Elite Dangerous needs its own "Operation Health"

And there are a lot of us who do understand that some things don't show up until it hits live, and we accept that as a reality of programming, but yeah, that is an entirely different scenario than we are talking about here. To me, while the unfixed bugs that were allowed into live were pretty crippling to me to the point of making the game unplayable, I think what concerns me far more, and I suspect many other players who are actually really supportive, but at the same time objective, what worries us more than the bugs is the decision making process that led to the decision to release, and release when they did in the first place.

That type of decision making, if allowed to continue does not bode well for the future of the game, and for those of us who absolutely love this game, that is a very troubling thought. It is difficult to have confidence and faith in decisions made by proven poor decision makers.

Well said. That is worrisome indeed.

If they'll decide to release that...what next?
 
So Ubisoft of all companies have committed to pulling one of their money making expansions in favour of improving the core of their game, Rainbow Six: Siege. They'll be driving to improve the servers & bug fixes.

https://rainbow6.ubisoft.com/siege/en-US/news/152-290265-16/operation-health-qa

I think 99% of people here would agree that we all want to see improvements to the core of Elite. Not the drip feed bug fixes we've been receiving but a fully fleshed 100% push to fix the core of the game, server stability & mechanics.

So to draw attention to this... FD if Ubisoft can manage to take their finger of the money drug, take a step back and agree to improve the core stability & mechanics of the game, please can you take a serious look at doing this?

I think the best way to do this would be to have a 2.5 update which comes before 3.0.

Yup!
 
FD believe adding new functionality is better than revisiting existing game play and extending, which is has lead to what Elite is now. Half finished functionality, and ED seem to think "job well done, lets move to the next idea". There's plenty of low hanging fruit, improvements to QoL that could be made.
 
Honestly I don't think FD is capable of completing a patch like that simply due to the fact that for the most part the core gameplay loop itself is broken on many levels and affects the vast majority of playstyles. Nothing you do affects anything except for your credit balance and the vague knowledge that some actions can push one minor faction influence by 0.01% (not that there's much reason to care about that either since it doesn't affect anything aside from minor system changes which if displeasing can be bypassed by doing 1-3 jumps to the next inhabited system). Due to the removal of superpower bounties there is almost no consequence to committing crime in a random system and pvp bounty hunting died instantly and contributed to the death of the trader->pirate->bounty hunter dynamic alongside nerfs to rare trading.

Trading can barely even be called that since it's just two way hauling where nothing ever changes and the complexity goes up to go to eddb trade loop -> find highest profit -> trade until you either become nihilistic or the route runs dry. Because of the lack of interactivity between bgs states and commodity markets even basic levels of common sense like battle weapons being desired goods in war systems don't pan out and the only way for pirates on the other hand to consistently pirate other players is to go to cg systems or to go to eddb themselves and pray to Braben that most traders use similar criteria and that p2p gods are on their side.

The BGS and Trading mechanics not being linked in a big way reflects on just about every facet of gameplay that you can face excluding social interaction with other commanders since it is impossible to align with minor factions or superpowers you can't make anything have major consequences. Since there is no player driven economy or ability to align with any minor factions or incentive to do aside from RP reasons there is no reason to care if Blue Gang of HIP 1235423560+ - 23521 wins or loses a war and there isn't even a way of knowing what assets they can win or lose and the only reason to care about the existence of the state itself is conflict zones which are grindable and again the outcome doesn't matter.

Bounty hunting is the least affected playstyle alongside CZ gameplay but bounty hunting has nothing to do with bounty hunting itself but rather wave clearing similar to a really bad Diablo clone or something and there is no real excitement to be had doing bounty hunting when the closest you can get to it are assassination missions which are never worth it because going to a haz res or a cz pays more credits per hour. Conflict zones are okay for the most part since wave clearing in it makes thematical sense and the outfitting levels of the ships are mostly consistent with what you could expect but capital ships and wave spawn mechanics need way more work.

Combat itself heavily suffers from a lack of contextuality and a sense of any sort of consequence, a problem which is further compounded by the games inability to correlate NPC combat rank with NPC combat prowess. Right now the majority of the NPC combat coding is okay for the newer players and unbearably easy for the veterans, we need to find a scaling where we get the early 2.1 AI behaviour for higher combat ranks so that there is challenge for the veterans but make it scale down better so that newer players don't get demolished.

