Cheers, saved me watching the video. Yea frontier going to pretend this thread/video doesn't exist. None of the above will change
A message to Frontier From D2EA
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The community is not an homogenous entity. Any suggestion will always have its detractors. There is no singular community agreement on anything.
if you are more perceptive, you will realize that it is "very" homogeneous.
If you review carefully, you will realize that throughout the forum for years, there are always the same requests and they do not go beyond a list of 10 things, they are always repeated.
I wish you were right... but no, E.D is not gaining fans, and the number of youtubers who specialize in space games confirm it, the evidence in the numbers is not showing that ED is increasing the number of players. You can give me any story you want, but I prefer facts and evidence.
Dude, update.
already a creator of content and modifications did it for skyrim, and another creator did it for Wow, they are free modifications and created by a single person.
Dude, get real.
You're making the important point: It is an unofficial mod for a ded game, running from someone's free tier OpenAI account just well enough to make a Youtube video.
It doesn't cost the game publisher anything and when someone makes a screenshot of an NPC going full Tay on them, it doesn't fall back on them, either. When the service connection fails, the content creator can just edit out that part.
I was merely trying to point out that "Stick ChatGPT in the NPCs!!1" is not as easy, cheap, reliable and think-of-the-children-safe as you might think.
Open only? Very divisive.
Ship interiors? Very divisive.
Etc.
There are a lot of the same requests, but its not like people all agree with those requests.
Sometimes its stuff people directly oppose. Sometimes its not that people don't want it at all, just they think FD should focus their efforts elsewhere instead.
For example, i'm not against FD adding ship interiors, but i am against them doing it now, when there are other areas i feel need more attention first.
If you gave 100 people here the budget and resources to take ED in the direction they wanted, you'd end up with 100 different games.
more like 150 different games...
There were elements of the video I liked and agreed with and parts I didn't.
I would genuinely love to see more for explorers to find out there. I got my start in Elite Dangerous as an explorer, and while I find it realistic that the vast majority of worlds out there are lifeless rocks, it would be neat to see more variety in geology or even on-foot prospecting of elements. Fissures and caves, that sort of thing. The 1:1 scale of Elite's Milky Way make it a fantastic exploration sim, and I find myself able to identify more and more of the night sky IRL. More puzzles involving the Guardian ruins to solve on-foot would also be grand!
As a carrier owner I'm not pressed on the jump timers since I get there's some server-side limitations, and carrier guests should have some heads-up before being dragged potentially 500 LY away. A long-jump exploration ship has always outpaced a fleet carrier, what the carrier offers is a mobile base and social hub out there. As a more exploration-combat minded pilot I despised the idea of mining to refuel my carrier, but did it once on an expedition to the Heart Nebula. It was surprisingly relaxing and fits the vibe!
I have enjoyed the combat-oriented nature of the Thargoid War and voted as such in D2EA's poll. While the average litmus of the game does seem to me that most pilots prefer only exploration or space-trucking, Elite Dangerous also offers some of the richest combat mechanics for space games out there. Being able to individually target and disable modules, use FA-off and match velocities to orbit, use an array of different weapons systems and modifications creates a fun tactical experience. I also disagree with the argument that non-combat pilots should be able to expect safety without fitting proper defenses, as the game even prompts the player to take such preparations in the form of NPC pirates (when in or near space inhabited by humans). Granted an engineered PvP player will be orders of magnitude more lethal, but there's a reason I fly a Cutter instead of a Type-9 for hauling tritium. A Type-10 even has the same Mass Lock as the Cutter and costs less than the Anaconda, no rank grind needed. And if one wants to engineer the aforementioned PvP ship, they will first need to assemble a solid exploration vessel to reach places like HIP 36601 for the crystal shards. Proficiency in all trades can reward and feed into each other.
There has been some desire within the hard-core on-foot combat CMDRs out there in EOFCC to have more on-foot weapons and some rebalances. Namely a proper railgun sniper or to rebalance the Executioner's bolt to travel significantly faster. Or even have the Greater Range modification increase projectile speed similar to ship engineering. I would also enjoy more ships like the Mamba Light to be able to both race away from Thargoid Glaives and carry a single additional CMDR if desired, my Courier is getting lonesome!
I would genuinely love to see more for explorers to find out there. I got my start in Elite Dangerous as an explorer, and while I find it realistic that the vast majority of worlds out there are lifeless rocks, it would be neat to see more variety in geology or even on-foot prospecting of elements. Fissures and caves, that sort of thing. The 1:1 scale of Elite's Milky Way make it a fantastic exploration sim, and I find myself able to identify more and more of the night sky IRL. More puzzles involving the Guardian ruins to solve on-foot would also be grand!
