Hello All,
Long time ELite player, and it's pretty much the only game i play now. However finding the game increasing frustrating to play. Which started me thinking of why i'm getting frustrated, and i this is my concluesion, and what could be done to fix it.
A lot of people will object to my statement, so i'll start with a rebutal. I know it's a game, and it's not suppose to be realistic, but this really is (for me) the problem of the game. I don't mean the physics, or anything like that. What i mean is, why do i have to blow up trading ship to get Chemical Manipulators?, or find blown up ones in USS. Someone can make them to build the ships, so why isn't there a market for them? Why do i have to drive around a planet surface in and SRV to collect iron? It's g iron! Why can't i store cargo at stations?, or just in my already stored ships? It makes no sense. and there are loads more.
It seems that all of these unrealistic game elements have been implemented for expediance. Either to drive grind, or give us a reason to use the content they have created. For example, i love the planetary landings (tho the SRV sucks) but driving around looking for basic element to harvest is so dull. There could be so much more they could do to use the planetary landing with little effort. For example, find the highest spot on a planet and you get to name it, by drilling a beacon into the ground. The next person who gets within a radius of it, get a discovered by X message or something. This would be an awesome reason to do explorations. Fly around the planet looking for what you think is the highest spot. Find the closest place to land, which might not be easy on a mountain, and find a way to drive the SRV to the top. Or missions to retrive items from a planet, with only the co-ordinates to go by. You fly there, drop down and land, get into the SRV and use the radar thingy to locate and retreive the item. Maybe when the item crash landed it is buried itself in a small crater, so it's not visable from your ship. Maybe it's was left there so it's just on the surface, so you get lucky and can spot it from your ship. You could even have high reward missions only available in open play with multiple people competing and/or fighting the retreive the item. Maybe once the item has been found and dug up it starts a homing beacon, and everyone on the mission can track it, chasing down the player trying to get it back to the station.
Give us real reason to go down to a planet surface, not grinding mats. It can be the same mechanics, i.e. park up your ship, drive around with the SRV scanner, kill some skimmers, pick something up, then you are done. Drving around looking for 5 tungsten deposit is lazy game design. Just RNG grind, and dead dull.
Or take the engineers. Currently we have to do pointless SRV havesting, or scan/combat grinding to get mats to engineer our ships. Why not have the engineers say hey i'm the best at tuning jump drives, so i'm rich from it. I don't have time to waste doing you favours. But i have a list of things i need, or things i need doing, i.e. missions (can be wacking some pirate who stole from/ him off, getting some rare commodity only available far away, or illegal, basically all the current mission types). each mission you do for him, he will tune one of your components, or some mission credits to engineering tune barter system. Atleast then we aren't just grinding mats to do engineering, we do missions, with an actually purpose. And maybe the missions are non-negotiable, forcing player to do mission types outside of their comfort zones, and missions aren't just selected to maximum return. I.e. my brother watched a galatic history program last night about the 3105 battle of alpha whatever. Now he's bugging me to take him there. i don't have the time. If you take care of it (and bring him back safely) etc etc.
And make the missions more fun. Kill 60 pirates. really, do the same thing 60 times. it's just more grind. Why not get a mission to go and defend a mining operation. The mining company just got intel that a group of pirates are planning a raid of a mining operation. You get a private USS point on a planetary ring, drop in. There are a bunch of mining ships, there is some scripted radio mission text, then after a minute a bunch of pirate ships, or maybe a few waves of them, drop in. You have an awesome fight, clean-up, back to the station to get your cash. no RNG waiting for wanted ship to spawn in a RES, no killing 60 ships, with each kill pretty much the same. Again you could have open play only missions. one player has to kill the mining ships, the other protect them.
They have built an awesome game, but it just seems that it's half baked. My suggestiona are:
1. replace the unrealistic grind with interesting missions which give us a reason to do things.
2. focus on improving what you have already built. new ships are great, and aliens are cool etc. Love the new guardian stuff, but i would perfer the existing stuff made me feel involved in the universe, not grinding. grinding in a new ship is still grinding.
