Small ships are only obsolete for those that force themselves to minmax, although in some cases, using a small ship is minmaxing. I'll agree with module progression being obsolete, but this is something you'll notice in any mmo. There will be relics of obsolete gameplay for a new player to wonder what its purpose ever was.
C'mon, this is faintly ridiculous.
- Thread starter Noddie
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Small ships are only obsolete for those that force themselves to minmax, although in some cases, using a small ship is minmaxing. I'll agree with module progression being obsolete, but this is something you'll notice in any mmo. There will be relics of obsolete gameplay for a new player to wonder what its purpose ever was.
saying that something has a purpose when the player has to make the conscious decision to not have all around better equipment to do whatever it is they want to do in the game is not a purpose.
I think that's what people mean when they say the ship is obsolete.
It's not like better/larger ships are harder to find and unlock ... they're available in the same places as the smaller ships. Credits are the only downside to a larger ship and credits are effectively worthless given how easy it is to make far too much of them.
It's not about min-maxing and dealing with some kind of compromise. It's that a larger ship is just a better option by any measure. There is no gameplay except lacking large pads on outposts that creates an advantage for smaller ships.
I think that's what people mean when they say the ship is obsolete.
It's not like better/larger ships are harder to find and unlock ... they're available in the same places as the smaller ships. Credits are the only downside to a larger ship and credits are effectively worthless given how easy it is to make far too much of them.
It's not about min-maxing and dealing with some kind of compromise. It's that a larger ship is just a better option by any measure. There is no gameplay except lacking large pads on outposts that creates an advantage for smaller ships.
Deleted member 121570
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Nonsense. All large ships fly like crap and are slow. Most mediums ain't much better.
If you wanna fly fast, and fly fun, you gotta fly small. Flight capability can be more important for fun than earning credits by mining etc.
By any speed & agility measure, large ships are the worst option around.
Nope
While small ships are the fastest, med and large ships can also be fast. The imperial Cutter has amazing straight line speed. It doesn't stop or turn but it's fast.
Corvette has a very respectable turn speed.
And then type 10 is inarguably supreme at keeping paper from flying away.
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
What can an eagle do that a vulture can't?
I really wish there was content for ships like the hauler and the adder etc. But if there is (other than for fun which isnwhyni fly mine) I can't see any logical in game reason why any Cmdr would risk their.meat sack in an eagle when a vulture is earnable in under an hr
Deleted member 121570
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I think you might need to redefine what you consider the word 'fast' to mean if you imagine a Cutter fits that term in any way meaningful for what stuff like Viper, Courier & Eagles can do. Ditto Corvette & T10. I can only assume you're going for comedy value, especially with the T10 in there
Break 800?
My whole point here is that "fun to fly" is the most important reason so many folks fly small. The content is whatever you make it, whatever you fancy doing in something that flies well.
Speed/Agility are metrics upon which most small ships are capable of much, much more than any large. Cobra IV not included.
Like I've said before - if flying is your fun, you fly small. Larges are good at other stuff, but flying is not one of em.
Or that you need bigger and bigger sensors that add INSANE amounts of mass to your ship - destroying jump range, speed and agility - yet provide ZERO benefit over smaller sensors ...
I think you might need to redefine what you consider the word 'fast' to mean if you imagine a Cutter fits that term in any way meaningful for what stuff like Viper, Courier & Eagles can do. Ditto Corvette & T10. I can only assume you're going for comedy value, especially with the T10 in there
You are comparing it to the very top of the spectrum. Cutter can beat 500, Clipper can get to 640.
Its not iCourier fast, but it's faster than most.
Plus, when it comes to keeping papers, or villages from being blown away you can't beat the type 10.
I also predict dragging a type 10 across the battlefield will be our first ground combat meta.
Deleted member 121570
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Of course I'm comparing it to that - that's literally the point I was making.
