything this should be looked at as major encouragement.
For the competition
If competitors can't catch up given a hiatus by FD, then ED is what we have.
Enjoy what we have. It's better than complaining about what we don't have. You'll sleep better.
FD's track record of poor and often confusing, misleading, and even often later reversed communications, not to mention questionable decisions that often lead to community rages, is legendary. Anyone who isn't aware of this simply hasn't been around very long.
And NO - it's not the Community's fault.
I enjoy playing ED. Despite the questionable design twists and turns often spending time and energy into things either poorly done or of no interest to myself or other players, ED has made progress and is still the best option in the genre. There may be some competitors trying to gain ground, but I don't yet see a better option that tempts me to "jump ship" yet.
The 2020 update is more of a communication to lower expectations and defuse unwarranted anticipation, rather than generate enthusiasm.
We don't even have anything but raw speculation regarding content - so basically it's a non-announcement other than "don't expect anything major for more than a year."
If anything this should be looked at as major encouragement.
For the competition
If competitors can't catch up given a hiatus by FD, then ED is what we have.
Enjoy what we have. It's better than complaining about what we don't have. You'll sleep better.
I'm not so sure:
1/ If they give details, the details get torn to shreds and over thought on the forums for months until the reveal and then everyone freaks out because its not as they clamoured for.
2/ If they don't give details, the details will get imagined and fantastic conjectures chock full of hyperbole rules. Then the forum goes completely nuts not getting any information.
Keep the falsely entitled maniacs going nuts I say.
It's a Surprise. You have to be patient and wait until 4Q 2020.
Make the best of what we got is what you are saying.
I'm Mister Brightside too.
E: D has no competition. NMS is a cartoon, Eve is a spreadsheet, SC is a tech demo, Rogue System a nerdgasm of complications.
It's always been FD's policy to underpromise, because whenever they don't do that and something doesn't make it into the game or gets delayed, there is a storm of protests.
They said they would change their roll-out strategy from the old season based model to something else. I guess that something else is "Finish all aspects of the update and then roll-out everything in one go". This does mean that you have to first create all aspects of your intended update before you can roll it out. So think about Horizons and collect all the chapter patches and instead of releasing them incrementally, roll them up in one gigantic update that was released at the time of the 2.4 update. That would have meant that Horizons would have been released on the 26th of September 2017 or about slightly less than two years after the release of the original Elite Dangerous.
I guess they are trying to avoid delaying each incremental patch with changes demanded by the user base, which is probably one of the reasons that the Horizons chapters were getting delayed all the time. FDev will undoubtedly release more information about what will be in version 4 when they feel confident that it will make it into that release. It is in their best interest to do this. But I'm not waiting for the sort of feature baiting that happens in the Star Citizen development camp, where people are strung along with empty promises, missed deadlines and continuous shifts in development plans.
Looks like that's precisely what they want to address:
"As development progresses, we will share more news and announcements on features, as well as timelines regarding this upcoming content for Elite. We can understand that having a long wait for news can be frustrating"
Er... I don't get where these are "lowering expectations":
"We believe this will be a defining moment in the history of the game and it will be our biggest update yet."
"To give this more context, in order to realise the ambition for this update, and the size and scope of the content we wish to bring to the Elite Dangerous galaxy, we estimate this major milestone will be ready by the latter half of 2020."
"but we truly believe that this will be the single most impactful update for our community."
QED.
So if that's the case then why does Frontier even mention the next DLC at the end of 2020?
Because one way or another they have to put right the expectation? The story had been probably late 2019. Things change though.
I think that's another important point. ED is FDev's first title as an independent publisher iirc.
To get that going, both the KS and Horizons were pre-sold but that is a horrible way to go on, as bad for the devs as it is for the community imo, as things designed by committee rarely turn out well. Tweaks yes but design, no.
Publishers tend to prefund development ahead of time and sell a completed expansion to recoup, getting away from the idea that the game is going to be better when it's designed by the playerbase. You need the money to do that in the first place though, so we ended up in the presale but ultimately players always have agendas based on how they personally play the game and - while you can't blame people for that - it's realistically better to have a gamesmaster who's not influenced and has freedom and space to plan their evil deeds.
There have been benefits to player-testing - on engineering and weps balancing and so on - but it does instill a culture of demanding instantaneous changes in complex code development that can't really be expected to turn on a sixpence. I actually don't think FDev would change the experience of having done a presale season but I reckon if you asked them, they'd probably prefer never having to do it again! Good job we're (the community) such a fluffy bunch eh.
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There were also plenty of sneak peeks in the lead up to Horizons. They made the newsletters actually worth reading.
Yeah. I think wasn't there (iirc) a run between when Horizons officially announced and the beta? I think it's going to be different this time around though (possibly a shorter lead time) because unlikely to be another presale season. I mean, there might be presales of the expansion, but not like a year before 3/4 of the code is even writ. Under the circumstances thinking about it, extra kudos to Horizons devs, because that takes brass orbs!
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Alfred J Kwak
Banned
Dont care what they think , they just proved you can disregard every thing they say on expos , meets or what ever gaming events they are promoting new content .
Frontier has been lying to the community since the release of horizons. Or havent you noticed that after the horizons release suddenly the key people that interacted with the community suddenly when missing.
I do respect they remain the quality of q4 disapointing content.
So what were lies and who went missing?
Ian Phillips
Volunteer Moderator
I used the bobbleheads.
Alfred J Kwak
Banned
Oke rectification all but one that uses the bobble heads still a bit weird you use them as they are Christmas bobble heads and its march now .
Me too! And the paints
Everything.
@Alfred J Kwak: frankly, given how low your opinion on FDEV is, are you really expecting something from them?
Your disappointment duly respected, in my records FD delivered (nearly) everything they "promised" and such things cannot be said of the competition. While the game is not "perfect" and may never be, and even if some things got delayed or were implemented differently from what some community members might have preferred, ED is the best space sim there is so far and by far, and the teams at FD delivered it. We all owe them respect for this.
"Lying", on the other hand, is a strong accusation and completely inappropriate here. If you had ever worked on a software project of this scale, you would know better how things work and appreciate the results a little more.
And then, it is quite normal that people join and leave a project, in particular one that stretches over several years. Some left, others came, development goes on. I didn't notice any unusual fluctuation after Horizons. It may be, though, that it's not a developer's job to take part in endless discussions with end customers, in particular not in an increasingly toxic environment. YMMV.
Finally, do you actually remember the Horizons release by yourself? Just asking, for your initial post is from Sept. 2017 and there you said you are new to the game (and the forums).
O7,
[noob]
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