If you're wondering where Frontier's attention is directed at...

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

I guess people genuinely (as a German I had to look up how to spell that!) feel that way. Both Old Duck and Karrde Sun are reasonable people that I absolutely respect for their opinion. In regards to Elite Dangerous I tend to see things from a positive angle, so I think just because they feel differentely it doesn't mean their view is invalid. Maybe they just feel that the game was in maintenance mode although it's factually wrong.

Hey im just grateful to have people to discuss the topic of elite dangerous with. Especially if people have a different point of view.. discussions are very short when people agree I might even learning something from reading a different point of view.

Sadly for me my first online game was world of warcraft, did time in swtor, and doing time in eso at present. I can't unsee what these other companies do, this isn't in the same league. But it does match very well what egosoft do, cdpr do with cyperpunk, its not all chaos and panic, just makes better sense compared to all the others. Maybe it was an experiment for them 10 years ago as a company to have a dance with service games, but as frontier evolved, from the outside everything they make is connected closer to single player with dlc? Totally fine? Sure theres technically multiplayer etc.

 

[Moriarte]

I don’t agree with the sentiment that maintenance mode = doom. Maintenance mode = maintenance mode. In the initial years 2013, 14 & 15 lots of stuff was coming out the workshop. Even some stuff we didn’t need came out, but hey, more is better than less. Now that the borders have been drawn and the galaxy is filled, more or less, according to the original plans, the pace and scope of further fulfilment is limited by the nature of the stage of the process we’re in. Limited by things like unoptimised graphics, UI limitations, low morale of people who’s been drawing exact same things for 8 years straight, limited by rate of financial return, etc. I’m arguing that even if FD wanted they can’t showcase the same rate of progress as they did in initial years due to complexity and place on the curve. The project is slowly gravitating towards a mode of rare additions, most of which is maintenance. And that’s fine.

The answer is learning from architectural mistakes and starting again, from the beginning. iirc This is the fourth iteration of Elite. Someday they’ll make it to number 5. Or maybe someone else will beat them to it.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Oh yeah just in case i don't think maintenance mode is doom either. Doom is when they stop paying for the servers, but my guess and hope is vanilla sales and arx from new first time addicts should cover that for a while. Hopefully.

Where elite is up to is not really our business.. what would it take for frontier to return to form both in sales and to warrant a full development team? I think we can only dream of the question here, a real answer is so far away from us as players.

Could they turn off the bgs and drastically reduce server costs? That might even be an option in the distant future.

 

[Old Duck]

I don’t agree with the sentiment that maintenance mode = doom. Maintenance mode = maintenance mode.

I guess it depends on how you play Elite. I basically play community goal to community goal these days, with a strong preference towards combat-related community goals. This is my "end game" content. So if maintenance mode (or whatever you want to call it) means that we're not getting fun CGs on at least a bi-weekly basis, then that is "doom" for me personally. Of course that doesn't mean the game itself is doomed, it just means my fun in the game is doomed.

And yeah, of course I have strong feelings about that. It makes me sad that something that used to be quite common (and for me, enjoyable) has for some reason been removed from the game.

 

[PeacockBoy78]

Yeh well I gotta say that if you are looking to try and de-motivate, de-moralise and thoroughly the developers who work really f*cking hard to keep this game interesting then why don't you just continue as you're going?

So many people on here are toxic. Why not be a little more constructive from now on?

 

[babelfisch]

Hey im just grateful to have people to discuss the topic of elite dangerous with. Especially if people have a different point of view.. discussions are very short when people agree I might even learning something from reading a different point of view.

Sadly for me my first online game was world of warcraft, did time in swtor, and doing time in eso at present. I can't unsee what these other companies do, this isn't in the same league. But it does match very well what egosoft do, cdpr do with cyperpunk, its not all chaos and panic, just makes better sense compared to all the others. Maybe it was an experiment for them 10 years ago as a company to have a dance with service games, but as frontier evolved, from the outside everything they make is connected closer to single player with dlc? Totally fine? Sure theres technically multiplayer etc.

