ANNOUNCEMENT Fleet Carriers Update - Patch 3
Having played a number of MMOās over the last few years, my experience is very different. Most do it far worse than FDev.
With respect to updates I have yet to play a game where an update didnāt introduce a number of bugs which required patches to fix. Worse case was a major update that crashed the whole game and it took them 3 days to get it up and running again.
As for balanced game play, that is a joke. The current business model is to make entry very cheap or free and initial progress very quick to get you hooked in and invested. It then becomes increasingly hard to make any progress without grind, UNLESS you have very deep pockets and then you can buy the resources and upgrades you need with real cash. The players who donāt or canāt pay then get left behind and the wallet warriors dominate. The companies donāt care as the big spenders are dropping thousands to support their gaming habit, why would they care about players who maybe spend a few pounds every couple of months.
As for FDevās direct competitors, No Manās Sky team have done the most to expand and get their game developed. Eve from those that have played it tell me is broken. Star Citizen 6 years in and $400 million and it is still a buggy alpha release. FDev the worst? Not from where I am sitting!
Finally the grind aspect of ED I have yet to find. The mentality that you have to grind seems prevalent, but IMHO, it is a perception more than reality. A recent example one of our new squadron members was asking about places to get data for engineering. Jamesonās crashed Cobra and trade for it I replied. His reply it will take me a week of grind to fill my bins with encoded. So I said donāt do it. Work out what you need, spend an hour or two out there, gather and trade until you have what you need and a bit spare, then leave it. Why make it a grind and feel you have to fill your bins or earn a billion credits?
So clearly we now need to start searching to find overlapping hotspots of everything except diamonds!
Whether or not the game is an MMO has no bearing whatsoever on the attainability or number of fleet carriers or other high-end items. EVE Online is also an MMO, and there's no expectation that every player owns a titan, nor are there 30 of them in every popular system.
Clearly your sample doesn't include me, or any of the corp I fly with.
On that note, and to flog my current hobby-horse a bit more, I was told the same a while back. Care to guess what happened when I tried to land there with all the fleet carriers in that particular system?
No? I'll just explain real quick then:
Exit supercruise... Hang. Go make coffee... Disconnected. Relog... Timeout. Start without horizons & recover to orbit.
Relog with horizons & try again... Transition to glide... hang for 2 full minutes... No site anywhere. Relog... Timeout. Restart... Timeout. Restart... Oh, there it is.
Get some mats, try to leave... Hang. Go make another coffee. Repeat.
Sound like a grind to you?
I'm not alone here either. Word on the street is console players have it even worse. And yeah, none of this horsehockey happens when there aren't a stupid number of carriers in system.
That one's got me beat, but it seems to be a perception many players have.
X4 recently had a mining nerf too, and there was the very same predictable "how are we/new players supposed to get quick credits now, it's going to add more grind" complains.
My response: So don't grind. Go play the game. If you find you can't have fun and make progress at the same time, file feedback, write a mod, or go play something else.
I really don't understand this obsession with filling bins or watching a credit balance increase at all, games are supposed to be about fun. Grind what you need for that and no more, life is short.
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I agree that perception plays a big role. But if an activity is as mind-numbingly boring as that relog-fest, even one or two hours will feel like a grind. If there wasn't such a vast difference in reward, players would "just play the game" instead and wouldn't feel the grind so much.
The game has gotten worse and worse since the introduction of the engineers. It's no longer fun.
You haven't been to Kirre's Icebox.
The main system is overrun with FCs. Once you got a parking spot there, you left your carrier there and ferried stuff with an Alt FC.
You think that's bad? Now check the surrounding systems! They are ALSO chockers full of FCs. You really need to jump 10 LYs to find a system that still has an open slot somewhere. Found a spot like that? Consider yourself lucky.
I think instead of Upkeep, they really need to make it by login date.
Not logged in for a month? Remove the carrier. Parking spot becomes available, Upkeep still acrues, the carrier is still active until decomissioned, but doesn't take up space/slots.
