Powderpanic
Banned
So while I am sure the White Knights are already sharpening their pitch forks and lighting their torches, I will begin.
A friend of mine had been watching me play ED with great interest for the last year or so, regularly watching when I streamed and taking a general interest in the game until he got a PC that was able to run the game.
He had bought Horizons on its release with the hopes his high-end laptop would be able to play it but it just wasn't doing the game justice.
My friend lets call him "Bob" had been a fan of the Space game genre since original Elite, X-Wing, Wing Commander, Frontier 2 etc etc
Literally you couldn't get any more of a fanboy/target audience than Bob.
Excitedly after building his new super PC and getting Division out of the way, he started on ED and begin blazing his trail.
The first couple of weeks were the standard amazement of how great the game looked, how you could this and that. "OMG I HAVE A SPACESHIP"
He refused any starter credits from me and wouldn't take my advice to use the surface scan exploits for some easy cash.
No, he had waited for this game for long enough and by joe was he going to play it properly.
This lasted for two weeks, he had amassed around 30 million and had a fully specced Vulture.
He then asked me what else was there to do.... He had done all the mission types, run 5hrs of exploration to get access to Farseer, shot up a RES and CZ with me for bigger payouts, driven on a planet, spaced Ubered, CG'ed, mined and done lots of trading while watching CrunchyRoll. All the core "Content"
It was then i explained it to him, that he has experience pretty much all ED has to offer and all that is left is to repeat which ever task/tasks he found the most interesting to make money to afford a different ship. Or try and RP something enough to make it interesting. I had mention the BGS and Powerplay and pointed out that you just grind missions to make either a number go up on a screen or space bobs to change shape slightly.
The sound of shock was almost heart wrenching....
So I said to him, at this point most players start to look at PVP and recommended he tried pirating with me or just plain gank some players at a CG.
This was when I really broke him... I told him that like he had had to do with Farseer. He now had a whole bunch of really boring arbitrary tasks to complete to unlock all the engineers to make his ship stand a chance in PVP.
He did about a week of engineering and has now quit playing Elite Dangerous.
I very much doubt he is the only one who's Elite career has ended like this.
Did he get his money worth from the game - yes totally
Is this really the sort of player retention that FD wants? - I really hope not.
What is the point of this story - Maybe someone at FD will read that a player of exactly the demographic they want, just found their game empty, grindy and essentially after the honey moon period.... boring.
A friend of mine had been watching me play ED with great interest for the last year or so, regularly watching when I streamed and taking a general interest in the game until he got a PC that was able to run the game.
He had bought Horizons on its release with the hopes his high-end laptop would be able to play it but it just wasn't doing the game justice.
My friend lets call him "Bob" had been a fan of the Space game genre since original Elite, X-Wing, Wing Commander, Frontier 2 etc etc
Literally you couldn't get any more of a fanboy/target audience than Bob.
Excitedly after building his new super PC and getting Division out of the way, he started on ED and begin blazing his trail.
The first couple of weeks were the standard amazement of how great the game looked, how you could this and that. "OMG I HAVE A SPACESHIP"
He refused any starter credits from me and wouldn't take my advice to use the surface scan exploits for some easy cash.
No, he had waited for this game for long enough and by joe was he going to play it properly.
This lasted for two weeks, he had amassed around 30 million and had a fully specced Vulture.
He then asked me what else was there to do.... He had done all the mission types, run 5hrs of exploration to get access to Farseer, shot up a RES and CZ with me for bigger payouts, driven on a planet, spaced Ubered, CG'ed, mined and done lots of trading while watching CrunchyRoll. All the core "Content"
It was then i explained it to him, that he has experience pretty much all ED has to offer and all that is left is to repeat which ever task/tasks he found the most interesting to make money to afford a different ship. Or try and RP something enough to make it interesting. I had mention the BGS and Powerplay and pointed out that you just grind missions to make either a number go up on a screen or space bobs to change shape slightly.
The sound of shock was almost heart wrenching....
So I said to him, at this point most players start to look at PVP and recommended he tried pirating with me or just plain gank some players at a CG.
This was when I really broke him... I told him that like he had had to do with Farseer. He now had a whole bunch of really boring arbitrary tasks to complete to unlock all the engineers to make his ship stand a chance in PVP.
He did about a week of engineering and has now quit playing Elite Dangerous.
I very much doubt he is the only one who's Elite career has ended like this.
Did he get his money worth from the game - yes totally
Is this really the sort of player retention that FD wants? - I really hope not.
What is the point of this story - Maybe someone at FD will read that a player of exactly the demographic they want, just found their game empty, grindy and essentially after the honey moon period.... boring.
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