After looking at the new beta, I have a few comments. It is time for serious discussion AND the DEVS to listen to us.

[RhymeRhyme]

For me the game is boring as well as I stated out like dozens of times. The game needs a goal and an integrated storyline that goes along with interesting missions.

The sandbox approach failed as after you've done everything for a couple of months, the motivation level drops to 0. Done this, done that. The game is too repetitive and our actions have no impact on the game at all. Some sell it as a feature but it's cleary not. It's a boring game.

Why the new Seasons or patches will not help??? Because the underlying gameplay doesn't change. You can shoot 15.000 ships as a single player or NOW(!) wow, shoot 35.000 ships with your crew. The gameplay is still dull and repetitive.

So, GIVE US A STORYLINE and interesting GAMEPLAY and cool missions. Make gameplay meaningful. I don't need more fancy features (Except atmosphere and maybe space legs). What I want to see is better gameplay. Not hunt, trade and explore again and again with nothing is really changing.

 

[Iafeth]

The game needs a goal and an integrated storyline that goes along with interesting missions.

So, you will finish this "goal" and "storyline" in 20-30 hours. And wat's next?

 

[the100thmonkey]

You know, people might not like my lack of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.. Too bad.

Oh sweet baby Jeebus this is bad.

You've lost any sympathy I had with your inability to do the very thing you enjoined everyone else to do in your first post.

Bye.

 

[GJ51]

I don't know...

I'm in that boat of having over 4k hours played, really appreciate what ED is and still enjoy - but

I look back at something like Passenger Missions. Nice addition to the game. Plenty of upside potential.

Then I have to ask myself, "What is/was it about Passenger Missions that was such a huge development challenge that we had to wait for it until CQC, Power Pray, SRV's, and probably other things I've forgotten about, were added in?" That's the type of decision making at FD that leaves me puzzled.

Oh, and then the best part - looks like Passenger Mission payments get the hard nerf in 2.3.

So we waited 2 years to get something that we think actually adds to game-play a bit, looks like it could/should have been added a long time ago, and it's already up for the nerf hammer.

So is it any wonder that some of the early players are leaving?

I'm not the terribly creative type, but I've seen videos from others like Obsidian Ant who make great suggestions for game improvement ideas that don't look very difficult to develop and yet we continue to get the grandiose feature flops that don't seem to add much.

I'll take planet surface navigation bookmarks and the ability to plot a landing to a specific lat/long on a planet surface - and a working SRV scanner over a Holo-me. It's not that I don't like Holo-me, and I understand that it's a precursor to space legs, but I don't see it as a necessity for multi-crew. So we hear space legs is still a long way off so why doesn't FD focus on some simple things that will give them and the players more bang for the buck.

It's been said many times that too many things just feel like placeholders. Looking back at how long the Orca has been in the game makes refuting that a bit difficult.

We still talk about improving missions and just this week I get a mission that sends a redirect to another port for delivery, but then can't be cashed in at the destination.

FD seems to spend lot of time going over the same ground, like the whole constant PvP re-balance fetish they seem to have, while rolling out overly aggressive half-baked new features that seem dubious at best in improving game play.

I don't really know... maybe just burning out.

Sadly, too many of the players I used to fly with are already gone.

 

[Eymerich]

People always want more, MORE, MORE ..... Just take a break, play something else. There is no need to loudly demanding something from Fdev. It isn't how game development works.

No.

It s not like this.

People doesn't want more : people want something better of what have been delivered .

2.2 and 2.3 are very modest addition to game : multicrew is fine for the first hour maybe and you ll do the same thing you did in the past year

Slf is good for how ? 6 maybe 10 hors then but anyway you ll found yourself doing the same thinh

There are no addition to gameplay ( except 2 .0 and 2.1 ).
.
Mission have been fixed but we did nt get any addition of it since 2.0 ( and they are quite limited ). They have Added big ships but you can do anything ; they have Added asteroidi base which is nice but there is no gameplay involved ; mc has been reduced because the haven't time and resources

2.1 was delayed because no time and resources.

Honestly the idea i have is that Fd is giving less and less time to Ed.

 

[tagos]

I play in enjoyable binge bursts and stop when I feel burned out. I hear what the OP is saying though.

There are major game areas that need massive fleshing out with procedurally generated events. The number one of these for me is exploration.

I'm meandering towards Jaques and it's fine. I'm in the mindset of an explorer and can immerse myself in the game.

But I could immerse myself more if the bath was a little deeper.

What it is missing is procedurally generated events and rewards. There's no encountering mysterious signals that lead to interesting encounters. There's no encountering anything that hasn't been specifically placed there.

I'd love to encounter procedurally generated entities that live in space for instance. To be able to scan them for good rewards and rep.

