Update Dev Update - 16.04.2015

[OxKing]

Beyond that we will have low and high intensity resource extraction sites. At low intensity sites there is lower output for mining, but also a heavier system authority presence and lower pirate presence. For the high intensity sites this is reversed, so is more dangerous with more pirates and less security, but also greater rewards for mining there.

You always think in game play matters, not in what would make sense in a realistic universe.
Why should there be fewer police units in higher valuable areas? This sounds pathetic.
I hope those two types of RES are not in the same Asteroid Belt or Ring, because this would make it even more awkward.
A higher output in anarchic systems along with more pirates there would be fine. But please, don't put it together the illogical way i mentioned above.
The whole game is mostly screaming GAME MECHANIC all over it. It is noticeable in so many areas of the game that you try to regulate and preventing players from doing things
and limit their abilities on all corners. (Capped rare goods, trading profits, amount of ore in a single asteroid.) Invisible walls everywhere. It would be more fun to be in a believable universe
instead of this limited and over regulated one.

Unlike this single point of the different RES Types, all the stuff is great news. Looking forward to it!

 

[Aeos]

I want to be really excited about 1.3, really I do. Maybe once bitten twice shy?

I can't help but feel from what I'm reading here about Mining is a huge missed opportunity. As far as I understand a Miner looses efficiency by 'blazing his own trail' through the galaxy in search of that undiscovered resource site. By which I mean, the established/signposted high and low RES sites will provide more reward to them. Shame really.

While I do feel there are always missed opportunities with a lot of the updates they do, they have to make some progress to build up to those things. Within the time frame of each update they always produce quite a bit of functionality in the given time. It does suck that miners won't get as good of returns finding that random asteroid belt, but really that just depends. Pristine metallic rings already have a pretty good yield. And personally I like the idea that increased potential for interacting/risk gives increased rewards. It's not like they are nerfing how people normally mine. They are giving incentive to places where no one in their right mind would mine today and creating chances for unique player interaction.

 

[Sysmon]

You always think in game play matters, not in what would make sense in a realistic universe.
Why should there be fewer police units in higher valuable areas? This sounds pathetic.
I hope those two types of RES are not in the same Asteroid Belt or Ring, because this would make it even more awkward.
A higher output in anarchic systems along with more pirates there would be fine. But please, don't put it together the illogical way i mentioned above.
The whole game is mostly screaming GAME MECHANIC all over it. It is noticeable in so many areas of the game that you try to regulate and preventing players from doing things
and limit their abilities on all corners. (Capped rare goods, trading profits, amount of ore in a single asteroid.) Invisible walls everywhere. It would be more fun to be in a believable universe
instead of this limited and over regulated one.

Unlike this single point of the different RES Types, all the stuff is great news. Looking forward to it!

I almost agree with OxKing here! It does appear a bit one-dimensional to balance security against profitability. Ideally a site would be really attractive at first, spark some sort of lawless gold-rush condition. Then a major faction would move in and take control, upping security until the easy bits have been mined out. Otherwise a site may have some level of prospectivity, with only very occassional sweet spots. The major factions would likely appreciate receiving a steady stream of metals and minerals from those, but not really spend much effort on patrolling the sites. Someone could strike gold, so to speak, in a low-prospective site (turning it highly prospective) and the gold rush would start again leading to the first situation.

In both cases, the low-high risk situation develops from one to the other.

The system now is static, it seems, and mature - that is, the security vs mining profit has already balanced out.

A bit more dynamics on the fringes would be great: A "free" economy would have minimal profit margins in the busiest central regions, but large profits to be made on the periphery although possibly at smaller quantities of goods. Rare goods should stay rare, or they wouldn't be eventually, as the market gets saturated.

Of course, changing to a more dynamic galaxy would not change things for many, as they would run for the latest online trade tool, rush all to the same routes, and wonder (and becry) why everything has flatlined.

S

 

[Viajero]

And personally I like the idea that increased potential for interacting/risk gives increased rewards. It's not like they are nerfing how people normally mine. They are giving incentive to places where no one in their right mind would mine today and creating chances for unique player interaction.

This.

While I agree with the apparent lack of suspension of disbelief (it would be nice for example if a majority of high yield low security sites happened to be actually in low security, anarchic systems or similar) at least it seems as if the main goal was to generate or increase those opportunities for interaction and trade off decisions in gameplay.

