Have recent official polls by FDev made forumites believe ED is "Design by Committee"?

[Ozric]

What I’m truly curious about is: when Frontier is designing new content, do they ever take any playstyles into consideration other than combat? Because multicrew had potential to be useful to all styles of playing. Trading, exploration, mining, none of them are getting anything at all with multicrew, it is a purely combat only feature. AGAIN. That just seems terribly narrow minded given Elite’s diverse range of playstyles?

I’d love to hear an answer on this Brett, because frankly it’s beginning to get very tiresome to have so much of your customer base simply not considered when developing new content.

You won't get an official answer. I've been trying for over a year to get an official statement about the state of exploration and it is ignored every single time. Simple fact is that, despite everything it brings to the game in terms of media coverage and sales, Frontier just don't care enough to say anything, because they know they're not going to do anything about it.

Though to be fair Michael did reply once about a year ago, to say they were happy with the core of exploration.

 

[CmdrChorusLindarr]

Yes I think they probably have. I also think that some of them had that impression even before the recent polls.

Whilst I'm fully in favour of discussion of upcoming features, I do find the degree of input some players expect to have into fundamental game design decisions to be somewhat troubling, not least because they are invariably players who have significant amounts of time available to play the game and seem to be incapable of recognising that a mass market game simply cannot pitch any of its headline content at player with four hours a day or more to play the game because that isn't in any way representative of the average player. Not only of this game, but of any game.

You're absolutely right here and I totally agree.

- - - Updated - - -

Actually, and I admit I am being rather facetious here - Mining is helped by this as you can have a buddy watch your back and get some turret shots in when trouble comes

Also, SLF's too. Since a launched fighter can run interference and provide precious time to make a quick high wake if things go sideways fast.

 

[Obsidian Ant]

So far the feedback to the dev update has been extraordinary positive, compared to the usual bashing, whining and ranting. It was so positive that I felt the need to create a negative thread just to keep the balance.

Just is the power of forums that they can make negativity seem larger than it actually is. I agree that for the most part, many people are very happy about 2.3, despite what a brief glance at the forums threads may imply.

 

[thirstyfish]

I voted fish for reasons that should be obvious.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Condiments poll? Missed that but Lea & Perrin's Worcestershire table sauce (sorry for spelling) gets my vote

Why apologise for spelling it right?

 

[Martian Successor]

We take most of the forum feedback into consideration, but we don't always react and change things based on forum feedback alone.

Along with my forum feedback I will also send over some biscuit cake. Will that help? *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*

 

[Bomba Luigi]

Recen't Polls? Can only remember one and people didn't act any diffrent before that one

And the thing about the whole ship transfer is that as far as I know even withhin FD people where very split on how to do it, if all in FDs office would have been on board with instant I doubt we would have ever seen that poll. Feedback has always been taken into account but if FD themselfs are dead sure about something they are doing it.
Which is all just my guess of course, could be wrong.

 

[Martian Successor]

Just is the power of forums that they can make negativity seem larger than it actually is. I agree that for the most part, many people are very happy about 2.3, despite what a brief glance at the forums threads may imply.

I realise that the majority of the playerbase play in Solo/Private but does nobody think there is a potential combat balancing nightmare approaching based on Sandro's outline of multicrew?

I am sort of amazed at the lack of giving a hoot about the minority of us that play in Open, both from the community and it seems from the developers too. I mean we're a minority, but it doesn't mean we should be ignored just because we want to continue playing in Open and expect as fair and as balanced an environment as is possible. So far multi-crew strikes me as a super buff to the big 3, essentially making them God mode enabled immortality boats and thus turning combat encounters in Open into "go multicrew in a big ship or go home".

Do we really want to artificially force a playstyle on Open like this?

 

[milligna]

Sounds like a lazy repeat of your Engineers rant.

 

[Droid8Apple]

I think there are more people that are happy with 2.3 than those who are unhappy. The unhappy ones just appear to be louder.

It remains to be seen whether or not Frontier will cave to pressure, as you have pointed out Frontier have set a precedent on this. The thing of it is, that if Frontier have a good strong vision on Elite, then they should have no need to bow to pressure on any of the large features.

To be honest though, the only large feature they have changed in the past is a rebalance of The Engineers - for the rest of their headline features they have stuck to their guns. For the most part it's the minor features and the quality of life changes, where they have given in to the community.

I would add to your thought that another major change before testing was the ship transfer wait times. It was a louder group of people to respond for wait times and because of this I've never once used the "feature". I would assume, that like me, this caused people to play the game less. Those of us who've played now for years and have thousands of hours sometimes need good reason to pick up the HOTAS again after a break. That change alone disheartened me from playing with a specific task in mind (IE- community goal, livestream, etc).

What it comes down to is they're (FD) damned if they do and damned if they don't. The immersion-babies got their wait times so a tick should be given to the non-immersion-babies for this multi-crew "tele-presence holorganic materialization transfer"... until proven otherwise at least.

On a brighter note; I can't think of any of my friends who said "oh darn darny darn! now we can get engineered parts easily... I don't want to play anymore"

 

[Jukelo]

Almost every product is designed by comitee to an extent if you stretch the definition far enough. If you have a customer base and rely on that base for your income, then chances are you need to take their wants and needs into account when designing your product or you'll be out of a job. Knowing that, it would be stupid for a customer to not express their preferences to try and get the best product for themselves.
Unless you're Apple and can just create fads at will ofc.

 

[Lustan]

I voted yes but it doesn't apply to myself. There are definitely people here that believe that. I'm not one of them.

 

[CmdrChorusLindarr]

Sounds like a lazy repeat of your Engineers rant.

Apologies, but who was this directed at? You weren't clear.

 

[OriginalBadBoy]

Yes ....

In that its being designed by a committee of non developers who think they are entitled to an opinion, because they are gamers and should be listened to.

Frontier should just do what they want, its their game in the end not ours.

 

[askavir]

Obviously a game cannot be designed by commitee.

But that doesn't mean people are not free to say "I love X" or "I hate Y" whenever they feel like it.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

What a laugh.

No. Nothing I say has ever had any influence on the game.

That doesn't mean that pointing out obvious, game-breaking problems with mechanics and going over the lack of polish existent on many features isn't cathartic. If FDev choose to read my posts and take it into consideration great, that was a lucky day, but I'm just here to blow off steam because I'd rather be frustrated with a bunch of loobies on the forums that don't understand what it takes to make a good game than I would being frustrated with the game itself.