Elite Dangerous is the Largest Empty Sandbox Ever Made

[ALGOMATIC]

Tough words, but its very true. And I hate that its even a thing.

We are getting guilds in the future though.

But everything listed there, Well most of it cannot be accomplished while keeping every mode equal. They can add all the awesome features above. But just like powerplay, a very small portion of the community will use it.

For example we have powerplay for PVP right? But instead the community has created their own PVP hub instead because of the imbalances. Even though something like powerplay and BGS have a great foundation to build upon. https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/7eztt3/introducing_the_pvp_hub/

So they have two options, leave everything as it is now? Which is not working for this community. Or CHANGE the symptoms causing the problems.

The #1 symptom is that a lot of people have a problem with is objective control vs other players while in single player or friends mode.

In every other game I have played Overwatch, Counter Strike, World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Guildwars 2. PvP and even some PVE within those games were used for objective control. It gave reason to shoot others, it gave reasons to interact and work as a team. It gave reasons for communication.

Here in Elite Dangerous you can accomplish all your goals even against other people while removing yourself from the multiplayer experiences. This is why we have people saying they get "griefed and ganked".

If all this stuff above were fixed. This thargoid stuff thats slowly rolling out wouldn't be a big deal. And half of the features of this game wouldn't feel like they are missing because of it.

But, I still love the game. And I have hopes for these changes, because they are starting with the guilds/fleets here in the future. Surely they cant make the same mistakes they did with Powerplay?

I do believe we are on the right track. And my fingers are crossed the finally pull the trigger.

By doing so this would bring meaning to the features of this game that arent widely used. They really have spent a lot of time with the BGS and Powerplay. And its a shame their potential is being held back all because of a simple "all modes are equal" problem. Which started out awesome by the way. I thought it was a neat Idea, especially when I first started this game. But as you grow as a player, and start engineering your ships to be competitive. You just end up in a hauling match in an alternate but same universe.

What are we engineering these ships for? To do the same thing we did when we started this game? Just a little bit faster? That makes no sense.

Making these changes would give people plenty to do while others things happen behind the scenes. And If these things were done before hand. I dont think people would be complaining about the "mile wide inch deep" thing. Or community goals, Or the slow rolling thargoid stuff. Because they could be involved with a team for ongoing BALANCED gameplay for all while the rest of the story unfolds.

Man, if we had a community driven economy,(which we have the stepping stones for through the BGS). Id farm all day and sell stuff if it was worth my time in credits, and if I could make modules and sell them too. Oh baby. Thats all I'd be doing. I played the Auction house in WoW. Made lots of gold.

Bounty hunting players and people going after me is really fun. As a streamer, I think I am the only one thats encouraged stream sniping(for me only) Because it made me feel like the game was full. It felt like thats the way the game was made to be played. Ive only been killed once out of the 20 or so times its happened in a year. Other than that is was PVP fights vs Other PVPers.

Anyways, I do believe they are on the right track with some of this stuff. They seem to be starting fresh, starting over with how things are produced. And maybe they will change their mind and give this game the depth it needs by fixing the most obvious of problems.

Here's hoping for the future of Elite Dangerous!

Yeah.

The game has a fundamental issue with the design of private modes being equal to open.

People want to sit in solo, farm pve tokens and call it multiplayer game play.
Any PvP content that is being suggested terrifies them because they are so bad at this game and only capable truck A to B and call it trade, scoop honk and call it explorarion.

What content can you expect? If the thargoids will force a full scale war, the solo carebears will be the first to squel how they are "forced pve" and where is the block button.

Nothing will change and there is nothing to hope for, there is no point anticipating complex content where majority cant even dock without a docking computer, and fdev caters to the weakest link, hence the simplicity and a shallow content.

Elite is a sandbox? Good joke, its a cookie cutter proc generated unfinished open world with nothing to do, but excells in providing hiding spots for the weak.

So what is their suggestion? To create my own content, so when I role play a thargoid park ranger enforcing the hunting season I become a griefer and "forcing pvp onto others".

 

[Enderby]

It's empty because there are not enough different things to do. The environment needs many, many more interactive opportunities.

Need more than shoot, scan, deliver.

Other things. To. Do.

 

[Sole Hunter]

Yeah.

