...so they can fight effectively against the Guardians...
Anyone else getting a bit frustrated with the prolonged narrative?
- Thread starter Peter Mannion
- Start date
It kinda reminds me of watching the latest Obi-Wan series on Disney+. There is no sense of fear for the main characters, because we already know they are alive and well in the future. It's more of a curiosity of "How will they resolve these plot points while not breaking established canon?" My interest in the current story in Elite is similar. There's no way that Frontier is going to kill off Thargoids after all the energy they spent making Thargoid combat unique and totally separate from the rest of the game (much to my own personal dismay). I'm talking about all the special AX weapons locked behind annoying (IMO) "grind walls" that have zero use outside of AX combat, weapons that would become paperweights if Thargoids were removed; Thargoids themselves being something that Frontier poured a crazy amount of time into developing. So instead I'm watching the plot from a distance wondering, "How is this super-weapon going to fail, because we all know it will, and how will that change the overall game going forward?"
BTW, I'm one of those people who feel that the Obi-Wan series was not needed and was a bit of a letdown. Likewise, I think a storyline in Elite that is similarly "boxed in" was the wrong way to go. Had the story gone a direction that was totally open to any sort of outcome, say a campaign to find the Thargoid's homeworld, I'd be much more interested despite not being an AX combat pilot myself (the explorer in me would love it).
For what it's worth, my bet is actually on "the superweapon works - at least on an immediate tactical level - exactly as advertised" and we all log in to U13 to find that all NHSSes bigger than a Sensor have vanished [1]; cue mass forum complaints.
It'd be the bigger subversion of expectations in the short-term, gives more immediate political fun in the various human-vs-human conflicts by emboldening rather than weakening the shadier parties, and makes it easier for the Thargoids' next step to be a genuine surprise to both players and NPCs in both timing and nature.
[1] For proper trolling: also those NHSSes and the Barnacles; get to add in complaints about not being able to [easily] unlock Farseer or Palin/Sedesi for a while.
Sure you can. Post Galnet articles about a brewing conflict, then come CG weekend time announce two competing CG goals with opposing outcomes. Assuming one follows the well-established format of CGs, the rules and boundaries are all set. It's been done before, and it works just fine.
And that's just Frontier's own example; plenty of games make this work and have been making it work for decades.
This is hubris. There was never any point, explicit or inferred, during the Jaques refuelling CG where contributors were to have any reasonable inkling of it being a competitive, as opposed to collaborative, event. It was not an official storyline with player input, it was a player-created storyline with official input. A chance of failure in the case of insufficient player effort & time is entirely different from forcing a failed narrative down everyone's throat in the face of overwhelmingly successful efforts.
What do you mean "history says otherwise?" That is observably untrue by anybody who spends 5 minutes browsing these forums and reddit for relevant community responses to these events. I certainly don't see a lot of pleasant things that most people have to say about the Gnosis. Or the narrative in general - I mean, that's why this thread got started. Is there much talk? Yes. Is the talk about how those events kept people invested and made them want to keep playing? Looking at the majority, no.
"Unexpected" 'gotcha' events are hardly some sort of 'highlight' of narrative story telling. Especially when it's done by directly undermining your players.
Obviously players are going to talk more about events that gave them a bad time and broke their trust, than spend time reminiscing about the good moments. Wanting more good moments goes without saying.
I suppose on the bright side, this means Fdev did learn something from the SNAFU moments and were able to create several moments where players could actually have a good time and go home happy. I certainly wasn't around for most of it.
Maybe. From where I sit, the railroading of the Azimuth narrative seems to fly in the face of that conclusion. I feel like I can just read a series of Galnet articles collected on a wikia page at a slightly later date, and get the same narrative value, for all the impact my participation or lack thereof has on what can be done with Thargoids. But, of course, I'm biased being that I've been disinterested ever since Jaques. (I did contribute recently to the Colonia Bridge projects, however; I'll take colonization projects where I can get them.)
