![[VR]m335](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/156/156512.jpg?1592093295){kind=avatar}
Hoping this will reach the developers, especially Sandro Sammarco and the "space loach". Seeing the developers take this perspective of a new player ranking up in Elite would be truly refreshing. It is a story of both inspiration from the greatest achievements in Elite, and frustration at the little things holding them back. This will touch on some specific issues in Engineering, Crime, and Punishment, but is intended to speak to a general need for fixing some professional mechanics in Elite. Additionally, I would appreciate brevity from those outside Frontier Developments.
Earlier this year, I bought my way into Elite Dangerous, in part because having heard of all the activity around Salome, I wanted to establish my place in a universe where opportunities for similar engagements might arise in the future. More generally, I hoped to work with other players who could act professionally under both calm and chaos. My prior experience with space simulation was in Descent Freespace.
Early on, my playstyle might have been exceptionally disciplined. Before anything else, I configured a HOTAS control scheme that incorporated almost all controls, and then went through all training missions. Only after sufficiently proficient to win the combat exercise did I proceed to actually play Elite. Staying strictly in open, with this mindset, I successfully completed several missions right away, and soon was well on my way from Sidewinder to Eagle. It would be a long time before I saw a rebuy screen, and IIRC, that was on account of thrusters going offline while fumbling power management on an overloaded Eagle configuration above a planetary surface.
Once my Eagle was fully outfitted, and with a few extra credits in the bank, I felt comfortable to begin exploring the galaxy. Not exploration like, see pretty sights from an Asp with 50ly range, of course. At this point, many parts of the bubble were literally inaccessible, well beyond the Eagle's 16ly jump range. Having a bounty while in USS or Res zones was still a dangerous prospect, with the NPCs attacking in groups, seemingly without provocation. It wasn't yet clear what consequences a bounty would actually have around stations, and many concepts like combat zones, were still unknown.
Traveling the Milky Way galaxy for the first time was among the most awe-inspiring gaming developments to see in person. Having the opportunity to actually travel places I could see in the night sky was both thrilling and highly educational. Being able to visit my home planet, looking right at home, knowing I could zoom down from the entire universe to one tiny place on Earth was a special part of that journey. Sol was the first permit I earned. Equally, the galaxy still seemed like a vast, dangerous place, with wonders and terrors at every corner. These were the good times in Elite.
I began looking for other CMDRs, having seen only one or two in weeks. There was some bounty hunting CG going on, which I figured would be a good opportunity to earn 600k credits, as well as compare my ship with that of other CMDRs. On my long journey there, no CMDRs were sighted. For the first time, I may have relied upon white dwarf jet cone boosting. Spending about three days at the CG, I found only a few tens of CMDRs, and maybe one or two actually wanted. Attempting to interdict one of these twice did not go well, but provided useful data. That Anaconda did take down my Eagle, but only when it had managed to turn and face me directly. Probably after I had made several strafing runs. This would remain a typical pattern until after I unlocked almost all Engineers.
Here the timeline gets a bit more fuzzy. Several things happened. Most significantly, I went looking for player groups, and found Delta Squadron. Their mix of ethics, acceptance policies, training resources, and formal website, showed a healthy commitment to professional conduct. Carefully choosing to join Delta Squadron was the best decision I made in playing Elite. For their support, camaraderie, and team work, there are none better. Without their help, answering my flood of carefully chosen questions, supporting my endeavors, and evaluating my progress, I could never so rapidly gained the understanding or resources that make me an Elite pilot today. At about the same time, I reached Felicity Farseer, engineering both FSD and enhanced thrusters for my Eagle. Crossing from the Asellus Primus side of the galaxy, to the Bugayaman and Deciat side, definitely required boosting from white dwarfs, which were bookmarked. Earning the five million credits required for enhanced thrusters probably involved my first wing operations against PvE targets in HazRes and Conflict zones. With that, and other methods, earning credits would not be a significant focus.
Along the way, I had explored enough of Elite, and asked enough questions, there would be no further surprises for me in PvE, whatsoever. Every bit of PvE from here on was of utterly no value, except perhaps to fall more soundly asleep that night. Repetitive tasks became painfully obvious as the order of the day. Having paid for a multiplayer game, I faced hundreds more hours of grind, before I would actually be enabled to participate. These were the beginning of bad times in Elite.
Engineer unlocking almost immediately became my primary focus. After briefly testing a Vulture and Fer-De-Lance, I settled on an Imperial Eagle as my primary ship. Visibility was important to me, as a VR user. Having a high rate of turn, high speed, two small railguns, and a turreted pulse laser, it seemed like a good ship to be taking into potentially hostile PvE situations. By this point, I visited another CG, and found many more CMDRs than ever before. To my happy surprise, several CMDRs interdicted me, including CMDR Ethelbert, with a Vulture. Almost immediately, I could confidently rule out any ability to survive any encounter in any situation involving hostile players without thorough engineering. Many mods would be required, but the need for the best possible thrusters set an obvious minimum threshold of work.
Everyone knows what is involved in unlocking the engineers, especially Professor Palin, so there is no point in detailing that experience. Perhaps more notably, I set out after Professor Palin as one of my first objectives, having recently bought an exploration Asp. In the end, Elite recorded about 500 hours in-game time, which was a severe hardship. Elite grind competed badly with real life, in spite of most of those hours being at times I would have been too exhausted for any creativity.
Five hundred hours! An experienced gamer, with perfect knowledge (through Delta Squadron) of every material location, every community developed tool, and every resource in the game! It is easy to see how many players need 1500 hours or more to get into a remotely decent ship. By comparison, most moderately experienced FPS players tend to become comparably competent well within 100 hours or less.
Having overcome this obstacle course, I finally find myself looking for any kind of PvP interaction. Logistics, trading, and missions, are of course not permitted. Pirating is neither profitable nor ethical. Arranged matches are good practice, but being arranged, do not constitute much of a profession. CQC is not much of an open world profession either, and is not popular enough anyway. Racing is likewise somewhat of a narrow activity. Bounty hunting seems like the natural way to go, hunting the hunters, albeit still under somewhat limited conditions.
After a few months of waiting, I run across the infamous CMDR Harry Potter in a Sidewinder. With my fully engineered Imperial Courier, I score the kill in a _lawless_ system, gaining at most, a few Power Play merits. At least, I have scored my first kill as a bounty hunter in an open universe. Later, the wizard switches to a heavily armored Federal armor tank, at which point, even with my fellow Delta Squadron wingmen, there is no chance of scoring another kill. Even without high waking, these heavily armored ships have the speed and maneuverability to outrun any of our guns. In fact, my other wingmen later became wanted (though I did not). This is still as close as I have managed to get to any kind of PvP profession.
With a few more engagements demonstrating the difficulty of bounty hunting any legitimate PvP targets, as well as overcoming instancing bugs, I begin to look towards working with other player groups, as well as Delta Squadron, in hopes of gathering sufficiently powerful wings to go hunting. At the recommendation of one of Delta's high command, I chose to join Adle's Armada. Although some at PvP Hub are (immaturely) trolling Adle's Armada's recruitment "This Is Our House" video, I am nevertheless impressed by the coordination, teamwork, and scale of the operations presented there. Equally impressive is their ethical commitment to protect new player regions of space. However, as this is not long after "2.4" has dropped, on the way in, I am warned that the group has recently gone through rapid, drastic shrinking. Looking at INARA, I realize my other options are probably rather limited anyway, so I go ahead with signing up.
Imagine my frustration! I have been through over five hundred hours of grind, and counting, only to find that getting together the multi-wing operations to successfully prosecute one remaining PvP profession - bounty hunting - will require much more work. Possibly more searching for player groups, maybe even building these communities back up. By the look of things, these tasks will be difficult, maybe impossible.
Today, I am not sure what the future holds. I do not know if some of the recent changes will go far enough, fast enough, to bring back the Elite community I wanted to be part of. Not having been around before 1.3, which some of the more senior CMDRs report were better times, I do not have first hand knowledge of what it might have been like if things ran more smoothly. Meanwhile, Star Citizen looms, built on CryEngine, with graphics Elite could never compete with, but no VR support for the forseeable future, maybe no core gameplay either.
Crucially, Elite has the potential to focus on core gameplay, and maintain a competitive edge in that regard. Elite could stay ahead in gameplay mechanics, focusing on tools and vast space, rather than shiny graphics and neat toys. The sandbox is there, work on the functions that translate player actions into database entries has the potential to create the opportunities it needs.
