Difficulty sliders aren't really compatible with persistent, multiplayer only, games.
Whatever system is in place has to be a one-size fits all thing, because we all play in the same sandbox.
C'mon, this is faintly ridiculous.
- Thread starter Noddie
- Start date
Difficulty sliders aren't really compatible with persistent, multiplayer only, games.
Whatever system is in place has to be a one-size fits all thing, because we all play in the same sandbox.
A proper balance would have higher rewarding items being fundamentally harder to acquire or higher rewarding activities being harder to complete successfully. Not simply take longer (which is fdev's goto way of "balancing").
And to entice players into those harder to accomplish activities beyond just credits, the result of the action should matter more to the BGS than the easy grind activities in addition to being worth more (or in place of). Things like triggering expansion into unpopulated systems or at least npc activity in those systems that impacts the faction in the system they originated from. Power collapse would give meaning to the activities in powerplay. Faction collapse (full extinction of a faction rather than just retreat). Potential Faction splitting into new factions when they grow too large. Pledging to factions and acting as members in the game. There are lots of ways one can think of leveraging the bgs better to create purpose behind activities in the game that have lasting impacts without going down the eve online path.
A difficulty slider isn't necessary. better gameplay loops are. The value and difficulty of which can be dependent on security levels etc ... but ultimately it requires new game loops for the various roles that implements a way to test the player in that role - since no such test exists in any of the currrent gameplay loops outside of maybe a couple opt-in combat scenarios.
edit: for instance, exploring should get harder and harder the further away from human populated systems you get. via environmental hazards and navigational limitations that must be mastered by the player (no, not a silly hold the target mini game). The way you acquire valuable data should require risk and skill. Not the same press of a button you do when acquiring worthless data. And getting the most of your money should depend on where you sell that data (i would 100% get rid of stellar cartographies from carriers). With factions doing extraction paying for data that shows them valuable ore reserves... and factions that are over populated paying the most for data that includes earth likes etc.
Trade would similarly require significant changes. With only those systems that have high risk of criminal activity or in active war-type states giving good sell prices. Though, open trade boards should be halved (half of stations should have the board removed) and categorized as trade hubs ...diverging from other stations that deal mostly in orders via the mission system. This makes the distance between ad-hoc trade points longer. It also increases the likelihood you would have to navigate thru or within risky systems to have the fastest route. The risk to traders should be significant in such lower security systems to warrant the increased wealth you can acquire and to encourage players to strategize their routes to minimize their risk if possible. Other forms of improving trade and testing players can occur via missions (buy / sell orders) that can spawn scenarios to be tailored to the reward better than ad-hoc sandboxy activities.
Mining would be a lot like exploration in what it needs. it needs environmental hazards tied to the more lucrative items that can be mined. Those hazards would be a means to create a progressive test players have to master to mine those items successfully. This is on top of npc hazards that vary due to the security level if in populated space. However, i would tend to make most in-bubble mining require accepting missions for factions that have mining rights to the rings/belts in question as most in-bubble areas would be spoken for by one or more corporations/factions and require permission or risk being attacked not just by pirates but by system authority ships if spotted. Creating another pathway to test players looking for opportunity.
Combat has it's own progressive test, it's just done poorly. Too much is opt-in or RNG based. Rewards dont make much sense since they're arbitrary and not really tied to the BGS. There needs to be a better suite of missions that allow more varied combat activity. Things like defending ships or areas by joining them as part of their wing or escort detail. Being hired on by some faction or corporation to patrol a system etc. NPC's need more archetypes and routines that vary significantly so players can't depend on a given behavior every single time they interact with a given npc type.
etc etc. It's really not hard to envision even smaller incremental improvements to the existing game mechanics that dont go as far as the above but still improve things, yet we dont get them. instead we get shifting credit amounts around and that's called balancing while the underlying problem remains and nothing changes.
