In 2015 I dropped into a sidewinder with thousands of other Cmdrs, with little more knowledge of what to do than excitedly smash the ‘launch’ button and cautiously venture out of the mail slot. The next few hours, days, weeks, and months would be spent captivated by the highest learning curve, punishing risk/ reward, and awe inspiring scale and gameplay I had felt in a game to that point in my life. It was truly incredible and had nearly gotten to the point that I was addicted, quite literally.
That first year of exploration of the entirety of Elite was euphoric, but not without nuances- as the main hot topic of the time was credits. Where to find them, and why they were so ungodly slow to earn. Credits were the pilot’s ticket to freedom, and they were very hard to come by. With bounty hunting being punishing for those unable to kill big ticket bounties expediently - if at all, mining paying peanuts, trading requiring massive cargo vessels and huge time sinks that casuals couldn’t commit to or afford, and exploration being the laughingstock of credit farming (much to Bongo’s dismay).
However, there was a glimmer of hope… a profession that offered a moderate time sink, high skill ceiling, prudent planning, improvisation, business accumen, patience, and a gambling problem. The way it worked:
You’d need a ship that could dock at an outpost, so my choice was the AspX. I could fit about 80T of cargo with 5A thrusters and a 2C shield to fend off any bumpy rides. Fighting was out of the question, especially with a full cargo hold. I needed speed and maneuverability, and enough shields to last about 3-4 seconds of FSD boot while getting hammered.
The pickup location was just on the outer rim of the bubble, a small system called Robigo. Robigo offered BIG ticket payouts for high risk smuggling work, human cargo- slaves. At the time there was an exploit where you could swap modes and stack missions offered between solo and multiplayer modes. You could do it the legit way by just waiting for a mission board refresh but that could take about 15 minutes, and swapping was just faster for players on a time crunch, especially if your missions had a short delivery window. You could stack about 10 missions paying anywhere from 3 - 15 million per drop off, pending on how many slaves you could fit in your hold per mission etc.
This. Was. Huge. I mean HUGE cash for the time. You could potentially make between 30 - 50 million credits for a 30 to 40 minute Robigo run (if you were good). And good God the risk was worth the reward. And that’s what made this gameplay better and more exhilarating than anything of the time. The loop itself was high risk. If you were scanned at any point in your journey, game over- every mission you collected was failed in an instant.
I used to call it the gauntlet. From the second you launched, it was a mad dash to beat the white knight Cmdrs trying to scan you in protest of mode swapping, ruining your run right off the bat, even if you had collected the missions legitimately. Sometimes they’d be circling the outpost and targeting/ scanning Cmdrs inside by selecting you from the nav panel- another exploit, but for the self-proclaimed ‘good guys’ it was AOK (thanks FDev). If you’re lucky enough to make it out of Robigo, there would be plenty more interdictions to fight, quick plotting changes to make while scooping, navigating the fuel scoop dead zone with no scoopable stars for several jump lengths, submitting and running from pirates, and finally - making it to your first heavily patrolled federal drop off point, moving like a slug with 80T of spacesick slaves after bobbing and weaving for 130LY in a 13LY jump range AspX.
I would drop into the station radius about 10km out, lining up the mail slot shot at full speed, just barely beating the scan and screaming through the mail slot, flipping the 180 FA off boost Ebrake and slamming her wide butt down on the landing pad. Drop off 1 complete. Time to do it 9 more times, deeper into the bubble each time. All the while remembering the feeling of your gut dropping as the bright orange triangle flashed on your screen 10 times in quick succession after you couldn’t escape a scan. Gut punch- time to start all over or call it a night. For me, this was peak Elite.
A mix of emergent gameplay, bad behavior, high risk/ reward, legitimate skill/ pilot requirement, and genuine fun. I couldn’t tell you how many times my buddies and I would make the gauntlet runs together and either have a great night bathing in credits or a terrible night ending in gut wrenching defeat. Unfortunately though, these times didn’t last long.
Within a couple of months Robigo would be dismantled, offering no more smuggling missions, on top of having the entire smuggling mission functionality nerfed into the ground. The entire profession was killed, right out of the gate, year one. FDev had dropped the hammer so brutally hard that smuggling wouldn’t even be considered a valid profession for another 5 years or so, if it can even be called that now. Not even a chance at compromise or salvaging the gameplay loop. The next several months would be a mirror image of lucrative gameplay loops being smashed into the ground by FDev, time and time again. The first blow to Robigo, for me, was the wake up call. I kept playing, but I had lost my fire for the game that I had back then and having watched FDev continue along their path of questionable development choices over the years has been anything but fun.
The reason I still come around these forums and putter about in my engineered murder Vette is evident from my experience outlined above- I’ve still never had a game come close to what this game gave me year one. I’m still around because I always had hope, but I’ve never put myself in a position to feel let down by FDev again. I felt the potential this game had back then, and watched miss after miss after miss. I know there are plenty of you out there that are okay with the way things have gone and are now, and that’s okay. But I haven’t been for a while, and that’s okay too.
Long story short, this is why I get on here and hold FDevs feet to the fire. Over time, it has, in my view- been a clear and consistent bumpy mess of poor decision after poor decision, and I’ve never been able to tell exactly who’s interests FDev choices are actually geared towards, because it hasn’t been mine.
