Frontier WANTS people to have the fun, not the grind!
- Thread starter MissMeYet
- Start date
You guys missed my point. I was expressing the two extremes.
Last edited:
It’s a fine line between grind and tedious mind numbing boredom. All down to personal interpretation..
If you make the game about acquiring "things" then what do you do when have everything? Log off and wait until the next ship/module gets released?
Anyone who has played the game long enough should know by now that everything that can be done in the game can be done from any tier 1 ship. So the act of wanting bigger ships is a choice not a requirement. You can blame the devs for making stuff you want I guess, but you can't blame Frontier for making you want it. Nor can you blame them for deciding to make your interpretation of Elite about material accumulation.
In all honesty, the biggest ships are imo, the most boring to fly. Unless you count their SLFs. I have all the ships except the Cutter (which I don't want) and I never did the grind. I just played the game, and eventually had enough fun that my bank account allowed me to purchase a bunch of big ships that mostly gather dust.
Currently in my DBX hallway to Colonia.
Last edited:
Exactly this. +1
Having X amount of credits or ships or whatnot is only an enabler. E: D is far more about the experience than the game itself... sometimes setting personal goals, and achieving them over time.
I sold my Cutter and Anaconda ages ago. I still keep the Corvette around, but that's gathering dust.
Awhatnow?
Firstly, I don't think there's ever been much of a "grind" for credits in the game.
The only "grind" for credits is the actual game itself.
Secondly, credits don't get you "good ships". It's engineering that does that.
And engineering IS a grind.
"Go out and spend your Smeaton-credits on a big, shiny new ships and enjoy them. Pay no attention to that heavily engineered ship bristling with guns that's closing in behind you!"
That's definitely not going to end in tears, right?
Last edited:
Choosing to ignore progression doesn't make mechanics less grindy. If you choose to stop your progression early and you enjoy the game with that, all the more power to you. That does not mean other people are making up the grind they feel. I've experienced just about everything there is to experience in the game and in most of the ships, from Sidewinder to Cutter. Now I'm trying to breathe a little more life back into the game for myself by puttering about in a Viper IV, getting it engineered and playing with all the systems all over again. Guess what, the grindy parts are still there to be had. This doesn't stop me from enjoying the game or the ship, but to ignore it and shove it off as a mind trick would be lying to myself and it would be lying to the developers by making them think they nailed it. I can just as easily say you are mind tricking yourself into believing it doesn't exist and we can go in circles all day, but that doesn't sound very fruitful either.
So how about a compromise? We both enjoy the game in different ways and neither of us are wrong about our own feelings on how the game can be improved. Fair?
As a side note, yes, I often do log out until content patches release (doesn't have to be ships/module updates either) once I burn out on the game again. I'm not one to be able to experience the same content for years on end and remain content. Seems like a normal thing to me.
It's a bit more nuanced than that, but it's pretty good if you want to make people sound silly.
The way I see it there are two co-habitating modes of progression in Elite: 1) material acquisition 2) skill/knowledge honing/acquisition. It's not really about right or wrong ways to play the game, after all the game clearly has a standard MMO material progression available to any player that wants to follow it. Most players take BOTH tracks of progression up to a certain point, and then tend to level off when they reach their comfort zone. However, it does seem to be a trend that people who more highly value material acquisition tend to get fatigued more easily and to feel that the "game" is a grind, since they spend most of their time attempting to increase their paper stats and acquire a finite set of ships/gear. Material grinders also tend to quit or take LONG breaks shortly after reaching the "endgame" of acquisition. Whereas people who focus on player skill (eg small ship pilots, knowledge acquirers, PVPers, CQC mavens, etc) these people tend to focus more on the joy of flying and their skill ceiling is usually a soft one that allows for continual asymptotic progression. The skill ladder in Elite is nearly infinite.
Does this mean that people who approach the game purely from a standard material/rank grind viewpoint are doing it wrong? No, certainly not. It just means that they are more likely to burn out, and even if they don't they will almost always hit a hard ceiling when they run out of content to acquire. This is a perennial problem with MMOs though, and not specific to Elite: all MMOs have a finite amount of content to "grind" through, and although Gear-focused Acquirers are loath to admit it, without a grind, they likely wouldn't know what to do with themselves.
So where does this leave the average Elite player? In my experience, if you play the game long enough, you will realize that the game auto-levels the NPC generation based on which ship you are flying, your combat rank, degree of engineering, etc, and outside of PVP it really doesn't matter which ship you fly. If you fly bigger ships, the game will throw bigger ships at you. If you fly smaller ships, then the game will generate smaller ships. The trend follows with pilot rank. But no matter what, if you play the game you will make money, and LOTS of it, regardless of which ship you fly. Depending upon how central acquisition and material progression are to your worldview, this realization can either be liberating or depressing.
Since you are focusing on flying smaller ships now, it sounds like you already figured most of this out. I am glad to hear it! I hope you enjoy the Viper, it's really one of my favorite ships. Especially the Viper III pared down to a paper hull for more agility and speed. Put on Enforcer Cannons and fixed MCs and that is like a mini Fer de Lance in terms of killing power, runs out of ammo quickly and requires really good aim though
I just got one thing to say to that:
Tetsuo!
[video=youtube;MvJsr7Y_t_A]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvJsr7Y_t_A[/video]
[video=youtube;MvJsr7Y_t_A]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvJsr7Y_t_A[/video]
![[DOOK] Droogie](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/124/124078.jpg?1553527149){kind=avatar}
