I only play in Open. I don't like ganking at all. I DO like team-based PvP (which ED does not have). What ED does have and actually encourages IS ganking, be it by the fact that we can interdict, fire upon, hatch break each other, experimental weapon mods only seem to affect players, etc., etc., etc.
Question for Open players who don't like PVP/ganking... help me understand
- Thread starter Danquememe
- Start date
And yet you don't see that perhaps you have the wrong view of the game - I know I do, to me it's an exploration sim with some extras. Well, maybe not the wrong view, but a skewed one. You admit yourself there is whole sections of the game you haven't played, and yet you are so insistent on it being a combat sim..
And this just a regurgitation omy my last point.. Except even the game mechanics are against you here. When I'm not out in the black, I'm running missions and playing my local BGS. This provides with all kinds of mission types that don't require combat - combat missions exist, they just don't pay compared to Boom deliveries.
And again I'm left commenting, maybe it isn't really the PvP-oriented combat sim you've been thinking of it as. I've played other open games where I've never had to look over my shoulder at the other player ship wondering if it's going to attack me, even though there's no good in-game reason for it at that moment.
The problem isn't that Elite is broken, it's not. The problem is more that nothing is quite complete. Trading is a halfassed mess. PVE combat kinda works. Bounty hunting is incomplete, as is any kind of real C&P. People say Elite is 'a mile wide and an inch deep', well, I think it's a little more than an inch deep, but not much.. Ignoring legs, what I hope EDO brings us is a more well-rounded and complete experience for what we already have. I'd like to see trading have a true galactic market - even fragmented by faction. I'd like more of the Guardian and Thargoid stories, CG's and II's could be fun - and call for legit combat. I'd like to see some more landable planets with interesting things on them, like ancient stone ruins.. If the game was complete, or even fully fleshed out in the bits we have, I suspect less people would feel that PvP was their only choice.
Oh, and the 'But the ships have hardpoints' doesn't really wash, there have been a number of civilian SUV's and off-road vehicles that have had a gun mount kit for the roof that was either a factory addon or available as an aftermarket product. A friends late 70's Range Rover had a circle marked on the inside of the roof - cut that out and the gun mount drops straight in..
Agree with post above, but to add to this ^ particular paragraph:
No, it's not what FD wants. They either didn't know what they were doing, or simply didn't care. It's virtually cannot be deliberate design or vision, it just happened to be like this and not many attempts been made to change/improve it. That's it.
Certainly, if there were more engaging activities in the game, people would do them. But the PVP is REALLY good despite the broken state of the game, so once people get to that level, they're going to main as PVP players regardless. Adding depth and options for meaningful PVP content will just bring more people to that point, IMO.
That's where I try to help, by providing potentially engaging opportunities, by sharing wing rewards so PvPers don't have to mine so much, by trying to provide places to fight in peace, and reasons to fight in battle.
And you do too, by helping anyone that wants to (regardless of hat colour) to learn how to equip their ships & do more than just run.
PvP is just as incomplete as the rest of the game. Whilst the game still enables pointless killing with no consequences, it's unfinished. While the game has no kind of 'matchmaking' for PvP, it's not done - PvE combat is also incomplete, but it does mostly have working difficulty levels. And again that's the main problem with the game, it's not finished. It's a mishmash of partly done ideas. Frankly, I don't get the fascination with combat in ED.. It's lazy and gatekept. Megaships. FC's and stations are all completely invincible, they also seem to have weapons that have no turrets. In fact, combat against anything other than another player-type ship is non existent.. I want to level a planetary outpost.. Blow holes in stations.. And yes, I fully expect a serious reaction to doing that, not just a station insta-kill. But nope, no joy. So I spend my time in the black, looking for oddities in the Stellar Forge.
There is team-based PvP in the game (wingfights in rings), and it's tons of fun. If there wasn't, I probably would have left the game long ago. It's just there are only very basic tools and mechanics available in the game to support it. You can wing up and set up an instance, and pretty much that's about it. Even these minimalistic tools are not perfect (buggy navlock, buggy instancing, lag, desync, shadowrams, sometimes it's a major pain to set up even a small 2v2 instance where everyone can see everyone else). That said, the other day we somehow managed to set up a 8v8 at first attempt, to everyone's surprise.
