Anybody at Frontier?

Ed used to hint that he knew more than he was allowed to say. Surely CMs have to know the direction that ED is travelling in so they can plan a coherent communication strategy?
Just after the Odyssey trailer was released, I asked Ed (Lewis ... in case anyone isn't sure who or what "Ed" is) during one of his streams, what he thought of the Odyssey trailer. It was a throwaway comment Ed could have easily ignored ... but he didn't. While Ed still couldn't say much, being still under NDA from Frontier, as there are still things that are not public, he did comment that he used to see some monitors with work on them, that we're only now seeing glimpses of.

So, back to my replying to you, Ed isn't hinting that he's seen more than he's allowed to say ... he's flat-out saying he's seen more than he's allowed to say.
(EDIT: Sorry if it seems like I'm correcting you, it's actually a good thing as it confirms Odyssey has been worked on for over a year at least, and probably longer)
 
Haha - I don't want that phrase to put you off. Obviously there will be some things I will want to keep quiet until the right time such as big announcements, but I full intend to be open and honest with you all where I can.

I actually like your analogy, the way I see this is that the community will be the first to tell me when I do something wrong or if something is wrong. I can then do my best to work to fix that or certainly put it in the hands of those that can.
I think most (mature) people understand that 100% transparency is impossible, but there is a middle ground to be had somewhere between the current "Radio Silence" and "fully transparent realtime running commentary".

Trust me, you'll know when something is wrong / contentious. 200 pages overnight ALL IN CAPS type of wrong :D

Open Powerplay, VR and the FSS turned the forum from the Zen garden of Planet Coaster into something akin to a grim dark 2000AD war zone.
I was thinking more like a scene from terminator salvation, but yeah I can see where you are going with this, good choice of analogy.
 
Welcome, kind sir.

Many of us will be more than happy to play Elite with you. It would be a fine way of involving with the community.
Psst... [whispers] he's a console scrub... :p

At the rate he's making friends on the forum, I suspect there is going be requests from the community for Arf to get accounts on PC & PS4 so they can play with their new friend.
 
Sounds great Arthur.

So, as I don't know of any better place currently to ask those questions to which good or bad answers are better than no answer at all, I'll use here as you seem to be pretty active right now (been in similar teams so I do get how things go)

The current situation with Low Temperature Diamonds is confusing to quite a lot of players in various ways.

My question is:

Do the game designers, consider the current -prices- that Low Temperature Diamonds -sell for- to be what they intend, design wise?

This is not about distribution, amount you can mine, how, and where - that has been adjusted and patched a few times, so is clearly being looked at. This is about the -sale price- of the commodity at stations.

Taking into consideration this very good and sensible quote from David Braben.

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Could you ask one of the designers who is responsible for resolving the above quoted situation, and get back to us with their response?
Yes or no would be fine.


Ssshhhh! You are only meant to ask about VR in odyssey dagnamit! :p

Seriously though I'd also like the above question answered as simply put hundreds of millions per hour is wrecking what many of us, myself included, perceive as the intended balance / tempo of progression in the game.
 
What's actually destructive is when white knights attack people for providing feedback. This gives frontier the option of actually taking their advice, believing stupidly that its impossible to keep people happy, and giving up because of it, when in truth its really easy all that needs to be done is a business decision or two to implement it (which i accept is probably the hard part).



The point is, hard line extremism is only a white knight or star citizen fan thing. In fact, (as an example) a few bug fixes would earn mountains of good will and easily please. Happiness! Players!! Possible!!

I've often seen bickering along the lines of "I want X" & "NO X will ruin my gameplay", but until the VR thing I'd never seen players actively revelling in others disappointment, and the amount of baiting / trolling / flaming pointed our way has been disgusting. The VR supporters are accused of derailing the Odyssey announcement thread into 200 pages of "Wah Wah I want my VR" but if you read through the thread between Tim Smith's last two dev posts it was a vicious battlefront, in which we were either quoting Frontier's previous comments that indicated their support for VR and how it was relatively easy to implement, all hail Greg, or politely in a non tantrum way saying "I play in VR and an very disappointed by this decision please reconsider". As for the conduct of the opposition? Galling.