The repetitive nature of all moneymaking activities leads to the point where once you get past the fast progression of the early ships and know how mechanics work and realize that you simply won't get any sort of new variations to making credits the only thing that really matters is credits per hour seeing as ever possible activity will just be repeating the same very simplistic pattern ad infinitum which is one of the massive contributing factors to why money exploits are so prevalent and sought after by the community. The actual ship progression in the game is akin to a speeding truck meeting a concrete wall once you get to about python tier unless if you EXACTLY know how to make money and it is at this point that you seriously start facing the core issues with the PVE core gameplay loop if you want to get progression to bigger and (possibly) better ships and modules.

The closest we have to consequences storywise the Thor-goid's thing and even for that you need to be up to date with social medias because finding anything by accident is basically impossible aside from hyperdictions.

Powerplay also suffers from the lack of a player driven economy and a lack of superpower bounties and a lack of meaningful rewards as there is no real consequence to grinding merits or even winning or losing systems aside from RP value. You only have a very limited set of ways to attack opposing powers and since all systems that are non-anarchy have the same laws and same crime and punishment there's no distinction between imp, fed and alliance systems aside from the ones in your own head.

The naval rank system is about as barebones as you can get while still getting away with calling it a complete mechanic as is exploration. The only big improvement made to exploration was the payout buff which while significant only increased the reward (while being an easy number change) but did nothing about the gameplay itself.

Exploration as we know it has no depth as the ye olde way of describing it as "honk, scan and jump" while very slightly oversimplifiying it is far more true than dedicated explorers would have you believe. Nothing you can find aside from specifically FD created content has any excite value as once you are past the point of seeing every class of celestial body a couple of times you have seen it all and done it all and the only thing you can keep on doing is repeating until you get a more rare assortment of celestial bodies in a system or ones that are bugged and have a weird colouring or something. As the only danger explorers face is falling asleep about a thousand times so that your ship explodes or making a stupid landing a thousand G world is the only way to endanger your ship aside from stupid jumping in low scoopable rate areas (a feat far more difficult to achieve than some would have you believe) it is impossible to endanger your ship in any way aside from stupidity, the monotone content getting to you, straight up bugs like spawning in the ejection cone or just stupidity.

And all of that is just scratching the surface of the massively broken E:D iceberg for PvE where I didn't even talk about a LOT of topics including but not limited to engineering, PvP issues, crime and punishment mechanics, the issues with risk/reward overall in this game, the absurd overuse of RNG mechanics.

Just as a final note the only reason E:D didn't get a MASSIVE backlash for 2.1 (an even bigger one than it already historically did) is because NMS failure saga happened at the same time. The original 2.1 engineers mechanics were so badly designed and such a massive timesink for E:D that it is best compared to patches the likes that killed MMORPGs like Star Wars Galaxies. Don't get me wrong engineers is still very, very, very bad but it is marginally more bearable than early 2.1.

If you want more ranting then just give me topics and I will get to it at some point.
 
Last edited:
It wasn't so much a financial basis as much as a goodwill and investment in the game.
"Drop everything and only fix bugs" is purely a money thing though, and frankly very few people here would be grateful or understanding of the results being no new content (amagadneedmoardepthmahmershn), and that's before the part where everyone not involved in that (art, writing, marketing, …) is suddenly just sitting there twiddling thumbs and waiting for their turn. If it wasn't that double-punch in the face, everyone would be doing those clean-up runs on a regular basis.
 
Last edited:
Honestly I don't think FD is capable of completing a patch like that simply due to the fact that for the most part the core gameplay loop itself is broken on many levels and affects the vast majority of playstyles. Nothing you do affects anything except for your credit balance and the vague knowledge that some actions can push one minor faction influence by 0.01% (not that there's much reason to care about that either since it doesn't affect anything aside from minor system changes which if displeasing can be bypassed by doing 1-3 jumps to the next inhabited system). Due to the removal of superpower bounties there is almost no consequence to committing crime in a random system and pvp bounty hunting died instantly and contributed to the death of the trader->pirate->bounty hunter dynamic alongside nerfs to rare trading.

