A big (fixable) problem: the player is not supposed to die

[Thetele]

I think dying to npc is little bit too hard or too easy depending on what you do. But npc are mostly boring in both cases. Dying to something else is almost impossible and most likely way to die outside combat is to smash into planet or loitering too long.

I think that elite is in bad spot between the perma death and no punishment. I can't say which one i would prefer but i feel that current isn't good balance. "top tier" pvp death cost too much, so much that open isn't worth to play in for "poor" players or traders, but doesn't punish player if they have money so dying is what ever to most people.

Its weird middle ground that we are stuck with. Its design decision that frontier can't/won't change because it would make too many people angry. Same as crime and punishment system won't see changes because most are used to current one and would complain more than frontier can handle if they do major changes to it.

 

[Y nt Zoidberg7]

I disagree with the overwhelming majority of your ideas, they would trivialise the game too much.

But I do agree that explorers have more to lose than most other professions in the event of their death.

Now that we apparently have the technology to 3D print fighters, I'd like to see a similar module for explorers, 3D printing navigation beacons.

That way, at certain intervals in their journey, the Explorer can create and deploy a navigation beacon which they can then upload their data to. If they die, they still go back to the last station docked. Now I'm weary that this may induce some Jaques behaviour, whereby they upload their data and then suicide to get back to the bubble. I'm not sure quite how to combat that. Perhaps uploading your data to a nav beacon only gives you 50% pay out and the remaining when they reach a Universal Cartographics?

Obviously there would need to be restrictions on how many beacons that an Explorer can deploy, in my mind it's not something you're going to be doing every jump, but maybe every 1k light years.

I like this idea, you could even make these data beacons a module that you would have to buy and put in an internal slot (class 4 slot holds 4 data beacons or something like that).

 

[Zmidponk]

Now that we apparently have the technology to 3D print fighters, I'd like to see a similar module for explorers, 3D printing navigation beacons.

That way, at certain intervals in their journey, the Explorer can create and deploy a navigation beacon which they can then upload their data to. If they die, they still go back to the last station docked. Now I'm weary that this may induce some Jaques behaviour, whereby they upload their data and then suicide to get back to the bubble. I'm not sure quite how to combat that. Perhaps uploading your data to a nav beacon only gives you 50% pay out and the remaining when they reach a Universal Cartographics?

Obviously there would need to be restrictions on how many beacons that an Explorer can deploy, in my mind it's not something you're going to be doing every jump, but maybe every 1k light years.

How's about this - they upload the data to the beacon, but this doesn't transmit it. Instead, fitting in with the established lore that FTL communication is quite rare, except for data physically moved by ships from system to system, it simply acts as a data cache backup, so, if the explorer gets destroyed, the data is safe, but they have to go back and collect it from the beacon for another attempt at actually delivering it to a station.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Well, speaking personally, I would not miss the 'multiplayer' part too much

It's certainly the decision which has led to the most compromises, complaints, and unsatisfactory designs. (On the other hand, for me personally, it's also led to the most fun times I've had in an Elite-like game ... so I really have no idea now if it was worth adding or not)

Nope. Traders and explorers have good reasons for considering having non-combat internals, but there is nothing forcing them to do so.

They can - and certainly should - fit at least defensive internals. But you have to give up some internals to the job - I figure you need 4.5 internals for a serious exploration ship (ADS, DSS, SRV, AFMU, bigger scoop) and you need a pretty big ship before you can give up that many internals and still have enough left over to actually win a fight.

I don't have any sympathy for shieldless traders who get blown up, but I am constantly baffled - ever since 1.0 - that the pirates are so incompetent and rare that it was ever something people even considered for a second!

If you know of an actual cheat or exploit, report it to Frontier. Otherwise, you are basically moaning about players succesfully making money in this game.

Oh, I don't mind people being billionaires - indeed, given the number of people whose fun is "do stuff with money" than "get money", I'm absolutely fine with that.

I really hope this isn't a serious suggestion. It would utterly trivialise the game.

It was more obviously sarcastic in earlier drafts. I cut out a lot of the sarcasm to keep the wordcount down, which seems to have been a mistake.

Not really much different from suggestion 1.

Maybe, maybe not. I still would find this option unsatisfactory on balance, but it would be closer to the standard singleplayer save/load gameplay which the previous three games in the series used, and which I think the basic trader/pirate/hunter gameplay is still fundamentally designed around.