On the playerbase side, the PvP community does have a reputation for toxicity. It is my firm belief that this much of this toxicity results not from the nature of non-casual players, but from the nature of the only play style which does not require any in game motivation - griefing. Because griefers are sustained by salt, the lack of core gameplay mechanics for other professions does not affect them. The resulting reputation is not deserved by other PvP players who might otherwise be involved. Today, I heard more about legitimate PvP players - having served in Adle's Armada legitimately protecting new players no less - having been accused of mental illness or terrible criminality in real life. In reality, the PvP community has gone so far as to build many of the tools used by other players, as well as to work with the existing community in manipulating the BGS to create an in-game arena space, despite the risk of others ruining it from the safety of solo/private. Additionally, the PvP community tends to be much better informed as to who the "bad guys" are, leaving other players more subject to actor-observer bias against the entire community categorically.
What matters now is to see a general bugfixing cycle take place in Elite, focused on making some professions in game actually work, sooner, rather than later. Reducing the barrier to entry for new players, allowing people to directly interact with instancing, ensuring repeat CMDR killing criminals are usually wanted, adding a pilot's federation reputation to identify more dangerous commanders, restricting BGS impact to open only, adding logistical operations to defend in open, attempting more events along the lines of Salome's return, allowing player defined missions, enabling trading between players, or making piracy profitable, are some possible solutions, but not the only options. To be completely honest, I would be satisfied to see Elite become much more like EVE, but that is not necessary either. Just fixing any one of those problems might be enough to establish a food chain that makes a profession workable. In fact, I am quite certain FDev really does not need to meet anyone's specific expectations, as much as to ensure a suitable variety of professions are appropriately rewarded. We don't need anything implemented well, it is perfectly fine to make some mistakes - trying again would show much of the support the community seems so desperate for. Risk of creating an exploit here or there should not be seen as an excuse, but as an opportunity to really think through how things could be made to work. As a game, Elite should be focused on creating a bridge between players, challenging them to compare and improve legitimate skills in basic problem solving, like piloting, teamwork, community building, science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics.
Ultimately, my recommendation to Frontier Developments is to take the next few months to spend some quality time ensuring professions in the open universe are challenging and rewarding. Instead of adding anything new, realize the potential for what already exists. I believe the community around Elite Dangerous shows the gaming community's desperation for a challenging open-universe massively multiplayer online space sim. Please focus on delivering something of this experience.
Earlier this year, I bought my way into Elite Dangerous, in part because having heard of all the activity around Salome, I wanted to establish my place in a universe where opportunities for similar engagements might arise in the future. More generally, I hoped to work with other players who could act professionally under both calm and chaos. My prior experience with space simulation was in Descent Freespace.
Early on, my playstyle might have been exceptionally disciplined. Before anything else, I configured a HOTAS control scheme that incorporated almost all controls, and then went through all training missions. Only after sufficiently proficient to win the combat exercise did I proceed to actually play Elite. Staying strictly in open, with this mindset, I successfully completed several missions right away, and soon was well on my way from Sidewinder to Eagle. It would be a long time before I saw a rebuy screen, and IIRC, that was on account of thrusters going offline while fumbling power management on an overloaded Eagle configuration above a planetary surface.
Once my Eagle was fully outfitted, and with a few extra credits in the bank, I felt comfortable to begin exploring the galaxy. Not exploration like, see pretty sights from an Asp with 50ly range, of course. At this point, many parts of the bubble were literally inaccessible, well beyond the Eagle's 16ly jump range. Having a bounty while in USS or Res zones was still a dangerous prospect, with the NPCs attacking in groups, seemingly without provocation. It wasn't yet clear what consequences a bounty would actually have around stations, and many concepts like combat zones, were still unknown.
Traveling the Milky Way galaxy for the first time was among the most awe-inspiring gaming developments to see in person. Having the opportunity to actually travel places I could see in the night sky was both thrilling and highly educational. Being able to visit my home planet, looking right at home, knowing I could zoom down from the entire universe to one tiny place on Earth was a special part of that journey. Sol was the first permit I earned. Equally, the galaxy still seemed like a vast, dangerous place, with wonders and terrors at every corner. These were the good times in Elite.
