1.1 Beta - You're not missing anything

[Enride]

Yep, I really get the POV. It's a compelling reason to not participate in beta's, for me. It's comparable to opening your Christmas presents before Christmas. I knew I'd like this game, what to generally expect etc. I think the devs have done a fair amount of work in the past month.

I'd frame it simply like this. If someone isn't enjoying the game, how long did it take them to realise? If you don't like the speed/direction of development, how long will you wait? If there is optimism, then they can simply come back at a later date.

There's always a degree of finality with the more critical postings, almost like they need reassurance to go do something better with their time. In my little world, I've already had $60 worth of entertainment, and I think within 3-6 months a lot of the mainstream suggestions will be implemented.

Aside from the 'is that it' improvements of 1.1 there's the Mac version they've been working on. I'm (err) quietly optimistic about the game, and played it quite heavily upon release but have taken it easy the past week due to work commitments. The nice thing is I'm not really missing out or obligated to 'catch up' in any grind-related manner. It's all good (for me).

I entered alpha last March but up until release cant have logged more then maybe 20 hours gametime. Alot more time spent discussing and reading on the forum though, which has been a great source of joy and excitment and one of the reasons ill say that it was money well spent!

But most of all, the entire time ive mostely been eagerly awaiting to see the game become what I was hoping for! And in part what they advertised the game would be. And for every big development stage we expected the game to come closer to this vision that we have been fed, only to be somewhat disappointed.

Now dont get me wrong, seeing the game go from alpha to release in less then a year is impressive as hell!
But all the time I guess many of us expected (suspected) that FDev had much more that they kept "in house". (Probably part of the reason some people started talking mythically about this so called "vertical slice" theory)

So while im still optimistic about ED, and I still think it can become one of the most amazing games to be released, I still find myself in the exact same situation as I was the entire last year; Waiting for the next update.
But that was during beta, now the game is released and supposedly "complete" (though, we know a game like this is never really finished) and I cant help but feel that I should now spend more time enjoying the current game then looking forward to the next update...

I agree with you, FDev have been doing alot of work the past month and greatly improved some parts of the game.

But how can they seriously prioritize nighttime citylights, enhanced clouds and the so called "community goals" before wings, alliances and the overall coop/multiplayer experience.

After all, THEY where the ones who made a huge statement about how important the multiplayer aspect of the game is...
Well, then start working on it then...



Sorry for ranting, generally speaking I am not completely disappointed with ED or FDev.
Just had a buildup for a while wondering why ED seems to go more towards an early end then the wonderful sim I was hoping for :/
Whatever the case, ill be here til the end still hoping, wishing amd waiting.

 

[Extrasmooth]

It's a beta build guys. They will only be enabling bits at a time to test, we're just meant to be testing it.

I'm sure they will enable something else equally stupid to test next week.

 

[WalterHWhite]

But how can they seriously prioritize nighttime citylights, enhanced clouds and the so called "community goals" before wings, alliances and the overall coop/multiplayer experience.

Good post Enride, to that point specifically, I think it's a case of not being able to please everyone all of the time. I've seen people complain about plotting 1000ly jumps while others really appreciate it (and requested it). Improvements to open play may only affect 50% of the playerbase, 1000ly jumps 5%, combat logging 15% etc etc

As Kyle Brennan had posted earlier, a more structured suggestion/poll approach may help prioritise what the developers should work on (aside from what's already set in stone)

Repped your post because putting thought and time into it is appreciated. I'd like to think our reasonable requests for the game will be returned in kind with improvements to the game. It does get tiring to see the one liner dismissive type posts, you have stamina if you've been here longer than me old bean!

 

[DoneWithFD]

Everyone's supposed to test the game mechanic by repeating the same cargo run delivering food to a starport that just wants so many thousands of tons of food. There's a progress bar showing how much has been delivered just like on Blue Peter. In return for taking part you get 5% off metals at the starport for 2 days. If you deliver the most out of all participants you get 20,000CR as well.

Oh. My. Gods.

I can't contain my laughter directed at how pathetic a game mechanic this is. Is this really the extent of Frontier's creativity when it comes to "meaningful" content? I... just... wat?

 

[GJ51]

Plowed through the whole thread...

What's the real issue?

Why is the ED team devoting so much time and energy on things of no interest to it's users?

The only decent thing I saw in the beta was the really nice improvement to the route planning. So why do we sit in the real game reading forum posts to make a 90 LY journey?

ED - from the get go has lacked insightful leadership, vision, and decision making at the top. No sign that will improve anytime soon. Yes the actual devs work hard and do a great job ... ON THE WRONG STUFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[xyphic]

But how can they seriously prioritize nighttime citylights, enhanced clouds and the so called "community goals" before wings, alliances and the overall coop/multiplayer experience.

ED's team is multidiscipline. They have people who know a lot about procedural generation, some who know a lot about GPU shaders and render pipelines, and some who are more au fait with networking and multiplayer. Not every task requires every discipline, and it would make little sense for the graphics engine programmers to start wading into networking code or vice versa. You'd end up with an almighty mess (and I'm sure the devs in question would be the first to admit it). So don't worry, just because city lights and cloud shaders have been improved for this release doesn't mean that resource was borrowed from elsewhere to do it.

As to community goals, I'm not sure how this fits in with the grand scheme of things. My gut instinct is that it's more of a server-side than a client-side thing, so even that may not have impacted on the Wings schedule. I can see why Frontier are keen on community goals, but its execution still needs some work (e.g. balancing reward to incentivise those tasks over the normal grind).

 

[Vasious]

Man Id love to have you chaps work for my little brokerage, it would be a multi-national Mega Corporation by the end of the quarterif you did as much as you expect from others.
It'd be wonderful

 

[Flyinpiranha]

Being an actual software developer, I think you're way underestimating how difficult some of the most trivial appearing bugs are to a) reproduce and b) fix.

