Games with a healthy playerbase don't need to figure out what they're doing wrong. Maybe if both games started bleeding players they'd need to change something.
C'mon, this is faintly ridiculous.
- Thread starter Noddie
- Start date
Games with a healthy playerbase don't need to figure out what they're doing wrong. Maybe if both games started bleeding players they'd need to change something.
The economy feels very robust to me. I've put a lot of hours into the game in a short period of time and I've been rewarded with money and ships. Shouldn't that be how it's supposed to work?
Also no I didn't say that about players and you need to calm down there buddy. It's not even coffee o clock here. Why so serious?
Strange place indeed. I've never seen a game where min/maxers come complain that they are min/maxing and getting compensated for doing so. If you're stacking massacre missions in fully engineered ships and complaining it's too easy and rewarding...well duh? I mean what did you think you were doing?
Ask FDEV for an endgame or something instead of telling me my idea of fun is toiling away in an Adder for two months to make a living. Screw that.
I did enjoy the early game. Very much so.
Even progressing through from E rated modules to A rated on the sidewinder was quite an accomplishment.
To get that next ship, great. My first Cobra. WOW! The AspX was just a dream for a long time, the Python was a very very long term goal, and the Anaconda? End-game. Years down the line.
It is clear that the game has moved on from its original vision. I remember the Kickstarter campaign where the more you pledged, the better your starting position.
Pledge more real life cash, get an Eagle at the start. An Eagle!
Pledge even more and actually start out in a Cobra with 500 credits, not the standard 100. This was a big deal. IIRC this was actually £10 more to get this.
Credits mattered! And that was the game’s vision, obviously.
But FD completely changed this, intentionally or not. We had 500M+ per hour mining, bounties increased, mission pay-outs increased, and credits just became meaningless. The balance was screwed forever, we could never go back from this.
It’s still a great game, but it is not the same game. Better or worse? Well that’s up for constant debate of course.
My view is worse - but I don’t begrudge anyone with the opposite opinion, and I certainly wouldn’t try to convince anyone in this. It’s just my opinion.
If nothing else, it has effectively removed most ships from the game.
Who’s going to fly an Adder now? A great ship that I had for weeks as I progressed. Doesn’t even get touched now does it? The Eagle, Cobra, Viper... all just skipped because new players can progress too quickly. Even the likes of the Vulture - a great ship in its day, skipped. We’re all flying round in the same end-game ships. And that, I think, makes the game poorer
It is very clear that it is a completely different experience now, and is not even what the developers envisaged at the outset, never mind the player-base.
But, we move on, times change, things evolve, players come and go. And we set new goals...
Even progressing through from E rated modules to A rated on the sidewinder was quite an accomplishment.
To get that next ship, great. My first Cobra. WOW! The AspX was just a dream for a long time, the Python was a very very long term goal, and the Anaconda? End-game. Years down the line.
It is clear that the game has moved on from its original vision. I remember the Kickstarter campaign where the more you pledged, the better your starting position.
Pledge more real life cash, get an Eagle at the start. An Eagle!
Pledge even more and actually start out in a Cobra with 500 credits, not the standard 100. This was a big deal. IIRC this was actually £10 more to get this.
Credits mattered! And that was the game’s vision, obviously.
But FD completely changed this, intentionally or not. We had 500M+ per hour mining, bounties increased, mission pay-outs increased, and credits just became meaningless. The balance was screwed forever, we could never go back from this.
It’s still a great game, but it is not the same game. Better or worse? Well that’s up for constant debate of course.
My view is worse - but I don’t begrudge anyone with the opposite opinion, and I certainly wouldn’t try to convince anyone in this. It’s just my opinion.
If nothing else, it has effectively removed most ships from the game.
Who’s going to fly an Adder now? A great ship that I had for weeks as I progressed. Doesn’t even get touched now does it? The Eagle, Cobra, Viper... all just skipped because new players can progress too quickly. Even the likes of the Vulture - a great ship in its day, skipped. We’re all flying round in the same end-game ships. And that, I think, makes the game poorer
It is very clear that it is a completely different experience now, and is not even what the developers envisaged at the outset, never mind the player-base.
But, we move on, times change, things evolve, players come and go. And we set new goals...
