Greetings commanders o7
In the past one or two years I barely touched E: D. Having followed its Beta and joining in on release I have lived through pretty much the entire post-release development. I've left when engineers went live, came back for some new, shiny deep core mining, and kept rough track of new stuff. Now, a friend of mine, who originally started the game with me but stopped playing way earlier, wanted to get back into E: D. Star Citizen reattracted his attention for space games and E: D just seems a tad less buggy. And behold: when checking the recent additions to E: D gameplay, he saw the fleet carriers and decided that we totally should have our own. We'd have 5 billion credits sooner or later (not that I ever bothered to go further than 1 billion), and some million credits in a week, what's the problem? That literally is his incentive to get back and big in the game. I wasn't brave enough to tell him that carriers are a huge waste of everything, yet. On top, we're actually trying to pull other friends in, to actually buy the game to play with us. To work on a carrier...?
What do I tell them? Where is this great WE-experience, with which I can lure these people in, without them dropping the game after a week of grinding?
You see, we were looking at the whole E: D vs Star Citizen eagerly way back when, wondering which one would one day become the ultimate space game. It seems apparent to me now, that E: D isn't in the competition for this any longer. My hopes for Odysee diminish in my findings how little powerplay, mutli-crew or even Horizons seem to have matured.
Being way more experienced in E: D, I really wanted to tell him "awesome idea! We can do this and that, have fun this and that way! And get that carrier running!" And I was really optimistic, too. Years ago, gameplay somewhat was dull. We lacked the skill and equipment for PvP, whereas PvE was just a tagging game. Trading was a risk-free adventure of jumping to a station and back, with a minor peak on the danger side when NPC interdictions really seemed hard to escape from. Mining meant shooting steady rocks (HOW ARE THERE STATIONARY ROCKS IN SPACE), making profit off of multi-crew seemed like a miracle to pull off.
So, for the past weeks, I worked myself back into the game. Catch up with rebalance, new mechanics, understanding complex mission settings, everthing that one would expect to see after such a long break. But, where is all the fun stuff that at least I hoped for to come?! How can it be, that the greatest changes that I've noticed include the modified exploring experience with this new and fancy wave scanner, and the ability to not only shoot at rocks for profit but the ability to blow them up? Sure, these are nice changes. But, since time has passed and this is meant to be a multiplayer experience, I SOMEHOW expected to see great new content for multi-crew, some improvements to wings or ANYTHING that I could happily present my friend we'd be able to do in this game.
There ain't much you can do with a friend flying around in a mighty T6. Loading him up with precious cargo and playing armed escord just doesn't seem to do the trick. The only truly dangerous thing to happen are the random encounters of other players, and all armed engagements I had in this game always followed a kill or be killed mentality. Not once has a player shown slightest interest in cargo. NPCs just don't seem to be a thread at all. We could have flown into a combat or war zone. Tagging enemies in a combat zone is mightily fine if you need risk-free ranking, but terrible if you want to provide a friend with quality time in a game. I could utilize my own fleet and get him in as mutli-crew member, but that didn't seem to help his seven-digit credits account much. So, alas, I sent this pitiful soul off to Robigo to fill his pouch. Some hours in, he's now flying a Python. Great! Took me long enough back then.
I told him to get some T5 materials from those missions. Just trading down the materials makes the engineering life easier. Sweet! Way bigger jump range, stupid amounts of shields, greater numbers over all. Caught his attention with that. A tier 3-FSD in, he's enjoying the progress so far. Having joined on release day, he's seeing all of this for the first time. Admittedly, guaranteed good rolls and the material trader make engineering way less tedious nowadays.
So far, little opportunity has opened up for us, where playing together would have been profitable. Mining the same rock side-by-side would've been the greatest WE-experience I could finde. Overall... you do your grind, I'll do mine (i.e., derping around in the galaxy waiting for him). Just way faster progress this way. Who likes teamwork anyway.
What's next? I'll tell him: get these shield boosters engineered. Shields for days. I can't seem to make out great changes in the balance department.
