Here’s my take on what Elite Dangerous is getting wrong…

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

I am not talking about kickstarter obligations (those mostly ended at point of product release - I thought I made that clear with my reference to the DDFs being mostly moot) but the obligations to existing users of the released product (c/f compliance with Trading Standards and similar regulations), arguably removing the BDS/IDS/ADS functionality could be considered a breech of those obligations (and their own guideline/rule of building on the past), especially given both the nature of the replacement mechanics and the length of time the prior mechanics were in play - the placeholder argument loses all legitimacy at that point. Plus there is the point that FD seem to be resistant and/or dismissive of suggested improvements which arguably are necessary to meet their obligations - and I am not necessarily talking about reviving the BDS/IDS/ADS mechanics either.

Ultimately, the overriding point is that the introduction of the FSS/DSS failed to hit the point of acceptable compromise. It adversely affects the in-game experience for at least some with no acceptable alternate mechanic.

I apologise to OP for this slight derail and would like to make clear it is not my intention to start a new FSS debate.

I think saying “arguably removing the BDS/IDS/ADS functionality could be considered a breech of those obligations”, would be fantastically difficult to argue.

Put aside for one moment whether you like the FSS or not.

Does it allow you to search a system? Yes.

Has the introduction of it caused the game to be unplayable for reasons such as it always causes the game to crash? No.

So as cumbersome, ugly, inefficient as some may find it, it still performs the task required of it and has not caused the game to cease working.

That you might not like it is not going to be a breach of terms.

 

[lenna]

I apologise to OP for this slight derail and would like to make clear it is not my intention to start a new FSS debate.

I think saying “arguably removing the BDS/IDS/ADS functionality could be considered a breech of those obligations”, would be fantastically difficult to argue.

Put aside for one moment whether you like the FSS or not.

Does it allow you to search a system? Yes.

Has the introduction of it caused the game to be unplayable for reasons such as it always causes the game to crash? No.

So as cumbersome, ugly, inefficient as some may find it, it still performs the task required of it and has not caused the game to cease working.

That you might not like it is not going to be a breach of terms.

Actually it can be considered a breech due to it's implementation - there are various points that make it at-least a technical if not absolute breech of their obligations.

Ultimately, this is not off-topic since it is a clear example of FD failing to consider all the aspects in play and dismissing or ignoring the concerns of at least some.

 

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

Actually it can be considered a breech due to it's implementation - there are various points that make it at-least a technical if not absolute breech of their obligations.

Ultimately, this is not off-topic since it is a clear example of FD failing to consider all the aspects in play and dismissing or ignoring the concerns of at least some.

With complete respect, take them to court then.

We disagree and are unlikely to be able to say anything to change the others position. No malice or hard feelings but we’ll go round in circles

 

[Old Duck]

We disagree and are unlikely to be able to say anything to change the others position. No malice or hard feelings but we’ll go round in circles

Giving up so early? This can't be a true ADS vs FSS debate unless you go for another 500+ posts, LOL.

Now can we get back to discussing Fleet Carriers and Elephant Butt Leather, please?

 

[Soron Silin]

I've only played for a month or so but I've looked at an ADS tutorial and I have to say, that was garbage. The whole system with a single honk? I might get a little bored searching for the last of 32 planets for five minutes, knowing it's a boring ice world of no monetary value, but I'm a completionist damn it. The FSS is a pain but it is immersive and it makes sense. There's real science behind what we are doing. We get to concentrate even for only half a second on every one of the planets that we discover.

If I was to make one change to it, it would be to have the little arrow things work from further away when there are only a few signal sources left. That's it. That's its only fault.

That's my experience, but I did build a control console particularly to make it more practical. Tuning the dial on a cheap HOTAS throttle was horrible and using button tuning was unplayable. A centering thumbstick must be worse. So I can understand that some people might have issues with it. It's certainly a major change from honk and leave.

 

[Burke]

I've only played for a month or so but I've looked at an ADS tutorial and I have to say, that was garbage...........There's real science behind what we are doing. We get to concentrate even for only half a second on every one of the planets that we discover.

You have no idea what you are talking about if you have only played for a month. What science is there? It covers up information that is technically available to make you jump thru the hoops of uncovering it. I used to concentrate on every body in a system quite often, hell i used to fly up to and scan each one, land on some of them. You justify FDs vandalism of what was once enjoyable gameplay by giving them praise for it. I havnt logged into the game for close to a year now, thats what the FSS did. All i can tell you is just dont by any skins cause one day you might log in and find what you enjoyed doing has been taken away too.

 

[lenna]

With complete respect, take them to court then.

