It's not the game - it's you.

[RadgeGadgie]

Reposting a message from before, as a Moderator threatened to unleash his +3 vorpal sword of Mod Twappage on me.

Sorry y'all if it offended. I thought the existence of a profanity filter meant we could actually post profanities, as those who didn't like them didn't have to see them. I've not posted much so I was unaware that words like "odds boddikins" and "dash my buttons" were more appropriate.

Originally Posted by RadgeGadgie

Originally Posted by gazmoid
There is no way ED is harder than Frontier ( Elite II ) ... Maybe you were just a better pilot back then. I certainly was better at Hypersports then than now. ED is far easier - in fact for me too easy.
G.





You know all it took to access menus in E2F? A couple of mouse clicks or f button presses. Now I'm taking twenty five minutes, ending in weeping and criminal damage when I throw the PC out the window into the roof of a parked panda car just trying to ask the bothersome station to let me launch.

Manoeuvring in E2F just required holding down the right mouse button and steering with the mouse. Now you need to bankrupt your gluteus maximus on a HOTAS. Combat? Piece of nutritionally drained biological output in E2F! You just pause the game, find the enemy, lock onto it as a target and engage the auto-pilot, firing lasers when he's in the gun-sight.

No need to have to dancewhimsically around consciously flying the beastly thing from jump-exit to target, as the auto-pilot did it for you. Docking also done by the AP. No need to wait until you can already do everything you don't want to, so you can afford a poxy docking computer, like in ED.

The galactic map was so simple even a dribbling imbecile (which I think I'm not far off being) could use it. You start right over the "top" of the galaxy and could zoom in or out to make smaller or more major system appear. Centre on one using the arrow keys and it became your jump target. In this game you start off at some neck-wrung angle in some backwater star system that's the equivalent of Scott Base, Antarctica and the act of manipulating the map is ridiculously un-simple and furiously and nonsensically complicated.

E2F was simpler and more straightforward in every single way. I played it for about three years and was worth billions of credits and had a fully upgraded Panther clipper. In this I can't even fly the melon farming Sidewinder out of the station.

I will freely admit I must be crap. But the difference in accessibility, learning curve and beginner-friendliness that exists between ED and E2F is not in any way close. E2F was learnable and relatively quickly. This, in comparison, is a disorganised, festering mess. Much like my brain.

I didn't want to be a whiner. I wanted to love this game. Fact is, I don't even know if it's good or bad for myself, because I've never been able to learn it.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

You still can refund if you ask nicely i gues. So far from what i hear.. You better to wait of No Man Sky. Not all games are good for all ppl) Some of us need something.. special.

A refund after fourteen months? Really?

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

Why not? It's an overnight guaranteed route to maximum revenue, isn't it?



No, GW2 looks like another F2P success story from that article. Well, that plus pay-to-play updates like ED does. In fact, they had virtually the exact same payment model as ED. Pay for the game, play for free, pay for the updates. I wouldn't be at all surprised if FDev started giving the base game away for free at some point too. It's already heavily discounted.

What does this have to do with subscriptions?

Part of the argument against subscriptions is that it wouldn't increase revenue, which wouldn't lead to nice changes like dedicated servers because dedicated servers are so expensive they cripple any business model. Except for the same business model that FD uses seems to be just fine with dedicated servers, and a subscription model would only mean more income above that.

In other words, the problem all along has been FD, and if they can't make this business model work as efficiently as their peers over at ArenaNet then maybe they should try something else. Unless someone wants to try and convince me that Elite: Dangerous is more expensive to develop than an MMO.

 

[Darian]

I think you got it backwards did you not?
More content isn't going to change a thing if proper game mechanics don't follow : the current game could be amazing if only there was some game-design revolution.

When i talk about mechanics i talk about adding things like landing on planets, SRV and so on, things that get you from A to B
Content is for me what i do at A, why i go to B and what i do once i arrives at B

In this regard Frontier adds mechanics (modes of transport and destinations you can acess) but the content is lacking, the reasons why and the activities you can do at places.

The planet side missions and so on are not different to what you do in space, and the game play in itself with the SRV is nothign breathtaking new, I did similar on the C64 already (way back when dinosaurs delivered our data)

And that is what annoys me, they are building that big universe and think it is cool all by itself.

(yes, the menues and what not couldbe better, ships could have an better "building" act and so on, but all for itself the game is great, but an universe wide and an inch deep)

 

[McDosy]

Part of the argument against subscriptions is that it wouldn't increase revenue...

