Half-Baked

[Vedmo]

I'm pretty sure nobody in the forum suggested the current C&P system to Frontier, whereas a whole heck of a lot of us argued against it and lost anyway.

I've wondered before how much of the feedback stuff ultimately just leads to Frontier looking at the extremes and trying to land somewhere in the middle, resulting in nobody getting what they want and everybody getting something nobody wanted.

The open PP focused feedback looked to me to be dangerously capable of leading to such an end, back when they had me duped into thinking a change was actually imminent.

Also, I can't stop visualizing a half baked old duck entree now. Thanks a lot.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

Elite Dangerous is half-baked.

HALF... BAKED...

i reckon its like one of them cheap Chinese buffets where they never bring any of the good stuff out, you pay £19.99 all you can eat with promise of sweeeeet sweeeet crispy duck in hoisin sauce, the posters on the wall show the pancakes all neatly wrapped up, yet you get your little plate and you walk up to the buffet awaiting those sweeeet sweeeet pancakes.

What you find in lute warm chicken, fatty beef ribs, lots and lots of rice and salad, and chips, most of the spoons are cross contaminated and all the food has a skin on it because its not been refreshed for 4 hours, you sigh to yourself mainly because you're British and complaining is just not something we do in public

So... you fill your plate full of crap, chips, beans, some questionable chicken nuggets (basically all the re-heated frozen stuff from iceland) and stuff your face with filthy low quality food vowing never ever to return to the establishment, you are stuffed to the brim, on the verge of being sick, you literally will explode if you eat another bite.... and there it is... they bring out the bloody crispy duck, well you cant have the duck now your stuffed.

A stampede ensues before the duck is nerfed eaten by everyone who only came into the restaurant for the duck in the first place and all that's left is an empty tray and empty promises from the staff that more duck will be coming soon!

you leave the restaurant and for 1hr 45 you rant about it in the car journey home, its a waste of money, a waste of time, it was disgusting, im never going there again, you make a promise.

Next Friday comes and Chinese is on the agenda again, you find yourself outside the Chinese buffet with the crispy duck posters outside.... you step inside

Theres still no duck.

There will never be any duck.

you should go to a different restaurant but for some reason you just keep going back, the most disappointing pile of crap restaurant ever but you just keep going back for more..

this is Elite!

 

[Lightspeed]

Is this a positive thread or a negative one? Is "half baked" like the bottle that is half full or half empty?

 

[Old Duck]

Is this a positive thread or a negative one?

YES! [yesnod]

 

[EDanaII]

Is this a positive thread or a negative one? Is "half baked" like the bottle that is half full or half empty?

Schrodinger's thread.

 

[zimms]

i reckon its like one of them cheap Chinese buffets where they never bring any of the good stuff out, you pay £19.99 all you can eat with promise of sweeeeet sweeeet crispy duck in hoisin sauce, the posters on the wall show the pancakes all neatly wrapped up, yet you get your little plate and you walk up to the buffet awaiting those sweeeet sweeeet pancakes.

What you find in lute warm chicken, fatty beef ribs, lots and lots of rice and salad, and chips, most of the spoons are cross contaminated and all the food has a skin on it because its not been refreshed for 4 hours, you sigh to yourself mainly because you're British and complaining is just not something we do in public

So... you fill your plate full of crap, chips, beans, some questionable chicken nuggets (basically all the re-heated frozen stuff from iceland) and stuff your face with filthy low quality food vowing never ever to return to the establishment, you are stuffed to the brim, on the verge of being sick, you literally will explode if you eat another bite.... and there it is... they bring out the bloody crispy duck, well you cant have the duck now your stuffed.

A stampede ensues before the duck is nerfed eaten by everyone who only came into the restaurant for the duck in the first place and all that's left is an empty tray and empty promises from the staff that more duck will be coming soon!

you leave the restaurant and for 1hr 45 you rant about it in the car journey home, its a waste of money, a waste of time, it was disgusting, im never going there again, you make a promise.

Next Friday comes and Chinese is on the agenda again, you find yourself outside the Chinese buffet with the crispy duck posters outside.... you step inside

Theres still no duck.

There will never be any duck.

you should go to a different restaurant but for some reason you just keep going back, the most disappointing pile of crap restaurant ever but you just keep going back for more..

this is Elite!

And if you finally get your hands on some, it will be Old Duck.

 

[Old Duck]

And if you finally get your hands on some, it will be Old Duck.

An Old Duck is like an old wine - mighty fine

 

[Enderby]

An Old Duck is like an old wine - mighty fine

The mighty duck

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I'm pretty sure nobody in the forum suggested the current C&P system to Frontier, whereas a whole heck of a lot of us argued against it and lost anyway.

From what I can remember Sandro said someone mentioned it in the forums. At first they dismissed it, then came around to the idea.

Bounties on ships is just wrong in my view. It makes little to no sense.

Some of the ideas in the new C&P are okay, like the detention centres and so on. It's the bounties on ships which I can't get my head around.

 

[Old Duck]

From what I can remember Sandro said someone mentioned it in the forums. At first they dismissed it, then came around to the idea.

Bounties on ships is just wrong in my view. It makes little to no sense.

Some of the ideas in the new C&P are okay, like the detention centres and so on. It's the bounties on ships which I can't get my head around.

Like everything else, C&P is half-baked. I also think detention centers are fine, bounties tacked onto rebuys, etc, all good. I even came around to the idea of bounties on tied to ships, since in the days of old pirates were often identified by their ships (and then they could walk in a crowd of people unnoticed unless scrutinized). Remember the slave auction scene from Cutthroat Island?

But then Frontier has to convolute it all, including the UI, with things like hot modules and anonymous protocols and little headphone icons everywhere and..... Sigh... Good engineers reduce complexity in their designs, something FDev was never taught in school it seems. It's all the complex nonsense that makes C&P rubbish IMO. And yes, a lot of us offered a variety of alternative suggestions that made a heck of a lot more sense than hot modules and anonymous protocols. Frontier's response? "Yes, we hear you, but...."

Now their "but" has turned into a butt - an old elephant's butt, and I'm still talking about C&P

Should we talk about the new Analysis Mode vs. Combat Mode next?

 

[Chaparral]

If it is a quantum question, I fall within the many worlds camp, and therefore must be a version of Elite that is fully baked.

You do know that Raxxla is a portal to that other universe right?

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Should we talk about the new Analysis Mode vs. Combat Mode next?

You mean the weapons on/off button? I'm sure the idea must have been so you could separate scanner groups from weapon groups, but then we go back to your thread title with the implementation. I wonder how much potential bug prevention coding time went into that little piece of gameplay.

 

[Captain Thea Kreutzer]

You do know that Raxxla is a portal to that other universe right?

Fake news . We dont know what Raxxla actually is.

 

[Ra'Kaan]

Elite:210 ?

 

[Chaparral]

Fake news . We dont know what Raxxla actually is.

The other universe does.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

that is all.

 

[RamirezKurita]

Yes, that is a good point. I think you argue the wrong things*, however. For example, I wish that BGS and factions had been flushed out rather than adding the totally separate yet surprisingly similar gameplay mechanic of PowerPlay. Had the effort that went into PowerPlay been put into the existing faction / BGS system, well that would have been something.

On a similar note, people have been begging for NPC crew forever, and we get multicrew instead. Funny thing is, the one aspect of multicrew that Frontier nailed, the "holome", would have been perfect for NPC crews, whereas the broken part of multicrew - networking, could have been totally avoided had Frontier focused on NPC crews instead.

Unfortunately these are two things we are now stuck with. I'd be thrilled if Frontier retconned both PowerPlay and Multicrew and retooled those assets and existing game code to BGS and NPC crews, but I highly doubt that will happen. Then again, they did retcon the ADS, so maybe there's hope yet!



* as in, making the argument about exploration vs strategic gameplay instead of the examples I give

Pretty much hit the nail on the head - FD are constantly adding in new, unrelated parallel mechanics rather than updating and expanding existing ones.

Powerplay you mentioned; rather than simply expanding our interactions with the BGS and deepening the relationships between the factions, superpowers, pilots and VIPs, FD decided to bolt on a tangentially related layer.

Players wanted to fly a ship together with their friends, but instead of expanding the NPC crew mechanics to allow players they created another, entirely independent mechanic for players to share a ship.

Mining needed an update, so rather than adding depth to traditional mining methods they simply bolted on another couple of basically unrelated mechanics that only share the word "mining" in common.

Surface stuff is entirely built around the SRV, with a massive slew of restrictions that seem to only exist to divorce it further from the rest of the game, rather than simply making the SRV one of many tools for a ship (or its crew) to interact with stuff planet side.

Players wanted organised PvP, but rather than implementing some kind of in-game missions (getting sponsorship from factions?) relating to taking part in combat tournaments at CQC hotspots we got literally an entirely separate game.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Like everything else, C&P is half-baked. I also think detention centers are fine, bounties tacked onto rebuys, etc, all good. I even came around to the idea of bounties on tied to ships, since in the days of old pirates were often identified by their ships (and could walk in a crowd of people unnoticed unless scrutinized). Remember the slave auction scene from Cutthroat Island?