And to entice players into those harder to accomplish activities beyond just credits, the result of the action should matter more to the BGS than the easy grind activities in addition to being worth more (or in place of). Things like triggering expansion into unpopulated systems or at least npc activity in those systems that impacts the faction in the system they originated from. Power collapse would give meaning to the activities in powerplay. Faction collapse (full extinction of a faction rather than just retreat). Potential Faction splitting into new factions when they grow too large. Pledging to factions and acting as members in the game. There are lots of ways one can think of leveraging the bgs better to create purpose behind activities in the game that have lasting impacts without going down the eve online path.
A difficulty slider isn't necessary. better gameplay loops are. The value and difficulty of which can be dependent on security levels etc ... but ultimately it requires new game loops for the various roles that implements a way to test the player in that role - since no such test exists in any of the currrent gameplay loops outside of maybe a couple opt-in combat scenarios.
edit: for instance, exploring should get harder and harder the further away from human populated systems you get. via environmental hazards and navigational limitations that must be mastered by the player (no, not a silly hold the target mini game). The way you acquire valuable data should require risk and skill. Not the same press of a button you do when acquiring worthless data. And getting the most of your money should depend on where you sell that data (i would 100% get rid of stellar cartographies from carriers). With factions doing extraction paying for data that shows them valuable ore reserves... and factions that are over populated paying the most for data that includes earth likes etc.
Trade would similarly require significant changes. With only those systems that have high risk of criminal activity or in active war-type states giving good sell prices. Though, open trade boards should be halved (half of stations should have the board removed) and categorized as trade hubs ...diverging from other stations that deal mostly in orders via the mission system. This makes the distance between ad-hoc trade points longer. It also increases the likelihood you would have to navigate thru or within risky systems to have the fastest route. The risk to traders should be significant in such lower security systems to warrant the increased wealth you can acquire and to encourage players to strategize their routes to minimize their risk if possible. Other forms of improving trade and testing players can occur via missions (buy / sell orders) that can spawn scenarios to be tailored to the reward better than ad-hoc sandboxy activities.
Mining would be a lot like exploration in what it needs. it needs environmental hazards tied to the more lucrative items that can be mined. Those hazards would be a means to create a progressive test players have to master to mine those items successfully. This is on top of npc hazards that vary due to the security level if in populated space. However, i would tend to make most in-bubble mining require accepting missions for factions that have mining rights to the rings/belts in question as most in-bubble areas would be spoken for by one or more corporations/factions and require permission or risk being attacked not just by pirates but by system authority ships if spotted. Creating another pathway to test players looking for opportunity.
Combat has it's own progressive test, it's just done poorly. Too much is opt-in or RNG based. Rewards dont make much sense since they're arbitrary and not really tied to the BGS. There needs to be a better suite of missions that allow more varied combat activity. Things like defending ships or areas by joining them as part of their wing or escort detail. Being hired on by some faction or corporation to patrol a system etc. NPC's need more archetypes and routines that vary significantly so players can't depend on a given behavior every single time they interact with a given npc type.
etc etc. It's really not hard to envision even smaller incremental improvements to the existing game mechanics that dont go as far as the above but still improve things, yet we dont get them. instead we get shifting credit amounts around and that's called balancing while the underlying problem remains and nothing changes.
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I Suppose once they realise that credits isnt what ED is about, they feel invincible to pay any insurance cost and not scared of dying even in the biggest fully kitted out ship, it takes the emphasis of credits away. Isnt that like most games, once you have all the money then it eventually has no value and you can "Play" the game in whatever way.
Also i suspect that ED is competing with other genres and titles, and we already have a RL job trying to bring in cash...who wants a digital job to worry about money too?
Try to please most people most of the time probably.
Terrific point!
Big money was to be made in the old anarchy systems. But, like you say, you best have military lasers (or as a minimum beams front and back), 4 missiles and an ECM. It was risky!
Stick to the Corporate States and you were safe - but the buying price was high, the selling price low.
Risk/Reward was there nearly 40 years ago!
But I don’t really see any difference between systems in ED. Entering anarchy system, press J to abort. No, I won’t, because it makes no difference whatsoever.
It should matter
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I see a huge difference. I can blow up Beluga Liner's in Anarchy systems for Engineering mats without getting into trouble
This is right. You really had to think twice about going to Riedequat in the original Elite.
