Complain about the game's problems!

[Quantis Trap]

But, if you care about the game and aren't just passing through, do more that JUST complain.

Complaints threads I see floating to the top today:
* Weird and pointless offer for selling passengers into slavery.
* [Crime and Punishment] Why ATR ships will be useless?
* The Chieftan is annoying
* Okay Dev's: Why do i have to scan a ship for a bounty, ...
* Well I didn't expect *THAT*...
* ... more ...

Now my point is not how much complaining is going on in each of these threads and others. It's more about what complaining players who do care about the game are willing to learn and do to help make the game better.

Let me take the first thread in the list above as an example and try to explain why Frontier is knocking it out of the park, but still needs our help:

This thread wails about the slavery counter offer missions sometimes not paying nearly as much original mission.

Contrary to what often is suggested in threads like this, bugs like this don't happen because Frontier managers or developers are idiots.

When we're playing this game, there are literally thousands/millions of separate bits of data and formulas and executing scripts swirling around hour virtual existence at any given moment. In the instance we're in, these data bits and calculations control things such as the state and position of every, ship, station, outpost, accepted mission, where they are positioned and where they are headed just to name a few.

The slavery counter offer value being out of proportion to the original offer is only out of proportion when you have destination stations which are extremely far away from the arrival point. This is most likely because in formulas in the mission script, the distance from the arrival didn't always play a big roll in calculation of the mission reward but now it does. The problem is that when that mission script was adjusted to take into account the distance from arrival, the template/script for the generation of the counter offer mission was not updated as well. A small detail like this is a very easy thing to miss in a game system with thousands of data, formulas, templates and scripts, etc.

You might ask why did the Frontier developer who changed the mission not know to change the counter offer mission too? Well, there's no guarantee that they were the same developer that originally created the mission so they may not have even been aware of the counter offer mission, let alone how it works. Even if they were the same developer, this is a vary complex set of game rules which no one developer can remember all the time.

Please give the Frontier Developers a break because this amazing game is a lot to manage!

If you're annoyed by small details like this being out of wack, then join lots of us in open the beta starting at the end of the week, watch for threads explaining what needs to be tested, and do more than just fly the newest ship.

 

[acg515]

I've never really understood the negativity. It's not perfect but no game is. I've enjoyed it since the beginning.

 

[Franc Kaos]

...
You might ask why did the Frontier developer who changed the mission not know to change the counter offer mission too? Well, there's no guarantee that they were the same developer that originally created the mission so they may not have even been aware of the counter offer mission, let alone how it works. Even if they were the same developer, this is a vary complex set of game rules which no one developer can remember all the time.

Nail on the head right here I believe, explains the peculiarly anaemic multicrew implementation, the no new game modes for the Thargoid invasion, the missing orrery, the games over reliance on RNG in place of actual game mechanics. The people working on the game now aren't the same people who originally developed the game.

In the original KS video David Braben advertised the engine as being very modular, and easy to add to later. What's been shown so far doesn't reflect that statement at all - can't MC with SRVs because technical reasons, can't add CQC to main game because ???, can't add orrery because new game modes would be required (to get rid of the USS / CZ placeholders), can't merge Powerplay with BGS because reasons...

Opinion (mine).

 

[Quantis Trap]

I've never really understood the negativity. It's not perfect but no game is. I've enjoyed it since the beginning.

You get it. I can tell by your avatar!

Nail on the head right here I believe, explains the peculiarly anaemic ...

In the original KS video David Braben advertised the engine as being very modular, and easy to add to later. What's been shown so far doesn't reflect that statement at all ...

Yes, but what you may not understand fully is that no matter how modular you make the game an how much you try to keep the same developers involved, it's not always a perfect world. Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep the same developer working on the same stuff for three years!

The point I'm trying to make is that if you like the game and want it to succeed then do what you can, such as participating in this beta in a positive way!

 

[Soon(TM)]

I have a complaint.

How come a small Dev team create a game like Megaton Rainfall that has an entire universe to explore with every planet landable, and destructible terrain, and the ability to land on gas giants and stars (your a super hero like superman before you ask)

https://youtu.be/uz_y8t3MDmc

But yet ED only has a small percentage of landable planets 4 years into the game with a Dev team that was once 200 people strong?