If at login the system is full, FC gets moved to the nearest system. You are getting a jump for free. Free stuff!
So have Tritium hotspots been fixed? I'm guessing this is a server-side setting that needs to be adjusted rather than a client-side code change. I'm also hoping the abrasion blaster problem is somehow server related... I'd like to be able to refuel my carrier out here in deep space, please and thank you.
Exactly. Complaining means people still care enough to bother.
I didn't think the HGE's had an exploit pre-patch? They used to have, (I'm thinking the supercruise out and drop straight back in again), but since they fixed that it was still possible to get a decent number of HGEs in an evening's play.
I tested HGE's and mining last night. Mining just to confirm the same issues already reported so nothing new to report, but in a system in war state, 34 bodies and a population of over 5 billion, I had zero HGE's. (There were only 4 signals at all, with 1x encoded being the 'best' one.)
Jumped to a neighbouring boom system, with similar numbers, and had one HGE, none in the next, then back to the first system to get another one.
With an average of 9 - 12 items collected each time it feels like signal sources have been nerfed as well.
There as to be something to work at or strive for in the game or it lacks purpose. A couple of hours doing something less than thrilling to achieve some significant progress in the game is minor compared with most MMOās. One I tried once you reached a certain level you had to grind hours of mining to upgrade anything, or you could spend real cash and get it instantly. I just play the game mostly with occasional trips to places like Jamesonās Cobra for a specific purpose. Tried laser mining, found it mind numbingly boring, donāt do it. Tried core mining, enjoy it. It has never matched the massive payouts of LTD mining boom, but it earns a reasonable amount. Wonāt be able to afford a FC in a couple of weeks, but maybe one day.
As the gambling ads say āwhen the fun stops, stop!ā
I had a similar experience pre patch. In a whole evening found I found 5 or 6 HGEās. As for mining I had my best ever run in a VO hotspot, post patch so not all mining is nerfed.
The HGE exploit was to logout to desktop to respawn. Logging out to main menu didnāt work. As soon as you entered SC after reloading the HGE respawned close by.
Like gambling, ED is an addiction for many of us.
Well I never used the supercruise > drop-back in glitch, nor the logout to respawn exploit, and pre-patch a couple of weeks ago I was able to spend a few evenings reliably routing through a number of systems that were all one jump apart and in states of war or boom and get between 3 - HGE's in every system. Lots of flight time granted, but it was consistent and felt like it worked fairly considering the trading rates at the material brokers.
Last night in the same duration I got maybe (guessing as I haven't run the numbers) 20% - 25% of what I was getting a fortnight ago.
Yes, they are now called Void Opal Hot Spots.
I thought I'd have a look what's in my fav VO hot spot system. Needless to say, it was empty of FCs, which was a big welcome.
I drop into one of the VO hot spots, shortly thereafter, I find:
Countless surface and subsurface Tritum deposits.
3 LTD cores
1 VO core
And due to the Abrasion blaster but, I got to leave a big load of LTDs behind... in a VO Hot Spot!
I made it back to my carrier with 100t of Trit though after an hour of mining.
But on the bright side, the Arx store is now enriched with more paint jobs, where someone got to play with the color slider.
Pertaining to HGE's. Prior to the FSS addition to the game. It got bad enough that you could only find one if you were lucky once an hour. The problem here being that if you are designing a game that is so tedious and boring that to accomplish a task you need to pull up Netflix to be entertained. The design of the game is bad. Games are by their nature supposed to be entertaining and fun. Not boring, tedium.
Whether you see it as a grind or not is not relevant. Because what you enjoy as a task, may not be fun for someone else. If you don't think it is a grind. That is perfectly good for you. But that does not mean your point of reference is shared or even equal to someone else's point of reference. It isn't a bad thing. That is what makes life interesting.