Beats me. It's a bit of a tangent, but I wouldn't be sorry to see AX weaponry disappear/become irrelevant. I've never been a fan of 'magic bullet' stuff applied to progression games. "Here's all the time and effort you put in learning about and using these weapons - but now all of it completely useless! Now you have to use this 'silver bullet' and nothing else!" It's like how Borderlands 2 made everything about applying Slag stacks, to the point that in the endgame, if you weren't explicitly slagging and bullet hosing everything to the utmost, you had no chance of killing anything - and making pretty much all other damage mechanics irrelevant. Totally turned me off (though I had other things I didn't like about that title).
Sally seems excited about this narrative. Narratively, if not mechanically, competition and opposition have been made explicit - so totally sabotaging any player expectations, is reasonably not a threat. I suppose the net result for me is I am ambivalent in my expectations for this storyline.
That mechanic was abused heavily, and for a long time, especially where player faction competition was concerned, until Fdev finally introduced mechanics to counteract the effects. If you don't call it metagaming to use something that is known to be uncounterable - or even detectable until after the fact - that's a statement of your personality on its own.
You presented yourself, in this post here, as the everyman for everybody tried to probe bomb Jaques. So why are you acting surprised when the accusation aimed at all of those players also winds up aimed at you? You had hardly made any claims of altruism at that point in the thread.
Ah, right, the implication that anybody disagreeing with your actions or supposed reasoning for them is out of joint, unreasonable, making things up, finds ill intent where there is none, is a bigger troll than any trolls who trolled them, and seeks to enforce their own made-up house rules on everyone else.
Where have I heard this kind of argument before around these parts, I wonder...? Surely not every single time conversation about griefing comes up?
Either you made your 'contributions' in the way that you did (because the DM allowed it), or you didn't.
That Galnet article was a precursor to another Community Goal. There was absolutely nothing connecting Obsidian Orbital with Jaques or vice versa. There was no connection with Jaques to any official narrative at all, actually.
And the claim that "there was no deliberate attempt to exploit" is a flat-out lie. Read the responses to this thread. I know for a fact I am not alone on my observations and feelings on this.
You have a paradoxical way of showing it, to say the least.
Oh, for pity's sake. "Well, I never said that rocks won't fall on your head out of the blue, just as you're about to start your next adventure! So it's on you that your character died!" Now this is an example of what a bad DM would look like.
You're pulling at straws. There was literally no set precent, anywhere, for "environmental context" to affect the outcome of a community goal in ANY capacity, let alone one entirely made up by the players and entirely disconnected from all ongoing official narratives.
I don't disagree (and I loathe the UI changes after the switch from wikia), but it has uses, and in this case, cleanly linked references.
Retcon is the explicit removal of events after they happened. This is just shutting down any expectations of second attempt on the behalf of the players - no doubt thanks to being gunshy of all the controversy that got stirred up around Jaques, the disappearance, the early (by Fdev reckoning) rediscovery, and ensuring rushed narrative bedlam. As far as I can tell, there has been no such removal of events from the narrative timeline.
Because that's what it means to live in a world where other people exist. That obviously applies to virtual ones as well. And even the realm of discussion that exists in the format of this forum. On top of that, you seem to have expressed bewilderment at my conceptions of events and judgements of your stated actions. Understanding where I'm coming from, in turn, may allow you to offer me better understanding.
Fdev couldn't have had control over any of the player's actions. Yes, they are responsible for the narrative choices they made. That doesn't mean they had complete control - or responsibility.
Your description of competitive ranked PvP gameplay is a good example of how that kind of game is an inevitable source of toxicity. Too much competition - especially in contexts where one often cannot do anything to change the outcome, which is all too frequent in these games these days - is not healthy. It's a lesson I had to teach myself the hard way, regrettably.
Regarding putting PMFs ingame, that was a big problem that Fdev was 100% responsible for. I'm glad they finally put a system in place and also brought Squadrons along, because that situation was terrible. Nobody should ever have to be put on a waiting queue spanning literal years to have a group in a multiplayer game. I think it's a given you couldn't have had any reasonable way of knowing, in that instance.
But you and the others probe-bombing Jaques Station absolutely knew that it has detrimental and disruptive effects. No, I don't think you could have predicted that Fdev would choose to say it causes a misjump - but the aim was most certainly to take the station offline or hinder it.
