Do you want ED 2 or an Expansion?

[Jmanis]

That's not even close to correct, sorry. I was there. The first real nerfing seemed as the cheapest response for them to deal with negative steam reviews. This was back in 2016, in the days where you needed to play (well i needed to) about 40 hours before you could afford an asp explorer, then go do the (best experience available in gaming) robigo run, upping your credits to about 20-30 million per hour, with a minimum 2-4 hour commitment. Why this was insane was that a really sizeable part of the elite community LIKED how it was... maybe 30-40% on reddit given replies? History is can only be seen from the side that won?

I'd elaborate on this a tiny bit in that I don't ever think Robigo was a nerf[1]... rather, it was a fix, and a poorly-thought out one that tracks with, frankly, the entire history of ED's development around the mission system. Whether it was mission stacking (skimmers, powerplant destruction, beacon scanning), commodity changes (leading to ridiculously-high-paying transport missions), Rhea passenger missions, or Robigo slave runs, as much as the community enjoyed them, they were very obviously never intentional... rather, they were oversights in the development of the mission board.

Yes, people enjoyed the activities (mostly because they paid orders of magnitude more than other activities, but some enjoyed them for the activity), but the problem is when an enjoyable activity exists on the basis of a bug, the reality is you just can't let the bug sit there, otherwise it will bite you later on (And it has done on numerous occasions for FD).

There's a really great example of this in Satisfactory (and the correct dev response) with a thing called cheat-crete (1:50 in particular for this topic).

Spoiler: Cheat-crete

In earlier versions of Satisfactory, when placing anything in the game, you couldn't clip things (i.e have objects intersect, at all. This could lead to some pretty infuriating situations where you were trying to place a conveyor belt in clearly open space, but it wouldn't work. Something to do with collision bounding boxes... I won't go down that path right now.

Cheat-crete was a side-effect of a buggy bounding box with one of the concrete foundations, meaning you could clip it, and use that as the snap point for other objects which, because it was snapping to the unclipped thing, would . This led to a whole bunch of people being able to do some really cool architecture, including circle architecture which (was) not possible by-default.

But it was a bug, and CSS knew that, so in one update, it got fixed. And people hated that. So what they then did was:

• Undo the fix in a patch; and
• Fix the bug, and formalised the loved mechanic in an actual, intended mechanic.

This resulted in the introduction of new clip mechanics called soft and hard clipping, where the general gist is major elements still can't clip (hard clipping), but many other elements, particularly those used for decorative effects, or functional pieces with fiddly alignments, you can now clip freely (soft clipping). You get a warning, but it puts the power of doing ridiculous things (or not) into the users hands.

The bug (or rather, oversight) with Robigo was that the original populated galaxy had no remote outposts (like Robigo)... everything was less than 30 or so light years apart. And so mission generation contexts were unbounded... when selecting a target for a mission it was certain you'd guarantee to have a couple target systems to use for missions.

So of course, the problem was when we put up a couple places that were remote by comparison, they'd go "grab the nearest systems" which were 150-odd LY away. Not a problem, until you realise that the tooling for those missions is tied to that distance (reward, type etc) and you end up in weird edge-cases which don't make sense and your balance goes out the window like, in Robigo's case, a mission board near-completely full of slave smuggling missions. This issue is indistinct from the extant issue regarding stacking delivery missions, where only one consumer exists "within range" and so every delivery mission targets that system... there's a bunch of reasons why this is a problem.

So FD "fixed" this, by capping the range of systems to look as mission targets. This was a problem, because it led to a huge amount of stations (even some within the original bubble) now losing all missions from the board. That is, Robigo wasn't nerfed, FD just fixed a bug that needed fixing.

What FD failed to do in unlike the CSS case though was recognise this was a well liked mechanic (being able to do long-range smuggling missions[2]), and implement an actual mechanic around the generation of good-paying long-range smuggling missions so they could occur organically around the galaxy, rather than just as an edge-case byproduct of a poorly designed mechanic.

There's so many examples of this happening through the game's development... It's why I said originally; No expansion, no sequel, just iterate on the current mechanics to actually use them better, and the same goes for the mission board generations.

