I'm not mad, only disapointed.

So apparently anarchy factions disable the local material traders. It's not like anarchys didn't already have enough going against them and material traders were too rare to begin with or anything.
 
No one complains when an Anarchy faction/system brings on new IF Contacts. It's a matter of trade offs. Certain conditions have consequences. I really don't see a problem.
 
No one complains when an Anarchy faction/system brings on new IF Contacts. It's a matter of trade offs. Certain conditions have consequences. I really don't see a problem.

The trade off for that is IF contacts are essentially required to do anything in the game now due to the harshness of 3.0 C&P. That's literally the reason they were added to anarchies.
 
Last edited:
Personally I don't see why Material Traders aren't in every station. I feel Frontier made a few missteps here, they scattered them around, and then made it so that the galaxy map only reveals them in systems you've visited. All this does is force us to use Inara. That's it. Nobody is flying around randomly docking at stations hoping to get lucky. Nobody. We try the galaxy map first, see if anything happens to be close. If nothing pops up, we immediately alt tab and look it up online. This system as been the oddest implementation of a time sink I've seen so far, and Elite has some strange ones.
 
They want you to have a personal narrative/journey... :)

I want to put them through USMC Basic Training. See: Full Metal Jacket. :)

Trouble with wanting us to have a personal narrative is that they don't give us a narrative. We have to make that up too. How about I just pretend my buddy "Inara" called me and told me where to find a dude that'll take my crappy materials and give me some good ones. There. Done.

It's a little bit ridiculous that I have to travel 80 light years to find a dude who will exchange Iron for Nickle.
 
Personally I don't see why Material Traders aren't in every station. I feel Frontier made a few missteps here, they scattered them around, and then made it so that the galaxy map only reveals them in systems you've visited. All this does is force us to use Inara. That's it. Nobody is flying around randomly docking at stations hoping to get lucky. Nobody. We try the galaxy map first, see if anything happens to be close. If nothing pops up, we immediately alt tab and look it up online. This system as been the oddest implementation of a time sink I've seen so far, and Elite has some strange ones.

It's even worse than that, cus if you have the system data for a system, whether through visiting the system, buying it, or it being one of those common systems that you get the data for by default, you can just view the system map and check each station for a material trader under it's services. This means that you can usually tell whether a system you haven't visited (but have the data on) has a mat trader without leaving the game, but you have to search manually because the automatic filter that is supposed to help you find them doesn't use most of the ingame data the player has available. Who thought this was a good idea?
 
Personally I don't see why Material Traders aren't in every station. I feel Frontier made a few missteps here, they scattered them around, and then made it so that the galaxy map only reveals them in systems you've visited. All this does is force us to use Inara. That's it. Nobody is flying around randomly docking at stations hoping to get lucky. Nobody. We try the galaxy map first, see if anything happens to be close. If nothing pops up, we immediately alt tab and look it up online. This system as been the oddest implementation of a time sink I've seen so far, and Elite has some strange ones.

Frontier seems to be under the persistent delusion that most people are happy to play that way: just fly around randomly, and be pleasantly surprised when you happen across something useful. That was one of their major flawed assumptions with their initial design for engineers, too. I don't get why they keep getting surprised by the same thing. Players enjoy player agency. We enjoy knowing what we want, and what we need to do to get it. Hell, a lot of elite is figuring out the ship you want, then working towards getting it. Why do the devs seem convinced we actually just want to roll dice, and just... I guess be amused at whatever said dice just give us?
 
Frontier seems to be under the persistent delusion that most people are happy to play that way: just fly around randomly, and be pleasantly surprised when you happen across something useful. That was one of their major flawed assumptions with their initial design for engineers, too. I don't get why they keep getting surprised by the same thing. Players enjoy player agency. We enjoy knowing what we want, and what we need to do to get it. Hell, a lot of elite is figuring out the ship you want, then working towards getting it. Why do the devs seem convinced we actually just want to roll dice, and just... I guess be amused at whatever said dice just give us?

You just described pretty well exactly how I play ;)
 
You just described pretty well exactly how I play ;)

Relying on random outcomes to serve as game play is not good design. I know there's a segment of the community that loves to putt around and pretend stuff, but can't we all agree that having some player agency is better?
 
Relying on random outcomes to serve as game play is not good design. I know there's a segment of the community that loves to putt around and pretend stuff, but can't we all agree that having some player agency is better?

I'm in favour of player agency, but my dissent for hyperbole overruled.
 
Isnt a Anarchy goverment a oxymoron?

anarchy is a government type, at least theoretically. the absence of institutions and authorities doesn't preclude the existence of self government. again, theoretically.

funny thing is that no one used the expression "anarchy government" before you ...

regarding op: anarchists, smart people!
 
I'm in favour of player agency, but my dissent for hyperbole overruled.

While we aren't rolling physical dice, consider how when the engineers first came out, there was even less in-game information on where to find a given material. The only info there was the flavor text description of the item, which often gave you no hint, or hinted completely incorrectly. The devs apparently thought this was fine. Just wander around in random systems, in random states, dropping in random types of USSs (which spawned randomly- shipping lanes etc. weren't a thing yet), until you happen to both get the right combination, and it randomly spawns the right material from it's internal random spawn table.

...which we then took to an engineer, got a random (with huge ranges) result from the blueprint, and had a random chance of also getting an experimental effect. Favors didn't exist yet. This is what was initially released. FDev spent considerable time designing and building this, presumably thinking it was all great up until the released it and saw the player base's reaction.
 
Last edited:
While we aren't rolling physical dice, consider how when the engineers first came out, there was even less in-game information on where to find a given material. The only info there was the flavor text description of the item, which often gave you no hint, or hinted completely incorrectly. The devs apparently thought this was fine. Just wander around in random systems, in random states, dropping in random types of USSs (which spawned randomly- shipping lanes etc. weren't a thing yet), until you happen to both get the right combination, and it randomly spawns the right material from it's internal random spawn table.

...which we then took to an engineer, got a random (with huge ranges) result from the blueprint, and had a random chance of also getting an experimental effect. Favors didn't exist yet. This is what was initially released. FDev spent considerable time designing and building this, presumably thinking it was all great up until the released it and saw the player base's reaction.

Oh that damn roulette wheel was the worst, and so misleading. The odds that the pip will end on an effect were far lower than the ratio suggested. Was so rigged. Plus, there was even a bug where it could land on an effect and still fail. Happen to me once. Just terrible.

Most games of this nature have loot drops of some kind. Every MMO does this, but at least they mask it behind some gameplay, like defeating a difficult and complex boss or whatever. None of them reward rare loot drops by having you run into a straight line waiting for a randomly generated "chest" to appear where you need to click on it before it disappears and it may, just may, have something good inside. Could you imagine WoW doing this? Their players would lose their minds. Frontier gets away with much here, mostly for being the only half way decent space game on the market.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom