Maybe time to pause the beta?

[Ydiss]

Is that a downside? Or rather [1], is it in any way unexpected given the parameters?

They said 8000 systems were completed. Let's assume most of them, at least, were outposts at ~20kT of cargo each.
Multiply up and that's 160 million tonnes of cargo.
(And sure, a bit more delivered to build things bigger than a Coriolis, and a bit more delivered to build things after the starting outposts and to incomplete-at-time-of-writing systems)

That sounds like a lot ... but it's only marginally higher than the all-time 1-week record for a trade CG (which was also a "build new systems" CG, interestingly), the purpose of these new features is to be popular and bring people back to the game who were taking a break, and the targets have been set well within the normal capabilities of an established player.

It's a lot more rapid expansion than players might have expected - we were presumably thinking more in terms of major tasks where a big group might have got its first system confirmed by now - but must surely have been no worse than the high end of what Frontier expected.




[1] I've been saying for a while that 20,000 systems is way too big for the bubble to be, so in that respect doubling the size makes things worse. But when it comes down to it, once you allow Colonisation at all you've clearly decided that's both unfixable and it's better to work with features which don't care about the bubble's size in future, so that's (like the introduction of Fleet Carriers was) the change in direction.

I don't see it as a downside. The galaxy has so many systems, it really makes no difference how many get colonised.

I meant mostly that it occurred due to an exploit (that they are now fixing). The downside of live testing is exploits can happen and not get caught before something goes live. I didn't say it was a huge one though

 

[Stealthie]

Seems, to me, like FDev are trying to "pause" it by selectively disabling various aspects of Colonisation.

Problem is, basically, the genie is out of the bottle.
Even if they disabled/removed every part of Colonisation, there'd still be thousands of CMDRs jumping around the bubble in their FCs, hoovering up CMMs like a giant swarm of virtual locusts... with the result that disabling Colonisation, itself, probably wouldn't fix the issue that's arisen.

Let's not forget that FC's were originally intended for squadrons to own but many toys were thrown out of many prams until FDev capitulated and made FCs available to individuals, which initially resulted in pretty much the same kind of gridlock we have now.
FDev apparently made the whole thing a bit more efficient so that under average conditions the servers could cope with an average amount of FC movement but it's always been apparent that anything that provokes a lot of FC movement causes the hamsters to fall off their wheels.
And, Colonisation is proving to be the ultimate stress-test for the systems that control how FCs get moved around.

Maybe they need to start restricting which FCs can move (perhaps based on each FC's ident?) so they can figure out just how many FCs can move at one time before it all grinds to a halt?

 

[Bigmaec]

Yes, because this is going from bad to worse. It was a ridiculous decision in the first place, doing a Beta in a Live (production) environment, and better to just take your loss, and do the work properly. I have a lifetime in IT, and no serious company I worked for ever did a Beta in production. And for a very good reason. I predicted this whole f-up when I heard it announced, and I am not surprised it indeed turned out to be a big mess

Testing a feature of this magnitude on live beta makes sense, because this way all the quirks are found out fast.
Like the exploit, or several bugs. Having some downtime now, or later because they can't find it in a "real" beta makes no difference.

I have seen way worse updates by FD, this one runs smooth as it goes, and I take some hours offline from time to time and getting my stuff already done in live
over a grind for nothing in a real beta

 

[Archvillain]

[1] I've been saying for a while that 20,000 systems is way too big for the bubble to be

I missed those discussions, now I'm curious why you feel that way. Can you elaborate (or link)?

To me, the bubble did seem very big in the early days when jump range was small, but that has changed. Or are you referring less to gameplay and more to a lore perspective, such as the number of years of human history is a stretch for the level of development we see?

 

[Bigmaec]

I missed those discussions, now I'm curious why you feel that way. Can you elaborate (or link)?

To me, the bubble did seem very big in the early days when jump range was small, but that has changed. Or are you referring less to gameplay and more to a lore perspective, such as the number of years of human history is a stretch for the level of development we see?

I'm not Ian but my opinion is that from a gameplay perspective it's way to big.
Everything is same same and if you aren't in Deciat, ShinDez or the CG system the chance to meet anyone is next to nil.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I missed those discussions, now I'm curious why you feel that way. Can you elaborate (or link)?

Sure - it means there are essentially too many identical copies of most things, so nothing really matters.

