How and why is the meta killing the game?! Is it a problem with player expectations?

[Genus]

I mean, seriously, the more I think about it the more baffled and disappointed I become. I wonder why a significant portion of the forum posters even bother with the game at all.

What doesn't help is how we often let ourselves divide up into camps around the various debates that crop up, and then assume that "because some people agree with me, I'm right, so everyone should have to play the game based on x, y, z rules, because they benefit my gameplay." It's human nature to default to this, and almost every position is gonna have a selection of people that support it. We just have to remember that this is a game, not a natural right.

There are a lot of massive members frequently possessed by their animus in this forum, it's a form of cognitive dissonance. I find witnessing that behaviour fascinating.

"The fundamental attribute of animus possession is the use of arbitrary opinions, often but not necessarily with an intellectual flavor, to provoke. It's something more akin to a challenge on character than to an intellectual exchange. And the purpose of it in some sense is to see if you’re foolish enough to engage in the argument itself, even though it’s not a real discussion, and to assess whether you’re competent, or capable of holding your temper.

People who engage in it try to locate themselves, it’s a test. And the right way to pass a test when you’re dealing with someone who’s animus-possessed is not to take the bait, no matter what. If you engage in the argument, you lose. Whether you win or lose the argument, you lose by engaging in the argument.

Because you validate the claim that the territory that’s been staked out in the manner it’s been staked out is the territory that should be subject to dispute."

~ Peterson

Due to this type of interaction being so common on these particular boards, the culture suffers for it. Not only in the sheer amount of eye-rolling that must go on from the more rationally inclined, but more importantly due to the level of engagement created by the negative culture that results.

For example, posters become hesitant to engage with certain members due to expecting the inevitable bait and switch. Also, it occurs with such regularity, that when a post comes along that happens to be both timely and relevant, it's meaning and message are undermined by those expectations.

Fortunately, the other half of posters I find interesting and engaging for the right reasons, they've helped with my game no end. And I thank them for it. o7

 

[Imo]

Frontier made a beautiful, giant procedural generated galaxy. Now, since three years we wait for all the excitend things David Braben promised during the kickstarter campaign.

 

[znôrt]

it's just an epiphany I came to.

roll again, use top grade mats this time

 

[WR3ND]

Speaking of meaningless gameplay, a certain player faction of my choosing is about to get an exploration data bomb of about 200 million credits just for the heck of it.

 

[Raumfahrer Spiff]

If this game provided me with deep, engaging PvE gameplay that kept me busy, I wouldn't care about PvP meta at all and just play in solo or private group. But it doesn't, PvE stops being challenging or rewarding once you get good enough at the game to make enough credits to afford a decent combat ship. After reaching that point, I tried to expand my gameplay into powerplay (and therefor pvp), but I quickly found that PvP combat in this game is actually less interesting and engaging than PvE. It all comes down to who has the most meta build and using a bunch of magic spell debuff weapons to neuter and unique advantage their build might possibly give over a meta build. Every PvP encounter I have had, except for one, has felt just as one sided as a PvE battle, except sometimes I was on the side of the shieldless sidewinder wing. I've killed players and forced them to high wake using a terrible build that only gave me victory because I had better engineering mods than they did. On the flip side I have found myself completely at a loss as to how to fight actual PvP builds as doing so would require me to spend countless hours engineering (they are fixing this in 3.0 thankfully) and force me to use a VERY small set of ship and weapon combinations.

Maybe I'm just looking for too much out of this game. But as it is I am starting to struggle to find a reason to play. Powerplay is just a grindfest that occasionally is interrupted by one side killing or driving off the other without much of a fight. Of all the ships and builds in this game, PvP is mainly just FDL's, Clippers, and FAS, with the occasional corvette or cutter thrown in using PAs, Rail guns and frag cannons as their main weapons. The outcome of almost all PvP encounter's I have had could be determined just by looking at each side's build and engineering mods, with pilot skill basically determining if the losing side high waked or exploded.