Break it down into a different way of thinking instead. If it takes 10 hours of continuous play time to work through a goal. Whether you decide to break that up across months so as not to notice it. Or choose to work on it at a targeted approach. That does not shorten the length of time spent to achieve goal X. It is still a grind because in both outcomes either way the same amount of work and time and effort had to go in. But on one side you were not invested to get to the other side of the goal efficiently. Where as the other focused on the goal to get it accomplished as soon as possible. The approach just does not change the work needed. The very fact you felt the need to bury something with in other tasks so as to notice it less. Is also a sign that it wasn't a fun, enjoyable, and entertaining thing to do. You avoided it to do other content that was fun. Thus, it was a grind.
The one thing many of us can agree on. Frontier with Elite Dangerous there is room for potential. The problem is their leadership is not listening to their customers. Their developers do not actually "Play the Game" the way their customers "Play the Game". Frontier's Leadership share in the same failure. Not one of them has the balls to sit down and do a live stream to prove they can, and have played, and enjoys their tedious game play. Not one of them right now would go mining for LTD's with their "Supposed" fix that broke mining. Not one of them has the heart to actually admit they are not allowed to spend the time they would need to in order to test the game the same way their player base plays the game. Because they have designed the game to take hours to accomplish something. They just won't get a sign off to be payed to actually "Play the game" they have designed. They certainly don't go home on the weekend to spend their free time in a game they are required to work on. Work does not beget entertainment. I sure wouldn't want to stick my head into Elite after working on its code for features that are not in the game yet, or trying to identify a bug in that same code.
As it is, with their current patch and their bugs. I have zero interest to play Elite myself. It isn't worth my time. It is just bad programming, bad bugs, and unrewarding game play.
Whether you see it as a grind or not is not relevant. Because what you enjoy as a task, may not be fun for someone else. If you don't think it is a grind. That is perfectly good for you. But that does not mean your point of reference is shared or even equal to someone else's point of reference. It isn't a bad thing. That is what makes life interesting.
Break it down into a different way of thinking instead. If it takes 10 hours of continuous play time to work through a goal. Whether you decide to break that up across months so as not to notice it. Or choose to work on it at a targeted approach. That does not shorten the length of time spent to achieve goal X. It is still a grind because in both outcomes either way the same amount of work and time and effort had to go in. But on one side you were not invested to get to the other side of the goal efficiently. Where as the other focused on the goal to get it accomplished as soon as possible. The approach just does not change the work needed. The very fact you felt the need to bury something with in other tasks so as to notice it less. Is also a sign that it wasn't a fun, enjoyable, and entertaining thing to do. You avoided it to do other content that was fun. Thus, it was a grind.
The one thing many of us can agree on. Frontier with Elite Dangerous there is room for potential. The problem is their leadership is not listening to their customers. Their developers do not actually "Play the Game" the way their customers "Play the Game". Frontier's Leadership share in the same failure. Not one of them has the balls to sit down and do a live stream to prove they can, and have played, and enjoys their tedious game play. Not one of them right now would go mining for LTD's with their "Supposed" fix that broke mining. Not one of them has the heart to actually admit they are not allowed to spend the time they would need to in order to test the game the same way their player base plays the game. Because they have designed the game to take hours to accomplish something. They just won't get a sign off to be payed to actually "Play the game" they have designed. They certainly don't go home on the weekend to spend their free time in a game they are required to work on. Work does not beget entertainment. I sure wouldn't want to stick my head into Elite after working on its code for features that are not in the game yet, or trying to identify a bug in that same code.
As it is, with their current patch and their bugs. I have zero interest to play Elite myself. It isn't worth my time. It is just bad programming, bad bugs, and unrewarding game play.
The Arx store is turning into a typical phone App Store, filling up with 99% crap that only 1% of players are interested in, while the few good paint jobs either get buried or purposefully hidden except on holidays (I'm looking at you Midnight Black). But that's a topic for a different thread.
Probably more because the game industry is set up so that publishers tend to get 10x as much money as developers while doing 1/10th the work.