ANNOUNCEMENT Lavecon 2019 Content Reveal

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Exactly what I'm trying to explain to some of these gullible sods.

Everyone here thinks Frontier is a soddin' charity all of the sudden.
No one thinks its wierd we got practically 0 Content reveal.
We a full FAQ on what some Premium currency will be.

I dont think insulting people (regardless of which side of the coin your opinion is) is helpful to be honest.

you may be right and any in game earnings may be so miniscule as to be essentally pointless...... or you may be wrong, but i think it is only fair to suck it and see 1st. it has the potential to be great, and the potential to be rubbish. We cant know yet either way which it will go. Given what other people consider excessive grind and what i consider to be perfectly fine or even "too fast"... I reckon i have a chance of being satisfied by it. If not however i will moan when i have something to moan about

 

[BDelacroix]

Just read this this morning as this last weekend was a sort of extended holiday for the US customers.

1. We were not to have anything major until the end of next year, so take that into consideration.
2. Fleet carriers. They seem interesting, not sure what a solo player can (or even would) do with them. I happen to have 3 people in my group, but I am essentially solo. We know next to nothing about them so there's that.
3. The final point bothers me a little. I totally understand that Frontier needs to be making money. They are a business. I totally understand that cash shops are the go to in modern games. As anyone who even briefly peruses this thread can already see, cash shops have a bad reputation.

I also totally understand that I find them distasteful. A lot of effort went into changes to present the cash shop up front.
Again, I totally understand you need money. I just find cash shops distasteful. Don't worry too much. I also understand why Cracker Barrel has but one entrance and exit and everyone must pass through their shop before visiting the restaurant area to eat an overpriced meal.

 

[Rudolphus]

So again no content for LEP

 

[Dutchman141]

I think you're wrong. If the in-game Arx accumulation is like other games, then we may well earn enough to buy something every couple/few weeks. Maybe not the most expensive items (ship kits, exotic paint jobs), but a bobblehead, lighting effect, etc sure.

As an example, that's exactly how Fortnite works - you can purchase bundles of V-bucks for cash, or you can earn them in-game - and the rate of in-game accumulation has meant that I bought my son one Battlepass, three(?) years ago for 8.99£ and he has earned enough V-bucks in-game since then to buy another Battlepass for every 10 week season since then, and buy a few other bits with his leftovers. Sure, to buy one of the really expensive rare skins he'd need to save his leftover in-game V-bucks for a year, but he's happy with what he has, spends no money at all on the game, and is learning not to fall for what is basically a low level promotional gambit. If my 12 year old son can resist being stimulated into buying stuff he doesn't really need/want, I hope the adults playing ED can too.

Well I hope you're right but I'm not very enthusiastic about it.
With Fdev's reputation of loving grinds in ED I don't think those arx coins will be a goose with golden eggs.
They need to make money, nothing wrong with that, so giving out store items will be done very carefully.
As to adults or kids resisting in-game purches, I recall an EA employer once saying that people will buy actually anything, and EA is a master of milking the crowd so I think he knew what he was talking about.

Being able to change your vanity stuff in the main menu looks very convenient at first too but imho it's just a way to encourage players who are outside the bubble to buy the latest stuff before they've lost their interest by the time they return to the bubble.
Sounds hard but that's how businesses work, everything is focused on making money, especially an in-game store and/or it's currency.
Fdev is not a non profit organization by any means.

We'll just have to wait and see how this turns out but I'm not shouting yay free paints just yet.

 

[Alien]

Well I hope you're right but I'm not very enthusiastic about it.
With Fdev's reputation of loving grinds in ED I don't think those arx coins will be a goose with golden eggs.
They need to make money, nothing wrong with that, so giving out store items will be done very carefully.
As to adults or kids resisting in-game purches, I recall an EA employer once saying that people will buy actually anything, and EA is a master of milking the crowd so I think he knew what he was talking about.

Being able to change your vanity stuff in the main menu looks very convenient at first too but imho it's just a way to encourage players who are outside the bubble to buy the latest stuff before they've lost their interest by the time they return to the bubble.
Sounds hard but that's how businesses work, everything is focused on making money, especially an in-game store and/or it's currency.
Fdev is not a non profit organization by any means.

We'll just have to wait and see how this turns out but I'm not shouting yay free paints just yet.

Spot on ^^^

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

We'll just have to wait and see how this turns out but I'm not shouting yay free paints just yet.

A totally sensible decision. but equally i would say dont shout "booo! money grubbing sods either" (not accusing you btw)

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

So again no content for LEP

As expected. I think FD have already said all stuff this year is free for everyone (who owns horizons).... 2020 update should be when the LEPers get some sugar.

 

[marx]

FD announce no major updates until the big 2020 update.

People say they are dissaponted that the next update will not be a big one.

Consider that the last time FD said that two updates will be minor ones, which were Beyond chapters two and three, we still got some content.
This time around, it doesn't seem like there will be any. Just fleet carriers at the end of the year, which were said to be for squadrons only. Unless there's more to the December update they haven't revealed yet. But if there were, surely they would have mentioned it at least, no?

 

[Shnyrik]

Fleet carriers. They seem interesting, not sure what a solo player can (or even would) do with them. I happen to have 3 people in my group, but I am essentially solo. We know next to nothing about them so there's that.

It depends really much on their possible capabilities: would we be able to store ships/modules/cargo there, what would be the jump range, what would it require to recharge those jump drives, how would be interactions with other players implemented (i.e. stations, including mega-ships, are "immortal" now, but what would be with those carriers?) and so on.