Fast and agile is defined by the upper limits, not the lower/middle mediocrity of large ships. Fast and agile is exclusive to small ships.
They're the best in the game at it, and large/medium ships can't compete.
I guess you could say a UPS van might be faster than a dumptruck, but your argument is basically like claiming this means the UPS van is fast when there's an F1 Ferrari sitting for sale right there beside it, nearly for free at a fraction of the price UPS want for that brown 'fast' van.
Of course, this is only important if you like the fun and challenge of flying ships that are actually fast and agile. If you don't, that's cool. Go haul some mail or save a village or somethin'.
there's nothing in the game that requires the agility and size of a small ship that can't be done by a larger ship safer, faster, and almost certainly, more flexibly.
The fact that a small ship can run circles around some if not all larger ships doesn't matter. Maybe when thargoids are actually invading and waging war and not only part of some remote opt-in crap. We know for sure none of the human npcs force that kind of compromise. Trade doesn't. Exploration doesn't. Mining doesn't. None of the missions do (except landing on outposts due to lack of large).
Literally the only scenarios that do better with a small ship are imaginary ones in your head as far as gameplay is concerned.
The fact that a small ship can run circles around some if not all larger ships doesn't matter. Maybe when thargoids are actually invading and waging war and not only part of some remote opt-in crap. We know for sure none of the human npcs force that kind of compromise. Trade doesn't. Exploration doesn't. Mining doesn't. None of the missions do (except landing on outposts due to lack of large).
Literally the only scenarios that do better with a small ship are imaginary ones in your head as far as gameplay is concerned.
I suggested a while ago a few things that could make small ships worthwhile.
Example 1: Blockades.
You have a rare BGS effect called a Blockade, where a hostile faction surrounds the stations of a target faction with millions of mines, so incredibly dense you need to very carefully steer through them. These mines are 'smart mines' that are attracted to heat, and randomly have Radiant Canister and Reverb Cascade, so if you take one mine, you gain heat, attract more mines, lose your shields, and die.
So you need a very small, nimble ship to navigate through the minefield to reach the station, which offers extremely lucrative passenger missions and pays huge amounts for commodities.
Example 2: Giant Asteroids
Scattered randomly in asteroid fields are giant asteroids riddled with randomly generated caves. Inside are large amounts of deposits, both surface and subsurface, of extremely valuable commodities, but the only way to get to them is in a small ship specially kitted out for it. Even better if the asteroid is unstable, and if you shoot the wrong thing inside, the asteroid will collapse and block your exit, so you die and lose all the minerals you've collected.
Example 3: Let class 7 fighter bays hold the smaller of the small ships.
This allows large ships to use a smaller ship like a Hauler or Adder as a shuttlecraft, offloading small amounts at a time to outposts, or finishing courier missions.
Example 1: Blockades.
You have a rare BGS effect called a Blockade, where a hostile faction surrounds the stations of a target faction with millions of mines, so incredibly dense you need to very carefully steer through them. These mines are 'smart mines' that are attracted to heat, and randomly have Radiant Canister and Reverb Cascade, so if you take one mine, you gain heat, attract more mines, lose your shields, and die.
So you need a very small, nimble ship to navigate through the minefield to reach the station, which offers extremely lucrative passenger missions and pays huge amounts for commodities.
Example 2: Giant Asteroids
Scattered randomly in asteroid fields are giant asteroids riddled with randomly generated caves. Inside are large amounts of deposits, both surface and subsurface, of extremely valuable commodities, but the only way to get to them is in a small ship specially kitted out for it. Even better if the asteroid is unstable, and if you shoot the wrong thing inside, the asteroid will collapse and block your exit, so you die and lose all the minerals you've collected.
Example 3: Let class 7 fighter bays hold the smaller of the small ships.
This allows large ships to use a smaller ship like a Hauler or Adder as a shuttlecraft, offloading small amounts at a time to outposts, or finishing courier missions.
