It seems to me that the majority of players want the game to be much less difficult than it has recently become. There was a time when I fired up Elite Dangerous and enjoyed being the baddest badass in the galaxy (in my own head) for a few hours. It was great fun to fly to some Has Res site and kill a bunch of pirates like some kind of interstellar Lone Ranger.
But those days have gone now, and some poxy little NPC FDL or Vulture can now fly rings around my Federal Corvette and make it perfectly clear that I'm just a very average piece of cannon fodder with an expensive ship and little talent. Oh well, there goes the wonderful fantasy. It's like sending an SAS squad with live machine guns and hand grenades into a paint-balling competition. Challenging, yes. But I suspect that most people would be somewhat put off.
I know there are some fanbois out there with plenty of time on their hands who can eat a pizza at the same time as flying a Hauler backwards with FA off while strafing a wing of Elite Anacondas to death and filling in their jobseeker's allowance forms with their other hand, but then there are the rest of us - with a few hours of play per week during which we have paid to feel like Luke Skywalker. Personally, I play Elite on a three year old laptop, I steer using my mouse, I'm tired of dying every couple of hours, and I'm annoyed that interdiction has been rendered practically impossible to use. On top of all that, every time I get close to becoming Elite, something new is introduced that makes everything much, much harder to achieve. I had been gradually increasing my Deadly ranking for months, increasing by half a percent per day on average. Nowadays, I would think myself lucky if I could get 1% per month. I wish I had had the time to get ranked Elite when the going was so much easier.
If the number of people who fly solo or in limited groups is anything to go by, the majority of people don't enjoy being ganked, griefed or generally slaughtered in open play, but now the NPCs are doing the same. My guess is that the number of (normal) players who risk using an expensive ship in a combat zone nowadays is almost zero. If normal space is anything to go by, I expect that life expectancy in a CZ would be just a few seconds.
I would have thought that when playing in Solo mode (like most people do), it would be reasonable to expect the game to judge the competence of a player and to set the skill levels of NPCs accordingly? After all, it is a game. It should be challenging, rewarding, interesting and fun. I paid good money to be entertained, so that a very average piece of cannon fodder can go back to thinking that he's the baddest badass in the galaxy again.
But those days have gone now, and some poxy little NPC FDL or Vulture can now fly rings around my Federal Corvette and make it perfectly clear that I'm just a very average piece of cannon fodder with an expensive ship and little talent. Oh well, there goes the wonderful fantasy. It's like sending an SAS squad with live machine guns and hand grenades into a paint-balling competition. Challenging, yes. But I suspect that most people would be somewhat put off.
I know there are some fanbois out there with plenty of time on their hands who can eat a pizza at the same time as flying a Hauler backwards with FA off while strafing a wing of Elite Anacondas to death and filling in their jobseeker's allowance forms with their other hand, but then there are the rest of us - with a few hours of play per week during which we have paid to feel like Luke Skywalker. Personally, I play Elite on a three year old laptop, I steer using my mouse, I'm tired of dying every couple of hours, and I'm annoyed that interdiction has been rendered practically impossible to use. On top of all that, every time I get close to becoming Elite, something new is introduced that makes everything much, much harder to achieve. I had been gradually increasing my Deadly ranking for months, increasing by half a percent per day on average. Nowadays, I would think myself lucky if I could get 1% per month. I wish I had had the time to get ranked Elite when the going was so much easier.
If the number of people who fly solo or in limited groups is anything to go by, the majority of people don't enjoy being ganked, griefed or generally slaughtered in open play, but now the NPCs are doing the same. My guess is that the number of (normal) players who risk using an expensive ship in a combat zone nowadays is almost zero. If normal space is anything to go by, I expect that life expectancy in a CZ would be just a few seconds.
I would have thought that when playing in Solo mode (like most people do), it would be reasonable to expect the game to judge the competence of a player and to set the skill levels of NPCs accordingly? After all, it is a game. It should be challenging, rewarding, interesting and fun. I paid good money to be entertained, so that a very average piece of cannon fodder can go back to thinking that he's the baddest badass in the galaxy again.
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