Multiplayer Connectivity below today's Standards: Playability is limited - Multiplayer and Developement Issues
It happens again and again and with every patch it happens more frequently. Disconnects, instance crashes, multiple instances, insane high pings, desynchs and much much MUCH more related to multiplayer connectivity.
Now, not in a year or two, NOW is the time to finally improveme it and bring multiplayer to an acceptable standard. All modes are affected with Open Play obviously suffering the most of that.
But before I turn this into yet-another-rant I am actually now taking my time, sitting down and write a detailed and constructive post describing the issues, failures and what has to be done to solve them (not how, tho, this is neither my job nor my skillset).
By the way, there is no TL;DR version available this time ...
Let's start.
Multiplayer Connectivity Is Below Today's Standards
Yes it is, I know no other game that suffers more from these issues as Elite: Dangerous. Choosing P2P as the main connection architecture still creates discussions for multiple reasons. The most important ones, however, are that the P2P architecture is usually seen as a a greedy move by Frontier to save money at the cost of player experience.
With this thought in mind, let's take a look at the P2P architecture in the case of Elite:
Many of the P2P enemies (including myself) are requesting servers as a main connection architecture as experience shows that games with a client to server model (short: client-server-model; CSM) have generally better multiplayer connectivity than those who renounce servers. Examples are any given MMO(RPG) game that rely on servers vs any MMO(RPG) game that doesn't.
However, technology isn't as advanced as many of us think or expect it to be. Depending on where you live, your local internet connection determines your multiplayer connectivity quality in Elite. And if you are a poor one living in Australia (sorry, Rinzler) you gonna suffer from general technology standarts. Instead of glass fibre some countries still use bamboo filled with salty water and isolated with hardened clay to transmit electrical signals.
Additionally, there are cases where the net has already been improved and been blessed with glass fibre but due to insanely stupid house construction your home can't benefit from that as there is a 5m copper cable build deep down inside the basement which connects to the glass fibre, creating a bottleneck and rendering the benefits from glass fibre useless.
That said, P2P is extremely dependent by environmental circumstances.
The lack of servers leaves all the players with their own problems and issues which are carried directly into the game.
Frontier benefits from the lack of servers due to non-existent monthly cost, increasing the financial resources which ultimately benefits the game as a whole (or other games apart from Elite). But as stated above, player experience suffers and it has gotton to a point where not only the experience suffers but the general ability to play the game.
As an example we can mentioned the famous supercruise tunnel of death. Quite frequently in Open Play, I personally have experienced this in Solo as well. All attempts to work around that issue have failed and the connection error message appeared.
This essentially blocks game content from the player, limiting access. It might be worth mentioning that many players have a personal timeout error which is mostly know as patience. This value varies from player to player starting from 1 second and usually has no capping but a mathmatical limit that is determined by the circumstances. In my personal case, my timout error is set to 30 seconds simply because it is faster to task kill Elite and relaunch it than waiting 30 seconds to get into supercruise.
This is failure
Turn it all the way you want. We all love playing Elite, hence we are and complaint hoping something will be done to improve it. As long as we are the community/player base is in a healthy state but as soon as players stop caring, checking the forums or other media to get the latest news from Elite, the game will suffer from continous player base shrinking. I am speaking for myself now but I am aware that a good amount of my friends are thinking likewise: If these long existing issues are not getting fixed soonTM, they never will.
The connectivity has been a disaster since day one when Elite was released. Remember all the stories from commanders and friends trying to find eachother when wings weren't a thing?
"Where are you? I am at this antenna thing with the blinking red light on it."
"I am there too but I can't see you."
"Maybe you are at the other side? try turning around."
"Already circling that, what's your distance to the station?"
"Like 200 meters."
"Screw this, it's impossible."
... Yeah, people were going crazy trying to get instanced with their friends ... and you know what? People are still going crazy trying to get instanced. Another example is my very own private group with only two people whitelisted. The first one obviously being myself and the second one being my friend.
You'd expect that in a private group there is no need for multiple instances as there is no logical reason to seperate lone players as they represent the bare minimum of workload an instance has to carry. Yet the matchmaker decides to place us in seperate instances even though we are both in supercruise and there are only two people in that private group.
This is failure and limits playability on top.
In Open Play this issue is pretty much existing in any location at any given time as long as there is more than one player in the same area. Wing signals instead of actual ships being 1km away represent the failure of the network architecture and the netcode as a whole.
Wasted resources
Even though I am sounding mostly negative here, Frontier has proven to be highly professional in terms of bugfixing and improvements. Back then there was a ramming bug where rams wouldn't be count as a single hit, but multiple hits in a really tiny timeframe so you'd experience around 100 rams per second. This obviously increases the damage dealt/recieved by that value. Ships would instantly explode as soon as they would touch something with low velocity. Especially with that AI from that time, rams were quite frequent and so was the rebuy screen. I have written a forum post, demanding a 24h hotfix as this bug would break the game making the experience suffer and generally reducing my and other's motivation to play the game.
And see there! The next day I logged in Frontier have released a hotfix in less than 24 hours, fixing the ramming bug. This kind of work can be compared to other highly successful games. Bug fixing and improvements are a really high priority at successful games as they obviously enhance player experience (even though it doesn't contribute to income/profit as of new content/DLCs).
But times have changed. Instead of bug fixes and improvements we get unwanted game content such as CQC or multicrew. Even htough alot of players used these features, it has eroded quickly to a space desert which basically makes these features useless as they are unused. This blocks game content as other players are required for the usage of these features. Anyone up for a CQC match? (30 minutes later still looking for a match) No? Oh, okay ... noone here I suppose.
Why? Why are players not using these features? The answer is straight forward, simple and pretty obvious: lack of bug fixing and improvements.
The insane amount of bugs when multicrew was released made it nearly impossible to play with friends or randoms without experiencing a disconnect, crash, desynch or other playability limiting issues.
It's fine as long as it is just inconvinient to use but the disaster is routed in the low quality of the product itself which makes it not possible to use it. Compare it to a X52 Pro. The build quality is low and even my second new stick is already making weird noises. I am now keeping the old one for the sole reason to have a repair part delivery in case my new stick breaks. I pray to god it doesn't break at the same piece.
So what does this show us? The increased financial resources by renouncing servers and benefiting from a higher monthly profit is wasted and the human resources (developement/time) is too. Frontier invested in new content that is just as broken and unfinished as the P2P architecture. This means that we are currently in a lose-lose situation. We lose quality in order to be delivered with more low quality products. Quantity over quality is also an issue that can be seen in Elite's gameplay but that is another story and would lead to a case of off-topic.
Playability is limited
Yes it is. All modes are affected. And since Elite requires permanent connection to the servers the netcode and multiplayer achitecture plays a fundamental role in player experience. It is true that without multiplayer, Elite couldn't be played.
I would like to go into details now. Below are cases of frequent issues that are mainly connected to the multiplayer connectivity architecture.
Case 1: Supercruise Tunnel Of Death
It still happens, not as frequent as the latest patch but still frequent enough to represent a problem. You all know how it goes, you are in a populated area in any given mode (most frequent in Open Play, obviously) undock and wish to enter supercruise in order to fly over to the resource extraction site and do some bounty hunting. Upon charging your FSD you begin to count with your friendly board computer from "five" to "engage" ... "engage" ... "I said engage ..." ... "ENGAGE ALREADY!". But no, the 000.000 seconds are the longest zero seconds any time you enter supercruise in any populated area. Not-so-rarely it never will place you into supercruise as it can't connect to other players and/or the servers.
