I love E:D But really?

Stealthie

Stealthie
Shurimal said:
Design goal for me is to have enough shield strength so it never goes down under normal circumstances when fighting up to 4 opponents at a time (RES sites, PP signals, compromized nav beacons, CZ-s) and have fast recharge rate to have as many MJ restored as possible during the lulls in combat. And have enough hull and module protection that if the shield does break, I have enough resilience to either finish off the last opponent or disengage and recover in supercruise/put enough distance that I can do a standstill reboot before the enemy catches up.
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At the risk of stating the obvious, there's a big difference between PvE and PvP.... and that's not to say, necessarily, that a PvP build is always going to be "better" than PvE.

Thing is, for PvP, you're really only ever interested in winning/surviving your current fight.
You might decide to fit frag cannons because they deliver huge DPS and, as long as you can win one fight, it's a win and you can go rearm.
You fit a massive shield and, even if it takes an hour to recharge, once you've survived a fight you can dock at a station to recharge it.
You can fit SCBs to recharge your shield and, if they all get used in a single fight, that's okay because you can head back to a station to recharge them.

For PvE, you'll probably have different goals/intentions.
If you're trying to help some faction win a war, for example, you'll want to win one CZ, and then another, and then another...
You want weapons with the biggest possible ammo' capacity (ideally, you'd probably pick an all-laser build if you could get it to work) so you don't have to re-arm after 10 minutes.
You want a shield that's as strong as possible and recharges quickly so you can, again, remain in combat as long as possible.
You also don't want to rely on things like SCBs because once they're used your shield is going to erode fairly quickly in the next couple of fights and you'll have to go back to a station to recharge them.

Take a PvP build to a CZ, for example, and it's going to beat the living poop out of NPCs for about 10 minutes but then you're probably going to have to head home to recharge/rearm.
A PvE build probably won't be as lethal but you'll be able to keep fighting for an hour, or more, before you need to rearm.
 

Shurimal

Shurimal
Stealthie said:
At the risk of stating the obvious, there's a big difference between PvE and PvP.... and that's not to say, necessarily, that a PvP build is always going to be "better" than PvE.
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Precisely. The classic "meta" PA+rails FDL is not very effective at a RES. And, there are outliers like soloing wing assassinations where a PvP ship is all fine; and overlaps like a prismatic+SCB-s Paci PII that is really effective at clearing out Powerplay NPC-s at signal sources (usually the spawning of signal sources ends faster than ammo and SCB-s).
 

kofeyh

kofeyh
GraXXoR said:
ok, sorry. I'll shut up now and go back to my max engineered, 50LY Hauler.
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Hope that cathartic yelling at clouds helped you feel better.

Frontier has maybe 100k active players at most at present. Probably less. Up until a year ago it was way, way less. They have kept the universe servers going for a bit over 10 years, and in the last two, gone for broke breathing new life into a game that was absolutely on life support.

At some point, either they make some money to keep the servers on (and provide a forum so you can have a vent about optional paid content) which allows you to continue to play otherwise pretty much entirely unscathed, or they don't make some money and the servers shut down (and before the forums do, probably provide a place for complaints about that).

So far Frontier have made good on the promise that ships in the arx store will be added to the game, a few months later, for credits. Each has been added as a result. Cobra Mk V, just recently.

I have zero problem with Frontier funding the further development of the game. To do so would be to shoot one foot off out of idealistic principle.
 

amigacooke

amigacooke
Frontier (or customers) had been funding ED for over a decade before early (late) access ships came along. Maybe the plan is to fund further development, maybe the plan is to fund development elsewhere in Frontier and continue the recovery from the unfortunate fallout from the abortive 3rd party publication and Realms of Ruin.

Who knows, I don’t think that Frontier have ever claimed any income is ringfenced, that appears to be a community invention.
 

Cmdr Snuffler

Cmdr Snuffler
Stealthie said:
At the risk of stating the obvious, there's a big difference between PvE and PvP.... and that's not to say, necessarily, that a PvP build is always going to be "better" than PvE.

Thing is, for PvP, you're really only ever interested in winning/surviving your current fight.
You might decide to fit frag cannons because they deliver huge DPS and, as long as you can win one fight, it's a win and you can go rearm.
You fit a massive shield and, even if it takes an hour to recharge, once you've survived a fight you can dock at a station to recharge it.
You can fit SCBs to recharge your shield and, if they all get used in a single fight, that's okay because you can head back to a station to recharge them.

