Does anyone at FDEV understand the word 'Incongruent' ?

[yyy]

I'd disagree with your first point. System authorities have to detect crime or have evidence of an idividual's criminality. The ship scan that can happen near a station is exactly for this purpose and if you manage to evade the scan you are in. Even RL criminals have cars and they happily go to their favourite garage to get them repaired. Yes RL criminals always have eyes at the back of their head, but it doesn't stop them going about their business. When was the last time you walked into a shop and the owner asked you if you were clean of any crimes before he decided to serve you?

I agree with the powerplay aspect though. Powerplay should only be possible in Open.

 

[Crash1099]

FD should give us the possibility to colonize new systems in an automated way.

I'd even pay bucks for a colony ship.
I'd fly it to Sagitarrius A, name the station "Void" and found a Theocracy in the name of the Black Nothingess.
Then all could bask in Nothing.

I even deal with a scientific station out there non-faction owned.

 

[Ozimandeus]

Well I could hardly believe it when they not only allowed me to land but also repaired my ship AND gave me enough ammunition to be able to carry on my killing spree against their own people, Jesuz are these Guys STUPID or what ?

Well we are British old boy, wouldn't be the first time that we sold arms to people that want to shoot us - I mean, someone is going to supply them, so we might as well make a little money on the side of the venture.

(OOC Its just Art imitating real life if you ask me)

 

[WiseDuck]

I imagine once the money dries up all we're likely to see is another theme park tycoon game.

Now thats something I like them to spend their time on, instead of flogging a dead horse around the room.

 

[Whiterose]

Now thats something I like them to spend their time on, instead of flogging a dead horse around the room.

Its not dead....its just resting.

 

[Parmo]

Good point.

We can also fly to Sagittarius A* in less than 10 hours and cross the galaxy in a few days. Yet there is no scientific endeavor to do so.. no outposts where the science community would be begging for them, no tourism infrastructure out at nearby nebulae or other interesting points of interest, no attempt to really expand beyond the frontier, despite it all being in reach and so easy to get to. Instead humanity and its entire infrastructure is all lumped into a sprawling urban blob.

That's one of the most disappointing things for me, there was no imagination put into the physical distribution of colonized space. It would have been far more interesting to have colonies and clusters, pockets of humanity, strewn throughout the local Orion Spur, each distinct and separate from one another with frontier badlands and tenuous trade links in-between. Long distance trade and commerce between pockets of humanity could have opened the game up to some challenging trade opportunities and commerce based missions, and really made something like powerplay make more sense as the powers try and get a foothold on their tiny patch of the galaxy.

The game is flawed in so many ways. It seems the emphasis on immersion and a coherent and believable foundation was very low on the to do list.

FD should give us the possibility to colonize new systems in an automated way.

I'd even pay bucks for a colony ship.
I'd fly it to Sagitarrius A, name the station "Void" and found a Theocracy in the name of the Black Nothingess.
Then all could bask in Nothing.

Great ideas that I would love to be in Elite Dangerous. But I think they are far more harder to implement well technically than most seem to appreciate.
[]

This would be my guess.

Exploration being a prime example. It reeks of marketing people having the final say on it.

As a person who has a very cold suspicion of marketing predators I'd like to agree. However, I just do not know how many marketing personnel FD employ directly if at all, or if their marketing targets are fulfilled by an external company; or what influence they have.
The comment has made think about Powerplay though from this perspective. And CQC. I can certainly see marketing people focus on the 'faction' that constitutes the major part of the console customer base. The PC customer base may well be much smaller: I just don't know.

 

[Uncertain]

I'd disagree with your first point. System authorities have to detect crime or have evidence of an idividual's criminality. The ship scan that can happen near a station is exactly for this purpose and if you manage to evade the scan you are in. Even RL criminals have cars and they happily go to their favourite garage to get them repaired. Yes RL criminals always have eyes at the back of their head, but it doesn't stop them going about their business. When was the last time you walked into a shop and the owner asked you if you were clean of any crimes before he decided to serve you?

