Quoted for truth...
Concerns about the scale...
- Thread starter Vaeth
- Start date
Quoted for truth...
Well the game is not REALLY big, after all it's only the milkeyway generated.
Just be happy they did not decide to add all the other procederaly generated galaxys,
Just as many as stars in our galaxy AFAIK.
Not to speak of the intergalaxy journey.
IF, hopefully a IGdrive will be buyable (just kidding)
Just be happy they did not decide to add all the other procederaly generated galaxys,
Just as many as stars in our galaxy AFAIK.
Not to speak of the intergalaxy journey.
IF, hopefully a IGdrive will be buyable (just kidding)
If it was single player only it wouldnt be a problem, so why just because it is now possible to bump into another human is it a problem.
The game is full of ships, friends, foes, neutral. Some human controlled, some not.
Most not.
Before your chances of meeting another human were 0. Now its possible, but it will never be wall to wall, well, some places will be.
The game is full of ships, friends, foes, neutral. Some human controlled, some not.
Most not.
Before your chances of meeting another human were 0. Now its possible, but it will never be wall to wall, well, some places will be.
In what way is the Galaxy excluded from that idea with the current design?
(Folks, don't get out your popcorn yet... one might hope that isn't what we're talking about here)
People can do what they want. Hang out in the core systems, go exploring, whatever. It's all available, with as much or as little socializing as each individual player wants.
Even better, we're getting (I think) three character slots. Keep one in the core systems for more interaction with other commanders if you want it. Have another one out exploring the fringe where there's a pretty good chance you'll never meet another player. And then one more; maybe that's the one you use for combat training by smashing up free Sidewinders, or demo'ing the game for friends at your computer where all you're risking is the free Sidewinder. You don't have to choose between being alone out in the Galaxy, or busy with other players in the core systems. You can do both!
The size of the Galaxy puts no restrictions on socializing. That's up to each individual player.
@Zenicetus Where did you hear or read about 3 character slots?
:S
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I'm afraid you're the one being inflammatory this time. Despite all the holes in the unnecessary statement, I have no motivation to care about it.
I was simply pointing out that because the chances used to be 0 doesn't mean that .01 is a goal that everyone should be satisfied with, and anyone who isn't satisfied is wrong. Just to encourage diversity in the community and people's perception of possible gameplay. I tried to do this in the simplest way possible.
You know... To avoid turning the thread into a mudfest?
Thank you.
It's been mentioned in the forum several times, and it's mentioned on the Wikia FAQ about the game, but I can't find a direct link to a DDA discussing it. Maybe someone else will post a link.
I always assumed that it was players assuming there would be several slots, not necessarilly 3, just more than 1. I'm not sure it has ever been confirmed or denied.
@ Windscreen Smudge:
Okay, I apologize if I insinuated something that wasn't implied by your complaints about the game. I'm still interested to know what this is about:
Is it a complaint about the scale of the Galaxy being modeled, or about the game mechanics? Because it seems to me that there are plenty of ways players can interact (or not) that won't be affected by the staggering galactic scale. It's a player's choice to get lost in the Galaxy if he or she wants to, and they can still keep a "social" player somewhere else.
Edit to add: Assuming that's actually the plan. It would be nice to get some confirmation on multiple characters per account.
Okay, I apologize if I insinuated something that wasn't implied by your complaints about the game. I'm still interested to know what this is about:
Is it a complaint about the scale of the Galaxy being modeled, or about the game mechanics? Because it seems to me that there are plenty of ways players can interact (or not) that won't be affected by the staggering galactic scale. It's a player's choice to get lost in the Galaxy if he or she wants to, and they can still keep a "social" player somewhere else.
Edit to add: Assuming that's actually the plan. It would be nice to get some confirmation on multiple characters per account.
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Before WoW Made a fecal fest of the entire idea of social interaction within an MMO, random encounters with people you had never met before was one of the premier forms of said social interaction, and is still what most people look forward to in an MMO.
Low player density through instancing combined with a huge, for all practical purposes endless playing area makes random encounters far less likely, and even more less likely to lead to any meaningful social interaction.
So for anyone for whom that is the main draw of an MMO is the random interaction which builds into in-game acquaintances, connections etc.. which I think the OP is one such person, these attributes of Elite can be worrisome for obvious reasons.
