First Impressions Matter

[safe4mx]

I stumbled across an excellent piece about Elite: Dangerous by the folks at Ars Technia. Overall their impressions are overwhelmingly positive. Like most people playing and covering the game, they love it , but the content of the third page troubles me. I'll post a few choice quotes:

The worst bit about Elite: Dangerous isn’t the bugs ... but rather the other players

the in-game bounty system awards money for destroying pirates or other bad guys to the ship that fires the killing shot, so you might drop into a combat zone and start whittling away the shields of a hostile NPC, only to have a far better equipped player zip in front of you and claim the kill and the credits with a quick missile or railgun blast. Right after that, they’ll more often than not flip around and blow you up just out of spite.

this leads to a very unfriendly atmosphere around most of the starter system’s instance zones

It’s currently impossible for anyone not willing to devote many hours of game time to even have a chance of flying around in anything but the starter Sidewinder.

Perhaps most damning:

Posts in the official forum complaining that new players are having a hard time are rabidly shouted down by others who enjoy the current high degree of difficulty (including this peach of a commenter, whose sole contribution to every thread appears to be some variation on "if you don't like the game like it is, you suck and you get better or stop playing.").

And this should be a gigantic red flag:

I’d pay real money to be able to play the trading/NPC combat version of the premium beta alone.

---​

When I read this I can't help but think of a buddy of mine who was in town last weekend for a wedding. He flew into town Thursday night and I offered to just let him crash at my place while I was at work on Friday. He knew I had coughed up the cash for the Elite beta and wanted to check it out. He's been watching the game like a hawk for some time now and he was extremely excited to get behind the throttle.

When I got home I asked him how he liked it and the first thing he did was apologize for getting my Eagle blown up (no worries, new phase soon) and then said while he loved the look and the feel of the game, trading was pointless with 4 cargo slots (truth) and he couldn't go anywhere without getting blown up by another player. He said it was really off putting. He said he still plans on getting the game (and will probably buy into the standard beta) but the community reminds him way too much of EVE Online and he said he'd much rather play by himself or with a group of people who just wanted to shoot pirates -- he's well aware of the systems that will be in place in the full game; just doesn't think they'll have much of an effect. Having played the beta myself and watching the "ganking" get progressively worse, I'm inclined to agree with him.

There has been much consternation here, Reddit, and else where about fracturing the community when the game is released. There is a concern that people will avoid the open universe in favor of a more restricted player list -- or will just play single player. This troubles me as well as one of the big features of this game is the massively-multiplayer aspects and I like the idea of a big dynamic galaxy with other living breathing people. That being said, given my experiences early in the beta and some of the less-savory aspects of the community, I think I'd rather share this rich galaxy with players of a similar (cooperatively-driven) mindset.

I have no problem with the concept of PvP, I like the idea of hunting down some griefer/pirate with a posse and splitting the bounty. I just think this "this is how it is, get better or stop playing" and spitefully shooting up players who offer no challenge is toxic and is actively planting the seeds that will inevitably lead to a fractured and segmented community.

I fully expect this post to get the same negative response mentioned in the Ars Technia article but I hope at least a few people (ideally including someone at Frontier) read it and think about the nascent community of Elite: Dangerous and how behaviors in game or on forums now will impact the final product down the road. I'm in it, I think this is going to be a great game and I will continue to participate in the beta process and give feedback, but at this rate I will also be eagerly awaiting the point where I can just play with friends.

 

[Rog]

I think most of this behaviour will change as and when already discussed anti-griefing mechanisms are introduced into the game.

No real surprise that E: D isn't immune to antisocial types, but we're still in early beta. We should be grateful that this type of behaviour is by design going to be curtailed - in many games that's the main entertainment that many derive as far as I can see.

As to the forum responses; well that reviewer was just picking up on a fairly isolated example that's not exactly representative of the general forumites here at all. IMHO.

 

[Calebe]

The way I play the beta is I won't attack anyone except in the combat area and they need to be on the other side. That is how we all should be playing and testing the game. It is not a case as some claim, all is fair as it is testing so I will blast any and everyone out of the sky. Sorry that is being childish and not really being honest. They just want to harass and think wow look at how badass I am. Actually it makes you look like a juvenile punk looking to brag and ruin others experience IMHO.

Agree or not, it is your call, but I agree with the OP, it makes the community look bad if people attack others that are not in combat area's. Go to one and you show red on a scanner, then your fair game and you should expect someone or an NPC to come for you. (I think all players and npc's if red should not distinguish players and npc's they should all be the same, but that was a different thread).

