how to bring players back

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
DjVortex said:
Actually "grinding" is very common in all kinds of shooters, including the "arena" type first-person shooters.

Of course in those you aren't grinding for in-game loot. You are grinding your own skills. And with the most popular shooters we are talking about one or more probably two orders of magnitude of more grinding that you'll ever need to do in ED in order to merely not end up at the bottom of the list every round.

There's a reason why I never play those games. They make absolutely no sense. You literally need to play for thousands of hours in order to hone the skills necessary to stand against the average player and not get immediately killed.

In that sense having to spend a couple of hours grinding for materials for better weapons and armor is a walk in the park.
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I'm pretty fine with stuff that broadens the gameplay as long as the starting gear is as viable. Once the powercreep comes in, you have the problem of unfair matchups. Tiered Matchups bring the problem with partitioning the player base and potentially giving you trouble finding a match.
Foxhole is a decent PvP game since progress is a faction wide effort. I need not grind mats I can grind "lives" at the front instead. Fractured Space was a decent PvP MoBa - like. You accumulated points to buy new ships that played differently. Each had unique playstyle but none of them was really overpowered. What made a difference was how you played. I think stuff like League of Legends takes similar approach.
And that is the approach I prefer in games, too. I don't want to play uphill battles until I did my chores. That's not what I paid for - I pay for entertainment.
 

Frankymole

Frankymole
Kayvan said:
My suggestion in one word: Quests.

Make questlines that players can follow, for exploration / discovery, for political involvement / powerplay, for certain organizations.
And not those stupid procedurally generated meaningless missions, but actual scripted stuff with NPCs you can meet and talk to.

Boy, that would be HUGE!
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Isn't that Starfield?
 

Screemonster

Screemonster
Disemboweled Ego said:
Imo it's a running joke that if you want to progress in something then the intended way is basically almost never the most effective way to do things and there's always some way to entirely cheese the system. The intended way usually also just gets boring and grindy because there's really not enough done to make you think about what you're doing since there's not enough variation in the basic tasks you're doing.
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I sure do love the "personal narrative" of running laps around the same three guardian sites dozens of times to unlock modules.

The first time at each site was mindblowing, amazingly atmospheric, fantastic and immersive.
Then they made the rest of the unlocks "cool now do that fifteen more times".
And that was before the azimuth modules where they're a buy rather than an unlock.

An amazing, memorable, immersive setpiece of wonderful and mysterious alien archaeology, a fantastic piece of work by the designers in putting together the layouts, the sound design, the props, everything, only to have the experience utterly soured by "make them do it over and over and over to get the modules"
 

varonica

varonica
Screemonster said:
I sure do love the "personal narrative" of running laps around the same three guardian sites dozens of times to unlock modules.

The first time at each site was mindblowing, amazingly atmospheric, fantastic and immersive.
Then they made the rest of the unlocks "cool now do that fifteen more times".
And that was before the azimuth modules where they're a buy rather than an unlock.

An amazing, memorable, immersive setpiece of wonderful and mysterious alien archaeology, a fantastic piece of work by the designers in putting together the layouts, the sound design, the props, everything, only to have the experience utterly soured by "make them do it over and over and over to get the modules"
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You mean as compared to all the other MMO's where you have to run the final boss 100 or more times to get the epic armour set you want? At least in ED you know what you are going to get when you do a boss aka "guardian ruins" run and not rely on random chance to get the lucky epic armour drop. It's all apples and pears of course, but ED involves far less repeat content than most MMO's to get what you want.
 

Felix DiCestria

Felix DiCestria
I remember completely mapping systems when I was new. I still do sometimes when I discover a new system, because it's interesting and the payout doesn't mean that much.
Do what you enjoy and worry about rank later.
 

Disemboweled Ego

D
varonica said:
You mean as compared to all the other MMO's where you have to run the final boss 100 or more times to get the epic armour set you want? At least in ED you know what you are going to get when you do a boss aka "guardian ruins" run and not rely on random chance to get the lucky epic armour drop. It's all apples and pears of course, but ED involves far less repeat content than most MMO's to get what you want.
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The difference there is that in a simulation game the gameplay alone isn't enough to carry a grind like that, while in MMOs it's expected that the gameplay and group interactions will keep it players engaged for long enough to develop more content. You usually don't do repeated fetch quests to get the best endgame gear in MMOs - even gathering almost always requires materials from high end monsters rather than just mining or gathering flowers harder.

No one is asking for those kinds of systems in Elite (except as part of salvaging maybe) and the ask seems to always be to lower the number of stuff needed.

The amount of grind in Elite isn't that bad actually nowdays, but it's just that the material gathering activities are really boring (and require occult knowledge). Saying "you can just get them passively via normal gameplay by collecting mats off ships you kill or missions you do for fun" flips the amount of time/work needed to get the mats to being awful again.

The issue is that I'm not having fun gathering materials and changing the numbers wouldn't fix it.
 

angusmadmac1

angusmadmac1
After making billions I just do Shindez as that has all the modules so I dont have hunt around for stuff. I take the extra 5 % I have to pay as a convenience tax
 

Kayvan

Kayvan
Note that at least for the time being, there isn't a single LYR system that sells Alliance ships (Chieftain et al).
But that's really a tangent, and certainly not very relevant to the question how to bring players back.

In general, as we're discussing here, I suppose there might be a bit of a "survivor bias" -- people who post on the forums tend to be people who still actively play the game, and what they find desirable might not line up with what players who have left want.
 

Rory12

R
There is no need to invent anything. The increase in players was in large-scale group battles with the Thargoids. It was fun and interesting.

There needs to be continuous fighting somewhere. There are few people who can fight basilisks alone. We need group battles.

I would also add a model of the co-pilot (bot) to the cockpit. So that you don't feel so lonely when flying :)
 
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