Trading can barely even be called that since it's just two way hauling where nothing ever changes and the complexity goes up to go to eddb trade loop -> find highest profit -> trade until you either become nihilistic or the route runs dry. Because of the lack of interactivity between bgs states and commodity markets even basic levels of common sense like battle weapons being desired goods in war systems don't pan out and the only way for pirates on the other hand to consistently pirate other players is to go to cg systems or to go to eddb themselves and pray to Braben that most traders use similar criteria and that p2p gods are on their side.

The BGS and Trading mechanics not being linked in a big way reflects on just about every facet of gameplay that you can face excluding social interaction with other commanders since it is impossible to align with minor factions or superpowers you can't make anything have major consequences. Since there is no player driven economy or ability to align with any minor factions or incentive to do aside from RP reasons there is no reason to care if Blue Gang of HIP 1235423560+ - 23521 wins or loses a war and there isn't even a way of knowing what assets they can win or lose and the only reason to care about the existence of the state itself is conflict zones which are grindable and again the outcome doesn't matter.

Bounty hunting is the least affected playstyle alongside CZ gameplay but bounty hunting has nothing to do with bounty hunting itself but rather wave clearing similar to a really bad Diablo clone or something and there is no real excitement to be had doing bounty hunting when the closest you can get to it are assassination missions which are never worth it because going to a haz res or a cz pays more credits per hour. Conflict zones are okay for the most part since wave clearing in it makes thematical sense and the outfitting levels of the ships are mostly consistent with what you could expect but capital ships and wave spawn mechanics need way more work.

Combat itself heavily suffers from a lack of contextuality and a sense of any sort of consequence, a problem which is further compounded by the games inability to correlate NPC combat rank with NPC combat prowess. Right now the majority of the NPC combat coding is okay for the newer players and unbearably easy for the veterans, we need to find a scaling where we get the early 2.1 AI behaviour for higher combat ranks so that there is challenge for the veterans but make it scale down better so that newer players don't get demolished.

The repetitive nature of all moneymaking activities leads to the point where once you get past the fast progression of the early ships and know how mechanics work and realize that you simply won't get any sort of new variations to making credits the only thing that really matters is credits per hour seeing as ever possible activity will just be repeating the same very simplistic pattern ad infinitum which is one of the massive contributing factors to why money exploits are so prevalent and sought after by the community. The actual ship progression in the game is akin to a speeding truck meeting a concrete wall once you get to about python tier unless if you EXACTLY know how to make money and it is at this point that you seriously start facing the core issues with the PVE core gameplay loop if you want to get progression to bigger and (possibly) better ships and modules.

The closest we have to consequences storywise the Thor-goid's thing and even for that you need to be up to date with social medias because finding anything by accident is basically impossible aside from hyperdictions.

Powerplay also suffers from the lack of a player driven economy and a lack of superpower bounties and a lack of meaningful rewards as there is no real consequence to grinding merits or even winning or losing systems aside from RP value. You only have a very limited set of ways to attack opposing powers and since all systems that are non-anarchy have the same laws and same crime and punishment there's no distinction between imp, fed and alliance systems aside from the ones in your own head.

The naval rank system is about as barebones as you can get while still getting away with calling it a complete mechanic as is exploration. The only big improvement made to exploration was the payout buff which while significant only increased the reward (while being an easy number change) but did nothing about the gameplay itself.

Exploration as we know it has no depth as the ye olde way of describing it as "honk, scan and jump" while very slightly oversimplifiying it is far more true than dedicated explorers would have you believe. Nothing you can find aside from specifically FD created content has any excite value as once you are past the point of seeing every class of celestial body a couple of times you have seen it all and done it all and the only thing you can keep on doing is repeating until you get a more rare assortment of celestial bodies in a system or ones that are bugged and have a weird colouring or something. As the only danger explorers face is falling asleep about a thousand times so that your ship explodes or making a stupid landing a thousand G world is the only way to endanger your ship aside from stupid jumping in low scoopable rate areas (a feat far more difficult to achieve than some would have you believe) it is impossible to endanger your ship in any way aside from stupidity, the monotone content getting to you, straight up bugs like spawning in the ejection cone or just stupidity.