But then Frontier has to convolute it all, including the UI, with things like hot modules and anonymous protocols and little headphone icons everywhere and..... Sigh... Good engineers reduce complexity in their designs, something FDev was never taught in school it seems. It's all the complex nonsense that makes C&P rubbish IMO. And yes, a lot of us offered a variety of alternative suggestions that made a heck of a lot more sense than hot modules and anonymous protocols. Frontier's response? "Yes, we hear you, but...."

Now their "but" has turned into a butt - an old elephant's butt, and I'm still talking about C&P

Should we talk about the new Analysis Mode vs. Combat Mode next?

I like the idea of annonymous protocals, but the option should be there at all times for when you want to sell something on the black market and use intersteller factors and anything else illegal they add in the future.

The fact that the black market is part of the official station contact is madness. They could really expand on black markets too, have different contacts for different illegal products, the better the rep, the better price you get. Have them offer missions to smuggle stuff in and/or out of the port, that could include people too. Doesn't make sense to have these missions on the open to everyone mission board.

Also there should be black markets in every high security station/base. No real need for them in anarchies or low security systems as most things would be readily available. In medium security there should be some black markets.

The black markets should only deal with contraband.

Add a fence to annonymous protocals sell your stolen goods at instead of the black market, have these contacts offer missions to steal certain items from certain ships.

A fence would most likely be in medium (medium paid but with some difficulty) and low (low paid but easy) security systems, a few in high security (high paid but with a high degree of difficulty). Again, an anarchy wouldn't really need one.

The Fence should only deal with stolen goods.

Put bounties back on to people, then put notoriety on the ship, then use notoriety as a way to control what you can and can't do with your ship.

Make most things a fine. The only things that should get you a bounty are attacking another ship (damage above a certain threshold, anything below should be a fine), ship destruction and piracy/theft of goods.

Maybe if you get enough fines from a single faction, then it will turn into a bounty, but the threshold should be reasonably substantial. Keep the bounties tacked onto rebuys as well. Thats good. Using Intersteller factors to clear bounties is good as well, they will be expensive to clear. Self destruct should not clear a bounty. Sure you can use a sidewinder to die in, but you still have to pay off your bounty (and any associated costs) at the detention centre, you will spawn in your sidewinder and the ship you did the crime in could very well have become notorious in the area so you won't be able to summon it. You will have to go to it.

This is what I would have done, but it's a lot of work, but sometimes it need to be done.

 

[Hell Razor5543]

While there are definitely issues within the Game, I feel that we, the Players, are partially to blame for this (and the reason for why FDev are having to do so much maintenance). How many of us have made (what we believe to be reasonable) demands of things to be done/added/changed within the Game? With so many demands FDev have (in order to keep the Players on side) tried to do what they can, to the point where there are now a lot of problems.

Let me use an analogy, if you don't mind. Imagine you have completely built yourself a house (from the foundations up). It is a nice house, and suits your needs well. Your circumstances change (unexpected increase in the size of your family), so you build an extension. Later, as the children grow up, they want their own rooms, so you convert the attic. Next you need to add garages (and, to keep people dry, they are built onto the side of the house). Now you start seeing cracks appearing in the original structure, so you call in a surveyor, who tells you that the foundations, although well built at the time, are not holding up well under the extra weight, and need to be repaired.

 

[Old Duck]

Like everything else, C&P is half-baked. Rant follows..

Flipping Harvey Dent's coin to the other side, there's a lot in ED that I can ignore, and by ignoring these things, the game is better for me. Looking back at C&P, I decided not that long ago that my "pirate ship" shall always be that, and I'm not going to try to clear my bounties, nor will I be swapping modules. Nor will I try to sneak into a port where that ship is wanted, thus I'll never need to deal with these dumb anonymous protocols. Speaking of, the AP is so destructive to my "immersion" that when I'm being good, I'm trying to be really good, thus I work hard to avoid even minor fines when operating out of my favorite ports of call. So ironically the pure annoyance of C&P makes it have more teeth for me, which is exactly what I want out of C&P.

Same goes for things like Engineering. My engineering is very modest overall, thus I'm not grinding or hunting HGEs or anything else that seems to bring many people grief. And since I don't own any "god ships", the game still offers me a challenge.

My biggest personal frustrations come from things that I would love to do if they were done right - like a more engaging, strategic, meaningful PowerPlay game. However, no amount of handwavium can make PP enjoyable to me in its current state, so it just sits on the shelf growing mold. BGS is similar, in that I love the idea, but the execution is tedious to me, though enough people enjoy it that I admit this may be an instance of personal preference vs. an actual flaw in game design.