As a carrier owner I'm not pressed on the jump timers since I get there's some server-side limitations, and carrier guests should have some heads-up before being dragged potentially 500 LY away. A long-jump exploration ship has always outpaced a fleet carrier, what the carrier offers is a mobile base and social hub out there. As a more exploration-combat minded pilot I despised the idea of mining to refuel my carrier, but did it once on an expedition to the Heart Nebula. It was surprisingly relaxing and fits the vibe!
I have enjoyed the combat-oriented nature of the Thargoid War and voted as such in D2EA's poll. While the average litmus of the game does seem to me that most pilots prefer only exploration or space-trucking, Elite Dangerous also offers some of the richest combat mechanics for space games out there. Being able to individually target and disable modules, use FA-off and match velocities to orbit, use an array of different weapons systems and modifications creates a fun tactical experience. I also disagree with the argument that non-combat pilots should be able to expect safety without fitting proper defenses, as the game even prompts the player to take such preparations in the form of NPC pirates (when in or near space inhabited by humans). Granted an engineered PvP player will be orders of magnitude more lethal, but there's a reason I fly a Cutter instead of a Type-9 for hauling tritium. A Type-10 even has the same Mass Lock as the Cutter and costs less than the Anaconda, no rank grind needed. And if one wants to engineer the aforementioned PvP ship, they will first need to assemble a solid exploration vessel to reach places like HIP 36601 for the crystal shards. Proficiency in all trades can reward and feed into each other.
There has been some desire within the hard-core on-foot combat CMDRs out there in EOFCC to have more on-foot weapons and some rebalances. Namely a proper railgun sniper or to rebalance the Executioner's bolt to travel significantly faster. Or even have the Greater Range modification increase projectile speed similar to ship engineering. I would also enjoy more ships like the Mamba Light to be able to both race away from Thargoid Glaives and carry a single additional CMDR if desired, my Courier is getting lonesome!
Don't involve CR..
- ED is not gaining fans (which is entirely true)
and what you claimed, which was
- ED would be gaining fans/not have lost them to start with if Frontier ignored all those other players and paid attention to what your community thought they should do
are two very different statements.
In terms of facts and evidence:
- whether you measure by EDDN traffic, Steam Charts or Squadron Leaderboard totals, the two months immediately after U14 started the Thargoid War were the busiest in the last 12
- on EDDN traffic or Squadron Leaderboards, they're also the busiest since the Odyssey release itself; on Steam Charts they're 2nd and 4th
By post-Odyssey standards, that's quite a success, even if it didn't quite get to the higher levels between the Epic Giveaway and Odyssey release, and even though it wasn't sustained.
And between 2017 and 2020, "space legs, let us get out of the spaceship like in SC / NMS" was definitely one of those top 10, as was "let us land on atmospheric planets"
Was Odyssey, implementing two major top-10 player demands, therefore a great success? Or is there more to success than "listen to some vocal players on game direction", perhaps.
Not releasing it a year too early would have helped a lot, obviously, as would having had a realistic view from the start about how to get it to work on consoles. But that's a different point to "listen to a community on the development direction", and the forum has always only been representative of a particular minority type of player (which includes me)
Thinking about the lack of content - there's games that add about as much or less content over a longer period of time than Elite, but that constantly tweak the balance or add quality of life features.
Usually it's games where I see an update and go "Huh, that's still getting new patches after all these years?" and it's not because the games were super broken on launch or anything. And skimming the patch notes, it's obvious the changes are there to make the game less frustrating, even if it's a game I haven't played in a while and don't remember the exact mechanics and pain points of.
With Elite there's maybe 1-2 such changes per patch (new keybinds, FC stacking on system map) that get drowned out in a sea of minor bugfixes and minor visual/audio improvements. Can't really fault them for prioritizing that, but with how many issues there are this could go on forever without the patches really making a difference beyond the new content.
Assuming they keep this up and don't just put the game on maintenance mode it could easily be at least another 2-3 years until they fix most of the minor bugs (and look at and decide to ignore all the harder to fix stuff) and resources get freed up to do more new stuff/features (esp random stuff the community is asking for). Overall the bugfixing would probably be better for development long term since Odyssey created more tech debt than it solved.However realistically the playerbase will keep shrinking if they just do this and nothing more. So whatever new content there is in those patches has to be enough to retrain players somehow.
I wish there was any other takeaway from this than to temper your expectations for another 1-2 years at least.
Usually it's games where I see an update and go "Huh, that's still getting new patches after all these years?" and it's not because the games were super broken on launch or anything. And skimming the patch notes, it's obvious the changes are there to make the game less frustrating, even if it's a game I haven't played in a while and don't remember the exact mechanics and pain points of.