More incongruencies! Criminality is completely insubstantial outside of human society, so the only time it matters is when the criminal meets someone out in space who can scan them with their tiny mobile scanner module, or when the criminal enters a massive centralised space station where countless people live and work bazillions of miles from the next living soul, which can scan them with... er, with many tiny mobile scanner modules! Their five cops milling around outside will probably scan at least 30% of the people they notice. A foolproof way to keep your station's populace safe and sound. They would easily be better off just installing a scanner module in the wall above the toaster rack, soldering a giant laser to it and letting a baby play with the Scan button.

Then after Baby makes the police redundant, they can stop cruising around the back & sides of the station where nobody ever goes, and refocus their efforts on satisfying the new fine- and bounty-based economy Baby has created. They do give you enough time between receiving a fine and having to pay it to literally let you escape to the other side of the galaxy though, so they may have to rethink that part of the law in order to make a profit, have the slightest impact on crime, be in any way effective as police etc etc.

Really, though, it's just beyond daft. It's like they actively sought out the most nonsensical but technically plausible methods for everything and went ahead with it full bore. The capitals of the galactic superpowers of 3000AD are guarded less efficiently than a grocery store today. It's not very satisfying to successfully smuggle hundreds of tonnes of highly illegal goods into a public transport hub if they haven't even bothered to get someone to watch the door, or at least put a camera on a stick or tell their security which part of the station is the infinite void of space and which part is the people so they can finally stop wasting fuel flying around in circles looking for smugglers behind stars.

 

[random_tangent]

Good point.

We can also fly to Sagittarius A* in less than 10 hours and cross the galaxy in a few days. Yet there is no scientific endeavor to do so.. no outposts where the science community would be begging for them, no tourism infrastructure out at nearby nebulae or other interesting points of interest, no attempt to really expand beyond the frontier, despite it all being in reach and so easy to get to. Instead humanity and its entire infrastructure is all lumped into a sprawling urban blob.

That's one of the most disappointing things for me, there was no imagination put into the physical distribution of colonized space. It would have been far more interesting to have colonies and clusters, pockets of humanity, strewn throughout the local Orion Spur, each distinct and separate from one another with frontier badlands and tenuous trade links in-between. Long distance trade and commerce between pockets of humanity could have opened the game up to some challenging trade opportunities and commerce based missions, and really made something like powerplay make more sense as the powers try and get a foothold on their tiny patch of the galaxy.

The game is flawed in so many ways. It seems the emphasis on immersion and a coherent and believable foundation was very low on the to do list.

Indeed. As you say, a trip to Sag A can be done in the time it takes to drive from here to the south of France, or to fly from here to the far east, and people used to trade along these routes when it took a lot longer than that to traverse them. There might be a serious paycheck for resupplying a far flung outpost, or helping a cluster of systems defend themselves from piracy far from the most fortified systems. At the moment the ED universe feels a bit like the map of a conventional "open world" rpg, but with only a single massive settlement. You can spend a lot of time out there in the wilderness wandering around, but ultimately there is very little to find. I know people will say it has been confirmed that there are Thargoids out there somewhere, but the possibility of an incredibly rare encounter which in truth will only ever impact a small handful of players before it becomes "main text" within the game, does not constitute a reasonable quantity of stuff to discover out there in the black.

 

[PiLhEaD]

...I saw that they were selling the 'Retributiobn' Laser...

...OK im no programmer BUT i would have thought that the code required to prevent some of these issues would be pretty straightforwrd...

It's a bug, report it.

As an aside (and it's just an observation, I'm not having a 'pop') with nearly 30 years in IT, if I had a penny for everytime I heard the 'how hard can it be?' line, well, Greece could have come to me for their bail-out

Last time I pointed out "incongruencies" to Michael Brooks he was unable to justify the choices they'd made in the game's design (regarding flight model at that time) with any sort of in game logic, and instead shot me down with "playability trumps realism". I assume this is just one more of many such examples.

As someone who h-a-t-e-d the pure newtonian physics in <whichever Elite game it was> and gave it up as a lost cause very quickly, I should 'blooming' well hope so.

