I'm sorry, I'm about to ramble some more. It's all your fault.
You mean... like a degree, a work history, or a credit score? Yeah good thing we don't have anything like that in reality.
The closest equivalent to what you say is found in the codex. The rank itself doesn't express any kind of useful information. All it says is something like you destroyed a certain amount of ships in any amount of time (could be 2 months, could be 4 years), and that at some point, it has congratulated with a badge and stopped counting. Nothing like a degree, work history or even credit score.
It's obviously supposed to be a reward. It's a medal, a congratulation badge, nothing more. Not some sort of concise curriculum that helps you ponder where you are in the game.
And every badge you get (elite ranks, empire ranks) works the same way. They're just a medal and bear no useful information for yourself or other. The Codex has got you covered if you want to get a sense of achievement by the numbers.
But we could make that comparison of yours work: it would be like assuming because you had a degree in biology 20 years prior to your long career as a project manager in pharmacical software development, you're still relevant as a biologist.
My point is that such a ranking system would be relevant as a dynamic, fluctuating measure of your ongoing gameplay, and not as a meter in the UI, but expressed through interactions with the NPCs and how you seem to be perceived.
Using your analogy, your resume doesn't magically unlock every possibility forever. Interactions with enterprise and people you work with will count at least as much ; these interactions will change overtime and change your informal and actual
ranking with them (your resume will just as soon be forgotten by everyone).
but if you want to get into that then becoming an adult is learning to control yourself not learning that you have to surrender that control.
Most adults don't see an add and suddenly get compelled to buy an object because everyone has experience with buyers remorse and are capable of pausing and thinking "do i really need this? how often would i use it? what else could I get for the same investment?" Those who can't don't go very far and are generally stuck living paycheck to paycheck. Children see an add for a transformer on TV and absolutely must have it and think the world will end if they don't.
I don't think we should go into that discussion. And I'm ok to put the blame on me for having set foot in that territory, which has way too many implications to be seriously debated here. The blame for having tried to turn it into a derogatory argument and to avoid the implication, is on you though. But that's ok, this is internet, people lose their temper, I don't mind.
I'll try to make this as short as possible: first the compulsive buy was an extreme example to allude to the notion of reward and pleasure in our brains, which is a thing in adults too, and the consequences on decision making and why we play games. English is not my native language so I struggle at being clear and consise with concepts like that. So I probably should have avoided that topic. But you're just making a strawman argument putting the particular example of the compulsive buy forward.
Also, the ideal world in which you always have the time and determination to pause and question your decisions is a fantasy. Or even, the ideal world in which you would be
willing to question your motivations, like, say, the motivations behind spending time to get good at a video game or why you're even debating game features with a stranger who has no power to change the game. "Becoming an adult is learning to control yourself", that's more the teenager perspective who dreams of being superman and believe it can be done. As an adult, it would be more about "learning who I am, my strong points, my weak points and trying my best to control myself and knowing when to let go".
I know why I play Elite. It's an escape from reality and a source of pleasure shots gratified by simulated sense of achievements. If you wish to use this sentence against me to pretend you can weaken the point I make, feel free to, but you're only fooling yourself.
If I wanted to believe I'm the master of my brain, I probably wouldn't be playing that game, even less spending energy in contemplating the many ways this time sink could be improved to have me drawn even more into it instead of learning a new language or plumbing or simply improving my current skills.
But I'm not a monk so I compromise with my cravings as long as they're not detrimental to others (and myself to a certain extent), and that's about the only realistic goal I think one can have without fooling him/herself, especially when you spend some time in a forum dedicated to a video game. That's not to say you can't have the ambition of more, and maybe you should, to make sure you somehow keep your impulses in check as much as possible, but it's not the same as believing all your decisions are made rationally, all your impulses are in check, you can always be aware of all the unconscious motivations that gets in the way of any decision making process, and that you can always consciously be willing to fight them. Also with the goal of reaching total control, would come many more questions and we could easily spend the next few days unraveling that topic and all that it infers.
I'm old enough to remember playing games from the time of the original Elite. If I try to put my video games consumption in a rational perspective, I see no reason why my younger self would waste his time with those repetitive button mashing and and pixel soup of a few primary colors. Now if I'm honest, I know this was all about the pleasure shots I got from the fake sense of achievement video games provide, which is the basic reward system of every game, and which is what I was trying to touch upon to in my previous posts, probably clumsily.
Now how come what I used to find pleasurables don't seem as much now? 2 things comes to mind as I'm writing:
- The standards of video games have evolved; I need more believable environments and interactions now that I know it can be done (but I've been playing FE2 quite a long time so probably not always that important)
- I want reasonnable thrills and pleasures from my games, but growing up, that pleasure had to come through more clever game design in order to sustain the fake sense of achievements. What seemed fulfilling as a kid is probably too simplistic or not relatable as a grown-up and can't convey the sense of achievement that triggers the pleasure response we seek in games
Problem is I don't get much sense of achievement from Elite PVE experience. The system is way too simplistic for that. I get a great relaxing experience flying spaceship, pretending to be a good spaceship pilot, but the universe around feels dead which makes my game experience feels disconnected from this world.