I am new to all of this, so maybe my experience with PvP hasn't given me the full picture, but as it is right now I am seeing very little that interests me in the current PvP meta, and very little to keep me coming back to the game as a whole in general.

Have you ever seen Isinona's videos?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHQMdJGyMvM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moITRrezrUI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=___lRaq-xZ4

Watch a few of them, there are several different ships and builds used, and they give me a lot of different ideas for different tactics to try in different ships, while thinking more strategically instead of trying to just duke it out with highest alpha meta ships. Plus they are just entertaining cause the pilot is pretty darn talented and takes you through some pretty interesting situations and stories that he finds and creates organically.

I only bring it up because Isinona's style of gameplay has been inspiring how I approach the game for a while now, and your situation felt a little similar to mine (PvE becoming unrewarding but still staying outside of the PvP meta). It does involve a bit of down-grading and/or side-grading, but once you are no long in an OP ship, you have to think more about why you do anything because there are trade offs and consequence to you actions--for instance, flying in a shield less ship to save power and lower heat generation so you have to be sneakier and fly more precise. Huge overengineered ships have too much space for buffed out stats which leave just way too much room for error, so definitely with the NPCs you kinda stop caring what they are actually doing cause none of it is going to affect you. Once you get into huge over-engineered ships everything kinda becomes trivial and there's no cost or drama to any of it, kinda the difference between playing on easy mode and hard mode really. You would make a lot less credits this way, but if you already have a bunch, it allows you to play for the thrill of it and the challenge of it, bottom-line be damned. As a playstyle you are blending a personal narrative thread through all of the actions you do while you're flying around. You give yourself more reasons for doing everything, like staying in SC for a few more seconds cause you want to try and lose that NPC by crashing into the planets ring and hide amongst the asteroids, or to chance turning silent running off because of rampant heat damage even though you might get spotted by the player FDL you just dodged.

The great thing is, if you can get to know you ship well enough and really have a fine tuned muscle memory for all of the different things your ship can do (with creative enough outfitting), even in small ships like the Vulture, you can find plenty of situations where you can survive running into OP attackers (NPC or player), and even, using your wits and the game environment, find lucky moments where you can actually take one of them out, or at least knock them down a peg or two before escaping and running away. I find myself going to social areas like CGs, lore sites, or popular bases, and just more or less make up some reason to care about what's going on around there. I don't go in specifically looking for PvP fights, because I'm certainly not outfitted to try and make a first strike and have any chance of success--you won't be trying to start many 1v1s on purpose or anything with ships like this. But eventually I'll run into other players organically and I'll have to try and shake them in SC or escape them if they interdict me, and stuff like that, but sometimes I might see that Cutter that attacked me 20 minutes ago is now wounded and shieldless with someone is on their tail.. so I'll ride their wake down and see if there's anything I can do to assist the other player, or maybe someone attacks me outside a station and I can goad them into following me into a no-fire zone to get the station defenses to help me. You just also have to get particularly good at recognizing bad situations that you need to avoid like the plague--knowing the limits of your ship and the capability of other ships is extremely important. But on the the plus side, your routine NPC engagements feel meaningful and fun again because there's an actual element of risk with that slim chance you might not make it if you mess up (though you are more experienced now, so the smaller ships don't feel quite as fragile and useless anymore).

This is just some stuff that helped me a lot in side stepping a similar kind of slump. Downgrade or side grade into a ship or ship build that you just find interesting or fun, and avoid the meta build. Do some engineering to make it specialized and capable, but don't stress out over getting G5 everything. Play around with weird loadouts that give you a variety of tricks up your sleeve, and just get to know that ship really really well. Then just start to recognize the situations where you and your ship can thrive, and keep a weather eye on your scanners for emerging conditions. Joining a player group that plays the BGS, helped to give me a head start on the "making up reasons for where to go and what to do" part, and everything else is just up to what kind of crazy situations I can get in an out of with my ship and bag of tricks (with over 300mill in the bank and low rebuys of small/medium ships, I can afford to get in some pretty touchy and exciting situations often..)