I began looking for other CMDRs, having seen only one or two in weeks. There was some bounty hunting CG going on, which I figured would be a good opportunity to earn 600k credits, as well as compare my ship with that of other CMDRs. On my long journey there, no CMDRs were sighted. For the first time, I may have relied upon white dwarf jet cone boosting. Spending about three days at the CG, I found only a few tens of CMDRs, and maybe one or two actually wanted. Attempting to interdict one of these twice did not go well, but provided useful data. That Anaconda did take down my Eagle, but only when it had managed to turn and face me directly. Probably after I had made several strafing runs. This would remain a typical pattern until after I unlocked almost all Engineers.
Here the timeline gets a bit more fuzzy. Several things happened. Most significantly, I went looking for player groups, and found Delta Squadron. Their mix of ethics, acceptance policies, training resources, and formal website, showed a healthy commitment to professional conduct. Carefully choosing to join Delta Squadron was the best decision I made in playing Elite. For their support, camaraderie, and team work, there are none better. Without their help, answering my flood of carefully chosen questions, supporting my endeavors, and evaluating my progress, I could never so rapidly gained the understanding or resources that make me an Elite pilot today. At about the same time, I reached Felicity Farseer, engineering both FSD and enhanced thrusters for my Eagle. Crossing from the Asellus Primus side of the galaxy, to the Bugayaman and Deciat side, definitely required boosting from white dwarfs, which were bookmarked. Earning the five million credits required for enhanced thrusters probably involved my first wing operations against PvE targets in HazRes and Conflict zones. With that, and other methods, earning credits would not be a significant focus.
Along the way, I had explored enough of Elite, and asked enough questions, there would be no further surprises for me in PvE, whatsoever. Every bit of PvE from here on was of utterly no value, except perhaps to fall more soundly asleep that night. Repetitive tasks became painfully obvious as the order of the day. Having paid for a multiplayer game, I faced hundreds more hours of grind, before I would actually be enabled to participate. These were the beginning of bad times in Elite.
Engineer unlocking almost immediately became my primary focus. After briefly testing a Vulture and Fer-De-Lance, I settled on an Imperial Eagle as my primary ship. Visibility was important to me, as a VR user. Having a high rate of turn, high speed, two small railguns, and a turreted pulse laser, it seemed like a good ship to be taking into potentially hostile PvE situations. By this point, I visited another CG, and found many more CMDRs than ever before. To my happy surprise, several CMDRs interdicted me, including CMDR Ethelbert, with a Vulture. Almost immediately, I could confidently rule out any ability to survive any encounter in any situation involving hostile players without thorough engineering. Many mods would be required, but the need for the best possible thrusters set an obvious minimum threshold of work.
Everyone knows what is involved in unlocking the engineers, especially Professor Palin, so there is no point in detailing that experience. Perhaps more notably, I set out after Professor Palin as one of my first objectives, having recently bought an exploration Asp. In the end, Elite recorded about 500 hours in-game time, which was a severe hardship. Elite grind competed badly with real life, in spite of most of those hours being at times I would have been too exhausted for any creativity.
Five hundred hours! An experienced gamer, with perfect knowledge (through Delta Squadron) of every material location, every community developed tool, and every resource in the game! It is easy to see how many players need 1500 hours or more to get into a remotely decent ship. By comparison, most moderately experienced FPS players tend to become comparably competent well within 100 hours or less.
Having overcome this obstacle course, I finally find myself looking for any kind of PvP interaction. Logistics, trading, and missions, are of course not permitted. Pirating is neither profitable nor ethical. Arranged matches are good practice, but being arranged, do not constitute much of a profession. CQC is not much of an open world profession either, and is not popular enough anyway. Racing is likewise somewhat of a narrow activity. Bounty hunting seems like the natural way to go, hunting the hunters, albeit still under somewhat limited conditions.
After a few months of waiting, I run across the infamous CMDR Harry Potter in a Sidewinder. With my fully engineered Imperial Courier, I score the kill in a _lawless_ system, gaining at most, a few Power Play merits. At least, I have scored my first kill as a bounty hunter in an open universe. Later, the wizard switches to a heavily armored Federal armor tank, at which point, even with my fellow Delta Squadron wingmen, there is no chance of scoring another kill. Even without high waking, these heavily armored ships have the speed and maneuverability to outrun any of our guns. In fact, my other wingmen later became wanted (though I did not). This is still as close as I have managed to get to any kind of PvP profession.
