Just don't feel like logging in...
- Thread starter Altissimus
- Start date
I LOLed at that
I agree with what you are saying, I also started playing in beta, so have been playing on and off for months. I've had my moneys worth and then some, and at the same time think there is so much missing from the game to call it released.
How many months (hours?) do you normally play a new game for?
I just hope they add in one massive patch "Soon(TM)" that fixes most of the problems and adds in enough content to keep people playing for the next 6 months let alone "Years"!
Trading makes me sad now (I know there are good routes out there, but what I find dries up in one or two runs), and the missions are a bit repetitive (why can't they be adding a bunch of these now), so I'm just flying to USS and blowing ships up. Not a money maker, but more fun while I wait for the new normal to sink in.
I can make 100k an hour in my asp at a nav point and risk a 600k rebuy cost if I get destroyed or I can make 125k every 5 mins with my 4 trade routes.
Even with the trading working the way it is now, it's still more profitable than any other profession in Elite: Stellarium
Hi all,
i'm a pretty new player, bought the game 2 weeks ago, and i already feel the emptiness =/
I've read the first 13 pages until now, and i hope what i post now isn't already covered between pages 14 and 27 =/
I pretty much agree with everything said here, "empty sandbox", "unfinished", "too early released" and so on.
Another thing FD should consider is their own reputation.
I guess some of you guys know Mechwarrior: Online (MWO). For those who don't know the game and the story of it's development, let me try to introduce you real quick into history. And please correct me if anybody finds something wrong in my post, i'm recalling all that stuff from my memory, so i might miss some parts or recall them false.
MWO was originally planned as Mechwarrior 5, but turned into a Free-to-play somehow.
The licence for the Mechwarrior franchise was bought by Piranha Games Inc. (PGI). The game was originally funded through a backer-programm, where you could buy into alpha and beta stages, get some mechs, ingame-currency and some other stuff. Pretty much like ED or Star Citizen.
PGI then chose to team up with a publisher, Infinite Game Publishing (IGP).
So much for the very basics.
Luckily, i don't have to write all the stuff down here in details, because a lot of other people already did.
Read here about "A Cautionary Tale: The Rage of the Mechwarrior Online Community": http://thetrendythings.com/read/6864
Next big thing was, the mentioned Community Manager Garth Elam got fired and replaced by "Niko Snow", causing the next big storm within the community. The statement "You know knothing, Niko Snow" was one of the most used phrases in this time i guess.
In December 2013, PGI announced the next package, the "Clan Pack"... they even made it into the Forbes Magazine with this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertc...online-offends-players-with-500-golden-mechs/
Another thing isthe outright lying by PGI about the status of the development. Everything was always "90 days" away. Community Warfare? 90 days. Ingame voice comms? 90 days. This was going on not for some weeks, we are talking about years here. The first announcement on Twitter was in 2011, and it's still going on. The "Community Warfare Lie Bubble" finaly bursted when the game was officialy released in September 2013. Community Warfare was originally stated to be due out within 90 days of open beta (i.e. January 2013). On the "Launch Party" in September 2013, PGI came up with nothing but a Powerpoint-presentation (not even a good one) about CW. They had nothing else to show, so the didn't even start coding anything about CW.
So, to sum it up, they achieved to make a huge load of bad press, just because of bad decissions, most of them regarding handling the community.
And now comes my point: In September 2014, PGI decided to jump onto the Space-Sim-Train, announcing a game called "Transverse". They set up a website for it and asked people to pledge for their game. They wanted 1 Million $ for "space-flight", at 1.5 Million players would have been able to adjust their modules and stuff for their ships, and at 2 Million, players would have been able to acutally fight in space. Awesome goals, i know, but that's not the point here. It's also not the point that the little ingame sequences they showed were looking like Freelancer with a texture-pack, or that all the ship-design were outright stolen from ED and Star Citizen. I don't know how, but they somehow even achieved to get the original Wing Commander licence... at least that's what they said.
http://www.themittani.com/content/traffic-control-transreversal
The point is, they wanted money for their game... 1 Million $ at least. So they set a 30 days goal for the first Million.
Do you guys know what they got? 11.030$ from 133 backers after something about 20 days (they took down the site after 20-somewhat days, i guess they were ashamed). And no, there is no typo in these two numbers. It's 11.030$ from 133 backers, really
This is a slightly modified version of a post the creative directr of transverse did at reddit (don't know the original link at the moment), but it pretty much sums it up.
What i want to say is: I take any bet that PGI will not be able to kickstart anything withing the next 10 years, just because of their bad reputation.