 

[seko]

Not everybody is complaining. My impression is that it is possibly new players that want to go from spring chicken to siht hawk, in two days. Also the 'Hirogen' knuckle draggers, who believe that everyone who plays in open, from rookie to elite is their 'prey' as of right, and neither group have, or want to have, any interest in the many other facets, or the lore, of the game.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I generally avoid the "meta".. it generally tends to turn the game in to a job.
Some may enjoy it, but I do not.

I like to just play the game, for example, I unlocked most of the rank for the Corvette from running missions I enjoy, rather than countless stacked dull data deliveries. (I did do that for about 20% of the final rank though. I became impatient. Lol)

I don't really mind if I achieve my goals or not.
The other day I set off to look for Arsenic and Datamined Wake Exceptions (or whatever) to upgrade the FSD on my iCourier.
I spent a few minutes scanning wakes, and got nothing, then decided to try the surface, and bombed about in the SRV.
Also got nothing. I decided I'll find them when I find them. I'm in no rush.

Then I just flew around in canyons at high speed, and wrecked 3 iCouriers.

Fun!
Did I achieve anything? No, I actually lost money..!
Was it fun? Mostly!

I'll only do a "meta" activity if it's also actually fun. Robigo Smuggling was one of those, high pay, great fun, loads of risk.

And surface bombing. It was just fun. No risk or anything. Just funny to pop skimmers from space with rockets.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[NW3]

Where is my in game commander diary? So there is no main storyline and there is no tools to keep track of your role-playing. All there is making money and looking good.

What we have is good. What we have is not good enough. It's good but it can be great. And sure things take time and resources. But when simple quality of life things get overlooked (manual waypoints on planets, ) for a whole rehaul of a decently working crafting system, then people get miffed.

But If we are expected to improve wether it be towards more "sandboxy" gameplay or a "narrative" driven gameplay, then we need the IN GAME tools to make that happen.

The in-game tools are (very slowly) improving. In the meantime, instead of whining about it, use some of the community tools. You'd like a commander diary? Go here: https://www.edsm.net/ Want achievement awards? There are "badges" there too. I particularly like the map of my travels on that site. If you run a companion program like EDMarketConnector, it will automatically upload your travel data (and anything else in your game log).

True, what we have is good, but not good enough. FD is making improvements, so I can wait. In the meantime, I'm off exploring. I'm sure the game will be better, by the time I return to the bubble.

 

[gooddoc]

In my opinion, Im quite satisfied with FD's development of the game to date.

Sadly I only found the game was going to be available a couple of weeks before launch, if Id found out sooner, I would have probably become a kickstarter.
The game suits me fine, I'm able to do what I want, at the pace I want to (within the limits of the game mechanic). That's one of the best parts of the game that I like.
This is a game that you have to be able to set your own goals & achievements, there is no '...to progress to level 2 you must go to A & kill X before time Y.....' gameplay, which is why I stopped playing video games.

I also think that's maybe why FD has so much negativity on these forum's, some player's need a plan set out for them & want to finish the game in a weekend, that's not Elite Dangerous.

The game isn't the finished article yet, I knew that from the day I bought the game in December '14. I wasn't around when in the kickstarter days, when DB said there'd be this, that & 'tother in the game at some stage. These i would have thought would be idea's that the team were hoping to get going & put into the game down the line.
Yet player's continually post '...we were promised this.....when's that coming to the game...', maybe I'm wrong but that's not how buying into a development plan works. I'm sure that DB still has Space legs & Atmospheric Landings & other stuff on his 'todo' list & will get these thing's rolled out when they're ready.

I didn't buy 'the finished article' I bought a game that FD would develop & improve in the years to come. I can say that's exactly what FD have delivered so far.

Sure, the game isn't perfect. There's lots of thing that I don't like in the game, I sometimes wonder why FD are bringing more things into the game that I'm not gonna touch, but then FD are hoping to please as bigger audience as possible.
You can't please all the people all the time, sadly the internet & in particular their forum's are a breeding ground for people to hide behind their anomynity just to post in anger & rage at what is at the end of the day........A GAME!