Side note: The funny part of all this is the bugs generally lead to the fun gameplay that people are after... but because it's a bug, bug gets fixed, and activity ceases. There's a distinct lack of holistic vision at play here.

[1] You can tell it was a bugfux rather than a targeted nerf because the impact went well beyond just Robigo

[2] Noting there was still the bug they had to fix where you could simply sell the slaves at Robigo, fly to a system a jump away from the target system, buy a bunch of slaves and hand them in... thus, mission cargo was born.

 

[Senzafine]

I seem to be in a minority of one here, but I just want improved planetary generation. Much more geologically realistic looking and varied landscapes on each planet and moon. Of course there are limits as to what can realistically be modelled with todays tech but surely we can do better than landscapes that often look like melted cheese or bizarre spikes? Thicker atmospheres, water, proc. generated fauna and flora would all be great of course, but they'll all look and work better with more believable looking terrain.
Shallow perhaps, prefering graphics over gameplay, but as a pure explorer I'm really only here for the spectacle and wonder.
Space Engine is no substitute either, planetary generation is unimpressive and it doesn't have the flight model and soundscape of ED. No where near the same level of immersion. NMS is too cartoony. For now ED is the closest to what I want, don't particularly care whether it takes an expansion or reworking in a new engine for its potential to be fully realised.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

@karrde sun
Do you remember robigo being exploited?

 

[Ian Skippy]

Excuse me, what? lol.
"I don't want the company that created this game to have anything to do with the game they created, because imo they can't develop." is what I read from that.
And that's hilarious af.

On topic:
Expansion.

Pretty much all key people that developed ED 1.0 left ages ago, and Frontier has been releasing shoddy flop after shoddy flop for years now. Logos don't develop games, people do. And FDs output has been pretty hopeless for a long time now.

It's not "hilarious af", it's pretty sad.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

@karrde sun
Do you remember robigo being exploited?

No.. only refreshing the mission boards to get the best fills for your cargo hold. If there was anything more game breaking done i didn't know about it.

..... If you do mean mission boards... lol.. the people who were boasting about 40-60 million per run always forgot to mention that you could be stuck in the station for an extra.. 30/40/60 minutes while waiting for the board to refresh... and thats not including the minimum 20-30 mins just to fill up non optimised.. Actually getting 40+ million an hour was the dumbest idea ever, unless you wanted to brag about it.

 

[HappySpaceInvdr]

maintaining someone else's code who is now long gone is often much harder than maintaining your own code that you know inside and out, which is why I personally think an entirely new rewrite (using tried and true techniques of the original) would be better than to continue building on layers of old code. Someone struggling to work with the "old code" might actually write brilliant new code if given a chance.

Working with a legacy code base written by someone else... I'm a software developer, and this is the absolute worst part of the job, if ever it lands one your desk. Particularly when the original author has not practised "Clean Code"... grrr.

/shudder

 

[HappySpaceInvdr]

Unless it's rewritten from the ground up (including the Stellar Forge), we'll never get rid of that ridiculous skybox bug when travelling the galactic core, or that weird column devoid of any neutron stars up towards Beagal Point. And we'll never get proper realistic black holes.

So my vote, as an explorer, is for ED2.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

I'd elaborate on this a tiny bit in that I don't ever think Robigo was a nerf[1]... rather, it was a fix, and a poorly-thought out one that tracks with, frankly, the entire history of ED's development around the mission system. Whether it was mission stacking (skimmers, powerplant destruction, beacon scanning), commodity changes (leading to ridiculously-high-paying transport missions), Rhea passenger missions, or Robigo slave runs, as much as the community enjoyed them, they were very obviously never intentional... rather, they were oversights in the development of the mission board.

I loved all of those yes. Once you got sick of being dumb though, and worked out those features yourself.. the most time i spent in elite was realising that those conditions could occur in more places than just the ones the community had found and was playing follow the leader with... for so many months, my main play session was doing an eddb query for the right station and economy type and going EXPLORING in the bubble to see if the conditions would create a goldrush. The side benefit of giving the bubble a purpose added so much to the game world as well, there was always a reason to stop by any station in any system to see if it had stacking missions. This compounded with the visuals and the flight experience.. it was great.