I think WoW and SWTOR aren't really fair comparisions. Both used to be subscription based IIRC. And they already started with a much bigger target audience. They just have 100x the money FDEV has. And while it's probably fair to put some of the blame for the smaller player base on the game, let's not forget that space sims used to be a niche back in 2012 and that no other publisher thought you could make money with it.

Apart from that I am actually happy that Elite isn't anything like the traditional MMOs. They all share the same basic principle, HUD, etc. Essentially they are all clones of WoW with bad graphics, bad animations and bad gameplay. I haven't found a MMO that doesn't look stupid yet.

 

[Gordon Freeman IV]

I think there’s a few Cutter owners that would beg to differ on that one

Cutter is considerably better in wing fights as it can keep up with the fight however in a 1v1 the corvette pilot can use its higher burst damage output, combined with drag frag and not clasing reverskis the vette pilot can easily dispatch the cutter. Remember: feedback is your friend, dont let those 8A banks go un cancelled. (If cutter reverskis vette pilot should also reverski in the opposite direction, let him come to you)

 

[CaptainPugwash]

Cutter is considerably better in wing fights as it can keep up with the fight however in a 1v1 the corvette pilot can use its higher burst damage output, combined with drag frag and not clasing reverskis the vette pilot can easily dispatch the cutter. Remember: feedback is your friend, dont let those 8A banks go un cancelled. (If cutter reverskis vette pilot should also reverski in the opposite direction, let him come to you)

You did say 1v1 so I’ll concede defeat
The fact is I hate combat with either of them, prefer the conda with rails.

 

[Muzz UK]

The super tanker comment around 4:40 from David Braben implies to me that the game will continue to do its thing but at a slow rate with out much intervention. Same as guys its being developed and supported just don't expect miracles or quick turnarounds.

 

[Gordon Freeman IV]

The super tanker comment around 4:40 from David Braben implies to me that the game will continue to do its thing but at a slow rate with out much intervention. Same as guys its being developed and supported just don't expect miracles or quick turnarounds.

Keeping servers online is not "being developed" we want new content not a slow death.

 

[babelfisch]

The super tanker comment around 4:40 from David Braben implies to me that the game will continue to do its thing but at a slow rate with out much intervention. Same as guys its being developed and supported just don't expect miracles or quick turnarounds.

I thought he was talking about the reception of Odyssey with that analogy and not the speed of development. If you take a look at reviews for example you will notice that it's going to take a long time until they are more favourable although improvements already started some time ago. I think that interpretation makes more sense.

 

[Muzz UK]

Keeping servers online is not "being developed" we want new content not a slow death.

See I think theres two issues here:
1. The game doesn't make enough money to warrant massive investment at this time.
2. The game cannot be developed at the speed in which we first through for technical reasons.

Going to be dangerous here and compare to Star Citizen which has had much more investment. Sure it has a lot more of the on foot features but in terms of space content its not any different. They've spent hell of a lot more money too on SC which tells me Elite due to current tech is much harder to make and doesn't have the market. The kickstarter suggested a 10 year development plan which we're 75% through but we probably have 25% of the features David B talked about.

It makes no sense for Frontier to ramp up production size and speed of content release as the profit margin won't be enough. Time to accept Elite for what it is. No one else other than Chris Roberts is making a space sim / space mmo. No Mans Sky is nothing like Elite or SC.

I still love Elite I hope they don't pull the plug.

 

[Maolagin]

I guess it depends on how you play Elite. I basically play community goal to community goal these days, with a strong preference towards combat-related community goals. This is my "end game" content. So if maintenance mode (or whatever you want to call it) means that we're not getting fun CGs on at least a bi-weekly basis, then that is "doom" for me personally. Of course that doesn't mean the game itself is doomed, it just means my fun in the game is doomed.

And yeah, of course I have strong feelings about that. It makes me sad that something that used to be quite common (and for me, enjoyable) has for some reason been removed from the game.