So what is their suggestion? To create my own content, so when I role play a thargoid park ranger enforcing the hunting season I become a griefer and "forcing pvp onto others".

Emergent player driven content.

You might as well go outside throw rocks in the yard.

lol......

 

[Lateralus]

Still mostly a hollow experience three years into full release... Let us review:

Starting with the Good:

• Flight model is excellent, rewards skill that takes a long time to master
• Decent visuals (mostly)
• Audio is fantastic and atmospheric
• Ship designs are nice IMO
• Great variation in possible ship builds and weapon variations
• Good variation in available customisations and cosmetics
• Character creator is decent
• Scale of the galaxy is impressive
• Community goals are good for creating player bottlenecks
• Wings are useful
• Thargoid ships look and sound very cool
• Strong background lore and the game is faithful to previous titles in the series

The not so good:

• Still have done nothing with PvP bounty hunting - no tracking tools, no central most-wanted lists, max bounty capped at a level which makes it totally pointless to try
• Still have done nothing with criminal careers - they just seem to want to focus on the punishment side. Punishment without reward will just push players away.. (will piracy ever get any focus??)
• Exploration is still basic and repetitive (honk if you're bored)
• Trading is repetitive and most of the commodity types are valueless and only useful for new players. No player to player trading of any sort (open goal missed)
• Rare commodities have never been utilised properly, they could be the cornerstone of the open play trader-pirate-bounty hunter ecosystem... but allocations are too small (and drip-fed) to be attractive to traders
• Landable planets started off looking ok with some nice variations and colours.. but this was clearly too interesting so Fdev made them all grey and beige
• PvP is still a useless sideshow because Fdev seem to be scared to give it a purpose - 'meaningful' DB said in the kickstarter days, it's anything but
• Mining is eclipsed by all other activities in terms of profit when it should be the best earner (mineral, metal and high tech commodities are all way too low in value - this hurts piracy too)
• Naval rank is still a horrific, nonsensical grind, with most ranks serving no purpose whatsoever - has little to do with conflict zones either which is odd
• Capital ships look nice but are actually pretty underwhelming
• Galnet is a wall of text that is full of uninteresting waffle and is hidden away where you forget about it
• Community goals are over-used, and are pretty much the only interactive way to carry the narrative forward
• Powerplay was too grind-driven to ever be successful with it's 'free to play' style treadmill super-grind.. Restricting it to open might have made it work on some level but that would require them to come of of their comfort zone regarding mode parity (open goal missed)
• CQC was fun for a couple of hours but the lack of depth made it a novelty that about 99.99% of the playerbase got bored of pretty much immediately. Concept was based on assumptions about what console players and PvPers wanted... both were incorrect assumptions
• Engineering effectively gated PvP to all but the most determined players. It's also a mixture of horrific grind and online casino (draggable sliders were such an obvious avenue, why the multi-tiered RNG which everyone was bound to hate?)
• Multicrew, pretty much the same as CQC, nice idea but it lacks depth so nobody bothers - requires a turret or fighter to actually serve a purpose (turrets suck and fighters are limited to a few ships)
• Thargoids, while well designed (visual & audio), are pretty much a ride you can choose to go on... this removes any sense of mystery/fear from them
• Lack of new ships in the Horizons season made things a bit stale
• Still only one ground vehicle two years into Horizons
• No new planet types to land on since 2.0 - many assumed volcanic planets were on the agenda for season two - but Fdev were probably in retrospect referring to those small volcanic features found on some rocky worlds - disappointing
• Its taken Fdev 3 years to realise that player factions/squadrons need proper mechanics, will be four years by the time they arrive - they listened too long to the 'go play EVE' crowd
• Fdev have let combat logging run rampant throughout the game for three years.. Alluded to a solution but always seem to kick the can down the road. Where's this karma system then, beyond beyond?
• They have provided too many ways to circumvent player opposition, rendering proper faction conflict an impossible pipedream
• Giving players the ability to block other players from instances is a ridiculous concept - it's too open to abuse. Should be comms only (also adds to the game's instancing woes)

To summarise, it seems FDev are a company that have a lot of nice ideas, but have trouble manifesting these ideas into engaging gameplay. They either miss the player desires completely (powerplay, CQC, engineering casino) or whittle down a good concept into 'minimum deliverable product' (multi-crew, Thargoids) for the sake of a quick release. Saying requested features are 'too difficult' to implement has been a reoccurring response - why is this? There was so much ambition in the early days, now the bar is seemingly in the process of being lowered. Remember many still are expecting at the very least, 2 more Horizons sized expansions to make the their lifetime expansion passes worth buying... Anything less and it will kick off big time around here (I'm personally not bothered, I'll have probably jumped ship to SC by then).