FD, take car of your game and your community, the phrase "even bad publicity is advertisement" doesn't always fit =/
i'm a pretty new player, bought the game 2 weeks ago, and i already feel the emptiness =/
I've read the first 13 pages until now, and i hope what i post now isn't already covered between pages 14 and 27 =/
I pretty much agree with everything said here, "empty sandbox", "unfinished", "too early released" and so on.
Another thing FD should consider is their own reputation.
I guess some of you guys know Mechwarrior: Online (MWO). For those who don't know the game and the story of it's development, let me try to introduce you real quick into history. And please correct me if anybody finds something wrong in my post, i'm recalling all that stuff from my memory, so i might miss some parts or recall them false.
MWO was originally planned as Mechwarrior 5, but turned into a Free-to-play somehow.
The licence for the Mechwarrior franchise was bought by Piranha Games Inc. (PGI). The game was originally funded through a backer-programm, where you could buy into alpha and beta stages, get some mechs, ingame-currency and some other stuff. Pretty much like ED or Star Citizen.
PGI then chose to team up with a publisher, Infinite Game Publishing (IGP).
So much for the very basics.
Luckily, i don't have to write all the stuff down here in details, because a lot of other people already did.
Read here about "A Cautionary Tale: The Rage of the Mechwarrior Online Community": http://thetrendythings.com/read/6864
Next big thing was, the mentioned Community Manager Garth Elam got fired and replaced by "Niko Snow", causing the next big storm within the community. The statement "You know knothing, Niko Snow" was one of the most used phrases in this time i guess.
In December 2013, PGI announced the next package, the "Clan Pack"... they even made it into the Forbes Magazine with this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertc...online-offends-players-with-500-golden-mechs/
Another thing isthe outright lying by PGI about the status of the development. Everything was always "90 days" away. Community Warfare? 90 days. Ingame voice comms? 90 days. This was going on not for some weeks, we are talking about years here. The first announcement on Twitter was in 2011, and it's still going on. The "Community Warfare Lie Bubble" finaly bursted when the game was officialy released in September 2013. Community Warfare was originally stated to be due out within 90 days of open beta (i.e. January 2013). On the "Launch Party" in September 2013, PGI came up with nothing but a Powerpoint-presentation (not even a good one) about CW. They had nothing else to show, so the didn't even start coding anything about CW.
So, to sum it up, they achieved to make a huge load of bad press, just because of bad decissions, most of them regarding handling the community.
And now comes my point: In September 2014, PGI decided to jump onto the Space-Sim-Train, announcing a game called "Transverse". They set up a website for it and asked people to pledge for their game. They wanted 1 Million $ for "space-flight", at 1.5 Million players would have been able to adjust their modules and stuff for their ships, and at 2 Million, players would have been able to acutally fight in space. Awesome goals, i know, but that's not the point here. It's also not the point that the little ingame sequences they showed were looking like Freelancer with a texture-pack, or that all the ship-design were outright stolen from ED and Star Citizen. I don't know how, but they somehow even achieved to get the original Wing Commander licence... at least that's what they said.
http://www.themittani.com/content/traffic-control-transreversal
The point is, they wanted money for their game... 1 Million $ at least. So they set a 30 days goal for the first Million.
Do you guys know what they got? 11.030$ from 133 backers after something about 20 days (they took down the site after 20-somewhat days, i guess they were ashamed). And no, there is no typo in these two numbers. It's 11.030$ from 133 backers, really
This is a slightly modified version of a post the creative directr of transverse did at reddit (don't know the original link at the moment), but it pretty much sums it up.
What i want to say is: I take any bet that PGI will not be able to kickstart anything withing the next 10 years, just because of their bad reputation.
FD, take car of your game and your community, the phrase "even bad publicity is advertisement" doesn't always fit =/
My main problem with ED at the moment isn't so much the lack of "content" (it's early days, I can forgive that), but the utter predictability of what we currently have.
Most games with a reasonable amount of grind spice it up a bit by allowing players to hit the jackpot from time to time, thereby making the grind mechanic one of "if I log on and perform activity A for a couple of hours, the chances are the result will be X, if I'm lucky the result will be Y, and if I'm really lucky the result will be Z".
Where ED falls down for me is I know exactly what the outcome of performing a given action for an hour will be. I know what I'll earn from exploration, I know what I'll earn from bounty hunting, running missions, piracy, or a combination of both (averaged out over a couple of hours it's very predictable). I know what I'll earn from trading. Mining is totally predictable. I know full well that my chances of dying by anything other than utter personal negligence* are practically zero. There's absolutely no mystery and zero chance of surprises.
What baffles me about the current state of ED's gameplay isn't the lack of it as such, it's how on earth anyone could reach some of the decisions involved in creating it.
Take, for example, mining. The difference in terms of development effort between what we have at the moment - the equivalent of open cast coal mining when it comes to variety, suspense, and economics - and something a lot closer to, say, prospecting for gold or digging for gems, is next to nothing. Instead of having a probability table that's outcomes are such that the mere act of half filling an Asp smooths out any variations, how about adding in a few rare and expensive things that crop up occasionally? It would be so trivial to implement that it's almost embarrassing, and would add an element of mystery to the whole thing. For added brownie points, a little variation in asteroid appearance, hey, there'd even be an element of skill to picking through rings to find the good ones.
Then there's exploration. Offer some sort of bonus for completely scanning systems? Nah. Discover an earth-like planet, just waiting for humanity to move in? Ask Susan and I'm sure she'll give you a fiver out of the petty cash. Use graphical representations of unexplored planets that don't tell you exactly what you're going to find out when you scan them? Nah, can't have players being surprised at what they find, best ease them in gently.
Then there's combat. Pick a target, shoot it, pick a target, shoot it. Sure, the combat mechanics themselves are on the right track, but it's way, way, way too easy, and there's absolutely no sense of the epic. The mere act of making the higher rated NPC pilots fight like they hadn't just rolled out of the pub at closing time then attaching a bigger bounty to them as a reward would have transformed it... but no, we get elite NPC pilots in Cobras who'll fly up to you, park, make a comment about scanning you, then die in a hail fire from a similar ship with very little extra effort over what it would take to kill a mostly harmless NPC. I mean, if the qualification for Elite status is owning a shield then, hey, I should be utterly Elite by now. It's all just so trivial, and comes down to little more than a lack of thought on the part of the game designers. It shouldn't be down to me to make combat dangerous by consuming too much alcohol beforehand.
That said, do I have hope for ED? Yeah. Am I packing it up? No, just backing it off and dipping in and out to see what happens. The basic stuff all seems to be there, it just needs tweaking, polishing, and the addition of bells and whistles. We've got the core of something potentially very good indeed.
In the meantime, my advice to ED's game designers would be to Google "MMO rare drop", mull the concept over for a while, and realise just how easy it would be to spice ED up a bit while we wait for the addition of the bigger mechanics we're after.
* In my case, by far the most dangerous aspect of the galaxy is my own occasional forgetfulness with respect to asking for docking permission.
Most games with a reasonable amount of grind spice it up a bit by allowing players to hit the jackpot from time to time, thereby making the grind mechanic one of "if I log on and perform activity A for a couple of hours, the chances are the result will be X, if I'm lucky the result will be Y, and if I'm really lucky the result will be Z".
Where ED falls down for me is I know exactly what the outcome of performing a given action for an hour will be. I know what I'll earn from exploration, I know what I'll earn from bounty hunting, running missions, piracy, or a combination of both (averaged out over a couple of hours it's very predictable). I know what I'll earn from trading. Mining is totally predictable. I know full well that my chances of dying by anything other than utter personal negligence* are practically zero. There's absolutely no mystery and zero chance of surprises.
What baffles me about the current state of ED's gameplay isn't the lack of it as such, it's how on earth anyone could reach some of the decisions involved in creating it.
Take, for example, mining. The difference in terms of development effort between what we have at the moment - the equivalent of open cast coal mining when it comes to variety, suspense, and economics - and something a lot closer to, say, prospecting for gold or digging for gems, is next to nothing. Instead of having a probability table that's outcomes are such that the mere act of half filling an Asp smooths out any variations, how about adding in a few rare and expensive things that crop up occasionally? It would be so trivial to implement that it's almost embarrassing, and would add an element of mystery to the whole thing. For added brownie points, a little variation in asteroid appearance, hey, there'd even be an element of skill to picking through rings to find the good ones.
Then there's exploration. Offer some sort of bonus for completely scanning systems? Nah. Discover an earth-like planet, just waiting for humanity to move in? Ask Susan and I'm sure she'll give you a fiver out of the petty cash. Use graphical representations of unexplored planets that don't tell you exactly what you're going to find out when you scan them? Nah, can't have players being surprised at what they find, best ease them in gently.
Then there's combat. Pick a target, shoot it, pick a target, shoot it. Sure, the combat mechanics themselves are on the right track, but it's way, way, way too easy, and there's absolutely no sense of the epic. The mere act of making the higher rated NPC pilots fight like they hadn't just rolled out of the pub at closing time then attaching a bigger bounty to them as a reward would have transformed it... but no, we get elite NPC pilots in Cobras who'll fly up to you, park, make a comment about scanning you, then die in a hail fire from a similar ship with very little extra effort over what it would take to kill a mostly harmless NPC. I mean, if the qualification for Elite status is owning a shield then, hey, I should be utterly Elite by now. It's all just so trivial, and comes down to little more than a lack of thought on the part of the game designers. It shouldn't be down to me to make combat dangerous by consuming too much alcohol beforehand.