I would rather they finish the job properly and both acknowledge and fulfil their obligations - blood sucking lawyers are a waste of time, effort, and money. They are a blunt instrument that should only be used as a last resort. If it came to that I would also accuse FD of making false public declarations wrt their "consulting the exploration community" claims. If they truly had consulted the community then the end result should have not been the FSS/DSS.

FD should acknowledge the mistakes they have made with the exploration changes in 3.3 and work to correct them - they need not change their overall implementation just add tweaks here and there... there are enough threads and posts on the aspects that need changing/improving.

This thread is about the mistakes FD have made and their apparent ostrich manoeuvres to date over suggested changes to the FSS/DSS count on that score.

 

[Burke]

You know that in all seriousness there is no court. Game complanys ripping off their customers isnt exactly a new thing, the correct response is, or at least always has been in the past, to have their games for free until you feel like you have been compensated. That assumes thay actually make anything worth having..

 

[lenna]

You know that in all seriousness there is no court. Game complanys ripping off their customers isnt exactly a new thing...

No it is not exactly new, but there are limits to what can be considered acceptable changes and FD have breached them.

Lets take one obvious example - the claim that the revised exploration system is learn-able due to the audio component. That alienates explorers that have hearing impairment, something that was not an issue till they introduced the changes. The answer is relatively simple though (add a truly recognisable visual representation of the audio output in the FSS UI) which is perhaps the most infuriating aspect about it.

However, let's not get bogged down in the specifics - they have been covered sufficiently in other threads - this thread is more about the poor level/nature of FD's communication with the community. Where the FSS/DSS is concerned, it has been astoundingly poor both on the lead up to and since the release of 3.3.

 

[BinakAlgo]

This is already a thread about 1 vs 1 replies but I'll be oblivious to it and pretend that someone will read me.

Similarly things like the Gnosis and the Salome storyline got massive complaint mega-threads on the forums afterwards. And then we found out, in the nine months gap between the Gnosis and the Enclave, what the alternative was of Frontier never running anything interesting enough to be even slightly controversial. I'd far rather that they did stuff and said stuff and took the risk that it's not going to be universally popular, than they did nothing to ensure that no-one had anything to talk about.

On a side note, anyone knows what were the reactions of the writing thing after the Salome storyline? It was years before I was around so I never knew. Sure, they were prepared to get Salome killed by the players, that was part of the event, but, what did they think or said when they discovered it was done by players who not only backstabbed the other 3,000 players telling them they were "on their side", but they actually cheated and used an exploit to get perfect fully engineered ships to do so?

I would be devasted if someone did something like that to my work, but that's just me.

Imagine you purchase a book and then the author comes in and removes a chapter after-the-fact (ADS) and inserts a bunch of grammatical errors (bugs) that weren't in the book when you bought it. In fact, he goes and changes huge parts of the plot, so that the book is no longer the same one you originally bought. Sounds silly? Well that's what you get for comparing software to a book.

This is taking an analogy too far without looking for the details. For example, we are not buying a book, we are purchasing a license and in the terms and conditions of that license, it said Frontier reserved the rights to change whatever they wanted without notice, including the License Conditions themselves. I guess it is unfair but that has to do with the copyright legislation.

But just for the sake of it. Tolkien changed the whole chapters of Bilbo and Gollum in "The Hobbit" so it made sense with LotR. I just mention this example because it is famous, but this happens all the time with all kind of books, science books in special, second, third... tenth whatever editions change and chapters are removed, other introduced and not everyone likes them. Professors ask their students to get a specific version all the time because they dislike the newer ones. True, we can't do that with Elite as it is a different media and again, we bought a license.

The suggestions section is, i think, just for the forum-users’ to air their ideas and feel like they’ve contributed something. A plecebo sort of thing. A hole into which ideas can be thrown. And then ignored.

And, fair enough.

This is certainly true and I'm convinced of it and I also let me fall into the illusion, but if the placebo doesn't convince the players that they are being heard then the placebo is failing. All that would be needed is one single Frontier employee replying once a week to the suggestion forums with a "Noted, we'll keep it in mind but we can't promise anything" will be enough to keep the placebo working.

I havnt logged into the game for close to a year now, thats what the FSS did.

The reasons to love the FSS are just piling up. I really like it.

 

[Burke]

The reasons to love the FSS are just piling up. I really like it.

If i was a new customer looking at ED and i watched the FSS being used i wouldnt buy the game. Watching that for 5 seconds would be an instant no. I notice its on sale again aswell, seems to be on sale very very often. I wonder if they are panicing over low numbers or something. The FSS is something that is obviously bad and tedious, you dont even need to use it to imagine the misery of it. Other games youtubes bring cutomers in.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

On a side note, anyone knows what were the reactions of the writing thing after the Salome storyline? It was years before I was around so I never knew. Sure, they were prepared to get Salome killed by the players, that was part of the event, but, what did they think or said when they discovered it was done by players who not only backstabbed the other 3,000 players telling them they were "on their side", but they actually cheated and used an exploit to get perfect fully engineered ships to do so?

