Fleet Carriers - Patch 3 - Known Issues
- Thread starter Stephen Benedetti
- Start date
Thanks Stephen. I have but a few comments.
1. I presume that in addition to gathering analytics from the game engine you will also be actually playing the game to experience what your users are experiencing? Is it not absolutely critical that play testing is done?
2. The user community has in fact voiced a great many comments on the quality of the patch (i.e. 4 attempts to fix mining exploits, resulting in the worst mining experience ever, and abrasion blaster not working) which have not yet been acknowledged. If your response does not address this concern, can you please let us know if indeed you will be responding to this concern?
3. The changes you make to the mining hotspot distribution logic are required, however in this context it is not just the 'fixing' that needs to be done. There is evidence from the patch history and user feedback that multiple attempts to fix mining have gone seriously wrong. It is simply insufficient to keep putting sticking plasters on a problem when you need to step back and ensure you understand the code enough to get things right first time - and absolutely not end up breaking the fundamental functionality of mining tools. This is not a good look, and by not acknowledging this whatsoever, there is no increase in credibility for Frontier as a game development company. A design review should happen, so that mining code can be maintained, because clearly Frontier are not able to maintain it with any acceptable level of quality - i.e. the last patch.
4. By now Frontier should have rolled back to the previous patch. Why? Because in any other commercial software setting that is precisely what would have happened. A critical bug (abrasion blasters) plus an assortment of other bugs were introduced. It is not just the development and testing process that has come under fire, it is also the fundamental principles by which Frontier maintain and update the game. So for the last 24 hours, and perhaps another few days, you are comfortable with leaving your game out there, exposed to existing and new players alike, fundamentally broken?
5. Responses would benefit from being somewhat more genuine, with apologies called out for actual mistakes. Again, no apology at all for breaking the abrasion blaster is pretty much unbelievable. Where is the accountability?
6. If you are able to, and this has not already happened, please escalate this issue within Frontier. Such was the unimpressive quality of the last patch, many players have progressed to the next level of disappointment and disillusionment. It is extremely likely that the profitability of future big updates (e.g. space legs) has already suffered as a result of this latest patch, and if any systemic problems are unchecked, it is inevitable that profits will continue to be hit. The gaming industry has many examples of users taking a stand and simply not buying games from particular publishers out of principle.
Apologies if any of that sounded harsh, but I thought it worth calling out, and you may disagree with me of course. I wish you luck in addressing the next patch, although as I mentioned, the roll-back should have happened arguably about 2 hours after it went live when it became clear you disabled a key mining tool for all users in many contexts.
o7
I stand by my statement - Mining is / should be the most basic profession. There is very little danger involved in doing it.
There are some days when I play and want to do something a bit dangerous and other days when I just want a harmless couple of hours losing myself from the real world.
Mining used to be a boring / difficult thing to do. It needed a bit of love and attention. The revamp of mining needed a driver for why peope would do it (apart from deep core explosions going boom) so made it financially profitable. In my opinion, it now has a different driver - Tritium mining, and should therefore not need a financial push.
There are missions for mining x amount of y mineral to pay z credits - that is the financial way to money money from mining if one needs to exist.
![[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/234/234580.jpg?1612617334){kind=avatar}
Is there any info available on the patch my PS4 is installing now? I know they said yesterday there would be one but that was it.
Mining has become incredibly easy, this is true. There is at least some skill in core and SSD mining, but the normalisation of exploits into 'methods' is not my cup of tea. Each to their own, but I go into the void and mine places I've found.
In terms of realism, mining precious commodities for money makes sense. The market dynamics, well I'm not too sure about them.
Given the 5bn CR benchmark for a Fleet Carrier, IMO the financial rewards for other activities should increase. Here is an example - who in their right mind is going to take a mission to destroy 90 elite level ships for 12m CR? Missions like that, which take a looooong time, should be afforded a larger time limit, and 10 times the reward.
I am downloading it too now but there’s no info about it anywhere yet.
Why is special attention paid only to issues related to the latest updates? What to do with the problems that have been dragging on for several years? Or is it no longer a problem?
^^^^This x100
If I recall correctly, I saw something buried in the thread from the community support guys that it was a pre-patch. As in, wouldn't make any changes itself but was preparing for a subsequent patch.
Aah okay thanks.
Thanks. Mine is done. I neither own a carrier or mine, so I’m not sure what they have given us but the game seems to be working ok.
Thanks, I read that but it was as vague as a politician’s tax return. I just wondered if they’d given any further specifics.
For me, I always envisioned most of this happening via the Squadron/Player Factions mechanics.
My Commander names are D.D. Harriman and James "Mac" McIntyre from the Heinline Man Who Sold the Moon universe blended with a lot of his other stuff. My D.D. Harriman is the original resurrected as a "female" because I am fem in real life (the story character never had children just like the Heinline character "Slip Stick" Libby, never had children and when Lazarus Long went back to retrieve Libby's body to do a rejuvenation, they discovered "he" was actually inter-sexed and during the rejuvenation developed as a female rather than a non-functioning male (my personal place in life) Lazarus Long retrieved D.D. Harriman because it was his basic Industrial Enterprises he built so he could go to the moon that enabled the Long Family to escape Earth.
