I dont get why everyone thinks Ellite is such a grind

[DR Grandreefer]

I count vanilla of course. And end game does not mean end of game - it means unlocking all available content and building a character that can handle that content well. How long you faff around with it is not what interests anybody - it is how long it takes to possibly get there and that doesn't take huindreds of hours - a couple dozens tops.

Well there is your problem. Vanilla isn’t all of Skyrim now is it? Nor is just playing the core elite dangerous game all of Elite. Plus you couldn’t tell somebody who played all the add ons for either game, that you beat the game, when you didn’t beat the add ons. So we are on different conversations. Thanks for confirming.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Well there is your problem. Vanilla isn’t all of Skyrim now is it? Nor is just playing the core elite dangerous game all of Elite. Plus you couldn’t tell somebody who played all the add ons for either game, that you beat the game, when you didn’t beat the add ons. So we are on different conversations. Thanks for confirming.

Even with DLCs it wouldn't take 1000 hours to get to access that content neither. Your goalposts just don't move that far.

 

[DR Grandreefer]

Even with DLCs it wouldn't take 1000 hours to get to access that content neither. Your goalposts just don't move that far.

Ok now try to meet me in the middle where I said it was. 400-500 hours to compete Skyrim. Still more time then I spent to get a almost fully engineered cutter from scratch. Now my whole point of all of this is if I can do it in that amount of playing tome others can too. I’m even teaching others to do it too. You clearly think it’s so hard that you need to complain to ops who believe otherwise and is showing many others how. Why not try to look into some info for yourself. What not try to figure out how much easier the game has been since 3.0 release. I’m giving 60-70 million in credits to randoms in the galaxy with wing missions. It only takes me about an hour to complete those missions. It’s about working together to progress. My words aren’t just me talking. This is coming from the experience I have had with helping CMDRs progress in Elite. If you think you can just hop on a bike and do backflips, which is what a fully enginneered Cutter in under 3 weeks of playing in Elite could be compared to, then you just don’t get what Elite is about. Plain and simple. More knowledge means easy progression and less repetivness because you know what else you can do. Yet we have a whole swarms of people just looking to do the same mission over and over and then want to complain about it. I’m going to sit down one day and record how much time it takes me to do one of every type of mission in the game. I bet it’s a few 100 hours itself. Either way you do you CMDR. I’ll help you if you need it and many others have tutorials out now to also help make the grind easy and therefore almost not grindy at all.

 

[CmdrKull]

What is the issue about this grind, is that it consist of scarce amount of simple actions. Which you have to repeat over and over and over.

I read your post and I get your complaimts, I really do... But I keep coming back to this. People say that trade routes and CGs and power play are just A-B, A-B, or that exploring is honk and scoop, honk and scoop. Well, you could say that taking a stroll around your neighborhood and climbing Mt Everest both involve a lot of one foot in front of the other before you end where you began, but Context is Key! You should be doing things for the purpose of doing them; for the fun of it or not at all.
If you're doing Activity B because you want money for Activity A, you're not going to enjoy Activity B very much. This does NOT mean activity B is broken and needs to be fixed, it probably just means you should vary it up a bit. Maybe poke around on the forum for fun alternatives, and don't dismiss them out of hand just because they're not the top 1% earner. Mining is surprisingly fun. Piracy is unsurprisingly fun. They don't pay a ton, but if you do something fun every time you log in you'll never notice you the "grind" until you have the money for some Cutter upgrades. Trust me, it was more fun when I could only get a couple upgrades at a time. I'm actually playing that way again to upgrade my Corvette because I don't want to drop below 1B with Squadrons just beyond the horizon.

 

[shadragon]

6800 hours....jeezus

A good start certainly.

 

[shadragon]

What is the issue about this grind, is that it consist of scarce amount of simple actions. Which you have to repeat over and over and over.

I do get the latest grind comments, especially for the Guardian sites, but I'll bet you get up at the same time, have the same breakfast, go the same route to work, do the same thing, go home the same way and play on the PC, every, single, day.

A series of simple actions over and over. For that, you get an income and over time you build up savings and buy better things. At the end of that comes two people; the first moans and complains about it demanding more, More, MORE for less time spent (usually under a picket sign). The second just gets on with it and is determined to have a good time while doing so.

Don't know why I brought that up. No parallels to any space sims I know of.

I don't have any Guardian items, blueprints or materials on any of my accounts and I'm still having fun, thank you very much.

 

[akaliel]

100 hours in Skyrim and you called it beat. I would say you only focused on the main quest and missed so many side quests that it’s safe to say you missed more then 60% of the game. That percent is being modest.