A game that you ought to remember, is shared with every other player, to one extent or another. You cannot shirk the responsibility of your actions when it was deliberately trying to muck with other players, whatever your reasons were. Yes, Fdev - like any DM - could have taken action to prevent the muckery, or at least not make the muckery the prime driver of the narrative moving forward (and pushing aside anything else up to that point). The fact remains that you participated in that muckery of your own doing, not because Fdev made you.
Fdev are not trolls simply because they have enabled or at least ignored trolls in their game, your individual actions & motivations notwithstanding.
I'm not sure if the game has ever kept the 'unique' station Herald posts indefinitely, I can't say I know enough to be certain though...and I'm certainly not able to check Jaques myself. Goodness knows if it's not just a bug or oversight of some other nature. The change to another forum structure later on certainly can make it hard to reference these things. I feel like they would go for the Galnet articles first and foremost, if the intent is to retcon anything.
Subjective, gatekeeping, that street goes both ways in this context. I've laid my motivations out in the clear, so I don't see why you continue to hold yours close to the chest, given you are bothered to this extent.
Incidentally, here's a great example of the consequences of putting in player narrative. I actually PM'ed the person who wrote that and said I was delivering UAs, but not to sabotage... my intent was to see if they wanted to join in, but they were actually apologetic for potentially misrepresenting things going on. But no, FD's endorsed line was that it was sabotage. Thanks FD
"I'm delivering pipe bombs to your office, but it's for other mysterious reasons and totally not anything nefarious. You should help me! Hey, where are you going? No, don't tell the officials there's a saboteur, come back!"
You knew what UA bombing was, you knew what effect it had on stations. It's not really the fault of a third party observer journalist player for putting an accurate label on things, however 'apologetic' they may have felt after your honorable(?) intentions.
In before Proteus turns out to be a Halo Ring that wipes out all sentient life in the region of the human bubble and all CMDRs are magi-science-tele-presenced over to Colonia for the future of the game. Now THAT would be trolling...even though I recall a once-prominent Elite streamer who repeatedly professed with absolute confidence that this would occur, back around 2017-8ish.
Thargoid ships do sound a lot more fun in comparison.
Yes, if you do exactly the same routine things as have been done before with no variation, twists, surprises or innovation, people even in bulk will generally have a better idea of what the rules are.
It also makes, long term, for a really boring story - as complained about repeatedly at the time in the 2018 storyline which was just Galnet + routine CGs. There's also the serious problem with competitive CGs that unless Frontier get incredibly lucky with the balancing - which they have been getting better at, but still needs a lot of luck too - the end-of-week outcome is really obvious after at most six hours, which takes out all the suspense.
Under that method the Premonition finale would have been each side doing a war CG in Tionisla for a week, then whichever side won determines whether Salome made it to the station or not over the Thursday server reset. The eventual outcome might have been preferable to many in the short term, but no-one would have found it particularly memorable afterwards.
I said "current rules". There were certainly different rules in play from Frontier back in 2016 when that CG happened with I think a rather naive expectation that players would come up with interesting storylines if given the tools, combined with not actually having any scalable way to give a player base this big the tools. Drew Wagar's Premonition storyline in 2017 was even more different in terms of what the rules were. The current story team at Frontier is different people, different leadership, different approach, different ways of incorporating player activity. (And had that approach been in place back in 2016, Jaques would quite possibly still be hanging around the fringes of the Pegasi Sector today... I'm not saying it's without its own issues)
But ... poking the recent NMLA plot in that regard:
- there was a haul-by-numbers CG to give the Far God Cult one megaship per tier, to then engage in missionary or pilgrimage work
- as by the "rules", three megaships were then added to the game on completion of that CG and set off on their routes
- then one of the megaships - in a way completely unintended by any CG hauler and not even hinted at during the original CG, was hijacked by Theta Seven
- a collaborative challenge then took place to break a code to discover this (though with a competitive prize for the first to do so)
- a competitive CG then took place between NMLA backers and Imperial loyalists in which destruction of that megaship was not stated as a possible part of the outcome
- the megaship was then destroyed
Do you feel that a separate previously unmentioned megaship should have been used instead to avoid retrospectively breaking the assumptions of the original trade CG participants?