See i thought they broke it for another reason.. the mission dispenser worked in realtime, and the more broad (generalisation) the template, the more time it took to calculate the results. Remember for a brief period people were complaining about the mission board taking 30+ seconds to load missions? I don't know for certain, but in my memory, the goldrushes going away was correlated with the mission board performance fixes. I'm reasonably sure i was actually doing that game at the time, and overnight it was just removed.

Can't play one game forever i guess. But really.. every station had a point back then if you cared about it.. currently they have the same boring template, all the stations became invisible. The last time i played elite, stations were literally only there for new players, power play, and roleplay. And they all look the same. /sigh.

 

[Jmanis]

I loved all of those yes. Once you got sick of being dumb though, and worked out those features yourself.. the most time i spent in elite was realising that those conditions could occur in more places than just the ones the community had found and was playing follow the leader with... for so many months, my main play session was doing an eddb query for the right station and economy type and going EXPLORING in the bubble to see if the conditions would create a goldrush. The side benefit of giving the bubble a purpose added so much to the game world as well, there was always a reason to stop by any station in any system to see if it had stacking missions. This compounded with the visuals and the flight experience.. it was great.

I can totally get behind that conceptually... but for me the issue was that the correct conditions were, in most cases, completely incongruent with the way the BGS is intended to function.

For example; massacre stacking[1]. If that were to be the "gold rush state", it should be viable because a system is experiencing a Pirate Attack, Lockdown, Civil Unrest or other security crisis causing lawful factions to focus on knocking down (unaffiliated[2]) criminals within that system. Instead, ideal massacre stacking occurs where there is only one anarchy faction within 10Ly (or 20? Been a while...) of the system you're picking up that mission. The irony being that in the current implementation, the ideal conditions for a bounty hunter occur where there is a distinct absence of pirate activity, instead of an abundance, which makes no sense whatsoever in game where the main loop for bounty hunting is "Kill pirate, get bounty, repeat".

Much like Robigo slave runs, my main issue with that situation was not that it was a thing, but that it was impossible for it to occur in most other places of the galaxy, where it would actually be entirely reasonable for mid-range missions to exist anywhere in the populated galaxy. I do get that that might "dilute" unique circumstances that occur around the galaxy, but I also think there's better ways to organically make that happen through procedural mechanics.

[1] Though fundamentally, I'd see them replaced with wave-based combat using scenarios undertaken at Mission USS, but that's not relevant here
[2] The problem being massacre stacking targets Anarchy factions exclusively... for stateful situations, especially where an anarchy faction may not be present in the system where a faction experiences this, it should be targeting an unaffiliated "criminal" faction, such that the effects are not as pronounced on anarchy factions like they currently are.

 

[ethelred]

If we're in Dreamland which I suppose this question takes us to, I prefer to see updated gameplay loops for a whole variety of activities.

Necessarily that would be different game compared to what we have now.

That could be done with the current game, but would involve a galaxy wide reset.

They could legacy up the old game if people who left the game years ago started crying about losing their inappropriately named "first finder" tags.

I think ed2 is more likely than that though .

 

[Ian Doncaster]

If you look at the sort of sales games like Starfield, Star Citizen and No Mans sky are pullling in compared to Elite its clear this IP has a tonne of untapped potential for Fdev.

Tricky one.

NMS and Starfield are both much more heavily focused on walking around outside your ship - planet surfaces, etc. - rather than the spaceship flying experience. You can play NMS for hours or even days without ever entering your spaceship by using exocraft and the various sorts of teleporters to get about; there's certainly not a huge amount to do inside the spaceship by comparison other than being a more convenient way to travel.

All the other games which are more focused on the spaceship-flying side have significantly fewer sales than ED - X4 is reasonably popular but not as much, Star Citizen has less than half ED's sales (sure, it does better at attracting the rare players who'll pay high 3-figures or more for a game, so it gets a lot more money out of them on average, but on player count it's nowhere near), everything else is much more niche than that to the point where it doesn't even make it into comparisons here. There's not much evidence that there's a big pool of "people who like games about flying spaceships" out there still to get.