Case 2: Moving Wakes
Usually wakes of any kind display the left-over energy of another ship's frameshift drive. However, for some months now certain wakes represent a player being placed into a parallel dimension even htough you are in the same area with no other players around you. When that happens it is required to terminate one of the instances and try to connect to the correct instance with your friend in it. There is no way you could forcefully do it, all fate is determined by the P2P architecture.
Case 3: Extreme Pings
The latest addition of the network statistics are a sweet cherry on top of the never ending disaster. Average ping times of 500ms are pretty common and barely acceptable for any high-end gamer that can run Elite on ultra. The disparity between the different types of quality such as FPS and ping is extreme. And I am not exaggerating here. The visuals, sound and gameplay in Elite are atleast of A+ quality but the multiplayer connectivity could be coded by a hobby teenager with no financial fundamendation. Average ping times of high quality games usually don't exceed 100ms on average, Elite's average ping time is (as displayed) with 500ms.
To round it all up, there are some even more extreme cases with pings exceeding four digits in milliseconds (X>1000ms) .
Below in this spiler is a video of Rinzler and me having a friendly PvP duel which shows what extreme high pings (also known as latency) causes.
As you can see, it is not only immersion breaking and annoying, no, it is also limiting my ability to outmanouver my opponent. As soon as we get instanced together, this latency is applied to all characters (PCs and NPCs) which makes it impossible to dodge non-hitscan shots, limiting playability even further.
Case 4: Exploits
Last but so-not-least are the exploits that come with this architecture. The most obvious one is combat logging. Frontier have officially stated that combat logging is an exploit and not working as intended, however, as described previously in the "failure" section they failed to fix it even after more than two years which is 180° away from the direction of professionalism. There are no words of describing how wrong that feels. The only thing that can be said is that Frontier is ignoring certain flaws ingame and/or are refusing to solve harder problems tha trequire more resources than usual. To clarify my statement I'd like to mention that I define their behavior by their actions and not by their communication. "Working on it." or "SoonTM" are of no value here. Actual patches and/or hotfixes are the only thing that are considered in my statement and the lack of those patches underline my previous points.
Furthermore modeswitching is a common exploit too, many use it to generate more missions that are of better value. It's like having unlimited more turns/rolls on the mission board in order to pull higher value missions out of the RNG.
An official dev statement (which I am not willing to search now as it is tied deep down in the big forum of Elite: Dangerous) claims that modeswitching is not working as intended (just as combat logging). Said developer even gives the playerbase the fault for using it. The argument would be that there is no exploit if noone uses it. True, if we are all honorable and social players then noone would make use of combat logging or modeswitching. Furthermore there would be no player killing or war on planet earth in general. However, the reality looks different and simply hoping for a phantasy world won't help.
What Has To Be Done
Alot. A real lot of work. Basically the work that hasn't been done for the past two years since Elite has been oficially released. We players really don't care how you do it, Frontier. What we care about is the quality you deliver. You can use your P2P architetcure as long as the connectivity quality can be compared to other triple A++ games out there but the current reality is different to say the least.
First you have to improve general stability of the connections. The frequent DCs and crashes make it unplayable fro mtime to time, especially on server-sundays. Secondly is to improve the connections themselves. High pings and long loading times are not only annoying in their current state but limit playability as a whole. As a third thing to do you have to keep the achieved quality long term. There is no use improving something and screwing it all over again (Hello rare material reward bugs!). The result is once again a wasted resource as invesments have been made just to break it again.
And even though I claimed to not suggestion on how to do it I am still not understanding why we don't have servers. I simply do not believe Frontier that Elite has so much workload to be calculated that there is no top notch server capable of doing this. But even then why isn't there a central server for each instance that is populated with atleast 9 players that sends and recieves all the information from the players? Establish a really fast connection to the server so players only have to connect to a single end device instead of multiple once. This would take networkload away from the players and place it on a brand new device that soley is build to recieve and send information, not calculate the movements and other code stuff. The clients send the calculated information to the server which then passes it to all other players and does the same with all these other players in one instance. The server wouldn't be the key element of that, the connection between players and server would be plus the workload would be handle more efficiently.