- there's not enough variety in the system generation (types of government, economy, station, etc.) to stop systems being really interchangeable. Everything has tens if not hundreds of copies, so none of them exactly matter
- so for example the Thargoids at their greatest reach had captured 200 inhabited systems, and if you didn't happen to visit there, you'd never know (but if they'd attacked at "yes, this is actually a credible threat rather than something which might wipe out humanity long after all of ED's current players have died in real life" rates, it'd have had the opposite problem of spreading the human players across incomprehensibly many fronts at once and making their actual presence largely optional). It would have taken literal years - in the absence of any human defence - for the Thargoids to capture a system that anyone much had heard of before
- a few exceptions aside, the players-per-system count is basically "one" or more usually "zero", which means that a lot of things don't quite work:
--- obviously if you're into meeting people, you usually don't
--- but it also means that commodity markets tend towards "boring" because you'll often be the only one using them. Weirdness like CMM Composite recently aside
--- and similarly BGS states and influence really aren't all that dynamic because a lot of systems don't have enough people acting in them to keep it moving
- on the Powerplay side, you get a similar issue to with the Thargoid War: powers don't really benefit from having more systems once they get above a critical threshold (which they're all well above), and there's plenty of spares, so there's no incentive for conflict in what should be the Official Competitive Bit
- basically all the multiplayer bits don't have critical density of players ... but it's also clearly gratuitously big for singleplayer stuff (FE2 had about 1000 systems - the smallest of the four for inhabited space - and I doubt many players visited all of them, either)

One of the particular things I look for in this sort of game is a "sense of place" [1]. Elite Dangerous is pretty good at that in terms of the distinction between the bubble, and deep space, and Colonia, and the smaller outlying colonies. But within the bubble, everything basically blurs together to be a homogenous mass. It's not helped by the distinctions between Imperial and Federal space, or Democratic and Feudal government, or Grom or Mahon influence being fairly subtle - but even accounting for those, it's all pretty samey.

Colonia has the same components, but with only 70 systems to build from them, each of them feels a lot more distinctive. And it has a higher (well, maybe not this week) player/system count than the bubble, so you occasionally see other players, and the markets and BGS states are all a lot more volatile.

About 1000 systems would - with hindsight - get about the same player/system ratio as Colonia in the main bubble. You still wouldn't necessarily see many other players except in the very busiest systems, but you'd see the effects of their passing through much more. Powers would have 30-100 systems each, so would really need to fight each other if they wanted more. A Thargoid invasion taking out 200 systems would be an absolute crisis, not a "call me in a couple of decades if they're still here" event where the (story-level, I'm sure the actual fights were fun!) excitement has to be added artificially.

The thing is, I'm pretty sure the Frontier-of-2014 never gave the slightest bit of thought to sizing the bubble to likely player numbers or future story options or anything like that. It's the size it is because this is a sequel to FFE, so Sol, Achenar and Alioth need to be superpower capitals, and the sphere of inhabited space needs to be sized around that. Which, now that it's a sphere rather than FE2/FFE's circle, and now that the LY distances between those three are set to their real-world values, makes it about 150-200 LY radius.

Having decided (I doubt it was ever really considered an option!) not to fix the issues arising by using the Thargoids to compress the bubble to 1000 systems, then going the other way and saying sure, why not let every player have their own system or ten has some appeal to it. That itself gives a certain sense of place, in a different way.


[1] In terms of the obvious competitors, I'd say No Mans Sky aggressively rejects the concept, and X4 does it extremely well (though not in a way that ED could replicate the specifics of, of course!).

 

[Agony_Aunt]

And today, in completely redundant posts, I'd like to present, exhibit A.

 

[oblivionmanman 2476]

in a normaly beta after its excepted as working and you took part in the beta,all progess is lost as you go back into live and start youre trip again,at least running it live you should keep what you have done,hard to explain as im not computer savvy,hope it makes sense to someone.

 

[Cmdr Nighthawk]

Testing a feature of this magnitude on live beta makes sense, because this way all the quirks are found out fast.
Like the exploit, or several bugs. Having some downtime now, or later because they can't find it in a "real" beta makes no difference.