For now we have an example of how a group of players can put a mobile station with it's 500 ly per week to a good use for exploration

 

[tokachy]

y las piernas para cuando, nos dan vueltas con tiendas y meganaves
y donde estan las piernas? y los planetas con atmosfera?

 

[EUS]

The game already has a currency, why does it need another?
Oh right, so the pre-existing customers cannot spend their already earned hrs of gaming.

 

[avow555]

I thought that in the UK they called 100 a grand.

100 is a Ton
1000 is a Grand

 

[amigacooke {macOS}]

FD announce no major updates until the big 2020 update.

People say they are dissaponted that the next update will not be a big one.

Do people not listen to what FD tell them? Are these the same people who say FD should listen to them and that FD don't speak to us?

I do listen and I try to rein my expectation in, but somehow Frontier finds a way to underwhelm me. A different way to get bits and bobs in a slightly more complicated way (or for free for the patient) wasn't in my wildest dreams or even my rather more reasonable dreams.

There are plus points, but very few for me.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

You are absolutely right.

So the Icy planets will arrive, perhaps, during the minor updates of 2020 before the new era ?

There were only two thing missing from that beyond 3.3, that was fleet carriers and ice planets. Fleet carriers are coming, so lets hope that the Ice planets are coming too. But I suppose they may wait until the 2020 update (but have it available to everyone with the required expansion). After fleet carriers there will likely only be two more updates until the big one.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

The game already has a currency, why does it need another?
Oh right, so the pre-existing customers cannot spend their already earned hrs of gaming.

Its a valid point however i think the ED credits are now borked to the point of uselessness. to balance against the billionaires would mean players like myself who play in a strict manner where if it smells exploity or unbalanced i wont go near it, would mean i could never buy anything.
balance it against players like myself and the billionaires would be able to buy everything in the store with change to spare.

so ultimately i think this is the only way FD could have done it to be honest.... (well not quite true they could have made it so doing specific missions or game content gave specific cosmetic rewards, but then that isnt monetisable - i really would love that however)

 

[marx]

It depends really much on their possible capabilities: would we be able to store ships/modules/cargo there, what would be the jump range, what would it require to recharge those jump drives, how would be interactions with other players implemented (i.e. stations, including mega-ships, are "immortal" now, but what would be with those carriers?) and so on.

Yup, and since I don't think the primary intended use for fleet carriers will be for exploration, but a mobile base for squadrons moving around in the bubble, I expect they won't be practical for deep galaxy exploration. Too little jump range and/or too high jump costs to make it feasible to move over large distances. I would be pleasantly surprised if they would turn out to be actually useful for exploration, but it's not what I expect.
Besides, it'll be interesting to see if you could even sell your data on carriers. The Gnosis does have UC, no?

 

[Dutchman141]

A totally sensible decision. but equally i would say dont shout "booo! money grubbing sods either" (not accusing you btw)

No offence taken, everyone is entitled to their own opinion and yours could be just as valid as mine.
I'm not calling them money grabbing sods in any way, I'm calling them a profitable business just like so many other businesses.

Just another thing to think about though, why do you think you can only gain credits by just playing the game?
Is it because Fdev is so incredibly generous or do they want to keep controll over how many arx coins you get, people tend to commit themselfs to grinds in this game, this way you can not influence how many arx coins you get by commiting yourselfs to arx grinds or other tasks in-game.

 

[GlitchedVision0101]

I'm hoping they add multiple ship bundles, say you like the cobalt blue paint job and want a bundle that includes that paint for all ships... that would be nice lol

 

[avow555]

The game already has a currency, why does it need another?
Oh right, so the pre-existing customers cannot spend their already earned hrs of gaming.

Unfortunately this a very common thing in MMO type games where people aquire large amounts of currency.
Have a look over at Star Trek Online it has multiple currencies.

 

[Northpin]

Somehow strange that no one came up yet with this question in the QA part about ARX points:

So I ask the console players who already have experience with frontier points (they're called like that, iirc?): Can you already purchase skins with these frontier points? If so, can you extract from these points (calculating it back to real money) what an average paintjob (roughly something between 3-5 Euro) would cost in real money?
What I'm up to in case you wonder is, if the real money prices for the cash shop won't significantly change, all what we still could complain about is if the choice of purchasable bundles is too rough or just too big so that fine grained purchases would be impossible and we're encouraged to purchase more than we actually need - which I strongly suppose. Anything else would be very naive to expect.

As it is now:
Frontier points are sold in packages of 300 (€3.99), 500 (€6.49) , 1000 (€12.49), 2500 (€29.99) points.
A 6-pack paint job is 300 points
A standard ship-kit is 700 points

Prices might seem higher for the 300 points package but this might be because MS/Sony are taking a cut.
But if you do the math for a ship-kit and a paint-kit, 1000 points (€12.49) equals the prices from the store €9+€3.5

So yea, you cannot pay for a single paint worth of 100 or 150 points (€1.25)
How much will let yourself being affected by this? Apparently for some this is worth throwing a tantrum.
Personally this is not affecting me, maybe because i'm the type that buys beer by the 6-pack and never by the bottle and the type that goes shopping once a week.

But this might not be the case for September update. Frontier might change the package size for Arx.
If they go for packages equivalent to 100, 300, 500, 1000 points, then you can make all sort of combinations to reach the amount you need.

And on top of that, we will also get some free Arx by simply playing the game.
Yet some still consider this a rip off...

edit: and you will also be able to buy a single paint not the entire paint kit. \o/
and somehow all of this is bad and is spelling doom for ED and FDev