I see a huge difference. I can blow up Beluga Liner's in Anarchy systems for Engineering mats without getting into trouble
Lol. You’re a bad bad man
Maybe. I imagine that if I look hard enough, I can see all the passengers bodies shooting out into the void as the hull implodes. Not that I can hear that over all my maniacal laughing.
Umm..does that make me a bad man?
The thing is, you need boring but safe activities for lower skill players. Not everybody is a flight god, and the game needs to be for everybody. So then you make the dangerous activities more rewarding. This is largely what I think you're proposing. A higher reward tradeoff to encourage riskier activities.
The problem is then you get players whining about the high rewards and how fast players get even crazier ships/engineering. Basically, people are just going to whine that other players are succeeding because humans suck.
So right now, reliably, with an actually relatively high degree of risk (running illegal passengers that could get my expensive beluga instakilled entering a port if I'm scanned) I can reliably make 10 million an hour without great effort. That's reliably, sometimes I can make more money, sometimes it's 15-25 depending on the mission selection. My Beluga's rebuy is 10 million, so if after an hour of gameplay shipping passengers around I get scanned, whups! I'm out ANOTHER 10 million. Sliding backwards there.
I think the rebuy on my combat cutter is 34 million. So that's probably 3 hours, maybe less, of gametime burned for ONE DEATH. I don't know of a single other game that for one death will penalize the player with 3 hours of work just to get back to that point. I'm sure they're out there, but I can't think of any. Realistically, most times I've had to grind that money up again I can do it in an hour and a half. But if I'm participating in a combat zone for a squadron mission, I'm not immediately heading back to remake that money, and I might end up dying a few more times resulting in a 70 or 100 million deficit that I then have to make up. That's, at that ten million guaranteed rate, 10 hours of gameplay. More than a workday of work doing activities purely to raise money. Again, how is this not punishing?
That's a high penalty for death. And you know what? It results in an aversion to risk taking. This is why people often don't grind in open. It's all too easy to have your funds quickly depleted. In fact, your comments about risk suggest to me that you don't play in open.
So I don't really see how your desire for greater penalties is of benefit to the larger player base, when penalties are already severe. PVP players are annoyed people avoid open because the ship rebuy costs are so high.
Actually, I expect you only think the penalties aren't great enough because you DON'T play in open. "The galaxy is not cutthroat enough" is the kind of comment I would expect a non open, non powerplay player to make.
But please, I would be interested in hearing the specifics of how you would increase those penalties.
What's easy, challenging or hard is different for each of us. One issue is that for some, even the most difficult challenges are too easy or too boring.
and bless be that time sink
Risk is a combination of the odds of suffering a negative outcome and the penalty realized if that outcome comes to pass. Both of these are extremely low in this game. One has to be reckless or incompetent to lose ships more than once in a blue moon and when one does, a setback of an hour or so is completely trivial.
I preferred the stakes in games like Jumpgate or Shadowbane, but even they didn't reach my ideal.
Not in my view, not even close.
There is far too little of this aversion.
One of the most immersion defying things in this game is the reckless behavior of CMDRs. Even I find it difficult not to give in to these temptations. I want to play a character that values his life and property, but the game makes this very difficult to do without completely handicapping myself, because it provides such minimal incentives for care and caution. His life and continued prosperity are never at risk, no matter how much he overextends himself.
Not this PvP player. I would much rather have those who are so risk adverse stick to modes more suited to them then advocate for a less open Open, a less consequential game, or disrupt instancing through reckless and inconsiderate use of the block function.
I do sympathize with those dedicated PvPers that primarily seek organized matches, but there are far better solutions for that sort of play than undermining the consequence mechanisms of the broader game. Personally, I'd like to see some sort of in-game 'simulator' (Jumpgate and to a lesser extent Planetside 2, are good examples of this) where assets could be tested and contests fought, without touching their character's assets, or influencing the BGS, in any way. Failing that, even playing matches were tapping out is the norm would be far preferable to globally diminishing rebuy penalties.