With Elite there's maybe 1-2 such changes per patch (new keybinds, FC stacking on system map) that get drowned out in a sea of minor bugfixes and minor visual/audio improvements. Can't really fault them for prioritizing that, but with how many issues there are this could go on forever without the patches really making a difference beyond the new content.
Assuming they keep this up and don't just put the game on maintenance mode it could easily be at least another 2-3 years until they fix most of the minor bugs (and look at and decide to ignore all the harder to fix stuff) and resources get freed up to do more new stuff/features (esp random stuff the community is asking for). Overall the bugfixing would probably be better for development long term since Odyssey created more tech debt than it solved.However realistically the playerbase will keep shrinking if they just do this and nothing more. So whatever new content there is in those patches has to be enough to retrain players somehow.
I wish there was any other takeaway from this than to temper your expectations for another 1-2 years at least.
The issue with this one is that FD never had a clear idea about what they wanted out the gate, opting for a middle road that never made the most of both sides.
If they had stuck with the original plan of permanent mode choice then people could have things the way they want. Once the game was established they could have done it again by making Powerplay Open only and made it the team fisticuffs feature to mirror CQC.
Conversely whats happened is FD have made a space-age Football Manager, where your opponent is either a graph or an aggregated abstract. While it works, after a while the game becomes more of stacking and grinding, and finding ways to min max.
FD could have also made the whole game single player and saved a massive amount of money and time by rejecting the GaaS concept - every so soften inject new stories / ships, mission packs etc. I mean, FD have kind of done this in game now with the tutorials, it could have then led to possible alliances with Powers, superpowers etc.
But again how many players would they have lost with Open only? How many players would never have joined (me for one) with Open only if PvP was a thing?
There's a beer waiting for you in the hotel lobby mate
O7
If it was in at the start (as in Open universe, solo universe), you'd then have automatically grouped people who wanted that experience and the ongoing game would flow from that expectation (unlike now where nothing can really get established)- what I mean is, people resort to solo to overcome players, rather than overcoming who is there by other means available- thus Open can't grow or be anything more than a novelty.But again how many players would they have lost with Open only? How many players would never have joined (me for one) with Open only if PvP was a thing?
There's a beer waiting for you in the hotel lobby mate
O7
Another YT guy, Obsidian Ant did a poll during the PP flash topics and around 50% of 7.7K wanted OO, with a split of 25% no change and 25% weighted modes. This was reflected in the forums here- the overwhelming response (75%) wanting some form of change.
Re numbers: from my time at Utopia heloping run the power, you had about ten to fifteen people keep the power solvent- how do I know this? Because what was planned happened with very little variation. Ben Ryder and myself flipped nearly all of Utopian space to favourable, and two Kumo guys undermined all of Utopian space in a cycle. Now, if you have a hard core of very low numbers what would injecting nearly 4K more (based on responses) do if (being generous) hundreds 'left'?
I'm not sure that's true - they wanted, and the DDF members generally agreed on, "FFE but multiplayer", where multiplayer was very much designed around how multiplayer might have worked in the FFE era: LAN party connections where you fly with someone you already know to escort them on a trade run, or go on a bombing run against that Federal base they keep rebuilding on Pluto together.
The problem was, of course, having got out of the gate and had that concept messily interact with real players on MMO scale, they didn't have a particularly good way to fix it. They'd already made a whole bunch of compromises to what could have been the offline solo game to get it to be multiplayer at all, which it was too late to go back on, but were also too committed to the Horizons release by the time they realised the problem to go back and fix things to make use of the multiplayer side better either.
If they were serious about MP / GaaS they would have had a proper server structure to support that, and design features accordingly. If they had then an actually consistent MP experience might have been possible.
IIRC the structure they agreed on was one that was cheapest but was heavily flawed.
I think they had a clear idea - allow multiplayer and pvp, but without forcing people into it, but on a pure voluntary basis and without incentivizing multiplayer and without punishing soloers (up to a point since there are certain perks for multiplayer as trade bonuses, shared bounties, etc - but it's not something major)
that's costing money, and since they dont charge a subscription for multiplayer, they have to keep the costs as minimal as possible
Stop it!
You know the way to the Hotel.
That 'clear idea' led essentially to nothing though. Like I said a few posts back, ditching MP would have been more in line with what FD normally do and been far more suited to the ongoing support level needed. Instead you have solo and open that try to interlock but hold each other back- split galaxies (like now with legacy and live) would have (when DBOBE hit the button) much better with no mixing, even with the MP architecture built.
Thats down to the business plan.
But this is all retrospective- going forwards FD have a tricky act because they have to please who is left and pray these people are the ones buying cosmetics. IMO FD have spent to much time on Thargoids after a promising start...whats happened is you have a really smart AI which is now time-gated through future updates. I can't see an update to exploration out exploring StarField, so whats left?
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