AMA III - Revenge of the Glyph

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Paul_Crowther

Community Manager
Frontier
Hi all,

It's time for a new addition of the Community AMA!

Before posting please bear the following in mind:
  • One question per post
  • Repeat questions may not receive an answer; check through the thread before posting
  • Please do not start conversations with other players; stick to questions and replies to ourselves
Answers from previous threads we won't be repeating:

  • We have not been able to identify a current solution to the Pulse Wave Analyser bug. It has been pushed to our code team to investigate further. Please be aware that they are currently working on Odyssey and working from home. This is a priority for us.
  • A fix for the Azure Paint Job has been rolled out in testing and we are currently waiting to see if it is successful.
  • With regards to unrevealed lore and narrative we won't be confirming or denying any information!
 
Please could you introduce a new assassination mission which has a risk/reward structure that favours the CMDR using a smaller ship with no engineering?

That would introduce a new and fun challenge for seasoned pilots, and make greater use of small ships like Eagles and Sidewinders, which a CMDR can just buy and dispose of on a whim.
 
Major concern regarding Odyssey and what will happen after it's launch. I understand the focus is Odyssey right now and probably everyone is fully committed on it, but I find it quite incomprehensible on how long it takes Frontier to solve MAJOR bugs that have been reported for months and still no patch has been applied. I know as CMs you say "it's being solved and when the fix is available, we will roll it out".

So my question is: after Odyssey is launched, will we see activity from the Devs team to be around for bug fixing within few days or will Elite Dangerous fall in the "low priority project" once again? In fact, are there plans to keep updating Elite Dangerous after Odyssey?

The game has soooo much potential and unlimited possible content such as knowing more about Thargoids, possibility of having new type of aliens, continue the amazing lore, and the list goes on with soooo much you can add into the game. My main concern is that Elite Dangerous falls in the "forgotten" drawer as it happened after Horizons, I really am afraid of that :(
 
We can currently hire MULTIPLE NPC crew members, even though only 1 can be active at any time.
It seems a shame that we spend time (and credits) ranking up NPC crew but they only have a minimal impact upon the game play mechanics (SLF being the only use).

With this in mind...Have you considered/planning on making better use of the NPC crew - for example NPC wings.

Here's a simple idea: When in a RES site, for example, you could earn rank via your interactions with the local faction(s) by protecting them from hostile NPCs, or players.
It would be amazing if you could offer NPC wing (and possible missions thereafter) during these sessions as a result of your influence. The game could serve up an escort mission for the mining/transport ship as it leaves the RES site and looks to dock at a particular station. The "mission" could require a jump to an initial location (to hook up with additional friendly NPCs) and end with jumps to the destination. Each of these locations could be a possible ambush site by pirates, bounty hunters or hostile factions.

Another idea to make better use of our Crew NPC....
How about letting our crew fly their own ships (one from our own shipyard) in RES site missions as wing support (see above) or performing simple delivery missions for us whilst we play the game (from the Station mission system). FDEV may need to discuss if these NPC actions ultimately affect BGS or not, but the crew face real danger if they get killed whilst on active duty (they permanently die), as does the ship.
We could then fly escort to our NPC "crew" and that would add a new dimension to the game play, and introduce a risk element - especially for us players who don't/can't/won't wing up with human players.
 
Will we be able to hire npc in places normally reserved for multi-crew ?
Will we be able to win back an admiral and hire a small fleet of ships that can be sent to different missions (approximately as it is done in star trek online or no man's sky)?
 
With the folding of base game and horizons - would it be possible to access the horizons-exclusive ships from the base game in the shipyard (all Alliance ships, both kraits, beluga, t-10).

as it stands, you can't switch to one of those ships if not running horizons, or buy one.

I'm pretty sure those commanders sometimes running on outdated hardware or the base game for other reasons would appreciate that!
 
Everything so far points to Thargoid combat on foot (mainly with Ammonia worlds being terraformed), will that be a possibility in Odyssey?
 

Arthur Tolmie

Lead Community Manager
Frontier
Please could you introduce a new assassination mission which has a risk/reward structure that favours the CMDR using a smaller ship with no engineering?

That would introduce a new and fun challenge for seasoned pilots, and make greater use of small ships like Eagles and Sidewinders, which a CMDR can just buy and dispose of on a whim.
Thanks for this suggestion - we are always looking for this feedback and will pass this on! -Arf
 
In the previous AMA you said that current way of gathering materials - The Relog - isn't satisfying on your end. Which is great news on our end :)

I have a proposition that can alleviate the Manufactured materials issue in the meantime, that you probably could implement even before odyssey launches.

Idea is to make the HGE spawn all possible materials in quantities of minimum 3.
Resulting in a HGE from a faction in Boom, in Federal system spawning 4 materials:
Core Dynamics and Proprietary Composites, Proto Light and Proto Radiolic Alloys, all yielding 9 materials each.
Unless that's not how HGE works... But I'm fairly positive it is :D

That would mean for the players that all they need to do to find the legendary Pharmaceutical Isolators, is to go to a high populated system in an outbreak - that's a 3 minute search in the Galaxy Map - and simply go there for 9 pieces of a G5 mat they need. And 9 is enough to have 99% certainty of full G5 mod. My opinion is that it would eliminate the need to hoard those and thus eliminate the exploit-ish ways of gathering G5 mats.

I know it's not perfect but you have shown us with the rebalance that you do listen, and maybe before you implement a general overhaul in how materials are gathered, this could become a half measure.

Also it should become more known that Pirate Activity Detected [Threat 7] POI in Civil Unrest systems spawns Elite Anacondas that drop 2x G5 mats at once. But that kill is not available for all the players to efficiently gather materials. ;)

Q: Are you planning to change this Soon (TM)?
 
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Hello. My question is in regards to piracy. Currently piracy isn't a viable occupation for two reasons. One it's very difficult for most to stop a free-floating ship and two the amount of valuable cargo that spawns.

In years past it was possible to stop a ship by shooting out the power plant or the drives. That was changed and now we have no way to slow down a ship without using workarounds such as force shells and the bumpstop method. I don't believe these methods are intended gameplay.

The playerbase has proposed many methods of doing this, the most popular method being the grappling hook (because they appear in the books and presumably the Adamastor was towed into orbit using them as well). Other suggestions by players include having the FSD interdictior have a tractoring effect in normal space, having a new limpet type that can attach and slow it down, give collector limpets the ability to stop a target, a thargoid tractor beam.

I realize your team is hard at work on other projects right now and we are all thankful for that. All I'm asking is when things begin to settle down could you look into ways of making piracy viable.
 
Dear FD team members,

can we expect a more comfortable way of handling the modules? A better overview and sortability of the stored modules would be very desirable, as well as a possibility to transfer modules back and forth between ships without having to constantly switch back and forth between ships.

Many thanks for your attention and efforts.

DMaster
 
Is it possible we can get an update on the UDC issue? There is nothing else there other the Unstable Data Core. No Clues or hints as to what to do or where to go next. The local system Listening Post mentioned it's existence. That was the purpose of the bug report mentioned from the 1st AMA, but unfortunately that "fix" appears to have ether failed to fix the issue, or it fixed some minor other issue unknown. The only possible hint found thus far (again assuming there IS supposed to be a scannable Data Cache at the crashed Type-9) is that when a CMDR stores the UDC on there ship an invisible timer starts counting down that expires in about 12-24 hours after scooping it up, indicating we are supposed to carry it somewhere far away with no indication as to where. Is it possible to get an clue on this issue? If the UDC is the Cache there is no hint as to where to take it next (neither in the Listening Post that lead to the UDC's location, nor on anything at the site). An issue tracker post has been made and has several user contributions but hasn't progressed [ https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/21259 ] I know many CMDRs would really like this mystery thread to finally see it continued to the next rung.

Sorry about the wall of text. I really wanted to be precise with this particular question.
 
In last AMA session cmdr Lightspeed asked about Supercruise, but without answer.
I really like this game, but SC is not part of it. Very often it's spending time doing nothing.
For example, we can travel >1000 LY in 15 minutes - and then you need 20 mins to reach the station!?
Independently from player's skills, ranks, ships, engineering - you can't travel faster in SC.

Question: Any plans to change it?

(And if you have any doubts how many players would like to change it or not, you can simply open poll
here in this forum. Or even better - put poll in the game as CG, as competition! And then all of us,
Fdev and players would have real numbers to use as arguments, instead of foggy approximations like
"some" players would like it, "many" players would not).

Thank you!
 
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