And all of that is just scratching the surface of the massively broken E:D iceberg for PvE where I didn't even talk about a LOT of topics including but not limited to engineering, PvP issues, crime and punishment mechanics, the issues with risk/reward overall in this game, the absurd overuse of RNG mechanics.

Just as a final note the only reason E:D didn't get a MASSIVE backlash for 2.1 (an even bigger one than it already historically did) is because NMS failure saga happened at the same time. The original 2.1 engineers mechanics were so badly designed and such a massive timesink for E:D that it is best compared to patches the likes that killed MMORPGs like Star Wars Galaxies. Don't get me wrong engineers is still very, very, very bad but it is marginally more bearable than early 2.1.

If you want more ranting then just give me topics and I will get to it at some point.

Best post I've read in quite a while here on the forums. Have some rep.
 
Last edited:
So Ubisoft of all companies have committed to pulling one of their money making expansions in favour of improving the core of their game, Rainbow Six: Siege. They'll be driving to improve the servers & bug fixes.

https://rainbow6.ubisoft.com/siege/en-US/news/152-290265-16/operation-health-qa

I think 99% of people here would agree that we all want to see improvements to the core of Elite. Not the drip feed bug fixes we've been receiving but a fully fleshed 100% push to fix the core of the game, server stability & mechanics.

So to draw attention to this... FD if Ubisoft can manage to take their finger of the money drug, take a step back and agree to improve the core stability & mechanics of the game, please can you take a serious look at doing this?

I think the best way to do this would be to have a 2.5 update which comes before 3.0.

I don't even know what to say, comparing Frontier to Ubisoft like that, but be that as it may, I'd love to see a list of the so called 'bad' things, because last I checked most left right now is subjective, as in what people like or dislike of mechanics, and yeah, no "Operation health" is going to ever make everyone happy. Yes there are some bugs sure, but many of those do not affect a big group of people.

So yeah improvements, sure, but 'bug fixes' aren't improvements in my book, at least my experience with Elite has been very trouble free of late, and no that doesn't mean I dismiss problems, but a lot of the 'problems' reported are connection ones which is not going to have a universal fix.
 
Last edited:
Honestly I don't think FD is capable of completing a patch like that simply due to the fact that for the most part the core gameplay loop itself is broken on many levels and affects the vast majority of playstyles. Nothing you do affects anything except for your credit balance and the vague knowledge that some actions can push one minor faction influence by 0.01% (not that there's much reason to care about that either since it doesn't affect anything aside from minor system changes which if displeasing can be bypassed by doing 1-3 jumps to the next inhabited system). Due to the removal of superpower bounties there is almost no consequence to committing crime in a random system and pvp bounty hunting died instantly and contributed to the death of the trader->pirate->bounty hunter dynamic alongside nerfs to rare trading.

Trading can barely even be called that since it's just two way hauling where nothing ever changes and the complexity goes up to go to eddb trade loop -> find highest profit -> trade until you either become nihilistic or the route runs dry. Because of the lack of interactivity between bgs states and commodity markets even basic levels of common sense like battle weapons being desired goods in war systems don't pan out and the only way for pirates on the other hand to consistently pirate other players is to go to cg systems or to go to eddb themselves and pray to Braben that most traders use similar criteria and that p2p gods are on their side.

The BGS and Trading mechanics not being linked in a big way reflects on just about every facet of gameplay that you can face excluding social interaction with other commanders since it is impossible to align with minor factions or superpowers you can't make anything have major consequences. Since there is no player driven economy or ability to align with any minor factions or incentive to do aside from RP reasons there is no reason to care if Blue Gang of HIP 1235423560+ - 23521 wins or loses a war and there isn't even a way of knowing what assets they can win or lose and the only reason to care about the existence of the state itself is conflict zones which are grindable and again the outcome doesn't matter.

Bounty hunting is the least affected playstyle alongside CZ gameplay but bounty hunting has nothing to do with bounty hunting itself but rather wave clearing similar to a really bad Diablo clone or something and there is no real excitement to be had doing bounty hunting when the closest you can get to it are assassination missions which are never worth it because going to a haz res or a cz pays more credits per hour. Conflict zones are okay for the most part since wave clearing in it makes thematical sense and the outfitting levels of the ships are mostly consistent with what you could expect but capital ships and wave spawn mechanics need way more work.