Looking at the list above, that is a colossal amount of work to either deliver or improve on, and given Fdev's usual practice of tinkering around the edges rather than wholesale improvements - I'd say we will never see most of those things improved.

I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see this game getting too much better than it is currently.. Too many of Elites core concepts, along with some of Frontier's central design philosophies are bizarre and don't translate well into an engaging mmo game.

I think ED's players will always have one eye on the next update...

 

[Sole Hunter]

Still mostly a hollow experience three years into full release... Let us review:

Starting with the Good:

• Flight model is excellent, rewards skill that takes a long time to master
• Decent visuals (mostly)
• Audio is fantastic and atmospheric
• Ship designs are nice IMO
• Great variation in possible ship builds and weapon variations
• Good variation in available customisations and cosmetics
• Character creator is decent
• Scale of the galaxy is impressive
• Community goals are good for creating player bottlenecks
• Wings are useful
• Thargoid ships look and sound very cool
• Strong background lore and the game is faithful to previous titles in the series

The not so good:

• Still have done nothing with PvP bounty hunting - no tracking tools, no central most-wanted lists, max bounty capped at a level which makes it totally pointless to try
• Still have done nothing with criminal careers - they just seem to want to focus on the punishment side. Punishment without reward will just push players away.. (will piracy ever get any focus??)
• Exploration is still basic and repetitive (honk if you're bored)
• Trading is repetitive and most of the commodity types are valueless and only useful for new players. No player to player trading of any sort (open goal missed)
• Rare commodities have never been utilised properly, they could be the cornerstone of the open play trader-pirate-bounty hunter ecosystem... but allocations are too small (and drip-fed) to be attractive to traders
• Landable planets started off looking ok with some nice variations and colours.. but this was clearly too interesting so Fdev made them all grey and beige
• PvP is still a useless sideshow because Fdev seem to be scared to give it a purpose - 'meaningful' DB said in the kickstarter days, it's anything but
• Mining is eclipsed by all other activities in terms of profit when it should be the best earner (mineral, metal and high tech commodities are all way too low in value - this hurts piracy too)
• Naval rank is still a horrific, nonsensical grind, with most ranks serving no purpose whatsoever - has little to do with conflict zones either which is odd
• Capital ships look nice but are actually pretty underwhelming
• Galnet is a wall of text that is full of uninteresting waffle and is hidden away where you forget about it
• Community goals are over-used, and are pretty much the only interactive way to carry the narrative forward
• Powerplay was too grind-driven to ever be successful with it's 'free to play' style treadmill super-grind.. Restricting it to open might have made it work on some level but that would require them to come of of their comfort zone regarding mode parity (open goal missed)
• CQC was fun for a couple of hours but the lack of depth made it a novelty that about 99.99% of the playerbase got bored of pretty much immediately. Concept was based on assumptions about what console players and PvPers wanted... both were incorrect assumptions
• Engineering effectively gated PvP to all but the most determined players. It's also a mixture of horrific grind and online casino (draggable sliders were such an obvious avenue, why the multi-tiered RNG which everyone was bound to hate?)
• Multicrew, pretty much the same as CQC, nice idea but it lacks depth so nobody bothers - requires a turret or fighter to actually serve a purpose (turrets suck and fighters are limited to a few ships)
• Thargoids, while well designed (visual & audio), are pretty much a ride you can choose to go on... this removes any sense of mystery/fear from them
• Lack of new ships in the Horizons season made things a bit stale
• Still only one ground vehicle two years into Horizons
• No new planet types to land on since 2.0 - many assumed volcanic planets were on the agenda for season two - but Fdev were probably in retrospect referring to those small volcanic features found on some rocky worlds - disappointing
• Its taken Fdev 3 years to realise that player factions/squadrons need proper mechanics, will be four years by the time they arrive - they listened too long to the 'go play EVE' crowd
• Fdev have let combat logging run rampant throughout the game for three years.. Alluded to a solution but always seem to kick the can down the road. Where's this karma system then, beyond beyond?
• They have provided too many ways to circumvent player opposition, rendering proper faction conflict an impossible pipedream
• Giving players the ability to block other players from instances is a ridiculous concept - it's too open to abuse. Should be comms only (also adds to the game's instancing woes)

