CMDR just wants to play.

[Alvatore]

This isn't my post, but I'm crossposting it because I bloody well feel like it should be done.

Original text here, and edited-for-language version follows below:

TL;DR: Every time I want to play a space game, I boot up this one instead of the others. And every time I do, I’m reminded of why I put it down in the first place. It looks amazing, sounds amazing, feels amazing, and its mechanics are stupid. Every new feature FD adds is an amazing and revolutionary idea with an implementation poorer than my college-debt-ridden self.

This is a wall of text about my experience. While I make criticisms of the game herein, this post is NOT a formal analysis of everything right and wrong with Elite: Dangerous. And I fully realize that the relevance of this post is directly proportional to its physical weight: zero. I also know that Frontier will not read it. I also know that hardly anyone here will read it either and even fewer of them will care. I know that what lies here is a waste of an hour in which I could have been doing something more productive. But I have to get this out of my brain or I’m going to go crazy.

Some backstory. I bought this game on release back in 2014 and have been following the game since that previous autumn. I was let down by Wings. I was let down by Power Play. I was let down by Planetary Landing. And I have been let down by the Thargoids. After each update, I had high hopes, and I came back to try. I tried to love the game. I have poured hours upon hours into it. Not as many as some, but a whole more than others. But this game doesn’t reciprocate. I’ve made this complaint in the past but after my year hiatus, I have come back to the game to try again. I had never tried multi-crew until today.

So I booted up the game with a friend, who also hasn’t been in game for a while. Neither of us had tried multi-crew, so we were a little hopeful that maybe this would make us want to play more often, because we both love how this game’s presentation strikes us. We made our first stop and he dropped off some cargo. I got a dividend. I thought, “Cool! I get paid too! This is really not bad actually!” We continued. After a couple jumps, my client stopped responding and I had to reboot (I actually had to do this several times in a row). I was impressed that it was able to keep my crew session, despite the fact that it kept crashing. Then my friend had to go, and I was dumped back in my ship. Then I realized something while looking at the crew session summary.

I looked left. My transactions screen was brimming with a bunch of vouchers for factions that were hundreds and hundreds of lightyears away in all sorts of different directions. My heart sank.
I was NOT getting paid while in multi-crew. I was being assigned chores.

It’s difficult to describe how thoroughly sad I was in that moment. How? Why? Why the hell? Why can’t I be paid on the spot? How come I can’t access station services while in crew to just pay the dividends as I go? Why does this game punish my fun with needless chores? Can the faction paying the Helm not reach the person sitting next to them for some reason? What the hell?!
I’m floored. I’m completely flabbergasted at what a completely awful implementation this is. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this. Who came up with this? I just want to play. I don’t want to be assigned menial chores. I want to love this game. Why doesn't FD want it to love me too?


If you've read this far, I'm surprised, but I'm grateful. I am NOT asking for instant gratification. I just want to have fun without the game ting on my player agency while wearing a -eating troll-faced grin.

 

[Conch]

If you got allot of bounty vouchers from far away systems.. just go to a lowsec system and turn em all in at once.

 

[Muzz UK]

You make some good points but you need to remember multi crew is new and needs a lot of work.

I'm sure there was talk of allowing vouchers to be handed in else where at a lower price not sure if that'll be a thing but its a good idea, kind like a bounty vouncher trader who saves you hassle.

 

[babelfisch]

With all the justified criticism people might have with multicrew and the game in general, why did you pick one from someone who doesn't know how the game works? Simply visit interstellar factors (or whatever they are called now) and turn them all in...

 

[Susanna]

This isn't my post, but I'm crossposting it because I bloody well feel like it should be done.

Original text here, and edited-for-language version follows below:

TL;DR: Every time I want to play a space game, I boot up this one instead of the others. And every time I do, I’m reminded of why I put it down in the first place. It looks amazing, sounds amazing, feels amazing, and its mechanics are stupid. Every new feature FD adds is an amazing and revolutionary idea with an implementation poorer than my college-debt-ridden self.

This is a wall of text about my experience. While I make criticisms of the game herein, this post is NOT a formal analysis of everything right and wrong with Elite: Dangerous. And I fully realize that the relevance of this post is directly proportional to its physical weight: zero. I also know that Frontier will not read it. I also know that hardly anyone here will read it either and even fewer of them will care. I know that what lies here is a waste of an hour in which I could have been doing something more productive. But I have to get this out of my brain or I’m going to go crazy.

Some backstory. I bought this game on release back in 2014 and have been following the game since that previous autumn. I was let down by Wings. I was let down by Power Play. I was let down by Planetary Landing. And I have been let down by the Thargoids. After each update, I had high hopes, and I came back to try. I tried to love the game. I have poured hours upon hours into it. Not as many as some, but a whole more than others. But this game doesn’t reciprocate. I’ve made this complaint in the past but after my year hiatus, I have come back to the game to try again. I had never tried multi-crew until today.

So I booted up the game with a friend, who also hasn’t been in game for a while. Neither of us had tried multi-crew, so we were a little hopeful that maybe this would make us want to play more often, because we both love how this game’s presentation strikes us. We made our first stop and he dropped off some cargo. I got a dividend. I thought, “Cool! I get paid too! This is really not bad actually!” We continued. After a couple jumps, my client stopped responding and I had to reboot (I actually had to do this several times in a row). I was impressed that it was able to keep my crew session, despite the fact that it kept crashing. Then my friend had to go, and I was dumped back in my ship. Then I realized something while looking at the crew session summary.

I looked left. My transactions screen was brimming with a bunch of vouchers for factions that were hundreds and hundreds of lightyears away in all sorts of different directions. My heart sank.
I was NOT getting paid while in multi-crew. I was being assigned chores.

It’s difficult to describe how thoroughly sad I was in that moment. How? Why? Why the hell? Why can’t I be paid on the spot? How come I can’t access station services while in crew to just pay the dividends as I go? Why does this game punish my fun with needless chores? Can the faction paying the Helm not reach the person sitting next to them for some reason? What the hell?!
I’m floored. I’m completely flabbergasted at what a completely awful implementation this is. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this. Who came up with this? I just want to play. I don’t want to be assigned menial chores. I want to love this game. Why doesn't FD want it to love me too?


If you've read this far, I'm surprised, but I'm grateful. I am NOT asking for instant gratification. I just want to have fun without the game ting on my player agency while wearing a -eating troll-faced grin.

Welcome to the family... For what little it's worth, your not alone my friend. And yes I read it all

 

[babelfisch]

BTW
I guess this comment on reddit is from you:

"That's exactly right. Telepresence is their answer to everything, tbh. That's why the character editor is called "Holo-Me".

Yer' a 'ologram, 'arry!"

You are wrong, we are not holograms. The reason the character creator is called Holo-Me is because you can look at yourself like a mirror.

 

[Susanna]

If you got allot of bounty vouchers from far away systems.. just go to a lowsec system and turn em all in at once.

Using an interstellar factors contact found in the Contacts tab for the station. IFCs are only available at some stations. If I spot one on my travels I make a note of it in EDDiscovery so that I can quickly see where the nearest one is should I need one

 

[babelfisch]

Using an interstellar factors contact found in the Contacts tab for the station. IFCs are only available at some stations. If I spot one on my travels I make a note of it in EDDiscovery so that I can quickly see where the nearest one is should I need one

Every low security system has them, it's really not that hard.

 

[Marcus Tullius]

LOL, the usual advisors will give OP tons of clever suggestions from *don’t like the game, move away* to *check your internet connection for these disconnects* and *use interstellar contact* and nobody will smell the simple fact that ED is created by brilliant technical team using latest technologies, which is directed by game designers stranded in the middle age of PC games history.

 

[Achilles7]

:O An hour??? I wouldn't waste longer than 15 mins typing pointless crap on these forums - Nope, I save those literary bowel movements exclusively for work.

...& ofc, I am blessed with 'da spreadsheet/word processor skillz dat pay da billz' (that didn't sound quite as cool as I was hoping)....RSA II, ftw! ​

 

[True Phoenix]

Morning all, merry Christmas. I'm not a fanboi but if I have this right the OP (not the thread starter) is complaining because he did multi-crew in his mates ship that is some (no figures available) distance from his own ship and he would have to do a number of jumps to cash in bounty vouchers.

To be honest, I do not see a problem. Either do the jumps or go to an IF, just like most people do. I'll use an IF if I have a number of bounty vouchers gained from doing longer range hops around the bubble, it doesn't cross my mind to dock up in the system to cash in. I really do not see the issue with this. It does fit with the way bounties are allocated too, working as intended springs to mind.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

*uhm*

Could this stem from a fundamental misunderstanding?

The only time I did a money-earning MultiCrew Session as a Crew member, I received all Credits directly into my Balance (MC Distance : 22000LY). No Vouchers, no Dividends, nothing in the Transaction Tab, nothing to cash in.
Only irritating thing was that I never received any notification in-game (i.e. a Bounty reward notification while in an SLF after the Targets went down), so I wasn't sure if the MC session was bugged.

To me, MC Members seem to get everything cashed in at the moment of clicking "accept" in that Summary Screen? That's the way it looked like, I manually confirmed my Credits after the Session and I got paid correctly.

