Use it more and FD will fix it...
A little concerned at Gameplay additions being abandoned
- Thread starter TheSisko
- Start date
Raxxla?
It's rumoured once you find that it opens up new stuff in the Large Magellanic Cloud to explore ;D
anything older than 5 minutes is forgotten about with Frontier, exploration update, mining update, CQC, PP, Multicrew, SRVs, Planets, The Dolphin etc etc etc.
(rips windshield rear-view mirror off car and throws it away ) "What's behind me is not important"- Raul Julia, The Gumball Rally, 1976.
I used to believe that as well and things over at CQC have been improved ever since people use the CQC Discord to help setup matches. However, both features require some serious modifications to make them usable, but those players won't play it, so Frontier won't fix it.
The players have voted that the want the BGS manipulation as their end game, not Powerplay, so that's why the BSG got extensively modified at the end of Beyond. Which is a shame because some people have come up with a solution that will keep powerplayer's (Both Pvp'ers and Pve'ers) happy.
The Frontier catch 22.
Frontier: We don't want to fix it because nobody uses it.
Players: Nobody uses it because you haven't fixed it.
If I were, I'd be asking you guys about this Powerthingy I see mentioned now and then.
Just because the testing process is sub-par, that doesn't mean that features shouldn't be improved and maintained, when resources permit of course. And they don't need to make big changes, just small, agile changes as time goes by.
Just because the testing process APPEARS sub-par... it is terribly easy for each of us to sit where we are going "Didn't anybody test this?", when in fact things do get tested, however the development environment is often very different than the production environment. Different end-user machines aside, the internal environment is still going to be quite different than our environment. Sorry, just a personal rabid pet-peeve of mine. I'll have to have it put to sleep.
And I certainly did not suggest things should not be worked, tweaked, enhanced or improved - most things around here do need all of this and then some. I highly doubt anyone at Frontier considered any aspect of the game to be completely complete at this point. Games like this develop, in many ways, like children. Some grow taller faster, other develop more musculature, while others just grow hair in strange places - all long before, or much later than any of their peers. In the end, they all wind up as fully developed adults of one shape or another.
Elite is just getting into puberty - zits and all. The September update turned out to be quite a zit on all of our buttocks. But like any reputable dermatologist will tell you: "Don't Squeeze It." It's sore right now, don't make it fester, and certainly don't go picking, plucking, pulling or squeezing anything else right now.
As a developer, the first thing I was taught was to make your test environment as close to live as possible - making copies of live databases etc. I have no idea how Frontier are doing things, nor do I claim to be the coding wizards they are, nor do I deny that there is a very good reason why the test server isn't a perfect match for live- but - something IS wrong! That's fact. Adding Arx should not be causing the cliuster-frack of bugs we've had!
This game has had, what, 5 years of development now? That's a long time for any game. Sooner or later, it should be showing signs of its true potential, or getting close to it. I don't think just adding on half-baked gameplay elements and calling it a day is the best way of doing that, for Frontier's flagship IP no less.
Its like seeing a kid getting C+ grades when you know with 15% more effort, they could be getting B+ or even As. Just some extra care and attention, that's all I'm asking for. That would benefit everyone, Frontier and us.
I just produced a VERY large magellanic cloud....have at it!
I wish I could find the stream from way back when - sometime before the bug that caused mission to fail as soon as they were accepted. One of the Frontier folk actually talked about how sensitive the Cobra Engine was to coding changes, and how a simple seeming change, like changing the credit value for a mission could affect completely seemingly unrelated portions of the game. I have seen this sort of thing in two distinct arenas.
The first being when a development team purchases a third party engine as a development platform. Big commercial engines like Unreal, CryTech and Gamebryo all have top-notch support for development partners, but that doesn't always keep things from unraveling in weird ways, and I've been onboard with a few Early Release projects using these engines. Unity also has its share of these kinds of things.
The other case, and while less obvious to the majority, is when you're working with an engine of extraordinary complexity - Sims 3/4 (Elsie I believe it is called). Due to the nature of the engine and its extraordinary complexity, engine based mods are extremely difficult to create, often requiring dozens or even hundreds of hours of testing, retesting and debugging to make work correctly. Even earlier versions of this engine (Sims 2) were incredibly complex. I made all of one engine-based mod, transforming the "Wedding Arch" into a suitable Wedding Altar. I did no further such mod work, due to unbelievable complexity and sheer number of problems that arose during development of this. EA never released any modding tools for changes of this nature either, which only added to the complexity, though having spoken with some of the designers they assured me the tools they had to use were even more complex than the simple methods we had available for making these kinds of mods and changes. I did muster a few "official" kudos for my efforts in getting this to work when all was said and done.