If not, do you feel that the destruction of the megaship if the NMLA lost should have been explicitly stated as likely by Galnet before the CG started?
As an aside ... all the Fuel Rats were doing when suggesting the refuelling CG was hoping to get Jaques moving again. The idea of him attempting a jump to Beagle came from Frontier, though (and it's of course entirely possible therefore that it failing was also always the idea and the UA bombing didn't - in a Doylist sense, at least - cause it)
Really? I do. Every time someone posts a thread about how bad it was, other people come along to say "I was there and it was great".
Maybe I should start posting really critical threads about Enclave and Hesperus (and maybe even Ackwada and OrionU, for neat variations on the basic competitive CG format) just to remind people they happened and the Gnosis wasn't the last time Frontier did something innovative.
You say railroading, I say making very clear up-front how the story is going to go and what the rules for it are so that no-one complains later...
It's also very unlikely that the narrative would have gone this way had Tanner actually succeeded in his attack on Taurus. Now, sure, basic understanding of collective player psychology meant that Frontier could put up that - completely quantitatively fair! - competitive CG and be 99%+ confident which way it was going to go. [1] But that was an opportunity to move this onto another track, long after "Salvation is suspicious" had been established.
Is it impossible to shift now? Yes. The point was that players needed to decide to back or oppose Salvation without full knowledge and without a "perfect" opponent to rally round instead.
Same with the NMLA storyline where - it turns out - backing the Imperial dictatorship's status quo through thick and thin despite many well-signposted opportunities to change course was probably not the brightest idea for the majority of people who aren't playing actual Imperial loyalists ... and again, there was then no opportunity in the few weeks of epilogue to say "wait, we've changed our minds, can the Emperor's cryopod be accidentally destroyed during the recovery operation?". That's not how epilogues work.
(To return to the original complaint of the thread, the fact that this epilogue has taken several months while the dev team catches up with the writing team? Sure, that's rather less than ideal, and it would be a better story if it didn't have to be stretched out that long.)
[1] One day after all this is over - obviously no way it can be answered while the game's still running - "what was your plan for the plot if people sided with Tanner" would be an interesting question to find out the answer to.
I know ppl are used to the show format where the narration is split up into 60 or 90 min pieces. Yet they like to watch it in a binge so they get something like a coherent story. The episodal story telling doesn't work so well with computer media. And it kinda works even worse in MP where there isn'*t even a recapitulation of "what happened so far". It's been an issue from the start. We had the weekly galnet bits from the start and I stopped following them because it rather looked to me like a ragtag collection of random articles. And since none of it mattered in any perceivable way there was no reason to piece it all together from that tiny section of screen it actually covered. Just sifting through the list to piece the info together was more like a punishment than entertainment.
So yes, you can gear up player involvement with events - Warframe did that very successfully. Ppl actually bothered a bit about the story - they got some loot for it after all and there was two outcomes which would play out differently in the game world later.
It's just in ED there isn't really much impact you have. Not that there is much difference in Warframe, but Warframe manages to get the player actually invoilved in the narration. Best mileage I had in ED was running with a group and writing our own "story".
So we are agreed then it can, in fact, be done.
Where I believe you are mistaken this time is the thought that there cannot be 'variation/twists/surprises/innovation'. There absolutely can be. Such things can in fact take place without screwing invested participants over. Things can in fact be kept intuitive and enjoyable for all involved. Our example of a D&D group would hardly be such a widespread and popular phenomenon were this not the case, to say nothing of enjoyable storytelling in general. (Which is why those exceptional instances of books or movies that screw the viewer over in terms of enjoyment/expectations/satisfactions tend to make the rounds on reddit with sometimes-rightfully-earned criticisms.)
You are correct, at least, that narratives totally devoid of those things are boring. I would describe my attempted foray into the novel War & Peace as that kind of boring. I do also recall general complaints existing about boredom and shallowness; perhaps to some degree, the playerbase does bear responsibility for making the narrative-decision-makers of the time feel they had to do something wild and different.
Balance has been...unfortunate, too. I've gone on enough tangents in this one thread that I will leave that at that.