Last edited:
All games bleed players, we are a fickle bunch. We will happily play a game to the death until something new comes along, then suddenly that new game is 'da bestest game eva'. And often there is all the developer can do about it except hope their core players stay with them.
Really? We might have them but I don't see them often. Mostly I see a good variety of medium sized ships. That's one of the strengths of Elite is that a lot of the ships are viable.
Even if you were right about that, making the grind longer would only postpone the endgame of "everyone flying the same ships" Is the game good prior that point, and then poorer when it happens?
The stock Adder might be a middling stepping stone but don’t dismiss those early game ships out of hand; I’ve just hopped back into one post-engineers and it’s an absolute blast, and those small ships can get a fair bit of mid-career life when you can squeeze all that potential out of them. See my post above; they really force you to learn to fly! Worked for me, but none of the ships ‘above’ in the ship progression were really firing my thrusters recently.
True, but both those games are famously healthy and long lived. Comparing Elite to them is apples and oranges. Elite has needed to make some changes.
Clearly I think so yes.
For me, I enjoy the journey much more than the destination. I enjoy progressing through the ranks, gaining new items, ships, materials, credits etc as I go. That’s what I enjoy. I enjoy this process.
Others - you perhaps? - see this as grind, and just want to get to the end game, as that’s when the fun starts
I’m not saying one is right and one is wrong.
But I am saying that the original vision of the game was definitely a vision of slow progression - otherwise why would they gift you an Eagle for more real life cash.
What we’ve seen is a huge change in game mechanics that some original backers don’t like.
The game still has slow progression, it's just slowly progressing to a fleet carrier or slowly engineering your entire fleet. There's still plenty to waste your time on. Not sure why the original backers that are all flying the same ships care about what new players are doing. "you're not enjoying your game properly" seems to be the sentiment here.
Really?
That’s what you get from my posts?
Ok well either I haven’t explained myself properly, you have misunderstood, or you’re being deliberately provocative...
Last edited:
Right. And I've played as long as you and never even seen CLOSE to anything like that. I don't even follow what you were saying, you destroyed the Anacondas for what? Bertrandite or bounties?
This is the crux of the problem: If you curve a game on the top players, you make it inaccessible to 95% of the population.
I can't restate that point enough.
How many friends have you brought to elite? I've brought just off the top of my head eight people into the game, and nurse maided most of them through just learning how to fly. After a year, some of them still fly cobras, two of them have moved up to vultures, and two of them MIGHT be on Pythons now I think.
Cool. You've played the game for a lengthy period of time. You've learned all the inns and outs and secrets of how to break it. Fantastic!
No game can last forever. I LOVE Elite, but I've been playing seven years now. I've barely logged in for months because I have been playing FOR SEVEN YEARS NOW. In that time we've had ONE large expansion with a bunch of smaller (but significant) additions. Most of those additions, like the engineers and guardians are ABSURDLY grindy in that they give you 20 minutes of new content and then expect you to repeat it hundreds of times. This isn't WOW where they're cranking out a new land of content every year and adding it to the game. So yes, if you play for seven years, I fully well expect you to exhaust all the available content and find incredible loopholes.
If you want a mercilessly punishing game, go play darksouls. If you want a grindy treasure progression, go play diablo. Me? I really want a game that lets me fly around the universe in a variety of spaceships doing whatever I think is fun, whether that's hotrodding new ships, racing through canyons, exploring new stars, or murdering a few space pirates. Grinding up money to enable these things has always been the WORST part of Elite, and I dunno when you started, but I did a YEAR of cargo runs when this ball got rolling to get my Anaconda. Trust me. That wasn't fun. And those weren't good times.
Or we can ask for this one to be changed according to our tastes. There is, after all, a precedent.
Absolutely. As you say, this point can't be restated enough.
Speed-running is a well-known part of gaming, and a good speed runner can complete a game ten times faster than someone who knows what they're doing but isn't going all-out for speed. So if someone says "it should take at least six months to get an Anaconda", then that means it should take six months of continuously grinding the top activity over and over and over ... and probably more like six years if you want to have fun along the way, and more like six decades if you focus mainly on the fun side of it. So the first players who started out in Gamma might be starting to get their Anacondas now (I'd probably be considering whether I had enough to buy a Phantom).
