2 more months until Odyssey?

Urbanski101

Urbanski101
Agony_Aunt said:
But they have been working from home for almost a year now. Any impact is already factored in.
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Maybe but remember that schools are now shut again which means home schooling for those with kids.

Not sure how many of the FDev team have kids, probably not that many as they seem quite young on the whole but some of the more senior devs may have. It's definitely impacted my workplace and it changes the dynamic of WFH.

If even 10% of your staff are affected it will have knock on effects especially in the short term where workloads and projects are reshuffled, I'm going through this very thing right now at work.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Urbanski101 said:
Maybe but remember that schools are now shut again which means home schooling for those with kids.

Not sure how many of the FDev team have kids, probably not that many as they seem quite young on the whole but some of the more senior devs may have. It's definitely impacted my workplace and it changes the dynamic of WFH.

If even 10% of your staff are affected it will have knock on effects especially in the short term where workloads and projects are reshuffled, I'm going through this very thing right now at work.
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Don't know how its working in the UK with schools but for me its a major time saver, not having to get kids ready for school and drive them and collect them.

Schools being closed has been a major plus for me.

Just make sure they are awake, they connect via their system, and do their lessons remotely.
 

Red Anders

Red Anders
Starbrow said:
You don't even know what we are arguing for, and yet you wasted so much time writing this.
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Your air of misplaced superiority is sufficient to ensure I won't be wasting any more chief, so that's all good.

You're still flat out wrong about Horizons by the way. If you need to tell yourself that updates which you paid for as part of the Horizons season pass were really free that's fine by me, whatever gets you through the lonely nights. Just don't confuse your rich fantasy life with facts.
 

VR jefranklin18

VR jefranklin18
I cannot see Odyssey dropping in 2 months, aren't there a few more dev diaries to come yet? Obviously they may have been impacted by the current lockdown but I wouldn't be shocked to see Odyssey delayed so all the dev diaries can come out ;)
 

Urbanski101

Urbanski101
Agony_Aunt said:
Don't know how its working in the UK with schools but for me its a major time saver, not having to get kids ready for school and drive them and collect them.

Schools being closed has been a major plus for me.

Just make sure they are awake, they connect via their system, and do their lessons remotely.
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Yeah, that depends on the school, the kids, their age, their needs etc... i.e. it's really not that simple and everyone's situ is different, something I found out in 2020 and again now
 

Red Anders

Red Anders
Starbrow said:
Fact is:
2014 - Paid for the game.
2015 - Paid for Horizon.
2016 - all the content free.
2017 - all the content free.
2018 - all the content free.
2019 - all the content free.
2020 - all the content free.
2021 - Paid for Odyssey.

That's all there is to it. I haven't paid anything since 2015. That's 5 years of free content for me.
Other games roll out paid DLC's every few month, paid Seasonal passes each year, paid Expansions every few year, have content gated behind cash shop, have monthly subscriptions, but in ED i got 5 years of free content, none of it required for me to pay anything again until Odyssey.
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As I said,I also haven't paid, i.e. actually processed a debit card transaction for a game update, since I paid for Horizons in early December 2015. That doesn't change the fact that what I bought on that date was a season pass for updates 2.0 to 2.4, that the final update (2.4 - The Return) wasn't delivered until well into 2017 and critically, that part of that update, just like updates 2.0 to 2.3 before it was not in any way free, it was paid content. The fact you paid up-front for it in 2015 when you bought Horizons doesn't change the fact that you were paying for updates that were delivered up to and including 2017. Nothing changes it because it is a quantifiable fact.

If you would like confirmation of that, here's the announcement thread for the final Horizons update, 2.4, which was released on 26 September 2017, which I hope we can both agree is not in 2015.

Patch Notes - Update - 2.4 The Return - Patch Notes

Greetings Commanders, Today we have released update 2.4, The Return. We expect the servers to be down for approximately 9 hours. As usual with these updates, this amount of time could be longer than expected... we'll keep you up to date with the server status throughout the day. See our social...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk

You might notice that the information is split into two sections; Horizons and non-Horizons. Good luck with enjoying the Horizons content in 2.4 before they rolled Horizons into the base game because it was paid content. Advertised as paid content, sold as paid content, receipted as paid content, structured as paid content and delivered as paid content. All over this very board and the store, from day one, never suggested to be anything else.

It was no more 'free' than someone who paid for an LEP is receiving updates for 'free'. They are receiving them using a different pricing model for sure, one in which they paid more when purchasing the game than I did because their package cost more than I paid for the base game due to including future DLC releases, but they are categorically not receiving those updates for 'free' because if they were, they would have paid nothing more than I did for the base game.

Now you can apply whatever mental gymnastics you want to that but the fact remains that if you pay money for a season pass, that pass includes access to updates 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4, and all of which include content which would not be accessible to you had you not bought the season pass, you have paid for those updates.

We got additions to the base game in each of them too, which were free and are listed under the 'non'Horizons' section of the patch notes. We got gameplay tweaks and bugfuxes too and I for one was more than happy with the overall amount of content delivered up to 2.4, also with the content delivered after 2.4 in the Beyond updates which was unequivocally free and with pretty much every aspect of what I've received compared to the money I've shelled out since I started playing. I have no argument to make against value etc at all, it's fine by me.

