It's Happened Again

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Tiili

Tiili
He could also use hatch breakers to space that poop, or repeatedly break important modules and use repair limpets to keep the hull % up, can't really deliver that poop if FSD and/or drives are broken.

Or tell that he is going to do exactly this if the other player doesn't high wake from his system asap.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
SpaceAce said:
Interesting points - I have little to say about the BGS as it's currently of no interest to me.

As for Frontier, they say what they need to say to keep disgruntled players in line and game units selling. They're not interested, it seems, in creating a decent MMO - which it's advertised to be. We're stuck with this halfway house of a game - neither MMO or single player.

The game would do better with a company structured like a proper MMO (Eve online type of company) - a game that focused SOLELY on MULTIPLAYER - in my opinion. Oh well...
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And that's all fine. I don't care much for PvP, but I really enjoy the BGS interactions, it underpins and defines the reasons I play the game.

I alluded to this in a different thread, but if BGS became Open-only, so-called "Forced PvP" isn't my worry; I cut my teeth out in EVE. It's the fact that the entire strategy underpinning our groups BGS strategy would be obliterated, as it's entirely based on controlling assets and systems which are attractive, naturally-occurring PvE activity routes, in order to gain passive positive effects from players (in all modes/platforms). We're a very small group, but we barely have to lift a finger to support the systems we occupy and control because the trade routes we control are popular, and the systems we occupy exploit outlier conditions which provide good rank farming opportunities and the like.

Of course, players do bad things occasionally which we head off, but we've also held off entire powers with this strategy, because our reaction to opposition isn't "I want to go bop them on the head", our reaction is "How can we use this to our advantage, and if not, how can we use the BGS to create a positive outcome". And tbh, I think a game environment where every solution isn't "Bop the opposition on the head" is a pretty well-designed one. There's plenty of activities in the game where head-bopping is the way forward, but the BGS isn't one of them.

Bouncing off some of the stuff you said, if FD decided to basically ditch their entire instancing/non-cross-platform construction and say "Everyone is in Open, all the time, and everyone can see everyone" a-la EVE, I'd be "OK" with that, in the context of everyone's effects would still happen and support our group... but realistically there'd be a surge of departures from players who kickstarted this originally with the promise of a solo, offline mode, and so a bunch of those people would probably disappear and weaken our strategy anyway. That's a whole other topic though.... more realistically FD are beyond the point of no return with their networking though, so i doubt that's a possibility.
 

Havvk

Havvk
Jmanis said:
Here's the thing though; Outbreak is not a negative state in that it does not cause problems for a faction. If anything, it's a good state to have happen, and the OP (and their aggressor) don't get this..

It's a "negative" state in terms of it's connotations of human suffering and plague, but in BGS terms it's a good state.
  • Food becomes illegal, so more money can be made by smuggling it
  • Medicine prices go through the roof (=~ 4k profit per tonne)
  • Mission boards become more homogenous; instead of "supply random widget X which the station doesn't stock", the faction's board gets filled with "Supply medicines", so you can pre-empt the board with a load full of medicines. You also get return delivery missions from stations with medicines which always target the positive effects at your faction.
All these mean you can get some seriously good influences for your faction when it's in an Outbreak state. Like Ian alluded to, if I were the Op, I'd be thanking them if they were genuinely causing outbreak, because it's a very useful state to be in.

As a contrast, I hate the positive economic states (Boom, Investment). They tend to fill the boards with mining missions, and primarily produce mining missions, which are slow and ineffectual to achieve. I much rather a None state (for both economy and security) because it generates more Installation Scan/Power Plant Destruction missions, which are generally worth more influence, drop the influence of neighbouring factions, and still pay quite well.

The fact the OP has their nose out of joint, and their so-called aggressor is bragging about causing the Outbreak shows neither party actually understand what the BGS is or how it functions.... sadly this is a problem for any Open-only BGS proponent. In every single livestream FD have re-iterated that the BGS is about creating a living, breathing universe which all player actions impact, not for creating balanced, group vs group PvP content (because the BGS is most definitely not balanced).
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A lot of these BGS complainers tend to sound like they know nothing about how it actually works, in the end.
 

Sylow

Sylow
SpaceAce said:
Your perception is accurate. PC users are, in some quarters, referred to in the pejorative as the 'Master Race'. I'm a PC user.

Generally, 'Console Kiddie' is also used in the negative to refer to someone who thinks consoles and console games are the 'bee's knees' - superior to the PC/games - refusing to accept that, generally speaking, PC games are superior, and generally more difficult (Elite: Dangerous, due to the influence such 'kiddies', as well as a certain type of PC player - the Flight Simulator enthusiasts who probably enjoy a bit of train spotting too - is, sadly, an exception to the general rule...).
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While I dislike the idea that PC players would in any way be better than console players, i very much am in support of as many people as possible migrating to the PC. The actual reason for that being a financial one.