As it is there's - widely commented on - inconsistencies in what you lose and what you keep on ship destruction:
Lose: rebuy, uncashed bounties, trade goods, exploration data, potential increase to trade/exploration rank, some missions (and in 2.2, your NPC fighter pilots [1])
Keep: the rest of your cash, your ship, engineer modifications to modules, engineer materials, engineer data, combat rank increases (since you get them for kills, not for cashing in kills), some other missions

Why are some of these kept and some lost? (In 1.0, the logic was reasonably obvious, I thought ... but some of the additions since have gone the "wrong" way for what I thought it was, so.)

[1] This received a bit of forum protest when originally revealed by Frontier, and will probably get a lot more once it's actually out, because it puts combat players in the same position as explorers - one mistake and you lose months of progress. I'm 50:50 on whether Frontier will eventually back down and move this into the "keep" set or not.

I do find it interesting, though, that you're saying pirate threat needs to be increased when the very supposed issue that you're complaining about above is the vulnerability of traders.

Yes - I would increase both risk and reward: you die more often but when you get through the profits are huge - especially in low security systems. Whereas now, you die never which is fortunate because the profits don't cover losses on a basic trade route.

Good point about the 2.1 enhancements to outbreak, famine, etc. being much better for profits - I haven't done much trading since before 2.0, so I'd forgotten about those.

I can kinda see why you'd want this, but there's a major problem. The whole point of exploration is going out into the black to areas where no-one has ever been before and discover what's there - so who dropped the comms relays?

There's been sufficient exploration since the start of the game that you could drop a grid maybe 3kLY a square over the galaxy, put a comm relay near each intersection, and have them all in explored systems. Sure, 99.999% of the galaxy is unexplored - but 100% of the regions of the galaxy (perhaps barring a few outer rim sectors) have had some exploration carried out.

We could have a series of CGs to "scout out potential locations", "gather materials", "get fuel for the transports to place them" and so on - perhaps even have them built very slowly in stages heading outwards from Sol, so beginning explorers on well-travelled routes get to use them, but experts have to leave them behind or make far more major detours?

Except the problem is, if you do this, you're basically punishing success.

I'm not sure I view it that way. Most other games, if you succeed, you're "rewarded" by the game getting harder - beat a level in an RTS, FPS, ARPG, whatever, and the next one has tougher opposition, for instance. Obviously Elite Dangerous being open world and very free form doesn't have "levels" or "endgame" or any sort of curated difficulty curve for the player to follow (and rightly so!) - but I think it should fight more than it does the default tendency of the Elite series to make starting a challenge and continuing dead simple.

I'd far rather the game responded to the player succeeding by upping the challenge - so it's easy to make a billion, tougher to make two billion, and nearly impossible for anyone except the best to make and keep ten billion - than by saying "well done, you've won, that's it for meaningful challenges here"

 

[Mark Lock]

Edit note: if you read this as "I think the player should never die", "I think the game should be made even easier" or "I think the game should have lower risks for higher reward" you're reading it basically entirely backwards to my intent. If you could point out the bit(s) of the post that are leading to you that conclusion I might be able to reword them to be clearer.


Many big problems with Elite Dangerous - it's multiplayer, it's in space, it has a finite budget, it's a bit like Elite - are also its key defining features and the reasons to play it so much. The inevitable compromises aren't great, but we want to play "multiplayer Elite" enough that we (mega-threads aside) usually accept them.

One big fixable problem, however, is that the game is designed so that the player is not supposed to die. We all know players are not supposed to die: "I did X and died" threads exist, and the response is "maybe you're incompetent" rather than "well, yeah".

This causes problems for the game:
1) NPCs can't be made any tougher - and maybe still need nerfing - because if they are they might kill players, which is against the game design.
2) PvP, ending as it often does in a player death, is against the game design (outside of CQC, where players are supposed to die frequently and the game is designed around that)

When a player does die, the risk/cost is wrong. Traders and explorers have more vulnerable ships because their profession requires non-combat internals and lose more cash and progress if they die. A trader buying Palladium for 12.5k per tonne and selling for 14k, for every time they die, they need to make 9 successful trips to cover the lost cargo, plus a few more for the ship rebuy. To do better than break even, even a 5% death rate is tough.

This is impossible to balance. You cannot make NPCs so specifically (not) dangerous to kill a trader only one trip in 20. They're either going to be no threat at all or kill traders so often that they can't turn a profit. For explorers it's even worse - NPCs can never kill an inbound explorer in a balanced way. We say "never fly without rebuy" - but explorers easily carry more exploration data than the ship cost new.

Finally, with the right (not obvious) tricks, you can quickly become a billionaire and not have to care about rebuys anyway.

So it's a mess - the player is not supposed to die, but it really hurts if they do. The players least able to avoid death (traders, explorers, inexperienced) lose the most both proportionally and often absolutely on death, while combat players are at lower risk and lose less. The consequences of this spread out and cause a lot of the bitterest community debates.