I don't think it'd be reasonably possible to refocus Elite 5 on "not flying the spaceship" sufficiently to tap that bigger market without also getting to the point where calling it "Elite 5" would be incredibly misleading.

Come to think of it maybe we should all just buy up all the stock and become the shareholders

Even at the current historically low price, that would cost you a nominal £88 million, and in practice somewhat more because you'd need to convince people who've bought or are holding the stock at the current price to sell. You'd only need half of that, of course, to get a majority of the shares and be able to replace the Board - but even then, that's still going to be quite a bit of money since if we assume that Braben and Tencent won't sell to you, you need to buy pretty much all the rest.

If you could accumulate that sort of money, it would be considerably more efficient to use it to make your own game development company, hire a bunch of programmers, and get them to make the space game you want.

 

[Lunchmoney]

As a LEPer, expansion

 

[mearmortal]

I'd like to see some stuff fixed, like the missions for scanning obelisks, and others alike that have been broken for years.
I'd like to see a few new ships, maybe an explorer type vessel where you can have your SLF & SRV together, were you can have the extras we all want in one ship and off out in the black.

I'd like to be able to walk into the ship and reach the cockpit.
I'd like more NPC's to interact with, and less of the 'Your in my personal space' attitude and comments.
Those NPC's don't always have to offer you jobs that are illegal either.

Not everything in the galaxy has to be stolen to be obtained, maybe we can purchase the Data/Chemicals/Tech etc. we need with in game credits, what else can we do with the billions we have.

We should be able to land on an Earth World by now, we should be able to fly low over a water world and land on those Ice flows at the poles.

The reality is I don't think the expertise is there to be able to do this anymore, a lot of there key designers have left for one reason or another, and I get the feeling they just don't have the skill base to work on the 'older' code aspects.

These are my thoughts on what I could see helping the game as it is.

 

[Rat Catcher]

and less of the 'Your in my personal space' attitude and comments.

I just ensure that those with this attitude experience a zero survival sitiation at the end of a discharged firearm.

Not everything in the galaxy has to be stolen to be obtained

True, but why buy when you can steal?

The reality is I don't think the expertise is there to be able to do this anymore

More "there is no budget", might be more accurate, possibly?

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Much like Robigo slave runs, my main issue with that situation was not that it was a thing, but that it was impossible for it to occur in most other places of the galaxy, where it would actually be entirely reasonable for mid-range missions to exist anywhere in the populated galaxy. I do get that that might "dilute" unique circumstances that occur around the galaxy, but I also think there's better ways to organically make that happen through procedural mechanics.

Just in case.. it did.. not exactly the same thing as robigo, but i did find independently a number of stations that offered mid range (~150ly) stackable transport missions.

I get your point about missions should be associated with the pmf government..

Hang on i'm pretty sure they were at one point. It was government (industry) and economy, and the luck of the draw of how many of the required destination government / economy was available in range. It wasn't an advertised fact, but it did work maybe 2.2-2.4? I remember in 2.1 the mission board started getting interesting, actually connected to the bgs, then 2.2 even more so.. then some point after that they turned it off, drastically reduced the consideration, for performance reasons? Im guessing ian can confirm. Pretty sure there was some discussion about this around the time.

The super extreme cases required bases outside the bubble sure, but what i was suggesting earlier was it actually was connected to the bgs for a while.

The best places for these were in the far south imperial systems, for me anyway.

 

[Alec Turner]

I seem to be in a minority of one here, but I just want improved planetary generation. Much more geologically realistic looking and varied landscapes on each planet and moon. Of course there are limits as to what can realistically be modelled with todays tech but surely we can do better than landscapes that often look like melted cheese or bizarre spikes? Thicker atmospheres, water, proc. generated fauna and flora would all be great of course, but they'll all look and work better with more believable looking terrain.
Shallow perhaps, prefering graphics over gameplay, but as a pure explorer I'm really only here for the spectacle and wonder.
Space Engine is no substitute either, planetary generation is unimpressive and it doesn't have the flight model and soundscape of ED. No where near the same level of immersion. NMS is too cartoony. For now ED is the closest to what I want, don't particularly care whether it takes an expansion or reworking in a new engine for its potential to be fully realised.