To have the odd Thargoid attack as in the Olden Days.

Have some planetary exploration game loops to give me a reason to explore systems and land on moons.

It would be nice to set out into the Unknown. To be able to anticipate the possibility of interesting and rewarding discovery.

We are several years of development in now. It's long past time for procedurally generated content more complex than the limited variablility Unknown Signal Sources and Interdictions.

It's a huge galaxy. Hand crafted content such as the main plotline isn't enough.

 

[kilvenny]

I am very happy with ED, but I can understand people's frustrations.

I play MMO's and for me they offer a number of elements which I think ED would benefit from given that it is supposed to be an "MMO"

1) Leaderboards at the player and guild level (In ED add ranks to Elite and then create a score based on the three rankings, weight the scoring so its more important to level up in each of the 3 areas, not just one)
2) You and your alliance have something to protect or capture (In ED player bases and the ability to wrest control from another player or alliance and visibly see it reflected in stations/outposts and bases)
3) Some form of alliance functionality (In ED player factions/powerplay and the BGS are supposed to do that, but its all a bit disconnected.)


I would also look at things like materials for engineers, give materials a quality and then in places where they are found use the planet data to build a profile of the material, so that there is a finite amount of high quality material. Feed this into the engineers, since the quality of materials now matters the need for a random throw becomes less important. More importantly there is now a reason to explore, because you need to find the rich vein of material if you want the best upgrades.

 

[lenna]

Apologies if any of this has already been said and pointed out, but I am late to this discussion...

No story that engages your mind.

This is not meant to be that kind of game. It is not a Witcher 3 type game, nor an ESO type game, nor is it a Battlefield/Unreal Tournament/Frag-fest type game. It is a story/plot free open world type game where we as individuals are supposed to use that marvellous thing called imagination to come up with our own back story and plan how we as individuals want to progress and set our own personal goals. The story based titles do get old after a time regardless of the developer effort invested by the developers, games like ED tend to have a longer life IME.

I am sorry but without solid verifiable and relevant statistics to back your "MOST OF US" claim (and no, Steam related statistics do not count IMO), you are standing on a house of cards made of stuff weaker than sugar paper.

That being said, FD do work in the background towards things that are aimed at changing parts of the universe in small and big ways - the community goals, addition of easter-eggs/undisclosed semi-secret things to find, etc - and there is Power Play and influencing the BGS. if that is not enough for you and the group you are referring to then perhaps the individuals should move on to other games (at least for a spell until they find their motivation again).

I am dead against the principle of populist politics driving the development of games, and I can not count the number of threads on various gaming forums that start with grandiose claims like "wanting the game to succeed" or "most of us" based arguments. Most of your opening post seems to be stating a perceived issue with no real idea about how to solve it. If you have solid ideas to bring to the table then that is one thing, but your opening post is little more than a verbose way of saying "I am bored, have no ideas about what to do next in the game, and am unmotivated by the current known content".

TL;DR if you have ideas about how to improve the game, bring them to the table with a poll and lets hash them out - but threads like this are unlikely to generate positive results.

 

[CMDR ColD_ZA]

Great post OP,

I too am at the precipice of jumping ship, I have not much faith that things will get better,

Other MMO's that I have devoted Elite levels of time to allways had me positive and excited for the future of the game based on the most recent content showing me there is progress (and not glacial progress)

With Elite, I revisit the Kickstarter vids from time to time for motivation to "stick with it", but after all of the "Technical limitations" and "time and resources" responses we get lately I'm thinking that the vision they had back then for the game, are just that, a vision, a dream.

What we are getting in each update is some nice housecleaning and new features, but no gameplay.

:- Give us derelict stations and salvage missions and pilotable collector limpet controllers to to those salvage missions,

:- Write up a bunch of "pick your own adventure" stories, and then build them into the mission system to give us more living breathing missions, not the "outbreak triggered, bring us medicing" copy pasta (Prob "Technical limitations" with the missions system)

:- Let us target and scan USS's without loosing our target lock on our destination station (that's why I don't bother with uss's, its too much of a pain to have to look for and target your destination station)

:- Give us a "Space drone SRV/buggy" that we can deploy, maybe dock it at outposts or do hull repairs on our ships

:- Give us more complex labyrinth type Installations that we can explore the interiors of and do mission in with our space drone SRV/buggy (the game needs more "micro scale" interactions, its mostly massive distances with massive ships etc)

:- Give us at least a different type of ship per update, last (2 updates we got passenger ships)

:- Maybe put in massive "ship graveyards" thats like 20km in diameter with ship husks that we can fly through and look for Engineer comodities (like a scrapyard)

:- Let us Bookmark custom coordinates on planet surfaces

:- give us some mysteries that the commonfolk can solve by themselves and feel some achievement, (all the stuff we get now master's degree cryptographer stuff)

That's just a poorly thought out "top of the head" list

One of the reasons I have been holding out hope for Spacelegs is because if they put spacelegs in, they will have to put in something out of the norm, something different.... they cant just reuse things and plaster placeholders all over the place,

I've found myself logging in less and less these days, literally only have the intention to log in once every 4 weeks to quickly rank up in each power to get their modules...

Played a bit of Hellion's early access and the sense of adventure and fun that it's salvaging and spacelegs offer is off the charts, I find it really fun to fly to outposts that other players have abandoned, looking at what they left behind and piecing the story of the place together.... finding wrecks with useful stuff.

Frontiers USS's need some work after having the sense of discovery that Hellion's version of USS's offer.... the Not loosing your current target lock when scanning a USS would be a step in the right direction... will let many of them no longer go ignored.

 

[robbyp]

In the words of that inmortal poet, Taylor Swift:

###Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off ###

;-) Happy wednesday. Enjoy Elite.

 

[Red Anders]

As I wrote in another thread:

Its like Elite was a can of soda, and the updates gave us straws, bottles and cups, to drink it differently, when they could have given us beer and a meal to choose instead, or at least improve the quality of the soda.

Interesting analogy. You could extend it to include the people who are faced with a vast fridge full of assorted soft drinks, yet every day they scrabble around at the back of it looking for the six or seven cans of cherry 7-UP that are lurking there, drink them all, then spend all day moaning about how much they hate cherry 7-UP before waking up the next day and doing the same thing.

 

[M. Volgrand]

I will summarize my opinion about this in 4 simple sentences:

1) When a game has a gameplayability value over 150h, it is a game worth its price.
2) It is normal to eventually grow bored of any game, no matter how good it is.
3) I have played more than 6 weeks to the game. Which in hours is over 1000h.
4) Elite: Dangerous IS a good game.

Still worth improving? Certainly. But to say "I want Elite to succeed" is an understatement: Elite: Dangerous has already succeeded.

 

[Madrax573]

For me the game is boring as well as I stated out like dozens of times. The game needs a goal and an integrated storyline that goes along with interesting missions.

The sandbox approach failed as after you've done everything for a couple of months, the motivation level drops to 0. Done this, done that. The game is too repetitive and our actions have no impact on the game at all. Some sell it as a feature but it's cleary not. It's a boring game.

Why the new Seasons or patches will not help??? Because the underlying gameplay doesn't change. You can shoot 15.000 ships as a single player or NOW(!) wow, shoot 35.000 ships with your crew. The gameplay is still dull and repetitive.

So, GIVE US A STORYLINE and interesting GAMEPLAY and cool missions. Make gameplay meaningful. I don't need more fancy features (Except atmosphere and maybe space legs). What I want to see is better gameplay. Not hunt, trade and explore again and again with nothing is really changing.

The game you are looking for is the 'X' series of games. This is Elite where you forge your own path. That is why it has a Back Ground Simulation rather than a story line that you work your way through. Honestly if you don't 'get' this then ED isn't the game for you and you'll never be happy as it won't ever been that game.

The original Elite was as far from the type of game you describe as can possibly be.

If you need goals to have fun then ED just isn't you type of game, it is about the journey not the end of the story. There is nothing wrong with this and there are plenty of games out there that cater to this type of gameplay, ED just isn't one of them.

 

[Enderby]

I don't think FD know how to make this 'game' not boring.

I held out hope for over 2 years but it's still really dull.

There are not enough ways to interact with the galaxy (waste of time that was, 400 billion systems or whatever the it is).

 

[LeoBartlet]

I don't think FD know how to make this 'game' not boring.

I held out hope for over 2 years but it's still really dull.

Then perhaps you need to stop playing.

 

[signal11th]

The game you are looking for is the 'X' series of games. This is Elite where you forge your own path. That is why it has a Back Ground Simulation rather than a story line that you work your way through. Honestly if you don't 'get' this then ED isn't the game for you and you'll never be happy as it won't ever been that game.

The original Elite was as far from the type of game you describe as can possibly be.

If you need goals to have fun then ED just isn't you type of game, it is about the journey not the end of the story. There is nothing wrong with this and there are plenty of games out there that cater to this type of gameplay, ED just isn't one of them.

Yep forge your own path where nothing ever changes. I'm hostile is literally hundreds of systems= nothing happens, I'm wanted in dozens more= nothing happens, I have murdered and pillaged in countless systems that my name is dreaded and whispered in bars all over ,... no actually I just dock ,pay off my fines and I'm clean.... I have a ship that is capable of traversing the known galaxy but I can't target or scan multiple things at the same time (we can do that now), I can't even tell siri to put a bookmark on a planet surface anymore (must have been apple OS 3020 that took out that functionality out) believe me back in the 80's I was just happy I could fly around in space but it's 30 years later everything has changed apart from this game.

I mean I can run literally every mission available become king of the empire and it means nothing, I get to buy a ship that I can then fly around empire space and kill lots of people and then just pay off the cops and I'm clean... just weird.

 

[Enderby]

I have. But i still have the balance of S2 to come and am interested to see what 'S3' may bring. Thanks for the advice though.

 

[Madrax573]

Yep forge your own path where nothing ever changes. I'm hostile is literally hundreds of systems= nothing happens, I'm wanted in dozens more= nothing happens, I have murdered and pillaged in countless systems that my name is dreaded and whispered in bars all over ,... no actually I just dock ,pay off my fines and I'm clean.... I have a ship that is capable of traversing the known galaxy but I can target or scan multiple things at the same time (we can do that now), I can't even tell siri to put a bookmark on a planet surface anymore (must have been apple OS 3020 that took out that functionality out) believe me back in the 80's I was just happy I could fly around in space but it's 30 years later everything has changed apart from this game.

LOL I love how you guys always pick up on the least important part of a post to stand on your soapbox and whine about stuff.

I've never claimed the systems are perfect and a lot of them are getting worked on but really if you are not having fun in the game just play something else. If you have ideas on how to fix/improve something then post on the relevant section of the forums and keep an eye on it. If FD don't make the game you want to play then walk away and don't play anymore until they do. Simples.

- - - Updated - - -

I have. But i still have the balance of S2 to come and am interested to see what 'S3' may bring. Thanks for the advice though.

And are you actually playing and having fun in the mean time?

Serious question.

 

[Blackcompany]

Elite: Dangerous is incapable of being what you want it to be.

You, as an individual, will never not be bored by it, no matter what the developers do. Your need for daily excitement, for perpetual novelty, will never be satisfied by what can actually be delivered.

You do not speak for 'most of us', and admit that when you say that they will consider what 'some of us are saying'. The developers do take the needs and desires of the players in consideration, but that consideration does not mean they are absolutely beholden to the conflicting whims of subsets of the entire player base. They can--and must--make decisions between what they have the resources (time, skill, and technical considerations) to implement, and in what order.

Lastly, and most importantly, the developers' primary function is to develop the game, not engage with the forum to placate the dissatisfied. If you want the developers to directly communicate, that impacts their ability to work on any features. They can't do both.

By most of us, I think he means the vast majority of those who bought the game. Aka, all the ones NOT playing or supporting it any longer. I count myself among them.

 

[verminstar]

I love ED, but not right now. The whole exploration part being ignored fer so long is wearing me down, and Im only here 9 months total. Maybe its cos Im on the road to jacques and these forums that made me decide to load up GTA5 last night for the first time in a year. I think of it as desperation when I load up old classics while Im still enjoying other games.

I see history repeating itself here with the way FD are doing things...seen this exact same behaviour destroy more than one game, and its depressing to watch. But if they wanna give the middle finger to their own players by ignoring them, thats their business, their problem, but sure as hell I dont have any loyalty to them so I feel nothing when I load up other games instead.

I still play an hour or 2 a day here, though its nothing but chump change compared to how much I did play this game at the start. I play more gears4 or GTA than this atm, and once andromeda lands in a week or so, cyas in summer...maybe. I reckon that should be enough time fer FD to have either proved me right or approved me wrong. If nothing of any substantial relevance has changed by the summer, then cheerio, cya around and Ill have been proved right, because I suspect that is exactly what will happen...or not happen.

Id love to be proved wrong, but the signs so far aint good. I will continue to play this, but time is running out...writings on the wall fer me and the game itself has become a mere placeholder until the next shiny comes along and distracts me. Its cool but dull and shallow...Ill be lucky if I can manage a year outta this game which is a helluva lot less time here that I would have hoped...but Im not an original backer, not a fanboi and I dont make Braben to be some sorta messiah to gaming. Ive seen better efforts and results from very small dev teams...a lot smaller than frontier thats fer sure, and thats why Im not overly impressed with them.

Tis a shame...theres so much potential here and its utterly wasted on silly features and fluff. Its fun fer a bit, then it gets boring again so I take very frequent breaks...Im on one now as it happens. I take breaks because this game is simply not engaging me...mile wide and an inch deep springs to mind, but its hardly an original sentiment...and thats the worrying part...that Im actually not the only one who feels like that. Some days, it feels like the great majority feels like this.

Anyway whatever...play or dont play...Im off to pick a fight with the peelers ^