2.3 dev update feedback mega thread

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60% time i post something, moderator delete my post. I wonder. Is it me, or is it forum so.. salty.

How about - the post was so filled with swearing that it was removed?

I counted 5 'F' words that I can remember from a quick reading of it!
 
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Like CQC... you also jump in your fighter magically, despite your are parking your ASP at Sagitarius A. :)

I understand the feelings many of us had with this mechanic, but I think it's the only way this feature would be used an a regular basis.
If you have to meet up, it would feel nice, for the first three times, but then you go... nah I am good... I am just trading 10 jumps away, another time bro.

The difference with CQC is that you don't effect the ingame world. It is a completely seperate entity apart from a few credits and a title.
 
The difference with CQC is that you don't effect the ingame world. It is a completely seperate entity apart from a few credits and a title.

Which is a mistake from my opinion.

CQC very should be bring into the main game : with arena and tournament. Station welcoming such events should allow bet on fighting to speculate.

This is gameplay.
 
Arguably, the implementation of NPC Pilots for hire brought in a form of NPC crew - just not in the same way that the roles for players have been described. The NPC can fly and fight the SLF or the mother ship - managing all roles at once.

Sadly, given the feedback from the various polls on the subject (that indicate a significant majority of voters are in favour of NPC Crew over player crew), Frontier would appear not to have prioritised NPC Crew - and we're still waiting for NPC Wingmen....

Yeah. Sadly I suspect that FD wont' add NPC wingmen and NPC crew because they're afraid of further damaging PVP balance (like RNGineers did). Which is a sad alter to sacrifice these 2 great elements, given how poor PVP play is. No guilds. No shared ships, poor Crew implementation, no cash transfer.

All of the restrictions of a solo / MP game. None of the benefits.
 
Which is a mistake from my opinion.

CQC very should be bring into the main game : with arena and tournament. Station welcoming such events should allow bet on fighting to speculate.

This is gameplay.

Absolutely agree. I think the main reason for the death of CQC is the disconnection from the main game. If this would be included into the main game, much more players would access it. Make it accessible from stations in open as a first step, and i am sure the number of players jumps up immediately. Then add a spectator mode and racing, and this could become a major part of gameplay for many players.

Unfortunately, it looks like FD abandoned CQC development altogether, just like PP (except minor fixes). I hope someday they will realise that players ignore these features because they suck, and not because they are not interested.
 
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Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
Yeah. Sadly I suspect that FD wont' add NPC wingmen and NPC crew because they're afraid of further damaging PVP balance (like RNGineers did). Which is a sad alter to sacrifice these 2 great elements, given how poor PVP play is.

Even sadder, if that is the reason, as Frontier have recently acknowledged that they are well aware that the majority of players do not get involved in PvP.
 
Even sadder, if that is the reason, as Frontier have recently acknowledged that they are well aware that the majority of players do not get involved in PvP.

I think the game could really need another in depth design discussion before season 3.
Tell the community what is technically possible and then discuss priorities. This doesn't mean that the majority decides, but only that the reasons for every design choice become transparent and are communicate with the community.

The dumped down version of multi crew is a huge disappointment for me and i think also many others. Many hoped that this will be the update which brings multiplayer for non-combat activities.
 
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I could see that most people would only be 4-5 minutes away.

Just a sidenote, when I was active in powerplay we were scattered around the bubble, and usually "getting there" ate much of our playtime, especially in combat (undermining) ships. It usually resulted in this or similar conversation:

- Hello X, nice to see you online. Care to join our UM wing?
- Sure, where are you?
- XXX system.
- Ok, let me check... Aw shucks. 15 jumps away. How long do you plan to stay?
- 1 hr tops.
- Oh ok, nvm then, I need to switch to fuelscoop configuration and the station here only has 1E class... Till next time!

Yes, now we can use an AspEx and transfer the ship over. It will take only slightly longer and cost a lot of credits, but hey at least I don't have to endure "flying" that FDL all the way across the bubble. Even though I voted for delayed, I'd argue that the ship transfer should cost less and be a little bit faster. But while ship instant ship transfer did have some ramifications - for example, heavy powerplay undermining response spawning almost instantly or everyone flying their maxed out AspEx while fitting a 1D FSD to all other ships, the same cannot be said about telepresence. It's just a way to have fun with friends. So what if anyone "farms credits" that way? Every way to avoid The Grind in this expensive paid AAA title is a good way ;-)
 
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Arguably, the implementation of NPC Pilots for hire brought in a form of NPC crew - just not in the same way that the roles for players have been described. The NPC can fly and fight the SLF or the mother ship - managing all roles at once.

Sadly, given the feedback from the various polls on the subject (that indicate a significant majority of voters are in favour of NPC Crew over player crew), Frontier would appear not to have prioritised NPC Crew - and we're still waiting for NPC Wingmen....

Which for me at least is a great shame, but hey I'll live, just want a crew to call my own :)

At least I have Kali, she just went up to harmless bless her.
 
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Generally much better way for multicrew than telepresence would be:
1. Fast travel between station. If we want to lower coop barrier we should do it. If we can tranfer ships, why we can transfer it with us inside? For example before going to sleep we send our ship to some destination star port.
2. Multicrew require physical boarding. It is open for future improvements, more advanced roles and space legs. With "fast travel" between station it will be convenient as well as telepresence.
 
Oh I have feedback for the devs!!!!!!

Let me take a moment to collect my thoughts, calm down, and try to present this in a non-hostile positive way....

EDIT: Okay, I’ve added my collective thoughts and suggestions on 2.3’s multicrew to the thread, see below for them in post #84:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-mega-thread?p=5098542&viewfull=1#post5098542

Putting it here for more visibility on the front page:

*****************

OKAY, feedback. Since this is a 2.3 feedback thread I’ll keep my discussion to 2.3 stuff, namely the headline feature of Multi-Crew.

Let’s start with the summary:
Multicrew should be more than just a combat only feature, and Frontier should have included roles and positions to do more than just shoot things with it.

While I will say that multicrew currently sounds pretty sweet from a combat point of view, this new feature could have given new gameplay to many playstyles in the game, not only combat but including trading, mining, and exploration. A large percentage of the players do not play combat regularly, in fact combat isn’t even the style that is played the most:


A combat only multicrew is extremely limited in usefulness and by design alienates a huge percentage of Elite’s players. Frontier desperately needs to start considering players other than the combat crowd when designing new features for the game. This incessant combat only focus is hurting Elite overall, you need to balance development work better than that or the health of the franchise will suffer for it.

So, what other seats could be added to the multicrew feature which would broaden it’s appeal and give non-combat players ways to use it too?

Add an engineering station to multicrew.

Now, what possible duties could this new station have?

  • Navigation – Use the galaxy map to monitor and adjust the route, even search the local map for points of interest while the pilot flies the ship
  • Science – Allow the engineer seat to manually point discovery scanners 360°, giving the ship the ability to scan stellar objects in any direction. Also give the seat a way to boost scanning range via a minigame perhaps.
  • Mining – Allow the engineer seat to work the refinery, manually give collection drones targets to retrieve (without the drone self destructing afterwards). The engineer can also fire prospecting drones 360° around the ship, allowing the pilot to fly through the asteroids while the engineer searches for good rocks to mine.
  • Trading – In addition to the above navigation duties, an engineer seat on a trader would have access to a new info display which stores commodity prices for visitied stations, thereby allowing the engineer to actually search local systems for the best locations to sell carried cargo.
  • Damage Control – The engineer seat could work the AFMU and make repairs on the fly by carefully working the module page while the pilot continues to fly the ship.

Some other improvements that multicrew could use to make it better overall:

  • Add a new mining SLF which can mine & prospect asteroids. This way a ship with two commanders and a hangar on board could mine twice as fast and cooperatively! Note that only the mother ship is collecting ores.
  • Allow SRV’s to be manned by multicrews. This would transform surface base assaults into an awesome cooperative multicrew experience.
  • Increase the amount of crew from 3 to 4 total.
  • Give the option to switch helm control. Many friends would use this, it's risky but at least allow said risk if it's wanted.

The multicrew feature has much potential to improve Elite’s multiplayer experience for everyone, not just the limited group of combat players. Potential that the current 2.3 implementation completely lacks.

Is there any chance that Frontier is aware of this, or even planning to flesh it out in the very near future? I’m not talking S4 or later, I’m talking like in 2.3 yet or maybe 2.4? Because as it is now for 2.3, your new multicrew feature is going to barely be used at all by a vast majority of your players. There’s just nothing there for a huge amount of commanders.

Love the poll from this post.

Just clearly shows FD have almost zero clue about their player base.

Most people don't even do combat so FD are like, "I know, let's do loads of combat stuff, it will be great, Everyone will love it"

Doh!

It's a good job I only represent one person, as a premium beta backer I am sorely disappointed in the direction this game has gone in.

I wanted a living breathing galaxy with things to explore and find, new stuff round every corner with a feeling of excitement that made me want to play the game to experience what it has to offer rather than just credits and pew pew.

For me, the game hasn't been good since the 1.5 update, all down hill since then.

Everything is static and stale, nothing is alive, there's no hustle and bustle to the galaxy. The ruins do hardly nothing, the ground stations have no life, space stations are the only thing that has any feelings of life and it's taken two years just to do that!

And now more useless additions that only a tiny portion of the player base will utilise.

:( /Cry
 
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Generally much better way for multicrew than telepresence would be:
1. Fast travel between station. If we want to lower coop barrier we should do it. If we can tranfer ships, why we can transfer it with us inside? For example before going to sleep we send our ship to some destination star port.
2. Multicrew require physical boarding. It is open for future improvements, more advanced roles and space legs. With "fast travel" between station it will be convenient as well as telepresence.

Well, fast travel would be all good and dandy but if it requires 30-40min of transfer time, It's not going to work is it ?

But yeah, if one would be able to quick travel to a friend's location with the ship instantly (for a fee) if the distance is like < 200 lyr,
we would have proper coop play support. But I'm not sure FD has the balls to do such a thing given how they folded like wet noodles
with the transfer times.
 
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Telepresence is not really an issue to me, I can understand limitations that lead them to ease gameplay.

What bother me more is the lack of role. Everything is DPS oriented, there is no more support roles like engineering or navigation onboard. This will lead to make small/medium ship size very boring to share in multicrew.
 
Honestly I can deal with lore and telepresence. The real problem is how it simplify the multicrew and I can't imagine how they will merge multicrew with space legs and telepresence...

For Frontier

Dear Frontier,
If you plan to change your distribution model from seasons to smaller DLCs, sold as 3.0, 3.1, 3.2... 3.x... It is good time to sell Space Legs DLC at the same time as release of 2.3 patch ;)
 
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Honestly I can deal with lore and telepresence. The real problem is how it simplify the multicrew and I can't imagine how they will merge multicrew with space legs and telepresence...

For Frontier

Dear Frontier,
If you plan to change your distribution model from seasons to smaller DLCs, sold as 3.0, 3.1, 3.2... 3.x... It is good time to sell Space Legs DLC at the same time as release of 2.3 patch ;)

Exactly, tack it on now, and maybe deal with it later.

Sounds familiar...
 
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Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
Generally much better way for multicrew than telepresence would be:
1. Fast travel between station. If we want to lower coop barrier we should do it. If we can tranfer ships, why we can transfer it with us inside? For example before going to sleep we send our ship to some destination star port.
2. Multicrew require physical boarding. It is open for future improvements, more advanced roles and space legs. With "fast travel" between station it will be convenient as well as telepresence.

Given the community resistance to instant ship transfer, I don't expect that fast travel would be well received.
 
Thank god you are not designing this game. As the majority says, and I agree, if multicrew would require me to physically travel to my friend's ship, I will tell everyone to stay out of this game and leave as well. For god's sake, let gameplay win instead of your "immersion" fun breaking choices

I am not talking about immersion and I see that some deeper thinking about gameplay mechanics is beyond your scope. So let me try explain it:
The whole problem about: To telepresence or not to, is caused by whole multicrew simplicity. There few points you need to think about:
1. Controlling SLF as crew member would be very similar to normal ship piloting, there is only one benefit - instant match making.
2. Controlling turrets - this is only one truly new feature, focused on combat of course. Is it good? Maybe. Is useful? I don't know. Will it meet players expectation about multicrew? We will see...
3. Do you tired to think about it at least few minutes? Just think about endless possibilities which are created by proper multicrew. Electornic warfate modules with mini-games, in ship repairs with space legs, overriding power generator, there should be much more to do that just controlling turret and here we have question, how to handle that more advanced interactions like space legs with telepresence? Just imagine that may be crew of your friend ship even when you logoff. You are offline but your friend still playing so you are still "on the road"...
4. To be honest, the most game-changing feature of 2.3 is instant match making called multicrew. How we could achieve the same with much more logic? Fast travel between stations, jump gates etc. Just think about it....
 
Given the community resistance to instant ship transfer, I don't expect that fast travel would be well received.

^^ I can smell the smoke and hear the pitchforks from here.

Still, it would be the right move, and I would say that things would die down within 2 months.
FD would just need to don the flak vest for a while.

After all, design by commity usually ends in crap products and companies are not democracies.
 

Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
But I'm not sure FD has the balls to do such a thing given how they folded like wet noodles with the transfer times.

Frontier chose to listen to the community - and sought to ensure that as many players had the opportunity to vote on it (by not using the forums for the poll as there's no requirement to own the game to vote in a forum poll) - before implementing the design originally discussed in the DDF (i.e. delayed and with cost) rather than forcing in the feature as developmentally cheaply as possibly for 2.2.
 

Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
^^ I can smell the smoke and hear the pitchforks from here.

Still, it would be the right move, and I would say that things would die down within 2 months.
FD would just need to don the flak vest for a while.

After all, design by commity usually ends in crap products and companies are not democracies.

If fast travel were implemented then instant free ship transfer would be demanded - which would effectively remove the requirement to travel in a game based around travel within a representation of our galaxy
 
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