Don't have to force oneself to minmax. Indeed, I imagine choosing the right tool for the job, whatever that job is, and minimizing perceived risks, comes quite naturally to most people, once they have the experience to make such assessments.
Small ships have limited tangible utility because they were mainly intended to be stepping stones in a system where ships with greater utility would often be out of reach. One can certainly prefer small ships for more subjective reasons, and they have some niche applications, but the more expensive ships are broadly better at doing things the game attempts to incentivize, which means they will be the most common if the constraints on ownership have been lifted (and they have).
All of my CMDRs small ships are just as minmaxed as his large ones, if not even more so, due to tighter constraints and lower margins for error/failure.
That's a preference, as subjective as any other. Plenty of people for whom flying is their primary form of fun have different ones. Greater acceleration, higher velocity caps, superior rotationals...all objective measures of ship performance, but not objective measures of fun.
I have heard others use it for connectivity reasons, too many cmdrs in instance causing lagg issues, instead of switching over to private group. relevant in a 3rd world country with connection problems.
Don't think ED has time to enforce rules, they have proven to be slow on these things, besides OddC expansion is more important than enforcing rules at this point. Limitations of connectivity in open is on ED. Even if somebody "excludes" you as you say, does not impact your gameplay as you can find others to interact with anyway. Also it is working as intended coz overall majority appears to not have an issue with this fail safe, i had 3 players over the years blocked...recently unblocked them never needed to block others. But these three were causing the station to go aggro on me back in the day when ram-suicide killing themselves against my ship was still a thing before the patch. They did this repeatedly in open...so the choice was to block them or move to Solo...i chose to block them.
Never needed to block since then. I don't think many CMdrs know about blocking players even. I only found this out 2 years ago, from my 6 year play time.
Indeed, I liked Viper for its aggressive boost sound.
You are perhaps part of the minority.
Please most people most of the time, also if ED is competing with SC, and other genres and titles, shortening time limits to do mudane RL things in a digital game might not please the masses coz they might all leave and move on to games that provide fun/ engagement immediately instead of 30min later due to travelling. Remove the game barriers and more players will play.
The shared game state makes it more of an MMO to me than essentially any 'theme park' MMO. Everquest, WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, DDO, LotRO, etc...all have less meaningful massively multiplayer aspects than Elite: Dangerous, by any metric I'd consider relevant. Hell, the most MMO aspect of most of those games are their auction houses.
Not that ED is a particularly good example of an MMO, but theme park MMOs usually amount to little more than 3D chatrooms/lobbies where people then break off into small groups to do pre-scripted missions that have no impact on the wider game world, or anyone else in it.
It skews the numbers and the demographics of those that are available to interact with, which can most certainly impact my gameplay. Every block is potentially another new instance, and it only takes a handful of active blocks to dramatically thin out the population of an area. Even if CMDRs were perfectly fungible, blocking would still reduce the number of encounters with non-blocked individuals.
Things can be even worse when two or more groups are actually trying to encounter each other, but bystanders have one or more of them blocked. They could switch over to a private group, but since these are often organic encounters, not pitched battles, that would be very difficult to organize...or outright impossible if one group's primary goal is not to oppose the other, but to blockade run or 'gank' others present.
That hasn't been in dispute since they fixed it's instancing weight function and clarified it's use almost six years ago.
This is potentially a serious problem as those who don't understand the implications of a block may assume it's chat only and thus be inadvertently skewing instancing for others.
In early 2015 I had dozens CMDRs on my CMDRs block list, because I was under the impression it was chat only. The moment I discovered that it was actually affecting instancing, I had to purge that list.