Given that ringfights are consensual, they are (slightly) less affected by the utter lack of proper weapon/hitpoint etc. balance and the general rock-paper-scissor nature of OP magic effects than organic open space PvP encounters. A basic ruleset can be agreed upon beforehand, but it would be nice if some supporting mechanics were built in the game (matches and tournaments with rewards, automatic rulechecking, no NPC's in these instances, no rebuy cost, etc. etc).
But first and foremost improving the netcode, bugfixes and better game design (canopy, HUD) and a balance pass...
PwP is nice and cool when it happens.
Overall, i'd like to expect that on average, you'd get more instances of PwP than PvP when encountering other players (who actually want to interact, rather than just sending an o7 and otherwise ignoring you)
It would be nice. Doesn't seem to happen often that way though.
Well existence of multiple gankers kind of worsens atmosphere and cause paranoid reactions hindering co-operative play. One example about what happened to me once. Before mining was money making big thing there was one short lived gold rush involving shipping refugees from nearby system to binary system where orbiting B star quite far away was planetary outpost, target for those refugee missions. So long supercruise flight to there. Well once I was doing that money grind with my Imperial Clipper. Saw hollow square ahead of me, and hailed the ship for little chit-chat to pass long flight time. Well no. The other guy when he saw what kind of ship I flew (Clipper was at that time flown by some known gankers and such), about immediately high jumped away. I did not even have interdictor on my ship, so me attacking another ship would have been out of question. Some people did same without even contacting them, it was enough for them to see Clipper going on behind them.
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When you did the mining grind, did you in general sell the LTDs for 200k or >1M per tonne? (I assume it was LTDs, right? Though similar applies to anything else vaguely worthwhile to mine for credits)
If the latter, then the BGS had a significant effect on your experience by generating that price fluctuation (and therefore moving mined gems from "nice money but nothing special" to "best in the game by a clear margin"). If the former, you cost yourself 800k/tonne by remaining wilfully ignorant of it.
Equally, if you're out shooting at players in a hotspot, many of the more temporary hotspots - Laksak recently, for example - are generated by BGS fluctuations.
I'm being slightly picky here, of course, but to a large extent Frontier's goal with the BGS was to have it generate variety without players necessarily being consciously aware of it - hence the "background" part of the name. So if you get something out of it like good prices or a target-rich environment without being aware of how that's happened, it's succeeded at its primary goal. [1]
The fact that for some people the BGS can be deliberately manipulated as an "easter egg" strategy game is kind of a bonus - though one that Frontier have acknowledged and made adjustments to some mechanisms which would have been fine (and indeed beneficial) to its background role but were incredibly exploitable for the strategy game.
(Now Powerplay, that was supposed to be the deliberate high-profile strategy game, with all the numbers transparent, major galactic impacts, etc. ... and if it had been designed completely differently in all respects maybe it could have been. Except for the LYR outfitting discount and some slightly improved modules it's basically irrelevant except for its own sake)
[1] The same applies - with rather more complaints! - to the times the BGS generates additional challenges. These are generally considered bugs / bad design / evidence of Frontier hating the players. See for example the current lack of Tritium around Colonia which is entirely reasonable on any sort of "even vaguely realistic economy" basis ... or that time an important station ended up in Lockdown ... or the whole abandoned UA interference mechanism ... or the great Palladium shortage ... or that time a station stopped selling Tobacco temporarily due to a BGS state change and one player went on a massive rant convinced that Frontier had personally and deliberately nerfed their already mediocre trade route.
So it's hard for Frontier to make the BGS more noticeable.
I treat the BGS as a massive 'capture the flag' game. Pick somewhere to defend, and if it's worth anything someone else will want it too. I enjoy the diplomacy aspect of player to player interactions rather than only direct combat, and forming temporary or longer lasting alliances will allies against common enemies. One day I'll get crushed I'm sure (or I'll stop playing & my territory will be over-run), hasn't happened yet though
Just a point of order. It's usually not the people who play in Open and get hit by PvP who are whining. It's more often the people who want to control others' game mode choices.
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As I said, the design is fine, the game is fine, the people who gank and troll new players for the lols are the problem. They could just stop doing it, if they wanted.
It's not a failure of the design. The design Im sure is exactly what they intended in 2012-2014, and the game wasn't designed as a space Tarkov murder game for new players in 2020.
As I said, the design is fine, the game is fine, the people who gank and troll new players for the lols are the problem. They could just stop doing it, if they wanted.
BTW, what is it you want? You started this asking what players were upset about then they were ganked, the implication being they're playing your space ganking game, what do they expect other than to be ganked in their starter sidewinders?
You've had various answer(s) throughout this thread now. Basically - it's not really a space ganking game even if it lets you play that way.
But what is it YOU want and expect though? The paragraph above suggests you want fdev to actually change the game design/modes for a game designed in 2014, a game which was NOT created to be played as a space seal clubbing exercise. That would be a strange decision. Fdev aren't going to redesign the game for you or me or anyone else now.
Of course. If you're not in any hurry to get credits or materials for some other goal then the way the BGS affects rates of obtaining them is something you don't need to care about - you can just get lucky from time to time and enjoy it for what it is.
That said, enough people do care about profit [1] - whether there's anything to actually spend the credits on or not - that it also creates social opportunities, movements of players, etc. that can be interesting whether or not you're after credits yourself.
And similarly if you like particular types of gameplay - especially on the combat side - regardless of the payout: Combat Zones and Pirate Activity Detected POIs don't just make themselves ... particular mission types are more likely in some BGS states, as are signal sources, installation/megaship scenarios, etc.
[1] I mainly carry cargo to attract pirates and liven up the travel ... and I haven't been short on credits for things I want to buy for years ... but I still try to pick something which will make at least a few credits profit because it's more interesting that way than carrying the same 20t of gold around for weeks.
Rep given for the phrase "space ganking game"
"spanking game"? Wait no ...Rep given for the phrase "space ganking game"
Not quite, it is deliberate but its not the original vision, the history of Elite...
Elite - 1 Copy sold for every BBC Micro in the country of the UK. Statistically every single BBC Micro in the UK had a copy of Elite next to it on the desk. Why so popular? Elite was made on the basis 'We made a game we wanted to play and hoped other people wanted to play it too'. They were right, we did.
Elite Dangerous - Origination same as Elite. 'Elite Dangerous is what I wanted to do in 1984 but the technology wasn't there'.....then kickstarter...then 'investor demands....then contribution groups (cant recall name and I know it changed from one thing to another)....demands for an Open game.......demands for an MMO ('Its not an MMO')...the demands for PVP...the demands to stop PVP & Ganking (Block is the preferred Fdev response)....demands for Solo mode (originally was going to be solo)...etc etc. It all meant ED became a game designed by Committee or the Community upon release. it was trying to be something it wasn't originally planned to be because of too much input from the loudest people.
Fdev should have learned to say No a lot earlier and not tried to please everyone. They should have done the game they wanted and then built on it instead of trying to do too much at once or morph it into something else and then seemingly just leaving it 'unfinished' or disconnected (PP, CQC, Lore mainly)
In case you Don't know the phrase 'A Camel is a Horse designed by Committee'
This is true, no doubt. The game is what it is.
The thread was started, as mentioned, to help me glean perspectives and experience outside my own. It has been a huge success in that regard, as there continue to be thoughtful, insightful posts from a wide variety of contributors that really do help to flesh out a larger picture of what this game, and its Open mode, mean to people.
The truth that I am coming around to seeing - and this is just my take, there are others - is that Open is something of a Rorschach test. The lack of rules, the lack of consequences, the "mile wide and inch deep" variety of things to do, etc - all of it, together, serves as a sort of narrative canvas upon which players must create their own stories (since FDev have not provided one as such). Following their own moral code (or lack thereof), and assembling their own progression arc based on whatever it is they like doing most. Which of course can change at any time.
So really, saying the game isn't a ganking simulator isn't actually correct; it is, or at least can be, in just the same way that it can be a space trading simulator, or space exploration game, or alien fighting game, or whatever. It's all of those things, and all at the same time. It's what each player brings into the game with them, and what they seek to find or create within it.
Which of these is the intended mode of play? I.e. what does FDev or Braben actually want us to be doing in the game - what is "the way"?
I certainly don't pretend to know. Although it seems, to me, like they want us to do whatever we like. And again - that's the horns of the dilemma that we've been discussing in this thread. People enjoy different things, and yet here we are, all jumbled together, with nobody to enforce order beyond ourselves and not many meaningful consequences for our actions, irrespective of our choices. If that's not what FDev intended - well, that's unfortunate, because it's what they've seemingly created.