So, I can see three basic paths for improvement, all of which would include the removal of fast escape mechanisms such as submit-highwake. There are probably others, too!

1) Implement "lack of player death" properly.

Players aren't supposed to die - so players can't die. Anything which would cause fatal hull or module damage to a player has no effect. (Well, it would at least be consistent...)


2) Remove penalties for death almost entirely.

Destroyed players return to their last station with their ship and all attached cargo, data, transactions, missions, etc. in the state they were in immediately prior to destruction. Pay for repair to damaged subsystems and hull as if you'd narrowly escaped instead, and pay fines as now, but that's all.

Piracy gets a bit harder since players have no incentive to give up cargo - if you kill them with it on board, they keep it, whereas if they give it up (or you steal it) they actually lose it - but without fast escape there's time to force cargo drops, and hatchbreakers can be buffed.

NPCs can now be made much tougher because they don't cause significant losses - even one successful trade trip will make enough profit to pay for a few full repairs. Similarly it's not a big deal if a player shoots you down - just get back out there and shoot back!

This "equalises upwards" the experience so that death has the same effective consequences for everyone as it does for the current ultra-rich.


3) Rebalance the professions so death costs are more similar in terms of "time to recover"

This one is complicated and I've left out the details because they'd need months of adjustment to get right. The aim is to allow players to be killed without making this prohibitively difficult to recover from - but keeping the current gameplay where it does have a cost which one would wish to avoid if possible.

General: combat-oriented equipment and ships have much higher rebuy %, non-combat have much lower rebuy %. Buff NPC numbers and skills enough that they can be a threat to anyone; use system security levels and an expanded player reputation system (reprisals) to allow players to find their own level for risk/reward.

Trade: much better sell:buy ratios. Increase pirate threat significantly.

Exploration: introduce a network of UC comms relays every few kLY across the galaxy to allow periodic sale of data - avoid the all or nothing nature of exploration by being able to cash in every few million (like a trader or fighter can). Introduce more exploration hazards of various sorts.

Losing a non-combat ship should be less punishing in terms of successes-to-recover; losing a combat ship is worse than losing a non-combat ship (but still less likely). Players can largely avoid combat at the cost of profitability by sticking to high security systems and not taking on missions which actively harm opposed factions.

Billionaires will have a lot of enemies, so while making a billion might be "easy", keeping it can be made as hard as necessary for balance.

In contrast to '2' this is intended to "equalise downwards" so that death is a concern and possibility for everyone (and perhaps more so for the "endgame" players).

(This is my favourite option and so of course it's by far the hardest to implement)

Your post is totally wrong, death doesn't exist, you eject and never die, you just lose the ship and have to pay a rebuy cost...

High waking is already a way to allow defenseless ships to escape, it works well to some extent , it will probably change as soon as launchable fighters are released, T ships will launch a fighter and kill the aggressor ...
Problem with T series is they have poor maneuverability but they can have very good shields up to Class 8 for the T9, I killed tons of pirates while doing transport missions in my Asp Explorer, Ts are another matter and honestly I would buy an Anaconda rather than a T9 to be honest and Asp Explorer over T6-7, less cargo for the ability to destroy pirates and if you can't you simply high wake or boost away.

Yours is another post attempting to make FD tailor the game to your gameplay style and compensate for your lack of competence , man, please stop it and just GitGud !!!

 

[verminstar]

man, please stop it and just GitGud !!!

Spent a minute reading yer comment, then got to this bit at the end. And ye were doing so well there.

I want that wasted minute back ^^

 

[Martin Schou]

As someone who primarily makes his credits through trade and haulage, I can't say I agree.

The game already has things in place, that makes the cost of losing my seem weird. Upon ship destruction I still get to keep 1,000 micro materials, 500 pieces of data and all of my credits, but it is somehow impossible to retain the data gathered about a single star. At any time I can see the expected rebuy cost of my ship, and I can even see that there is cargo insurance, but I'm not allowed to use the cargo insurance.

Now, some of these things are a question of balance. After all, if an explorer can just suicide and retain all of the data they gathered, then that gets rid of a lot of the dangers associated with exploration. What could be done to alleviate that somewhat, is attach the data to your escape pod, but make it such that ship destruction inevitably scrambles the data, making it inaccurate for anything but statistical purposes, meaning it will be worth far less credits than normal, sold in a single lump and doesn't give you any first discoveries.

Cargo insurance would be a nice addition to ship insurance, but I'm not entirely sure how to balance that out.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

That's how ED looked like in 1.0 and 1.1.

And it wasn't fun.

Yes, it was full of salt as proper sea. "I want fly Anaconda sooo bady".