With a few more engagements demonstrating the difficulty of bounty hunting any legitimate PvP targets, as well as overcoming instancing bugs, I begin to look towards working with other player groups, as well as Delta Squadron, in hopes of gathering sufficiently powerful wings to go hunting. At the recommendation of one of Delta's high command, I chose to join Adle's Armada. Although some at PvP Hub are (immaturely) trolling Adle's Armada's recruitment "This Is Our House" video, I am nevertheless impressed by the coordination, teamwork, and scale of the operations presented there. Equally impressive is their ethical commitment to protect new player regions of space. However, as this is not long after "2.4" has dropped, on the way in, I am warned that the group has recently gone through rapid, drastic shrinking. Looking at INARA, I realize my other options are probably rather limited anyway, so I go ahead with signing up.
Imagine my frustration! I have been through over five hundred hours of grind, and counting, only to find that getting together the multi-wing operations to successfully prosecute one remaining PvP profession - bounty hunting - will require much more work. Possibly more searching for player groups, maybe even building these communities back up. By the look of things, these tasks will be difficult, maybe impossible.
Today, I am not sure what the future holds. I do not know if some of the recent changes will go far enough, fast enough, to bring back the Elite community I wanted to be part of. Not having been around before 1.3, which some of the more senior CMDRs report were better times, I do not have first hand knowledge of what it might have been like if things ran more smoothly. Meanwhile, Star Citizen looms, built on CryEngine, with graphics Elite could never compete with, but no VR support for the forseeable future, maybe no core gameplay either.
Crucially, Elite has the potential to focus on core gameplay, and maintain a competitive edge in that regard. Elite could stay ahead in gameplay mechanics, focusing on tools and vast space, rather than shiny graphics and neat toys. The sandbox is there, work on the functions that translate player actions into database entries has the potential to create the opportunities it needs.
On the playerbase side, the PvP community does have a reputation for toxicity. It is my firm belief that this much of this toxicity results not from the nature of non-casual players, but from the nature of the only play style which does not require any in game motivation - griefing. Because griefers are sustained by salt, the lack of core gameplay mechanics for other professions does not affect them. The resulting reputation is not deserved by other PvP players who might otherwise be involved. Today, I heard more about legitimate PvP players - having served in Adle's Armada legitimately protecting new players no less - having been accused of mental illness or terrible criminality in real life. In reality, the PvP community has gone so far as to build many of the tools used by other players, as well as to work with the existing community in manipulating the BGS to create an in-game arena space, despite the risk of others ruining it from the safety of solo/private. Additionally, the PvP community tends to be much better informed as to who the "bad guys" are, leaving other players more subject to actor-observer bias against the entire community categorically.
What matters now is to see a general bugfixing cycle take place in Elite, focused on making some professions in game actually work, sooner, rather than later. Reducing the barrier to entry for new players, allowing people to directly interact with instancing, ensuring repeat CMDR killing criminals are usually wanted, adding a pilot's federation reputation to identify more dangerous commanders, restricting BGS impact to open only, adding logistical operations to defend in open, attempting more events along the lines of Salome's return, allowing player defined missions, enabling trading between players, or making piracy profitable, are some possible solutions, but not the only options. To be completely honest, I would be satisfied to see Elite become much more like EVE, but that is not necessary either. Just fixing any one of those problems might be enough to establish a food chain that makes a profession workable. In fact, I am quite certain FDev really does not need to meet anyone's specific expectations, as much as to ensure a suitable variety of professions are appropriately rewarded. We don't need anything implemented well, it is perfectly fine to make some mistakes - trying again would show much of the support the community seems so desperate for. Risk of creating an exploit here or there should not be seen as an excuse, but as an opportunity to really think through how things could be made to work. As a game, Elite should be focused on creating a bridge between players, challenging them to compare and improve legitimate skills in basic problem solving, like piloting, teamwork, community building, science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics.
Ultimately, my recommendation to Frontier Developments is to take the next few months to spend some quality time ensuring professions in the open universe are challenging and rewarding. Instead of adding anything new, realize the potential for what already exists. I believe the community around Elite Dangerous shows the gaming community's desperation for a challenging open-universe massively multiplayer online space sim. Please focus on delivering something of this experience.
