Fleet Carriers - Patch 3 - Known Issues

[Lucaad]

Have to admit this leaves me wondering how you can introduce a patch "intended to bring down the effects of multiple overlapping hotspots" and say " any negative impact on locating and mining Tritium is unintentional and the intention is for Tritium to remain as accessible as it was prior to Patch 3" at the same time.

Seems a bit obvious to me that lowering the impact of overlapping Tritium hotspots would at least give some reduction if the patch had worked as expected, as even if Tritium is not considered one of the " rarer commodities" that nerf qualified that while it was especially them, it was all hotspots.

As soon as we get statements like that that contradict themselves it does leave me wondering if they know how the game the works or whether this is just PR.

But at least we would have the economic price impact of a rare commodity supply dropping to less than 10% of what it was right? Rather than the price dropping by half at the same time

Yes, the overlapping hotspots is an issue, but even single hotspots saw the hotspot commodity get MORE rare. They mention Tritium because that is a prime commodity for Carrier-explorers out in the black. It is painfully slow to mine Tritium for even one carrier jump at the moment (worse than before the patch), and now it looks like the supply/demand is affecting Colonia markets - commanders with carriers in Colonia can't even buy enough Tritium to fuel their carriers for the journey back to the bubble.

 

[Johnny7ee]

I really wish they would address the Type 10 and Type 9 Prospector limpets instantly killing themselves on launch, even when sitting idle. Worse in the Type 10. It seems that every 3rd or 4th prospector fails on launch. The launch sound is always there, and it deducts from my limpet count, but nothing is launched. Can reproduce this even when the Type 10 has no forward motion when launched. This bug has been around for like a year now. PLEASE fix this already.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

I wouldn’t pay much mind to it, some of the previous patches have gone horribly wrong. I mean they’ve all gone wrong, as this one did but this one was not horribly wrong. Just wrong. It’s part of the charm of the game.

Wow. Mind blown. I'll have to save your post as reference for what people do to themselves in the course being involved with Elite. I'm sure there's some psychological lesson there.

That's prime example of both why positivity cults are bad.. and infallible resilience though prolonged hardship.

Ps. its bad. While its good for you personally, its also more evidence frontier can collect that they can continue without improvement. "They'll take it." The ideal world is if you don't have to brainwash yourself like this because it works.

 

[Fenwe]

FDev, you have my sincerest compliments. In all my gaming years, I have never seen a company so thoroughly and professionally execute a profession. I stand in awe.

/salute

 

[Sysmon]

FDev, you have my sincerest compliments. In all my gaming years, I have never seen a company so thoroughly and professionally execute a profession. I stand in awe.

/salute

Normally it is Greenpeace or similar groups that put a stop to mining though. Maybe FD is digitally green?

S

 

[Darkfie1d]

Overlapping Hotspots Commodity Distribution
With Patch 3 we implemented a change that was primarily intended to bring down the effects of multiple overlapping hotspots, especially on rarer commodities (such as Low Temperature Diamonds). We're currently looking at data from the live game to determine the actual impact that it is having and will review this based on our projections. If the data does not meet our expectations we will be making changes accordingly.

At the risk of sounding cynical, what is there to look at? After an hour of trying to mine LTD in the triple ring at CC-K A38-2 I just gave up and left with less than 20. Not to mention if LTD has become this rare the price should go up, not down to compensate for the time spent finding and mining it.

Furthermore, I am new to this game, been playing for almost a month even though I had ED on my backlog since 2017, the larger issue is, in fact, the commodity market itself and the way it operates right now. We shouldn't be relying on third-party apps and websites to look up prices. That should be accessible from the game. We shouldn't be having to jump system to system to check out prices. This supposed to be a fun pastime, not a second job. If I wanted a second job EVE does it far better.

Another thing I feel compelled to mention is how every other activity in the game feels far less rewarding than mining. That is where Frontier needs to shift focus to. I am perfectly aware that LTD mining has been the sole way of making credits in the game, but can you really blame us? Doing everything else feels like a chore with no tangible rewards at the end. I made a 3000ly journey away from the bubble scanned as much as I could and the yields were not even on par with 5 minutes of mining anything. 2 days vs 5 minutes. The same goes for everything else, that is for the parts of the game I have been taking part in.

