Has April 1st been brought forward this year?

Before griefers could slam into you with low hull and no shields and the game treats it as you killing the griefer and gave you a fine. Now you can't use your expensive ship in that jurisdiction until you clear the bounty. You can leave that area and wait for the bounty to go away, or you can pay it off at IF for a premium. How do you think this is gonna play out at CG's? Griefers suicide against your hull while you're docking at a CG station, and now you can't do the CG until you clear your bounty because you can't access station services. Plus the cost of the ships involved is factored in now so they can suicide an expensive ship on your hull to make you play ridiculous amounts of money to clear it.

It's just a tiny fraction of the rebuy cost at low notoriety levels and you can always just not speed and avoid the issue all together. It's also absolutely not a new way to grief.
 
i just wish they would release new stuff 1 at a time, or once a week, instead of saving it all up for a big beta and patch, imagine if they upgraded game as and when they got stuff done, wow used to do that in the old days, was something to look forward to. after patch day.

There are loads of reasons why this wouldn't work. Releasing patches/hot fixes is one thing, releasing new content, even on a drip feed basis, is another.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if FD are squeezing the time-frame on this first release in 3.0 so they can move onto delivering some paid for content.

Emergent gameplay?

Deploying credit card!

Yes the purpose is to boost the sales. Perhaps with the new paid content but also with the basic Horizons by announcing that Q1 is released and operational
 
It's just a tiny fraction of the rebuy cost at low notoriety levels and you can always just not speed and avoid the issue all together. It's also absolutely not a new way to grief.

The people that whinge about this don't want to hear that the situation is avoidable, because they then have to acknowledge that failing to avoid it is their own dumb fault.

Also, I think there's an attempt to misappropriate the term 'griefer' here - my understanding of a griefer is someone who deliberately and repeatedly targets the same individual to [cause them] grief - sitting in front of a CG station and not being too careful around speeding goods vehicles doesn't seem to fit the bill, as they're not selecting and pursuing a specific victim; they're just taking advantage of the slow of wit who select themselves as victims by speeding.

Babelfish is right - nothing new here.
 
By looking at the beta forum I can guess that many if not most people disagree with your feedback.

You mean the large numbers of casual players who pretend that there's nothing wrong because they're distracted by their uber ship mods? Yeah, you can guess that they "disagree" with my feedback because they're trying to pretend it isn't a massive mess as long as they all get to fly uber ships. The problems I've described all exist but those players just try to pretend everything's fine because that's literally all they can do at this point. They could care less about game balance, they just want to be handed easy mods no matter how it affects the game or other player's prior efforts.

That said I would've preferred a different approach to Engineering as well (although I believe it's different to yours) but both of us aren't the majority of the community. Even if it potentially would be better for the game...

Unfortunately FD doesn't want to actually "test" anything or get real "feedback". They just want to push whatever redesign they came up with into the game and they're willing to push the new blueprints to ludicrous levels to convince everyone to tell them how "great" the changes are. No one was enjoying the system with beta 1, now suddenly it's such a "great" improvement despite being the same mess they originally planned on going with from the start. Literally every single potential improvement they added to Engineering comes with massive drawbacks and problems that put the game in a worse place than it was before the rework.

PS
BTW I also believe they should extend beta by at least two weeks. Frontier are doing the same mistakes again and again. On the bright side that means the Q2 update comes a few weeks earlier. On the other hand we will have problems with lots of bugs for the next 3 months. They finally need to learn to also beta test their release candidate.

It looks like it will just be Horizons all over again, except this time instead of just adding new features they're making the system more complicated and adding a new layer of mess on top of what already wasn't working.

They could have easily just taken the good suggestions they were given about how to improve Engineering and work with the system we already had. Instead they couldn't resist adding a new level cap and grindwall instead.
 
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So the newsletter says the beta finishes on the 9th February, now myself and a lot of others still can't run the beta because it won't recognise our controllers ('cos we have more than 4 things connected I think). Is this a joke or are F D so amazingly confident that they have overcome the problem (and many, MANY others)?

Such a short beta seems incredibly naff to me.

It's not really a beta. In software developers terms it's more like a release candidate. They only fix typos and small bugs. No functional code changes. Changes are limited to what can be done by changing parameter values (like the number of rolls to complete grades 1-5 in engineers, or the blueprint min/max effects).

Discovery of a real big nasty bug, unacceptable performance or severe gameplay weirdness would lead to postponing the release and a new "beta" later on.
 
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Rafe Zetter

Banned
Can't do that when you have consoles to update as well as Sony and MS have to validate patches for release as well.

We used to have small patches all the time early on before ED existed on consoles, once it did FDev stated this is how it would be going forward due to limitations of pushing updates to them.

They need the same code base on all three, can't have different versions so you are bound to console release cycles.