That's why I pointed out that it may be multiplayer, and it may be massive, but it is not massively multiplayer. The distinction is important.
If that's true, then "most people" have plenty of other choices in an MMO.
This one isn't copying the standard templates. It doesn't force player interaction, it allows it, at the player's discretion, and made even easier when we get multiple character slots. And yes, WoW might have paved the way a bit, with allowing players a choice of playing styles. ED just takes it much further, and personally I think that's a very good fit when the scale of the "game world" is as vast as this one is.
Anyone wanting intense PvP action or cooperative activities like a Miner's Guild will have no trouble finding it, by sticking to the core systems or joining the faction wars. And other players will choose other paths through the game. It's a big Galaxy out there.
From what we have been led to believe at present: if there are more than 32 players in a given area with decent ping times to each other, then there will be a new island created.
If you are unlucky enough to always be the 33rd player in an area, and there are only ever 33 compatible players in each area through some massively improbable set of circumstances, then your fear of travelling through space whilst stuck on an island with only a basketball named Wilson for company may have been justified.
But how likely is that, really? I would say not very.
So the chances of running into random human beings is no less likely than if everyone was playing on one big server (or a few big distributed servers, spread globally, as it would have to be for a game like this unless FD were planning to introduce some kind of quantum-entanglement based network architecture with the game).
The way they are doing it means that I don't have to pay a subscription fee, which is fine by me, and I may still run into the odd human (and let's face it, most of the humans on this forum are odd ones).
I'm with you part way on this. Random encounters are absolutely the best thing about MMO's too me and can make even a bad MMO fun for me.
The game mechanics are giving the players a degree of control over those chances. Playing solo means no random encounters. Playing in open and going places known to have a high player population (I think we can agree that this will be common knowledge in the community) maximizes those chances. People who prefer social interaction can find it, those who don't will not. I think that this choice can be a major draw for the game.
I agree that doing everything you can to maximize your chances will still result in less random encounters than are normal in an MMO.
But I disagree that this will make such encounters less significant. It will make such encounters more meaningful and memorable. The rarity of an event increases its significance.
My biggest objection to MMOs to date has been lack of scale. The size of Elite is it's primary fascination for me, and scale is the last thing I would want changed.
Instances are also separated by region and latency, which means if you don't live in an urban area or you do live in a region where a lot of people don't play Elite, or you have a bad ping, you won't be seeing many people by default and it goes downhill from there.
Right now there is a minimum of 3 slices to the pie.
1:Location
2:Quality of ISP
3: Number of eligible instances available.
And all three slices of the pie can get thinner based upon individual circumstances.
For some people, that's a pretty bleak prospect. I'd like to see more options in this area, like the ability to customize these parameters so that you can appear more often in populated instances even if the experience is sub-par.
Oh just stop, you completely ignored the rest of my post and got up on your soapbox to spout out the usual stuff about how Elite is going to be exactly how you envision it, because your vision parallels the great Brabens scriptures, and nothing that contradicts this vision will ever occur and any discrepancies in the holy scriptures is a matter of perception.
No one is amused.
That sounds reasonable.
I didn't see anything like that in those comments, IMO you twisted his comments. I'm perceiving some anger here, like it's getting personal.
No one is amused.
Can't get angry over rhetoric. It's rhetoric.
You do get tired of hearing it after the 9th or 10th time though, and start to wish that someone would change the station.
If someone out in the sticks somewhere wants to play with their 2-tin-cans-and-a-piece-of-string "broadband" connection, with all the resultant lag/packet loss/drops/etc, a client-server architecture might sound good for them. However, even the best predictive models can only do so much before problems start to occur, if the connectivity issues are great enough.
If dodgy connections have any negative effect on the experience of other players with high-fibre data diets, how is it fair to allow any mechanism whereby players can force such a situation into existence?
(People in urban areas have to put up with living in urban areas, and you want to try and force them to suffer an online experience as poor as those who have access to fresh air and scenery? That seems a bit unfair to me!)
Also, isn't mentioning areas of low takeup a bit redundant? If the amount of "SpaceGame" players in your region could fit into a phone box, the chance that the "SpaceGame" publisher will set up a server to cater for your miniscule player population is remote, so you're essentially repeating the latency argument, aren't you?