For PvE, you'll probably have different goals/intentions.
If you're trying to help some faction win a war, for example, you'll want to win one CZ, and then another, and then another...
You want weapons with the biggest possible ammo' capacity (ideally, you'd probably pick an all-laser build if you could get it to work) so you don't have to re-arm after 10 minutes.
You want a shield that's as strong as possible and recharges quickly so you can, again, remain in combat as long as possible.
You also don't want to rely on things like SCBs because once they're used your shield is going to erode fairly quickly in the next couple of fights and you'll have to go back to a station to recharge them.

Take a PvP build to a CZ, for example, and it's going to beat the living poop out of NPCs for about 10 minutes but then you're probably going to have to head home to recharge/rearm.
A PvE build probably won't be as lethal but you'll be able to keep fighting for an hour, or more, before you need to rearm.
Click to expand...
In general I think you're spot on, but there are exceptions. Soloing a wing assassination mission benefits from a more pvp focused build...more so when using medium and small ships.
 

[VR] Mad Mike

[VR] Mad Mike
kofeyh said:
Hope that cathartic yelling at clouds helped you feel better.

Frontier has maybe 100k active players at most at present. Probably less. Up until a year ago it was way, way less. They have kept the universe servers going for a bit over 10 years, and in the last two, gone for broke breathing new life into a game that was absolutely on life support.

At some point, either they make some money to keep the servers on (and provide a forum so you can have a vent about optional paid content) which allows you to continue to play otherwise pretty much entirely unscathed, or they don't make some money and the servers shut down (and before the forums do, probably provide a place for complaints about that).

So far Frontier have made good on the promise that ships in the arx store will be added to the game, a few months later, for credits. Each has been added as a result. Cobra Mk V, just recently.

I have zero problem with Frontier funding the further development of the game. To do so would be to shoot one foot off out of idealistic principle.
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don't forget when the servers are finally sunsetted, according to David braben, he confirmed ( presumably as an olive branch to those who wanted an offline game for fear of it relying on servers meaning it could be shut down at frontier's will ) that to make sure the game didn't die once retired all the code would be released to allow the community to keep the game alive - like has happened with other games.

it could be (not saying I want it to happen yet) that the official servers going dark could be the breath of life some gamers want in the hope it then goes the direction of Oolite with fans making content for it.

(equally it could be just a dull static universe which no one wants to play because it's so hard to do anything with, hence I am not wishing that gamble myself)
 
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Scoob

Scoob
You know, if FDev can raise extra development budget with "early access" ships. Great. I won't pay any more for them, but it's great for those that do. Drop a tenner (or whatever the ARX value is for a ship) have a blast in your new ship weeks before the poor peasants can buy them with credits, and support the game's ongoing development. It's all good lol.

It does boggle my mind though that we've had an actual game in ED for over TEN YEARS, where SC is still in early-access and is NOT a game in the true sense at this point. They are the poster child for project creep at this point lol. I dip in to SC every now and again, and aspects of it are most impressive. However, it's been over a DECADE and there's no game yet. There are various disjointed elements, but no cohesive whole, no true player progress. I backed SC before ED. I still want it to succeed. Might have another look at some point. I keep it updated, generally, but haven't actually run it for at least six months, likely longer.

So, yeah, while I was a little disappointed at the time that my original backer Lifetime expansion pass did NOT include ship DLC. If FDev can prey on impatient people to extract more money from them for future development, I'm good with that lol. (Tongue-in-cheek guys!)
 

Agema

A
I have played Elite: Dangerous since release. How much varies a lot year to year - a few days to regularly over a few months, but even on a slow year I tend to get more playtime out of E: D than I do off whole games I've played to completion.

So I paid for the base game, Horizons and Odyssey, but given the thousands of hours of enjoyment the game has given me over the last decade, coughing up for some ARX on top still seems cheap at the price.
 

amigacooke

amigacooke
I get them for no extra cost, as long as Odyssey has been paid for. It’s impossible to get the new ships without paying for them in some manner. Some are content to pay twice.
 

Morbad

Morbad
[VR] Mad Mike said:
don't forget when the servers are finally sunsetted, according to David braben, he confirmed ( presumably as an olive branch to those who wanted an offline game for fear of it relying on servers meaning it could be shut down at frontier's will ) that to make sure the game didn't die once retired all the code would be released to allow the community to keep the game alive - like has happened with other games.

it could be (not saying I want it to happen yet) that the official servers going dark could be the breath of life some gamers want in the hope it then goes the direction of Oolite with fans making content for it.

(equally it could be just a dull static universe which no one wants to play because it's so hard to do anything with, hence I am not wishing that gamble myself)
Click to expand...

Despite Braben's claims, I'm skeptical of the idea that Frontier would use whatever resources they had during the shut down of the game to package it in a usable format and gift it to the players. I think there are major financial, technical, and probably legal hurdles to this. I think it somewhat more plausible that if FDev were to change hands or go under, that someone would leak enough of the game and it's tools for people to start running private servers for the game.

Regardless, funding the status quo is a major disincentive to spending more money on this game, for me.

Elite: Dangerous, while I still believe it is, as of this post, far and away the best game of it's kind (that I have access to), has been going in a generally negative direction for at least the last eight years (the game functionally jumped the shark with Engineers). I would probably have been able to extract more enjoyment from it, if I had to put a thousand hours of hard work into getting a broken 2.0.xx leaked build functioning passably well than I've been able to with it under FDev control and development.
 

Jinx Chrome

Jinx Chrome
Knuttin Atoll said:
The issue (for me) is not so much about when or whether people have access to the new ships, but general balancing of the game in its entirety. I know "balance" is a bit of a meme at this point, but making existing content redundant seems like a shame to me, also because...

...what about new players who just bought the game? They'll just go straight to the Meta (which can now be obtained by simply buying ships for Arx, right after spawning in the noob system(s)) and skip most if not all the other ships in the game - which was already a problem with credit fountain inflation but this is a level up from that.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it seems very short-sighted and a poor game design choice, unless people treat Elite as a 100% sandbox, a little like MSFS et al, where you buy your planes and just fly them - but then why even have credits in the game still? It seems clear that Frontier no longer care about carefully balanced content and their priority is to milk it for Arx sales, perhaps understandable given where Elite is in its lifecycle, but it's a bit tragic that new players will never experience that same sense of progression and achievement of running and get to know the various ships in the game in a natural way. Again - perhaps it's no biggie and I'm just overthinking it and it's not something people still get pleasure from.
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I think that you have some good points written above in terms of game balance. However, a good balance is hard to achieve when a game is 10 years old because the long term players want to enjoy new content (e.g. ships), too. Let’s assume the new ships are only obtainable for seasoned players through locking them behind status, enormous engineering effort or huge amounts of credits, it would scare off people who just have discovered ED or who are long term players but play it more leisurely (or just less excessive than many of us in the forum ;) ).

There are many ways to play the game and insofar, yes, ED has more sandbox characteristics than many other games. On the other hand that is also one of the secrets of its longevity that we are not on rails going through the content like ED has intended but rather build our characters and career paths.
In terms of going straight to Meta (apart from the fact that those pre-built ships are nice but far from meta), I‘d say that it is up to everyone themselves if they want to skip the career path and ruin their game experience. I am more role play oriented without taking it too serious and therefore I don’t even own a carrier, don’t have high status in the Empire and Federatiom, haven’t pledged to a power etc. because it would not fit to my in game personality. Therefore, I can’t have certain modules although I have use for them but it doesn’t really matter.

In the end, players can/should do whatever they want in ED because there’s nothing (disclaimer: exploits excluded) how they can influence my own game, particularly not with a pre-built ship.
 

Ralph Vargr

Ralph Vargr
In my euphoria over finishing my Coriolis, I bought the pre-built Asp Explorer on sale for $13 USD.

It's worth about $4 USD, to me. The G5 engineered SCO FSD, and the Guardian Jump Booster are all that's worth it. To fix heat issues, and prevent the ship going splat on high-G worlds, I had to buy and engineer lots of stuff, leaving me with an Asp X I could have just bought, sans the Guardian grind. The Mandalay, with it's native SCO support, is the better ship.

Given the current economic environment for game companies, it's not if P2W isn't a thing. It's if it's worth the cost. In terms of time and effort costs, the T9 pre-built is worth it, if you don't have the Imperial rank for a Cutter. It was worth my time saved to buy one.

And, that's the summary- Is it worth it to skip the grind? Time is the ultimate currency in games.
 
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