Hi. Returning player, here. This is an FYI for any developers who may care about the player base. I left the first time in silence, but I wanted to leave my feedback for you this time, before I uninstall the game again—possibly for good (we'll see.) I think it's important that you understand my angle, because it's likely the angle of countless other players who will undoubtedly follow suit at some point soon. The so-called 'temp's who were never worth the effort in trying to hook, the long-term players who've finally seen more than enough. And make no mistake, the problem is your decision-making—it's not that we're simply getting bored of your game.
Credits
Firstly, when I joined the game, it became apparent very quickly that there is a very strong emphasis on making money by completing long, repetitive and mundane tasks. Fine, I'll stick with that, but then you've already lost points in my book there. Only a few ways were ever really worth the effort for that purpose, and the absolute best at the time was core mining. It wasn't unheard of for players to earn 200Mcr/h. It helped me purchase, outfit and maintain my Anaconda (I'm sure you're aware of the insurance cost here), among a few other ships.
In practice, core mining was generally engaging enough to not be as dull as the other options (normal mining, passenger runs, etc.), so I got most of the ships that truly interested me, and I kept playing. Then my friends stopped (friends who chose not to core mine, by the way), and it got pretty lonely, so I stopped too. I figured we'd probably return later on when you'd added more content.
The trouble with this, of course, is that only core mining was worth the time. The other activities—namely fighting and exploration—simply didn't ever pay out enough to warrant doing them for any other reason than curiosity or fun. When it comes to 'fun', they're only marginally so. There always has been a ridiculous emphasis on money making in Elite Dangerous, which, in retrospect, is a shame, when I consider the truly incredible idea and engine that the game is built on.
Fleet Carriers
So a year or two passes and you've added the fleet carriers. There was a lot of flak at the time regarding their cost, and I ignored it when reading about it. I thought it was just standard whining about changes, the sort of retaliation that often happens when something new is introduced to a game that might mix things up a little. I knew you were going to nerf something about my mining, but I didn't realise that it was going to be as bad as it is. So it has recently dawned on me that the complaining wasn't completely unfounded.
The biggest issues that turn me away are two: fleet carriers exist and are being abused in their current embodiment; and sell prices were hit hard by a nerf to the way demand works.
So, as demand drops for a commodity at a station, it will offer less payment, correct? The result is that mining is now no more lucrative than any other activities. The important thing here is that each of these activities have to be played religiously in order for them to pay out anywhere near the 100Mcr/h mark.
To make matters worse, you introduced carriers, which players can purchase and use for mass storage (whether or not you intended them to be used this way is another matter entirely), and that's exactly what they're doing. Mine as much as possible, hoard it in your carrier. When the carrier has a nice amount or is full, you move it near a station with a great buy price, and unload it all. Profit, right?
Because of the nature of demand fluctuations, when a player does this, they destroy the profit venture there for everyone else. They leave with full pockets, but the silly little man in the brand-new Asp Ex', out in the middle of nowhere, mining his Asp off to save up for that carrier, is still going on and on, braving sheer repetition on the premise that by the time he gets to that same station, his work will have paid off. Then he arrives and finds that the buy price is barely even half of what it said on some completely external resource, and the demand has shrunk. He has to look elsewhere. Maybe nearby? Again, other carrier owners were beaten to it, so they've gone to the next best areas. He has to go further afield, ultimately increasing the amount of time he's spent on one trip. Every time I've gone on mining trips since I returned, this has been the result.
Because of this, the little man isn't making 100Mcr/h now. He's spending all that time accumulating cargo, sure, but he's spending even more time just finding the best places to sell it to make the effort worth-while. Yet, I would argue that the effort wasn't worth-while in the first place—a hard hour for a measly 100Mcr? You have to be joking.
I had already thought of how carriers were being used and initially I would try my hand at grabbing one for that reason. In the end, they're now the best way to make money. And then I researched alternative ways to get credits, and then I worked out the simple numbers involved and discovered that I'd be expected to mine for a full 50 hours (assuming my best, religious mining) before I could buy one. And then I cringed.
When it comes down to it, the only people who could really afford the carriers were those who had saved billions up before you changed the way demand works. They've bought their carriers, and now they're back to accumulating money again in the best way available, even if that means that they're doing it at 50-60% effectiveness, past considered. But the way they're doing that is affecting the way other people can do the same thing. You've effectively catered for the rich few. But it isn't the newbies' fault—I mean, should they have started playing Elite earlier? Maybe if they were a bit more proactive about it, they'd be rich, too... Lol, wrong.
Other Activities
Missions aren't exciting, period. They're pretty dull and straight-forward. One or two have a payout not dissimilar to 100Mcr/h when you get down to it, but they're even more repetitive and mind-numbing than mining. The rest just aren't worth the effort beyond what I've stated.
Most importantly, what you've done here is balance everything down, not up. Credit gains on all other activities needed to go up to 200Mcr/h potential—mining didn't need to be brought down to 100Mcr/h at best consistency.
The most fun I've had in this game to date was unlocking my FSD booster—I went to a particularly creepy planetoid, the structure located on what appeared to be a permanently dark side. The atmosphere was great and the activity itself was a perfect mix of minor grind and engagement, so much that I'm almost interested to go and see what getting the rest of it is like. You know what could be interesting with that concept? FPS experience. Hmm... Odyssey is coming soon, right?
The Result
I've spent near enough ten hours working through ways that I might get good credit gain (that's time not spent playing your game), i.e anything more than 100Mcr/h, because I have ships that I won't use for anything more fun in case I get smacked with an insurance claim, and I've given up. As I understand it, the idea here is to balance out all of the ways players can get money—capping it at something like 100Mcr/h—that way, anyone can do almost anything in order to get rich, yes? No. Because of the cap, they won't get rich 'too quick,' buy all their stuff and then get bored and leave. You want us to spend about the amount of time that we might spend in real work on your game, doing the chore-like activities, enduring endless loading screens as we hop through systems countless times like zombies (because still no Hyperdrive Assist...) All for very little to show and little more than chores to experience.
What bothers me is that this was the only option you could think of for preventing player loss, but this option is undoubtedly going to cause even more players to stop, too. How many hours do you think is reasonable to ask of us to devote to playing your game? You realise that you're selling something for a flat price, yes? You sell microtransaction cosmetic items that are completely impractical. Presumably, you want players to hang around and add the odd payment so that the game makes even more money. But your in-game store doesn't offer anything even remotely interesting enough to warrant the cost. Furthermore, you've effectively nerfed credit gains and don't even have a means to get credits with premium currency. I'm not suggesting that would be a good idea in a pay-to-play game, rather, I'm saying that you've nerfed credit gains to beyond a reasonable state.
And that leaves DLCs. Look, Horizons brought something pretty neat to the game. Planetary landings was pretty cool at first, if hilariously unrefined and bland after the first few trips. This needs to be built on. Odyssey, too, sounds like it might be a real blast the first few times, but what you need to remember is that by bringing in some FPS elements, you're bringing the game in FPS territory—that's why it won't keep players around for long. There are games out there that will always be better for that particular thing. So if I were you, I would think very carefully about how it all weaves into your existing game, because we don't simply want 'space legs,' we want it to fit in with the rest of the deal and we want it to be something that hasn't been done hundreds of times before, better, by other developers. If it isn't on-point then I'm pretty sure that it's going to be the final straw for a lot of people.
What we actually want for Elite is more engaging content, and I'm not talking about a samey FPS experience. We want the world you've made on an actual galactic freaking scale to present meaningful activities that don't require hundreds/thousands of hours of our lives to experience first-hand—and it does at least demand hundreds. 50+ (more realistically, 70-80+) hours solely for a fleet carrier, just to exploit their bad implementation in order to pay for end-game things. Making money to buy everything is currently the only true end-game, but now you've crippled that venture, it will leave people wondering why they're bothering to play your trading/mining simulator. There's no wonder, there's no engaging content worth passing on to non-players for their consideration. I can't quite believe I'm saying this about Elite Dangerous of all games, but there's not much of anything noteworthy. I've sunk around 200-250 hours into playing Elite so far. Far too much of that feels incredibly wasteful. Moreover, after that amount of time, this is the conclusion that I've reached. No bueno.
I truly wish you the best of luck, whether I come back or not. I'd like to see this game go strong but at the moment I'm more than burnt out on it and don't have any faith in its current form at all. It's left me feeling bitter, not sweet. I don't usually choose to leave feedback like this, but ED has shown an outstanding concept in my mind that could really blow people away. It's just being mishandled. Badly. In fact, it is blowing people away, albeit not in a good way.
I'll pay close attention to the reviews and feedback of Odyssey when you release that, because I am interested. But make no mistake, that feedback is probably going to dictate whether I (and those in similar mindsets) come back or not.