I believe it is way easier said than done but we can all agree that in its current state the multiplayer connectivity is below today's standarts.
There Is Still Hope
Moving on, Frontier has announced that they want to focus now on improving the core game mechanics which also covers other issues such as powerplay being meaningless and the crime and punishment system being ridiculous.
Hoping that the netcode recieves a good amount of attention and love is the only thing I and others could possibly do now. And our repetetive request for Frontier to "Fix their damn game already!" have been heard.
Next thing to do is to re-establish the peek of the week link in the newsletter. I haven't read a newsletter ever since it has been removed even though they claimed to continue posting it after Horizons has launched.
My hope doesn't count towards the improvements themselves ... instead I hope tha tFrontier stops disappointing the players in insulting ways. It is obvious that game developement never meets 100% of the planned goals and that changes are being made such as the exclusion of an offline mode (which I would like to have seen as willingly as others) but certainy easy and basic disappointsments are the ones with the most impact. The termination of the peek of the week as well as general communication towards the player base adds heat to the debate in impacts the trust negatively.
Frontier, there is no possible way you can dodge or avoid negative criticism like this one (let it be constructivbe or not) and by refusing to communicate and exclude the player base you are just delaying the criticism and farming even more negativity due to the lack of information given to the community. It's a bad deal long term.
The game has changed in many ways and it is only logical to adapt to the new environment and circumstances. Change requires change and it's about time that Frontier finally changes its developement priorities so bug fixing and improvements are a top priority. Even meaningless bugs such as the FAS having the bottom right alarm light dispalced by 0.05 meters should be fixed. It just shows a high level of quality and professionalism to fix all know bugs and an acceptable seized timeframe.
As a little example, inside the spoiler below is a video showing player traffic from release to the end of year two.
Lastly I'd like to recommend something I have recommended before: Resilience. The community will watch every step you do and will try to find any reason to complain. It is their right to do so. If you are in need for compliments or are easily discourage by negativity which might impact your work then you are also in need for resilience. This throws up the debate of "Hardcore vs Carebear" and as a game developer of a potnetionally triple A++ game resilience is a minimum requirenment, especially with a growing player base as Elite. But remember: the quantity of players is not everything.
To come to an end I'd like to say thank you for your attention and as usual for my longer but rare essays ... I gonna fix the typos later as I am now not in the mood after a long period of time writing it.
Let's hope Frontier will do a great job fixing and improving Elite. Hoping is the only thing we can do besides writing too long-ish essays only a hand full of people read 100%.
Have a nice day
EDIT: First minor typo fixing
It happens again and again and with every patch it happens more frequently. Disconnects, instance crashes, multiple instances, insane high pings, desynchs and much much MUCH more related to multiplayer connectivity.
Now, not in a year or two, NOW is the time to finally improveme it and bring multiplayer to an acceptable standard. All modes are affected with Open Play obviously suffering the most of that.
But before I turn this into yet-another-rant I am actually now taking my time, sitting down and write a detailed and constructive post describing the issues, failures and what has to be done to solve them (not how, tho, this is neither my job nor my skillset).
By the way, there is no TL;DR version available this time ...
Let's start.
Multiplayer Connectivity Is Below Today's Standards
Yes it is, I know no other game that suffers more from these issues as Elite: Dangerous. Choosing P2P as the main connection architecture still creates discussions for multiple reasons. The most important ones, however, are that the P2P architecture is usually seen as a a greedy move by Frontier to save money at the cost of player experience.
With this thought in mind, let's take a look at the P2P architecture in the case of Elite:
Many of the P2P enemies (including myself) are requesting servers as a main connection architecture as experience shows that games with a client to server model (short: client-server-model; CSM) have generally better multiplayer connectivity than those who renounce servers. Examples are any given MMO(RPG) game that rely on servers vs any MMO(RPG) game that doesn't.