I couldn't agree more. As a matter of fact, one of the things I always say to people, be they friends, acquaintances, coworkers, bosses etc. is "if you have a genuine problem with something I say or do, please let me know right up front. Don't worry about my feewings, I'm a big boy and, more importantly, I could very well be completely wrong or a bastich without knowing it and how on Earth will I ever find out if nobody ever tells me?"



If somebody thinks I'm a jerk, I'd like for them to tell and tell me why that is so as well. Again, it doesn't matter if I agree or not, but I might learn something or, at the very least, have a chance to defend myself. I can't do either with "the silent treatment." The silent treatment only feeds resentment without an opportunity for either party to work it out.

Yeah, bad news is better than no news, but accompanying the bad news with the, presumably valid, reason why it is like that always makes the bad news easier to accept.
 
Ssshhhh! You are only meant to ask about VR in odyssey dagnamit! :p

Seriously though I'd also like the above question answered as simply put hundreds of millions per hour is wrecking what many of us, myself included, perceive as the intended balance / tempo of progression in the game.

Yeah, personally, I actually LIKE the RATE at which people can gain items from mining, I think it's more fun to get more stuff, faster - however!

I feel like the price is too high when you sell them - reducing that, but leaving the rate at which you can mine stuff seems like it keeps much of the fun, but resolves some of the credits issue.

This is what my question is about. I want to know if the -designers- intended the price to be so high.
 
I've often seen bickering along the lines of "I want X" & "NO X will ruin my gameplay", but until the VR thing I'd never seen players actively revelling in others disappointment, and the amount of baiting / trolling / flaming pointed our way has been disgusting. The VR supporters are accused of derailing the Odyssey announcement thread into 200 pages of "Wah Wah I want my VR" but if you read through the thread between Tim Smith's last two dev posts it was a vicious battlefront, in which we were either quoting Frontier's previous comments that indicated their support for VR and how it was relatively easy to implement, all hail Greg, or politely in a non tantrum way saying "I play in VR and an very disappointed by this decision please reconsider". As for the conduct of the opposition? Galling.
Ok, at risk of opening a can of worms .... as one of "the opposition" you mention (by default as I don't have VR) .... I saw VR players throw tantrums, toys and dummies out of prams and misconstrue and lie about what Frontier said instead of sticking to the facts. And no, not all VR players were like that, but some were.

So I'm of the opinion that as far as VR players vs non-VR players goes, it's not all black and white.
 
I've often seen bickering along the lines of "I want X" & "NO X will ruin my gameplay", but until the VR thing I'd never seen players actively revelling in others disappointment, and the amount of baiting / trolling / flaming pointed our way has been disgusting. The VR supporters are accused of derailing the Odyssey announcement thread into 200 pages of "Wah Wah I want my VR" but if you read through the thread between Tim Smith's last two dev posts it was a vicious battlefront, in which we were either quoting Frontier's previous comments that indicated their support for VR and how it was relatively easy to implement, all hail Greg, or politely in a non tantrum way saying "I play in VR and an very disappointed by this decision please reconsider". As for the conduct of the opposition? Galling.

Yeah, bad news is better than no news, but accompanying the bad news with the, presumably valid, reason why it is like that always makes the bad news easier to accept.

If that is the only baiting / trolling / flaming that you have seen, you have been very lucky.
Other examples I can (immediately) think of are:
  • The DFF
  • Cobra MkIV
  • Open only PowerPlay
  • PvP vs PvE
  • Transition to ARK
  • Fleet Carrier pricing / upkeep

This forum is awash with people who feel it is their right to say what they want how they want. Some people have valid contributions, some people just want a Like (+1) and some want to have fun derailing a thread. As soon as two keyboard warriors have opposing views the thread invariably becomes too toxic for Frontier to comment on.