The Elite series has always had the same shortcomings, and offered the same friction for me: one aspect gives me immense pleasure, and most everything else utterly frustrates me, as it fails to provide that precious sense of achievement or worse, gets in the way. But what it does well, it does best in its niche, so I come back to it for that, despite what frustrates me. And I try to understand what I find frustrating, despite me wanting to love it.
What worries me, is that I had almost the same ratio of pleasure/disappointments playing FE2 than playing ED, the latter feeling almost like a graphical upgrade of the former (it's obviously a bit more than that). But ED is way too recent to feel like a game from the 90s, despite all it does good.
Elite is a sandbox where you set your own goal.
I agree with the premise of that sentence. But
sandbox and
goal need some contextualization. The game design is what flesh out that sandbox and what determines the goals you can set realistically. You can't set
any goal. You can set any goal gameplay allows you to.
What you can do in that sandbox is fly a spaceship in the milky way and either fight other ships, mine resources, visit systems that are far away from human civilization. Now the main ingame
goal, the only one really as implied by the game mecanisms, is to get better equipments (ships, modules) so that you can do any of the aforementioned activities, whether you want to do them all or just a couple. To achieve that, you have to go through what is supposed to be some kind of game design/challenges (however you wanna call it) which are: increase the number in your ingame bank account, the number in your material and data banks, the number in your reputation ranks with an empire and/or another. Increase numbers to get new gears that makes you better at increasing the numbers. Once you're done increasing numbers... Well... You're on you're own, the BGS and its NPCs won't do anything to trigger your imagination or any sense of achievement.
Now, a player's imagination can wrap all this in a more interesting narrative. But basically there's no interaction with the gameworld: NPCs are glorified interfaces to the game database.
Interestingly, that's also how you can define the previous versions of the game.
There is almost nothing in the game that properly rewards you for anything. Spending an afternoon getting to fleet admiral isn't an accomplishment and is a very different system to the carrier ranks. One sucks and is a tedious grind just to do what you want (assuming you want any of the ships/permits) and the other gives you nothing after the first elite. Other than a representation of how you have played the game since you started your account.
I agree with that whole paragraph which is basically what I had said, except with the last sentence (and it took me way more than an afternoon to get to admiral!).
Hell, you can become an Elite explorer without leaving the bubble! The Elite rank doesn't express any history of your successes. It's really
just a trophy or medal. Not even an actual ingame medal your avatar could wear on his/her chest (for military ranks I mean)!
I'm pretty sure the Elite rank is supposed to be the reward that provides the sense of achievement which triggers the pleasure system of our brains, and nothing more. It was fine for a procedurally generated static universe on a BBC Micro or even an Atari ST, but it's bit irrelevant in a universe that has a "dynamic" BGS. But I understand you don't see it that way. Any sense of achievement related to that very quickly fades away.
At least, we agree on the idea that the ranking system is not a good incentive for playing the game.
Now the point of the suggestion we're commenting was to flesh out some gameplay around a reputation system and criminal behaviors. It proposed the approach of using a rank as a way to flesh out the consequence of illegal player's behaviors. In a nutshell, my response was saying : if the game can evolve to take players behaviors into account, please don't use a rank to express that notion, but rather more expressive interactions with NPCs; let's try to make a more lifelike PVE experience.
"other elite games used them this way" is irrelevant you said yourself those were just single player games built with a very different goal in mind to elite.
Well no, they're basically the same. Very comparable to what I experienced playing Frontier Elite 2 at least. Apart from the multiplayer aspects, which is mostly an anti-piracy dongle with the bare minimum in terms of multiplayer features, and which, at times, to me, almost feels like a game in the game but which logically suffers in parallel from the same problem as the core game ; namely: the PVE experience. I'm not interested enough in PVP so that it could compensate for that.
The PVE experience in ED feels exactly like it did in FE2. Odyssey will improve on that a little bit, by adding variety. But I fear missions, factions, npcs are going to feel as mechanically cold and lifeless as before.
I am fine with just flying around, buying ships. But the problem is when the game pretends to engage you in something and really does nothing with it. ED does that a lot, like the thargoids invasion, the rivalry between empires, different factions with differents political philosophies, etc.
It's like some wallpaper you don't like but can't change, so you just have to try and ignore it every time you enter the room; but it's always in the back of your mind, and sometimes depending on the light or what you're doing, you can't help but noticing.
Watching numbers and gauges that never have any actual impact on your interaction with the gameworld isn't gameplay to me and therefore not even a very useful information.
