Elite Dangerous is the Largest Empty Sandbox Ever Made

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Exactly.

I'd love to see a station being upgraded.. perhaps a mix of say Industrial and Tourist? Showing the transition of the station to the new owner type, or whatever.
Even better; perhaps the outside of the station can change too.. have half built pylons and what not, or perhaps see a Coriolis' rugged outside being converted to something luxurious to reflect the wealth of the system.. the builds on the outside of the station could be changed to look more wealthier.. or perhaps replace the cities with domed farmland, or processing plants..

Yes, in short.. a living galaxy, lol.

agreed.... i get that things are always better in your head but every time i see comments like this i think of the guy painting red dwarf in the opening credits.

DB once answered a question about damaged stations and cosmetic wear and tear , and he laughed it off stating not possible, every station would end up ruined by people shooting them....... to me this was incredibly blinkered.

this is why shooting at a station should be a huge no no and persistant offences had massive lasting pushback from the station. If need be give the station a shield, and make it so we cant get through it in our small ships..... you would need a cap ship (that we cant fly) for station cracking.

but not allowing people to be on the surface of the station repairing it because players would kill them just sounds to me like "you cant have nice things because of the players".... well, i would rather lose the players rather than the nice things to be honest..... personally i do not think FD need to do either, just make shooting at or colliding with a work person fixing the station mean that the station opens fire

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I'm sure Frontier have some. But since they're not sharing - and why should they - there are proxy measures available to players which can be used.

Station traffic reports: hard to collect in bulk [1] - but can be tracked and compared over time for particular systems.

EDDN FSDJump events: measure the same thing as traffic reports, but only from people using an appropriate tool (so PC only). However, much easier to keep track of automatically.

Nevertheless, the ratios can be compared: it looks like about 5% of the jumps on the traffic report are also logged on EDDN, when considering populated systems.

The overall pattern since 2.4 has been fairly constant, and using the 5% ratio would work out at about 400,000 jumps on weekdays and 600,000 jumps on weekends - to populated systems [2].

Depending on the assumptions you make about
- how many jumps the average player makes a day
- how many days an active player logs in each week/month
- what the populated/unpopulated activity ratio is
would give different conversion rates between jumps and active players...

...but that can be someone else's job. I collect the data mainly to watch people migrate about the bubble in response to in-game things: that it can give a very rough estimate of player numbers is a side-effect.

[1] For BGS-related purposes I have asked before if these could be included in the Journal, which would allow a range of new 3rd-party apps to develop ... but it's understandably not been a priority for Frontier yet.
[2] I suspect the ratio for unpopulated systems is higher than 5% as explorers have more use for these tools, so I don't want to try generalising.

Station traffic reports are far from accurate. You can have the same person jump into a station more than once in a day and it will state that 2 people jumped into the system. I have never used EDDN myself. Don't see the need.

Basically you are correct that only FDev know those numbers, and anything we come up with is so massively flawed that it isn't even worth considering.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

How long do we keep giving the benefit of the doubt?

So...what? Believe them or not as you choose. Continue to play or not as you choose. It's not a subscription model so it won't matter much.

They're already on record as stating that they're going to improve the core gameplay features after 2.4, and they have a Focussed Feedback area for players' thoughts on the matter.

If the new/fleshed-out features of Beyond fail to impress then that's​ the time to get foot stampy and throw the toys out of the pram. Now, however, is not.

 

[ALGOMATIC]

All very good but do keep in mind one simple thing: Elite is not and should not ever be an executive control game, it's about 'one pilot and his ship in a huge galaxy', and any attempt to turn it into the thing which Cosmo and a couple of other posters are wanting, is going to turn this game into something not-Elite.

You really do not want to go down that route. A majority of us do not want to be playing some redesigned executive control game which merely has an Elite skin.

Yeap, docking is hard amiright?

Anything that might change this game into something more complex than flying in straight line doing nothing, brings responses like these. Like I said, skilless players stop this game from moving forward.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

Yeap, docking is hard amiright?

Anything that might change this game into something more complex than flying in straight line doing nothing, brings responses like these. Like I said, skilless players stop this game from moving forward.

Your post contained nothing more than a strawman argument and baseless conjecture.

2/10, must do better.

 

[CaptainKremmen]

So...what? Believe them or not as you choose. Continue to play or not as you choose. It's not a subscription model so it won't matter much.