3. all please let us store cargo so we can freely switch ships .
if you got this far, thanks for reading
Long time ELite player, and it's pretty much the only game i play now. However finding the game increasing frustrating to play. Which started me thinking of why i'm getting frustrated, and i this is my concluesion, and what could be done to fix it.
A lot of people will object to my statement, so i'll start with a rebutal. I know it's a game, and it's not suppose to be realistic, but this really is (for me) the problem of the game. I don't mean the physics, or anything like that. What i mean is, why do i have to blow up trading ship to get Chemical Manipulators?, or find blown up ones in USS. Someone can make them to build the ships, so why isn't there a market for them? Why do i have to drive around a planet surface in and SRV to collect iron? It's g iron! Why can't i store cargo at stations?, or just in my already stored ships? It makes no sense. and there are loads more.
It seems that all of these unrealistic game elements have been implemented for expediance. Either to drive grind, or give us a reason to use the content they have created. For example, i love the planetary landings (tho the SRV sucks) but driving around looking for basic element to harvest is so dull. There could be so much more they could do to use the planetary landing with little effort. For example, find the highest spot on a planet and you get to name it, by drilling a beacon into the ground. The next person who gets within a radius of it, get a discovered by X message or something. This would be an awesome reason to do explorations. Fly around the planet looking for what you think is the highest spot. Find the closest place to land, which might not be easy on a mountain, and find a way to drive the SRV to the top. Or missions to retrive items from a planet, with only the co-ordinates to go by. You fly there, drop down and land, get into the SRV and use the radar thingy to locate and retreive the item. Maybe when the item crash landed it is buried itself in a small crater, so it's not visable from your ship. Maybe it's was left there so it's just on the surface, so you get lucky and can spot it from your ship. You could even have high reward missions only available in open play with multiple people competing and/or fighting the retreive the item. Maybe once the item has been found and dug up it starts a homing beacon, and everyone on the mission can track it, chasing down the player trying to get it back to the station.
Give us real reason to go down to a planet surface, not grinding mats. It can be the same mechanics, i.e. park up your ship, drive around with the SRV scanner, kill some skimmers, pick something up, then you are done. Drving around looking for 5 tungsten deposit is lazy game design. Just RNG grind, and dead dull.
Or take the engineers. Currently we have to do pointless SRV havesting, or scan/combat grinding to get mats to engineer our ships. Why not have the engineers say hey i'm the best at tuning jump drives, so i'm rich from it. I don't have time to waste doing you favours. But i have a list of things i need, or things i need doing, i.e. missions (can be wacking some pirate who stole from/ him off, getting some rare commodity only available far away, or illegal, basically all the current mission types). each mission you do for him, he will tune one of your components, or some mission credits to engineering tune barter system. Atleast then we aren't just grinding mats to do engineering, we do missions, with an actually purpose. And maybe the missions are non-negotiable, forcing player to do mission types outside of their comfort zones, and missions aren't just selected to maximum return. I.e. my brother watched a galatic history program last night about the 3105 battle of alpha whatever. Now he's bugging me to take him there. i don't have the time. If you take care of it (and bring him back safely) etc etc.
And make the missions more fun. Kill 60 pirates. really, do the same thing 60 times. it's just more grind. Why not get a mission to go and defend a mining operation. The mining company just got intel that a group of pirates are planning a raid of a mining operation. You get a private USS point on a planetary ring, drop in. There are a bunch of mining ships, there is some scripted radio mission text, then after a minute a bunch of pirate ships, or maybe a few waves of them, drop in. You have an awesome fight, clean-up, back to the station to get your cash. no RNG waiting for wanted ship to spawn in a RES, no killing 60 ships, with each kill pretty much the same. Again you could have open play only missions. one player has to kill the mining ships, the other protect them.
They have built an awesome game, but it just seems that it's half baked. My suggestiona are:
1. replace the unrealistic grind with interesting missions which give us a reason to do things.
2. focus on improving what you have already built. new ships are great, and aliens are cool etc. Love the new guardian stuff, but i would perfer the existing stuff made me feel involved in the universe, not grinding. grinding in a new ship is still grinding.
3. all please let us store cargo so we can freely switch ships .
if you got this far, thanks for reading
