So, The Bubble Is Burning, And...
- Thread starter Ralph Vargr
- Start date
I think the AX weaponry is one of the clever things about this. It means you must have purpose in building your ship and have compromises in mind.
And there's no need to fly your AX ship in Open, unless you want to take part in the RP with the "Far God" players.
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Fought off an incursion a couple of weeks ago which was a blast, no sign at all of the fargod'ers. I suspect they are all away on DG2 looking for even easier targets or I purged them when I blocked all the station griefers.
The station repairs are one heck of a grind 30 trips in a cargo clipper just for the titanium for one of the damaged stations, this will take a while.
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I am not really interested in fixing star ports, but I might bring materials if the profit is good.
On the other hand I could also do stuff that is more profitable.
I am definitely not going to dedicate weeks of my life to repair star ports. I do not mind a few burning star ports.
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I gave up killing Thargs since they just respawn anyway, no reason if the replacements continue to occupy a system despite efforts to eliminate the threat. FDev should remove respawn rights for these entities to allow the player to see some satisfation for their efforts. The threat is reasonably "old" enough for this to occur. Maybe a RamTa invention of some kind that will allow this aspect - The player needs a sense of accomplishment besides the inadequate monetary reward.
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You can see the thargoid level drop in galnet, can start at massive and lowers as you kill them.
The concept of 'good' profit is rather out of whack atm but I earned a lot of money delivering goods to the burning station (only one way trading though), and with a conda filled with Economy cabins doing the 5MM trip between the station & medical frigate (returning empty to the station) gets good money and excellent rep increase.
Profit for delivering to a repairing station starts off at around 2,000Cr/tonne at best and is again one way only.
So if you want to make money the passenger lap is pretty good, the cargo is more about feeling worthy than the cash. Finding reliable supplies can be an interesting challenge for the first few runs, but then it's just to and fro with only the occasional NPC pirate for company.
Just like a CG, just without the final payout for completion. I guess people would be more motivated if the faction owning the burning station actually gave out a bonus reward to everyone who helped, once they're back up and running. Those payouts would be tiered by amount of contribution.
Noticed this myself too.
Maybe frontier had plans for the bubble but not what to do if noone cared.
Frontier have proven in the past few weeks they are aware, can and do adjust goal numbers based on player participation. So given the numbers are so obviously impossible for players to win the tide maybe they're trying to send a message here.
But it is frontier so that being a crackpot conspiracy and they just made a mistake they can't get approval to fix is equally likely.
I keep going back to dj truthsayers long running championing of getting rid of the bubble so that they can reset the entire community to a much smaller space.. but at this point that would be so out of line and just frack people off. 2 years. 2 years.
Maybe frontier had plans for the bubble but not what to do if noone cared.
Frontier have proven in the past few weeks they are aware, can and do adjust goal numbers based on player participation. So given the numbers are so obviously impossible for players to win the tide maybe they're trying to send a message here.
But it is frontier so that being a crackpot conspiracy and they just made a mistake they can't get approval to fix is equally likely.
I keep going back to dj truthsayers long running championing of getting rid of the bubble so that they can reset the entire community to a much smaller space.. but at this point that would be so out of line and just frack people off. 2 years. 2 years.
The thing is, the repair requirement on a station is much less than a typical CG gets - a station might be about 0.5 - 1 million tonnes, while a trade CG gets 2-3 million even in their depleted state, and DW2 just got similar amounts for its mining CGs. Even in Colonia where the population is much lower, our trade CGs get over 1 million tonnes in a week.
The original "Repair Jaques" CG got 300k tonnes - enough to repair a lightly damaged bubble station - transported all the way to Colonia before neutron boosts existed.
The tonnage requirements are not actually all that big compared with the size of the player base.
It's a pretty realistic simulation of an actual long-term war (as opposed to these BGS mini-skirmishes) then?
(In other words, I agree completely that it's not going to be fun gameplay)
I guess they finally listened to those players who said "this Thargoid invasion isn't doing anything" - which was true, they really weren't earning their "existential threat" awards. As Jmanis points out, they're still less overtly dangerous than actual wars.
Not many, indeed. At 6 extra systems a week, even assuming no successful fightbacks, it will still be well over a decade before even a quarter of the bubble is on fire.
It's the psychological aspect of it - 6 a week is already far too many for AX commanders to fight back. But even an attack rate of 100/week would take four years to clear the bubble.
Numerically, your imagination - the DW2 CGs got enough materials between them to repair about ten stations.
There are other factors which mean the repairs are a much harder task, though - not least the player base being split between an increasingly large stack of damaged stations rather than having a single coherent goal.
There isn't much evidence that the Thargoids can move faster than about 50LY/week [1] - while their hyperdrives are in many respects more advanced than ours, on raw speed we seem to have a substantial edge. It would therefore take them about a decade to get here. That's far enough away that "eventually" is not worth worrying about
Additionally, there's no sign in - or anywhere near - the Colonia region of Thargoid territorial markers, so it's not clear that they'd want to come here in the first place.
[1] Neither of the canonical theories for what they're doing in the bubble in the first place make any sense if they can move faster than that.
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All in all, I am of course perfectly happy for people to give up and come out to Colonia instead. No Thargoids, no Powerplay, some of the best engineers in the game, and everything is conveniently placed close together. I don't see why it isn't more popular.
I don't see how the Thargoid invasion storyline can be made to work, unfortunately. On an operational and tactical level, sure, Frontier could add more variety to anti-Thargoid gameplay. I hope they do. But on the overall strategic level, the scale is just not practical.