I have roughly seven-thousand hours of play in Open (and at least a thousand of those are in PvP combat activities). Aside from CQC, testing in the training missions, or unavoidable technical workarounds, I exclusively play my CMDR in Open and do not mode switch, for any reason (no board flipping, no regenerating POIs, no avoiding hostile CMDR via means without in-setting context, etc).
The penalties for ship loss aren't great enough because it's nearly impossible to lose a ship. I can't even remember the last time I lost a ship outside of a PvP encounter where I was dueling to destruction or outnumbered at least five to one....wait, I did lose the ships I took to the 'Planet of Death' (which is inside a white dwarf's exclusion zone), but that was planned, and about as optional as things get. So, when it does eventually happen, losing five percent of it's sticker price is about as inconsequential as can be.
I'm actually a little insulted that you think my ideal of plausibility or immersion could be compatible with avoiding organic encounters with actual player controlled characters, given my obvious disdain for the capabilities of NPCs and degree of superficiality I've ascribed to them.
Any talk of increased penalties has to start with addressing the ability to bail on threats (PvE or otherwise, combat or otherwise) via contextless means, such as logging out or disconnecting. Fifteen seconds is nothing, and logging out should not be a valid way to escape a loitering timer or an attack from another ship. Likewise, severing connection or killing the client, while officially prohibited, are not rigorously enforced enough. Ultimately, the penalty for using not contextual means to avoid in-game consequences needs to be considerably harsher than sticking around. Blocking should also be a chat-only function, with any actual OOC harassment being dealt with by Frontier, who should have an obligation to swiftly and decisively enforce their rules, not abdicate that responsibility in favor of easily abused player tools.
Beyond that, I'd like Engineered modules to either not be automatically restored, even if they can be insured, or simply be uninsurable. These are supposed to be custom modifications, not off the shelf hardware. It's bad enough that mundane equipment is always on hand, irrespective of stock at the station one finds one's self at, but having the precise selection of Engineered equipment as well, when much of it cannot even be completed without actually visiting an Engineer in person? Flatly absurd. So, I'd either have them cost more to be restored and have to be shipped from Engineer systems (with normal transit times).
I would also like to see overtly reckless behavior further discouraged by making insurance more costly the more often it was used. The excess can start at 5%, but should rapidly grow from there, if one loses ships in a short period of time, then very slowly reset. In extreme cases, it would be rational for one to be declared uninsurable, or even penalized for fraud.
I'd like it to be possible to avoid having a crime pinned on one's CMDR though skillful gameplay (jamming comms, quickly destroying all potential witnesses, or using a generic and anonymous vessel, for example), but once one has been positively identified as a criminal, things should be far more difficult than they are now. There should be no 'anonymity protocols' allowed for systems with any kind of security; wanted ships should be proactively targeted and pursed by authorities, and bounties should be effectively permanent...requiring expensive and difficult rehabilitation efforts, a new identity that would effectively erase much of a CMDR's reputation, or the actual death of the character.
Negative reputations should also not automatically reset, and grievous offenses should result in permanent antipathy from the slighted factions. My CMDR has murdered tens of thousands of NPCs and is treated like royalty almost everywhere he goes, even when he should be reviled.
Of course, I expect none of those to be adopted and would be fairly content with my CMDR (Open only and largely grind-free) not having assets worth dozens of times his lifetime expenses, while averaging less than half a million CR an hour of income over the time I've played him. Kock a zero off the end of most payouts and restore the original fuel and repair costs...that would be satisfactory.
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I have no problem with increased insurance costs for repeated stupid behavior, once you're out of starter zone.
No way to loss of engineered modules, that's just punitive behavior and will keep people from playing and experimenting, but your increased costs for stupidity should cover that.
Reputation loss is fine and dandy, but earning that rep back shouldn't be about credits. It should be about running missions. Grindy, but since it wouldn't kick in except for repeated bad behavoir like what currently happens shrug
shakes head and there we go back to just wanting people to grind thru the game for no reason other than you think that's everyone's idea of fun?
You do realize that you can play that way in ED currently, right? Want to kill ships for no bounty, head to an anarchy system. Want to trade for low pay outs, just take low paying trade routes...
This is a sand box, build your own castle.