Drew has made various comments about it on his blog, but in summary he was fine with both cases and if he hadn't been he wouldn't have designed the event so that they were both possible.

A side note: some of the losing side has vastly overstated the effectiveness of both those tactics.

• yes, they claimed to be on Salomé's side, but they were a group with such a reputation that the majority of the defence team command didn't believe them, had people tracking them, and didn't deliberately let them close enough to be a threat: they just weren't able to move fast enough (with the massive load on network and instancing that night causing people to just get stuck in hyperspace or crash out all over the place not helping) when they went from "out of dangerous range" to "starting their sudden but inevitable betrayal" to catch all of them.
• yes, their ships were probably somewhat better engineered than they had a right to be - quite possibly some of the defending ships were as well, though - but the size of this benefit would only have made a difference in the outcome of an extended PvP battle between two player combat ships both flown by skilled pilots. In the compromised state Salomé's ship was in for the final battle - having already taken repeated heat damage from too-fast scooping and battle damage from previous attacks - it didn't make a difference in the end. (I've never fought the player who got the final kill, but I have fought some of their colleagues from that time, and they are considerably better than me in PvP - and we're all considerably better than Salomé was. A couple of percent extra ship performance - and that's all the exploit gave compared with what they'd otherwise have had - is neither here nor there compared with the skill gap)

This is certainly true and I'm convinced of it and I also let me fall into the illusion, but if the placebo doesn't convince the players that they are being heard then the place is failing. All that would be needed is one single Frontier employee replying once a week to the suggestion forums with a "Noted, we'll keep it in mind but we can't promise anything" will be enough to keep the placebo working.

There have been quite a few suggestions made here that have been (approximately) adopted into the game. That's obviously not conclusive evidence that Frontier got the idea from reading specifically here on this subforum as opposed to somewhere else or their own independent thinking on the matter, of course, but nothing will be. The trouble is that if the idea gets suggested repeatedly, we can't tell where they heard about it, whereas if it only gets suggested once we've probably forgotten about the post here by the time it gets implemented - or never read it - so don't notice.

Ultimately, those who want to believe that Frontier reads here will do so, and those who don't want to believe wouldn't be convinced by a generic "we'll think about it" response either.

 

[BinakAlgo]

There have been quite a few suggestions made here that have been (approximately) adopted into the game. That's obviously not conclusive evidence that Frontier got the idea from reading specifically here on this subforum as opposed to somewhere else or their own independent thinking on the matter, of course, but nothing will be. The trouble is that if the idea gets suggested repeatedly, we can't tell where they heard about it, whereas if it only gets suggested once we've probably forgotten about the post here by the time it gets implemented - or never read it - so don't notice.

Thanks for enlighting me on the whole Salome story.

About Frontier feedback. True, I also noted that some features were introduced after some suggestions were made, I remember especially, shortly after I started to browse the forums, the suggestion to make the docking computer capable of taking off, it was from someone who said had some motor disease and that launching through the mailslot gave him problems. Now we have it.

But as you said, that proves nothing.

What I believe is that Frontier, and any game developer who can, do not rely on "suggestion boxes" lone (or at all) because that only tells them a small part of the whole picture and sometimes it is even completely against the whole real interest of the player.

For example, do you remember the TV? Well, then you probably also remember that back a decade or two, there were huge polls and surveys about what people wanted to see on TV. Given the options, the vast majority, like 70% to 95% said that they wanted more educational programs, more informative news and less violent programs. Of course, you know that instead of that what we got were several "reality" shows about terrible and ignorant people being, emotionally, physically and verbally violent against each other terrible persons and becoming famous and rich because of it with massive positive ratings and huge profits of the producers.

This wasn't and will not be new, it's what I've seen others describe as the "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle" of the social sciences. The moment you ask someone a personal question, they will probably answer what they believe the interviewer wants, or what they think they want or what they believe it is a correct answer.

My point is that Frontier does not need the suggestion forum to know what we want most of the time. They have the vast information that our actions in the game give to them. They know if the exact number of players at any hour of any day. They know how much, on average, we play. They know if the FSS increased or decreased exploration. They know how many new players give up after failing their first dock. They also have marketing information about what people google and what people are playing so, they know what we actually want, maybe more than ourselves (in average for the global players for each platform, not specific people, of course).

Maybe they will look out after direct suggestions for features that have not been implemented so there is little data about them, like the Fleet Carriers, most of the players directly expressed in one way or another that they wanted their own personal FC and it seems Frontier listened... Or maybe they looked at the data from EVE and noticed that most players there want to have their own personal Dreadnought?

I don't know.