My Squadron is Harriman and Strong Limited (HASL) which was the Industrial Enterprise.
My long term plan was to eventually get enough like minded role players together and create a Player Faction, in a suitable system, Harriman and Strong Limited or maybe The Future History Players and build our own "economy". I had a couple real life friends that were interested, but they lost interest when wing/multiplayer mining was broken. Is multiplayer mining possible even yet, what, 8 months later??
Right now the game is basically broken since it looks like just trying to go to a system to sell ANYTHING can result in destruction but I am going to give it a shot and sell off all the exploration data I currently have then let the game sit for a few weeks.
All because the DEV's kowtowed to the PvPs/PP looking for essentially a MUDD arcade experience.
Build a mega ship. Stock it with fighters and repair supplies. Warp it into the system you want to take over. And shoot everything in sight.
Fortunately Epic Games put Torchlight II on the "FREE" sale and it is also now multiplayer (CoOp) and a couple of my real life friends are going to get it and we will spend the time saving that universe.
-------------------------------------UPDATE----------------------------------
Ok.. Spent almost an hour trying to get both ships into PG so I could Wing up.
Finally gave up and SOLOed them both into HR1185 because it was a podunk little place with 75,000 population so I thought it might be FC free.
NOPE!! 23 FC's??? Only non-FC places are two Outposts and a full Base (Ceres Tarn) on a 4.12G ringed 32.4% metal planet.
DSS on the ring showed absolutely nothing in the rings. No Hotspots. Very Strange system. Seven "T" stars with rings around them. A ringed Class III gas giant, a class IV gas giant with rings and a non-landable high metal content planet with rings.
The Commodity Market doesn't even carry tritium and will only buy LTD's ~550,000 and Painite ~450,000
Last edited:
It's not luck when others can report similar results, and they have. It is also not in any way a refutation of a problem that definitely needs solving, but perhaps, as I say in the thread, an interim, band-aid action so folks won't be entirely stranded.
That is mentioned in the first post of the thread I linked to. The point is not the time taken, which is admittedly too long (but there are reasons for that that have nothing to do with changes to hotspot conditions), but that the claim that all valuable material have been replaced by junk is just emotional hyperbole and not at all helpful.
The money minerals like LTDs have become much more rare. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, one simply has to put more effort into mining them. The tritium shortage is definitely a problem that needs fixing, since it is necessary for many FC owners' continuing operations, but my effort was to find a possible short-term band-aid type solution, not deny that the problems exists.
I understand that expectations have been sorely dashed by the last patch, and I agree it's a grim outlook until it gets fixed, that's why I decided to look into an end run around the limitations. But it is not as you stated, that all valuable minerals have been replaced by junk. Your own experience, while disappointing, denies that. That was the point of my comment. Having to work longer to achieve the same results is, for the money minerals, a cup of bitter tea for some, and for tritium it's a near-disaster for many. But while I and other Commanders have no way to fix it, we do have the option to investigate alternatives, which is what I did, with not a perfect outcome, but at least it's a small cup of water in a suddenly-conjured tritium desert.
They may have, (I doubt it though), but if so, I've not seen it.
Don't forget space invaders, asteroids, and donkey kong. Im talking about the standup machines, not the Nintendo console
Being able to find materials in the normal rings is irrelevant for the original point of the discussion though surely?
I've not seen anyone claiming that you couldn't find worthwhile things in general outside of the hotspots - the point of the hotspots is that (even by the patch notes) is that you should have a notably better chance of finding that named hotspot resource in that hotspot. When an easily replicable test shows that dropping into a single or double hotspot and firing hundreds of limpets at only the glowing asteroids gets either 0T of the hotspot commodity, or arguably even less than you'd have got by avoiding the ring, then the mechanic is broken.
The balancing argument of the game holds true as always, mining paid a lot more for the risk / reward ration than piracy or trading or bounty hunting, but removing the ability to meaningfully make money from mining doesn't help. All it does is make it harder to make money, and many used to blitz mining for a period to fund doing the other things they enjoyed more, like buying and fuelling a carrier for long exploration expeditions, but oh yeah, you now can't buy Tritium because the supply has dropped in stations and to make one carrier jump would require you spend more time mining tritium than doing anything else.
If the supply and demand mechanic were working correctly, given how hard LTDs are to find right now, the price should be through the roof - you don't manage a market by removing the supply and artificially keeping the price low as well.
The 'eggsploit' needed fixing, no-one can argue against that, but they could have fixed the excessive income possible from LTDs by EITHER reducing the availability (but being honest, the community would have still found the best locations) or reducing the price.
They've done the latter and smashed the mining mechanic completely such that whilst there are ways to make some money, having to deliberately seek LTDs in a Void Opal Hotspot, whilst not expecting to find any VO's is a route to insanity for anyone thinking that's a normal way to operate.