Nope, me too. Whether it be ED2 or an expansion, better terrain generation (and I'm one of those who still think that, behind the window dressing of blue skies and rocks, 3.8 terrain is better than 4.0 terrain) would be very high on my list of requirements.

 

[aRJay]

They should update therir engine and make an expansion(andromeda galaxy or magellan clouds/outpost building). Build up such a game from scrath wont be good for Elite and FDev.

Seeing as we have done so little in the existing galaxy I see very little point in adding more billions of locations.

The attraction of having to look after and manage what amounts to a customised but stuck in one location fleet carrier escapes me, OK it might be fun for a day or so building the thing after you had finished acquiring all the mats to get the modules to assemble it but after that?

 

[aRJay]

I seem to be in a minority of one here, but I just want improved planetary generation.

Not just that but I would love improvements there.

Much more geologically realistic looking and varied landscapes on each planet and moon.

Actually while I would like that what I would love is the terrain to create itself quicker and further away from me at least get all the heights and shapes sorted earlier. I am convinced a quarter of my collisions with the ground are not due to me losing height but the ground growing up into my ships path.
Having to stop and weight for rocks and bios etc to decide whether or not to appear can get old quite fast.

Of course there are limits as to what can realistically be modelled with todays tech but surely we can do better than landscapes that often look like melted cheese or bizarre spikes? Thicker atmospheres, water, proc. generated fauna and flora would all be great of course, but they'll all look and work better with more believable looking terrain.

Yes but until we get such atmospheres and life I am less convinced of the wrongness of the geology we see, after all we have few examples of terrain unaffected at any point by significant quantities of liquid or atmosphere.

Shallow perhaps, prefering graphics over gameplay, but as a pure explorer I'm really only here for the spectacle and wonder.

Perhaps not that shallow after all there are other gameplay styles than explorer that interact with planets.

Space Engine is no substitute either, planetary generation is unimpressive and it doesn't have the flight model and soundscape of ED. No where near the same level of immersion. NMS is too cartoony. For now ED is the closest to what I want, don't particularly care whether it takes an expansion or reworking in a new engine for its potential to be fully realised.

 

[VR Cmdr Paine]

ED 2 built on unity/Unreal and stick to the kickstarters vision

 

[Jmanis]

I get your point about missions should be associated with the pmf government..

Hang on i'm pretty sure they were at one point. It was government (industry) and economy, and the luck of the draw of how many of the required destination government / economy was available in range. It wasn't an advertised fact, but it did work maybe 2.2-2.4? I remember in 2.1 the mission board started getting interesting, actually connected to the bgs, then 2.2 even more so.. then some point after that they turned it off, drastically reduced the consideration, for performance reasons? Im guessing ian can confirm. Pretty sure there was some discussion about this around the time.

Depends what you define as distinct and varied. I'm going to say some things about State, Economy and Government effects, then throw a caveat at the end which comes back to that definition of distinct and varied.

State - The most impactful, as it should be. Lots of flavour text changes, so "Courier Data" becomes "Strategic Data Transfer" in war, "Deliver X goods" becomes "Boom time delivery" in war. Massacres obviously have some fundamental changes, and some mission types won't spawn in certain states, and things like Massacres will preference the war effort, rather than pirates (why war is bad for massacre stacking, go figure again). State is about the only thing that acts close to how it needs to for a dynamic, procedural system.

Economy - Has an effect, but in an obvious and mundane way. Economy changes what goods are in demand and supply... duh... and that changes what missions you might see. This might be more interesting if the economy wasn't essentially static, save for state changes which, given economic balance is a complete write-off, aren't worth chasing to exploit.
For any given economy, you'll get:

• Mining missions, if the economy has demand for mining-only goods
• Source missions, for (what seems to be a limited subset of[1]) goods in demand.
• Delivery missions, for goods it has in supply and for which there is a station within 10Ly that has it in demand.