I love the passion that everyone feels for this game, and I know we'd all like certain things changed to please us individually (yes, even me), but it is only a game, and honestly, I'm loving it - warts and all!

 

[Sandmann]

Its not dead....its just resting.

Pining for the fjords, perhaps?

 

[veryinky]

There are 19.000 inhabited systems with more than 40.000 stations.
Assuming that the colonization of Space began before 2.300, and lasts now for 1000 years, this means that there are over 40 stations built each year, on average. If we assume that the amount of stations being built is accelerating (more systems, more planets, more people, more ressources), we should see way more than that each year.

So far we had 2 stations being built in half a year. Unity and Mercenary's Respite.

Galaxy used to be a lot more populated a few centuries before, there was bird, amphibian, feline, insectoid aliens who owned planets and stations. Humans used to be in the minority and there was an organization called the "Galactic Co-operation of Worlds" or GalCop until Empire genocided the aliens for colonization space and destroyed the GalCop. There should be a lot of abandoned and derelict space stations floating over dead worlds. Plus a huge surplus market of Moray Starboats since there's nobody alive who needs ships designed for water breathers.

 

[Julio Montega]

But you have to scan first, even if its the basic "I click you scan"?
And the fines/bounties seem universal to me, without saying what they where for.

I forgot about the hello message, you're right on that one. But that goes for rep, not your wanted status.
Why they sell you stuff if you're hated by them is a little odd.. capitalism ftw.

You would have to transmit your registration/insurance reg number to the station for docking access,
since your ship is given a fitting port, right? Which leads as a connection to your CMDR files...
So why again am i able to dock at a hostile station?

"Oh this CMDR is a psycho-killer, he is even hostile towards us, should we revoke his docking clearance?"
"Nah, he is liquid... Treat him with the respect he deserves, he is a solution to those insolvent poor souls out there in the Haulers."

CAPITALISM! XD

 

[TaoZero5]

OP - You should read "Oh What A Lovely War" to see that 'incongruencies' are not an unnatural state of affairs.
e.g. British Army not being able to buy ammunition from British manufacturer because German Army's previous purchase had left the manufacturer with very little in stock. (Ah, Capitalism. Don't ya just love it?)

Now, I gave up reading posts in this thread after the first page (apologies - but I get easily bored, sometimes) so someone may have covered that already.

Galaxy used to be a lot more populated a few centuries before, there was bird, amphibian, feline, insectoid aliens who owned planets and stations. Humans used to be in the minority and there was an organization called the "Galactic Co-operation of Worlds" or GalCop until Empire genocided the aliens for colonization space and destroyed the GalCop. There should be a lot of abandoned and derelict space stations floating over dead worlds. Plus a huge surplus market of Moray Starboats since there's nobody alive who needs ships designed for water breathers.

It would only take a couple of decades for abandoned stations to have their orbits decay from not having anyone 'at the helm'.
Or - we could assume that unnatended power generators, after a few years . . . BOOM!!

 

[Samosa]

1) for reasons unknown they have no idea what they're doing to the game

This Option basically is a mystery - as there would be no single, logical explanation for it. Not one.

Here's a logical explanation:

Mr. Braben had one good idea (re: gaming). Elite. It was a great idea, in fact. He executed it in 1984, and he's been repeating it ever since.

Elite: Dangerous is the same idea. It has everything the original Elite had. Where we run into trouble is when FD have attempted to expand on that idea.

I still very much like the original idea, and that aspect of Elite: Dangerous.

 

[veryinky]

It would only take a couple of decades for abandoned stations to have their orbits decay from not having anyone 'at the helm'.
Or - we could assume that unnatended power generators, after a few years . . . BOOM!!

Eh, I'd argue that the stations in Elite are in orbits that are much higher than the real world counterpart so they have much less decay. Plus considering how quickly reactors in Elite consume fuel, they'd be cold long before they malfunctioned. And besides, discovering artificial satellites over planets would be neat.

 

[Zplintz]

The Alliance, Federation and Imperiala are not at war they just have battles over territory, resources and various desputes.

+1 for knowing where (who) this slightly paraphrased quote is from :-

Peace is good for business.
War is good for business.