They're already on record as stating that they're going to improve the core gameplay features after 2.4, and they have a Focussed Feedback area for players' thoughts on the matter.

If the new/fleshed-out features of Beyond fail to impress then that's​ the time to get foot stampy and throw the toys out of the pram. Now, however, is not.

I would suggest that waiting until after the Big Rework of Core Features is discussed/specced/coded/tested/released before expressing dissatisfaction... is akin to not bothering to say anything at all.

Because FD certainly aren't going to revisit core gameplaytwice. Certainly not with an approach of: "free for all Horizons customers", "nothing is sacred", "everything is up for review".

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Like I said, skilless players stop this game from moving forward.

you really are something!.

 

[Old Duck]

Dale's response just sounds like PR-man guff to me. If FD were going to listen to feedback they would of heard the forum begging them not to make Thargoids just re-skinned USS and CG's, but they just ploughed on with the same old gameplay elements and are now wondering why people are irate...

When you look up in the night sky and see a star IRL, you're not seeing it as it is, but as it was...... the rest of the story

 

[GreyAreaUK]

I would suggest that waiting until after the Big Rework of Core Features is discussed/specced/coded/tested/released before expressing dissatisfaction... is akin to not bothering to say anything at all.

Because FD certainly aren't going to revisit core gameplaytwice. Certainly not with an approach of: "free for all Horizons customers", "nothing is sacred", "everything is up for review".

Hence the Focussed Feedback area.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Oh never mind.

 

[Jockey79]

Like I said, skilless players stop this game from moving forward.

They most certainly do, with their constant GSP demands Frontier cannot focus on making real multiplayer content when they have to deal with mindless, skilless Sidewinder ganking from RNGneered combat ships.

Perhaps turning off PvP in open and restricting it to PGs only, Frontier could then develop tools and content for everyone to use.

I mean, MOM (Sarah J Avery) isn't just a whizz with the AI when FD let her loose, but she is a great author as well, perhaps they should let her write some stories for the game.

 

[Theodrid]

To be fair, I don't care either and I made quite a few of those.

I mean, all this is not for realsies anyway, and no one gives a crap about what anyone writes. It's just a way to get through a couple of minutes avoiding the terrible condition of not having something to do in that time, we'd rather submit to a constant stream of meaningless information pouring into our consciousness, because god forbid you might hear yourself think for a second. And if you're lucky you get a chuckle out of it and use that as excuse for coming back for to distract you from the kids skateboarding on the sideboard.

Okay, a sensible step back post with a 'to be fair'.......

My next question is where is and what have you done to the real Ziggy?

 

[FrodoHobbits]

Yeap, docking is hard amiright?

Anything that might change this game into something more complex than flying in straight line doing nothing, brings responses like these. Like I said, skilless players stop this game from moving forward.

"Just keep banging those rocks together"

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Okay, a sensible step back post with a 'to be fair'.......

My next question is where is and what have you done to the real Ziggy?

That was sensible? I was aiming for inane rambling. Must try harder in the future.

Sensible ... jeez.

The real Ziggy also cannot stand kids skateboarding on the sideboard.

 

[Theodrid]

Like I said, skilless players stop this game from moving forward.

My god, you are so right 'cos pew pew, pew pew, pew pew, "look at my epeen", pew pew, pew pew, pew pew, "nooby rubbish carebear forumdads", pew pew, pew pew, pew pew' is moving the game forward in leaps and bounds isn't it?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

For any state & government the players should be able to tell what going on and who's running the show.

communist state => what about propaganda holograms instead of ads ? Where are the social realism style stations with ludicrous plastcrete statues ?
corporate gov => where are the shiny black dolphins for vips' luxury hostels and just-at-the poverty line prefab towns ?

I'd definitely like to see all this too, but: all of this needs to be modelled, textured, animated, lit, etc.

It's pretty clear that one of the big constraints on Frontier is that because of the fairly realistic and detailed graphics style, the creation of major art assets has to be very carefully managed. There was a big update in station interiors in 2.3 to make them much more diversified by *economy*. So that's 9(ish) different interiors. There are 11 government types - if each one gets a different look for each economy, that's 99 different interiors. Sure, there can be plenty of re-use of components, but it's still a massive increase on '9'.