I have seen way worse updates by FD, this one runs smooth as it goes, and I take some hours offline from time to time and getting my stuff already done in live
over a grind for nothing in a real beta

The problem is there is still a lot of players doing other game parts like exploration / biologi. Are they suppose to take a few month out of the game while there is a chance you will get kicked in the face by a rollback and then you have to go out find all the funny flowers again?

It seems like its only game play for the Bubble nothing more, again exploration gets hammered and left behind.. Hell we cant even be apart of the update in colonia... but we have to sit back while the "bubble" again can have some fun new action...

 

[Archvillain]

there is a chance you will get kicked in the face by a rollback

I have been playing fairly constantly (every day) and have never had anything rolled back during this beta period. I've only ever encountered extra server maintenance time. How often and how bad have rollbacks been? (I was under the impression they didn't intend for there to be any)

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The problem is there is still a lot of players doing other game parts like exploration / biologi. Are they suppose to take a few month out of the game while there is a chance you will get kicked in the face by a rollback and then you have to go out find all the funny flowers again?

They've said that they don't intend to roll back except in the most extreme cases.

Further, I think it has to be understood that "roll back" in that case means "remove the colonisations of some or all systems" or "undo the last 24 hours of colony construction", rather than "roll back the entire game state to 25 February" - things like exploration data or trade rank or Powerplay positions aren't going to be affected no matter how badly Colonisation goes (and while the first week has had issues, nothing so severe as to require starting over!).

The only time that I can recall Frontier ever doing even a limited roll back on live was after a particularly serious BGS bug. In that case the BGS states of factions were returned to their state before the bug was introduced (which was only 2 days of rollback) and nothing else got touched. And most of the time they don't even do that much - usually it's just "that shouldn't have happened, but it's fixed now, play on from here". An entire decade, and they've had to do a roll back in production once, on something that most players wouldn't notice and didn't affect anyone's CMDR progress at all.

It's really not a risk at all in that sense.

 

[metatheurgist]

Sure - it means there are essentially too many identical copies of most things, so nothing really matters.

- there's not enough variety in the system generation (types of government, economy, station, etc.) to stop systems being really interchangeable. Everything has tens if not hundreds of copies, so none of them exactly matter
- so for example the Thargoids at their greatest reach had captured 200 inhabited systems, and if you didn't happen to visit there, you'd never know (but if they'd attacked at "yes, this is actually a credible threat rather than something which might wipe out humanity long after all of ED's current players have died in real life" rates, it'd have had the opposite problem of spreading the human players across incomprehensibly many fronts at once and making their actual presence largely optional). It would have taken literal years - in the absence of any human defence - for the Thargoids to capture a system that anyone much had heard of before
- a few exceptions aside, the players-per-system count is basically "one" or more usually "zero", which means that a lot of things don't quite work:
--- obviously if you're into meeting people, you usually don't
--- but it also means that commodity markets tend towards "boring" because you'll often be the only one using them. Weirdness like CMM Composite recently aside
--- and similarly BGS states and influence really aren't all that dynamic because a lot of systems don't have enough people acting in them to keep it moving
- on the Powerplay side, you get a similar issue to with the Thargoid War: powers don't really benefit from having more systems once they get above a critical threshold (which they're all well above), and there's plenty of spares, so there's no incentive for conflict in what should be the Official Competitive Bit
- basically all the multiplayer bits don't have critical density of players ... but it's also clearly gratuitously big for singleplayer stuff (FE2 had about 1000 systems - the smallest of the four for inhabited space - and I doubt many players visited all of them, either)

One of the particular things I look for in this sort of game is a "sense of place" [1]. Elite Dangerous is pretty good at that in terms of the distinction between the bubble, and deep space, and Colonia, and the smaller outlying colonies. But within the bubble, everything basically blurs together to be a homogenous mass. It's not helped by the distinctions between Imperial and Federal space, or Democratic and Feudal government, or Grom or Mahon influence being fairly subtle - but even accounting for those, it's all pretty samey.

Colonia has the same components, but with only 70 systems to build from them, each of them feels a lot more distinctive. And it has a higher (well, maybe not this week) player/system count than the bubble, so you occasionally see other players, and the markets and BGS states are all a lot more volatile.

About 1000 systems would - with hindsight - get about the same player/system ratio as Colonia in the main bubble. You still wouldn't necessarily see many other players except in the very busiest systems, but you'd see the effects of their passing through much more. Powers would have 30-100 systems each, so would really need to fight each other if they wanted more. A Thargoid invasion taking out 200 systems would be an absolute crisis, not a "call me in a couple of decades if they're still here" event where the (story-level, I'm sure the actual fights were fun!) excitement has to be added artificially.

