First, some background. I have logged several thousand hours of dedicated game-play in Elite Dangerous. I have completed the superpower rank grind for both the Empire and Federation. I have been to Beagle point and back twice. I have built and engineered over twenty different ships in my career. I have been active on the Frontier forums and am a moderator on one of the more successful Elite Dangerous discords.I have spent close to a thousand dollars in hardware and controllers specifically to improve my experience in this game and have purchased close to one hundred dollars of cosmetic items over the time I have spent in game. I engage with the community; I hear complaints from a whole array of players, and I keep track of what systems in the game are working and which systems are failing. Despite the things the game is doing well, I have not been able to sit down and enjoy a long play session since this spring.
Let me be very clear, I do not want to take a collective dump on the community or on the developers, I find that ire and aggression tends to shut people down and prevent the kinds of discussions that need to be happening right now in order to prevent the community from stratifying. As it stands now, veteran players like me are leaving the Elite Community in frustration because of the overall trend this game is taking.
Elite Dangerous has one of the best player communities of any game I have ever played. If you are a new player, and you ask for help, you are going to get it. If you don’t understand something, a quick post on one of the many discord servers will have other players literally stepping all over each other trying to give you advise. Its wonderful, and it stems from the overall atmosphere the game has. Elite Dangerous is hard, by design, and it’s great because it drives players towards each other in a universe that couldn’t give less of a damn about you. This is not Destiny, you are not the chosen one, you are one cog in a greater machine forging your own path.
It’s a real shame then, that the community developer relationship is one of the worst I have ever seen, though I would have to reserve worse overall for Apex Legends. Where Apex is financially and socially abuse, Elite Dangerous is neglectful and halfhearted. The trend has appeared to get worse despite apparent effort on the part of Frontier to try and patch the road a bit. The Suggestions section of the Frontier forums are rife with free ideas, even if they might be bad ones, I rarely ever see anyone from frontier acknowledging them.
Aside from occasional PR bog standard platitudes mentioned during live streams the suggestions section of the forums appears to be mostly unnoticed. I have posted several long form ideas on the suggestions board, and while I don’t expect personal composed rebuttal letters signed by Will Flanagan, it would be nice to suggestions get brought up and acknowledged more often than they currently are as part of a live-stream or forum post.
The live-streams have come a long way over the last year, with a relative increase in transparency and more information provided to the player base about ongoing work. The trouble here is, that often these live-streams feel far too scripted and their participants far too constrained by company policy to discuss the things the community wants to know about. This is a defensive reaction, and its understandable. However, total radio silence on issues or concerns the community has is a worse solution to a bad problem. It is driving older players directly into Elite’s competitors.
This all boiled over during the Elite Dangerous cheating scandal from a few months back. To summarize the problem, over the last six months there has been a proliferation in cheating tools that take advantage of Elite’s highly client authoritative peer to peer networking system. Several players protested the problem, and so far, the only response that the developers have made is to ban a few token players and issue a press release. This is not good enough and has been directly cited to me by several players as a key reason they stopped playing entirely. These players will not return to elite for any reason until the cheating issue has been addressed.
Another community sore spot was highlighted with the recent implementation of the Advanced Multi Cannon a few months ago. This module is treated by the game as a standard multi cannon that can be synthesized into AX capability. This weapon was found to be completely impractical only a few hours after its formal launch, with the Anti Xeno Initiative conducting a detailed study of the weapons damage and effective usage cases. To be short, there is no reason at all to use this module in practical AX combat under the current AX meta. It was pointless, and it still is pointless, and when the AXI and several other prominent players raised this issue with Frontier about this module we were met with absolute silence.
The Advanced multi cannon is not the only dysfunctional module in the game, You-tuber Yamics recently did a detailed study of the various tiers of weapons available in Elite. Though his tone was satirically aggressive, he highlighted several flaws in the standard weapon balance across the game. Some of these flaws are significant enough to invalidate the practical use of such weapons in almost every PvE and PvP encounter. This too has been an issue raised on the forum’s multiple times, again without any response. This same issue can be raised for several of Elite’s ships, though we will curtail this discussion for the sake of time.
If elite dangerous only fixed one thing, it should be their community relations. More than anything else, we need to see the developers engaging directly with us more often. When we ask a hard question, we aren’t trying to humiliate and demean, we are trying to understand. When we suggest something and its rejected, we want to understand the thinking behind its rejection so that we can adjust our own expectations and make recommendations and requests that are more attainable. Give us a way to highlight the things we need Elite Dangerous to do in order to be more fun.