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Can't we just play the game sometimes?

People playing game most likely just play game, not post here regularly.

Make your own conclusions

 

[Poseidal]

The metagame (or game outside the game), though usually just used for theory-craft and shifts in general play, is something that always exists in this game and all games. It is just something that exists when a game is made and people play it.

It becomes important with multiplayer games, as people interact.

 

[StiTch]

If you can't put yourself in the setting of the game, a future dystopian society in space, you'll never see why we have the systems we have. If you can't accept that your character is not the center of the story, and that there is no 'hero's path' to follow, you may never be satisfied.

FD are giving us just what they said they'd be giving us: a procedurally generated world of contracts, space ships in a digital replica of our known galaxy. It is necessary to realistically consider disconnects from what you want, and what we have. FD's material tells you exactly what to expect, is it fair to anyone, yourself included, to be disappointed when you get what was promised, but not what you hoped for?

I hate to say it, but this isn't quite the case either. I understand it was FD's intention, and it's a good intention, but FD have made absolutely every effort to cater more to the solo player and those that are unwilling to develop flight/loadout skills. Continually they quote that the galaxy is a dangerous place, and that our actions have consequences, but in reality neuter every aspect of danger if it's not 100% consensual (and even then...), and have ensured that absolutely any kind of change can be made predominantly by the solo player.

The result is a game with a backdrop that screams for a natural, living, cutthroat universe, and doesn't give the player any content to suggest they are the glorified center of the narrative - but in practice, let's face it, most players are the glorified center of the narrative, capable of mowing down NPCs like wheat and exacting any change possible in game as a one-man army from the shadows.

I'm not making an "I hate PG/Solo" rant (I'll save them for a rainy day), but ED clearly caters to the solo player too much to be any kind of true natural galaxy.

You are the centerpiece, and yet doomed to change your galaxy by delivering leaflets and poo.

 

[Bob Lighthouse]

I went looking for some mats but spent about an hour mostly flipping my srv around today instead.
.0004 G!

Just going as fast as I could and boosting off of things, trying to turn sharply right before lift off to get the spin going and using the thrusters to get the other planes in action.

Sometimes a rock would appear mid flight and I'd straighten out while still flying sideways or something; target lock and pewpewpewpewpew strafing across the planet surface!

I had a blast and still found a whole bunch of Ru and Te.

 

[crushdepth]

People like the game. Its unique, and has achieved some great things. But sooner or later you realise how much better it could have been. And then out of love for the game, you complain on the forums in the vain hope that it might one day be more than what it is.

∆ this. But if you offer criticism a lot of people will think you're a Bad Man.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

People like the game. Its unique, and has achieved some great things. But sooner or later you realise how much better it could have been. And then out of love for the game, you complain on the forums in the vain hope that it might one day be more than what it is.

So how much better it could have been? On what basis people make that assumption?

Or it is unavoidable consequence of having open world game with so much detail that it basically welcomes dreaming about more detailed stuff?

That's whole issue with these games - for lot of people they never will go far enough because it just keeps playing out in their heads.

Btw, it is not bad or anything. It is just something you have to accept.

No one dreams how great Civilization could be. It is great because it is very artificial in what it does, it is a game.

ED is more of life sim of space commander.

 

[W4rSkuLL]

Some sort of color coding and loot drops in the universe could make E.D even greater. To truly get something unique can do a lot for a game. Also interaction with your environment is great. Also the manufacturing of the graphics around loot and credits is important. Dollar signs and size variation on loot is good. Sound when you get a bounty. When I play in a zone to rake in bounty it would be more interesting for me if I could pick something up also from the wrecks which is worth something and also can be used to something. And have a chance to drop something unique which no one else have. To hire wing men and communicating more with the NPCs around would be great. Also an idea to be able to bring in one of your ships which is controlled by a NPC crew to land with you on a planet which can deploy a bigger SRV which can tag along you collecting materials and racking up cargo which you find. Also if space legs comes this NPC could tag along you on the surface eliminating foes inside POI buildings. And it would level up. Kind of like a follower in Diablo. A custimizable ship along with your own hired customizable NPC which levels up and gets better would be very cool. This NPC could also be used as a wingman. If it dies its dead. It would attach value and survivability to the game. Along with the fighter crews which is already in the game.