Combat itself heavily suffers from a lack of contextuality and a sense of any sort of consequence, a problem which is further compounded by the games inability to correlate NPC combat rank with NPC combat prowess. Right now the majority of the NPC combat coding is okay for the newer players and unbearably easy for the veterans, we need to find a scaling where we get the early 2.1 AI behaviour for higher combat ranks so that there is challenge for the veterans but make it scale down better so that newer players don't get demolished.

The repetitive nature of all moneymaking activities leads to the point where once you get past the fast progression of the early ships and know how mechanics work and realize that you simply won't get any sort of new variations to making credits the only thing that really matters is credits per hour seeing as ever possible activity will just be repeating the same very simplistic pattern ad infinitum which is one of the massive contributing factors to why money exploits are so prevalent and sought after by the community. The actual ship progression in the game is akin to a speeding truck meeting a concrete wall once you get to about python tier unless if you EXACTLY know how to make money and it is at this point that you seriously start facing the core issues with the PVE core gameplay loop if you want to get progression to bigger and (possibly) better ships and modules.

The closest we have to consequences storywise the Thor-goid's thing and even for that you need to be up to date with social medias because finding anything by accident is basically impossible aside from hyperdictions.

Powerplay also suffers from the lack of a player driven economy and a lack of superpower bounties and a lack of meaningful rewards as there is no real consequence to grinding merits or even winning or losing systems aside from RP value. You only have a very limited set of ways to attack opposing powers and since all systems that are non-anarchy have the same laws and same crime and punishment there's no distinction between imp, fed and alliance systems aside from the ones in your own head.

The naval rank system is about as barebones as you can get while still getting away with calling it a complete mechanic as is exploration. The only big improvement made to exploration was the payout buff which while significant only increased the reward (while being an easy number change) but did nothing about the gameplay itself.

Exploration as we know it has no depth as the ye olde way of describing it as "honk, scan and jump" while very slightly oversimplifiying it is far more true than dedicated explorers would have you believe. Nothing you can find aside from specifically FD created content has any excite value as once you are past the point of seeing every class of celestial body a couple of times you have seen it all and done it all and the only thing you can keep on doing is repeating until you get a more rare assortment of celestial bodies in a system or ones that are bugged and have a weird colouring or something. As the only danger explorers face is falling asleep about a thousand times so that your ship explodes or making a stupid landing a thousand G world is the only way to endanger your ship aside from stupid jumping in low scoopable rate areas (a feat far more difficult to achieve than some would have you believe) it is impossible to endanger your ship in any way aside from stupidity, the monotone content getting to you, straight up bugs like spawning in the ejection cone or just stupidity.

And all of that is just scratching the surface of the massively broken E:D iceberg for PvE where I didn't even talk about a LOT of topics including but not limited to engineering, PvP issues, crime and punishment mechanics, the issues with risk/reward overall in this game, the absurd overuse of RNG mechanics.

Just as a final note the only reason E:D didn't get a MASSIVE backlash for 2.1 (an even bigger one than it already historically did) is because NMS failure saga happened at the same time. The original 2.1 engineers mechanics were so badly designed and such a massive timesink for E:D that it is best compared to patches the likes that killed MMORPGs like Star Wars Galaxies. Don't get me wrong engineers is still very, very, very bad but it is marginally more bearable than early 2.1.

If you want more ranting then just give me topics and I will get to it at some point.

I agree 100% ! There isn't a real reason why or purpose to most of the game. I think an economy both ai and player based would solve a lot of issues in the above statements. Harvest your engineering materials or buy them from someone. Building ships rather then replacing them. Selling engineered parts due to limiting access to all engineers until a certain criteria has been met. Blah blah blah....Which leads to new material rather then a complete work over
 
So reading the latest update from FD, I'm feeling quite smug...

For this one day I'm going to act like it was all me and this post helped.

I am definitely in no way responsible for FD deciding to communicate that they're focussing on Core gameplay.
 
Back
Top Bottom