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Blocking clearly isnt a pandemic of a problem, you are the first to say it impacts your gameplay that i have seen, so i might be correct that PVP/ Open/ Insisting on player interaction is clearly what you aim for in ED without it i dont know what you had to do in ED then, just an assumption on all your posts. PVP specifically and group ineractions for this like a showdown is such a small rare element of ED (group exploration works fine and majority have no issues), that you are perhaps impacted somehow by being blocked and "your gameplay" is now ruined...its the 1st time i heard of that and so perhaps you are in the minoroty and most including ED is perfectly fine with you being the minority, coz they will please the majority.
Edit: Extra content...i was interested in your issues regarding your and other blocked players instancing and then finding results/ tests/ and intended funtiontionality.
It looks like the following stands out from these sources.
Blocking in Elite Dangerous
UPDATE - Thanks to much discussion and the very simple but elegant solution posed by one CMDR, I've changed my approach to the blocking system. I've decided to use it as a reverse iron man, in that once you have murdered me, I'm dead to you. You'll never see me again, because to you, I'm dead...
Block was always intended to block all contact between players comms and instancing, however at launch it blocked comms only. Then it was strengthened to reduce the chances of instancing with someone blocked. In these enlightened modern times it blocks people completely regardless of things like the friends list.
Probably as a result of the rules on online harassment being tightened worldwide.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/6e6z2l/ip_addresses_harvested_and_account_linked_beware/di9espl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Things that stand out for me from above reading sources:
1) " If most players aren't bad, corollary being that most players are good, then block makes sense. If most players ARE bad, and only a select are good, then private makes sense."
2) Blocking is only a problem for the minority especially when you dont know about it - " Solo excludes everyone. Private excludes the majority. Block excludes the minority. Open without block excludes no one. Especially with how empty the galaxy is, open- only wouldn't help much. "
3) Fdev incapable of enforcing rules and punishing gankers - "Reporting player abuse doesn't seem to make much headway. If you have examples of Fdev publishing punishments publicly, I honestly want to see them. Shadowbanning is a joke of a punishment.
Alternatively, if players are fine with interaction as long as it isn't PvP, then Fdev should implement a PvE flag or other such system."
4) The REAL issue here highlights problems with Fdev game design and tech regarding Wings/ instancing/ PtoP and server loads NOT blocking mechanic -
" I also agree that the instancing is horrible. I've been in a private group, winged with friends on the same VPN, but when one of us interdicted the other, we were dropped to separate instances. The lemon juice on the wound was that we could target each other, but not see or interact with each other. Likewise, I've been in Eravate in open with livestream players and never saw each other over two hours of time. For me, instancing is the real problem with the multiplayer aspect of the game."
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How often do the same cmdrs meet in open to have an instance issue, unless organized, its not a problem if nobody knows whats happening. Lol don't fret about a potential serious blocking pandemic, i think there are bigger things to be concerned about in ED and in life, just a hunch.
How often do the same cmdrs meet in open to have an instance issue, unless organized, its not a problem if nobody knows whats happening. Lol don't fret about a potential serious blocking pandemic, i think there are bigger things to be concerned about in ED and in life, just a hunch.
I frequently and repeatedly encounter CMDRs that I've encountered before, without having to try. Chances are, if my CMDR is in the same area as another, and there are no major connection issues, and no blocks in play, we will be placed in the same instances and be able to interact in any manner the game allows. So, how often? Often enough that I know many of the CMDRs that frequent my CMDR's home areas and would recognize a fair portion at most CGs.
Your arguments boils down to, 'I don't pay attention to this stuff, so it can't be a problem'. It's a collection of argumentum ad populum and relative privations fallacies that don't even attempt to address the issues presented.
If the underlying justification of the block feature is that we should be able to be free from the interference of others, even in Open, the fact that block itself can (and this is demonstrable) interfere with non-blocked others, introduces quite a paradox. Should one person's arbitrary desire to avoid contact with an individual, override the desires of others to have contact with that individual? Frontier seems to think so, or is at least apathetic to the issue. You seem to think so. I think prioritizing arbitrary exclusion over inclusion, in the Open mode of a game that has two other exclusive modes, is silly.