 

[Soon(TM)]

You might ask why did the Frontier developer who changed the mission not know to change the counter offer mission too? Well, there's no guarantee that they were the same developer that originally created the mission so they may not have even been aware of the counter offer mission, let alone how it works. Even if they were the same developer, this is a vary complex set of game rules which no one developer can remember all the time.

Does nobody at FDev take notes?

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I have a complaint.

How come a small Dev team create a game like Megaton Rainfall that has an entire universe to explore with every planet landable, and destructible terrain, and the ability to land on gas giants and stars (your a super hero like superman before you ask)

But yet ED only has a small percentage of landable planets 4 years into the game with a Dev team that was once 200 people strong?

Because FD have different priorities from what you want them to do and therefore working on different things?

Does nobody at FDev take notes?

I'm sure they take plenty of notes, but they won't always do things in the order you want them to. Personally i also think they should focus on fixing more of these small but annoying things (assuming the fixes are trivial), but i can't impose my will on FD.

 

[Quantis Trap]

I have a complaint. How come a small Dev team create a game like Megaton Rainfall ...
But yet ED only has a small percentage of landable planets 4 years into the game with a Dev team that was once 200 people strong?...

Does nobody at FDev take notes?

Let me try to answer for Frontier on this since they are busy for the beta:
1) The team which made Metatron Railfall did not try nearly as hard to model realism in the galaxy. A very hard thing to do. It's a choice Frontier made which I really respect.
2) As for the small percentage of landable planets comment, I think if anyone had time, they'd find that over 50% of all the planets (trillions) in the ED galaxy are landable right now. A small percentage of them even have interesting "atmospheres" due to thermal "outgas".
3) Even though there are/were 200ish employees in Frontier, a small percentage (I'd guess 15%, probably less) of them were ever code developers on the game.
4) Does nobody at FDev take notes?: Frontier doesn't need to take notes from me. They know, but knowing about an issue and prioritizing a solution are two different things.

 

[krylite]

I have a complaint.

How come a small Dev team create a game like Megaton Rainfall that has an entire universe to explore with every planet landable, and destructible terrain, and the ability to land on gas giants and stars (your a super hero like superman before you ask)

Because "Megaton Rainfall" is illusory width and depth and an arcady sped up jaunt through various pseudo astro and solar system sequences to appear "godlike". Far less detail and texturing than ED too. From the videos on yt, it looks to have stars as moving backdrops, but not all visitable, and then the system is roughly detailed and very little fidelity to astronomy in favor of being a nice procedural lightshow. Frontier could do a quick adhoc atomspheric rough generation, but it would look so obsolete and generic like Megaton, that the naysaysers would only just use it as an excuse to continue to label ED as an inferior product further (usually in favor of cig-arrets and SC). It also seems to be single/multiplayer, and nowhere an MMO world with persistent systems and stations that ED servers have to maintain and update for thousands of unique populated systems and faction bgs. Not to menion the ED fleet of player ships, detail, animations, stations are all done with a more realistic production style, as opposed to a cartoony style like NMS which can then get away with less demanding texture realism.

Elite 3: FFE as a 16bit game on two floppies had all landable planets with moons and atmospherics. Rough detail yes, but the planets still move in orbits and have reasoned out AU distance from their suns. You could also speed up the time and zip over the planet continents at a similar "godlike" view similar to the Megaton guy. Kind of reminds me of Flight Simulator's "slew mode" where you could zip through regions and states in seconds like a ufo. Comparing to today's games FFE was so ahead of its time.

 

[Weps]

If you're annoyed by small details like this being out of wack, then join lots of us in open the beta starting at the end of the week, watch for threads explaining what needs to be tested, and do more than just fly the newest ship.

Admirable stance, but there's a small aspect you forget: a lot of people have been doing this since 2014 and started to have enough.

For example, lots of people joined the Beta on RNGineers and warned about what will happen. 2 years later? Small details are still out of wack and, depending on what we see on this evening's stream, we might get the confirmation that they will remain so.

Personally I started to have enough after the fixed/gimballed combat rebalance beta. Joined that one, tested as much as I had the time to, struggled to record video on my non-shadowplay card at the time, for later reviewing and objective feedback, and what was the result of that beta? Nada, nix.

 

[Patrick_68000]

2019-2020 Soon(tm) the landings on the planets with atmospheres

 

[Deekin Scalesinger]

2019-2020 Soon(tm) the landings on the planets with atmospheres

I knew that FD trademarked "soon".