However, technology isn't as advanced as many of us think or expect it to be. Depending on where you live, your local internet connection determines your multiplayer connectivity quality in Elite. And if you are a poor one living in Australia (sorry, Rinzler) you gonna suffer from general technology standarts. Instead of glass fibre some countries still use bamboo filled with salty water and isolated with hardened clay to transmit electrical signals.
Additionally, there are cases where the net has already been improved and been blessed with glass fibre but due to insanely stupid house construction your home can't benefit from that as there is a 5m copper cable build deep down inside the basement which connects to the glass fibre, creating a bottleneck and rendering the benefits from glass fibre useless.
That said, P2P is extremely dependent by environmental circumstances.
The lack of servers leaves all the players with their own problems and issues which are carried directly into the game.
Frontier benefits from the lack of servers due to non-existent monthly cost, increasing the financial resources which ultimately benefits the game as a whole (or other games apart from Elite). But as stated above, player experience suffers and it has gotton to a point where not only the experience suffers but the general ability to play the game.
As an example we can mentioned the famous supercruise tunnel of death. Quite frequently in Open Play, I personally have experienced this in Solo as well. All attempts to work around that issue have failed and the connection error message appeared.
This essentially blocks game content from the player, limiting access. It might be worth mentioning that many players have a personal timeout error which is mostly know as patience. This value varies from player to player starting from 1 second and usually has no capping but a mathmatical limit that is determined by the circumstances. In my personal case, my timout error is set to 30 seconds simply because it is faster to task kill Elite and relaunch it than waiting 30 seconds to get into supercruise.
This is failure
Turn it all the way you want. We all love playing Elite, hence we are and complaint hoping something will be done to improve it. As long as we are the community/player base is in a healthy state but as soon as players stop caring, checking the forums or other media to get the latest news from Elite, the game will suffer from continous player base shrinking. I am speaking for myself now but I am aware that a good amount of my friends are thinking likewise: If these long existing issues are not getting fixed soonTM, they never will.
The connectivity has been a disaster since day one when Elite was released. Remember all the stories from commanders and friends trying to find eachother when wings weren't a thing?
"Where are you? I am at this antenna thing with the blinking red light on it."
"I am there too but I can't see you."
"Maybe you are at the other side? try turning around."
"Already circling that, what's your distance to the station?"
"Like 200 meters."
"Screw this, it's impossible."
... Yeah, people were going crazy trying to get instanced with their friends ... and you know what? People are still going crazy trying to get instanced. Another example is my very own private group with only two people whitelisted. The first one obviously being myself and the second one being my friend.
You'd expect that in a private group there is no need for multiple instances as there is no logical reason to seperate lone players as they represent the bare minimum of workload an instance has to carry. Yet the matchmaker decides to place us in seperate instances even though we are both in supercruise and there are only two people in that private group.
This is failure and limits playability on top.
In Open Play this issue is pretty much existing in any location at any given time as long as there is more than one player in the same area. Wing signals instead of actual ships being 1km away represent the failure of the network architecture and the netcode as a whole.
Wasted resources
Even though I am sounding mostly negative here, Frontier has proven to be highly professional in terms of bugfixing and improvements. Back then there was a ramming bug where rams wouldn't be count as a single hit, but multiple hits in a really tiny timeframe so you'd experience around 100 rams per second. This obviously increases the damage dealt/recieved by that value. Ships would instantly explode as soon as they would touch something with low velocity. Especially with that AI from that time, rams were quite frequent and so was the rebuy screen. I have written a forum post, demanding a 24h hotfix as this bug would break the game making the experience suffer and generally reducing my and other's motivation to play the game.
And see there! The next day I logged in Frontier have released a hotfix in less than 24 hours, fixing the ramming bug. This kind of work can be compared to other highly successful games. Bug fixing and improvements are a really high priority at successful games as they obviously enhance player experience (even though it doesn't contribute to income/profit as of new content/DLCs).