The thing is, I'm pretty sure the Frontier-of-2014 never gave the slightest bit of thought to sizing the bubble to likely player numbers or future story options or anything like that. It's the size it is because this is a sequel to FFE, so Sol, Achenar and Alioth need to be superpower capitals, and the sphere of inhabited space needs to be sized around that. Which, now that it's a sphere rather than FE2/FFE's circle, and now that the LY distances between those three are set to their real-world values, makes it about 150-200 LY radius.

Having decided (I doubt it was ever really considered an option!) not to fix the issues arising by using the Thargoids to compress the bubble to 1000 systems, then going the other way and saying sure, why not let every player have their own system or ten has some appeal to it. That itself gives a certain sense of place, in a different way.


[1] In terms of the obvious competitors, I'd say No Mans Sky aggressively rejects the concept, and X4 does it extremely well (though not in a way that ED could replicate the specifics of, of course!).

I disagree that's solely down to the size of the bubble. I think it's also got to do with their design choices. The socio-economic simulation part of the game works at a completely un-credible speed and scale just to pander to the people that demanded to be able to 'shape the galaxy'. If resources generated slowly and events had real weight you'd feel the effects a long way away and even be tempted to do something about it. We have a game where entire space stations are bult in a week, where wars don't appear to have any significant affect, where populations are just a number. Just look at Colonisation, how many babies are being pumped out to fill these 8000 new systems? Credible population growth? Forget it, I want to rule "my" system now.

ED is more of a God Game than a space sim now. I'm not sure what it's simulating at all now except Oligarch Fantasy.

 

[Archvillain]

ED is more of a God Game than a space sim now. I'm not sure what it's simulating at all now except Oligarch Fantasy.

You make good points, though I'd add that in order make the numbers work it has been oligarch fantasy from the beginning, if paying attention to the background. The Pilots' Federation reserves enormous power and access to unthinkable wealth for CMDRs, gatekeeping something the 99.99999% of humanity do not have access to.

But yeah; prior to Trailblazers, it was much easier to not think about the gulf if the societal implications were not of interest

 

[Ian Doncaster]

If resources generated slowly and events had real weight you'd feel the effects a long way away and even be tempted to do something about it.

Slowing down resource generation per station/system would help but for the majority of commodities would need to be to something like 0.01% of the current generation rate before it got to be noticeable in the general case.

Which would then have a problem (which I'm sure you'd approve of ) where a single CMDR in a T-9 could outhaul the entire export production rate of a 10 million+ population system (and probably buy the whole thing out in a matter of days if not hours)

(You might actually find a <1000-system bubble rather more believable in terms of individual CMDRs effects, because by and large everyone would be having their actions cancelled out by everyone else, so while it might in a theoretical sense be mechanically possible for an individual CMDR to make major changes to a system, there'd very rarely be times where any individual got the space to prove that. Normally there'd be hundreds of CMDRs operating in a system and making any deliberate changes against that stabilising effect would require very substantial effort)

Just look at Colonisation, how many babies are being pumped out to fill these 8000 new systems? Credible population growth?

Absolutely credible, because - I keep coming back to this - the bubble is really excessively unbelievably large.

Average population of a starter system is about 5000 people, so that's 40 million total people.

Galactic population was 6.6 trillion before Colonisation started, so to maintain that population at a stable level, assuming an 80 year average lifespan would require about 1.5 billion births each week.

So an extra 40 million/week on top of that (to keep the existing systems stable while families are forcibly migrated to the new systems) would imply a galactic population growth rate of around 0.03% annually. That's "rounding error" territory even if you think a lot of these new systems are Orbis-class and therefore a bit bigger, or you think everyone lives to Torval's 130+ years and so the real galactic birth rate for stable population is about half that.

(There are single multi-billion population systems who could have individually provided every person inhabiting the new systems without changing their population display at the precision the map shows it, with no actual galactic population growth at all)

Elite Dangerous absolutely does not care in the slightest about the realism of scale of anything smaller than a moon, but in this particular case the various arbitrary numbers make the population requirements of colonisation trivial to meet.

