Is having to rely on third party sites an intentional design decision or a side effect.

[Deleted member 147460]

I would love it if one of the devs could answer this but I know the odds are incredibly small. Nevertheless, I wonder if it a conscious decision to require one to rely on third part sites for various parts of them game? I mean, are there people working on the game who think that this is good game design? Please tell me there aren't. I wish I were sitting next to David Braben right now so I could just flat out ask him how he feels about this. It is my personal opinion that requiring one to go outside the game for various activities and information is a horrible idea. The fact that players needed to use some external language software to decode that alien thing is beyond absurd. It is my hope that rather than being intentional, it is simply a side effect of having a game this vast and complex (compared to most other games). This would give me a tiny bit hope that in the future they provide more in game tools. I have yet to read about one single player who enjoys opening up a separate browser window in the middle of their play session to go scouring the internet. I would bet my Star Trek collection that the overwhelming majority of players think this is bad game design.

 

[Theutus]

This is my biggest gripe with this game. It's the future let me all tab to my primitive browser to find trades/parts/ships/pristine rings/any info that my future space ship should be able to provide to me.

 

[Wylie28]

It creates a community. And secondly that isn't even true. 3rd party sites can makes things easier, but those things don't necessarily need to be easier. If you don't want to use 3rd party sites to find items figure out what each economy/government type sells. The alien thing didn't need decoded that was just a hint. I have come across everything in the game on my own without using any 3rd part coordiantes. Ive seen everything from a Probe, to barnacle, to geysers just by searching because I know where and how to look. Now if I want to find them the easy way, yes ill use a 3rd party site. But its far form required.

Creating a community is a good thing. Those people that make those sites thoroughly enjoy doing so. Its brings people together. Creates ineraction and teamwork even when playing and not playing. IMO All games should be designed to allow such things to be made. If you want to mindlessly cross items off a shopping list go find a different game. There are plenty of games designed for "the majority of players". If you don't like it, that doenst make it bad, that just means its something you don't enjoy. If it were bad game design no one would play. If people enjoy it, then its not badly designed, it just may not be designed for your typical player.

 

[GJ51]

This is a pretty old debate. I'll vote for "bad game design" mostly because the 3rd party apps and web sites offer things that feel like they should be part of ED.

The downside is that if you become overly dependent on some of these things, you may be inconvenienced if something you've come to depend on stops being supported.

 

[jmp470]

It's awesome that people step up to fill the void created by the developer. However, I dislike it because it kills the Elite experience for me.

 

[Ben Ryder]

3rd party sites for core game stuff = devs not doing it right.

Hey I a dev...

Gunna do tha core game.

Hey ya Hey ya

That's what we do


yo yo you

Mr player I'm da PLAYA

Watch ma stream!

---
Oh OK

I dont think its too unfair to say that a game that relies on a creating a soild premis and the delivering at a budget vs comptition in high trun around marekt and customer base should try and provide stuff like trade tools etc in the game. Not beacause a lack of thme is immersion breaking but because after 2 years or so they might reaise they missed a trick. Dave are you listnun!

 

[DocDelicious]

Probably wouldn't continue playing if the community and all information was contained in the game. It's one of the big draws for me.

 

[CMDR Cylixx]

It creates a community. And secondly that isn't even true. 3rd party sites can makes things easier, but those things don't necessarily need to be easier. If you don't want to use 3rd party sites to find items figure out what each economy/government type sells. The alien thing didn't need decoded that was just a hint. I have come across everything in the game on my own without using any 3rd part coordiantes. Ive seen everything from a Probe, to barnacle, to geysers just by searching because I know where and how to look. Now if I want to find them the easy way, yes ill use a 3rd party site. But its far form required.

Creating a community is a good thing. Those people that make those sites thoroughly enjoy doing so. Its brings people together. Creates ineraction and teamwork even when playing and not playing. IMO All games should be designed to allow such things to be made. If you want to mindlessly cross items off a shopping list go find a different game. There are plenty of games designed for "the majority of players". If you don't like it, that doenst make it bad, that just means its something you don't enjoy. If it were bad game design no one would play. If people enjoy it, then its not badly designed, it just may not be designed for your typical player.

Ignore issue; check.

Elaborate justification of mediocrity; check.