An what will follow?!
Here's our game plan: in our squadron of two engineered Pythons, we'll search for a far-out minor faction and support the living hell out of it. Establish system dominance. (I don't even see a point in putting him through the ranking system). It was the best idea that I could come up with, when he asked me "what are we gonna do with bigger ships?". Does it have any effect on the galaxy? A little, perhaps, none that I could name. End civil wars, get a system booming, sure looks nice in the system view.
There is this targoid stuff, which I haven't tried myself. The one true addition of gameplay since Horizons, I'd say. For this, I'd cut his engineering process and get him collecting guardian equipment instead. The way this works, however... How come, that it STILL is the most efficient way to grind precious guardian weaponry is to search for a nice site on a nice planet and collect stuff via relog methods? How come that relogging is still a means of ANYTHING in this game? Navigating menues is not fun.
Do I really want to put him through the process of aqcuiring guardian materials? With what incentive? Fighting targoids is fun, I'm sure. And all hail the sound designers. But, as far as I am aware of, there is nothing really to be gained by fighting them?
Lastly, alas PvP. We're going for a minor faction on purpose. No major fraction fighting, no powerplay. Get comfortable in the game first. But even then, is there a legitimate way to fight in powerplay yet? One that exceeds the amazing experience of mass murdering Haulers, that is. Maybe act as a open-play police, shooting down the bad guys. But how do you catch griefers and the like yet? From what I see, nothing has changed in this field either. We'd be looking for honourable pirates without a task manager? Is joining a league or PvP-organization proper "end game"?
Perhaps the worst thing is that in all this... we both can enjoy the game. Doing our own stuff. Following our own progression. Blazing our own tail. Alone, and only coming together when an idea comes up for shenanigans.
Is this it? We're forced into an online-only game (old salt is old), in which we have to be creative to make something out of whatever Frontier decides to be a good idea? I could derp around in the galaxy on my own for the years to come, discoverying weird star systems, training my PA skills, fighting back griefers. But I just fail to see the social component of it all.
Please help?
In the past one or two years I barely touched E: D. Having followed its Beta and joining in on release I have lived through pretty much the entire post-release development. I've left when engineers went live, came back for some new, shiny deep core mining, and kept rough track of new stuff. Now, a friend of mine, who originally started the game with me but stopped playing way earlier, wanted to get back into E: D. Star Citizen reattracted his attention for space games and E: D just seems a tad less buggy. And behold: when checking the recent additions to E: D gameplay, he saw the fleet carriers and decided that we totally should have our own. We'd have 5 billion credits sooner or later (not that I ever bothered to go further than 1 billion), and some million credits in a week, what's the problem? That literally is his incentive to get back and big in the game. I wasn't brave enough to tell him that carriers are a huge waste of everything, yet. On top, we're actually trying to pull other friends in, to actually buy the game to play with us. To work on a carrier...?
What do I tell them? Where is this great WE-experience, with which I can lure these people in, without them dropping the game after a week of grinding?
You see, we were looking at the whole E: D vs Star Citizen eagerly way back when, wondering which one would one day become the ultimate space game. It seems apparent to me now, that E: D isn't in the competition for this any longer. My hopes for Odysee diminish in my findings how little powerplay, mutli-crew or even Horizons seem to have matured.
Being way more experienced in E: D, I really wanted to tell him "awesome idea! We can do this and that, have fun this and that way! And get that carrier running!" And I was really optimistic, too. Years ago, gameplay somewhat was dull. We lacked the skill and equipment for PvP, whereas PvE was just a tagging game. Trading was a risk-free adventure of jumping to a station and back, with a minor peak on the danger side when NPC interdictions really seemed hard to escape from. Mining meant shooting steady rocks (HOW ARE THERE STATIONARY ROCKS IN SPACE), making profit off of multi-crew seemed like a miracle to pull off.