In recent times, I recall several CGs missing goalposts or coming down to the wire, as it often did in the past. No, Fdev have not always been on the ball with that, but I don't agree that it's always obvious and devoid of suspense. (And I can recall a few instances of going too far the other direction, where there was no reasonable way players could ever hit certain tiers.)
Regarding the idea of settling Salome's narrative with a community goal - no, I don't think that would fit, not without further narrative involving escalation of events to a broader conflict, and certainly not one just to settle such a 'dice roll' sort of outcome. It would have needed something that makes sense, with proper build-up and context. In an ideal world where combat is balanced and instancing isn't exploitable and troll players weren't allowed positions of privilege for reasons unknown, the concept of how Wagar & co. tried to allow players to influence the outcome was sound...in theory. But that's about as far as I'll give it.
I can settle for agreeing on the point of naive expectations of players. Given we have ship carriers and other megaships regularly moving around the galaxy by now, I can't imagine Jaques would still be interminably interred in the Pegasi Sector, but honestly I would have preferred the jump prevented from taking place at all, and further CGs involving getting Jaques going - perhaps even helping to fuel a hop-scotch approach across the galaxy to his intended destination - to what actually happened.
I am...hopeful, that there is different approaches in place now at Frontier, and not just when it comes to story/narrative. We sorely need a surpassing of shortcomings up til now. Something to match the unparalleled quality of the audio and support staff.
I can't claim to have paid much attention to the NMLA plot, I know it in passing at best. So taking your word for it...hm. Having 1 of 3 ships hijacked is less absolute than an all-eggs-in-one-bartender's-basket scenario, I feel like, plus it was followed up with an opportunity to do something about it. And in the instance of hijacking by more-or-less radical terrorists...it's not unreasonable to think ship destruction is a possible outcome with that in mind. Though I would surely think that should be reserved for pretty low tier of failure...and it's weird to pit a competitive CG around supporting terrorism? Was there any mention of bombs, radical threats, or things of that nature?
There's a question you've forgotten to answer here: was the NMLA/Far God Cult a player narrative & initiative? The context always matters, particularly with narrative.
If that's true, that certainly would leave me feeling conflicted...and reinforce the feeling that Fdev have had nasty trends of souring their own fun before it's even been had yet. I'd actually forgotten the angle of the Fuel Rats' involvement; given the massive amount of good publicity/PR/press they have generated for the game, it only makes it even more frustrating to me that 'their' CG got handled in the way that it did.
I usually see the same few people saying it was great. These forums offer many such testaments of players happy to be exceptions to the rule. "Just accept the game for what it is, Engineering isn't a grind if you just play the game casually [for tens of thousands of hours]", etc.
Given you appear to be much more knowledgeable about lore and events (and have a firm grasp on the names of them all) it would probably be entertaining, however you framed the discussion. Could put being tongue-in-cheek to good use.
That...is the definition of railroading, no? "This is what will happen. You won't have any options to do anything else. Enjoy the scenery."
I have to confess I don't even know who Tanner is, or where Taurus is. Nonetheless, a track is a track, and putting spaceships on rails is boring. I ask you, has there at any point of time been a presented opportunity for players to influence the opinions and actions of the respective political powers regarding Salvation? Any influence at all on the continuous Galnet articles stating their explicit support for it? (I mean, talk about a golden opportunity to make Powerplay membership meaningful.) There's so many facets to this where players could/should have an impact upon events, but...can't. Or aren't permitted to.
Wellll...it can't be an idea at all if you don't know about the cryopod, and as an official narrative with secrets/mysteries/disappearances afoot, nobody could reasonably have known what the outcome/epilogue would look like. And a competitive CG centered around a retcon would of course be a silly non-starter of an idea.
I agree about the missed execution of this event. All they really needed to do was allow the ship to make that 500 light year jump, end up in a centered system, find ourselves with just two or three star systems nearby that we could jump to, need to find resources to repair the ship which would be constantly under attack so that we can get the hell back out.
That would have at least given us the opportunity to have an adventure to save all of our lives. Instead, a fantastic opportunity missed.
Same old assumptions, same old mistakes, same old baseless rambling, same old gatekeeping, and I'm tired of picking apart the litany of errors in your posts.
Sorry I don't play the way you expect me to according to some non-existent code of conduct that I didn't sign up to. But that's not my problem, that's yours.