I admire the Community Manager's aspiration to be more open and honest with us but fear that people will constantly peck at questions that the CMs will not be able to answer (technical, commercial or logistical reasons) and will then drive further silence.
If you want to be more open, then tell us more (on things like the Thu night stream), but dont engage in answering questions at this stage - it'll allow us (the community) to educate ourselves about the sort of things that we can / cannot ask when eventually you do look to respond to questions.
 
Yeah, bad news is better than no news, but accompanying the bad news with the, presumably valid, reason why it is like that always makes the bad news easier to accept.
Yeah, I'd much rather that than the PR phrases "not at launch" implying there might be hope without FD actually commiting to anything.

If the news is bad I genuinely want to hear it, but with the reasons why.

For example:
  • I see no reason why they can't continue to do seated VR for atmospheric worlds.
  • I can see a problem with how they would then separate that seated VR from non-VR FPS. Access to airless worlds for Horizons is separated from the base game by different launchers and I don't think it's realistic to expect FD to create a separate VR launcher for Odyssey. That 'might' be a technical problem where the resources required to solve it might not have the payoff (financial and VR kudos) to make it worthwhile.
 
I've often seen bickering along the lines of "I want X" & "NO X will ruin my gameplay", but until the VR thing I'd never seen players actively revelling in others disappointment, and the amount of baiting / trolling / flaming pointed our way has been disgusting. The VR supporters are accused of derailing the Odyssey announcement thread into 200 pages of "Wah Wah I want my VR" but if you read through the thread between Tim Smith's last two dev posts it was a vicious battlefront, in which we were either quoting Frontier's previous comments that indicated their support for VR and how it was relatively easy to implement, all hail Greg, or politely in a non tantrum way saying "I play in VR and an very disappointed by this decision please reconsider". As for the conduct of the opposition? Galling.

That's not very nice. They do that for fun.

Look, without them, the issue wouldn't receive 50% or more of the public awareness, so there's that. With the fss, it went around in so many circles (even after we had refined proposals down to the subatomic level to meet their needs), i became convinced that they actually were on our side and were doing their part not to let the issue die. One can be grateful for that at least.
 
You were, as far as I can recall, reasonable in that discussion, but I don't want to derail this thread onto the topic of VR, but 90% of what we said can be and often was evidenced with quotes from Frontier. As such I'm not going to go into the pro's and cons and cite sources and all that jazz... in here at least ;-)

Yeah, I'd much rather that than the PR phrases "not at launch" implying there might be hope without FD actually commiting to anything.

If the news is bad I genuinely want to hear it, but with the reasons why.

For example:
  • I see no reason why they can't continue to do seated VR for atmospheric worlds.
  • I can see a problem with how they would then separate that seated VR from non-VR FPS. Access to airless worlds for Horizons is separated from the base game by different launchers and I don't think it's realistic to expect FD to create a separate VR launcher for Odyssey. That 'might' be a technical problem where the resources required to solve it might not have the payoff (financial and VR kudos) to make it worthwhile.
Very much this!
 
That's not very nice. They do that for fun.

Look, without them, the issue wouldn't receive 50% or more of the public awareness, so there's that. With the fss, it went around in so many circles (even after we had refined proposals down to the subatomic level to meet their needs), i became convinced that they actually were on our side and were doing their part not to let the issue die. One can be grateful for that at least.

That's a very interesting way of looking at things, I like that way of thinking.
 
So, back to my replying to you, Ed isn't hinting that he's seen more than he's allowed to say ... he's flat-out saying he's seen more than he's allowed to say.
(EDIT: Sorry if it seems like I'm correcting you, it's actually a good thing as it confirms Odyssey has been worked on for over a year at least, and probably longer)
Not a problem, I see it more as confirming rather than correcting :)
 
Well if that happened in the past, it would sprout again every 3 months would it? :p

Yes, perhaps I could ask Arthur to finally put those requests to bed and then pin the answer to the forum, like on the log-in screen, or even better, when you try to start a new thread, the pinned 'IT WILL NEVER BE OPEN ONLY' post pops up and asks, "Do you still want to continue with your new thread?"
 
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