I want to reply to another thread on the front page entitled "any grind is in your mind", but I've got the completely opposite view as the posters there.
The common meme I see around here is that playing the game with any kind of goal in mind is doing it wrong.
Tell me - in your mind, what is a game?
I read a book a long while ago - called Reality is Broken. It's about "gamification", or putting game rules on various things in an attempt to solve various problems. It's a great read, but one of the things I learned from that book is a very simple definition of how you can define any game:
A game is an activity in which a player overcomes arbitrary goals for some reward. Saving the princess, beating that tricky level, completing your castle in Minecraft.
Nobody plays a game without having some idea in mind of what they want to accomplish. Even if that idea is something as simple as "that looks cool, I want it!"
With that - back to the topic:
You can cut off the "shortest amount of time" and still be correct.
Look, Elite simply does not have that many different things to do. You can trade, you can pew pew, you can mine, you can explore. Let's break those high level things into their components:
This is why I say Elite is a lightyear wide and an inch deep. The "pattern" reveals itself very quickly, and you find yourself doing the above 4 activities over and over and over again, just with different "skins" on them.
There is no story here. It does not exist. Story in any other MMO is what gives you a reason to slay 20 basilisks and collect their crispy urethras to deliver to some random NPC. Story is what makes you feel like you're having an impact on the world. Story is the tasty filling on the bread that is the game mechanics.
Minecraft? Probably the sandboxiest of sandbox games? Even that has a story and has goals to work towards. Even if that goal is "get enough diamond to create that beacon" or "finish building that castle and populating it with NPCs".
A game with no goals is not a game.
Elite gives us implicit goals. Acquire bigger ships, upgrade your gear, slaughter that pirate, rank up with your factions and power, and so forth.
Here's a simple test. Pretend for a minute that you've sunk the time necessary to become triple elite. Exploration, trade, and combat. You have every ship, and you have an A rated and engineered build for each one. You have more money than God because you have no reason to spend any of it because you own everything already
What do you do next? What is your next goal?
Is it a wonder that people like the SDCs of the world turn towards CMDR harassment? It's not like there's much else to do.
And you dump on people because they see meeting those goals as the point of the game? Because they point to the utter lack of anything resembling a reason to do these repetitive tasks? Grind becomes grind when it becomes not fun - when you're working through tasks you'd rather not do because they're in the way of doing what you'd rather do. Elite's got a lot of that - some of it more arbitrary than others. I'd love to have a 5G FSD - but it requires me collecting a lot of hard to find materials (this is fine) and then rolling a ton of dice (boring) to get the chance to roll the dice (boring) to get the upgrade I want.
Something to think about. Expecting people to not have goals to accomplish in a game means it's a very poor game.
The common meme I see around here is that playing the game with any kind of goal in mind is doing it wrong.
Tell me - in your mind, what is a game?
I read a book a long while ago - called Reality is Broken. It's about "gamification", or putting game rules on various things in an attempt to solve various problems. It's a great read, but one of the things I learned from that book is a very simple definition of how you can define any game:
A game is an activity in which a player overcomes arbitrary goals for some reward. Saving the princess, beating that tricky level, completing your castle in Minecraft.
Nobody plays a game without having some idea in mind of what they want to accomplish. Even if that idea is something as simple as "that looks cool, I want it!"
With that - back to the topic:
You can cut off the "shortest amount of time" and still be correct.
Look, Elite simply does not have that many different things to do. You can trade, you can pew pew, you can mine, you can explore. Let's break those high level things into their components:
- Exploration: Plot a path out of the bubble, press the jump button 1000+ times (no exaggeration), occasionally stopping for fuel every 6-10 jumps.
- Trading: Jump to a station. Look at their goods prices. Bring up the starmap, look for a place that imports the stuff. Fill cargo hold, jump, dock, unload, repeat.
- Pew pew: Missions to kill stuff, or trolling other CMDRs. I don't count real piracy, since the game mechanics make it nearly impossible to do.
- Mining: Shoot a prospector limpet, repeat until decent asteroid is found, blast asteroid, suck up the fragments, repeat until bin is full, repeat until cargo hold is full.
This is why I say Elite is a lightyear wide and an inch deep. The "pattern" reveals itself very quickly, and you find yourself doing the above 4 activities over and over and over again, just with different "skins" on them.
There is no story here. It does not exist. Story in any other MMO is what gives you a reason to slay 20 basilisks and collect their crispy urethras to deliver to some random NPC. Story is what makes you feel like you're having an impact on the world. Story is the tasty filling on the bread that is the game mechanics.
Minecraft? Probably the sandboxiest of sandbox games? Even that has a story and has goals to work towards. Even if that goal is "get enough diamond to create that beacon" or "finish building that castle and populating it with NPCs".
A game with no goals is not a game.
Elite gives us implicit goals. Acquire bigger ships, upgrade your gear, slaughter that pirate, rank up with your factions and power, and so forth.
Here's a simple test. Pretend for a minute that you've sunk the time necessary to become triple elite. Exploration, trade, and combat. You have every ship, and you have an A rated and engineered build for each one. You have more money than God because you have no reason to spend any of it because you own everything already
What do you do next? What is your next goal?
Is it a wonder that people like the SDCs of the world turn towards CMDR harassment? It's not like there's much else to do.
And you dump on people because they see meeting those goals as the point of the game? Because they point to the utter lack of anything resembling a reason to do these repetitive tasks? Grind becomes grind when it becomes not fun - when you're working through tasks you'd rather not do because they're in the way of doing what you'd rather do. Elite's got a lot of that - some of it more arbitrary than others. I'd love to have a 5G FSD - but it requires me collecting a lot of hard to find materials (this is fine) and then rolling a ton of dice (boring) to get the chance to roll the dice (boring) to get the upgrade I want.
Something to think about. Expecting people to not have goals to accomplish in a game means it's a very poor game.
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