Again, this might be interesting if the economy wasn't static, and economic balance wasn't a complete write-off. The BGS would suggest it's best to chase certain state combinations... an outbreak near an Industrial or High Tech economy means great prices on Medicines, a famine the same for food (and indeed, if you see a famine crop up near an agri economy, you may see more "Deliver food for famine' missions at that station". Any dynamicity is a direct result of states which introduce demand for otherwise non-demanded items.

But... this all doesn't matter because of the currently botched state of delivery missions which reward primarily against cargo value. What this means is that, thanks to that and the mostly static economy, the only thing that is worth doing is the equivalent of massacre stacking for deliveries; finding an Extraction economy with a single station within 10Ly that has gold as an import. This makes all delivery missions from that extraction economy target that one station for deliveries... and because rewards are based on cargo value, not tonnage, the rewards for that are huge, even despite the nerf post-mineral price tweaks where a delivery of 50t of gold would net you 50m credits... that's down to 5-10m now, but a delivery of medicines wouldn't even break a million, thanks to that nerf.

The other thing economy does is flavour missions differently; "Source Semiconductors" in an agricultural economy becomes "Industry requires semiconductors" at an industrial economy, but are functionally no different.

Government - Just changes flavour text of the different mission types. So e.g "Destroy Skimmers" becomes "Corporate Strike Against Skimmers", for a corporation... It's never fundamentally changed what types of missions are available, only the flavour. The only exception to this is Anarchy factions (or factions that are Criminal ethos under the hood, since one or two player Feudals seem to be Criminal under the hood), which results in an entirely different set of mission templates generating.

Now... caveat emptor on this whole blurb. I suspect that under the hood, Government, Economy and (definitely) state[2] have an impact on the chances of particular missions occurring. Further, it might effect things like the chances of certain mission types targeting your faction... I certainly find my deliveries tend to target corporate factions more than others, though they do occur for others.

But it's not enough, as far as I'm concerned. When you have hundreds of missions generating every 10 minutes, you can generally find what you need in any given state, without any huge variation to base functionality. This is where government type needs more impact.

For example, in a famine, currently, any government type in a famine will be filled with "Source food" missions. Instead, the mission landscape should look like this:
Criminal Ethos: Exclusively missions to hijack food transports (illegal) and smuggle stolen food... and maybe a new mission type to supply stolen food.
Corporate Ethos: Exclusively missions to buy and deliver food.
Authoritarian: Exclusively missions to destroy pirates attacking food convoys, and also seize food from transports "in the name of the state" (i.e legally)
Social: Exclusively repairing/refuelling stricken food transports, and salvaging food from shipwrecks.
Available to all: Donating food.

That's what I consider distinct and varied. This could extend to things like War states... sure fighting the war is most effective, but missions could look very different depending on the gov type... Criminal all about stealing weapons and assassinations of leadership, Authoritarian about putting down generals and warfighters (legally), Corporate about supplying weapons and taking bribes to pay off deserters, and Social about espionage and sabotage. Right now, it's just all factions get mashed with "Massacre" missions and strategic data transfers.

You could then go one step further and introduce slightly different template sets based on superpower allegience. Boom time sees Federal factions transporting goods around, while Imperial factions see you moving imperial slaves around to work the boom more (and alliance transporting kale around)

[1] Something I've noticed with basically everything about the mission boards (and it makes sense to do this)... it doesn't distribute things intelligently, because it's too inefficient to consider the whole problem space. By this i mean, if you have 20 mission templates to pick from, and 100 missions to generate, a naive first pass would go "loop 100 times to pick a random template, assign it to a random faction, with a random target and a random thing".
But if you squint, you'll see it's way more complex than that, and the BGS simply wouldn't be able to keep up... so instead I suspect it goes
"Right, pick a random template. I'm going to make anywhere between 1-20 of them. Cool, rolled 20, I need to assign 1-10 to each faction, until I run out... faction 1 gets 10, faction 2 gets 5, faction 3 gets 6... oh, i only have 5, guess the other factions miss out" which is why, despite the world of options, mission boards are generally "blobby"

[2] Given things like Election remove Massacres outright, afaik. But again, state changes are fine imo