Someone please tell Morbad this is supposed to be a game. I almost want to believe he's not being serious. It's like he brainstormed every single way he could make this game more painful to bleed the fun out of it, and jotted it down. I lol'd in so many places reading that diatribe on how he would destroy the game completely....
EXCELLET point and very true, I agree 100%. I am always amazed what some people do in video games.
But as I said earlier: You can't set a games difficulty curve on the top players. You need to base it on the 95% otherwise you alienate the 95%.
For players who need godmode challenges, well I support having special difficult areas for you, but the truth is given Elite's slow development I don't really support crazy danger hotspots for you guys until a lot of other things are addressed.
Mending a badly damaged reputation should be much more involved than either of these. Genocidal war criminals, slavers, and turncoats shouldn't expect a few bribes or a stint of community service to restore them to the good graces of those they've earned the enmity of.
I'm not at all a fan of grind, because I don't find most forms of grunt work to be particularly plausible activities for CMDRs to engage in. I certainly don't consider them fun, nor have I been advocating anything I thought would be more grindy than what we've got now.
It's a sandbox with other players. Self-handicapping is one of the last things I want to do in an environment built around competitive (where I'm opposing people under no such constraints) and cooperative (where I'm expected to meaningfully contribute along side people under no such constraints) gameplay. My CMDR does not exist in a vacuum and the world cannot revolve around him, if there is anyone else in it.
I self-handicap far too much as it is, to the extent it impinges upon the depiction of my character as a rational and opportunistic individual.
Nothing incompatible about challenge and entertainment, or the depiction of a credible setting in a game.
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Dude, much of the time an hour is ALL I HAVE TO PLAY. So to me? An hour is not trivial, that's my playtime for an entire evening. So I am not well pleased by having to spend it retreading ground I've already trod.
How can you say that then complain about people trying so hard to avoid a rebuy they combat log? Convince me, please explain what risk taking behaviors you think should be curbed?
I suppose I guessed the complete opposite direction. As for loosing a ship, oh no, it really isn't impossible even in a PVE setting, and you're totally wrong about that.
You know, I was going to ask you how exactly you considered these changes beneficial to the game and player base, but there's just no real point. I totally understand that's the type of game you want to play. There's always someone who wants something like that. I hope someone makes a space game you can enjoy in that way. For the super majority of the rest of us who want to keep enjoying elite....sorry. But I think those suggestions are absurd. As has been said: This is a game. I don't need mistress spanks a lot the game to wack my behind whenever I miss a jump. Real death is punishing enough, and will come sooner than I like to think. I don't need the fantasy of a painful death in a video game.
For you? I think they should add an optional permadeath mode to Elite. There you go, you don't get rebuys, and death is severely punishing. You can regrind up from scratch playing the same game as everyone else, and best of all it doesn't require any other major changes to the game or affecting anyone else's gameplay experience.
Then don't get your CMDR shot down, save the recklessness for a cheaper ship, or use a more efficient means to acquire credits. Personally, I prefer the first option.
Combat logging has no in-game/setting/character context. It's not something a CMDR does, it's something their player does. It should not be possible to influence in-game events with them and no in-game event should be able to justify using out of context means to evade it's consequences.
List off all the contextual ways it's currently possible to face a rebuy screen, through action or inaction, and it will be pretty close to what I'm thinking of.
If you're trying not to lose a ship and you've got any real experience, it's very nearly so. All threats are optional and even after opting in, gameplay is strongly slanted in favor of defense and escape.
I know and I largely understand that opinion.
You say that like I'm somehow not aware of it, or that what I want out of this game is somehow not compatible with the term.
My ideal Elite: Dangerous is not the game you want to play, but that wouldn't make it any less a game, or even less reflective of Frontier's original vision for the game.
See what I said above about the presence of other players. I'm playing a multiplayer game and I wouldn't be able to get what I want out of a multiplayer game without the same rules applying to everyone...so, within reason, I'm going to use the most advantageous set of rules presented to me, even if they are not the rules I wish had been implemented. I'm neither going to overtly self-handicap, nor will I break any rules in letter or spirit.