That said, do I have hope for ED? Yeah. Am I packing it up? No, just backing it off and dipping in and out to see what happens. The basic stuff all seems to be there, it just needs tweaking, polishing, and the addition of bells and whistles. We've got the core of something potentially very good indeed.
In the meantime, my advice to ED's game designers would be to Google "MMO rare drop", mull the concept over for a while, and realise just how easy it would be to spice ED up a bit while we wait for the addition of the bigger mechanics we're after.
* In my case, by far the most dangerous aspect of the galaxy is my own occasional forgetfulness with respect to asking for docking permission.
QFT. *crosses fingers*
Seriously? What? 'The 'looping cars placeholder'. You're criticising a piece of animated background scenery that adds a bit of character to the stations. What do you want? For each little car to have its own neural net controller simulating its needs wants and desires? A comprehensive fuel model, so they need to stop and fill up on gas? When you look at E: D's credits are you expecting to see a 10-man team allocated to station logistics modelling?
.
I think on the big priority list of 'things to make better and add to E: D' that 'must program SkyNet to control looping cars' is not so much bottom of the list, but subterranean and on a different list held by the bloomin' mole people. That funny sound I've been hearing whilst reading this thread was obviously the sound of the bottom of the great E: D complaint's barrel (and 'tis a big barrel, to be fair) being scraped.
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Deadlock989
Banned
About once a week I run this game, look at my T6 sitting in dock, and hit exit. Why should I play? To grind more cargo, to get a slightly better ship, to grind more cargo? Why?
Maybe it's not a space-sim, but an existentialism-sim in disguise.
Deadlock989
Banned
It's not a very good disguise.
i think I reached that point last night. I've tried all the game has to offer currently. Don't mention 1.1 please because there's nothing in that patch at all. Community Chest ? Please. I've been bounty hunting lately with a friend in anarchy space to spice up the gameplay but with the exception of Anacondas there is zero skill involved. Annies don't require skill either, they're like an end-level boss with masses of HP you have to use all your ammo on. Breaking point came when after months of grinding I became allied with the Alliance (Neutral+, Allied with Alioth Indy). But I'm also Friendly with Fed and Empire. Then in a RES I hit a couple of Allied police during a dogfight so I turned rogue and killed a couple. Running with a bounty on my head I thought yeah, this might actually be fun now. I start to kill arbitrarily when interdicted by Allied forces. After a few I check my status, I'm Wanted, big bounty on my head, but I'm still Allied and with a positive reputation. What's the point when the games does everything to break the immersion you're trying to create for yourself ? The game is so broken its like a modern take on Humpty Dumpty. Elite started with high hopes, then came the big fall and nothing can put this game back together again.
Log in, buy a cheap new eagle and fully outfitted it (or viper/cobra) than undock, fly around for 20 seconds, re-dock and quit the game.
I believe the word you're looking for is "loot". ED needs loot. Currently it only has the most basic and generic loot there is; money. (All the random canisters that drop count as money as well, IMO). I think this is one of the major design flaws in the game - money is the only loot, and upgrades are only available in the shops. Many other succesful grind games have loot as the motivation for keeping up the grind; the shops offer only your basic equipment while the really good stuff can only be obtained by scripted / random rare events.
There should be unique loot that could only be obtained by doing the various activities; exploration, mining, combat, etc. As it is now, the only reason for doing anything other than trading (max cr/h) is for the "experience" of doing it, and that turns out to be a very shallow motivation.
Yes, the rare drops or loot from the npcs would be a very welcome addition. Something like platinum/gold in uss sites - I`m still chasing those hoping for some platinum.
I'm in the same "place" as OP. And I've been there since Gamma when I realized that what we had then was all there was going to be for the foreseeable future
I made threads on exactly this lack of interaction and life in the game back in beta, but the response then was generally "don't worry, it's only beta" and so forth.
I made threads on exactly this lack of interaction and life in the game back in beta, but the response then was generally "don't worry, it's only beta" and so forth.
Yeah I'm in that "Don't feel like logging in because what's the point" phase at the moment. Might take up jogging for a week or two. I suspect however that the feel of slipping my Cobra between 2 warring Anacondas will lure me back in. For how long I don't know. I sadly have to agree with the OPs points.