Then of course those government types come in four different superpower flavours (with some exclusions of particular types for particular superpowers), so we're perhaps up to 300 different station interiors alone ... plus perhaps ways to model transitional phases so if a station changes hands it takes a couple of weeks/months/years for the interior to be fully remodelled.

Probably the BGS state should have a more visible effect too. There's 11 of them (12 if you count "War" and "Civil War" separately for visual purposes), so that's up to ~4000 different looks for a station interior. (Many of which may be fairly similar, of course, so it's not 4000 different sets of assets)

And then all of these have to be considered on things other than stations too.

I'm sure Frontier are continuing to work on this - around new asset types actually necessary for the new features (Thargoids, megaships, INRA bases, Type-10, Chieftain, etc.) - but I expect it to be a very gradual increase in variety.

("It all looks and feels the same no matter where you go" was a criticism I saw of a review of FE2 back in the 90s. ED is a lot better than FE2 for variety but it can't possibly ever depict the realistically diverse architectures of a 20k-system society populated over centuries)

You know what stats of players activities don't show : players that do not play

Indeed. 170 million people are estimated to have played Tetris on the various platforms it was released on. That's - very roughly - 100 times as many who bought Elite Dangerous. The lesson is clear: future ships should be based on cubic models and easily stackable.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

I'd definitely like to see all this too, but: all of this needs to be modelled, textured, animated, lit, etc.

It's pretty clear that one of the big constraints on Frontier is that because of the fairly realistic and detailed graphics style, the creation of major art assets has to be very carefully managed. There was a big update in station interiors in 2.3 to make them much more diversified by *economy*. So that's 9(ish) different interiors. There are 11 government types - if each one gets a different look for each economy, that's 99 different interiors. Sure, there can be plenty of re-use of components, but it's still a massive increase on '9'.

Then of course those government types come in four different superpower flavours (with some exclusions of particular types for particular superpowers), so we're perhaps up to 300 different station interiors alone ... plus perhaps ways to model transitional phases so if a station changes hands it takes a couple of weeks/months/years for the interior to be fully remodelled.

Probably the BGS state should have a more visible effect too. There's 11 of them (12 if you count "War" and "Civil War" separately for visual purposes), so that's up to ~4000 different looks for a station interior. (Many of which may be fairly similar, of course, so it's not 4000 different sets of assets)

And then all of these have to be considered on things other than stations too.

I'm sure Frontier are continuing to work on this - around new asset types actually necessary for the new features (Thargoids, megaships, INRA bases, Type-10, Chieftain, etc.) - but I expect it to be a very gradual increase in variety.

("It all looks and feels the same no matter where you go" was a criticism I saw of a review of FE2 back in the 90s. ED is a lot better than FE2 for variety but it can't possibly ever depict the realistically diverse architectures of a 20k-system society populated over centuries)


Indeed. 170 million people are estimated to have played Tetris on the various platforms it was released on. That's - very roughly - 100 times as many who bought Elite Dangerous. The lesson is clear: future ships should be based on cubic models and easily stackable.

That's why you do different things for different elements and mix them up.

- Economy type - primary lighting colour
- Superpower - logos and base texture theme
- Power - texture details
- Govt. type - holograms and banners
- System state - additional textures
- etc.

Each list is short with a smallish number of variations but in combination you get a much larger number of results.

 

[Fosdyke]

Hi
can you confirm you will still be looking at the DDF archives and trying to implement that stuff as well ? FD have been worryingly silent imo about the likes of hirable npc wingmates, npc crew (not just the slf pilot) and missions such as escort and protect npcs etc.

I would be happy as a pig in muck if this came in and i am not the only one.

thanks

Hope FDEV will look into this. NPC Crew/wingmates and missions to support that are essential to bring life and achievements for us commanders in the vastness of the galaxy.

 

[Wolf Starslayer]

That's why you do different things for different elements and mix them up.

- Economy type - primary lighting colour
- Superpower - logos and base texture theme
- Power - texture details
- Govt. type - holograms and banners
- System state - additional textures
- etc.

Each list is short with a smallish number of variations but in combination you get a much larger number of results.

Hope you've put this in the suggestions thread, we so need communist statues NOW.[up]

 

[Fosdyke]

The thought that springs to my mind is this: improvements to the single-player aspect of game benefit everyone playing. Improvements to the multi-player aspect, however, only benefit a subset.

Agreed.