October Community Update Discussion Thread

you have very low standard for video games then,because ED has turned into a stale buggy mess,and no new updates worth $

Just because I like different things in games has nothing to do with 'standards' and that statement in itself is very arrogant and quite ignorant of others tbh.
And seeing as you aren't paying anything for the 'updates' proposed why cry about it?

If the game is for me or not, I can judge for myself. I have more than a year of playing time and have been involved since august 2014. No excuse for the relocation.

And I've been playing for over 3 years... whoop de doooo… I never said whether is for you or not I simply said if you aren't having fun don't play, that's your choice mate.
But if you play and aren't having fun then I would have entirely other questions for you...
 
Funny that for years people were doomsaying "maintenance mode" and people were saying, rubbish, stop exaggerating.
Now, we're all cheering on maintenance mode "yes, we don't want new stuff, we just want bugs fixed, let it take as long as it takes." :)

The sad truth is, nothing completely new has been added since the middle of 2016.
2017 brought "the return", thargoids, the rest of the year was "planning and bug fixing".
2018 brought Beyond, a rework of core mechanics. No new content as such, just better versions of what we had, and bug fixes.
2019 and 2020 were going to be small updates, and bug fixing.
We are in a constant loop of bug fixing, have been for years. The issue is, that some old bugs never went away, and with each small update, new bugs appear.

The reason Fleet carriers seemed a big deal, is that it was the first entirely new gameplay addition since the introduction of ship launched fighters in 2016. You could argue that Thargoids in 2017 was new, but that had been ongoing since 2015 and really it was another USS hunt with a bigger, harder NPC that you fight (plus i'll never recover from the loss of all the science and mystery that existed before they became a big bug hunt game).

This might go all the way back to the time when Horizons was first launched. Remember, ED didn't smash it's kickstarter, there were times it looked a bit shaky. Sales were decent but not massive after it was released. When Horizons first appeared it was at a premium cost, that had to be reduced fairly quickly before people jumped in a bought it in any great numbers. I would guess, that this loss of income is the reason it took two years to complete rather than one (half the income half the resource). It also probably explains why some decisions were made to cut corners to be able to meet the promises that were made. There might even have been a feeling that the project was basically done at that point and new income from elsewhere was needed, so it didn't matter how features were implemented, just get them in there under budget.

The interesting thing though was that sales kept going, horizons sales took off and then the console ports happened. People bought a lot of cosmetics and the community kept growing so it was a money maker in the long run.
This creates a problem, it would be madness to just cut off that income stream, so development has to keep happening, but now you have to deal with adding things to a code base that may have been a series of sticking plasters to keep it running short term, and any big changes mean that you have to almost go back to the start and rewrite it completely.
I am guessing that this is the 2020 plan. It's a ground up rewrite. The part finished projects that were whispered about in the past can't be added to the existing code as it would fall over completely, so they got dusted off, updated and written to fit in with this entirely new version of the game.
There are a load of things that "almost" made it, proper damage models, visible ship interiors (remember the half destroyed Anaconda floating in space with cargo spilling out of the cargo racks), comets, dredgers, ice planets, big planetary features, fleet carriers, multicrew (joking, joking).

This makes a lot of sense. It also explains why everything new has to basically reuse mechanics that already exist.
I would say that if this is the case, then the developers have actually done an amazing job, they have had to be creative to keep finding new ways to use the same assets, shoehorn new things in that don't upset the shaky base code and still keep it all hanging together. It must be disheartening for them to know they are doing the best with what they have available but they know that they're severely limited and us lot are biting at them for all the proposed features that were spoken about in the beginning (atmospheric landing, EVA repairs, ship boarding, hunting things on planets, space legs, etc etc).

The good news is that there is probably a lot of work in progress things that can be added to this new version of the game. That means that the work didn't go to waste.
The bad news, well, two years isn't actually that long to totally rewrite the game, and we really shouldn't expect to see anything in the meantime.

The danger is that people just walk away from the game completely and lose faith, so they have the risk that even if they pull off a miracle, not enough people will be prepared to come back and pony up the money, and player drop off over the two quiet years hurts their potential to make any return on the effort required.

I'm betting that ARX was a way to mitigate that risk, that's why it had to be added when it was. If enough people "invest" in ARX and start to build a cash reserve, then it covers the costs until they can get income from the big update. For FDEV, ARX is almost like money in the bank. The old way of "buying as and when" isn't as reliable as people pre purchasing "credits" and it looks good to the investors.

So, i'm going to give them another chance. I'm going to buy more ARX, i'll keep playing the game (though a lot less, there isn't really anything else left for me to do at the moment). I'll buy the next update no matter what. What Fdev need to do short term is put a small team to task on just story telling, creating events, little things that create excitement. Could be as silly as unlocking a few permit locked sectors and hiding some new assets to find or missions to recover lost objects, or throw in some science puzzles. This is a good time to get those rumours in full swing :) I'm sure they could hand place a few more things around the galaxy, maybe bases built by generation ships that crashed onto planets, who knows :)
 
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I think a focus on bug-fixing is probably a good thing, since while the major bugs tend to get fixed fairly quickly - on PC, at least, consoles seem to be stuck with some long-running crash bugs - there's a lot of bits where a feature just doesn't quite work ... lots of bits in the tracker around fighting Thargoids, or Powerplay CC calculations, or the Codex scanning ... and clearing that up would help a lot to polish things and improve the existing features.