 

[Julio Montega]

The Alliance, Federation and Imperiala are not at war they just have battles over territory, resources and various desputes.

+1 for knowing where (who) this slightly paraphrased quote is from :-

Peace is good for business.
War is good for business.

I believe he is a Ferengi, right?
Some Uncle of Quark?

 

[veryinky]

Unless you're one of the Reidquatian rodent aliens who were killed off in the great Empire "humanist first" purge. They used to have a vibrant pre-industrial agricultural civilization, all gone now.

 

[random_tangent]

OP - You should read "Oh What A Lovely War" to see that 'incongruencies' are not an unnatural state of affairs.
e.g. British Army not being able to buy ammunition from British manufacturer because German Army's previous purchase had left the manufacturer with very little in stock. (Ah, Capitalism. Don't ya just love it?)

Now, I gave up reading posts in this thread after the first page (apologies - but I get easily bored, sometimes) so someone may have covered that already.

Truth: stranger than fiction. I think there are probably a couple of responses to this:

1) I don't believe the current system is well thought out. In other words, problems like the ones the OP points out are not "by design".
2) There are probably degrees to this sort of thing which will test the suspension of disbelief of different people to varying extents. I think I probably believe that allowing an enemy to buy weapons and ammo from you, which they're just going to use to blow up more of your ships, stretches believability for the majority of people. It's asinine to suggest that "profit" is the motivation when the cost to the faction in lost assets is likely much greater than any margin they make on ammo and/or weapons and/or fuel and/or repair.

It would only take a couple of decades for abandoned stations to have their orbits decay from not having anyone 'at the helm'.
Or - we could assume that unnatended power generators, after a few years . . . BOOM!!

Probably true. I'm not sure how accurate the post you were replying to is in the context of the game lore, but hypothetically: wouldn't it be cooler if these things were in the game, rather than be left with a plausible explanation for why they aren't?

- - - Updated - - -

Here's a logical explanation:

Mr. Braben had one good idea (re: gaming). Elite. It was a great idea, in fact. He executed it in 1984, and he's been repeating it ever since.

Elite: Dangerous is the same idea. It has everything the original Elite had. Where we run into trouble is when FD have attempted to expand on that idea.

I still very much like the original idea, and that aspect of Elite: Dangerous.

Here's another area in which we run into trouble: gaming has moved on since 1984. What was "enough" to constitute a game then, is not necessarily "enough" to constitute a game today. So, funded conventionally, a modern rehash of the 1984 game would have been a commercial flop (imo), and as you intimate, the ways in which they have expanded upon the original concept are...questionable.

 

[CMDR_Havok]

Btw People who you shoot down can't tell the tale, so you're not as well knows as you would guess I imagine.

Except that they DO know who I am as they put a 6k bounty on my head for each and every kill :-o and i'm pretty sure that by the year 3100 that even an automated traffic control system would be able to pick up on that and say 'no'.

and that still doesn't explain why they are selling a special Alliance weapon to enemy pilots yet NOT selling it to their own pilots !

and it doesn't explain why my hard earned bounty dissapears after only a week. Poor bounty hunters must be going mad at that one.....

or why they are unable to transmit my identity and misdemeaners to their nearby systems.

Or why in a technologically advanced age we have to transport *tonnes* of documents around.

Or why our cockpits suddenly dissapear when we look at the map or powerplay screen but doesnt dissapear when viewing the stockmarket.

And it doesn't explain why a 100 yr old design space ships has exactly the same cockpit instrumentation layout as a recent one, in fact I cant figure out why they are ALL the same !

And why do witchspace jumps take the exact same length of time for all ships and distances.

And why do they have pirates and bounty hunters as an advertised game role but give them inadequate tools to do the job and let all the traders hide in solo thus making those roles a complete farce ?

And why do some ships 'hang out' at navigation buoys and Signal sources rather than getting on with their journey,

And why do they make mass murder a fineable offence and then execute you for loitering..... (that one really worries me).

And why why why are there so many dumb/illogical/incoherent game mechanics ruining what is actually quite close to being a truly great game ???? why ???