Skyrim uses a procedural generation system for a lot of the "What work do you have for me?" missions and a bunch of other random ones. You can literally play the game forever doing these. The main quests and bigger side quests can be wrapped up in 100 hours. Less if you laser focus on them, use quick travel a lot and not bother meandering around.

BTW Skyrim VR is truly the bees knees.

If you've ever been walking around and hear an NPC talking to another about some thing and suddenly you get a quest and a journal entry. That was a procedural generated quest from it's Radiant Quest System.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Ok now try to meet me in the middle where I said it was. 400-500 hours to compete Skyrim. Still more time then I spent to get a almost fully engineered cutter from scratch. Now my whole point of all of this is if I can do it in that amount of playing tome others can too. I’m even teaching others to do it too. You clearly think it’s so hard that you need to complain to ops who believe otherwise and is showing many others how. Why not try to look into some info for yourself. What not try to figure out how much easier the game has been since 3.0 release. I’m giving 60-70 million in credits to randoms in the galaxy with wing missions. It only takes me about an hour to complete those missions. It’s about working together to progress. My words aren’t just me talking. This is coming from the experience I have had with helping CMDRs progress in Elite. If you think you can just hop on a bike and do backflips, which is what a fully enginneered Cutter in under 3 weeks of playing in Elite could be compared to, then you just don’t get what Elite is about. Plain and simple. More knowledge means easy progression and less repetivness because you know what else you can do. Yet we have a whole swarms of people just looking to do the same mission over and over and then want to complain about it. I’m going to sit down one day and record how much time it takes me to do one of every type of mission in the game. I bet it’s a few 100 hours itself. Either way you do you CMDR. I’ll help you if you need it and many others have tutorials out now to also help make the grind easy and therefore almost not grindy at all.

I don't need 500 hours to "complete" Skyrim - in the time i would get to a Cutter and fully engineer it I could play Skyrim at least 5 times with 5 different new characters and develop them to a decent level, discover the best gear for each and even complete the storyline.

 

[DR Grandreefer]

A good start certainly.

7000 plus now and thats just my Xbox account. My PC account is the one that has a little less then 3 weeks played. I guess I feel people who play the game as much as me may have something to teach to those who only have an hour or so a day to play. I feel that about half feel im just a person who plays the game to much and cant possibly have any tricks to make it easy. Most just want to complain about how horrible it is. Even if they dont play the game enough to even know. Hell, I still learn tricks for money and ranks for everything in Elite daily.

Edit: I originally said 8000 hours. i changed it to 7000. The precise number is 7102 hours played on Xbox right now.

 

[DR Grandreefer]

I don't need 500 hours to "complete" Skyrim - in the time i would get to a Cutter and fully engineer it I could play Skyrim at least 5 times with 5 different new characters and develop them to a decent level, discover the best gear for each and even complete the storyline.

I think your "complete" and my "complete" is very different. Maybe the same difference that I see when I think "grind" in a game and thats because I play so many games, so often. It is mostly about perspective. But with knowledge perspective can be changed.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I think your "complete" and my "complete" is very different. Maybe the same difference that I see when I think "grind" in a game and thats because I play so many games, so often. It is mostly about perspective. But with knowledge perspective can be changed.

With 7000 hours in one game I find it hard to believe there is enough perspective available to report from so many other games you claim to play so often.

 

[Tex Arcana]

To the OP: I don't either.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

So, just posted in another thread about the grind, and ill say the same here:

Its up to you how much you grind. My recommendation is don't grind. Do what you enjoy doing, and let the credits and stuff come. Any time you feel like you are not enjoying the game, either take a break or change your activity. Get involved with a player group, that can help as well.

And ultimately, if you are not enjoying the game, stop playing.

I do laugh when people say ED is a grind. Its largely self-imposed.

You want to see a real grind? Go play Fortnite: Save the World. Been playing that the last few days, and boy, that game is 100% grind. And tons of fun to boot. And even if you grind and grind, you still can't get everything. The developers in their wisdom don't provide enough skill points before you hit the max to unlock everything.

Seriously, if you think ED is a grind, you need to play other games. ED's grind is optional. Some games are designed to be pure grind.

 

[Stealthie]

I hear everything you’re saying. The norm you a referring to can be changed with some info.

Erm, wot?

You said that it's taken you ~2 weeks of in-game activity to reach whatever point you're at.

Red' simply pointed out that the amount of time you've taken equates to around 10 months of more casual play.

Assuming that you actually used the "info" you're referring to, yourself, then it's going to take somebody who plays for 2 hours a day roughly 10 months to reach the same point you've reached even if they do use the same "info" that you use.

Your "shortcut" seems to consist of "play for really long periods and you'll get things done faster".

I think most players are well aware of this already.
As I said, I got my Cuter in 3 days - ~30 hours of play - but I'm not going to try and tell anybody that means it's possible without grind.
Because getting my Cutter in 3 days required a large amount of grind.

A really, really, large amount of grind.

 

[Patrick_68000]

6800 hours....jeezus

283 days without stopping

 

[GunnerBill]

I unlocked an engineer, sourced materials from traders, surface prospecting and some USS hunting then modded 5 weapons to G5 in about 3 hrs.

There is no grind.

 

[zaikoji]

It really does boil down to one man’s meat. It just seems that the poison in this case is particularly virulent..

 

[reload]

Having taken pretty much a year out, after finally returning from the Distant Worlds expedition around February last year, I decided to pick the game up again with the release of Beyond 3.0. I mean here, I took a year out after returning - I've only picked the game up again properly February this year.

Since then, I've brought my Imperial and Federation ranks up to King/Admiral, polished off my Explorer rank up to Elite (from 40% Pathfinder). Trade rank has also gone to Elite from about 60% Tycoon, and I'm now working on my Combat rank - I was about 20% Dangerous, now about 60% Deadly.

I've now got a hyper-engineered 65 Ly (unladen) Exploration Anaconda, and an equally over-engineered PvE combat Corvette. My Beluga pulls in stonking cash from Medb passenger runs, although I've now got more cash in the bank than I know what to do with.

If anything - at least to my eyes - ED has become a lot easier over the years. Christ knows how Onepercent managed Elite rank back 3 months after initial launch.

Edit: Current playtime - around 1200 hours. I've certainly got my money's worth from the Premium Beta kickstarter backer, that's for sure.

 

[idahosurge]

It is only a grind if you choose to participate in the content that is a grind.

Have not participated in either the Thargoid or Guardians grind content and never will.

 

[JonesTheFilm]

I've been playing ED for less than a year. I started on PS4 launch day which was June last year.
In that time I've built a fleet of six ships (Sidewinder, CobraMk3, ViperMk4, AspX, Python, FDL) all of them A-rated, I've gained an Elite rank (exploration) and I've reached Imperial King and Federal Rear Admiral ranks. I currently have about 250,000,000 cr in the bank.

I didn't do much Engineering pre-3.0 because I did find it annoyingly grindy, I just did 'essentials' like extending FSD range for the Asp, etc. Since 3.0 though I've jumped right into it as it's way better and in the relatively short time since the 3.0 update I've fully (to my satisfaction anyway) engineered the Viper, Asp & Python and am most of the way through engineering the FDL.

Actually, I only bought the FDL yesterday at Jameson Memorial. I A-graded it as far as I wanted but I also G5 Engineered most of the important modules (at least the ones I thought to pin blueprints for) using the Remote Workshop, so ...thrusters, FSD, power distributor, shield generator, ...and half-engineered some other stuff, Utility Mounts mainly. It probably took me about 20 minutes in total. Sure I still have other things to do (e.g. weapons) because I didn't have them pinned, and I still need to visit the Engineers if I want Experimental Effects, but now I have a 20+LY range on a ship that had under 7LY to start with so the travelling's not going to be too much of a chore.

Granted I did have quite a lot of materials stocked up, but it didn't feel a grind to get them. My play-style changes according to my mood, so sometimes I'm happy driving around planetary surfaces blowing up the occasional rock, sometimes I fly around systems dropping into USSs to see what happens, sometimes I do a bit of bounty hunting in a RES - which has those periods after a fight when you're surrounded by nothing but green & white radar blips so I just fly around scooping the white ones until it livens up again.

I've never really felt the 'grind' in ED at least in my 11 months of playing, save for the pre-3.0 Engineers which I did mostly ignore at the time anyway (because, yeah, it was grindy). It feels like I've done quite a lot and advanced a good amount in my 11 months to be fair.

I can't say I haven't been frustrated at times, but that's far more to do with time-sinks than grind. I hate periods where you're just staring at the screen waiting for something but not actually doing anything (long super cruise journeys are the main culprit here for me - that's appalling gameplay IMHO, flying in a straight line, no need to even touch the controller, sitting watching a counter on screen, ugh!), but gameplay that actually keeps me busy is fine and seems to be varied enough that I can just switch to something else for a while if what I'm doing gets boring.