Realistic for some or not, FDEV seems to be producing more toys, tools, to play in the sandbox. Either way lets have a go at it before we conclude anything I guess.

 

[Aeos]

You always think in game play matters, not in what would make sense in a realistic universe.
Why should there be fewer police units in higher valuable areas? This sounds pathetic.
I hope those two types of RES are not in the same Asteroid Belt or Ring, because this would make it even more awkward.
A higher output in anarchic systems along with more pirates there would be fine. But please, don't put it together the illogical way i mentioned above.
The whole game is mostly screaming GAME MECHANIC all over it. It is noticeable in so many areas of the game that you try to regulate and preventing players from doing things
and limit their abilities on all corners. (Capped rare goods, trading profits, amount of ore in a single asteroid.) Invisible walls everywhere. It would be more fun to be in a believable universe
instead of this limited and over regulated one.

Unlike this single point of the different RES Types, all the stuff is great news. Looking forward to it!

Well, it is a game above all. If they always choose the realistic route, the game wouldn't be very enjoyable. You can think about it this way: High Profit increases pirates want to be in an area, this is realistic. Security Vessels are costly, contesting these high areas isn't feasible as there are more pirates than security vessels. Instead of supplying their own security in these high risk areas, the bounties they placed on the pirates is enough to give incentive to commanders and bounty hunters to pick up the risk the security forces don't want to take. It's kind of how the military hires mercenaries to do missions or hold areas they don't want to put their own soldiers into. Seems pretty realistic to me.

 

[Pinworm45]

This is great info. I'm so happy with your guys work on patching. When the game released I said "it needs something to better group players, for a more social experience" and then community goals came out. Then I said "the game needs to be a lot more intuitive and better about grouping with other players" and Wings came out and (more or less) perfected a simplified, intuitive and good grouping experience.

Now I've been saying the mission system needs to be overhauled, mining needs improvements. And that's what the focus is.

It's really, really nice that you guys are seeing where the game needs improvement and are going all-out with said improvements. I'm so glad I spent 150$ on this game and that it's only continuing to get better

PS: About consumable drones. While initially that makes you think "ugh station restocking", it's actually kind of clever when you think about it.. The fact that they fill inventory slots means that you reserve that slot to pick up an item. You NEED it anyway. AND you'd need to go to a station when you were full on inventory and out of drones.. So really that's actually okay, and will work fine. I'd still also be okay with it not being consumable, that might be nicer, but this will work fine too and I think is less of a deal than people suspect.

 

[Dejay]

Two new mining minerals are being added – painite and osmium. There will also be a bonus in created minerals or metals when mining at resource extraction sites.

Sounds "gamey" and not plausible. Why can't I find a good mining spot for myself?

Ideally I would love a more realistic and fluid approach. Someone (NPC or Player) find a good mining spot with high concentration. You see ships converging at that position from supercruise. There is no "special marker" to mark the RES it's just an emergent property of the simulation. I love emergent gameplay. For example players or factions could try to defend the RES so they can mine it without competition. Or repeated distress calls will call in more police.

I also hope that painite and osmium won't be low grade stuff because then they only make mining worse (lower yield and longer search times for profitable asteroids).

 

[Nikonthenet]

You always think in game play matters, not in what would make sense in a realistic universe.
Why should there be fewer police units in higher valuable areas? This sounds pathetic.
I hope those two types of RES are not in the same Asteroid Belt or Ring, because this would make it even more awkward.
A higher output in anarchic systems along with more pirates there would be fine. But please, don't put it together the illogical way i mentioned above.
The whole game is mostly screaming GAME MECHANIC all over it. It is noticeable in so many areas of the game that you try to regulate and preventing players from doing things
and limit their abilities on all corners. (Capped rare goods, trading profits, amount of ore in a single asteroid.) Invisible walls everywhere. It would be more fun to be in a believable universe
instead of this limited and over regulated one.

Unlike this single point of the different RES Types, all the stuff is great news. Looking forward to it!

'High Intensity' is such a misleading title. If only it was the other way round...
What i mean is, a Low intensity site suggests it is frequented less by miners(and also police), so there is more material there to mine.
I agree with your sentiment tho.

