Conflict of intended gameplay and desired one in open world game like ED

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I just wanted to point out one big reason why there's such discussion about payouts despite ship running costs being extremely low in ED.

It is buyouts.

Goal of insurance is to make death matter. Game doesn't have perma death - first three games had - and that's exchange we have here. While I would like to see some gradual increase for players who lose their ships quickly and lower insurance for those who don't it is not what I wanted to point out.

Most of credits per hour discussions come down to 'how fast I can regain rebuy for my super expensive super mega ship'. But game clearly uses insurance as way to insure players don't lose their ship so quickly. Insurance is way to put breaks on people thinking they are still in Sidewinder. Big super ship can introduce considerable damage, thus losing it means way to balance it out.

You might argue that game should not be this way, that it should serve more arcade approach, but ED is not such game.

In the end all such issues come from people imagining that 'open world game' does not have fundamental rules. They do. You blaze your own trail - within someone's game with rules and rulesets.

 

[LeoBartlet]

Ok cool

 

[Dean Demon]

You are extremely unlikely to ever get perma death today, i would hazard a guess that about 0.01% of games being released today have anything near perma death and today's gamers just couldn't handle it in fact they take great offence that a game even has a manual. Buyouts certainly are not an issue as there is far too much money just being thrown at you at every corner in ED, blaze your own trail is certainly what ED is in that we all have our own way of playing and each have our own skillset and role playing technique so one size certainly doesn't fit all, fly safe CMDR's.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

You are extremely unlikely to ever get perma death today, i would hazard a guess that about 0.01% of games being released today have anything near perma death and today's gamers just couldn't handle it in fact they take great offence that a game even has a manual. Buyouts certainly are not an issue as there is far too much money just being thrown at you at every corner in ED, blaze your own trail is certainly what ED is in that we all have our own way of playing and each have our own skillset and role playing technique so one size certainly doesn't fit all, fly safe CMDR's.

It seems if you fly big three with super engineered stuff rebuy can be something of small outpost yearly budget.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Right ... which leads to the requirement that no activity in Elite: Dangerous be intrinsically risky.

Sure, rebuy encourages people not to just throw away their ships.

Now let's take an activity that's supposed to be risky - fighting Thargoids, Elite-ranked wing assassinations, whatever. There are three possibilities:
1) The activity is dangerous - you have a significant chance of losing your ship. Rebuys are easy to recover: people do the activity, which is presumably fun, and can either fund the rebuys reasonably quickly from the times they don't die, or from other activities between times.

2) The activity is dangerous - you have a significant chance of losing your ship. Rebuys are hard to recover: people largely ignore the activity because every time they do it they need to do something else for several hours or more afterward.

3) The activity is not actually dangerous: people do the activity.

So if rebuys are to discourage death, and do so successfully, we conclude that as a matter of game design the player must never die (or really, fail) and the game must never generate a situation where they could except through their own recklessness.

That's a really big limitation on what gameplay is available - it must be no risk, all reward in the most part, except for some advanced zones which can be made into no risk, all reward with some preparation. Obviously this is not good for the Thargoid "threat" if true.


I don't believe "no risk of failure" to be an intrinsic requirement of "open world" games - quite the opposite! - so what went wrong?

 

[Valorin]

I just wanted to point out one big reason why there's such discussion about payouts despite ship running costs being extremely low in ED.

It is buyouts.

Goal of insurance is to make death matter. Game doesn't have perma death - first three games had - and that's exchange we have here. While I would like to see some gradual increase for players who lose their ships quickly and lower insurance for those who don't it is not what I wanted to point out.

Most of credits per hour discussions come down to 'how fast I can regain rebuy for my super expensive super mega ship'. But game clearly uses insurance as way to insure players don't lose their ship so quickly. Insurance is way to put breaks on people thinking they are still in Sidewinder. Big super ship can introduce considerable damage, thus losing it means way to balance it out.

You might argue that game should not be this way, that it should serve more arcade approach, but ED is not such game.

In the end all such issues come from people imagining that 'open world game' does not have fundamental rules. They do. You blaze your own trail - within someone's game with rules and rulesets.

I agree with that. Emphasis on "someone's game", because the whole thing does not belong to the players, but the company developing it. You can say "Elite is this or that" and I am certain, people will reply differently, maybe because they play the game in a different way. But in the end, the heart of the game is still space sim. Things you do take time. If you take that away, you cut down on the space sim aspect. And that goes for many other things that would push the game into that ultra user friendly "value our time" kind of way, most other games are nowadays. It would break the fundament it is build on, and which makes it unique.
If we would significantly increase jump range, for example, many people who play Elite for the sake of combat, would rejoice, because many of those really don't care about traveling time and just want fast pew pew. At the same time, many explorers would lose the feeling and accomplishment of feeling far, far away from inhabited space, because going back would be much faster and easier.
The inconvenient things in Elite make it seem real for me. I don't ask myself what the developer is trying with this or that, I rather take things as they are lorewise and ingame. Inconvenience is an aspect of sim games, which make things feel more real and also alive, even if jump, honk, scoop, jump is boring if you do it again and again and again.

For me it's the necessary barrier between inhabited space and being out there. And this applies to many other things Elite does differently from other games. That's what I love about it.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I just wanted to point out one big reason why there's such discussion about payouts despite ship running costs being extremely low in ED.

It is buyouts.

Goal of insurance is to make death matter. Game doesn't have perma death - first three games had - and that's exchange we have here. While I would like to see some gradual increase for players who lose their ships quickly and lower insurance for those who don't it is not what I wanted to point out.