 

[metatheurgist]

Which would then have a problem (which I'm sure you'd approve of ) where a single CMDR in a T-9 could outhaul the entire export production rate of a 10 million+ population system (and probably buy the whole thing out in a matter of days if not hours)

Yes, that'd be amazing! Then players might be motivated to increase production by supplying raw materials and there'd be reason to mine stuff other than 100% Mozanite 100% of the time.

Average population of a starter system is about 5000 people, so that's 40 million total people.

I'm not just talking about starting pop. People are already building Coriolis stations, probably multiple Coriolis in some cases. You think those System Lords Architects are going to be happy about their big expensive stations sitting empty for years at a time? I don't think so.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

I disagree that's solely down to the size of the bubble. I think it's also got to do with their design choices. The socio-economic simulation part of the game works at a completely un-credible speed and scale just to pander to the people that demanded to be able to 'shape the galaxy'. If resources generated slowly and events had real weight you'd feel the effects a long way away and even be tempted to do something about it. We have a game where entire space stations are bult in a week, where wars don't appear to have any significant affect, where populations are just a number. Just look at Colonisation, how many babies are being pumped out to fill these 8000 new systems? Credible population growth? Forget it, I want to rule "my" system now.

ED is more of a God Game than a space sim now. I'm not sure what it's simulating at all now except Oligarch Fantasy.

I don't think this is entirely fair. The scale and speed of how socio-economic factors evolve is a consequence of the realities of it being a form of entertainment in a live-service format, in other words it's a multi-player game with a shared setting that can't be paused or sped up in order to fit around the meatspace lives of the actual people using it.

FDev have been clear enough about what our role is in terms of colonisation. We're called Architects, not rulers. We get to shape systems in broad strokes, but we don't get to set policy, taxation levels or even appoint the local dog-catcher. We get a modest stipend from the systems we design, but it's nowhere near oligarch-level embezzlement.

The idea that any of this is pandering is just way off.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I'm not just talking about starting pop. People are already building Coriolis stations, probably multiple Coriolis in some cases. You think those System Lords Architects are going to be happy about their big expensive stations sitting empty for years at a time? I don't think so.

Some people are, but not many of them. The mean population of the current new colonies is around 12000. A few Coriolis/Orbis builders doesn't compensate for most players only having got as far as an Outpost (or not even as far as securing their first claim). Less than 5% of the systems appear to be Coriolis class, barely 2% are Orbis class. The top players/groups are going to get systems with populations safely into the millions, but not into the billions.

A 1% annual increase rate in galactic population (which would be comparable to modern-day Earth and entirely plausible [1]) would provide 60 billion extra people annually, or 6 million per system. If we assume the current growth rate of 12000/week continues indefinitely then that's only a tenth of that.

(And in future years this gets better, not worse, because the increased NPC population compounds the growth rate, but the player population involved in colonisation is likely to stay at best level)


[1] If we somehow end up needing a 10% annual increase, the routine use of bulk cloning to provide populations for new colonies was established in The Dark Wheel back in 1984. But we won't.

 

[metatheurgist]

1% growth is completely implausible when you consider populations decline in developed economies. And it is pandering.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

1% growth is completely implausible when you consider populations decline in developed economies.

That can go in the giant pile of "this is light-hearted big explosions sci-fi" not "explore the effects of hypothetical future tech sci-fi" things that Elite Dangerous does.

(Though we have sufficiently little idea of whether the current population decline (or rate-of-increase slowing, at least) in certain developed economies is a permanent fixture or one which will reverse again in fifty years following some other socially relevant change, which gives even fairly serious sci-fi wide latitude to pick an answer which suits the rest of the story.)

For something like ED where sub-planetary scales are largely irrelevant, our ships break conservation of mass, energy and momentum continually, the net social impact of inter-system travel times reducing from "several months" to "an hour" was "none at all", etc. it's even less relevant. Everything else has been hand-waved since 1984 in the service of space pirates and smuggling and implementing a 17th century economy and power balance with spaceships, why not population growth. Maybe most of the ED population are cloned and brought up in collective camps so that no-one actually needs to spend time raising them, and that's why the galactic population has remained absolutely static for the last decade?

 

[Rat Catcher]

I'm glad that I just play a space game and don't give a hoot how realistic it is, or how terrible the economy is, or whatever. As long as it is enjoyable, I'll keep playing it, when the fun stops, so do I.