Player Retention
- Thread starter Red Rocket
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Just a clarification, it was Canonn who "sold" the event, not FD. FD told them it probably wouldn't work and tried to dissuade them with talk of a "new kind of Thargoid", but Canonn insisted on attempting the jump.
There weren't 15,000 unhappy explorers either; most of us were having a great time.
I AM OFFENDED. Now I shall make hundreds of threads decrying your ignoring of me.
See? That's how it works, FDev. At least Bottom Hat graces me with a meme!
It was just my usual, long-winded opinion that FDev has a track record for not providing the tools necessary to:
- Enhance and Incent player made content
- Equip (Player) Community Leaders to Attract and Retain other players
- The two above points explain why DW3 is postponed, why Elite's overall community standing is in decline, and (possibly) why the game itself feels in decline relative to OP's expressed frustrations and concerns with player retention.
The trouble with summaries is that summarizing something before writing it all out is just a lot of unnecessary, complex thinking.
And darn it! The forums are not for thinking.
Well...that explains a LOT...
Don't get me started on interiors (too late).
The biggest trouble with interiors often cited - much like the FSS troubles - is syncing. How do you syncronize a player moving inside the ship, while the ship itself is moving (even if landed on a planet, which is moving). That's a very real and valid concern, not least for the huge technical implications. One look at star citizen, glorious and beautiful and horribly incomplete, and you'll know this to be true.
When it works, landing a ship - on another ship that's moving - and disembarking is...chef kiss
When it works. Which is, like, never.
Which is why most games with ship interiors of one kind or another, a la Star Trek Online, use instancing. Like your ship 'vanishing' when in SRV or On-Foot (and it is dismissed), interiors would function similarly in Elite. You can't be in combat. You can't be moving (flying, drifting). Landing gear down or zero thrust in normal space, that's the catch. Then, you 'go to interiors' and your ship - and you - vamoose.
Does this have lore problems? Yeah. So does a cockpit glass shattering but bullets the size of your head not killing you instantly. Or telepresence in some places but not others. Or the blue circle of armstrong. You get the idea, I'm preaching to the choir, here.
This doesn't make interiors 'easy' by any stretch. It just makes them actually feasible. Like in other games. Should Elite do it? Well, I think so. Will FDev do it? Probably some day and, like EDO, probably half-finished. Is what it is.
Back to the FSS...and whatever this thread is about...what IS it about?
(Checking Title)
These sorts of features, if implemented smartly, could benefit player retention. See! On topic.
I get a gold star now, right? Oh, oh...actually, I'd love a free rank in combat. That's worth, like, five thousand forum likes, me thinks.
That is being very generous. Canonn found a way to reach previously unexplored space and created a player driven narrative. FDev, for whatever reason, didn't want them there and permit locked the system mere hours before the jump was to happened and then lored the whole event away as a Thargoid ambush.
What was the issue? Why weren't we allowed there? And why not just say, "no." And then they published in galnet what was going to happen before it happened.
The whole thing was a damp blanket or roaring good fire.
I had an epiphany.. FDev had managed to implement PvP with no unwanted violence on concourses and probably in upcoming FC interiors! Probably there could be a small amount of griefing, but really nothing major. 
Maybe that was a very blunt hint?
It was probably a foul-up, but it could have been seen as the "last call" to get off the ship.
More seriously though, I don't see any sense in blaming FD for something Canonn hyped up, when we all saw FD trying to talk Canonn out of it. And the way it turned out was vastly better than "oops, your jump failed, Gnosis hasn't moved and nothing happened" would have been.
I'm well over it now, and actually am grateful for the event because it was what got me into PC gaming. I literally bought a PC to go on the Gnosis as my XBox CMDR was my main at the time...but I do still squarely blame Frontier. Canonn had to submit the Gnosis' flight plan to FDev. FDev had to approve it. Canonn was vocal about wanting to get across the Col 70 Sector and expressly said they were going to do it. FDev could have easily not approved the flight plan and quietly put a squash to it, but they didn't. They knew, from the jump, that it was not going to happen but still let us get amped up for it. So much so that this CMDR bought a laptop and ground his nose off to get the CR's for an AspEx with even some minimal engineering to make the deadline for the jump. Anyhow, not the point of this thread...but speaking towards player rentention, that event was a master class in how not to retain players. I eventually came back, but was put off the game for a few weeks, honestly.
Yes, though complaints were fairly evenly split between whether they should have:
- fixed the website publishing bug (in-game worked fine) so that it didn't publish before the events it described
- (effectively) published that article three weeks earlier than the events it described
You want an honest answer?
My assumption is that the game is currently in limbo because FDev don't want to implement anything important before console players get a crack at Odyssey but they're not sure whether or not the console port of Odyssey is ever going to happen.
Well, it was hardly "hours" before the jump, anymore than things changed at the "last minute." Warnings about Thargoid activity in that area started over a week before the Gnosis was scheduled to jump. I'll grant you that the Galnet article going out a bit early was a bit of fail on Frontier's part, but that's probably because I believe Galnet articles are published during the daily server tick.
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I was thinking about this the other night while playing, I personally think the travel time between places is fair given the scale of it all but things could be tweaked so that it didn't take so long to slow down while approaching your destination. It's those last moments that seem to be extended that can test the patience sometimes, the thought that we're almost there but then wait, no, not quite yet for a few more minutes...
That's the potentially dangerous bit though, the chance to interdict or be interdicted. Plus gravity braking is a thing in supercruise, but mostly the danger (albeit rare).
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It was all warned long enough and clearly enough in advance that loads of us got on board expecting some Thargoid excitement. I actually flew out to the Gnosis from the Bubble three days before for that reason, and spent those days exploring nearby systems and collecting surface materials. So I just don't believe that there were unsuspecting explorers aboard. If I had three days to get there, they had three days to escape.
It was absolutely well telegraphed. I had time to prep my exploration ship, jump out to the Gnosis, do some exploring, see more warnings, jump back and buy enough modules to refit my explorer to survive Thargoid action if necessary, jump out again and transfer those modules to the Gnosis...
I think that was the point for me when the gamer in me decided to focus on something else.The optimist in me says you might be right. The realist in me remembers that I thought the same when I played the Alpha and thought "This can't be all". The pessimist sees the state of the game, the lack of clear direction, the new gag order on CM Comms and fears the worst.
Like many of us, we all want this game to succeed. But with every "update", that wishful thinking gets flushed a little bit more down the drain. I'd love to get back into Elite. But right now, I see no reason to do so. Just to shovel more credits? The Exo "gameplay" is horrible to me to say the least, the on foot CZs are really just to attract the COD players, which I am not. For now, this game has been mothballed on my end.
I sincerely hope Fdev gets their act together and turn this around, with more depth.
This ^, exactly. Stranded somewhere a la Jacques Station or stuck in the Cone Sector, unable to get out. Something. Just ending up one system away because Thargoids was...dissappointing.