An essay to FDev:

Hi Frontier,

I have a counter plea. Please don't get your player community involved in design choices and development. Do not go down the path of design by committee. Make the game that you want to make with the long term vision of greatness, rather than short term appeasement changes.

You should however read suggestions on the forum. They can help with sharpening existing or planned mechanics, or even offer an idea that's still aligned with the overall vision.

You should listen to quality of life complaints, to give you cues on how the game's interface might be interfering with play in some cases, to help guide any redesigns you may choose to do.

You should pay heed to bug reports, and be more transparent about which bugs have been internally confirmed, and which of those are being prioritised by developers, even if you don't provide an ETA for release.

You should do sufficient public beta testing before any release, including ones as small as the minor updates you've begun.

You should hire a few play testers as full time players of the game, even when there's no specific testing required, as they can pick up on issues and give useful reports for bugs and QoL issues. They're also handy to run proposed changes by, and may identify balance problems with newly introduced mechanics before players have a chance to take issue with them.

You should continue to allow sufficiently long periods of time for major updates, such as you have for the 2020 one, and ignore those who keep screaming for information to be released about planned features before you're able to confirm their inclusion. A sticky thread on the forum giving a little insight into the development process, and why things can change may mitigate some of that, but expect people to complain anyway, while you remain firm nonetheless. The minor updates are a great idea to keep people interested in the interim, effectively giving the player base some entrees to sample before they receive the main course.

You've made a great game that thousands of people have enjoyed for countless hours. You've made some mistakes, but all development companies do. You've been seemingly lax on some of the problem areas of the game that need attention, in terms of integrity and robustness, but the hope is that from now until the 2020 update, a good chunk of that will be addressed.

Thanks.

No one sane enough would ask FDev to leave decisions for players to make, because players won't and don't have to take any responsibility for those.

Edit: Not referring to OP. As I see he was just asking FDev to work with the community. The method how ever, is questionable. Many players would like to speak for his own instead of be represented by leaders of certain groups.

"people don't comment much on things which they like but which aren't apparently in danger of being removed or changed"

I believe most people won't start a topic on what they like on the forums. However they will come debate you as soon as you stomp on things that they like. Does that happen often when people criticize the CQC, Powerplay, or multi-crew? No?
 
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Some commander, hoping for change
So many updates to the game for me were questionable shallow bolt ons or simply half-baked designs (from supposedly the output of 100+ folks), I was getting more and more doubtful about FD's ability to take ED in a really good direction... And then we had delay after delay, and most recently Mining 2.0 even coming out with bizarre half baked unbalanced mechanics... So yeh! I'm even more doubtful now...

Watching and waiting to see if 2020 brings more of the same half-baked confused shallowness. Or at last, some truly bar raising development and mechanics....
 
I agree that more direct involvement with the community could only ever be a good thing, but one part of this I do dissagree with.

But let's talk the elephant in the room. HUD colors. Simple hacks were able to modify HUD colors exactly how we've been requesting from you guys for years now. And yet, you guys say that it's impossible given how the code was implemented. FDev, are you lying to us? Or are you incompetent? If you can't implement a simple method of HUD color change (there's a whole colorblind community that you're screwing here), how can we trust you with the development of the game to you going forward? If anything, you should take some pointers from those hackers. They might know the game better than you do.

Well, I mean, sure, there is a way to "hack" the issue to do some things, it doesn't work well, and has some pretty dodgy side effects. There's no way Frontier would be OK with a solution like that, they need to make a real solution, that can be fully supported, and maintained.

Now, I have absolutely no clue why the UI pallette was baked into the game so deeply, in the way that it was, and it's a pretty terrible decision really early on in development for sure, however, that decision was made an executed upon - and it's not going to be a simple fix to change it.

I suspect they would need to re-code the entire UI display system of the game, or at least large portions of it, and it's been developed significantly since the game launched, but always from that initial (pretty silly) basis. Assuming this would be easy, or that Frontier are lying, or incompetent is kind of strange - this is a case of priorities, to make this modification would clearly take a huge amount of time from some (I expect) pretty senior programmers, and likely some of the original guys that built the base game. It's really not something they could smash out in a day.

But you are right, they need to fully explain this, not have a community manager explain it in a very brief manner because they literally don't understand it (no offence to the community manager(s) in question, it's likely a complex issue you shouldn't be expected to fully understand) but get a dev, who does, to spend a little time to explain it.

Other than that though, yeah, more communication, more testing, more involvement of players in testing/balancing all of this would be good for the game.
 
This is the thread from someone with a high regard for their own words who is diverting attention from the more useful thread - and now you made me give it more airtime it doesn't deserve 🤷‍♀️
Giving threads you don't like "more airtime" is your specialty, nobody makes you do it (I kinda wish you'd stop) ;)
 
6 months old, sure, but I've done plenty of what there is to do in the game. You have no idea how much void opals can fast track progress. Maxed Fed/Empire rank, traveled to the Southern Nebulas, Betelgeuse, DW2 WP1 (that was in a 23 ly Krait MkII in my third week of playing the game), went through plenty of Guardian space, have most of the engineers (the important ones for PVP at the least), killed a cyclops, killed a medusa, ran rescue missions on burning stations, fought in several powerplay wing fights, 1v1'd a Vette at Shinrarta and won, ganked 30 for 32 interdictions at Cubeo (to prove the drag munitions buff was broken OP), crashed Mitterland Hollow, landed a T10 on a 5g planet, climbed space pumpkins, discovered proto Lagrange clouds. I know many of this game's ins and outs like the back of my hand. The only thing I've left to do is triple elite and dive further into the expanse. Planning on taking a 45 ly T10 out to Colonia and Sag A at some point. That'll be fun. Trust me when I say I know FDev can do better. Unless your expectations of them have dropped so low... then, damn.
Aaaaawww..... Such a busy little bee.
And there was myself and everyone else thinking oooh void opals, such a waste of time.
Methinks you watched waaaay too mamy YouTube videos on getting good and now you're all like omg! FD suck! Let me tell you how to fix the game!
Yup. Sounds like a regular old 6monther to me.
Aaaw bless. Here have a pat on the head and a Farleys Rusk biscuit.
 

The Replicated Man

T
Ultimately this is still a fairly strange thing to go nuclear over.

I've seen many complaint posts and this is far from Nuclear. The OP is in fact being very reasonable given the circumstances.
Might be futile, but at least he is saying it as it is.
 
OP got some good points actually.
He's 6 months old only but he got a good overview of what's been happening here since years.
This community is asking for transparency since years --> FD believes this is not a winning move --> FD keeps making mistakes.
Sorry but there's no evidence that this is a good tactics.
The suggestion forum is just a joke. At the beginning I wrote a lot in there. I don't even read it anymore.
I used to frequent alt.fan.elite back in the late 90s and early 2000s and David Braben was an active poster there at the time. People would post suggestions for Elite 4 there (it was pre-, pre-ED days but (either on alt.fan.elite or in an email exchange I had with him, I can't remember which) David Braben said that he tried to avoid looking at them as he didn't want people claiming something as their's if it made it into E4. Make of that what you will (and yes, DBOBE was thinking about an Elite sequel back then and posted some of the first concept art there).

I understand that the community should not be allowed to decide on the new content of the game BUT the QoL's should be defined with a Community Survey. They spent so much time in useless things that no one ever asked.
Quick example: 2 updates (2 really?) focused on the ship GUI. What you've done it's not bad, but who cares?? On the other hand I've seen many players asking for a better Outfitting page and better mission filters on the mission board. Still no feedback at all from you about these. And what about more missions variety? We have the same missions since 2 years, the only addition was the wing missions, which are exactly the same thing but played in multiplayer.
I think the UI changes are to make the game more accessible, especially on console. Don't forget, lots of people complained about the UI when ED first came out, so any focus on it now is partly in response to community input.

Another one: you developed the guardian fighters. They're cool indeed... no one asked them! But SRV's... :eek: how many people already asked for new SRV's, SRV modules and outfitting and more varied gameplay associated to them. If you'are really obsessed with the Guardians plot then release a Guardian SRV!
The concept art book does have more SRV types, so they may well come at some point but FD have a direction that they want to take the game where Guardians and fighting the Thargoids is very much a major part of it. I have said before that ED should have been more fleshed out before they re-introduced the Thargoids, but it is what it is.

FDEV replies in this forum are non-existent. It would be nice to interact with them and have a quick chat time to time to discuss QoL or issues with the game. But this is not a thing with FDEV and it's a big shame. Stop your livestreams and jump in the forum. I'm sure the game and the whole community will benefit from this!
I think I have expressed my thoughts on FD's communication policies enough times now but yes, I would like to see a lot more interaction. But if they're called liars, incompetent, don't play their own game (Adam Woods' Twitter disproves this nonsense statement), etc. you can understand why they don't
 

The Replicated Man

T
Aaaaawww..... Such a busy little bee.
And there was myself and everyone else thinking oooh void opals, such a waste of time.
Methinks you watched waaaay too mamy YouTube videos on getting good and now you're all like omg! FD suck! Let me tell you how to fix the game!
Yup. Sounds like a regular old 6monther to me.
Aaaw bless. Here have a pat on the head and a Farleys Rusk biscuit.
I wasn't aware we were having some sort of d**k measuring contest.
 
Now, I have absolutely no clue why the UI pallette was baked into the game so deeply, in the way that it was, and it's a pretty terrible decision really early on in development for sure, however, that decision was made an executed upon - and it's not going to be a simple fix to change it.
Because they had finite resources - £1,578,316 from the Kickstarter campaign and were under pressure to finish the product before the money runs out.
That kind of money will buy you 40 developers for 1 year, assuming 1 developer is paid £40,000 gross. And those costs are only for developers, without any other. It took them 2 years to release, so I guess that the team was much smaller.
In such circumstances you program to deliver a working product ASAP, without much care for good design, maintainability or ease of change.
 
Honestly, I think if FD revealed their complete roadmap a large portion of us would be so horrified we’d give up on the game.

Imagine now if we all knew for an absolute fact that we wouldn’t ever be getting...

New SRV’s
Panther Clipper
Military ranks fleshed out properly
HUD colour changes
CQC update
Powerplay update
Spacelegs
Atmospheric landings

...insert your most wanted feature^

I don’t think they can afford to reveal their plans, it’d probably be met with a tide of disappointment and people freaking out.

It is kinda odd this needs to be spelled out, but people should play games they enjoy playing. If someone plays a game they dont enjoy, in the hopes that years in the future they may enjou it, they are (I am sorry to say) not very bright. If someone doesn't enjoy playing ED as it is, right now, without any further updates coming, they would be wise to simply play something else.

Gamers are weird.
 
I've seen many complaint posts and this is far from Nuclear. The OP is in fact being very reasonable given the circumstances.
Might be futile, but at least he is saying it as it is.

"how can we trust you with the development of the game to you going forward?"

There's a ton of comedy hyperbole in the OP. But let's agree to disagree ;)
 
It is kinda odd this needs to be spelled out, but people should play games they enjoy playing. If someone plays a game they dont enjoy, in the hopes that years in the future they may enjou it, they are (I am sorry to say) not very bright. If someone doesn't enjoy playing ED as it is, right now, without any further updates coming, they would be wise to simply play something else.

Gamers are weird.
I'd say that this is true for all other games except Elite, because no other games exist for 35 years and no other games hook on our childhood feelings and memories. It doesn't have anything to do with brightness.
 
I'd say that this is true for all other games except Elite, because no other games exist for 35 years and no other games hook on our childhood feelings and memories. It doesn't have anything to do with brightness.

Well, to each his own. If someone insists on playing a game they don't enjoy because they liked to play another game in the series decades earlier; their call.
 
It is kinda odd this needs to be spelled out, but people should play games they enjoy playing. If someone plays a game they dont enjoy, in the hopes that years in the future they may enjou it, they are (I am sorry to say) not very bright. If someone doesn't enjoy playing ED as it is, right now, without any further updates coming, they would be wise to simply play something else.

Gamers are weird.
Few games have a 10 year plan built into them though, with updates trickling out over the months it’s only natural for expectations for the games future to build. Especially when sitting on a huge bag of potential like ED.

But you’re right of course, you have to enjoy what you’re doing in the moment and gamers are weird.
 
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