I suspect the Cobra Engine falls into this realm - something so complex even Rube Goldberg would go "that's excessively complicated". I'd love to hear from an "insider" to confirm this.
Hell yes. I would love some high-money hauling missions to take stuff along the CCHwy to stations along the route. Would be cool to work up a ship for doing that which could take 500+ tons at a time.
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I'm fairly new, and it doesn't take a Professor Palin (see what I did there) to see they don't give 2 steaming craps about PP anymore. It's a shame. Not even a mention they will CONSIDER working on it in the future. The 2020 update will surprise the hell out of me if it includes even one minor revision to it.
PP could be one of the things that really adds a lot of replay value and player interaction if they improved it. Players want it improved. It wouldn't take much. Better rewards, a possible migration to Open only (which would be welcomed with better rewards), more npc interaction and dialogue to make you feel like you're part of a huge imperial or federal arny, NOT PAYING MILLIONS FOR MERITS (I've never understood how a high ranking general or prince would only just about make his credits back instead of getting a realistic stipend), Aisling noods for reaching rank 5, etc. Okay, that last one was a joke... maybe.
Idk about everyone else but PP was one of the features I was really excited to try out when I first started playing Elite... Until I tried Power Play.
EDIT: When I say "I'm fairly new" I meant new to the forums. I've been playing Elite for over a year.
PP could be one of the things that really adds a lot of replay value and player interaction if they improved it. Players want it improved. It wouldn't take much. Better rewards, a possible migration to Open only (which would be welcomed with better rewards), more npc interaction and dialogue to make you feel like you're part of a huge imperial or federal arny, NOT PAYING MILLIONS FOR MERITS (I've never understood how a high ranking general or prince would only just about make his credits back instead of getting a realistic stipend), Aisling noods for reaching rank 5, etc. Okay, that last one was a joke... maybe.
Idk about everyone else but PP was one of the features I was really excited to try out when I first started playing Elite... Until I tried Power Play.
EDIT: When I say "I'm fairly new" I meant new to the forums. I've been playing Elite for over a year.
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So instead of introducing a dozen half-baked elements to the game, maybe they should have introduced three or four well thought out and feature-complete items. There's plenty of us who'd be happier with no PowerPlay, CQC, Multicrew, [insert half-baked cookie here] if it meant what's in the game was fully baked and debugged.
I've long rallied for Finishing a Feature - Horizons for example. They gave us Engineers and Planetary Landings. Well, some of it - they gave us landings on airless worlds, leaving every form of atmospheric world locked away (still). Now I get, there's a lot involved in atmospheric landings, but I would have been more than glad to trade off space artichokes (thargoids) showing up at all for the ability to land on swampy world with a thick, swirling argon atmosphere instead.
But perhaps because they are the Disciples of RNGesus, we have a lot of fractured bits, slowly working their ways together instead of something that might be a bit less expansive in scope, but more polished.
I seriously question what exposure you have to commercial software development, to post such garbage.
Sorry, but it's plainly visible and obvious that they are a 2-bit gaming house trying to play with the big boys but haven't yet made it out of the play pit. I have 35+ years experience in the software development industry, so unless you can match that don't even bother trying to peddle that garbage near me.
Sorry it really irks me no end to hear this tripe peddled around. If the dev environments are so different then it simply shows that these people have no clue what they are doing. Why would anyone develop on a platform that was so different to what the actual players have? It makes so sense what-so-ever, but does in a way explain the pathetic ethos frontier display on a release basis. Bad coding, untested fixes, untested new code etc etc
And before some intern jumps out at me with the while release, gits, branches stuff. I am well aware of them, I use them on a daily basis with another 500 odd devs/analyists and PMs. Yet we never manage to produce the manure heap that frontier manage to create.
Whats even funnier to us looking at this is how they then implement a scenario where when the bugs are reported, they then have to be voted on or get ignored. Pathetic, but expected from amateurs. But yes a good way to bury their heads in the sand.
But the bit that really takes the biscuit is the posts on these forums giving the 'oh give them a break', 'the dev environs are diff to the test environs' stuff. And then people accept that as par for the course and how dev actually works in large scale commercial enterprises. It is not.
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hmmmmmm I kind of hope the opposite. IF FD are still keen to make PP open only I think it needs to be 100% removed from the BGS and be its own separate entitiy, otherwise FD will be making large parts of the BGS Open only which I cant support.
as for OP I too am worried at FDs logic of only developing features if they are used a lot...... because it is a chicken and egg problem. IF a feature is half baked then players are less likely to use it, which then means less likely to be developed.
IF OOPP is officially off the table then sure, build it into the game.... however at the same time this happens i would like to hear an official confirmation that PP would be staying mode agnostic so as to stop the panic which would be inevitable should that happen. equally CQC could have parts of it put into the game (keep what we have now but add to it)
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