However, this also needs to come with a focus on the bug tracker itself, so that Frontier can actually find out what bugs need fixing. There are thousands of "unconfirmed" bugs in it ... but
- some of these have actually already been fixed
- many of them are duplicates of other confirmed bugs, or other unconfirmed bugs
- many of them are not actually bugs at all, but misunderstandings of how the game is supposed to work [1]
- a few of them are genuine problems but should have been support tickets rather than bug reports.
...so the actual bugs are buried under a mass of other stuff, which makes it difficult for us to find and confirm them if we are also affected.

If Frontier are serious about fixing bugs, then this needs to start by getting some more people working on the bug tracker and properly triaging the backlog.

(Turning the confirmation threshold down would help, too - it's unnecessarily high at the moment)


[1] One example that I saw a while back: someone was fighting in a RES, and suddenly their shields collapsed instantly from 2/3 strength. They fled the fight but their shields didn't come back. They'd got away from the NPCs and were checking their modules, when their ship mysteriously exploded. A clear bug ... or probably they just nudged the "silent running" key.
 
Funny that for years people were doomsaying "maintenance mode" and people were saying, rubbish, stop exaggerating.
Now, we're all cheering on maintenance mode "yes, we don't want new stuff, we just want bugs fixed, let it take as long as it takes." :)
The two updates (April and September) this year have brought a bunch of QoL changes and New Player Experience improvements; Fleet Carriers are still being developed and on roadmap, just delayed to Q2 2020. In the interim FDev say we'll be getting two updates focused on bug fixes to stabilise the game, ready for Fleet Carriers. New Era has been in production since Summer 2018 and due Q4 2020.

All of the above rules out "maintenance mode":
Wikipedia said:
In the world of software development, maintenance mode refers to a point in a program's life when it has reached all of its goals and is generally considered to be "complete" and bug-free. Continued development is deemed unnecessary or ill-advised, but occasional bug fixes and security patches are still issued, hence the term maintenance mode.


The sad truth is, nothing completely new has been added since the middle of 2016.
2017 brought "the return", thargoids, the rest of the year was "planning and bug fixing".
2018 brought Beyond, a rework of core mechanics. No new content as such, just better versions of what we had, and bug fixes.
Come on now - simply check the bulletted summaries on Elite Wikia if you've forgotten what new content and features were added.
https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Elite_Dangerous:_Horizons
https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Elite_Dangerous:_Beyond

While copy-pasting a list to here seems redundant, here's a marked screengrab of just Beyond 3.3's new content and feature additions (yellow dots) alone (which I created yesterday for another CMDR misclaiming "nothing new has been added"):
9UHAnTb.png
 
Betas.... eh.... didnt work too well the last time. Sure we got to test and play around with new features and squash some bugs beforehand... only to deal with brand new bugs after the beta at launch.

Betas help and I'm on board with public betas. But they are not a cure all, and yes much to the dismay of some, there will be bugs at launch. Deal. Adapt and overcome.
 
Betas.... eh.... didnt work too well the last time. Sure we got to test and play around with new features and squash some bugs beforehand... only to deal with brand new bugs after the beta at launch.

Betas help and I'm on board with public betas. But they are not a cure all, and yes much to the dismay of some, there will be bugs at launch. Deal. Adapt and overcome.
There will be a beta test for the fixes from the beta test... repeat.

We all know that one bug fix leads to several new 'features' in ED so not expecting a bug free update of any kind.
 
Purely personal perspective:
I don't know how may others playing ED 'create' their own game in the sandbox galaxy as at least that way some direction is given to the game outside of tasks already provided. Since the 'confirmation' of FC's in December I had been planning around a year's worth of play for my alt based around the information we had already been given. Since the announcement yesterday of another 2 quarter delay to enable bug-fixing that idea has, of course, been discarded...

I guess I had better cook up a whole new set of 'silly things' to do now, but today I'm feeling less inclined - no doubt I'll bounce back in time :)
 
And people said years back that Elite wasn't in maintenance mode. LOL at them.
This game clearly exceeds the capacity of FD. 100 developers they said. Ha!

Evertytime I see a comment like this... I wonder if the poster is aware of the "next era" developement that is said to be even bigger than Horizons?
 
There's not really much to discuss. We've been informed.
As hard as it may be to accept, we're not the ones in charge of Elite, its development, project directions, or anything. We're just here to play, report bugs and spend money.

If slowing things down is what it takes to get a better quality release, then slow them down. It's not like Star Citizen is going to be any closer to release anyways.
It's not like the space ship demi-sim market is overflowing with competing titles.
We're a pretty small niche in the gaming world, so why not fill it the best possible way?
 
I'm betting that ARX was a way to mitigate that risk, that's why it had to be added when it was. If enough people "invest" in ARX and start to build a cash reserve, then it covers the costs until they can get income from the big update. For FDEV, ARX is almost like money in the bank. The old way of "buying as and when" isn't as reliable as people pre purchasing "credits" and it looks good to the investors.

Interesting theory... however, ever since Arx got implemented, I have not given FD any real money for cosmetics. Since I can earn Arx by doing things in the game, FD have, in my case at least, shot themselves in the foot. If I want a new Paintjob or whatever, I will just save my Arx that I earn ingame. No point for me to buy cosmetics for real money any more.
 
Does anyone know if FDev spends any time reading these forums (especially suggestions), or is reddit the de facto official-but-unofficial platform like it is with Warframe?
 
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