 

[geoffrey.hdt]

SI also hope that painite and osmium won't be low grade

There is some on earth! Everybody head to SOL! Wait, leave the game and go search for some for real!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painite

More "seriously", painite sells for average 33k and i expect osmium to be pretty high since it is close to platinum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmium

 

[InMemoriamSirocco]

Great Stuff.

Although i'm interested in power play......I'm really looking for something.....anything about landing on planets and how development is progressing.

Come back next year then... seriously. Implementing planetary landings is basically the same as programming a whole additional game and merging it with what we already have. Even just landing on outposts and stations - with enough content on board those stations that it actually makes sense to leave the ship, and not only to have a look around, but to actually DO stuff that matters there - would require a LOT of development time.

Back on topic: The more I read about this powerplay update, the more excited I get. I have a feeling this will become a major game changer, in the literal sense of the word. And, as far as I can tell, in a very good way.

Michael, may I suggest an official video tutorial (series?) explaining the changes and how things in the game work post-upgrade? A lot of players will have to throw their current experience overboard and learn many steps in the game anew. Might be a good idea to point them in the right direction...

 

[mossfoot]

Sounds "gamey" and not plausible. Why can't I find a good mining spot for myself?

I partly agree with this sentiment but only in the following fashion:

In populated space it's fair to say the best places to mine are already known, and these get marked on the map. Fair enough, I don't see that as gamey. But what if you discovered a new planet with a metal-rich ring... shouldn't you have a way of finding an RES within it to get the most out of it? Using the Detailed Surface Scanner on the ring itself to reveal them?

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

I have always been disappointed with USSs (another 'obvious' placeholder in the beta that is still there). The underlying problem, IMHO, is that FD did not get Supercruise quite right (or, more likely, did not finish it). We have 3 travel modes ('normal', 'SC' and hyperspace), and the 'big thing' about SC was that it truly enabled an environment where players could go anywhere: just point in the right direction and away you go, and thus avoided the dreaded 'rooms in space' that the DDF were so vehemently against. (Of course, the P2P instancing design does force a certain level of 'rooms in space' with, at best, players being passed from one instance to another if they just fly off in a random direction.)

The big problem to me was always the transition from SC to normal flight, and the information that you need to make appropriate decisions. At first sight, it would be good to be able to see 'smaller objects' (i.e. ships, spaceports, etc., not planets) that are not in SC from SC, to help on drop decisions. But it just cannot really work because even the slowest SC speed is so incredibly quick compared to normal travel and small objects (you travel the drop distance to a spaceport in much less than a second even at the slowest SC speed). Nevertheless, being able to 'see what is there outside SC' seems to me to be important.

... And that's really what a USS should be. Some sort of indication that there is something there. Those somethings could, and should, be all sorts of things. If a CMDR has dropped out of SC (to avoid a potential interdiction, to go make a cuppa, to log off, etc., etc) why are they not visible to other CMDRs who are 'close enough'? Why can I see a USS (which might have a single spaceship in it) from 50LS away, but not see the CMDR I was chasing who just dropped out of SC and is thus much closer to me?

Ideally all these things should be brought together into a coherent whole. But it needs the background sim/persistent NPCs/persistent other stuff too that is not there yet. Once it is, if it ever is, then a USS should end up being just some sort of persistent (or reasonably persistent - I have no problem with things vanishing after a while (like floating cargo decays), especially if no one is around to see it vanish) object that should be visible to you if you are near enough. I would very much prefer that those reasonably persistent objects were not unique to a player, but visible to all in the same instance, assuming they are in the right place to be able to 'see' them. But that also bumps up against the instancing model, and that is still not 'right', and may never be, in that what is happening in one instance is not known to another instance that happens to be in the same place. Hence the stories we hear about instancing bugs where players can be shooting a ship whose CMDR thinks is in another instance, and so cannot understand where the damage is coming from. And also the stupid work around of going into solo to get a pad to land on when a spaceport is full in your instance. So fixing all of this in a coherent way is not trivial. But, really, 'random USSs that pop up obviously 'just for you' are naff.

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

Sounds "gamey" and not plausible. Why can't I find a good mining spot for myself?

You should be able to, of course. But why do RESs even exist (ignoring the gamey reason for now)? Why in the vast expanse of potentially minable rocky bits in a planet's ring, are there a couple of identified, named on system charts, etc., RESs? The only plausible non-gamey reason is that they have been looked at and identified as being much better for finding the stuff that you want to mine than a typical random section of the ring. So if you go off by yourself and just try your luck, you should usually expect to find less good stuff to mine than at the RES. But, of course, there should be a chance that you could (literally) strike gold, just not a very high chance.