And in fact to the contrary, "maintenance mode" would probably be good for you! The big Galnet blackout was due (at least it was strongly implied) to pulling all the writing/localization team into Odyssey work. Without an all-hands push going on, that kind of community content is very cheap to keep going compared to developing significant new features. All it takes is a small team of writers and CMs and an engineer to write the scripts that trigger various events. Pull a couple of artists from the general pool now and then to whip up new decals and skins. In principle, that kind of operation could probably be self-supporting almost indefinitely, at least until it got to the point where major engineering work became necessary to keep it working on modern PCs.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

I think WoW and SWTOR aren't really fair comparisions. Both used to be subscription based IIRC. And they already started with a much bigger target audience. They just have 100x the money FDEV has. And while it's probably fair to put some of the blame for the smaller player base on the game, let's not forget that space sims used to be a niche back in 2012 and that no other publisher thought you could make money with it.

Apart from that I am actually happy that Elite isn't anything like the traditional MMOs. They all share the same basic principle, HUD, etc. Essentially they are all clones of WoW with bad graphics, bad animations and bad gameplay. I haven't found a MMO that doesn't look stupid yet.

If there was no advertisement and it was up to me to make my own conclusion, i would have just considered elite like every other mid + size single player game. With a multiplayer feature, and dlc and microtransactions. For single player games, that seems like a common option for a company wanting to continue to maintain and get revenue from a large development effort.. even assassins creed seems to be doing it?

Have a look at the elite dangerous steam page though. Which honestly i never read, but i think every content creator for elites history did, and that's probably where the assumption came from with me.

Actually this is probably the root of all expectation mismatches. If frontier just changed the image to be an ongoing single player game what they deliver matches up to the expectation. The only thing out of place is frontier have a notably higher bar than other companies for bugs to get fixed... it sounds so simple to me maybe im not supposed to understand these things.

 

[Red Anders]

So ED has come out of a Boom state and just survived an Infrastructure Failure?

And we're in the middle of a bunch of public holidays, you might be onto something here.

 

[St0rmFury]

Yeh well I gotta say that if you are looking to try and de-motivate, de-moralise and thoroughly the developers who work really f*cking hard to keep this game interesting then why don't you just continue as you're going?

So many people on here are toxic. Why not be a little more constructive from now on?

Not enough victim blaming in this post, you gotta try harder.

 

[Shockbot]

The super tanker comment around 4:40 from David Braben implies to me that the game will continue to do its thing but at a slow rate with out much intervention. Same as guys its being developed and supported just don't expect miracles or quick turnarounds.

For me this statement is obvious for that, that he has not much connection to ED anymore because it is called Carrier ?

 

[Cmdr Eratosthenes]

Bruh, it's an 8 yr old game...

 

[Cmdr Derzelat]

Yeh well I gotta say that if you are looking to try and de-motivate, de-moralise and thoroughly the developers who work really f*cking hard to keep this game interesting then why don't you just continue as you're going?

So many people on here are toxic. Why not be a little more constructive from now on?

I would really love to see one day of what this "constructive" thing might mean....11 updates and still no change for the exploration minigame, and with all the feedback asking for a redesign în a meningfull way and still no change, or years of repeated feedback (constructive feedback) and requests for powerplay improvements with little to no results. Literal hundreds of forum pages of feedback in Alpha stage only ( read Time dedicate to it) and yet little to no consequences. Constructive feedback or criticism has an effect only when is not just acknowledged but also integrated in development, otherwise might be regarded as toxicity.

 

[St0rmFury]

I would really love to see one day of what this "constructive" thing might mean....11 updates and still no change for the exploration minigame, and with all the feedback asking for a redesign în a meningfull way and still no change, or years of repeated feedback (constructive feedback) and requests for powerplay improvements with little to no results. Literal hundreds of forum pages of feedback in Alpha stage only ( read Time dedicate to it) and yet little to no consequences. Constructive feedback or criticism has an effect only when is not just acknowledged but also integrated in development, otherwise might be regarded as toxicity.

There's also plenty of constructive feedback in ship engineering balancing thread.

5 months later and still nothing.