The console is only a good deal for the extremely casual player, who just wants to play one or two games and also doesn't need a computer for anything else in his life. Only very early in their life cycle consoles offer comparatively cheap hardware for the price. As soon as a console is on the market, experience has shown that prices for hardware drop faster than prices for consoles, so within a year or two, you can already get a PC with similar performance to a much lower price.

And that's before looking at all the other downsides of consoles. You save money on the hardware, but they make you bleed out of your nose for new games, online play and the likes. The financial costs just keep adding up, so even the semi-active player, who just wants like two or three new games a year, generally is better off on the PC, especially if he's also ready to wait for a little for good offers on steam, GOG or the likes. And if you want online play, you eliminate the financial advantage in the first 6 months.

Thus the only advantage remaining for the console would be that it's set hardware. You don't need to trouble yourself with updating drivers, tuning stuff, etc. But you also loose a lot of functionality of the PC.

And this in the end is why in my circles the consoles are also seen as "teenie thing" or "poor people trap". A gaming PC does cost more than a console, so the initial investment is higher. Thus people who don't have the money available to get a new and good PC all too often opt for the seemingly cheaper choice of the console. A PC would've saved them a lot of money in the long run, but it's only an option if you have the money for it at hand at the start.
 

Sunyavadin

Sunyavadin
Sylow said:
The console is only a good deal for the extremely casual player, who just wants to play one or two games and also doesn't need a computer for anything else in his life. Only very early in their life cycle consoles offer comparatively cheap hardware for the price. As soon as a console is on the market, experience has shown that prices for hardware drop faster than prices for consoles, so within a year or two, you can already get a PC with similar performance to a much lower price.

And that's before looking at all the other downsides of consoles. You save money on the hardware, but they make you bleed out of your nose for new games, online play and the likes. The financial costs just keep adding up, so even the semi-active player, who just wants like two or three new games a year, generally is better off on the PC, especially if he's also ready to wait for a little for good offers on steam, GOG or the likes. And if you want online play, you eliminate the financial advantage in the first 6 months.
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But the price rapidly drops for the consoles as well. There's no way I could have afforded to put together a PC capable of running the same games as my XBox for the £200 it cost me new back in 2016. My laptop at the time was behind it on graphical capability, but cost £350, and was a two year old budget model itself. As a dedicated PC builder I've owned more than I can count, and they always end up easily costing more than consoles, and that's as someone who grabs all my components on sale. You pay more to get more flexibility in what it can do.
As for the prices of games on console, you can generally grab the most popular ones second hand after a few months for under a tenner. There's a reason sales on digital storefronts always have such low prices as they do, it's because they track the second-hand market, and price to match. You see it all the time on XBox, like clockwork, the prices of games in sales are matched to what you saw them for in CEX last week.
As for online subscriptions, they're fairly cheap for anyone smart enough to buy prepaid cards when they can pick up a bargain. I've never given MS my card details for XBox Live, and never paid more than £25 a year for it. I spend many times that on upgrades to my desktop every year. And every year I get about half a dozen games with it that I was going to buy anyway, so that saves me £30-60. So it's a net profit.
I have more than 500 XBox games, 250 of which I got as part of games with gold, so over 6 years of getting them, they effectively cost around 50-75p a piece, tops. The rest of them I follow a simple rule for. £15 is the most I will spend on a game, and that's for a complete edition or collection of games in a series. Many of those remaining ones came as a £10 bundle including 2-3 games, and a whole lot, almost all the digital copies of anything, were paid for entirely by my MS reward points...
In the last year I've spent about 3x as much on my desktop system as I have on my XBox in the last 3. (Just replacing my graphics card when it burned out cost more than a new XBox One would right now) And my gaming laptop, which I take everywhere with me, cost well more.


(Disclaimer, I am the person willing to spend £500 on a 4-drive external bay with hardware RAID for my XBox, to be able to have all my owned games installed at once, but that would have cost the same for my PC, and when the XBox reaches the end of its useful life that same external enclosure can be hooked up to my laptop or desktop. And I've already removed the drives from it once to go in my PC, when I upgraded them to larger ones, so it technically doesn't count as a ridiculous console expense, since I share hardware between all my systems, and most console users don't do this sort of thing)
 
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Sunyavadin

Sunyavadin
Jmanis said:
Here's the thing though; Outbreak is not a negative state in that it does not cause problems for a faction. If anything, it's a good state to have happen, and the OP (and their aggressor) don't get this..

It's a "negative" state in terms of it's connotations of human suffering and plague, but in BGS terms it's a good state.
  • Food becomes illegal, so more money can be made by smuggling it
  • Medicine prices go through the roof (=~ 4k profit per tonne)
  • Mission boards become more homogenous; instead of "supply random widget X which the station doesn't stock", the faction's board gets filled with "Supply medicines", so you can pre-empt the board with a load full of medicines. You also get return delivery missions from stations with medicines which always target the positive effects at your faction.
All these mean you can get some seriously good influences for your faction when it's in an Outbreak state. Like Ian alluded to, if I were the Op, I'd be thanking them if they were genuinely causing outbreak, because it's a very useful state to be in.

As a contrast, I hate the positive economic states (Boom, Investment). They tend to fill the boards with mining missions, and primarily produce mining missions, which are slow and ineffectual to achieve. I much rather a None state (for both economy and security) because it generates more Installation Scan/Power Plant Destruction missions, which are generally worth more influence, drop the influence of neighbouring factions, and still pay quite well.

The fact the OP has their nose out of joint, and their so-called aggressor is bragging about causing the Outbreak shows neither party actually understand what the BGS is or how it functions.... sadly this is a problem for any Open-only BGS proponent. In every single livestream FD have re-iterated that the BGS is about creating a living, breathing universe which all player actions impact, not for creating balanced, group vs group PvP content (because the BGS is most definitely not balanced).
Click to expand...
This is why many of us have been inclined to just assume the OP's ignorance of how the BGS works is what's going on, and that the so-called "aggressor" is just someone they assumed must exist, and doubled down on inventing (Or someone saw their forum post and decided it'd be fun to troll them by sending gloating messages, if so - bad show dude) after people explained that systems which will take biowaste just naturally end up getting a bunch of biowaste, because that's how stuff works. The alternative being two factions active in the same system both have no idea how the BGS works and one is actively aiding the other through efforts to "Undermine" them. Which is frankly just too facepalmy to think about.

Also don't forget it becomes easier to get certain types of mats for your engineering in outbreak systems.

Also, hard agree that Boom sucks SO hard for mission boards. I hate it. Nothing but mining. No matter what the local economy is. So frustrating. This is why I stock passenger cabins at my home station for whenever one kicks in.
 
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The Nephilim

The Nephilim
SpaceAce said:
Why is it that there are certain people on this forum who seem to think that their financial situation should be taken into account when considering issues like the OP is presenting? Ultimately, the vast majority of players have a means of playing in OPEN.

I think it's valid to ask why the majority of players (on Steam, and other platforms) should have their OPEN playing experience affected negatively to account for players who choose to play in SOLO - either deliberately (and use SOLO for the type of problematic undermining activities this thread seeks to discuss) , or as a result of their personal financial choices and issues. Ultimately, financial considerations of players - being able to access OPEN - is not, in my opinion, a valid argument against Frontier doing something to prevent SOLO players engaging in the activities described. The simple solution is to abolish SOLO.

And, I'm quite positive Frontier make clear that an internet connection is needed to play this game at the point of purchase. If some console company, XBOX, PlayStation - whatever - decide to charge extra for greater internet access using the console, that should not be used by such console owners as a mechanism to try and claim that certain features should not be implemented or changed in the online game: Elite Dangerous. The issue, in reality, is not with Frontier - it's with Microsoft or Sony. Such players affected should lodge complaints with the relevant company and seek to have the pricing/policy changed. Otherwise, vote with their feet and choose another option that isn't as expensive.

I may get bother for stating what I just did - by the 'hidden hand'. However, I believe that if someone is making such claims, I should have the right to respond to such claims.
Click to expand...

I dunno, perhaps because it's relevant to them???
 

Sylow

Sylow
Sunyavadin said:
But the price rapidly drops for the consoles as well.
Click to expand...

Not at the same rate. Generally speaking, consoles at release sell a hardware package to a much lower price than you'd have to pay on the open market if you buy all components seperately. Within a year the numbers even out, after two or three years the console is a bit cheaper but they make profit on the hardware, while the same hardware is dirt cheap on the market.

It's very much a perception problem. You look at the console and it's still the up to date model. You look at the up to date PC hardware and it costs much more. Would you look at the actual hardware used for the console, most people would dismiss it as being several years old and thus badly outdated.

Sidenote: game development also reinforces that. New games usually are built to have extra features again and again, constantly raising the bar. The same game, when released for a console, doesn't bring some of these features or uses some other tricks to reduce performance cost. The developers know that the console is the same hardware and aim for it to run properly.

Mind you, many of the "awesome higher quality" features eat a lot of performance while not even being visible on mid-quality screens. So indeed it doesn't make sense to push those things to the console as many users would never even notice them.

More interesting for me, as non-console-owner is the part for cost of games. There my perception might actually be off. Whenever i look for a game and stumble over several versions, the console versions cost more than the PC option. But i admit that i didn't look into that any further, so you might be right there, that the trap of costs can be avoided. All i know is that all console producers at release do calculate the same way: they sell hardware cheap and make the money by the games being more expensive. Then console prices drop slower than hardware prices, while at least in my perception games tended to stay more expensive than the PC counterpart.
 

Misty_Dark

Misty_Dark

Jenner

I wish I was English like my hero Tj.
Jenner
Closing, since we're just name calling at this point.

(Where's that dead parrot picture that TJ always uses.....)
 
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