 

[Valorin]

It's like a bunch of rabid flatulent ducks foaming at the beak around here. Quack!

This is so very accurate.
I think the main reason for all the complaining is something that started when games started to stay in development while players already play. Somewhen along this idea, which is pretty awesome actually, many people for some reason had the idea, that because they paid for the game, they are entitled to demand whatever they want from the developers. This is, of course, completely wrong. Of course developers need to listen to a community of players, because they want to keep as many people playing as they can, but the game belongs to the developer. The truth is:

Players just bought a ticket for the ride. They didn't buy the development team. That's right. The game does NOT belong to the players. Really.

What's also kinda funny is the fact, that all those people who like to complain and demand so much, are just louder than the others. Means, the negativity you see is just the background noise of the mob feeling entitled. The community is much bigger and much more reasonable than it sometimes seem.

EDIT: just to include this here: constructive criticism and suggestions are another thing entirely. It's just that feedback is not something like "DEVELOPER, I WANT THIS AND THAT AND THIS AND ASAP! I KNOW YOU ARE TOO SLOW THOUGH I DON'T EVEN KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE CODE YOU'RE WORKING ON!"

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Some sort of color coding and loot drops in the universe could make E.D even greater. To truly get something unique can do a lot for a game. Also interaction with your environment is great. Also the manufacturing of the graphics around loot and credits is important. Dollar signs a size variation is good. Sound when you get a bounty. When I play in a zone to rake in bounty it would be more interesting for me if I could pick something up also from the wrecks which is worth something and also can be used to something. And have a chance to drop something unique which no one else have. To hire wing men and communicating more with the NPCs around would be great. Also an idea to be able to bring in one of your ships which is controlled by a NPC crew to land with you on a planet which can deploy a bigger SRV which can tag along you collecting materials and racking up cargo which you find. Also if space legs comes this NPC could tag along you on the surface eliminating foes inside POI buildings. And it would level up. Kind of like a follower in Diablo. A custimizable ship along with your own hired customizable NPC which levels up and gets better would be very cool. This NPC could also be used as a wingman. If it dies its dead. It would attach value and survivability to the game. Along with the fighter crews which is already in the game.

Well pointed out potential improvements not requiring space legs or anything.

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

People playing game most likely just play game, not post here regularly.

Make your own conclusions

So you don't like the game as you are posting here quite regularly?

Not sure why having conversations about "meta" aspects of the game is a bad thing or would indicate that those participating in such discussions have some problem with the game.
Maybe taking about "meta" is a bit to "meta"?

OK, that's for me in this threat. I hope you all enjoy the conversation and/or discussion, and the game

 

[Rob At Work]

I mean, seriously, the more I think about it the more baffled and disappointed I become. I wonder why a significant portion of the forum posters even bother with the game at all. I don't think this is due to any fault of the game in particular, just maybe player expectations about it. The negativity here hurts my soul, for goodness sake.

Look, I have high hopes for the game as well and would certainly like to see more from it, but damn. Chill out for goodness sake. It's like a bunch of rabid flatulent ducks foaming at the beak around here. Quack!

Sorry if I've compromised your missions in death thralling or something, but taking a step back and looking at the greater picture of things, this mess is the heart I'm left with.

Spoiler

https://i.imgur.com/ilnnoXJ.png

I guess there is a portion of people who don't like playing video games as a pastime.

I don't mean this to be a complaint thread, honestly, it's just an epiphany I came to.

Can't we just play the game sometimes? Can't we just not worry about meaningless grind and credits and materials and crafting for a while? Look, you all suck. I know it, you know it. It's OK to be bad at video games. Don't hate the game. [haha]

But then what would be the point of the internet?