One of the best tools Frontier can provide is a way to vote on feature requests the same way we vote on bugs. Give us more control over how new features are implemented, a way to see what our community wants the most. Then use that tool to directly engage with the player base so that we are all working on the same page. So that we all understand the things we want the game to do, and the things the game can do. Fostering better communication, providing better channels for understanding, and providing the community more information about progress will make a world of difference, and will do more to bring the veteran players back than any number of fleet carriers or space legs.
Respectfully Dryheat4u.
Let me be very clear, I do not want to take a collective dump on the community or on the developers, I find that ire and aggression tends to shut people down and prevent the kinds of discussions that need to be happening right now in order to prevent the community from stratifying. As it stands now, veteran players like me are leaving the Elite Community in frustration because of the overall trend this game is taking.
Elite Dangerous has one of the best player communities of any game I have ever played. If you are a new player, and you ask for help, you are going to get it. If you don’t understand something, a quick post on one of the many discord servers will have other players literally stepping all over each other trying to give you advise. Its wonderful, and it stems from the overall atmosphere the game has. Elite Dangerous is hard, by design, and it’s great because it drives players towards each other in a universe that couldn’t give less of a damn about you. This is not Destiny, you are not the chosen one, you are one cog in a greater machine forging your own path.
It’s a real shame then, that the community developer relationship is one of the worst I have ever seen, though I would have to reserve worse overall for Apex Legends. Where Apex is financially and socially abuse, Elite Dangerous is neglectful and halfhearted. The trend has appeared to get worse despite apparent effort on the part of Frontier to try and patch the road a bit. The Suggestions section of the Frontier forums are rife with free ideas, even if they might be bad ones, I rarely ever see anyone from frontier acknowledging them.
Aside from occasional PR bog standard platitudes mentioned during live streams the suggestions section of the forums appears to be mostly unnoticed. I have posted several long form ideas on the suggestions board, and while I don’t expect personal composed rebuttal letters signed by Will Flanagan, it would be nice to suggestions get brought up and acknowledged more often than they currently are as part of a live-stream or forum post.
The live-streams have come a long way over the last year, with a relative increase in transparency and more information provided to the player base about ongoing work. The trouble here is, that often these live-streams feel far too scripted and their participants far too constrained by company policy to discuss the things the community wants to know about. This is a defensive reaction, and its understandable. However, total radio silence on issues or concerns the community has is a worse solution to a bad problem. It is driving older players directly into Elite’s competitors.
This all boiled over during the Elite Dangerous cheating scandal from a few months back. To summarize the problem, over the last six months there has been a proliferation in cheating tools that take advantage of Elite’s highly client authoritative peer to peer networking system. Several players protested the problem, and so far, the only response that the developers have made is to ban a few token players and issue a press release. This is not good enough and has been directly cited to me by several players as a key reason they stopped playing entirely. These players will not return to elite for any reason until the cheating issue has been addressed.
Another community sore spot was highlighted with the recent implementation of the Advanced Multi Cannon a few months ago. This module is treated by the game as a standard multi cannon that can be synthesized into AX capability. This weapon was found to be completely impractical only a few hours after its formal launch, with the Anti Xeno Initiative conducting a detailed study of the weapons damage and effective usage cases. To be short, there is no reason at all to use this module in practical AX combat under the current AX meta. It was pointless, and it still is pointless, and when the AXI and several other prominent players raised this issue with Frontier about this module we were met with absolute silence.
The Advanced multi cannon is not the only dysfunctional module in the game, You-tuber Yamics recently did a detailed study of the various tiers of weapons available in Elite. Though his tone was satirically aggressive, he highlighted several flaws in the standard weapon balance across the game. Some of these flaws are significant enough to invalidate the practical use of such weapons in almost every PvE and PvP encounter. This too has been an issue raised on the forum’s multiple times, again without any response. This same issue can be raised for several of Elite’s ships, though we will curtail this discussion for the sake of time.
If elite dangerous only fixed one thing, it should be their community relations. More than anything else, we need to see the developers engaging directly with us more often. When we ask a hard question, we aren’t trying to humiliate and demean, we are trying to understand. When we suggest something and its rejected, we want to understand the thinking behind its rejection so that we can adjust our own expectations and make recommendations and requests that are more attainable. Give us a way to highlight the things we need Elite Dangerous to do in order to be more fun.
One of the best tools Frontier can provide is a way to vote on feature requests the same way we vote on bugs. Give us more control over how new features are implemented, a way to see what our community wants the most. Then use that tool to directly engage with the player base so that we are all working on the same page. So that we all understand the things we want the game to do, and the things the game can do. Fostering better communication, providing better channels for understanding, and providing the community more information about progress will make a world of difference, and will do more to bring the veteran players back than any number of fleet carriers or space legs.
Respectfully Dryheat4u.