Don't get me wrong I wanna play this game, I really enjoy flying to places, enjoying the massive scales and scenery, flying different ships for different reasons, but I also wanna feel rewarded for the time I put into my efforts. There has to be a better balance between activities that give you credits.

Anyway, that is my 2 cents as a newly joined CMDR.

Have a nice day. o7

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

I'd say you are the polar opposite of what you're trying to mock up here. I see a lot of overdramatizing and chronic pessimism. I can still survive in the void and I heavily depend on Tritium with my low fuel approach. Just a temporary obstacle that will be fixed soon - as always with such obvious bugs after an update.

Me? I've never complained strongly about the tritium. I filled up my carrier and based on a gut feeling decided not to empty it, so my carrier is fine. The only thing sad about tritium is they turned off sandbox trading, which was enjoyable for a time. Last night i decided i didn't want a second carrier anyway so moving on. I've been too goal focused in elite and its killing my enjoyment of the game.

What is interesting though is.. ignoring the dumbness.. in the first post they didn't immediately say they were going to undo the changes.. just they were reading the data off the live servers to see if its what they were intending. A near task on the job sheet is to find a tritium hotspot and try mining.. both in and out them, to see exactly how it is. There's a chance that people are just expecting the extreme peak best conditions.. it maybe quite acceptable for me personally because i never min maxed anyway. The only check i have is the frequency of the presence of minerals when prospecting new asteroids.. i never measured yield or tonnes per time.

 

[Konan]

Speaking as a professional dev with 37+ years of coding experience, it is now pretty clear that we've established that it IS utter incompetence on the part of your Dev teams and QC that they keep rolling out broken patch after broken patch after broken patch. Please explain how such a thoroughly broken implementation managed to get past both dev-testing AND through a QC cycle? This is not the first time you have completely broken the game, though it is, admittedly, the most extreme.

Here's the thing... how is it, that without the benefit of access to the code or the algorithms used to generate these rings, that miners from /r/eliteminers on Reddit can gather data and generate graphs that show just how severely broken this patch is in a matter of hours and yet your own dev team WITH access to the code AND the full details of the procedural code can't figure out how badly they broke things? There's something seriously wrong with your teams. Maybe you should consider closed betas that allow the miners to black box analyse your systems prior to release? Just a thought.

One last thought: GET YOUR S**T IN ORDER.

Seeing as how you opened the door and mentioned your coding experience and the years you've worked in it....what games did you work on? What were the products you worked on. For all we know you worked on sh** projects....

 

[alexzk]

"Restock all fighter hangars" not working as it was on beta doing on FC.
Wing missions to kill pirate - interdicted named guy, killed him. Got some bounties like 300-400-600 (for Elite pirate? really?). Got fine on me too. Mission is NOT complete.

 

[alexzk]

It seems we have 1 known issue - whole game is broken, each piece of it. Everything is not working right.

 

[MishaTX]

Thanks for the prompt response to the situation @Stephen Benedetti , it really is appreciated so we all at least know what you're aware of and working on, rather than having to wait until a few hours before a patch drops. Kudos for that!

Now just a quick question (and I hasten to add that I do understand that you have to prioritize and that some issues obviously are more urgent than others) : Any plans to address anything not having to do with mining and/or FCs, such as POIs going missing /not showing up when FSS/DSS'ing? Or the broken megaship looting missions (as well as other issues reported numerous times in the forums?

Again: I do understand that fixing blue tunneling, game crashes, hot spots not having any of the materials they're advertising and FCs being stuck in the black are vastly more important issues, but an acknowledgement that you're aware and will address it when time permits would be most welcome.

Thanks again.

o7

 

[Kestrel71]

Why are you paying 40k a tonne when you can pick it up for 4k a tonne?

2k worth fo

Oftritium would get you to the quadrable hotspot and back which is further than the triple.

Obviously if you are going somewhere like colonia then you need to buy the fuel accordingly.