 

[Soon(TM)]

Let me try to answer for Frontier on this since they are busy for the beta:
1) The team which made Metatron Railfall did not try nearly as hard to model realism in the galaxy. A very hard thing to do. It's a choice Frontier made which I really respect.
2) As for the small percentage of landable planets comment, I think if anyone had time, they'd find that over 50% of all the planets (trillions) in the ED galaxy are landable right now. A small percentage of them even have interesting "atmospheres" due to thermal "outgas".
3) Even though there are/were 200ish employees in Frontier, a small percentage (I'd guess 15%, probably less) of them were ever code developers on the game.
4) Does nobody at FDev take notes?: Frontier doesn't need to take notes from me. They know, but knowing about an issue and prioritizing a solution are two different things.

Well it seems that procedural generation isn't as amazing as it once was, when single developers can make entire galaxies using procedural generation it kind of takes the "ooh, ahh" away from FDEV.

Hey look we simulated the entire milky way....oh wait, one guy simulated an entire universe!

 

[crushdepth]

If you're going to complain about people complaining, you could at least have listed some of the *real* complaints threads instead of those garbage tier ones.

That is my meta complaint.

 

[Anopheles]

My only complaint is that it has a creative narrative written by very talented engineers (see Powerplant mechanics) which works as well as a machine built by very talented writers.

They need to hire specifically talented creatives to build systems around narratives instead of building a narrative around systems.

 

[2Karl]

I think the game is great, although would benefit from having more puzzle trails / clues for invested players to follow in order to solve mysteries and discover new stuff. On the whole though I can't really complain too much.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

 

[znôrt]

You might ask why did the Frontier developer who changed the mission not know to change the counter offer mission too? Well, there's no guarantee that they were the same developer that originally created the mission so they may not have even been aware of the counter offer mission, let alone how it works.

it's called "agile development" and is the new standard: no one is irreplaceable, it's all about 'the team', 'the definition of done' and 'adding value' in small bits, just like a coral reef grows,etc ...

problem is, software is not a coral reef. but that doesn't bother the industry in the slightest.

(it has a point. it works with (smallish) cohesive teams of highly motivated and talented people, with full transparency and openness. then again, *any* methodology works with such teams, which are scarce. in practice it tends to produce monstrosities under the carpet and bland excuses for management by shifting the responsibility on the developers and delaying decision making to the last minute. it's also a major factor for crunch time, which in turn burns developers out, in a vicious circle)

 

[Funny]

I just wanna say, those of you defending devs, while nice, are kinda missing the point of what consumers are for. They’re here to give feedback on which things they like, and which things they don’t like.

Due to a certain thing called negativity bias, the bad things unfortunately tend to stand out a lot more than the good. So when pretty much every aspect of the game is riddled with unavoidable annoyances, small or large, you will logically see way more complaint/critical threads than those praising the game.

Well, it doesn’t help that the only true strengths more or less can be summed up in “looks prety, flies nice”. Lots of features are underdeveloped which, while understandable, will not make players go onto the forums and talk about all the fun they had with them. Which I guess is sad, but when things like the recent station attacks happen, people do go out into the forums and express their happiness. That shows that people don’t hate this game, and are all too eager to express their joy at playing it, but they only did that because it accomplished a goal in a really nice way with no real flaws ofher than the initial bug (which was a bug, and fixed quickly, so we forgave it quickly as well). And as mentioned above, nothing else in this game currently can truly make people do that, so, yeah.

In short: I think elite dangerous has a real problem with spreading itself too thinly, and too wide. I don’t think it’ll always stay that way, the beyond series is a good indication that they themselves recognise that, but that still doesn’t excuse any of the present issues in the game. Expecially because I and lots of others really, really want to love this game to death, but are constantly held back by a seemingly infinte hoard of bugs and instances of bad design. And we will constantly point those flaws out because their removal would allow us to give this game the love we want - thus giving rise to all the threads mentioned here.

 

[znôrt]

rep for the good analysis.

In short: I think elite dangerous has a real problem with spreading itself too thinly, and too wide. I don’t think it’ll always stay that way, the beyond series is a good indication that they themselves recognise that

yes, that's what i thought too. looking at 'beyond.q1' checklist though i'm starting to wonder ... how is a new 'power weapon grind' based on the very same premises going to help improve the core game? looks rather counterproductive to me ...