Oh, that was my whole argument against subscriptions.

 

[Shar]

May I suggest several rant threads first. To gain some extra support point out the obvious second hand fittings inside the ship too. No point in a perfectly good bug report not being backed up by pages upon pages of inane ranting! It seems to be the way things are done around here...

Indeed Mr Mallory indeed, I was hoping to recruit windscreen smudge to the course, he is very effective you know, although i have not been keeping up are we still ranting on the subscription model or are we demanding Pay-to-win yet, seems a natural progression, to ruin the game at least, thankfully the developers despise both of those concepts so i think were quite safe for now however on a positive note it is keeping them busy banging there heads against a brick wall, its giving me a headache just thinking about it. tally-ho and all that.

 

[SnowyNI]

Ive finally found a problem with the game, i have a smudge on my ships windscreen and i just can not remove it, should i do a bug report.

Did you try licking it off?

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

Oh, that was my whole argument against subscriptions.

Unfounded, as seen.

The only thing that stops a game from being successful with a subscription is if it's a bad game. I look at it as a way to force Frontier to get their ducks in a row.

 

[Shar]

Did you try licking it off?

No, bit hard when were not allowed out of the spaceships silly, the last station i docked at, trollwinerville i think it was, orbits the planet areyoukiddingme its in the dingbat system, well anyway the mechanics would not touch it said something about its not my job then stormed off to report me for bringing an illegal substance onbaord, so its still there ill try taking my ship in real close to a star might be able to burn it off. however if you have a taste for that sort of thing your welcome to try.

 

[Ignition]

I played and still playing elite for more than 2000 hours. I can for sure say that it is truth. It's not a game at all. The problem is always in YOU.

I played Path of Exile 2000+ hs, so I can say that the problem is always you, the game is fine.

What kind of argument is this LOL.

 

[McDosy]

Unfounded, as seen.

The only thing that stops a game from being successful with a subscription is if it's a bad game. I look at it as a way to force Frontier to get their ducks in a row.

That's incredibly naive.

 

[CMDR Kantos Kan]

That's incredibly naive.

I don't know. WoW has been quite successful so far, after a few years. I've heard that they have been losing subscribers lately, maybe people get tired after a few years. But we're talking about 4 or 5 years now, if not more. Same with EVE that has been at it for 12 or 13 years someone reported in a previous post. I would imagine that if they still do it after several years, it must be profitable or they would have gone out of business, like many others...

 

[Wasp0]

No, bit hard when were not allowed out of the spaceships silly, the last station i docked at, trollwinerville i think it was, orbits the planet areyoukiddingme its in the dingbat system, well anyway the mechanics would not touch it said something about its not my job then stormed off to report me for bringing an illegal substance onbaord, so its still there ill try taking my ship in real close to a star might be able to burn it off. however if you have a taste for that sort of thing your welcome to try.

if you listen to Radio Sidewinder, they have a Windscreen cleaning service at several of the most popular stations, guaranteed to remove persistent smudges.

On a side note Shar, your avatar is both creepy and compelling! I can't stop staring at it, but this frightens me! I do like it, I Think

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

That's incredibly naive.

No. It's not. Competition is stiff in the MMO market. F2P was only rising to overtake Subscription models because F2P was offering the better game. People realized this and now Subscription games are going to start coming back, but only after they start making better games than the F2P models.

Put Frontier in the same hotseat. They can either produce a better game that draws people in and makes the subscription worth their while in comparison to other games, or they can fail.

Star Citizen has a subscription just for a special forum that they occasionally drop screenshots and extra news articles on along with the occasional in-game piece of cosmetic trash for your hangar. You don't even have to buy the game to subscribe. It's wildly popular. It doesn't take much to make people sign up.

 

[McDosy]

No. It's not. Competition is stiff in the MMO market. F2P was only rising to overtake Subscription models because F2P was offering the better game. People realized this and now Subscription games are going to start coming back, but only after they start making better games than the F2P models.

Put Frontier in the same hotseat. They can either produce a better game that draws people in and makes the subscription worth their while in comparison to other games, or they can fail.

Star Citizen has a subscription just for a special forum that they occasionally drop screenshots and extra news articles on along with the occasional in-game piece of cosmetic trash for your hangar. You don't even have to buy the game to subscribe. It's wildly popular. It doesn't take much to make people sign up.

Now we're back on MMOs. You didn't say an MMO, you said a game. If you can't think of a game that you have bought but wouldn't subscribe to, then I doubt there's much point me giving examples.

ED isn't an MMO. You've said as much yourself. "Unless someone is going to try and claim that ED is more expensive to make than an MMO," I think it was.

If the main target market isn't people investing hundreds and hundreds of hours then a subscription model would be suicide. There's so much more to succeeding with a subscription model than making a good game. FDev will know how many hours the majority of their customers play per session and per week and across the lifetime of the first release and will be basing their strategy accordingly. I keep having to say this, but if your main market is people who bimble about in spaceships for a couple of hours a couple of nights a week, chasing those people away with monthly subscription charges is not a master strategy. It doesn't matter how good the game is. They're not going to suddenly start finding the extra hundred hours of recreation time a week that makes a subscription service feel like good value.

Also, F2P is not only rising to overtake subscription models because they were offering better games. That's also incredibly naive. How good your game is is irrelevant. Good or bad, there will still be a payment model that is best suited to the structure and audience of your game. That is most definitely not always a subscription model. Online games are switching to F2P in their droves because the first, key step to success is a large player base. You achieve that faster and more reliably by giving the game away for free whether your game is brilliant, mediocre or dire.

That said, it is nice to hear someone say that F2P games have been succeeding because they are quality rather than because they are a vicious con that surely spells the end of video gaming as we know it. For that, I take my hat off to you.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

Now we're back on MMOs. You didn't say an MMO, you said a game. If you can't think of a game that you have bought but wouldn't subscribe to, then I doubt there's much point me giving examples.

ED isn't an MMO. You've said as much yourself. "Unless someone is going to try and claim that ED is more expensive to make than an MMO," I think it was.

If the main target market isn't people investing hundreds and hundreds of hours then a subscription model would be suicide. There's so much more to succeeding with a subscription model than making a good game. FDev will know how many hours the majority of their customers play per session and per week and across the lifetime of the first release and will be basing their strategy accordingly. I keep having to say this, but if your main market is people who bimble about in spaceships for a couple of hours a couple of nights a week, chasing those people away with monthly subscription charges is not a master strategy. It doesn't matter how good the game is. They're not going to suddenly start finding the extra hundred hours of recreation time a week that makes a subscription service feel like good value.

Also, F2P is not only rising to overtake subscription models because they were offering better games. That's also incredibly naive. How good your game is is irrelevant. Good or bad, there will still be a payment model that is best suited to the structure and audience of your game. That is most definitely not always a subscription model. Online games are switching to F2P in their droves because the first, key step to success is a large player base. You achieve that faster and more reliably by giving the game away for free whether your game is brilliant, mediocre or dire.

That said, it is nice to hear someone say that F2P games have been succeeding because they are quality rather than because they are a vicious con that surely spells the end of video gaming as we know it. For that, I take my hat off to you.

ED is intended to be an MMO, but falls short of that category thanks to technical limitations, such as their poor social tools and abysmal P2P system. Going to a subscription model would necessitate these improvements, because it's what people would expect of a game requiring a subscription. People are already expecting these improvements, in all honesty.

Payment model and how players enjoy the game are not mutually exclusive. The important thing is to make sure they work well together.

ESO had 1 million players on day 1. That's a fast adoption rate for any MMO. However, it's also crap. There were 5 million beta testers registered for the game. 4 million didn't buy it because it was garbage and wasn't worth the initial cost or subscription fee.

The fee didn't stop 1 million people from buying the game on the first day. Testing the gameplay and being able to judge the value received in return for the fee turned away 4 million potential customers.

Archeage is dead in the water because they chose a slimy F2P model at the last minute. Despite having millions of beta testers in the U.S., their daily players now number a few thousand. Getting people in the door with a F2P model didn't save them.

 

[McDosy]

ED is intended to be an MMO...

Is it? Well then it's a good job that in failing so catastrophically to make the MMO they intended to make they managed, by fluke, to so perfectly recreate the tone, pace and feel of the original.

It's also quite fortuitous that they managed to find a large audience of players who were looking for exactly that and didn't really care about it being an MMO. I was kind of worried when I backed it that they'd bow to convention and chase a different market, which I wouldn't have got on with at all well. Now I find that they did, and the game I love is purely the result of happy accident! Get in!

Lucky, lucky, luck-luck, as Prince George would put it. I'm going to buy a lottery ticket.

My advice now, FDev, would be to just go with the fluke, like me playing pool when I'm drunk. Just pretend all the stuff you nailed with absolutely zero development effort was the main focus of what you were going for in the first place. Mum's the word!

It's kind of ironic. Over the years, I've played maybe a dozen or so games that were going all out to recreate the feel of Elite and failed. Then FDev manage to do it while focussing on something else that they were making a total balls of. I guess it must be in their genes or something.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

Is it? Well then it's a good job that in failing so catastrophically to make the MMO they intended to make they managed, by fluke, to so perfectly recreate the tone, pace and feel of the original.

It's also quite fortuitous that they managed to find a large audience of players who were looking for exactly that and didn't really care about it being an MMO. I was kind of worried when I backed it that they'd bow to convention and chase a different market, which I wouldn't have got on with at all well. Now I find that they did, and the game I love is purely the result of happy accident! Get in!

Lucky, lucky, luck-luck, as Prince George would put it. I'm going to buy a lottery ticket.

My advice now, FDev, would be to just go with the fluke, like me playing pool when I'm drunk. Just pretend all the stuff you nailed with absolutely zero development effort was the main focus of what you were going for in the first place. Mum's the word!

It's kind of ironic. Over the years, I've played maybe a dozen or so games that were going all out to recreate the feel of Elite and failed. Then FDev manage to do it while focussing on something else that they were making a total balls of. I guess it must be in their genes or something.

You assume that the experience in ED and being an actual MMO are mutually exclusive properties. They aren't.

"Large audience" they did not find. ED is a middling success with a low retention rate.

 

[Kristov]

Windscreen, have you actually looked at the market lately for online games? WoW has a F2P model, almost every other large online game is F2P, many having switched over from a subscription plan to F2P in order to keep the game alive, such as STO, LotRO, DDO, SW:TOR, and WoW(although WoW's model isn't helping them, they only let you play for free for so many levels, then it's pay up, probably why they are under the 5m subscriber mark now and still dropping fast).

Purely subscription based games are losing customers left and right due to the plethora of F2P games that are good, fun and, most importantly, don't cost anything to try them out and play them. The entire market is switching to the F2P format, not just bad games by bad developers Windscreen, and this isn't new, it's been happening for over 5 years now for games that are big in the NA/EU markets, while it's been a huge thing for the Pan-Oceanic market for a decade now. It works, it makes money, and that's what counts in the final analysis, the product must produce a net profit, and the F2P model has consistently done exactly that for bad, good and excellent games alike.

You keep on telling us how subscription is the only way to go, despite the entire industry saying you are wrong, after all, you know better, you keep telling us so, therefore it must be true, right?

 

[DefiledDragon]

Windscreen, have you actually looked at the market lately for online games? WoW has a F2P model, almost every other large online game is F2P, many having switched over from a subscription plan to F2P in order to keep the game alive, such as STO, LotRO, DDO, SW:TOR, and WoW(although WoW's model isn't helping them, they only let you play for free for so many levels, then it's pay up, probably why they are under the 5m subscriber mark now and still dropping fast).

Purely subscription based games are losing customers left and right due to the plethora of F2P games that are good, fun and, most importantly, don't cost anything to try them out and play them. The entire market is switching to the F2P format, not just bad games by bad developers Windscreen, and this isn't new, it's been happening for over 5 years now for games that are big in the NA/EU markets, while it's been a huge thing for the Pan-Oceanic market for a decade now. It works, it makes money, and that's what counts in the final analysis, the product must produce a net profit, and the F2P model has consistently done exactly that for bad, good and excellent games alike.

You keep on telling us how subscription is the only way to go, despite the entire industry saying you are wrong, after all, you know better, you keep telling us so, therefore it must be true, right?

I play SWTOR and I sub. The reason I sub is because it's a snipping good game and to me, it's worth the money. I know I could play it for free, but I choose to support the game because I enjoy it. If ED ever did adopt this model I would hope that the people who enjoy the game would support FD with a subscription. I know I would.

 

[Boomer Kay]

I play SWTOR and I sub. The reason I sub is because it's a snipping good game and to me, it's worth the money. I know I could play it for free, but I choose to support the game because I enjoy it. If ED ever did adopt this model I would hope that the people who enjoy the game would support FD with a subscription. I know I would.

I played SWTOR for about a week and dropped it.
It's .. WoW in space. Could have been KOTOR, but well, it's not.
I never bothered hanging out in their forum, telling their "fanboys" how much the game sucks (for me) and how much their core game design needs to be changed in order to be mildly interesting or novel (again .. for me).
But I think I've made that point like 20 pages ago already.