During the recent "Full Throttle at Pareco" Buckyball race (which was ultimately a huge success) a slightly surprising (to me at least) topic came up which is that apparently there are a significant number of console players who've been reluctant to take part in Buckyball race events because differences between console and PC mean they feel they've been unable to post competitive times.
I'm actually quite disturbed by this as we (the Buckyball Racing Club) have always strived to be as inclusive as possible. We run our time trial races over the course of an entire week (so everyone, irrespective of timezone, family commitments, etc) gets a reasonable chance to participate; we loosely try not to run too many consecutive SRV (or other planetary based) events so as not to exclude non-Horizons players; we usually have a regulation ship class (so it's not just the richest players with the most engineered ships who win); and we (or at least I) believed that we were platform agnostic.
So what I'd like to do here is try to gather some feedback about the console based Elite: Dangerous experience and whether we should consider having separate leaderboards for PC and console in future races.
To be clear, personally I've never used either an Xbox or PS4 to play Elite so I am pretty ignorant about what the experience is like.
I believe the case for having separate leaderboards stems from two main areas. The first is the controller itself which many seem to feel is a barrier to competitive racing (although, at the risk of injecting too much bias here, I have to add that the Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS, which I personally use, is, as far as I know, also available for Xbox and PS4?). The second is that apparently consoles suffer from slower transition times in and out of supercruise and hyperspace, and also perhaps, performance issues re: openining up things like the side navigation panel?
On the flipside, the main argument for not having separate leaderboards is that we don't want to create an artificial divide between PC and console players if we don't have to. Any form of Us and Them situation is surely best avoided if at all possible?
So ... I'd really welcome people's input on this. I'm aware (from recent experience) that this subject can easily turn quite antagonistic so I'd like to encourage people to try and focus more on addressing this opening post than on what's been written in this thread by others. I'd also like to say now that not everyone contributing to this discussion will be a fluent English speaker so please try not to take immediate offence at any seemingly aggressive turns of phrase.
In particular I'd like to hear about people's first hand experience of any of the performance issues I've mentioned (especially anyone who's had the opportunity to play on both console and PC), I'm interested in thoughts on the controller issue and whether it's reasonable for me to say that a console player can get themselves a cheap HOTAS just as easily as I can, I'd like to know about any other factors I may have missed and I'd also really like to hear from console players who've been aware of past Buckyball Racing Club events but who haven't participated because of any of the reasons given above (or others).
Thanks in advance.
Alec Turner
I'm actually quite disturbed by this as we (the Buckyball Racing Club) have always strived to be as inclusive as possible. We run our time trial races over the course of an entire week (so everyone, irrespective of timezone, family commitments, etc) gets a reasonable chance to participate; we loosely try not to run too many consecutive SRV (or other planetary based) events so as not to exclude non-Horizons players; we usually have a regulation ship class (so it's not just the richest players with the most engineered ships who win); and we (or at least I) believed that we were platform agnostic.
So what I'd like to do here is try to gather some feedback about the console based Elite: Dangerous experience and whether we should consider having separate leaderboards for PC and console in future races.
To be clear, personally I've never used either an Xbox or PS4 to play Elite so I am pretty ignorant about what the experience is like.
I believe the case for having separate leaderboards stems from two main areas. The first is the controller itself which many seem to feel is a barrier to competitive racing (although, at the risk of injecting too much bias here, I have to add that the Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS, which I personally use, is, as far as I know, also available for Xbox and PS4?). The second is that apparently consoles suffer from slower transition times in and out of supercruise and hyperspace, and also perhaps, performance issues re: openining up things like the side navigation panel?
On the flipside, the main argument for not having separate leaderboards is that we don't want to create an artificial divide between PC and console players if we don't have to. Any form of Us and Them situation is surely best avoided if at all possible?
So ... I'd really welcome people's input on this. I'm aware (from recent experience) that this subject can easily turn quite antagonistic so I'd like to encourage people to try and focus more on addressing this opening post than on what's been written in this thread by others. I'd also like to say now that not everyone contributing to this discussion will be a fluent English speaker so please try not to take immediate offence at any seemingly aggressive turns of phrase.
In particular I'd like to hear about people's first hand experience of any of the performance issues I've mentioned (especially anyone who's had the opportunity to play on both console and PC), I'm interested in thoughts on the controller issue and whether it's reasonable for me to say that a console player can get themselves a cheap HOTAS just as easily as I can, I'd like to know about any other factors I may have missed and I'd also really like to hear from console players who've been aware of past Buckyball Racing Club events but who haven't participated because of any of the reasons given above (or others).
Thanks in advance.
Alec Turner
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