Yeah and in the KS FDev said they weren't going to get into bed with another company or publisher because of the limitations it brings. How long did that last? a year?
 
Maybe "Open beta" ends on the 9th.
Then it closes for some work, and closed beta opens for a while.

Isn't that what happened last time? Or what of the other way around....

Yeah - the other way around is what we had before and what is normal. Closed beta(s) to show up most bugs then an open beta to give high-stress test of the release candidate.

This time seems to to me to have been entirely driven by the marketing department.

[insertgrumpuoldgitemojihere]
 
So the newsletter says the beta finishes on the 9th February, now myself and a lot of others still can't run the beta because it won't recognise our controllers ('cos we have more than 4 things connected I think). Is this a joke or are F D so amazingly confident that they have overcome the problem (and many, MANY others)?

Such a short beta seems incredibly naff to me.

You are right.

One factor to consider. Given the overall poor design and implementation of releases around powerplay, engineers, multi-crew, missions, ice mining, etc., it is more apt to think about open beta as an extended alpha period.

It may make players feel like they are "testing" the final product, and having an impact on its changes. In reality development is simply ongoing, and public imput figures marginally if at all to what Frontier plans to do.

This is why we get ill-designed and buggy mechanics on live that rarely get fixed. Its a shame given the wealth of talent at Frontier.
 
That came unexpected... but if the beta ends, why doesn't it go live at the same time?

My guess is that they allocated the budget for server use dedicated to the beta before initiating it. I see no real reason for panic as it's not much different from the way things have been done in the past. A short beta just means more patches to the live once it gets released.

It's probably the smart financial decision. I thought they had moved toward a more incremental change approach with fewer bugs, but this seems to be a return to past practice of massive change with loads of bugs that will need multiple patches.

It's still progress

Adapt or perish - there's no other choices
 
....No one was enjoying the system with beta 1....

I'm going to have to pull you up on that - I can't speak for anybody but myself, but I enjoyed the beta 1 system - True, I now have uber ships to fly around in, and I wouldn't wish to be without them - the desire for them was, in the first instance, my reason for going material gathering.

However, gathering materials for engineering became a major, if not primary, activity in my game - and not because I felt compelled to grind, grind, grind - it's because I enjoyed it.
Yes some aspects are tedious (Wake scanning, for example, is not something you can get better at with practice, nor is ship scanning for Unexpected Emission Data and the like) but some others were a revelation.

For example, to get MEF and CIF I had to learn to run bases - this took a bit of work, but damn, the exhilaration I felt when I clocked the first one was brilliant, and every base after that was an attempt to beat my record from the last. Accruing rare data became almost a side-event.
Later, when out surface prospecting, I realised that learning to pick my way through these bases accurately, and yet at speed, had been honing my SRV control to a fine degree - I find I am now able to tackle brutal, jagged terrain with confidence that I would not have even attempted before learning to run the bases.
Furthermore, base running is an excellent wing activity - you all want the data, you go from base-to-base together - everybody gets their go at the timed run, and their chance to bag the data, the crashes and mishaps become a source of hilarity rather than frustration, and after everyone's done, why not spend a few minutes looking for a likely ramp and having an impromptu long-jump contest, or see who can stick the best landing on some tricky ledge?
I like combat too, and enjoy material gathering in RES's and conflict zones, again, I do this mainly with wing-mates..... I like doing the vast majority of it for it's own sake, I think that's the point - it isn't grinding to me, and consequently I'd sometimes find I had to stop because I'd reached my materials target, not because I was sick of it.

Fortunately for me, the new system will still allow me to get my materials this way, as well as introducing the material exchanger for those who don't - but to those who think they don't want to do the hard yards to get the rare stuff directly, I'd simply advise that they at least look up some Youtube guides and see if it's as bad as they fear because, for my part at least, learning the ropes of engineering forced me to develop skills, and led to my finding enjoyment in things that seemed like a chore beforehand - particularly the SRV, which is now probably my favourite ship! (ironic, since I can't engineer it!). Yes the SRV does have handling shortcomings (some quite serious), but with practice you can fly the thing accurately enough, despite these shortcomings.

I hope I've articulated why I enjoyed the outgoing system, and how I've come about my highly-engineered modules - and notice I said not a thing about the RnG experience at the engineers themselves - if you enjoy the journey, the destination comes soon enough - when you're having so much fun that the material cap stops play, the engineer rolls come by the bucket-load - I got what i wanted in the old system, and I bet I'll get on just fine with the new system too.
 
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Thursday March 1st makes the most sense for a release date. It still falls within the Q1 range, which April 1st does not.

There is also just about the right amount of quiet time between the close of the Beta and the actual release, based on the previous interval of time between previous beta and releases.

At least that is what I will be planning for.
 
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