Flower/Green Storm Rising?Frustration would require investment, and I'm not invested. In fact, I really don't know all what's going on except what I see in random headlines posted to this forum. I've also had zero interest in this year's community goals except a couple of random "nothing to do with the narrative" bounty hunting CGs. Heck, the most exciting thing to happen in the game this year was when a station started falling out of orbit, which come to find out that was just a glitch that Frontier promptly fixed instead of using it for something epic.
Thargoids remind me of the Borg - way more interesting in the beginning when they were mysterious and all-powerful with motives unknown. I wish they (both Borg and Thargoids) had remained that way, and Frontier had went with a galactic war between superpowers for their narrative and gameplay instead.
But that's just me.
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That's a negative. I was there just last September, there is a fleet carrier but there is no base or planetary base nearby.
To the best of my knowledge the closest base station that you can find orbiting anything anywhere near beagle point is either explorers Anchorage near the big black hole or in Colonia.
Disappointed to see you'd rather resort to sweeping dismissiveness than argue your points in earnest. Let alone admit to any onus of your own bearing....
The megaship was destroyed because the competitive CG was successful in defeating the terrorists - their main ship was captured, then the terrorist leader blew up the one he was on (the Far God one) to avoid being captured himself.
This was towards the end of the plot - the terrorist leader had spent the last year blowing up various stations around the bubble, killing the Federal Vice-President again, and so on. I mean, it's not as if most players can really claim the moral high ground on "blowing up superpower infrastructure is wrong", but it still made his group more unpopular than not.
Had the CG "failed" from the Empire Loyalist point of view and the terrorists won, then the leader would have transferred himself to their main ship which would then likely have escaped to fight another day ... and there's a chance in that scenario that he'd have just abandoned the Far God one without destroying it. Or not, we'll never know, maybe that ship was always going to end up in bits either way.
(Frontier could have railroaded it as a bounty CG or a one-sided war CG like the recent Kumo one, and not given players the opportunity to support the terrorists in their last stand, but they didn't)
NMLA was entirely an NPC group, though by the end of their story arc their habit of blowing up superpower infrastructure had of course attracted some player support (and lots more player opposition).
Far God Cult ... greyer area. I think they may have come originally from a player suggestion way back, but I don't believe there's been any direct player involvement in suggesting their in-game appearance and previous plot events around them. Again, I believe some players back them as an interesting NPC group.
The Marlinist colonies are of course another grey area between them:
- the Marlinists themselves are an NPC group
- a player group (Dark Wolf Marlinists) formed to defend their BGS position
- this group was mentioned in Galnet due to their success in both defending the position and being publicly entertaining about it
- plenty of non-BGS events have happened to the Marlinists as well, whether through CGs or simply "this happened recently" Galnet articles
I'm pretty sure the Dark Wolf group is very clear that while it has been mentioned in Galnet and their work may have affected the outcome of bits of the story, they don't own the Marlinists and all they can do is fight for them as the game allows.
But then, likewise Jaques - from an FFE story inserted as a minor callback into Elite Dangerous; the Fuel Rats I think were quite excited by how the whole refuelling story spun out from their basic CG suggestion and have a little base in modern Colonia. Is it a player initiative, or is it a Frontier initiative incorporating a player suggestion for what one of their NPCs might do.
(There were quite a few people in the exploration community at the time vocally opposed to Jaques jumping to Beagle Point as they felt it should be kept clear of settlement. Whether any tried to do anything in-game about it I don't know)
For me the dividing line is this: player-run narratives must purely use tools available to players without explicit Frontier intervention. Anything else, and players are making suggestions to Frontier about what might happen next, which Frontier are entitled to incorporate, but not obliged to incorporate exactly as suggested, and it's a Frontier-run narrative.
I don't know about anyone else, but i'm getting a bit frustrated with the prolonged monologues..
Oh I dunno - half of them are very informative, as is usual for Ian
Probably more like 10 to 20%, but yeah some of them are actually good...Oh I dunno - half of them are very informative, as is usual for Ian
That's a little unkind... Ian provides almost all of the unbiased information about the game to be posted here.
Mouse wheel is getting a workout....