To summarise, it seems FDev are a company that have a lot of nice ideas, but have trouble manifesting these ideas into engaging gameplay. They either miss the player desires completely (powerplay, CQC, engineering casino) or whittle down a good concept into 'minimum deliverable product' (multi-crew, Thargoids) for the sake of a quick release. Saying requested features are 'too difficult' to implement has been a reoccurring response - why is this? There was so much ambition in the early days, now the bar is seemingly in the process of being lowered. Remember many still are expecting at the very least, 2 more Horizons sized expansions to make the their lifetime expansion passes worth buying... Anything less and it will kick off big time around here (I'm personally not bothered, I'll have probably jumped ship to SC by then).

Looking at the list above, that is a colossal amount of work to either deliver or improve on, and given Fdev's usual practice of tinkering around the edges rather than wholesale improvements - I'd say we will never see most of those things improved.

I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see this game getting too much better than it is currently.. Too many of Elites core concepts, along with some of Frontier's central design philosophies are bizarre and don't translate well into an engaging mmo game.

I think ED's players will always have one eye on the next update...

Amen, see you guys in 8 months for the next 3 lines of buggy code.

 

[Enderby]

After pp, cqc, mc & 2.4 (so far) it is kinda hard to 'keep the faith' though.

 

[SpaceScania]

Its really hard not to come back it. Because it really is the root of all the problems.

I have to disagree here. The lack of depth of certain game systems like exploration or trading have nothing to do with the existence of solo. Are you just referring to PowerPlay or PVP or something along those lines? Admittedly because I have little interest in those areas my knowledge of how those parts of the game work are limited.

But I do know this. There are so many different ways to play Elite and to me that diversity is a huge part of what makes it great. Blaze your own trail and all that.

 

[DukeIronHand]

Yeah.

The game has a fundamental issue with the design of private modes being equal to open.

People want to sit in solo, farm pve tokens and call it multiplayer game play.
Any PvP content that is being suggested terrifies them because they are so bad at this game and only capable truck A to B and call it trade, scoop honk and call it explorarion.

What content can you expect? If the thargoids will force a full scale war, the solo carebears will be the first to squel how they are "forced pve" and where is the block button.

Nothing will change and there is nothing to hope for, there is no point anticipating complex content where majority cant even dock without a docking computer, and fdev caters to the weakest link, hence the simplicity

Less is more. Talk less. Your "type" is your own worse enemy to your "cause" with such statements.
i would quit the game in a hot second rather then giving you the statisfacrion playing it "your way."
Brrr...you electronic warriors are awesome. No need to start a war where there isn't one.
You play your game and I'll play mine.

 

[RidingTheFlow]

Ah, pvp vs pve.
I personally think, FDev should develop entirely new single-player story-driven Elite game and leave ED in maintenance mode while also removing solo & private from it for PvP fans

 

[ALGOMATIC]

Ah, pvp vs pve.
I personally think, FDev should develop entirely new single-player story-driven Elite game and leave ED in maintenance mode while also removing solo & private from it for PvP fans

Agree, ED should be either online multiplayer or a single player game, not both.

 

[Sylveria]

Ah, pvp vs pve.
I personally think, FDev should develop entirely new single-player story-driven Elite game and leave ED in maintenance mode while also removing solo & private from it for PvP fans

Break it off into two separate games using the same developed resources they have now? I could live with that.

Not that it will ever happen, but I think it would be a good "middle ground" to solve the PvE/PvP (Open/Solo) dilemma. They're certainly not going to up and "strip Solo" out of the game just to "fill Open", no more than they'd do the reverse at this point.

 

[RidingTheFlow]

Break it off into two separate games using the same developed resources they have now? I could live with that.

Not that it will ever happen, but I think it would be a good "middle ground" to solve the PvE/PvP (Open/Solo) dilemma. They're certainly not going to up and "strip Solo" out of the game just to "fill Open", no more than they'd do the reverse at this point.