And there's a lot of rose-tinted glasses going on for the early game balance, too. The people contending for the Triple Elite challenge were generally in Anacondas in a week (from neutron farming for the Exploration Elite). Sure, I wasn't (after a week, I'd managed to upgrade my Freewinder's FSD to D-rated, I think) but that's not because it wasn't possible then. Nowadays with a much larger player base than in 1.0 ways to earn money quickly get found faster, get documented faster, get used widely faster ... but they've always been there. At least the current money-makers involve playing the game rather than spending an hour board-flipping then an hour sleeping in supercruise ... or selling mission cargo back to the source station ... or parking a turret boat next to a friendly capital ship in a CZ and leaving it logged in overnight.
(And even more rose-tinted if you consider FE2/FFE, where it was possibly with the Sol/Barnard's loop to get yourself to a Panther Clipper in perfect safety in a few hours ... most of which was upgrading your original ship to an Adder so you could get onto the exponential cargo curve in the first place. The Elite series has never been one where the money needed for a fully-upgraded ship has been difficult to obtain if you know how)
Yup. He nailed it IMO. That's exactly what you guys are saying to us.
You can enjoy that now with zero game changes. Just use self control. Ignore your credit balance. Don't buy new ships. Limit yourself to earning one A Rated module a month or whatever. It's not hard.
“You guys”?
Who are they? I speak for no-one other than myself.
As for saying he nailed it, then I repeat, either I haven’t explained myself properly (I thought I had though, I keep repeating that there’s no right and no wrong here, all I’m saying is that the game mechanics have shifted, and I preferred it as it was, all of which is true. But ok, maybe I haven’t articulated this well enough, in which case I apologise), or you have misunderstood (which I think is a problem at your end), or you’re being deliberately provocative (in which case you’re a tool).
Last edited:
Arthur and Susie?How many dents?
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
Deliberately play badly then? Take that logic to the extreme, may as well make all ships completely invincible then after all you can always use the self destruct option in the right hand panel. Why have credits or materials full stop just make ED full sandbox and we choose what we want at the start.
I get what you want out of the game and I sympathise. But from my view (and my view only) I preferred it when I had to try to max my profits to get as much as I could rather than try to NOT max them,
Now.... Ian I think it was said Elite has always had loopholes you can exploit... And yes it has . The difference is I could easily ignore those and still go about my game and pretent they didn't exist........ The way things are now that isn't possible.
And I am NOT all about increasing "grind" either. Personally I think with a stronger credit economy more stuff could be purchasable with actual credits .. imo only a handful of items should be the things "money can't buy" but 75% of materials which are common elements or ship parts that I have ON MY ACTUAL SHIP that get replaced without a care in the world under an insurance claim should be gettable with credits.
Even the stick many suggest about engineering gear being unique so should not be replaced by insurance practically always comes with a carrot of letting us salvage them from both our own wreck via a USS as well as by random drops or other wrecks etc.
Last edited:
Guys. Boys. Lads. Ladies. Undecided.
This is not a game about slow progression. If you want that? Go play EVE. This is a game about FLYING A SPACESHIP and always has been. But alas this is a game Frontier could not afford to build in full at launch, and so had to keep people playing for years while they made new stuff. So they did. They stretched it out.
God this kind of "Make it suck more" stuff is why I stopped checking in regularly. I still remember when I rudely discovered "Advanced maintenance" buried in a menu in one of the WORST UI decisions I've seen where you WILL lose a huge chunk of value off your ship just by flying it around because people complained the repair costs weren't realistic and it ruined their immersion. Yeah thanks, having to re-earn my starship is really compelling gameplay guys.
You wanna improve Elite? Take out the "ship depreciation" mechanic. CARS IN REAL LIFE DEPRECIATE. Fictional spaceships should not.
I don't disagree - but... (You knew I would)
Whose 'tastes' should the game be changed for?
We have a 'slow' camp, a 'fast' one, PvP & PvE camps, each, understandably, would like the game changed to provide more of their wish - it can't accommodate all of the options (but I'd welcome sufficient change to give all a purpose in the game) which probably explains the game we have now.