 

[Jezzah]

@annuverscot.

Im the same I detest the USS system for the reasons you give there as well as others which people have spoken of ad nauseum. Sadly I think that the power play update is not going to change the system to something better the suggestions for which are littered on this forum also ad nauseum.

The fact that Brookes has said that targets for Mission killing are now being shifted from wonky uss systems into having to pull them from SC indicates that they haven't rehashed the USS system to me. This is a stop gap that will assist with the current issues I suppose.

Just what are the developers intentions for in-system exploration, whatever about travelling a gazillion light years to some far flung system, id like to hear about them coming up with a much deeper system for finding things in the system once you get there or if your not an explorer geek then finding things in systems a few light years from achenar.

 

[Riekopo]

Using the drones requires a module slot and cargo space? This just seems stupid to me.

 

[heartorhead]

So what happen if I drop in the middle of a ring and not in a RES ? How will this be calculated ?

The same as it is now.

Michael

What if I drop at RES and fly away 50-100 km?
What is RES radius?

 

[Nyres]

Hi everyone,

This week has seen the release of the latest Mac beta build. As always I’d like to thank everyone testing the build and providing feedback – it is much appreciated and please continue to do so! The Mac team are currently focused exclusively on the Mac build in isolation, but in a few weeks we’ll run a combined Mac and PC crossplay test. I’ll post more details on that as we approach that test.

We’re only one week away from the Powerplay announcement, but in the meantime I have more ancillary goodness that will form part of the update alongside the new features. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the new drones that are coming and I have one more to tell you about – the prospector drone. This can be fired off to investigate an asteroid and determine its metal/mineral composition. Like all of the other drones (and limpets) each unit occupies a cargo slot and requires an appropriate module to control the type. So you need a cargo hatch breaker module and a collection drone controller to deploy either of those types of drone. The drones are universal and it is up to the controller to determine the actions of the launched drone.

While it does make some of the mining gameplay easier the main reason for adding the drones is to provide scalability for mining (in particular) thus making the larger ships more useful in that role. I also mentioned that there would be more love for mining beyond the new drones and here it is. Two new mining minerals are being added – painite and osmium. There will also be a bonus in created minerals or metals when mining at resource extraction sites. Beyond that we will have low and high intensity resource extraction sites. At low intensity sites there is lower output for mining, but also a heavier system authority presence and lower pirate presence. For the high intensity sites this is reversed, so is more dangerous with more pirates and less security, but also greater rewards for mining there.

It’s not all about miners of course. Continuing from last week’s details on the new mission system there’s another change that I can tell you about. Currently targets for missions are found in USSs (Unidentified Signal Sources), this will remain the case for some targets, but others like assassination targets will have to be hunted down in supercruise before they can be taken out.

Thanks!

Michael

I have one concern about the hunting down targets in supercruise, currently in my experience its very hard if not impossible for me and possibly others to be able to interdict npcs that are above the mostly harmless/novice range. As npcs they would inherently be be better than any player being able to avoid interdiction. Is there anything that can be done to avoid being stonewalled in Rank progression if the interdiction proves to be impossible for some people?

 

[sqzbox1]

Replaced with what? USS is quite solid concept, it needs to be fleshed out and be more consistent (and it gets more consistent with each release). How else you indicate something happening in space?

Totally agree Pecisk. The USS's come from stuff sitting in normal space whilst you are in in SC - makes perfect sense that the radar can detect SOMETHING but not get detail. This is the same as original Elite too BTW and it was fine. By adding low and high strength to them they become actually quite usable. I fail to see the problem and can't understand why a few people seem to think it is really bad. I think it is really good, and as a game mechanic, quite creative. Works for me!

 

[CMDR Nash]

The situation hasn't changed since last week, it's being looked into and is likely to take a few weeks to sort out.

Michael

Thank you, that's all we ask for Keep up the amazing work!

 

[knowles2]

I'm glad Frontier are spending time integrating super cruise further into the game and allowing us to track targets in SC. Hopefully one day we will be able to track them leaving and arriving at stations, outposts and planets and through multiple systems.