Yeah, I also don't think it will happen. I am not confident that they have the technical/resource ability to do so (even if ED maintained by skeleton crew - its probably already anyway).

 

[M00ka]

Break it off into two separate games using the same developed resources they have now? I could live with that.

Not that it will ever happen, but I think it would be a good "middle ground" to solve the PvE/PvP (Open/Solo) dilemma. They're certainly not going to up and "strip Solo" out of the game just to "fill Open", no more than they'd do the reverse at this point.

Was just thinking about that, it would be very easy for FD to create a PvP Only server. It would only need to have one system in it, one station, no NPC's because there would only be maybe a dozen players using it. Since there wouldn't be any non-PvPers on the server, there wouldn't be any easy targets, no salt to mine.

 

[Aslinkal]

Still mostly a hollow experience three years into full release... Let us review:

Starting with the Good:

• Flight model is excellent, rewards skill that takes a long time to master
• Decent visuals (mostly)
• Audio is fantastic and atmospheric
• Ship designs are nice IMO
• Great variation in possible ship builds and weapon variations
• Good variation in available customisations and cosmetics
• Character creator is decent
• Scale of the galaxy is impressive
• Community goals are good for creating player bottlenecks
• Wings are useful
• Thargoid ships look and sound very cool
• Strong background lore and the game is faithful to previous titles in the series

The not so good:

• Still have done nothing with PvP bounty hunting - no tracking tools, no central most-wanted lists, max bounty capped at a level which makes it totally pointless to try
• Still have done nothing with criminal careers - they just seem to want to focus on the punishment side. Punishment without reward will just push players away.. (will piracy ever get any focus??)
• Exploration is still basic and repetitive (honk if you're bored)
• Trading is repetitive and most of the commodity types are valueless and only useful for new players. No player to player trading of any sort (open goal missed)
• Rare commodities have never been utilised properly, they could be the cornerstone of the open play trader-pirate-bounty hunter ecosystem... but allocations are too small (and drip-fed) to be attractive to traders
• Landable planets started off looking ok with some nice variations and colours.. but this was clearly too interesting so Fdev made them all grey and beige
• PvP is still a useless sideshow because Fdev seem to be scared to give it a purpose - 'meaningful' DB said in the kickstarter days, it's anything but
• Mining is eclipsed by all other activities in terms of profit when it should be the best earner (mineral, metal and high tech commodities are all way too low in value - this hurts piracy too)
• Naval rank is still a horrific, nonsensical grind, with most ranks serving no purpose whatsoever - has little to do with conflict zones either which is odd
• Capital ships look nice but are actually pretty underwhelming
• Galnet is a wall of text that is full of uninteresting waffle and is hidden away where you forget about it
• Community goals are over-used, and are pretty much the only interactive way to carry the narrative forward
• Powerplay was too grind-driven to ever be successful with it's 'free to play' style treadmill super-grind.. Restricting it to open might have made it work on some level but that would require them to come of of their comfort zone regarding mode parity (open goal missed)
• CQC was fun for a couple of hours but the lack of depth made it a novelty that about 99.99% of the playerbase got bored of pretty much immediately. Concept was based on assumptions about what console players and PvPers wanted... both were incorrect assumptions
• Engineering effectively gated PvP to all but the most determined players. It's also a mixture of horrific grind and online casino (draggable sliders were such an obvious avenue, why the multi-tiered RNG which everyone was bound to hate?)
• Multicrew, pretty much the same as CQC, nice idea but it lacks depth so nobody bothers - requires a turret or fighter to actually serve a purpose (turrets suck and fighters are limited to a few ships)
• Thargoids, while well designed (visual & audio), are pretty much a ride you can choose to go on... this removes any sense of mystery/fear from them
• Lack of new ships in the Horizons season made things a bit stale
• Still only one ground vehicle two years into Horizons
• No new planet types to land on since 2.0 - many assumed volcanic planets were on the agenda for season two - but Fdev were probably in retrospect referring to those small volcanic features found on some rocky worlds - disappointing
• Its taken Fdev 3 years to realise that player factions/squadrons need proper mechanics, will be four years by the time they arrive - they listened too long to the 'go play EVE' crowd
• Fdev have let combat logging run rampant throughout the game for three years.. Alluded to a solution but always seem to kick the can down the road. Where's this karma system then, beyond beyond?
• They have provided too many ways to circumvent player opposition, rendering proper faction conflict an impossible pipedream
• Giving players the ability to block other players from instances is a ridiculous concept - it's too open to abuse. Should be comms only (also adds to the game's instancing woes)

