He made a big deal about putting me on ignore the other day, doesn't seem to be very good at it.
Ah sorry I see. There's 'history' of which I was not aware.
As you were.
He made a big deal about putting me on ignore the other day, doesn't seem to be very good at it.
https://www.pcgamer.com/david-braben-on-arena-and-the-future-of-elite-dangerous/
"[FONT=&]“There are missions out there I know almost no players have seen,” he says. “But we haven’t communicated it properly. There’s so much in there, and what we see from play patterns is that many do the same thing over and over. In that cycle, they just don’t get to see some of the variation. I’m not blaming players. We got it wrong.”Braben adds that even when he was playing the game in a certain way, he wasn’t seeing everything. “I wasn’t making friends with the minor factions. I was missing out on missions. And most players do that,” he says. “It’s a shame, because the missions actually drive you around the galaxy. But if you keep going back to the same place, you won’t venture very far. We need to change the way we communicate that.”[/FONT]
Let's face it: it's a ship building game. Nothing wrong with that i.m.o., but that's what it is.
I've been posting here since 2014 it means absolutely nothing.
You typed an effort post and I replied with one, you ignored most of mine to complain about my understanding of yours. So that's all the effort posting you'll get.
I've suggested an alterative overall approach and specific method for gathering the mat you think you need lots of, I've also told you I enjoy the game and gathering mats that way. I don't need to agree with you that it's crap.
Back on topic everyone, and knock off the insults please.
Yes, I take private stuff private.
How thick are you, 'son' ?
You just can't help yourself, can you?
There are lots and lots of threads about grind. However, what a lot of people class as grind, I class as playing the game. For example, I wanted to make some shield upgrades for my T9. So I worked out what I would need, and then set out to get them. In some cases I got things through doing other things. Selecting the right rewards for missions, or just scanning ships as a habit. In another case I went to a moon and drove around for a while until I had harvested 20 units of Niobium.
To me this is playing the game. I enjoyed those things. But is that playing the game for you, or is that grind? And if so, what do you class as 'playing the game'?
So all you people making post about how awful the game is and how much of a grind it all is; let's say you have all the money you need and all the ships you need, with all the engineering you need. What do you do now? What is 'playing the game' to you?
Load up game... arrive inside station.
Return to surface.
Turn on head look.
Watch people coming and going & crashing into things.
A good, valid question.
In short, personally I have a problem with Elite's game design decisions and not with grind, because I never felt like I grinded the game.
I can't help but look with a forgiving and (yes indeed, there I said it) patronising smile at angry comments such as 'I have to spend 10.000 hours now to max out my fleet of 30 ships, thanks frontier, your game suck'. I guess different people have different ideas of fun, for me it's not in amassing virtual riches and 'elite' tags but in moment to moment experiences. That's the only thing that will ever remain after playing any game, I think.
My idea of fun in Elite is in immersion coming from unexpected situations and well designed, deep systems interacting.
I wanted most of all to spend my time with Elite playing as a smuggler/miner/pirate, expecting to be utilising all that amazing heat mechanics to play cat and mouse with bouty hunters, pirates and security around asteroid rings, planetary surfaces and station territories. I quickly realised a whole plethora of mechanics surrounding such gameplay sandbox are very simplistic, borderline non-existent and npc cheat, behave and spawn either entirely predictably or without any logic.
I wanted to explore, imagining FTL type of survival dangers, studying maps to find right planetary ingredients then going planetside to hunt for materials that will let me patch that oxygen emergency or shields that failed after many jumps, electromagnetic storms, meteor showers, sun flares and so on.
I quickly relised there's zero gameplay to be found other than jumping from star to star repetitively, seeing small variations of few planetary models.
I wanted to engage in some form of Powerplay but realised there's little difference or effects between various states and it's largely a make-believe gameplay to feel any sense of achievement or making a difference.
My beef with Elite is how shallow or downright dissapointing most of its mechanics were made, against fairly realistic understanding of what they very easily could have been should better decisions have been made along the way.
It's down to expectations though and I entirely understand that. I don't play anymore but visit the forums sometimes.
I like games that reward thinking and 'come' to Elite from the background of ambitious - often emergent - design philosophies, growing up with games such as thief the dark project, system shock 2, deus ex, sid meyer's alpha centauri, x-com: enemy unknown, or subwar 2050 to name a few. This is not to sound self-important but to say I came here as a fan of games that are known for deep and innovative game design and were dissapointed at overall sum of parts that Elite turned out to be to me after the initial amazement at its scope.
I do think many many many things could have been done much better and were not down to technical limitations, simply - bad/simplistic design.
The most amazing moments of the game I have found in combat because that's where the game has only real design depth.
This has also been messed up I think, due to the way engineers were made, forcing upon everyone what may be referred to as 'grind' I suppose, just to stay competitive against others.
I believe it's a cheapest and laziest way to add content to a game, enforcing a linear rather than multidimentional system so to speak.
A good example of a clever system is PUBG, if one can look past the sufrace/genre difference.
The genius decision by PUBG is that all those crates with gear you 'earn' are cosmetic only - they don't give better damage or accurancy or anything beyond the main, very well balanced core. The equivalent of elite's engineers in pubg would be letting players update/upgrade their weapons permanently through grindy chores of collecting tones and tones of materials and once that system is in place, it will skew the careful balance of the core and it WILL force players into that tunel to stay competitive - which is exactly what becomes a grind now that I 'have to' max out all the engineered modules to stand a chance against another guy who bothered to spend loads of time doing stuff he hated just to have those modules.
It's what happened in Elite and what's to blame is both poor design ideas of FD and players who feel they need to max out everything to feel they accomplished something. It could have worked, easily, as everyting else if it was better considered and implemented but that's another discussion.
So the amazing design of Elite (UI, sound, art direction, many of its ideas on paper) sinks under a great many poor design decisions surrounding it. At least it does for me.
Don't call crying to a moderator defending yourself.
Everything else is gravy; sometimes a little bitter maybe, but most of the time; quite appetising.
Me: Can I have one of those savoury thickshakes but without the potatoes?
Drivethrough guy: You mean gravy?
Me: Yes thank you, gravy.
I'm curious, what do you class as 'playing the game'
Yeah, you're doing that thing where you read the first three words of something and start ballooning again. Remember, like in another thread where you tried to suggest I was conflating the slaughter in Myanmar with something in-game, when what I wrote was in fact the exact opposite of that?
I mentioned the length of time I had been playing and posting on the forums to highlight the amount of different topics you should have seen me involved in, reflecting the wide variety of game activities that I participate in, because you seemed to have got it into your head that I was spending all my time doing something I don't enjoy. Nothing more. If you'd bothered to read the post in question you would have seen that.
<snipped ranting>
Oh and lastly just to remove the mystery for you:
Wonk
(3) Noun - A member of a player group in another game Darty and I used to play, the players concerned being noted for posting the same dismissive and usually nonsensical replies to shout down anybody who didn't share their own opinion of particular game mechanics.
Sounds about right to me.