It still does not change the very simple fact that updates 2.0 to 2.4 were not free though. Nothing changes that fact because an indisputable, documented, historical fact is explicitly what it is. You're not changing it without a TARDIS or a DeLorean and a working flux capacitor.
 
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znôrt

znôrt
alexzk said:
Weird. I prefer all to be written, like in chat. Because what u/he said u cant re-read later. Also if you cannot write down your thought short then you have nothing to say yet.
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nail on the head.

i understand that different people have different communication skills, but written expression enforces a level of specificity which is invaluable more often than not, and particularly so in software development, to the point i would consider it a basic requirement. if you can't write it it's not worth saying. imo, barring exceptions, teams that suffered because of social distancing were being inefficient or disfunctional before already.
 

Red Anders

Red Anders
Starbrow said:
So you are saying that 3.0 is a free content but 2.4 isn't?

But in order to access 3.0 content, you have to buy the base game, right? Yet you consider it a free content.
But in order to access 2.4 content, you have to buy Horizon, right? Yet you consider it paid content.
In both cases you had to pay in order to access the content.

So either you should consider everything as a paid content, or in my case, everything as a free content ( because i believe they could have put almost every patch as a paid DLC, like many other games would have done, but they didn't)
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Are you just trolling here?

We all bought in by buying the base game. It's a always been impossible to play Elite at all without it.

The base game received a first year's updates at no additional cost.

In December 2015 the first paid for DLC, Horizons was released. Horizons was a season pass of paid updates and was clearly described and marketed as one at the time. At that point you could do one of two things:

1) Buy it - you received the specific Horizons updates (2.0 to 2.4, as each was released) and the general gameplay improvements.

2 Don't buy it - you received the general gameplay improvements in each of those updates but did NOT receive the paid Horizons updates elements from 2.0 to 2.4. In particular, that meant no planetary landings (2.0), no engineering (2.1) and no to the other Horizons-specific updates.

Your statement that 'in order to access 2.4 content you have to buy Horizons' is incorrect. Look again at the page I took the trouble to actually link for you. Look at the heading 'New Content & Features (Non-Horizons)' Everything under that list was accessible to people who only ever owned the base game, never paid for Horizons and never received any of the Horizons-specific content in 2.0 to 2.4. As I said there is no dispute about the fact that some free content was included in each of those updates from 2.0 to 2.4, I've never suggested otherwise because it is self evident.

But to access the content marked as being specifically for Horizons in 2.4, you absolutely needed to have bought the HORIZONS SEASON PASS which gave the entitlement to the paid element of those updates. I mean you did know that people who hadn't paid for Horizons got no engineering access (for example) until they rolled Horizons into the base game recently, right? Because engineering was the the paid element of the 2.1 update, imaginatively called 'the Engineers' and released in May 2016 and without having paid for the Horizions season pass you did not get those features, despite the fact you could continue to play your vanilla copy of Elite without the Horizons updates and with the free non-Horizons updates.

It's not whether I consider it a season pass - it was marketed, described by and sold as a season pass by Frontier, the company who created it. The game was basically a two tier game for the period from Horizons release until the recent roll-up of Horizons content. Some stuff in updates up to 2.4 was free for everybody. Some stuff wasn't. It locked exclusive content in each of those updates only to people who had paid in advance for it and as I said the entire issue of it being a season pass was a subject of increasingly controversial posts on here for literally two years or more as it became obvious that FDev's initial timetable for releasing those updates was absurdly optimistic. The only way you can possibly have failed to grasp this is if you went into cryo-sleep for three years and have just woken up with a disappointed Ettietne Dorn leaning over the wreckage of your excape pod mumbling 'yeah not going to get much for this one am I...' :D

After 2.4 when we moved to what became known as 'Beyond', FDev announced the end of the season pass model.

Also I do have to point out that if as you say they'd charged separately for each of the updates from 2.0 to 2.4, bet they would each have been around £7.99 which oddly enough is what FDEv charged for updated for their subsequent games, none of which usedthe season pass model after seeing what a gang-frak it turned into with Elite. So that would be the five updated 2.0 to 2.4 at about eight quid each. By an amazing coincidence, the Horizons season pass was £40 full price on release. How absolutely uncanny that is eh?
 

Red Anders

Red Anders
Starbrow said:
Same for The Horizon received a first year's updates at no additional cost - aka free content.

Also as Horizon was rolling out, 2.0 - 2.4 was nowhere mentioned. They just listed a list of features that they were going to role out for free for Horizon owners, or as you said at no additional cost.

As for your argument, 2.4 and content for Horizon and none-Horizon owners - that is a standard model of patches. Stellaris has been doing it since the start, rolling out paid DLC's while introducing content for base game owners, that didn't wanted to buy DLC's.

At the end 5 years of free content, is 5 years of free content, or as you said your self, content at no additional cost.
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Like I said in my post, I have no argument that value for money isn't involved here - I'm totally fine with it.

However the fact that some of the content was free does not mean that one gets to re-write the rules regarding all parts of the season pass. That's the only point I'm making here; you can't just arbitrarily declare something as 'free content'when you've already made a payment which is the only reason that you're able to access it.
 
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