FDevs does everything have to be a grind?

[CapuchinSeven]

Spot on my friend. The substitution of "time sinks" in place of innovative and engaging content is a glaring issue in ED and they often turn that into a car crash of a launch. I'm old school in regards to games and am no newbie to the grind, the diffrence with ED though is that there is nothing BUT the grind as of now (scripted Thargoid aside). They would have been better off including quest chains and mini-campaigns with rewards like madules or ship chassis for example but no they wont even dress it up, its unashamedley a grind fest.

This is also a is a very fair point. ED uses cheap, badly implemented RNG and grind/time sink gameplay as a substitute for innovative content. The real crime is that it really doesn't have to be that way, and hopefully with S3 they'll go someway to fixing that.

The only thing worse than the RNG style of gameplay is those that try and defend it with "it's for grown ups" or "you have to use your imagination" arguments. Bad game play is bad game play, if it was as perfect as they claim we wouldn't be getting it fixed in S3.

 

[Jex =TE=]

maybe i have not thought this through, however....

i would suggest ..

1) base "ingredients" which are the super cheap mass proguced stuff, ie food, should be in massive supply and essentially never run out....
2) as you move up the foodchain / pyramid there would be 2 potential supply levels a) in rich supply - no restrictions on purchase put in place and b) items in short supply, with limited amounts UNLESS you supply some raw materials needed for the in short supply product, in which case you get a full allowance.

what this would mean

a) small ships not affected too much, even in short supply a hauler could probably get enough to not worry
b) the big ships would have to do more than A B trading.. to be effective they would probably have to set up proper A - B - C - D trade loops to efficiently trade
(this is different to beta because there WOULD still be stock for the big ships but only IF they deliver stuff needed in the supply chain)

why is this good?

a) All products have purpose, and not just the high end stuff.
b) some products would ALWAYS be in limited supply... a system with population of a few 100k would not have infinite supply of slaves.. and this is ok imo.
c) it would be more realistic and be more interesting for trading.

where is the carrot?

profit margins from low demand to high demand can be increased. if i am only doing 1 400 tone run of farm machinery every 40 mins instead of every 10 mins it would be ok if profit margines from high supply to high demand were doubled.

it would mean those with big ships would not just be whales gobbling up supply, they would be key in generating that supply in the 1st place.... and the smaller ships can still compete, esp when it comes to CGs and the like.

where is the stick? i honestly dont see one, if balanced properly it would not necessarily decrease profits.

As it is right now, the BGS is pointless. It does nothing for trade and who really cares about flipping an RNG system to some other made up random generated clan. Having things actually make sense and have meaning would be far better. How about famine on a planet that requires food, medicine for disease, etc.

All you lot that have been landing on planets - you probably picked up alien bacteria... who knows what that could do.

Before they made the BGS even more pointless, affecting productivity by bringing in items was useless. So you bring in stuff, have to wait for supply before you can sell - nobody is going to do that over finding a good trade route where they do have supply/demand. So it definitely needs to be fleshed out a lot more.