To summarise, it seems FDev are a company that have a lot of nice ideas, but have trouble manifesting these ideas into engaging gameplay. They either miss the player desires completely (powerplay, CQC, engineering casino) or whittle down a good concept into 'minimum deliverable product' (multi-crew, Thargoids) for the sake of a quick release. Saying requested features are 'too difficult' to implement has been a reoccurring response - why is this? There was so much ambition in the early days, now the bar is seemingly in the process of being lowered. Remember many still are expecting at the very least, 2 more Horizons sized expansions to make the their lifetime expansion passes worth buying... Anything less and it will kick off big time around here (I'm personally not bothered, I'll have probably jumped ship to SC by then).

Looking at the list above, that is a colossal amount of work to either deliver or improve on, and given Fdev's usual practice of tinkering around the edges rather than wholesale improvements - I'd say we will never see most of those things improved.

I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see this game getting too much better than it is currently.. Too many of Elites core concepts, along with some of Frontier's central design philosophies are bizarre and don't translate well into an engaging mmo game.

I think ED's players will always have one eye on the next update...

+99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 to infinity and beyond

 

[WorldsGreatestForumDad]

I mean all that needs to happen is; Give modes their own identity. People can use single player or group player modes for personal progression they can bring into the multiplayer part of the game at any time.

This shouldn't be hard to do.

 

[SpaceScania]

Was just thinking about that, it would be very easy for FD to create a PvP Only server. It would only need to have one system in it, one station, no NPC's because there would only be maybe a dozen players using it. Since there wouldn't be any non-PvPers on the server, there wouldn't be any easy targets, no salt to mine.

Even though I don’t play in open I can see the wisdom of having a PvP open and a non-PvP open server. Other games have used that system to great success. How many people have joined the various PvE groups just to get away from PvP?

 

[jasonbarron]

It's downright eerie to read some (many) of the posts on this thread from people who are dedicated to the idea that this game never really improve.

 

[WorldsGreatestForumDad]

Still mostly a hollow experience three years into full release... Let us review:

Starting with the Good:

• Flight model is excellent, rewards skill that takes a long time to master
• Decent visuals (mostly)
• Audio is fantastic and atmospheric
• Ship designs are nice IMO
• Great variation in possible ship builds and weapon variations
• Good variation in available customisations and cosmetics
• Character creator is decent
• Scale of the galaxy is impressive
• Community goals are good for creating player bottlenecks
• Wings are useful
• Thargoid ships look and sound very cool
• Strong background lore and the game is faithful to previous titles in the series

The not so good:

• Still have done nothing with PvP bounty hunting - no tracking tools, no central most-wanted lists, max bounty capped at a level which makes it totally pointless to try
• Still have done nothing with criminal careers - they just seem to want to focus on the punishment side. Punishment without reward will just push players away.. (will piracy ever get any focus??)
• Exploration is still basic and repetitive (honk if you're bored)
• Trading is repetitive and most of the commodity types are valueless and only useful for new players. No player to player trading of any sort (open goal missed)
• Rare commodities have never been utilised properly, they could be the cornerstone of the open play trader-pirate-bounty hunter ecosystem... but allocations are too small (and drip-fed) to be attractive to traders
• Landable planets started off looking ok with some nice variations and colours.. but this was clearly too interesting so Fdev made them all grey and beige
• PvP is still a useless sideshow because Fdev seem to be scared to give it a purpose - 'meaningful' DB said in the kickstarter days, it's anything but
• Mining is eclipsed by all other activities in terms of profit when it should be the best earner (mineral, metal and high tech commodities are all way too low in value - this hurts piracy too)
• Naval rank is still a horrific, nonsensical grind, with most ranks serving no purpose whatsoever - has little to do with conflict zones either which is odd
• Capital ships look nice but are actually pretty underwhelming
• Galnet is a wall of text that is full of uninteresting waffle and is hidden away where you forget about it
• Community goals are over-used, and are pretty much the only interactive way to carry the narrative forward
• Powerplay was too grind-driven to ever be successful with it's 'free to play' style treadmill super-grind.. Restricting it to open might have made it work on some level but that would require them to come of of their comfort zone regarding mode parity (open goal missed)
• CQC was fun for a couple of hours but the lack of depth made it a novelty that about 99.99% of the playerbase got bored of pretty much immediately. Concept was based on assumptions about what console players and PvPers wanted... both were incorrect assumptions
• Engineering effectively gated PvP to all but the most determined players. It's also a mixture of horrific grind and online casino (draggable sliders were such an obvious avenue, why the multi-tiered RNG which everyone was bound to hate?)
• Multicrew, pretty much the same as CQC, nice idea but it lacks depth so nobody bothers - requires a turret or fighter to actually serve a purpose (turrets suck and fighters are limited to a few ships)
• Thargoids, while well designed (visual & audio), are pretty much a ride you can choose to go on... this removes any sense of mystery/fear from them
• Lack of new ships in the Horizons season made things a bit stale
• Still only one ground vehicle two years into Horizons
• No new planet types to land on since 2.0 - many assumed volcanic planets were on the agenda for season two - but Fdev were probably in retrospect referring to those small volcanic features found on some rocky worlds - disappointing
• Its taken Fdev 3 years to realise that player factions/squadrons need proper mechanics, will be four years by the time they arrive - they listened too long to the 'go play EVE' crowd
• Fdev have let combat logging run rampant throughout the game for three years.. Alluded to a solution but always seem to kick the can down the road. Where's this karma system then, beyond beyond?
• They have provided too many ways to circumvent player opposition, rendering proper faction conflict an impossible pipedream
• Giving players the ability to block other players from instances is a ridiculous concept - it's too open to abuse. Should be comms only (also adds to the game's instancing woes)

To summarise, it seems FDev are a company that have a lot of nice ideas, but have trouble manifesting these ideas into engaging gameplay. They either miss the player desires completely (powerplay, CQC, engineering casino) or whittle down a good concept into 'minimum deliverable product' (multi-crew, Thargoids) for the sake of a quick release. Saying requested features are 'too difficult' to implement has been a reoccurring response - why is this? There was so much ambition in the early days, now the bar is seemingly in the process of being lowered. Remember many still are expecting at the very least, 2 more Horizons sized expansions to make the their lifetime expansion passes worth buying... Anything less and it will kick off big time around here (I'm personally not bothered, I'll have probably jumped ship to SC by then).

Looking at the list above, that is a colossal amount of work to either deliver or improve on, and given Fdev's usual practice of tinkering around the edges rather than wholesale improvements - I'd say we will never see most of those things improved.

I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see this game getting too much better than it is currently.. Too many of Elites core concepts, along with some of Frontier's central design philosophies are bizarre and don't translate well into an engaging mmo game.

I think ED's players will always have one eye on the next update...

I think its really awesome the depth you go through to explain the problems within this game. You hit the nail on the head every time.

 

[RidingTheFlow]

I mean all that needs to happen is; Give modes their own identity. People can use single player or group player modes for personal progression they can bring into the the multiplayer part of the game at any time.

This shouldn't be hard to do.

Unfortunately does not seem like FDev have resource past making "identity" = "you don't match make with other players switch", and even with that they are struggling to deliver and have to stretch meagre content by artificial slowdown (randomness, grind).

Having something more meaningful, e.g. actual story missions in single player mode will require much more effort&resources than that.

It's downright eerie to read some (many) of the posts on this thread from people who are dedicated to the idea that this game never really improve.

Oh, it will improve. Just at the same pace it did improve past years.

 

[jasonbarron]

Still mostly a hollow experience three years into full release... Let us review:

Starting with the Good:

• Flight model is excellent, rewards skill that takes a long time to master
• Decent visuals (mostly)
• Audio is fantastic and atmospheric
• Ship designs are nice IMO
• Great variation in possible ship builds and weapon variations
• Good variation in available customisations and cosmetics
• Character creator is decent
• Scale of the galaxy is impressive
• Community goals are good for creating player bottlenecks
• Wings are useful
• Thargoid ships look and sound very cool
• Strong background lore and the game is faithful to previous titles in the series

The not so good:

• Still have done nothing with PvP bounty hunting - no tracking tools, no central most-wanted lists, max bounty capped at a level which makes it totally pointless to try
• Still have done nothing with criminal careers - they just seem to want to focus on the punishment side. Punishment without reward will just push players away.. (will piracy ever get any focus??)
• Exploration is still basic and repetitive (honk if you're bored)
• Trading is repetitive and most of the commodity types are valueless and only useful for new players. No player to player trading of any sort (open goal missed)
• Rare commodities have never been utilised properly, they could be the cornerstone of the open play trader-pirate-bounty hunter ecosystem... but allocations are too small (and drip-fed) to be attractive to traders
• Landable planets started off looking ok with some nice variations and colours.. but this was clearly too interesting so Fdev made them all grey and beige
• PvP is still a useless sideshow because Fdev seem to be scared to give it a purpose - 'meaningful' DB said in the kickstarter days, it's anything but
• Mining is eclipsed by all other activities in terms of profit when it should be the best earner (mineral, metal and high tech commodities are all way too low in value - this hurts piracy too)
• Naval rank is still a horrific, nonsensical grind, with most ranks serving no purpose whatsoever - has little to do with conflict zones either which is odd
• Capital ships look nice but are actually pretty underwhelming
• Galnet is a wall of text that is full of uninteresting waffle and is hidden away where you forget about it
• Community goals are over-used, and are pretty much the only interactive way to carry the narrative forward
• Powerplay was too grind-driven to ever be successful with it's 'free to play' style treadmill super-grind.. Restricting it to open might have made it work on some level but that would require them to come of of their comfort zone regarding mode parity (open goal missed)
• CQC was fun for a couple of hours but the lack of depth made it a novelty that about 99.99% of the playerbase got bored of pretty much immediately. Concept was based on assumptions about what console players and PvPers wanted... both were incorrect assumptions
• Engineering effectively gated PvP to all but the most determined players. It's also a mixture of horrific grind and online casino (draggable sliders were such an obvious avenue, why the multi-tiered RNG which everyone was bound to hate?)
• Multicrew, pretty much the same as CQC, nice idea but it lacks depth so nobody bothers - requires a turret or fighter to actually serve a purpose (turrets suck and fighters are limited to a few ships)
• Thargoids, while well designed (visual & audio), are pretty much a ride you can choose to go on... this removes any sense of mystery/fear from them
• Lack of new ships in the Horizons season made things a bit stale
• Still only one ground vehicle two years into Horizons
• No new planet types to land on since 2.0 - many assumed volcanic planets were on the agenda for season two - but Fdev were probably in retrospect referring to those small volcanic features found on some rocky worlds - disappointing
• Its taken Fdev 3 years to realise that player factions/squadrons need proper mechanics, will be four years by the time they arrive - they listened too long to the 'go play EVE' crowd
• Fdev have let combat logging run rampant throughout the game for three years.. Alluded to a solution but always seem to kick the can down the road. Where's this karma system then, beyond beyond?
• They have provided too many ways to circumvent player opposition, rendering proper faction conflict an impossible pipedream
• Giving players the ability to block other players from instances is a ridiculous concept - it's too open to abuse. Should be comms only (also adds to the game's instancing woes)

To summarise, it seems FDev are a company that have a lot of nice ideas, but have trouble manifesting these ideas into engaging gameplay. They either miss the player desires completely (powerplay, CQC, engineering casino) or whittle down a good concept into 'minimum deliverable product' (multi-crew, Thargoids) for the sake of a quick release. Saying requested features are 'too difficult' to implement has been a reoccurring response - why is this? There was so much ambition in the early days, now the bar is seemingly in the process of being lowered. Remember many still are expecting at the very least, 2 more Horizons sized expansions to make the their lifetime expansion passes worth buying... Anything less and it will kick off big time around here (I'm personally not bothered, I'll have probably jumped ship to SC by then).

Looking at the list above, that is a colossal amount of work to either deliver or improve on, and given Fdev's usual practice of tinkering around the edges rather than wholesale improvements - I'd say we will never see most of those things improved.

I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see this game getting too much better than it is currently.. Too many of Elites core concepts, along with some of Frontier's central design philosophies are bizarre and don't translate well into an engaging mmo game.

I think ED's players will always have one eye on the next update...

First rate analysis, CMDR. Have some rep.