The bubble has approximately 20,000 inhabited systems. At their current rate of 6 systems per week, unopposed they would take 65 years to set fire to the entire bubble. That's not a fast enough rate for me to be concerned about it - the game might not be dead by 2084, but I almost certainly will be. But - as above - it's way too fast for the minority of players interested in AX combat or station repairs to stand any chance of meaningfully slowing it down either.
But, on the other side, with 20,000 systems, most players don't have any reason to care about most of them. The few occasions where the Thargoids have attacked anything generally considered important - Deciat, or Kamadhenu, for example - they've been beaten off easily. The Thargoids could set fire to literally half the bubble, and provided that they avoided (or were repelled) in under a hundred key systems, no-one would really notice. Sure, lots of individual players might need to move home system, and some BGS groups might ragequit, but even then the effect would be minor.
Similarly on a gameplay level, players like to win. Games like Freespace certainly had missions where "getting some of your fleet out alive" counted as a "win" - but you got to go back 30 minutes later for revenge. In Elite Dangerous, this gives a major problem for the Thargoid invasion. If players can beat them more often than not, they won't actually be invading, because they'll be losing the war from the start. But if players can't beat them more often than not, they'll just - in general - do something else instead. And the whole thing has to be spread out over months (years) so that players who went on holiday for a week don't come back to find they missed the entire war. As a realistic depiction of the futility of war, it's pretty good. Unfortunately...
As I said, I don't have any ideas how to fix this.
There's a big difference between having one centralized CG and fracturing the player base over dozens of them.
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Is ObsidianAnts' Station burning again?
I don’t want the bubble to burn — I’ve never been to Colonia and I rather enjoy flying around the systems one can see in the night’s sky or the systems of original elite.
I rather enjoyed the alien storyline when it was a mystery — but I haven’t yet gone to unlock the guardian weapons. If they hadn’t nerfed the AX missiles so horribly I might have got into AX combat — but the payouts are low and I rather enjoy PVP and PVE human combat. Thargoid scouts are fun, but I’ve only really intercepted them when I was on the Gnosis (and yes, I rather enjoyed that event).
I think that the NPC traders could do more to help repair stations and there should be some gameplay around protecting them.
Unfortunately I think the DW2 expedition is rather disruptive — the most committed players are elsewhere. Clearly the player base is prepared to move a lot of material to repair or build stations it cares about.
I rather enjoyed the alien storyline when it was a mystery — but I haven’t yet gone to unlock the guardian weapons. If they hadn’t nerfed the AX missiles so horribly I might have got into AX combat — but the payouts are low and I rather enjoy PVP and PVE human combat. Thargoid scouts are fun, but I’ve only really intercepted them when I was on the Gnosis (and yes, I rather enjoyed that event).
I think that the NPC traders could do more to help repair stations and there should be some gameplay around protecting them.
Unfortunately I think the DW2 expedition is rather disruptive — the most committed players are elsewhere. Clearly the player base is prepared to move a lot of material to repair or build stations it cares about.
The thing is, station repair isn't like a CG. CGs have a mechanism for tracking both global progress and the individual player's contribution. All station repair has is a list of station repair materials needed in Galnet. Passing lightly over the incompetent design of the Galnet page (who in their right mind thinks that letterbox format is how you should present lists or for that matter any sort of text?) when I ran supply missions to damaged stations early last year I discovered that Frontier weren't even bothering to keep the list up to date.
After a couple of months of this I decided that if Frontier couldn't be bothered why should I?
The whole thing is - well, calling it half-baked would be a compliment it didn't deserve.
The requiem for Elite, as a whole.
Not convinced that fdev care whether people engage or not - Thargoids are just another form of content. This is an Elite game - there will be Thargoids just as there will be trade / combat.
I don't think fdev have put so much effort into the design of the Thargoids just to allow us to beat them. More likely the next few years will be revealing more of the past, more content in the form of more interaction types.
So really all that fdev need to do is make the new content more worthwhile so people will look at it
Good:
* Initial station pax mission - getting good support as people realise the rescue missions are good for ranking (and fun)
* AX CZ - fun, and the wave bonuses make them pay reasonably (plus the combat ranking is good)
* trading medicines to attacked stations is apparently worthwhile
* Eagle Eye (when it works) - decoding is fun, working out the patterns is nice science (though v.niche)
Bad:
* Repairing stations - the progress reporting makes it hard to care / work out where to go
* Infested systems - NHSS spawn rate is too low to be worthwhile, plus the way fdev hide them
* Wrecked megaship scenarios - appear to now be not even appearing, when they do they are fun, but tough - RNG may need adjusting
Really hoping the 'dev led' stuff includes this area.
I don't think fdev have put so much effort into the design of the Thargoids just to allow us to beat them. More likely the next few years will be revealing more of the past, more content in the form of more interaction types.
So really all that fdev need to do is make the new content more worthwhile so people will look at it
Good:
* Initial station pax mission - getting good support as people realise the rescue missions are good for ranking (and fun)
* AX CZ - fun, and the wave bonuses make them pay reasonably (plus the combat ranking is good)
* trading medicines to attacked stations is apparently worthwhile
* Eagle Eye (when it works) - decoding is fun, working out the patterns is nice science (though v.niche)
Bad:
* Repairing stations - the progress reporting makes it hard to care / work out where to go
* Infested systems - NHSS spawn rate is too low to be worthwhile, plus the way fdev hide them
* Wrecked megaship scenarios - appear to now be not even appearing, when they do they are fun, but tough - RNG may need adjusting
Really hoping the 'dev led' stuff includes this area.
What was this "winter is coming" thing?