Thanks for the help everyone, every time I come back all sort of things have changed and it's good to get a little heads up on the current situation.
I haven't messed with a bbcode forum in years so if I screw up the quotes don't bite my head off. I'll start with a general statement.
Let's see, what's the best way to put this? It's not that I hate ED, per se, but more that I'm disappointed. There's nothing quite like the first 15 hours or so of this game on the market, not in the slightest. It's tight, immersive, and a bundle of fun. But after that honeymoon phase wears off, there's just not a lot left to the game. "Mile wide, inch deep" gets thrown around a lot, but that's not the totality of the problem for me. It's more like a thin strand of steel wire that keeps getting drawn thinner and thinner. This game's built like a modern AAA game that frustrates the player into buying "time-savers" by offering a dull, repetitive, and sisyphean grind, but then forgot to sell the time savers. I guess because people like it that way? I don't get it myself.
That's not to say I want everything handed to me on a silver platter. I have Space Engineers for that,and that's got spacelegs and atmospheric landing already, it's more that I want a good balance between challenge, risk, and reward. Trading's easy but monotonous and requires massive cargo holds to garner any real profit. Bounty hunting's good at the beginning but quickly plateaus in profitability, same with mercenary work. Piracy's something done for its own sake, as a hobby, more than profitability, like gold panning. Exploration's fun and comfortable but takes massive time investment and again, is something done more for its own sake. I've only ever found two activities in this game that were "worth it": smuggling and core mining. Core mining's relatively new and is a good precedent for FDev to set, it's intricate and has a medium risk of blowing up your payday, which helps you stay awake, but it garners a worthwhile profit. Now smuggling slaves from Robigo back to the bubble, now that was some fun piloting. Filling up a rickety ASP with maybe some shock mines, a tissue paper shield, a big fuel scoop, and an engorged set of cajones was some seat-of-the-pants flying. You'd take a few missions, get chased by NPCs the whole way, and at the end of it all you'd have to silent running boost yourself into the mail slot to avoid detection and get away with your profit. All or nothing, riding on that one moment. It was risky, it was challenging, but so worth it at the end. Payouts in the mid seven figures for all your trouble, and you could stack a few. Then I guess the people who spent a hundred hours trading alcohol and consumer electronics for 3% margins got jealous that someone figured out a way to make their fortune, faster, and actually having fun for once? That's how I remember it at least. The worst part is the missions are still there, but you need 60 tons of space for one instead of 6, so you end up taking a more valuable ship and make less money, and take the fun out of it by being in something tougher. Oh well.
I'm still mad about Horizons too. ED was bare, BARE, back when that first came out. And then you got to pay $40, for what? Another grind in Engineers, and the ability to land on planets with... absolutely nothing to do. Gee, thanks. It's gotten better with time admittedly, but that's no excuse.
Oh Engineers, that's another thing. I still haven't really bought into that system, and I definitely suffer for it. Engineered components are orders of magnitude more potent than their stock counterparts. Y'know what that is? Mandatory grind. I played TERA, a Korean MMORPG, for about two-and-a-half or three years. If you've ever played a Korean MMORPG, you know what a gear treadmill is. In those, you grind hundreds of hours for incrementally better gear, to do harder dungeons, to get better gear, etc. ad nauseum. Sound familiar? I did the gear treadmill already, why did a space shooter need a Korean gear treadmill? And you know what you got for your effort? At least you got to do challenging, intricate content with good friends. What do you have in ED? And that's why I don't do PvP with people "my skill level" anymore. Sure, I'm probably a middling pilot at BEST, but I'm also a middling pilot who's four years behind on gear, and no patience to close that gap. I've got some rust on me but I bet I could go positive in CQC any day, but sure as hell not in realspace, because my shields plain aren't as good, and my guns plain don't hit as hard. I hear Engineering has gotten better since its inception, to be fair, but still, you've gotta really, really love the base experience to want to do the Engineer grind, and I just don't.
So what does that leave me with? Core mining and seal clubbing. And core mining only came about in the last what, year or so? So I seal club. And I hope to God or whoever your nondenominational deity, force of cosmic balance, or afro-american physicist you pray to, that me clubbing that poor, defenseless seal, causes him to quit the game, before he falls in love with it, and before it breaks his heart.
Now to attempt quotes.
Anywhoo, I know Shinrarta is the system you get a pass to when you get Elite in any discipline. I'm Master in combat so that'll probably be my ticket in there. If I can get back into this game I'll do a bunch of core mining to get some funds together, go do my engineer grind, and do a little real PvP in the INARA hotspots. It's not that I don't want to do real PvP, I had a lot of fun with it pre-Engineers, even when I lost (I remember underestimating a Cobra one time in my DBS. Pack hounds to the face + ramming speed = dead bug), but feeling like I don't even have a chance to play just because I haven't wasted hours of my life doing fetch quests for a shut-in savant is really disheartening. But I guess that's the price of admission nowadays. I want to find some fun in this game, and I think FDev's heading in the right direction if core mining is any indication, but I've been disappointed before.