So, for the past weeks, I worked myself back into the game. Catch up with rebalance, new mechanics, understanding complex mission settings, everthing that one would expect to see after such a long break. But, where is all the fun stuff that at least I hoped for to come?! How can it be, that the greatest changes that I've noticed include the modified exploring experience with this new and fancy wave scanner, and the ability to not only shoot at rocks for profit but the ability to blow them up? Sure, these are nice changes. But, since time has passed and this is meant to be a multiplayer experience, I SOMEHOW expected to see great new content for multi-crew, some improvements to wings or ANYTHING that I could happily present my friend we'd be able to do in this game.
There ain't much you can do with a friend flying around in a mighty T6. Loading him up with precious cargo and playing armed escord just doesn't seem to do the trick. The only truly dangerous thing to happen are the random encounters of other players, and all armed engagements I had in this game always followed a kill or be killed mentality. Not once has a player shown slightest interest in cargo. NPCs just don't seem to be a thread at all. We could have flown into a combat or war zone. Tagging enemies in a combat zone is mightily fine if you need risk-free ranking, but terrible if you want to provide a friend with quality time in a game. I could utilize my own fleet and get him in as mutli-crew member, but that didn't seem to help his seven-digit credits account much. So, alas, I sent this pitiful soul off to Robigo to fill his pouch. Some hours in, he's now flying a Python. Great! Took me long enough back then.
I told him to get some T5 materials from those missions. Just trading down the materials makes the engineering life easier. Sweet! Way bigger jump range, stupid amounts of shields, greater numbers over all. Caught his attention with that. A tier 3-FSD in, he's enjoying the progress so far. Having joined on release day, he's seeing all of this for the first time. Admittedly, guaranteed good rolls and the material trader make engineering way less tedious nowadays.
So far, little opportunity has opened up for us, where playing together would have been profitable. Mining the same rock side-by-side would've been the greatest WE-experience I could finde. Overall... you do your grind, I'll do mine (i.e., derping around in the galaxy waiting for him). Just way faster progress this way. Who likes teamwork anyway.
What's next? I'll tell him: get these shield boosters engineered. Shields for days. I can't seem to make out great changes in the balance department.
An what will follow?!
Here's our game plan: in our squadron of two engineered Pythons, we'll search for a far-out minor faction and support the living hell out of it. Establish system dominance. (I don't even see a point in putting him through the ranking system). It was the best idea that I could come up with, when he asked me "what are we gonna do with bigger ships?". Does it have any effect on the galaxy? A little, perhaps, none that I could name. End civil wars, get a system booming, sure looks nice in the system view.
There is this targoid stuff, which I haven't tried myself. The one true addition of gameplay since Horizons, I'd say. For this, I'd cut his engineering process and get him collecting guardian equipment instead. The way this works, however... How come, that it STILL is the most efficient way to grind precious guardian weaponry is to search for a nice site on a nice planet and collect stuff via relog methods? How come that relogging is still a means of ANYTHING in this game? Navigating menues is not fun.
Do I really want to put him through the process of aqcuiring guardian materials? With what incentive? Fighting targoids is fun, I'm sure. And all hail the sound designers. But, as far as I am aware of, there is nothing really to be gained by fighting them?
Lastly, alas PvP. We're going for a minor faction on purpose. No major fraction fighting, no powerplay. Get comfortable in the game first. But even then, is there a legitimate way to fight in powerplay yet? One that exceeds the amazing experience of mass murdering Haulers, that is. Maybe act as a open-play police, shooting down the bad guys. But how do you catch griefers and the like yet? From what I see, nothing has changed in this field either. We'd be looking for honourable pirates without a task manager? Is joining a league or PvP-organization proper "end game"?
Perhaps the worst thing is that in all this... we both can enjoy the game. Doing our own stuff. Following our own progression. Blazing our own tail. Alone, and only coming together when an idea comes up for shenanigans.
Is this it? We're forced into an online-only game (old salt is old), in which we have to be creative to make something out of whatever Frontier decides to be a good idea? I could derp around in the galaxy on my own for the years to come, discoverying weird star systems, training my PA skills, fighting back griefers. But I just fail to see the social component of it all.
Please help?