Look, people are human, and mistakes happen. Given what the patch notes said they were intending to do, this is clearly a complete failure of quality control / testing prior to release. They'd have got some stick for it, but hey, things go wrong.
Where the issue is being exacerbated now is that they haven't rolled the patch back, until they sort the mistake, and worse haven't (that I have seen) even acknoledged the extent of the issue.
At this point, Frontier have 4 - 5 hours left in the working day to either push a further fix out, or roll the last patch back, or leave the game in a broken state across the weekend. Given that many people only have opportunity to serious play at the weekend, particularly given the lockdown situations around the world, that option will only increase the irritation and frustration in the community.
I like this game, a lot, and it's frustrating that Frontier don't appear to be helping themselves in this situation.
Well they obviously missed the boat yet again. Instead of sending out a fix for mining we are left with fat chance of finding Tritium to refuel our FC.
If this is not fixed and I mean soon well you will have lost this player for good. Move over and make room for the other Space Game (not NMS!)
If this is not fixed and I mean soon well you will have lost this player for good. Move over and make room for the other Space Game (not NMS!)
This is far too low!
Please adjust that limit to make it more useful for us, because in all honesty we're going to need that limit upped by 5x or 10bn at least with a 10bn order it should last a few hours, so please listen and up this as soon as possible.
You give us the ability to set a decent price to rival stations and make it so players mining aren't getting ripped off by selling to carrier owners (thank you for that by the way), then the very next patch effectively cripple the usability of that and force us to micromanage the carriers being able to only order 1480 LTD for example is less than 3 people doing a 512tn run each its just not enough.
If something has to be limited couldn't you just limit purchase orders to say 5000 units? For LTD's @ 1.5mil ea that's 7.5bn
Or with a 10bn limit that would limit purchase orders to around 6600 for LTD's @ 1.5mil obviously higher buy price = lower purchase orders
So I did a bit of Math and realised there is already a limiting factor in place, the carriers storage itself.
We take the most expensive item on the Commodities market multiply it by the maximum 1000%
Thargoid Probe base price = 454,191 * 1000 = 4,541,910
25000 * 4,541,910 = 113,547,750,000 < Absolute Maximum
Using figures for LTD's:
Base Price = 232,550 * 1000% = 2,325,500
25000 * 2,325,500 = 58,138,750,000
Since 25000 is impossible to do due to the service allocation that should be the maximum and far exceed ANY player purchase order, these values can be globally adjusted by the base price of any item.
And lets face it who is going to try and get 20000+ Probes?? Am sure one of you nutters out there would.
Just like the carrier ship and module packs I bet you are not going to listen to your customers pleading with you.
It certainly looks like Tritium hotspots have an issue. I tried my usual hotspot today. Previously 370 limpets would get me 300-400 tonnes of Tritium. However today, I got less than 200 tonnes for the same number of limpets. Not tried other mineable types, but Tritium has definitely been affected
This is all well and good but maybe you could put some effort into your support, I am down 250m credits due to a bug that did not install the shipyard (though people can still store ships on my carrier) but cost me the money, I have been talking to support for a month now, they take at least a week to reply to any messages and so far after a month all I have to show for it is the issue being handed off to the QA team and them tell me that "according to our records your carrier has not got a shipyard installed" Like yeah no duh that's the problem I contacted you about TWO WEEKS AGO.
Normally this would not be a massive issue for a game company as I have provided the clearest report possible with exact dates and times of the bug as well as screen shots but it still gets passed to another team which no doubt will take weeks to reply (its already been 4 days with no reply) im not going to let 250m go down the drain when mining is also being nerfed, your support staff NEED to be better, this is by far the worst game support I have ever had to contact, they are not rude or anything just utterly clueless, A problem like this in my mind should be a simple, look at the game logs for the date and time provided and see if I was charged, support already say its not installed so just look and see if I was charged and when it shows I was charged either install the shipyard or give me the credits back, normally I would not be so annoyed but its been a MONTH with absolutely no help what so ever, sorry to say Frontier but it simply is not good enough, Either make your game less buggy and ready for release or actually have a decent support section.
Normally this would not be a massive issue for a game company as I have provided the clearest report possible with exact dates and times of the bug as well as screen shots but it still gets passed to another team which no doubt will take weeks to reply (its already been 4 days with no reply) im not going to let 250m go down the drain when mining is also being nerfed, your support staff NEED to be better, this is by far the worst game support I have ever had to contact, they are not rude or anything just utterly clueless, A problem like this in my mind should be a simple, look at the game logs for the date and time provided and see if I was charged, support already say its not installed so just look and see if I was charged and when it shows I was charged either install the shipyard or give me the credits back, normally I would not be so annoyed but its been a MONTH with absolutely no help what so ever, sorry to say Frontier but it simply is not good enough, Either make your game less buggy and ready for release or actually have a decent support section.
Last edited: