Ok... I made one angry post a long time ago with a mixed response, mainly because I was dumb and lost 100 million. Now that I've made it a lot further, learned from my mistakes, not given up, and have gotten deeper into the game, I have some ideas about game improvements, and I'm going to brain dump them here, and it'll likely be pointless because it's stuff that a lot of other people have been suggesting for years and FDEV has ignored the entire time.
1.) First off, this game has a very small and very vocal community that defends FDEV's grinds and poor game mechanics, and I get the impression their defense of such choices only serves to distract and confuse FDEV from important criticisms... Stop. Grind addiction is a real thing, I used to grind thousands of hours in the kings of grindy games like World of Tanks and War Thunder. Stop. Take a step back, really analyze the amount of hours you sink into this game, and think about whether those hours meant reasonable progress. This game is competing with other "second job" games as well as players who have real jobs that do not allow so much time to be spent in a digital universe, even if you wanted to. Alternatively, if you made billions using exploits, particularly ones that have already been patched out, or doing current mining... Just because there ARE methods to make credits quickly like that doesn't mean those methods make sense. Exploits are accidents that get patched out and a lot of people miss when they aren't in the know, and in a game that's all about "you do you"... Boy, sure seems like there's only one way to make a ton of credits quickly, doesn't it? And shocking that it's one of the lowest risk things in the game. Does that make sense from a game design perspective? And on that note:
2.) FDEV... , learn what risk vs reward means. Bounty hunting, combat, etc, SHOULD pay out WAY more than mining. Why are you offering so little credits in exchange for combat and bounty hunting over bloody mining? In no universe does this make sense. This game actually has a decent amount of depth and variety, this is one of the selling points. Want to be a BAMF bounty hunter? You got it. Want to explore the untouched? Do it. Want to become a trade tycoon? Make it so... But all of this might as well be entirely nonexistent when you make one task so low risk have such a massive payout, while more risky ventures barely break even. You CANNOT claim this game lets you do anything if the economics don't support it. Sure, you can TECHNICALLY do all this other stuff, but technically only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades if there's no incentive. You've essentially given your players no choice but to do this one task if they want to make credits quickly. And I'm sure some vets will defend this with "well, I make so and so doing this other task"... So? People wouldn't be doing so much diamond mining if it didn't payout so well for such little risk, and more importantly, it's a method of making credits that works well even in weaker low end ships, the same cannot always be said for things like trade where bulk cargo and lots of capital matters, or combat, where the bigger badder ship you have expands your options and safety margin in combat. And regardless, higher risk, higher reward, end of story, it's basic crap.
... And don't look at this and go "Oh yeah, good point" and nerf mining into oblivion, rather than buff combat. This game desparately needs less grind, not more. This leads to my next point:
3.) Look, the 50-100 million an hour I can make in my mining beluga (which took quite a while to grind up to in the first place), I could see that as being a fairly reasonable return... Shame it's one of the only ways to make that much so quickly, especially compared to combat, but there you go. I'd say that's... I dunno, 20-50 hours from sidewinder to Jameson Memorial and an A rated Anaconda? It's hard to tell because that's assuming a brand new player knows exactly what they're doing (news flash, they don't, new players fumble around in the dark for quite a long time before figuring out what pays and what doesn't). And a lot of vet players have long since forgotten that it takes a while to even grind up to a ship capable of printing that many credits, from a sidewinder.
That would be a reasonable amount of grind I think... Except... Again... Why is mining, an extremely boring, repetitive and low risk task the main way to earn that quickly? But, more importantly... That's not the end of the grind... Which is why ya'll should cool it with the credit grinding. The problem is that, if it exists in the game, in FDEV's eyes, it needs to be some form of grind. Station contacts? Grind their friendliness with you. Want one of the faction end game ships like the corvette or cutter? Grind that faction doing special missions that pay jack squat. Want to engineer your ship? First grind a ton of crap to even unlock EACH engineer, and then grind materials to DO the engineering, and then grind some more to rank each one up. Want guardian modules? Go do some grinding to get blueprints, materials, whatever it takes, etc. If you want to keep ALL of these things the massive grind that they are, then start buffing credit making methods, espescially when so much of the game has awful payouts. Better yet, buff all of it imo, but if you at least want to keep all these different end game grinds, then at least make it easier for new players to get to, holy hell.
I'll put it to you this way... I have 309 hours in this game... I only just made elite (Trade), and only just made a billion and some credits, now I have 2 of the ships I've always wanted (a beluga and an Anaconda), and another 500 million in cash to handle rebuys... As far as I'm concerned, after 309 hours of grinding (because, again, it takes a while for a new player to ferret out what pays, and low temp diamonds and void opals weren't a thing when I first started) As far as I'm concerned, after all this time, the game has only JUST begun. Your player base mainly just wants the freedom and flexibility to go role play without being penalized. They want to get their end game dream ship, engineer it to all hell, and then go have fun with it... It's taken me 309 hours to put my butt in a pair of ships I can go have fun like that in... But I now only have 2 engineers unlocked, and only Felicity maxed out on FSD range... Which means if I want more engineering options I have a TON of non-credit grinding to do. And if I want guardian modules, I haven't even touched that stuff yet. Also, I think I'd rather have a Cutter than an Anaconda, but given that is yet ANOTHER grind (faction rep), I'm probably not going to bother on that for a very long time. As far as I'm concerned, I'm 309 hours in just to get to the start of the REAL grind... And all this to make a dream ship I can go exploring in. Yes yes, I know I can technically go do that anyway in a cheap Asp Explorer... But not if you want to make much progress towards a fully engineered end game ship that you want. That's why people get so unhappy cornered into grinding just to GET to what they consider the "fun" part of the game.
It almost feels like FDEV are basing their entire strategy on content updates for their niche longtime playerbase that already has billions to blow on stuff... Which is why they keep making content updates that are yet another slog of a grind on top of everything else. That's probably the real reason why fleet carriers are what they are. Oh , the small portion of our playerbase that's already sitting on billions and fully engineered ships need something to do, let's make a permagrind end game item, genius! Problem with that is your longtime playerbase is already fed up with grinds and don't want to make this game a second job just to MAINTAIN their fleet carrier, and that sort of thing is a slap in the face to any new player that already has so many different independent grinds to go through. This game is already inaccessible to new players as a steep learning curve, so many separate grinds only makes it worse. How can I give a damn about fleet carriers if it took me 309 hours just to get to end game ships, and still have engineers, guardian modules, and factions to grind? And I don't blame people who do care about fleet carriers being so PO'd that they're exploitatively expensive. An end game item like that should be a REWARD not a second job. Make it "expensive" to maintain if you want, but it should be a reward to the player for sticking with this grindy g game so long. For example, how about by being the one form of earning a passive profit for the ship owner if they run it well. Like, how about take it out of the bubble, and having it be essentially a mobile station explorers can travel with. The players can buy ships and modules and repairs at a markup, and sell their exploration data to the carrier owner, (who can then sell said data at a profit to places in the bubble), sell ores and mats to help the owner fabricate modules and ships, etc. Being essentially a HOST, a fleet carrier owner should be able to rake in a passive income when they do well to be a good one and run their own little economy... Instead this is just... Hey, you know those billions you've spent a thousand hours grinding? Well here's the end game item we promised you that you can either all that away on, or grind for the rest of your life just to break even... Enjoy!
Seriously, the economics and grinds in this game absolutely kill it. Any one individual grind could be argued to be not that bad, but when every single game mechanic is made into one, it stacks up into an awfully annoying experience.
4.) Ok... So you want the gind FDEV? I get it, you want to be pseudo realistic, and that means treating your game like a second job so that players need to spend a "REALISTIC" amount of time grinding a spaceship, as if you're LITERALLY trying to save enough money to buy the actual Space Shuttle Endeavour. Fine... Maybe you'd get less complaints about it if the things players grind were "fun" to do. There's a tipping point where SO long to earn something no longer feels like such an amazing reward because of the effort required... But starts to feel like... Wow... I spent 309 hours of my life on a digital ship, I should get a life. Either it shouldn't take 309 hours, or those 309 hours should be fun enough to not notice or care how long it took.
Believe it or not, I actually had some fun mining, as repetitive and boring as it is. Sometimes I like playing chill games, not everything needs to be action packed. And with my triple monitor setup, I can be mining, watching netflix, and using 3rd party ED tools all at the same time... But what's interesting is what I had fun doing vs not when it comes to that mining.
Void opal mining deep core- Kinda fun... Low Temp Surface Mining- So brain dead and repetitive, it's kinda not. I actually miss when Void Opal mining was the best credit earner, even though it was honestly earning me less credits then than low temp diamonds earn me now. Void opal mining was a pretty intricate process, that involved a series of mini games requiring player skill to accomplish. It wasn't what I'd call "high risk", but there was at least an element of risk to it (in the form of potentially messing up your explosives), and required player skill. It took some skill to scan for, and recognize potential void opal cores from a distance, it took some skill to charge the asteroid correctly, and mining the core quickly with an abrasion blaster without killing too many collector limpets was a bit difficult. Each one of these "mini games" took concentration, and was one of the few game mechanics I thought was well implemented and thought out. Hell, you could almost justify it's payout with all the stuff you had to do to make it work.
Now?... Go to Borran, find a pack of asteroids, sit in one spot for 5-10 minutes, and sit there holding the mouse at asteroids with any low temp diamonds while the collector limpets do all the work... Move on to the next one. You could practically write a script to do this while you're at work or something. Are there more fun things to do in the game? Sure... Good luck earning creds at a reasonable pace or risk for it.
Point is, people complain less when the grinding is engaging. Repetition is fine so long as you're repeating something fun. Sure, it was silly to have void opal mining payout so much more than combat, but I never complained about it because I actually found it somewhat engaging to do. Should low temp diamond surface mining be a thing? Sure I guess, but in the mining world, I don't see why it now pays more than deep core mining which required at least some effort on the player's part. Even here, in mining, an example of risk vs reward being messed up.
Well... One of the biggest problems with ED is that a lot of tasks aren't particularly fun. FDEV has, for a long time, really needed to take a step back from making new content, to go back and revamp old content, to both fix long standing balance issues with various tasks, and to improve on the already existing gameplay. I'll give you a perfect example:
5.) FDEV, if you want your players to have fun grinding, and allow your players to role play as anything they want (which seems to be the aim, right?), then give your players as many options as possible, in a way that isn't infuriatingly illogical. For example:
I was excited for passenger missions when they came out... And when they finally did, I was thoroughly disappointed... A couple years on, and they're basically untouched with all the problems they've always had... And I'm not sure WHY they are the way they are, I don't know how the mechanics behind it got past an entire dev team with nobody questioning how silly passenger missions are.
For example... Let's say you're doing trade, right? Ok, let's say you have two 64 cargo rack modules. There's one trade mission that needs you to carry 30 items, and another that needs you to carry 90... So what makes sense, that you can do both missions because you have 128 cargo racks, or that inexplicably, the 30 item mission completely locks out all 64 cargo racks in one module, and now you don't have enough cargo space for the other mission?
The former, because the latter is completely stupid, who TF would think that makes any sense? Nobody right?
... Ok, so why on god's green earth do passenger missions act like that? Please correct me if I'm wrong if this has since been fixed, but last time I tried passenger missions, a passenger contract would lock out AN ENTIRE PASSENGER MODULE even if MOST of the cabins were still unfilled. Why do 3 people need 6 cabins? IN WHAT UNIVERSE DOES THIS MAKE ANY LOGICAL SENSE? FDEV basically shot passenger missions in the foot with this.
FURTHERMORE, something I couldn't stand about passenger missions is they're basically a charter only economy. You pick up passenger MISSIONS. Some dipweeds want to charter your ship to take them directly to their destination. Why is this a problem? HOW TF are you supposed to do bulk passengers? Remember, this patch came out with the Dolphin and the Beluga. So, the Dolphin makes sense in a charter economy. Just put one cabin on board, and basically be a taxi service, focussing on one passenger mission at a time. The Beluga however? Well, again, you can't fill every cabin because these stupid passenger missions lock out modules, and if you take 3 or 4 passenger missions... Odds are they aren't going to the same place, and it can be difficult to accept missions that make a convenient route. If you can't make a convenient route, you're almost spending as much time getting those 3 or 4 missions done as you would be only doing one mission at a time in a small ship like a Dolphin... So why bother with bulk? The missions aren't scaling up like they should, so why bother?
Meanwhile... If you look at trade... If you really want to fill every cargorack and go where-ever you damn well please, you can ignore missions entirely, and use the commodity market to plot your own profitable routes... This is much more akin to what I was hoping big passenger ships to play like. Passenger gets missions only, they have no equivalent of a commodity market. Personally, I was hoping there'd be a way to set up your own passenger lines, and run your own business, rather than be subject to the whims of individual passengers. Basically, show up at a station, and there would be, say, 2 categories, one for cruise, and one for passengers lines. For cruise, you basically advertise a cruise line to different sights with your quality of passenger modules, and that sets your ticket price. Then, have fun sightseeing while earning credits. Or, passengers, you advertise your own line, it takes some research to figure out where people are moving to using the in game tools in the galaxy map, and set ticket prices based on different factors which passengers can either buy or say no thanks. It'd take effort on your part to figure out demand. For example, You could maybe make bank setting fairly high ticket prices on economy class cabins in a civil war system where people are desperate to flee as refugees, but it's high risk of getting attacked on the way in and out.
Long story short, cargo trade gets both a commodities market and a mission market... Passenger doesn't, they only get what are essentially charter missions, no "commodity" (passengers) market, and the charters are dumb because they lock the module with half the cabins empty (WHY?). Imagine if the only passengers in the real world where charters. Planes like the 787 wouldn't exist while business jets would be the biggest thing around... The Beluga really is a pointless ship, terrible at combat, only slightly worse than proper cargo ships at cargo and mining, and sucks at the passenger missions it was meant for because there is no market for bulk passengers.
Also, passengers are A-holes. Why are you a fugitive who gets y when I engage in combat thanks to your presence? Are you really in a position to care? Does a 747 care about one of its no-name passengers being a whiny ? No. A passenger commodity style market would be nice for that too. There's no reason these things need to be mutually exclusive either, it's just it'd be nice if there were a decent way to do bulk passengers AS WELL AS things like expensive or high risk charter missions that would make small and nimble passenger ships profitable too. If you really want your players to find their own way in the universe, then... Give... Your players... Options.
Anyway, this was long winded, but point is, this is one small example of MANY where the game mechanics don't make a whole lot of sense, and could be done better, if FDEV would stop half-ing their content updates in the first place, and then never return to old broken game mechanics to fix it. I dunno who OK'd passenger module locking, but that guy should get fired, it's an awful game mechanic that makes no logical sense. Whoever came up with that should've had every developer at FDEV going... Wat? That never should've made it into the game without being caught as absolutely dumb by the time of that patch's beta.
6.) Social aspect.
Again... another example of FDEV not giving players as much control as they should probably have. For one thing, recently tried multicrew asteroid mining with my friend who's new to the game... Instancing was all kinds of broken, so that didn't work (to be fair though, we are 300ms ping apart on opposite sides of the planet). Fighters worked fine, but... There's no mining fighters, even though that's been suggested repeatedly. So unless he wants to just sit back and not help the whole time to get paid... Kinda boring for him. Did a bit of combat vouchers instead, but that's a terrible payout. He was happy for a couple hundred thousand being still in a sidewinder, but still, I was hoping to get him more. 10% is awful.
I know why you're doing this FDEV. There is no way for me to pay millions directly to my friend, he only earns 10%, I, THE CAPTIAN, have no way to crank that up so he can rightfully get 50%... It's all because you don't want new players to have ways to skip YOUR GLORIOUS G GRIND, LOOK AT ALL THIS "CONTENT" HE WOULD BE MISSING OUT ON... Again, I'd consider the game to not really even start till you're in your dream ship, with how much grinding there is AFTER that, so I don't really see a problem with helping a new player up to better ships. Especially since, in a wing, he's kinda useless to me right now in a wing, not sure what he's supposed to help accomplish in a sidewinder with a 7LY jump range.
And furthermore, these restrictions... They're pointless anyway, because they're not going to stop me from transferring millions of credits to him. Watch me drop 250 low temp diamonds for him to collect right outside a high sell station. It's just extra annoying steps... Like, you do realize there's a way to build gameplay out of this, INSTEAD OF annoyance, right? You really want a player driven economy? Ok, LET ME FINANCE PEOPLE. Let me buy my friend a ship, and take a cut of his profits till he pays 130% back, we both get something out of the deal. Let players start multiplayer businesses. In fact, it'd make the game more accessible too, because it would encourage older players to make sound investments by teaching newer players how to make credits and not lose the expensive ship you just bought them. There's great content to be had here, but OH NO, can't upset the beautiful grind you've created, gotta put EVERY player through it right? Fuel Rats are the closest thing to something like a player business, and they do it as volunteer work, mainly because FDEV has made player/player financial transaction such a massive pain in the butt that it's not really feasible as anything other than volunteer work. FDEV... Why are your players having to make amazing gameplay and content IN SPITE OF YOU? They do amazing work and don't see a dime for it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
TLDR: Grind's broken, Economy's broken, Game mechanics are broken, etc, ya'll heard it before, the die-hard ED vets are going to defend these mechanics for inexplicable reasons, and FDEV will continue on course making my post pointless... I guess I'm just here to vent into the void like so many other ED players.
"You can be anything in this game"... True, technically... The options aren't all there though. Boring mining is the best credit earner by SO MUCH that people are kinda stuck in that corner if they want to make a ton of credits, it completely violates the basic fundemental gaming principle of "risk vs reward", some credit earning methods are so bad you barely even break even making them pointless unless you want to go role-play on disposable income, and some game mechanics are infuriatingly illogical, and literally every aspect of the game has been made into a separate grind making the game inaccessible to new players. ED has so much potential, but it will always be unrealized until they hire some people who specialize in game design. Making pretty ships in a pretty universe is not game design. I mean "GAME" design. The part of the game that rewards its players for their efforts. You know... THE GAME. The game part of your game isn't functioning properly. It's a stunningly beautiful game that has been stunningly flawed for years. It's a good thing you have so many players leaving complaints. It means so many players see the potential, and desperately want FDEV to reach that potential. It's when players stop caring and just quit silently that the game dies. No game is perfect, but this game falls well short of what it could be. Just a few tweaks would go absolute miles. Everybody is going to have their own ideas on what would make this game better, and you can't please everybody, but you could at least start and please a lot of people by making some no brainer game design changes.
1.) First off, this game has a very small and very vocal community that defends FDEV's grinds and poor game mechanics, and I get the impression their defense of such choices only serves to distract and confuse FDEV from important criticisms... Stop. Grind addiction is a real thing, I used to grind thousands of hours in the kings of grindy games like World of Tanks and War Thunder. Stop. Take a step back, really analyze the amount of hours you sink into this game, and think about whether those hours meant reasonable progress. This game is competing with other "second job" games as well as players who have real jobs that do not allow so much time to be spent in a digital universe, even if you wanted to. Alternatively, if you made billions using exploits, particularly ones that have already been patched out, or doing current mining... Just because there ARE methods to make credits quickly like that doesn't mean those methods make sense. Exploits are accidents that get patched out and a lot of people miss when they aren't in the know, and in a game that's all about "you do you"... Boy, sure seems like there's only one way to make a ton of credits quickly, doesn't it? And shocking that it's one of the lowest risk things in the game. Does that make sense from a game design perspective? And on that note:
2.) FDEV... , learn what risk vs reward means. Bounty hunting, combat, etc, SHOULD pay out WAY more than mining. Why are you offering so little credits in exchange for combat and bounty hunting over bloody mining? In no universe does this make sense. This game actually has a decent amount of depth and variety, this is one of the selling points. Want to be a BAMF bounty hunter? You got it. Want to explore the untouched? Do it. Want to become a trade tycoon? Make it so... But all of this might as well be entirely nonexistent when you make one task so low risk have such a massive payout, while more risky ventures barely break even. You CANNOT claim this game lets you do anything if the economics don't support it. Sure, you can TECHNICALLY do all this other stuff, but technically only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades if there's no incentive. You've essentially given your players no choice but to do this one task if they want to make credits quickly. And I'm sure some vets will defend this with "well, I make so and so doing this other task"... So? People wouldn't be doing so much diamond mining if it didn't payout so well for such little risk, and more importantly, it's a method of making credits that works well even in weaker low end ships, the same cannot always be said for things like trade where bulk cargo and lots of capital matters, or combat, where the bigger badder ship you have expands your options and safety margin in combat. And regardless, higher risk, higher reward, end of story, it's basic crap.
... And don't look at this and go "Oh yeah, good point" and nerf mining into oblivion, rather than buff combat. This game desparately needs less grind, not more. This leads to my next point:
3.) Look, the 50-100 million an hour I can make in my mining beluga (which took quite a while to grind up to in the first place), I could see that as being a fairly reasonable return... Shame it's one of the only ways to make that much so quickly, especially compared to combat, but there you go. I'd say that's... I dunno, 20-50 hours from sidewinder to Jameson Memorial and an A rated Anaconda? It's hard to tell because that's assuming a brand new player knows exactly what they're doing (news flash, they don't, new players fumble around in the dark for quite a long time before figuring out what pays and what doesn't). And a lot of vet players have long since forgotten that it takes a while to even grind up to a ship capable of printing that many credits, from a sidewinder.
That would be a reasonable amount of grind I think... Except... Again... Why is mining, an extremely boring, repetitive and low risk task the main way to earn that quickly? But, more importantly... That's not the end of the grind... Which is why ya'll should cool it with the credit grinding. The problem is that, if it exists in the game, in FDEV's eyes, it needs to be some form of grind. Station contacts? Grind their friendliness with you. Want one of the faction end game ships like the corvette or cutter? Grind that faction doing special missions that pay jack squat. Want to engineer your ship? First grind a ton of crap to even unlock EACH engineer, and then grind materials to DO the engineering, and then grind some more to rank each one up. Want guardian modules? Go do some grinding to get blueprints, materials, whatever it takes, etc. If you want to keep ALL of these things the massive grind that they are, then start buffing credit making methods, espescially when so much of the game has awful payouts. Better yet, buff all of it imo, but if you at least want to keep all these different end game grinds, then at least make it easier for new players to get to, holy hell.
I'll put it to you this way... I have 309 hours in this game... I only just made elite (Trade), and only just made a billion and some credits, now I have 2 of the ships I've always wanted (a beluga and an Anaconda), and another 500 million in cash to handle rebuys... As far as I'm concerned, after 309 hours of grinding (because, again, it takes a while for a new player to ferret out what pays, and low temp diamonds and void opals weren't a thing when I first started) As far as I'm concerned, after all this time, the game has only JUST begun. Your player base mainly just wants the freedom and flexibility to go role play without being penalized. They want to get their end game dream ship, engineer it to all hell, and then go have fun with it... It's taken me 309 hours to put my butt in a pair of ships I can go have fun like that in... But I now only have 2 engineers unlocked, and only Felicity maxed out on FSD range... Which means if I want more engineering options I have a TON of non-credit grinding to do. And if I want guardian modules, I haven't even touched that stuff yet. Also, I think I'd rather have a Cutter than an Anaconda, but given that is yet ANOTHER grind (faction rep), I'm probably not going to bother on that for a very long time. As far as I'm concerned, I'm 309 hours in just to get to the start of the REAL grind... And all this to make a dream ship I can go exploring in. Yes yes, I know I can technically go do that anyway in a cheap Asp Explorer... But not if you want to make much progress towards a fully engineered end game ship that you want. That's why people get so unhappy cornered into grinding just to GET to what they consider the "fun" part of the game.
It almost feels like FDEV are basing their entire strategy on content updates for their niche longtime playerbase that already has billions to blow on stuff... Which is why they keep making content updates that are yet another slog of a grind on top of everything else. That's probably the real reason why fleet carriers are what they are. Oh , the small portion of our playerbase that's already sitting on billions and fully engineered ships need something to do, let's make a permagrind end game item, genius! Problem with that is your longtime playerbase is already fed up with grinds and don't want to make this game a second job just to MAINTAIN their fleet carrier, and that sort of thing is a slap in the face to any new player that already has so many different independent grinds to go through. This game is already inaccessible to new players as a steep learning curve, so many separate grinds only makes it worse. How can I give a damn about fleet carriers if it took me 309 hours just to get to end game ships, and still have engineers, guardian modules, and factions to grind? And I don't blame people who do care about fleet carriers being so PO'd that they're exploitatively expensive. An end game item like that should be a REWARD not a second job. Make it "expensive" to maintain if you want, but it should be a reward to the player for sticking with this grindy g game so long. For example, how about by being the one form of earning a passive profit for the ship owner if they run it well. Like, how about take it out of the bubble, and having it be essentially a mobile station explorers can travel with. The players can buy ships and modules and repairs at a markup, and sell their exploration data to the carrier owner, (who can then sell said data at a profit to places in the bubble), sell ores and mats to help the owner fabricate modules and ships, etc. Being essentially a HOST, a fleet carrier owner should be able to rake in a passive income when they do well to be a good one and run their own little economy... Instead this is just... Hey, you know those billions you've spent a thousand hours grinding? Well here's the end game item we promised you that you can either all that away on, or grind for the rest of your life just to break even... Enjoy!
Seriously, the economics and grinds in this game absolutely kill it. Any one individual grind could be argued to be not that bad, but when every single game mechanic is made into one, it stacks up into an awfully annoying experience.
4.) Ok... So you want the gind FDEV? I get it, you want to be pseudo realistic, and that means treating your game like a second job so that players need to spend a "REALISTIC" amount of time grinding a spaceship, as if you're LITERALLY trying to save enough money to buy the actual Space Shuttle Endeavour. Fine... Maybe you'd get less complaints about it if the things players grind were "fun" to do. There's a tipping point where SO long to earn something no longer feels like such an amazing reward because of the effort required... But starts to feel like... Wow... I spent 309 hours of my life on a digital ship, I should get a life. Either it shouldn't take 309 hours, or those 309 hours should be fun enough to not notice or care how long it took.
Believe it or not, I actually had some fun mining, as repetitive and boring as it is. Sometimes I like playing chill games, not everything needs to be action packed. And with my triple monitor setup, I can be mining, watching netflix, and using 3rd party ED tools all at the same time... But what's interesting is what I had fun doing vs not when it comes to that mining.
Void opal mining deep core- Kinda fun... Low Temp Surface Mining- So brain dead and repetitive, it's kinda not. I actually miss when Void Opal mining was the best credit earner, even though it was honestly earning me less credits then than low temp diamonds earn me now. Void opal mining was a pretty intricate process, that involved a series of mini games requiring player skill to accomplish. It wasn't what I'd call "high risk", but there was at least an element of risk to it (in the form of potentially messing up your explosives), and required player skill. It took some skill to scan for, and recognize potential void opal cores from a distance, it took some skill to charge the asteroid correctly, and mining the core quickly with an abrasion blaster without killing too many collector limpets was a bit difficult. Each one of these "mini games" took concentration, and was one of the few game mechanics I thought was well implemented and thought out. Hell, you could almost justify it's payout with all the stuff you had to do to make it work.
Now?... Go to Borran, find a pack of asteroids, sit in one spot for 5-10 minutes, and sit there holding the mouse at asteroids with any low temp diamonds while the collector limpets do all the work... Move on to the next one. You could practically write a script to do this while you're at work or something. Are there more fun things to do in the game? Sure... Good luck earning creds at a reasonable pace or risk for it.
Point is, people complain less when the grinding is engaging. Repetition is fine so long as you're repeating something fun. Sure, it was silly to have void opal mining payout so much more than combat, but I never complained about it because I actually found it somewhat engaging to do. Should low temp diamond surface mining be a thing? Sure I guess, but in the mining world, I don't see why it now pays more than deep core mining which required at least some effort on the player's part. Even here, in mining, an example of risk vs reward being messed up.
Well... One of the biggest problems with ED is that a lot of tasks aren't particularly fun. FDEV has, for a long time, really needed to take a step back from making new content, to go back and revamp old content, to both fix long standing balance issues with various tasks, and to improve on the already existing gameplay. I'll give you a perfect example:
5.) FDEV, if you want your players to have fun grinding, and allow your players to role play as anything they want (which seems to be the aim, right?), then give your players as many options as possible, in a way that isn't infuriatingly illogical. For example:
I was excited for passenger missions when they came out... And when they finally did, I was thoroughly disappointed... A couple years on, and they're basically untouched with all the problems they've always had... And I'm not sure WHY they are the way they are, I don't know how the mechanics behind it got past an entire dev team with nobody questioning how silly passenger missions are.
For example... Let's say you're doing trade, right? Ok, let's say you have two 64 cargo rack modules. There's one trade mission that needs you to carry 30 items, and another that needs you to carry 90... So what makes sense, that you can do both missions because you have 128 cargo racks, or that inexplicably, the 30 item mission completely locks out all 64 cargo racks in one module, and now you don't have enough cargo space for the other mission?
The former, because the latter is completely stupid, who TF would think that makes any sense? Nobody right?
... Ok, so why on god's green earth do passenger missions act like that? Please correct me if I'm wrong if this has since been fixed, but last time I tried passenger missions, a passenger contract would lock out AN ENTIRE PASSENGER MODULE even if MOST of the cabins were still unfilled. Why do 3 people need 6 cabins? IN WHAT UNIVERSE DOES THIS MAKE ANY LOGICAL SENSE? FDEV basically shot passenger missions in the foot with this.
FURTHERMORE, something I couldn't stand about passenger missions is they're basically a charter only economy. You pick up passenger MISSIONS. Some dipweeds want to charter your ship to take them directly to their destination. Why is this a problem? HOW TF are you supposed to do bulk passengers? Remember, this patch came out with the Dolphin and the Beluga. So, the Dolphin makes sense in a charter economy. Just put one cabin on board, and basically be a taxi service, focussing on one passenger mission at a time. The Beluga however? Well, again, you can't fill every cabin because these stupid passenger missions lock out modules, and if you take 3 or 4 passenger missions... Odds are they aren't going to the same place, and it can be difficult to accept missions that make a convenient route. If you can't make a convenient route, you're almost spending as much time getting those 3 or 4 missions done as you would be only doing one mission at a time in a small ship like a Dolphin... So why bother with bulk? The missions aren't scaling up like they should, so why bother?
Meanwhile... If you look at trade... If you really want to fill every cargorack and go where-ever you damn well please, you can ignore missions entirely, and use the commodity market to plot your own profitable routes... This is much more akin to what I was hoping big passenger ships to play like. Passenger gets missions only, they have no equivalent of a commodity market. Personally, I was hoping there'd be a way to set up your own passenger lines, and run your own business, rather than be subject to the whims of individual passengers. Basically, show up at a station, and there would be, say, 2 categories, one for cruise, and one for passengers lines. For cruise, you basically advertise a cruise line to different sights with your quality of passenger modules, and that sets your ticket price. Then, have fun sightseeing while earning credits. Or, passengers, you advertise your own line, it takes some research to figure out where people are moving to using the in game tools in the galaxy map, and set ticket prices based on different factors which passengers can either buy or say no thanks. It'd take effort on your part to figure out demand. For example, You could maybe make bank setting fairly high ticket prices on economy class cabins in a civil war system where people are desperate to flee as refugees, but it's high risk of getting attacked on the way in and out.
Long story short, cargo trade gets both a commodities market and a mission market... Passenger doesn't, they only get what are essentially charter missions, no "commodity" (passengers) market, and the charters are dumb because they lock the module with half the cabins empty (WHY?). Imagine if the only passengers in the real world where charters. Planes like the 787 wouldn't exist while business jets would be the biggest thing around... The Beluga really is a pointless ship, terrible at combat, only slightly worse than proper cargo ships at cargo and mining, and sucks at the passenger missions it was meant for because there is no market for bulk passengers.
Also, passengers are A-holes. Why are you a fugitive who gets y when I engage in combat thanks to your presence? Are you really in a position to care? Does a 747 care about one of its no-name passengers being a whiny ? No. A passenger commodity style market would be nice for that too. There's no reason these things need to be mutually exclusive either, it's just it'd be nice if there were a decent way to do bulk passengers AS WELL AS things like expensive or high risk charter missions that would make small and nimble passenger ships profitable too. If you really want your players to find their own way in the universe, then... Give... Your players... Options.
Anyway, this was long winded, but point is, this is one small example of MANY where the game mechanics don't make a whole lot of sense, and could be done better, if FDEV would stop half-ing their content updates in the first place, and then never return to old broken game mechanics to fix it. I dunno who OK'd passenger module locking, but that guy should get fired, it's an awful game mechanic that makes no logical sense. Whoever came up with that should've had every developer at FDEV going... Wat? That never should've made it into the game without being caught as absolutely dumb by the time of that patch's beta.
6.) Social aspect.
Again... another example of FDEV not giving players as much control as they should probably have. For one thing, recently tried multicrew asteroid mining with my friend who's new to the game... Instancing was all kinds of broken, so that didn't work (to be fair though, we are 300ms ping apart on opposite sides of the planet). Fighters worked fine, but... There's no mining fighters, even though that's been suggested repeatedly. So unless he wants to just sit back and not help the whole time to get paid... Kinda boring for him. Did a bit of combat vouchers instead, but that's a terrible payout. He was happy for a couple hundred thousand being still in a sidewinder, but still, I was hoping to get him more. 10% is awful.
I know why you're doing this FDEV. There is no way for me to pay millions directly to my friend, he only earns 10%, I, THE CAPTIAN, have no way to crank that up so he can rightfully get 50%... It's all because you don't want new players to have ways to skip YOUR GLORIOUS G GRIND, LOOK AT ALL THIS "CONTENT" HE WOULD BE MISSING OUT ON... Again, I'd consider the game to not really even start till you're in your dream ship, with how much grinding there is AFTER that, so I don't really see a problem with helping a new player up to better ships. Especially since, in a wing, he's kinda useless to me right now in a wing, not sure what he's supposed to help accomplish in a sidewinder with a 7LY jump range.
And furthermore, these restrictions... They're pointless anyway, because they're not going to stop me from transferring millions of credits to him. Watch me drop 250 low temp diamonds for him to collect right outside a high sell station. It's just extra annoying steps... Like, you do realize there's a way to build gameplay out of this, INSTEAD OF annoyance, right? You really want a player driven economy? Ok, LET ME FINANCE PEOPLE. Let me buy my friend a ship, and take a cut of his profits till he pays 130% back, we both get something out of the deal. Let players start multiplayer businesses. In fact, it'd make the game more accessible too, because it would encourage older players to make sound investments by teaching newer players how to make credits and not lose the expensive ship you just bought them. There's great content to be had here, but OH NO, can't upset the beautiful grind you've created, gotta put EVERY player through it right? Fuel Rats are the closest thing to something like a player business, and they do it as volunteer work, mainly because FDEV has made player/player financial transaction such a massive pain in the butt that it's not really feasible as anything other than volunteer work. FDEV... Why are your players having to make amazing gameplay and content IN SPITE OF YOU? They do amazing work and don't see a dime for it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
TLDR: Grind's broken, Economy's broken, Game mechanics are broken, etc, ya'll heard it before, the die-hard ED vets are going to defend these mechanics for inexplicable reasons, and FDEV will continue on course making my post pointless... I guess I'm just here to vent into the void like so many other ED players.
"You can be anything in this game"... True, technically... The options aren't all there though. Boring mining is the best credit earner by SO MUCH that people are kinda stuck in that corner if they want to make a ton of credits, it completely violates the basic fundemental gaming principle of "risk vs reward", some credit earning methods are so bad you barely even break even making them pointless unless you want to go role-play on disposable income, and some game mechanics are infuriatingly illogical, and literally every aspect of the game has been made into a separate grind making the game inaccessible to new players. ED has so much potential, but it will always be unrealized until they hire some people who specialize in game design. Making pretty ships in a pretty universe is not game design. I mean "GAME" design. The part of the game that rewards its players for their efforts. You know... THE GAME. The game part of your game isn't functioning properly. It's a stunningly beautiful game that has been stunningly flawed for years. It's a good thing you have so many players leaving complaints. It means so many players see the potential, and desperately want FDEV to reach that potential. It's when players stop caring and just quit silently that the game dies. No game is perfect, but this game falls well short of what it could be. Just a few tweaks would go absolute miles. Everybody is going to have their own ideas on what would make this game better, and you can't please everybody, but you could at least start and please a lot of people by making some no brainer game design changes.
Last edited:
![[Diplomacy] Carnegie](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/123/123809.jpg?1553527149){kind=avatar}