Most of credits per hour discussions come down to 'how fast I can regain rebuy for my super expensive super mega ship'. But game clearly uses insurance as way to insure players don't lose their ship so quickly. Insurance is way to put breaks on people thinking they are still in Sidewinder. Big super ship can introduce considerable damage, thus losing it means way to balance it out.

You might argue that game should not be this way, that it should serve more arcade approach, but ED is not such game.

In the end all such issues come from people imagining that 'open world game' does not have fundamental rules. They do. You blaze your own trail - within someone's game with rules and rulesets.

The original Elite games had saves, no permadeath.

 

[Wolf Starslayer]

Right ... which leads to the requirement that no activity in Elite: Dangerous be intrinsically risky.

Sure, rebuy encourages people not to just throw away their ships.

Now let's take an activity that's supposed to be risky - fighting Thargoids, Elite-ranked wing assassinations, whatever. There are three possibilities:
1) The activity is dangerous - you have a significant chance of losing your ship. Rebuys are easy to recover: people do the activity, which is presumably fun, and can either fund the rebuys reasonably quickly from the times they don't die, or from other activities between times.

2) The activity is dangerous - you have a significant chance of losing your ship. Rebuys are hard to recover: people largely ignore the activity because every time they do it they need to do something else for several hours or more afterward.

3) The activity is not actually dangerous: people do the activity.

So if rebuys are to discourage death, and do so successfully, we conclude that as a matter of game design the player must never die (or really, fail) and the game must never generate a situation where they could except through their own recklessness.

That's a really big limitation on what gameplay is available - it must be no risk, all reward in the most part, except for some advanced zones which can be made into no risk, all reward with some preparation. Obviously this is not good for the Thargoid "threat" if true.


I don't believe "no risk of failure" to be an intrinsic requirement of "open world" games - quite the opposite! - so what went wrong?

Interesting observations here and where I think the game went wrong was the rampant inflation in both hp's and credits. In the early gama build without scb/engineers and with low pay-outs for activities across the board there was a real risk/reward calculation, now we seem to have lost that friction of fear except from other players in gank setups.

Not really sure how they bring it back unless they can deflate the hp's and get some credit sinks to suck up the inflated funds, not sure they want to, will wait and watch.

 

[CMDR Oxnix]

It seems if you fly big three with super engineered stuff rebuy can be something of small outpost yearly budget.

Yeah, which happened the other day, 55 million rebuy cost... I got up to get a drink and ... I get back to an exploded ship on the launch pad. When I got up I somehow activated the launch and then sat there until I was destroyed... which is . Then, the other day I drop into a signal source with my ASP and some NPC drops in at the same time. The NPC proceeds to fly around shooting at nothing, which seems weird, but whatever, so I proceed to start scooping up materials in the area. All of a sudden I'm attacked and destroyed as I'm engineered to explore, 50+ LY Jumps, not fight. Rebuy cost isn't huge in the ASP, less than a million credits, but still a stupid way to get killed by a weird NPC. I've since made a few changes to power and shields so as to make it less likely to happen like that again. Anyway, if I'm doing risky activity then I expect to pay the price, but not something like these two incidents ... and perma death, I wouldn't even play this game if it worked that way as it takes a lot of time to get what I worked for.

 

[Bomba Luigi]

Its rather weird that a lot of people don't seem to understand that the game wants you to try and not die. Otherwise rebuy would not be there in the first place.

Sure, thargoid combat might be more difficult and its easier to die there tough thats kinda the point, I tough its supposed to be a high risk high skill pve actvitiy (its good to have something like that). It might could need a payment increase, don't know enough there about payments to judge.

The other risky actvitiy would be PvP but I don't know anything about that. But its strange, I remember lots of complains from the PvP community that time to kill is to high, so then rebuy shouldn't be a problem since there would be enough time to highwake as I would assume. But maybe ttk now is too low in the new engineer so you don't have enough time for a high wake, then I understand.

But I kinda suspect quite a lot of people who complain about needing a dozen or so rebuys in cash for a cutter aren't doing any of those two. without those two it can get risky too but only if you want to and mosty only in cheap ships.

 

[Quester91]

The day you'll own an anaconda/cutter/corvette and you'll actually know what kind of gameplay they offer and what kind of risk/reward those ship provide, I'll listen to what you have to say.

Right now you're just speaking from what you heard, what you think it is and what sounds good on paper.


In short, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Goal of insurance is to make death matter. Game doesn't have perma death - first three games had - and that's exchange we have here.

The first three games had entirely optional perma-death - as the game position could be reloaded from any one of a number of saved games.

 

[Roybe]

Not sure how much the cost of rebuy is out of balance with the time to recoup...but it is strong enough that there is a large incentive to a lot of people to find ways to shorten that time.

This is not a big ship...little ship problem either. Regardless of the size of the ship...a single loss means that the player is locked out longer from doing what they desire doing...and the longer that time to recoup is..the more pain is forced on the player.

A lot of folks would love to play the game and figure out some of the combat missions...or puzzles at Guardian sites...or any number of other things...but the rework required when the risk of loss is high (say at the learning stage of these missions and puzzles) it diminishes the incentives of a lot of people to get involved.

Look at the Thargoids. I couldn't afford to fight them when they first appeared...but I tried (my interest in content, overode my economic sense!) ..and wound up having to stop and go do some menial money making to try again. At this point I stopped trying...and hope the Thargoids destroy the game at this point...because the pain of learning how to fight them is not worth it. It, literally, takes the comfort of billions to be willing to try.

 

[MarcusKross]

If it is not the credit 'grind' it is the rank, if it is not that it is the materials and if it is not that its waaaah no end game content. Too many people with ADHD in these forums.