Because there are no stations selling tritium for 4K/t in any quantity right now -- none of them have more than about 6t available. Even if you were able to visit all the 4k/t stations, you'd only gather around 30 or so tons of tritium. The

Seeing as how you opened the door and mentioned your coding experience and the years you've worked in it....what games did you work on? What were the products you worked on. For all we know you worked on sh** projects....

I already answered that question; I work on Enterprise-scale software: big data, large networks, high performance, scalability, on-prem and in the cloud. The issue here is one of process. It's one thing to introduce bugs - that is always going to happen. It's quite another to release patch after patch after patch that is increasingly broken to the point we're at today when the prime focus of the patch ends up essentially taking down the single major money-maker in the game. Either both dev AND QC missed it (which seems unlikely considering this is not a bug or unintended consequence, but a serious flaw in the implementation), or there is a serious issue around their testing methodology. In either case, the problem needs to be resolved.

Consider how quickly unaffiliated players with no access to the code or knowledge of the underlying algorithms were able to statistically prove, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the implementation is not only nowhere near to what was specified in the release notes but is horrendously broken, and then try to explain how the very people who wrote the patch failed to see this during test prior to release. There is very clearly a problem, and while this is the most serious manifestation, it is far from the first time.

 

[ChipStar65]

I agree with your point, but that's not actually the point for this situation.

If people were complaining because LTDs were not peaking a sell price at 1 million, you'd be completely correct.

This is (currently, and hopefully a mistake that will soon be rectified) effectively a complete removal of any hotspots in the game by removing all valuable minerals and replacing them with worthless ones.

Really? Then how is this possible? Did it just today at a LTD single hotspot near the border between Inner Orion Spur and Elysian Shores.

It took longer than it should but that is partly due to my mining setup not being optimized for laser mining, and the majority of lodes in the rocks were from such laserable deposits. I was testing the tritium yield at a non-tritium hotspot, and honestly it's close to what I've been getting for a couple of weeks prior to the patch. I was trying to think outside the hotspot box, and it seems a way to at least temporarily relieve part of the tritium famine until a fix is implemented. It indicates that the problem is not necessarily affecting all hotspots as you imply.

More details here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/using-a-ltd-hotspot-to-mine-for-tritium.550944/

 

[Sphinx2k]

It's obvious that all the original designers/coders have left, all that is left is people playing with buttons and dials and seeing what happens with the player base as testers.

The economy is entirely broken now, players generating billions a day. New players are only mining and becoming rich and buying Anacondas within hours, completely ignoring all the different ships, modules, upgrades and gear progression in between. Sad.

 

[shadowwar]

If you had a decent bunch of QAQC people who could test this before you dump patches bugged to whatever are released on us player base. You know this hurts your reputation so exactly why do you keep doing this to us.

Tritium is way too hard to find in Tritium hot spots. I am 21,000 LY away from the bubble and can't find Tritium anymore. LTD In LTD hot spots does not exist. Overlaps are a terrible joke.

You people have broken our game.

 

[lagweezle]

You're living in the past, coding hasn't been like that for years. Especially game dev. Users are the testers, main bugs get worked out by professional testers and then it gets released and bugs get reported by actual users. While their reporting is worse than professional tester reports, there will be much more of it, including special cases that get overlooked.

While that might be "in the past" ... is it an improvement?
Are we, the users, better off for this change?
Just because it's "the old way" doesn't mean it's bad. Given how important the changes were in this case, it's pretty obvious that "the old way" would have saved a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot of pain. Users should not be considered beta testers for non-beta releases.

 

[AtomicJuggler]

"Restock all fighter hangars" not working as it was on beta doing on FC.
Wing missions to kill pirate - interdicted named guy, killed him. Got some bounties like 300-400-600 (for Elite pirate? really?). Got fine on me too. Mission is NOT complete.

Yeap, bug!
There is a workaround for this, use the (bullet) icon in the fleet carrier menu. This will restock fighters (at least it work for me on PC)

 

[AtomicJuggler]

Really? Then how is this possible? Did it just today at a LTD single hotspot near the border between Inner Orion Spur and Elysian Shores.