Hope you enjoyed the story as much as I enjoyed playing it, no matter how short lived it was.
o7
That first year of exploration of the entirety of Elite was euphoric, but not without nuances- as the main hot topic of the time was credits. Where to find them, and why they were so ungodly slow to earn. Credits were the pilot’s ticket to freedom, and they were very hard to come by. With bounty hunting being punishing for those unable to kill big ticket bounties expediently - if at all, mining paying peanuts, trading requiring massive cargo vessels and huge time sinks that casuals couldn’t commit to or afford, and exploration being the laughingstock of credit farming (much to Bongo’s dismay).
However, there was a glimmer of hope… a profession that offered a moderate time sink, high skill ceiling, prudent planning, improvisation, business accumen, patience, and a gambling problem. The way it worked:
You’d need a ship that could dock at an outpost, so my choice was the AspX. I could fit about 80T of cargo with 5A thrusters and a 2C shield to fend off any bumpy rides. Fighting was out of the question, especially with a full cargo hold. I needed speed and maneuverability, and enough shields to last about 3-4 seconds of FSD boot while getting hammered.
The pickup location was just on the outer rim of the bubble, a small system called Robigo. Robigo offered BIG ticket payouts for high risk smuggling work, human cargo- slaves. At the time there was an exploit where you could swap modes and stack missions offered between solo and multiplayer modes. You could do it the legit way by just waiting for a mission board refresh but that could take about 15 minutes, and swapping was just faster for players on a time crunch, especially if your missions had a short delivery window. You could stack about 10 missions paying anywhere from 3 - 15 million per drop off, pending on how many slaves you could fit in your hold per mission etc.
This. Was. Huge. I mean HUGE cash for the time. You could potentially make between 30 - 50 million credits for a 30 to 40 minute Robigo run (if you were good). And good God the risk was worth the reward. And that’s what made this gameplay better and more exhilarating than anything of the time. The loop itself was high risk. If you were scanned at any point in your journey, game over- every mission you collected was failed in an instant.
I used to call it the gauntlet. From the second you launched, it was a mad dash to beat the white knight Cmdrs trying to scan you in protest of mode swapping, ruining your run right off the bat, even if you had collected the missions legitimately. Sometimes they’d be circling the outpost and targeting/ scanning Cmdrs inside by selecting you from the nav panel- another exploit, but for the self-proclaimed ‘good guys’ it was AOK (thanks FDev). If you’re lucky enough to make it out of Robigo, there would be plenty more interdictions to fight, quick plotting changes to make while scooping, navigating the fuel scoop dead zone with no scoopable stars for several jump lengths, submitting and running from pirates, and finally - making it to your first heavily patrolled federal drop off point, moving like a slug with 80T of spacesick slaves after bobbing and weaving for 130LY in a 13LY jump range AspX.
I would drop into the station radius about 10km out, lining up the mail slot shot at full speed, just barely beating the scan and screaming through the mail slot, flipping the 180 FA off boost Ebrake and slamming her wide butt down on the landing pad. Drop off 1 complete. Time to do it 9 more times, deeper into the bubble each time. All the while remembering the feeling of your gut dropping as the bright orange triangle flashed on your screen 10 times in quick succession after you couldn’t escape a scan. Gut punch- time to start all over or call it a night. For me, this was peak Elite.
A mix of emergent gameplay, bad behavior, high risk/ reward, legitimate skill/ pilot requirement, and genuine fun. I couldn’t tell you how many times my buddies and I would make the gauntlet runs together and either have a great night bathing in credits or a terrible night ending in gut wrenching defeat. Unfortunately though, these times didn’t last long.
Within a couple of months Robigo would be dismantled, offering no more smuggling missions, on top of having the entire smuggling mission functionality nerfed into the ground. The entire profession was killed, right out of the gate, year one. FDev had dropped the hammer so brutally hard that smuggling wouldn’t even be considered a valid profession for another 5 years or so, if it can even be called that now. Not even a chance at compromise or salvaging the gameplay loop. The next several months would be a mirror image of lucrative gameplay loops being smashed into the ground by FDev, time and time again. The first blow to Robigo, for me, was the wake up call. I kept playing, but I had lost my fire for the game that I had back then and having watched FDev continue along their path of questionable development choices over the years has been anything but fun.
The reason I still come around these forums and putter about in my engineered murder Vette is evident from my experience outlined above- I’ve still never had a game come close to what this game gave me year one. I’m still around because I always had hope, but I’ve never put myself in a position to feel let down by FDev again. I felt the potential this game had back then, and watched miss after miss after miss. I know there are plenty of you out there that are okay with the way things have gone and are now, and that’s okay. But I haven’t been for a while, and that’s okay too.
Long story short, this is why I get on here and hold FDevs feet to the fire. Over time, it has, in my view- been a clear and consistent bumpy mess of poor decision after poor decision, and I’ve never been able to tell exactly who’s interests FDev choices are actually geared towards, because it hasn’t been mine.
Hope you enjoyed the story as much as I enjoyed playing it, no matter how short lived it was.
o7