 

[Aashenfox]

OP I feel your pain, my brother recently spent several days staying with us, he watched me effortlessly play elite and naturally it looked great to him, because I know exactly what I'm doing. He wanted to install it, I was reticent. He isnt a gamer. He plays games, but he's never been one to invest (time wise), and I told him... This game is not for everyone, it's not even for some, it's for the masochistic few. He was like yeh, all the good games are like that... And I said... Yeeeees. But elite is something else. You'll see. Suffice it to say he didn't stick with it.

I don't know who to blame. Do we blame the instant gratification nation, or frontier? The truth is somewhere in the middle. People do want things handed out to them rather than having to go hunting these days, combined with the fact that frontier seems to actually promote the opposite model, creates a very strong clash of style.

I don't know what to tell you. As Conch pointed out, some of your concerns are simply because you don't know about all the mechanisms available, and honestly, how would you? Perhaps THAT is the problem after all, proliferation of information.

 

[Dakron Nova]

You make some good points but you need to remember multi crew is new and needs a lot of work.

It wont be developed further. FD said they would develop it further if people used it.

I don't think many use it.

 

[babelfisch]

*uhm*

Could this stem from a fundamental misunderstanding?

The only time I did a money-earning MultiCrew Session as a Crew member, I received all Credits directly into my Balance (MC Distance : 22000LY). No Vouchers, no Dividends, nothing in the Transaction Tab, nothing to cash in.
Only irritating thing was that I never received any notification in-game (i.e. a Bounty reward notification while in an SLF after the Targets went down), so I wasn't sure if the MC session was bugged.

To me, MC Members seem to get everything cashed in at the moment of clicking "accept" in that Summary Screen? That's the way it looked like, I manually confirmed my Credits after the Session and I got paid correctly.

LOL, I think you are right about that
What a pointless thread.

 

[Muetdhiver]

^^ Seems right. MC cashes in immediatly

The OP TL;DR piece is still an interesting read in the sense that it nails one of the issue clogging up the gameplay : pointless busiwork and time gating.

Not that FD seems to get any wiser about it, given what is being proposed in the "improved" engineers XD.

 

[babelfisch]

^^ Seems right. MC cashes in immediatly

The OP TL;DR piece is still an interesting read in the sense that it nails one of the issue clogging up the gameplay : pointless busiwork and time gating.

Not that FD seems to get any wiser about it, given what is being proposed in the "improved" engineers XD.

The OP is actually the opposite of that. It says that the game would be way better if feature X would be implemented, ignoring that feature X is already there. It shows how bad our feedback actually is and that nobody should listen to us.

 

[Urbanski101]

Well I've been playing since beta.

Although I've taken long breaks I didn't know you could cash in bounty vouchers at interstellar factors contacts.

This is the first time I've heard of them and I play almost daily and visit these boards frequently.

How is anyone supposed to know this stuff....patch notes? I'd have to go back over several of those to find it if I haven't gouged out my own eyes with the sheer tedium of reading a series of badly worded and ambiguous walls of text

It's a cool feature, I must have missed when it was implemented but there is nothing in game to tell you....and this is one of the issues with ED. I'm all for creating our own game play and forging our own path but the UI and communication in this game is pretty poor.

How about a note in the transactions tab to say 'you can cash in these bounties in at the corresponding faction station or use a interstellar factors contact often found in low security systems'

 

[babelfisch]

Well I've been playing since beta.

Although I've taken long breaks I didn't know you could cash in bounty vouchers at interstellar factors contacts.

This is the first time I've heard of them and I play almost daily and visit these boards frequently.

How is anyone supposed to know this stuff....patch notes? I'd have to go back over several of those to find it if I haven't gouged out my own eyes with the sheer tedium of reading a series of badly worded and ambiguous walls of text

It's a cool feature, I must have missed when it was implemented but there is nothing in game to tell you....and this is one of the issues with ED. I'm all for creating our own game play and forging our own path but the UI and communication in this game is pretty poor.

How about a note in the transactions tab to say 'you can cash in these bounties in at the corresponding faction station or use a interstellar factors contact often found in low security systems'

From the manual, Page 179:

Interstellar Factors

At starports in systems with a security rating of 40 or less you will be able to visit an Interstellar
Factors contact.
Interstellar Factors is a somewhat disreputable organization that allows you to pay off fines
and claim bounties and combat bonds from any location in the galaxy.
When using the services of Interstellar Factors you will be charged a handling fee which is a
percentage of the credit value to be paid/claimed.

https://d1wv0x2frmpnh.cloudfront.net/elite/website/assets/English-PlayersGuide-Latest.pdf

They don't tell you ingame because they are shady subjects and not exactly legal.

 

[Lily from anim.o.v.e]

You make some good points but you need to remember multi crew is new and needs a lot of work.

I remember lot new games I bought bakc int he days and they didn't needed work. Why does it seem to be so hard today to make a proepr design and finish it's implementation?