"Better than you attitude"; check.

 

[FoxTwo]

Honestly, 3rd party sites will spring up no matter what. Even if the game contains all the necessary info within the game itself, there will still be 3rd party sites, if there is enough people out there that love the game enough to make the sites.

However, some of the 3rd party sites do indeed feel like they should have been part of the game in the first place.

On a personal note, I almost never use 3rd party sites for ED myself. At best, I may visit ED Shipyard at work to try out new builds of whatever ships I'm thinking of taking out to Sag A* or something. Other than that, I don't use whatever trade information or engineering tips etc sites for my ED gameplay. I do everything "in-game".

So yeah, I don't know where to go to find Thargoids, and I am glad they haven't found me. I have no idea what I'd need to enter the Thargoid bases or whatever... I'll find out when it happens to me.

 

[Ben Ryder]

Nice signature link

 

[TheNut]

As with all games, the development team designed and built a game they wanted to sell. What you see in Elite Dangerous _is_ the vision the elite development team agreed on, got funding approval, and committed development to. Now if you gave that team more money and more time, there's not a real game developer on this planet that wouldn't use that to make their game better, sometimes in ways you can't visually see. Alas, we live with finite resources and therefore can only commit finite development time. And yes, bad decisions _are_ made in any industry. It's all part of being human and going through the same evolutionary process as everyone else. In the end, gamers will feel the effects of that finite development time and will have to choose whether or not to help out. Elite Dangerous is fortunate enough to have fans who are just as passionate of the product as the elite team is, and therefore the Wiki, EDDB, Coriolis, Canon, and even streamers like Obsidian Ant are all community contributions to help make the game better and more enjoyable for everyone. In a lot of ways too, the elite team wants the community to share those discoveries rather than handhold us via Galnet or other such means. Is that to say we should have to alt-tab from the year 3303 to 2017? No, but that comes back to the time/cost principal of implementing those community features within Elite Dangerous. I'm sure if they could, they would be more than happy to give us a means to integrate every player into gal-net to broadcast our discoveries, successes, and stories.

This is also not unique to Elite Dangerous. Since the dawn of gaming we've had communities get together to help solve difficult problems, share information and walkthroughs, or even go so far as to mod games to make them better. And as for the puzzles themselves, it's not uncommon that some devs will sneak something crazy into their games. Many games have easter eggs that require you to "break" the level to discover them, often eluding to upcoming expansions or just some quirkiness showcase from the developers. To be honest, the spectrogram was a really neat hidden easter egg. It's not something you would expect your average gamer to figure out (not necessarily a good thing mind you, but that's another discussion), but the fact that someone did discover that most definitely put smiles on the faces of the elite development team. And it's not necessary to discover these things, it's just highly rewarding and affirms your intelligence and wisdom

 

[Vasious]

To me, external Cmdr sourced data bases and resources , seems to match the image of the Pilots Federation as a co-operative, run by members for member, galaxy spanning network as presented in the lore.

So intended or not seems to fit the world that have created.

After all so many things in life now are supplements by "let me google that" "I have an app for that"
Why not let the game word be organically generated by the player base rather than make one for the game only for it to be not fit for the exact needs of the players and limited by own UI etc, so long as they are supported by the Devs

 

[SAB380]

It was created using a game from 1984 as the model.
They expected us to note everything like system routes and favorite trades with pencil and paper like we did with Elite and Frontier.
No one apparently realized it was 2010+ and information systems in game are considered a critical part of video game design.

 

[DNA-Decay]

Dav Stott has spoken to this a couple of times.

Ed Lewis:"What's you opinion of eddb.io?"
Dav Stott: "I don't know what that is and I have no opinion"

He went on to talk about how everything you need to know IS actually in the game.
Trade routes etc, all there, all to be known, and he gave specific examples of how he did whatever you say you *need* third party sites to do.



Personally, I love all the content that is user created.
You can view Elite Dangerous as the operating system and the third party stuff are apps.
And here I include Discord, teamspeak and all the group sites, as well as eddb.io and INARA atc

 

[Mohrgan]

I think the Dev's offered the start of an in-game sourcing system, with the "Show Trade Routes" option, but were outpaced by creators from the outside. A great display of Emergent game play, if you ask me. Creating a service the players seemingly required, while FD were going down the check list for development. I can see they upgrade things in waves, dropping a feature, taking data, and adjusting. When the GalMap was abandoned early in favor of the now familiar sites, lacking data, FD moved pass those features, freeing up time, to bring us what they have, and leaving those diligently administered public services their place in the game.

But, I'm not always looking to find fault in others. It's a failing of mine.

 

[relayer]

When I read stuff like this, I keep reminding myself that I bought a game that was evolving/building. That's what the kickstarter said, and I assumed it was a multi-level game that was structuraly in development; "early access" if you wish. The broad design is sketched out, and now more detailing comes - even to an announcement that +2.4 is going to work on core game issues.

On topic: I don't alt-tab; I have a small tablet to the right of my joystick, and it displays various external E : D sites. I consider it an extension of GalNet. Surely there would be trade channels, news channels, scientific and other data channels and personal communication channels; a Galaxy-Wide-Net. Tips, secrets told in bars, experienced pilots advising greenies (if only to hire them later), crooked cargo handlers, bloated corps defectors...

I have no problem with immersion using 3rd-party sites and they don't really break my immersion. It's an info-web, and surely in the future we will have this kind of data at our fingertips.

 

[Valorin]

The internet and third party apps is my extended ship computer. Actually I think it's very good that these exist and Frontier can concentrate on other things to develop. Things are going very well for the company I heard, but they are still pretty small compared to a big studio. So I really don't mind using internet and third party resources. I am a bit sorry for the console people, but well, there's always something, and the internet databases are open for them too.

 

[lokvette]

I know a lot of what you can do with the external sites you can do in game, but for me the extra level the external sites give you is why I use them, and to that extent its more of a side effect, like any game external sites pop to help players with builds, lore, forums the list goes on. The main one Im using at the moment is EDSM, im updating its database as I go and it helps me keep track of where i've been and sometimes who's been there before me. Back in the bubble depending on what im doing I have maybe 3 to 4 external sites up for what they offer in terms of helping me on my way.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I suspect it's an intentional design decision at least in terms of prioritisation - they can put out information in the netlogs (or lately, the Journal) - and the community can process that far more quickly in far more different ways than they could ever do themselves.

So, for a recent example, in the exploration forum Marx has gone through the 3rd-party databases of Earth-Likes to do a detailed study of their properties and where they're more common. Sure, Elite Dangerous could have a feature in the Universal Cartographics tab which let you run arbitrary queries against the set of all discovered systems and scanned bodies. Will it ever? No - obviously not.

Providing the information through the Journal and letting people sort out what reports, visualisations, displays, etc. they want of it themselves is far more efficient - letting Frontier focus on developing the game and so provide stuff we want to report on in the first place - and produces a better quality result for everyone.

...

That said, certain 3rd-party tools do get supplemented, superseded or incorporated over time. In the exploration field:
- trilateration, once one of the major features of EDSM, was mostly replaced in 2.1 with the coordinates being placed in the netlog (then in 2.2, the journal). There are still use cases for trilateration but mostly no-one needs to anymore.
- you used to basically have to use some 3rd-party tool to keep track of which systems you visited. That's still useful for getting more detail, but the basic unvisited/visited highlight is on the map
- rock rats used to scout planets in their SRVs for jumponium materials on expeditions, sometimes taking hours for a team to confirm the contents of a system; in 2.2, the detailed surface scanner revealed that information from orbit in seconds
- people wanting to use neutron boosts currently often use 3rd-party tools to find the neutrons in advance; in 2.4, the in-game plotter will do it automatically.

...

I would also dispute that third-party tools are essential for playing in the first place. Certainly a lot of the common examples can be managed with just in-game information but because the 3rd-party tool is there and so convenient people don't bother looking for the in-game info in the first place!

 

[kofeyh]

Yes*.

* combination of exclusion of mechanics due to time pressures (which creates a demand regardless) and intentional obfuscation due to design intent (which creates a demand regardless). Life finds a way. Gamers? Doubly so.

Arguably, third party solutions respond to a need, and in any number of cases, may do so more elegantly and effectively than any in game system. This doesn't give Frontier a free pass not to bother, but it's going to happen anyway.