Is FD balancing the game for multi player?

[Han_Zen]

The game scales pretty well at the low end. Keep out fo trouble and pick you fights in the starter Siddy, maybe all the way up to Master or Dangerous. I think it was 2.1 when they introduced the encounters based on your combat rank (or best of the other 2 with some limits). For a lot of people the original 2.1 release was too hard (I liked it but there you go), so the egineer mods were dialled back (and the bugs that gave mega weapons removed).

All great but there is a lack of high end challenge and multi-player challenge outside of PvP. I would like to see that addressed, but keep the scaling they have now for the "journey" part - it is easier after the first journey but this more about knowing when to press your luck and when to press the J key.

Simon

There are a lot of misunderstandings about the mythical 2.1 NPCs. For some they were extremely difficult. For others, they weren't.

This was due to a bunch of bugs in the engineered weapons of the NPCs. From reports on the forum, it seemed that high ranking Pyton pilots were particularly exposed to these NPCs. Some of them had rapid-fire rails and plasmas that melted ships in seconds. Far beyond any super meta PvP ship we have now.
This came at a time when no one were properly engineered yet. Slow ships were very vulnerable.

For other player that didn't fit in the category where you got interdicted by the bugged Elite NPCs all the time, the 2.1 NPCs were fine. More challenging than now, but not OP.

It's a pity that we never really got to see the well engineered NPCs, without bugs. I don't think it would have been to bad for for the common player and it would have been more challenging for experienced combat pilots.

 

[kofeyh]

As usual FDEV managed to get the worst out of their merge of a SP and MMORPG game.

No, frontier just overly relied on the three elite rankings being aligned to actual competency, despite being little more than cumulative counters. Unfortunately, this hasn't had the expected outcome (repeating tasks, does not automatically equate to improvements at said task). This game is essentially various hot takes on repeated tasks, that do not reward improvements at said tasks. If there was some advantage or reward at getting better at a task, reaching elite would mean more than a considerable capacity for repetition.

Frontier took a punt. I don't blame them really. This isn't something easy to predict, although it was one probable outcome. It can be adjusted of course, by decoupling rank from mechanics and making context, ship, task and status most relevant, with rank being at best a modifier. But that is a very hard road that will be time consuming, so don't believe it will happen. It should. Absolutely. But it probably won't. Horse has bolted, its really too late to massively overhaul now.

Sliding difficulty is actually there. It's just saddled with CMDR rank being the primary trigger, not a modifier that it perhaps could be (since what we are doing, and where, is probably more relevant than simply how often we've done it). You can gain elite in all three major fields, and know next to nothing about all of them. Indeed, the only way to stop becoming elite, is to either a) stop playing, or b) reset the save.

It's inexorable; and therefore probably the worst stat to use as the primary trigger. Everyone, if they keep playing, without a reset, will become elite.

I'm one of a long list of people who would love that rank to mean something, but it doesn't. I'm not taking away from CMDR's accomplishments here; but rank doesn't have anything to do with ability. It's just a visual representation of a counter. I can't see it changing at this point.

 

[D.G.Cerberus]

It is, but not in the context many players mean when they talk about balancing AI. This forum alone has examples of people who dismiss this very idea when it's raised, because they feel that no location should be off-limits for any player. Then there are the rare but vocal threads from people calling for a difficulty slider for heaven's sake.

Right now AI are spawned, in part, according to the ratings of the players within their instance. But that doesn't really work with such an open world as ED has. Why do high power AIs only target high rated PCs in a given system, when lower rated players only see weaker NPCs when they visit the same location? It makes no sense.

It would be far better IMO if the difficulty curves were anchored to the extremes of system state such that high security superpower hubs spawned very few and relatively weak pirates while anarchic systems, unclaimed but rich in exploitable resources, spawned a non-stop stream of high rated badasses. Obviously this would work the other way around for security ships. Then all that would be needed would be to tweak the difficulty curve until the systems in the middle spawned sensible numbers and types of ship. And even if they got this "wrong", and an "average" player in an "average" ship could only survive in 20% of the bubble, that's still an insane number of visitable systems.

The playable space in ED is ridiculously huge, but sometimes it feels as though FD don't want anywhere to be off limits.

What's really irritating is that the 32KB version of Elite actually did a much simplified version of this 33 years ago. Even in a galaxy with only 2048 visitable systems there were some where only the best players could hope to survive for very long in the stock ship, especially if they had cargo on board, simply due to the number and aggression of the NPCs. Most players learned quickly and ignored those systems until they'd maxed out the defensive capability of the Cobra and gained some combat experience. Many never went back at all.

Exactly. +1 Rep!