I shouldn't have to come on here and defend Frontier's work ethic. It's clear that they are a talented bunch who work their socks off to try to keep us happy. How demoralising must it be for them to see threads like this criticising their efforts? They did an extraordinary job in getting to where they did at release, but it's not the fault of the developers that the game was released prematurely. What we should be doing is getting behind Frontier's team, helping them find and fix the bugs, giving constructive feedback and stop acting like whiny children. IMO.

I paid for a product. I shouldn't have to tell the chef how to make my meal. It's not "whiney children" it's an expectation of a "finished" product. I find the criticism apt at this point.

 

[Mu77ley]

If anything, they should be working (and communicating) progress on the multiplayer/coop part of ED and put on hold the continous stream of graphical/audio work...The game looks and sounds great already, leave these things til later.
No one will quit playing because cities doesnt light up at nighttime...
Not being able to team up and experience the game co-op will.

People still fail to understand that there are multiple teams working on the game and the fact that the audio and graphical team are working on other things has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the teams working on other areas.

Likewise, pulling audio and graphical specialists off their own particular areas of expertise is more likely to slow down development rather than speed it up as they won't know that area of the code as well.

 

[babelfisch]

After reading patch notes I am pretty hyped for 1.1. I don't care if community goals are a game changer, there are tons of other great improvements. Hope they get the bugs sorted out in time.

On "I don't miss anything"... Well I think OP doesn't get the point of a beta. It's not about having great fun, but rather to help devs by finding bugs.

 

[gary.brain]

ok so let me get this straight you moan about the new features of going to get x to y for the community.

But you love the Luxury sellers 3min away from a station back and forth just to make money....

go figure.

 

[Enride]

Good post Enride, to that point specifically, I think it's a case of not being able to please everyone all of the time. I've seen people complain about plotting 1000ly jumps while others really appreciate it (and requested it). Improvements to open play may only affect 50% of the playerbase, 1000ly jumps 5%, combat logging 15% etc etc

As Kyle Brennan had posted earlier, a more structured suggestion/poll approach may help prioritise what the developers should work on (aside from what's already set in stone)

Repped your post because putting thought and time into it is appreciated. I'd like to think our reasonable requests for the game will be returned in kind with improvements to the game. It does get tiring to see the one liner dismissive type posts, you have stamina if you've been here longer than me old bean!

Thank you Commander, Im not sure how much we agree or disagree about in all this but resonable discussions and respectful posts is a joy whoever im exhanging it with!

ED's team is multidiscipline. They have people who know a lot about procedural generation, some who know a lot about GPU shaders and render pipelines, and some who are more au fait with networking and multiplayer. Not every task requires every discipline, and it would make little sense for the graphics engine programmers to start wading into networking code or vice versa. You'd end up with an almighty mess (and I'm sure the devs in question would be the first to admit it). So don't worry, just because city lights and cloud shaders have been improved for this release doesn't mean that resource was borrowed from elsewhere to do it.

As to community goals, I'm not sure how this fits in with the grand scheme of things. My gut instinct is that it's more of a server-side than a client-side thing, so even that may not have impacted on the Wings schedule. I can see why Frontier are keen on community goals, but its execution still needs some work (e.g. balancing reward to incentivise those tasks over the normal grind).

I am aware of this and more often then not take it into consideration. Im glad your pointing it out, gives me a chance to pause, think and return to a more calm state of mind about the whole ordeal.

Thats not to say I dont think these features should have been prioritized more then alot of other features, like the questionable background simulation that still isnt much more then a fancy gimmick. This is something that should have been refocused a long time ago though, now they have little choice then to keep working on it.

People still fail to understand that there are multiple teams working on the game and the fact that the audio and graphical team are working on other things has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the teams working on other areas.

Likewise, pulling audio and graphical specialists off their own particular areas of expertise is more likely to slow down development rather than speed it up as they won't know that area of the code as well.

Yeah, Xyphic pointed this out already, and im aware of this fact. Doesnt mean FDev could not have prioritized differently.

Its a matter of opinion though, you might not agree with me.

 

[Biffa]

Hoping the good stuff is being saved for the expansion dlcs...

 

[Watcher]

Yes and no on some of this. Many of these bug fixes surely could have been rolled out as small hot fixes, evaluated to be working and then move onto the next one. Instead, we have a huge amount of bug fixes introduced at the same time, and now we are seeing bugs that had previously been fixed reintroduced, things that were supposedly fixed still not working correctly, things that previously worked fine, no longer working, and the new content is very thin.

It feels more like running this massive patch as a beta with beta testing is a gimick.

As a general rule you really do not want to be rolling out multiple hot fixes as rapidly as possible, it gives you little to no chance for QA and hugely increases the chances that this 'one little fix' has messed something up badly elsewhere. Yeah sure if there is something absolutely killing the game for everyone in a serious way then you do it, take the risk, cross your fingers... But not for lots of niggling things, they might annoy people, cause a lot of noise but do you want to risk killing the game for that? Better to bunch up as many of them as you can and do it in one big patch which you can test, and dare I say it _beta_ test, properly.

Which is seemingly what they've done...

And if, as you say, it seems to have caused lots of _other_ things to break or rebreak surely this validates the strategy - I suspect people would be even more annoyed if they were shooting out patches every other day each of which fixed one thing but accidentally broke something else.

I would much prefer they take their time and get it right - that doesn't let them off the hook, they still need to get it right - they just should be doing that in a risky fashion.

 

[Yaffle]

There's already a thread for discussing the 1.1 beta, so closing this as a duplicate