Calebe

 

[neilintheus]

I think the Alpha crowd (of which I am one) had quite a few people in there who were taking the whole thing waaaay too seriously. Not everyone, but some. It put me off posting in the forums.

I welcome the new influx of beta players as I am getting the impression that a bit more common sense is now making its way into the mix. And that the balance is moving away from the "get better or don't play" mentality to a "if you don't like it, maybe the game design needs tweaking".

At the end of the day the Alphas had their moment, now its time to start addressing the needs of the other customers who will make up the majority when this thing launches.

 

[Slone]

A lot of people playing online games don't have that "role playing spirit" that I thought would be mandatory. They don't try to understand the world they're playing in, they don't try to be part of it. They mostly see it as another landscape for their favorite sport which rule is to pwn before being pwned.

They mostly revel in the "power" of being anonymous in what is to them a very abstract world, a scenery, and unwind all kinds of frustrations, while fooling themselves with the idea this is good sport. They feel badass playing a kickboxing game against golf and polo players.

Hopefully, Elite will come with a complexity and a vastness that may discourage this kind of players. It's too early today to fear the game will be undermined by them.

 

[Amos]

These people who write about games first off, its still beta this is not the finished game, at the moment its very crowded and the game should not be played only tested and that is where these people write reviews or info about games fall off, I do not like griefing etc but at the moment its too crowded and that is what you get when we have hundreds of light years to play with then this behavoiur will stop

 

[deusx_ophc]

good post, making a point and voicing a concern that has been made already and also been genuinely addressed by both community & FDEV

my comments just right of the bat

1. we cannot judge systems that are not yet in place. the beta process will help to establish exactly how far reaching the proposed measures will be and what kind of tuning they require to get a good outcome (for all fractions of the player base). every player TESTING this game should be aware of this, it must be part of TESTER DNA.

2. first impressions do count, they are overwhelmingly positive. as alpha player i have seen the game develop and come on in leaps and bounds. that itself is a scary thought for what FDEV have in store for us. i mean the positive, mind boggling awesome type of scary.

3. ed is not a traditional mmo at all. and despite having some reservations on certain proposed ideas (player obfuscation) i see that ed has a chance to be that next landmark title, the one that overcomes the current misery & stalemate that is the classic mmo gerne.

4. the scale of the game in every aspect is huge, by definition players will be relatively small. unless you stay in the core of the known hubs or form bands of brothers you will not meet too many human players. certainly not as many as in ironforge or its equivalent.

5. the current situation of 10k (mainly bored until the next build) players in those 3 systems does make for good pewpewpew, that is given

i share part of your sentiment at times, but taking above into account alleviates that

 

[Antmax]

I agree with the biggest bug in the game being the antisocial thuggish behaviour of some players.

I suggested on another thread that if there is a game .log file of some kind. They could add whether you joined the side of a conflict and if not who killed you. Something you could submit like you would a bug. It should be easy to set up a parser to read specific info (joined conflict true or false, if false and killed by player, name of offending player and location/coords of incident) and add it to a database where repeat offenders can be automatically brought to the developers attention.

Players could submit incidents much like they would a bug.

Right now the game AI is much more law abiding than many of the players. You can fly around a conflict zone unmolested by AI so long as you don't take sides or act aggressively. But you will usually be attacked and killed intentionally by one of multiple players without any aggressive action on your part. Whether you took sides or not.

 

[michaelfife]

I think true griefing and ganking should have serious consequences. Like being banned from playing the game for a couple of months, or longer. Or Frontier taking away their ships and credits and giving them the basic sidewinder to start all over again.

 

[usernametaken]

Not really sure it's fair to take pot shots at the forum in an online article. All gaming forums have their share of unsavoury types. You can't mark E: D down because of them.

A few other things in that article irk me, but it's otherwise fairly good exposure for the game and that's always a good thing.

 

[Sanderson]

I've been on here for almost 4 weeks (laughable I know) and while I've seen the normal amount of tools you'd find on any forum, I've found this one to be exceptionally helpful and positive.

Maybe I'm just lucky.

Any time a person put's their hearts and/or money into something emotions run high, so human nature gets us all sometimes.

 

[Jexter]

Judging E by the current beta is like judging a book by its cover.

The scary part is some people actually DO

 

[prasak]

The article was really nice, but those are the things I cannot agree about. They are complaining about some guy on forums is a ...., but in fact this forum is the most friendly place to be and the % of stupid guys and trolls is very low. In the game, most of the people behave different in beta test, than they will in real game, and we have alot of people who are thinking, they are actually playing a game, but they are just testing the build and they will lose everything soon anyway.