It took longer than it should but that is partly due to my mining setup not being optimized for laser mining, and the majority of lodes in the rocks were from such laserable deposits. I was testing the tritium yield at a non-tritium hotspot, and honestly it's close to what I've been getting for a couple of weeks prior to the patch. I was trying to think outside the hotspot box, and it seems a way to at least temporarily relieve part of the tritium famine until a fix is implemented. It indicates that the problem is not necessarily affecting all hotspots as you imply.

More details here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/using-a-ltd-hotspot-to-mine-for-tritium.550944/

Yes, you can get lucky sometime with mostly tritium in LTD hotspots.
It seems that, with the current mining situation, the hotspot designations are completely misleading.

With that in mind, the logical course of action to find any resource in a ring (tritium or ltd or whatever) would be to search ALL hotspots until you get lucky and find a viable one.

This is, of course, unacceptable, to much time consuming and no guarantee that you will find any of the desired resource.

 

[Kestrel71]

You're living in the past, coding hasn't been like that for years. Especially game dev. Users are the testers, main bugs get worked out by professional testers and then it gets released and bugs get reported by actual users. While their reporting is worse than professional tester reports, there will be much more of it, including special cases that get overlooked.

Sit down; you're talking about something you clearly don't understand and have never done. What you're describing is amateur hour, unprofessional, seat-of-the-pants hacking and that is NOT how any serious software project is done, certainly not for any code-base of any reasonable size or complexity. In REAL software development, devs write code, devs also test that code before it goes to QC and devs review code before it gets pushed to the main branch; that means profiling for performance, writing test harnesses for verification, ensuring that the implementation meets requirements BEFORE it ever gets fired over the fence. In modern software development, QC is simply the final black box check but the code is verified long before it gets to them and it should only very rarely come back to dev from QC if the devs have done the job correctly in the first place.

 

[Konan]

Because there are no stations selling tritium for 4K/t in any quantity right now -- none of them have more than about 6t available. Even if you were able to visit all the 4k/t stations, you'd only gather around 30 or so tons of tritium. The


I already answered that question; I work on Enterprise-scale software: big data, large networks, high performance, scalability, on-prem and in the cloud. The issue here is one of process. It's one thing to introduce bugs - that is always going to happen. It's quite another to release patch after patch after patch that is increasingly broken to the point we're at today when the prime focus of the patch ends up essentially taking down the single major money-maker in the game. Either both dev AND QC missed it (which seems unlikely considering this is not a bug or unintended consequence, but a serious flaw in the implementation), or there is a serious issue around their testing methodology. In either case, the problem needs to be resolved.

Consider how quickly unaffiliated players with no access to the code or knowledge of the underlying algorithms were able to statistically prove, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the implementation is not only nowhere near to what was specified in the release notes but is horrendously broken, and then try to explain how the very people who wrote the patch failed to see this during test prior to release. There is very clearly a problem, and while this is the most serious manifestation, it is far from the first time.

Thanks for replying. I personally don't know what Enterprise scale software is but it didn't sound like a gaming project. Nevertheless, I am NOT a developer but a gamer. I enjoy Elite. What I find frustrating are players who think that there should be some major money making activity in the game. I think it's fair to say that many have made plenty of money the past few months with this horrendously unbalanced mining gameplay. What we want is balancd...correct? We want activities to be closer to even in regarding payout....correct? Then why does the answer come as buffing the other activities instead of nerfing the mining? I don't think the game was ever designed for players to make massive amounts of cash in hours to buy late game ships and Fleet Carriers. One thing I've noticed about some players is the issue not playing because they have acquired all the ships or seen "everything". ( I know it's impossible to see everything in the game). I don't know of many, though I'm sure there are some, that quit after while they were working towards a goal, such as a big ship or even the FC. Players say mining is fun now with huge payouts. Fun? It's the same activity....it's only "fun" because they can earn late game stuff in a matter of a day or even hours...the outcome is "fun"...the gameplay is the same. Imho, seeing harmless Anaconda pilots owning a FC ruins the idea of earning through time and effort and dedication the experience of Elite. Honestly, I don't know why anyone would play a game that you could get late game or endgame items at the beginning of the game. THAT is unbalanced.