And lastly, I'm not calling you stupid or bad if you like ED the way it is, I'm just trying to help people understand why I personally am conflicted over it, and why I channel that into ganking. I feel like I shouldn't have to say this but some people will undoubtedly hate me for having this opinion anyway.
Although if you're an Imperial and/or you like Gutamaya, in the words of the great Captain Lou Albano, you can go to Hell before you die.
I haven't messed with a bbcode forum in years so if I screw up the quotes don't bite my head off. I'll start with a general statement.
Let's see, what's the best way to put this? It's not that I hate ED, per se, but more that I'm disappointed. There's nothing quite like the first 15 hours or so of this game on the market, not in the slightest. It's tight, immersive, and a bundle of fun. But after that honeymoon phase wears off, there's just not a lot left to the game. "Mile wide, inch deep" gets thrown around a lot, but that's not the totality of the problem for me. It's more like a thin strand of steel wire that keeps getting drawn thinner and thinner. This game's built like a modern AAA game that frustrates the player into buying "time-savers" by offering a dull, repetitive, and sisyphean grind, but then forgot to sell the time savers. I guess because people like it that way? I don't get it myself.
That's not to say I want everything handed to me on a silver platter. I have Space Engineers for that,
I'm still mad about Horizons too. ED was bare, BARE, back when that first came out. And then you got to pay $40, for what? Another grind in Engineers, and the ability to land on planets with... absolutely nothing to do. Gee, thanks. It's gotten better with time admittedly, but that's no excuse.
Oh Engineers, that's another thing. I still haven't really bought into that system, and I definitely suffer for it. Engineered components are orders of magnitude more potent than their stock counterparts. Y'know what that is? Mandatory grind. I played TERA, a Korean MMORPG, for about two-and-a-half or three years. If you've ever played a Korean MMORPG, you know what a gear treadmill is. In those, you grind hundreds of hours for incrementally better gear, to do harder dungeons, to get better gear, etc. ad nauseum. Sound familiar? I did the gear treadmill already, why did a space shooter need a Korean gear treadmill? And you know what you got for your effort? At least you got to do challenging, intricate content with good friends. What do you have in ED? And that's why I don't do PvP with people "my skill level" anymore. Sure, I'm probably a middling pilot at BEST, but I'm also a middling pilot who's four years behind on gear, and no patience to close that gap. I've got some rust on me but I bet I could go positive in CQC any day, but sure as hell not in realspace, because my shields plain aren't as good, and my guns plain don't hit as hard. I hear Engineering has gotten better since its inception, to be fair, but still, you've gotta really, really love the base experience to want to do the Engineer grind, and I just don't.
So what does that leave me with? Core mining and seal clubbing. And core mining only came about in the last what, year or so? So I seal club. And I hope to God or whoever your nondenominational deity, force of cosmic balance, or afro-american physicist you pray to, that me clubbing that poor, defenseless seal, causes him to quit the game, before he falls in love with it, and before it breaks his heart.
Now to attempt quotes.
It kind of is. I know people disagree with me, especially here, but I think the saddest thing is that I was truthful and said what was in my heart in the OP, and what I believe is inflammatory.
Maybe. I feel like I'm giving the kids a dose of reality more than anything. I want them to quit, I want everybody to quit so FDev has to take a look at their game and make it fun. That's why I was so disappointed when No Man's Sky turned out to be half-baked on release, I knew it would be because ED was already a couple years old at the time, and absolutely mind-numbingly boring, so of course NMS would also be mind-numbingly boring, but I wanted it to be good so maybe ED had some real competition. Not like we're gonna get it from Scam Citizen. It's weird, ED to me is like a family member that's in and out of rehab all the time. You want to love them but you just can't put up with their self-destructive nature anymore.
Anywhoo, I know Shinrarta is the system you get a pass to when you get Elite in any discipline. I'm Master in combat so that'll probably be my ticket in there. If I can get back into this game I'll do a bunch of core mining to get some funds together, go do my engineer grind, and do a little real PvP in the INARA hotspots. It's not that I don't want to do real PvP, I had a lot of fun with it pre-Engineers, even when I lost (I remember underestimating a Cobra one time in my DBS. Pack hounds to the face + ramming speed = dead bug), but feeling like I don't even have a chance to play just because I haven't wasted hours of my life doing fetch quests for a shut-in savant is really disheartening. But I guess that's the price of admission nowadays. I want to find some fun in this game, and I think FDev's heading in the right direction if core mining is any indication, but I've been disappointed before.
And lastly, I'm not calling you stupid or bad if you like ED the way it is, I'm just trying to help people understand why I personally am conflicted over it, and why I channel that into ganking. I feel like I shouldn't have to say this but some people will undoubtedly hate me for having this opinion anyway.