But times have changed. Instead of bug fixes and improvements we get unwanted game content such as CQC or multicrew. Even htough alot of players used these features, it has eroded quickly to a space desert which basically makes these features useless as they are unused. This blocks game content as other players are required for the usage of these features. Anyone up for a CQC match? (30 minutes later still looking for a match) No? Oh, okay ... noone here I suppose.
Why? Why are players not using these features? The answer is straight forward, simple and pretty obvious: lack of bug fixing and improvements.
The insane amount of bugs when multicrew was released made it nearly impossible to play with friends or randoms without experiencing a disconnect, crash, desynch or other playability limiting issues.
It's fine as long as it is just inconvinient to use but the disaster is routed in the low quality of the product itself which makes it not possible to use it. Compare it to a X52 Pro. The build quality is low and even my second new stick is already making weird noises. I am now keeping the old one for the sole reason to have a repair part delivery in case my new stick breaks. I pray to god it doesn't break at the same piece.
So what does this show us? The increased financial resources by renouncing servers and benefiting from a higher monthly profit is wasted and the human resources (developement/time) is too. Frontier invested in new content that is just as broken and unfinished as the P2P architecture. This means that we are currently in a lose-lose situation. We lose quality in order to be delivered with more low quality products. Quantity over quality is also an issue that can be seen in Elite's gameplay but that is another story and would lead to a case of off-topic.
Playability is limited
Yes it is. All modes are affected. And since Elite requires permanent connection to the servers the netcode and multiplayer achitecture plays a fundamental role in player experience. It is true that without multiplayer, Elite couldn't be played.
I would like to go into details now. Below are cases of frequent issues that are mainly connected to the multiplayer connectivity architecture.
Case 1: Supercruise Tunnel Of Death
It still happens, not as frequent as the latest patch but still frequent enough to represent a problem. You all know how it goes, you are in a populated area in any given mode (most frequent in Open Play, obviously) undock and wish to enter supercruise in order to fly over to the resource extraction site and do some bounty hunting. Upon charging your FSD you begin to count with your friendly board computer from "five" to "engage" ... "engage" ... "I said engage ..." ... "ENGAGE ALREADY!". But no, the 000.000 seconds are the longest zero seconds any time you enter supercruise in any populated area. Not-so-rarely it never will place you into supercruise as it can't connect to other players and/or the servers.
Case 2: Moving Wakes
Usually wakes of any kind display the left-over energy of another ship's frameshift drive. However, for some months now certain wakes represent a player being placed into a parallel dimension even htough you are in the same area with no other players around you. When that happens it is required to terminate one of the instances and try to connect to the correct instance with your friend in it. There is no way you could forcefully do it, all fate is determined by the P2P architecture.
Case 3: Extreme Pings
The latest addition of the network statistics are a sweet cherry on top of the never ending disaster. Average ping times of 500ms are pretty common and barely acceptable for any high-end gamer that can run Elite on ultra. The disparity between the different types of quality such as FPS and ping is extreme. And I am not exaggerating here. The visuals, sound and gameplay in Elite are atleast of A+ quality but the multiplayer connectivity could be coded by a hobby teenager with no financial fundamendation. Average ping times of high quality games usually don't exceed 100ms on average, Elite's average ping time is (as displayed) with 500ms.
To round it all up, there are some even more extreme cases with pings exceeding four digits in milliseconds (X>1000ms) .
Below in this spiler is a video of Rinzler and me having a friendly PvP duel which shows what extreme high pings (also known as latency) causes.
Ping measured with "Frames-to-reaction method": ~3000ms
Rinzler is located in Australia
I am located in Europe
However, this also happens with players from Europe and even my own country as well. Four digit pings are pretty common since the last ~ 10 patches.
[video=youtube;wR1js7Z0BjA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR1js7Z0BjA[/video]
Rinzler is located in Australia
I am located in Europe
However, this also happens with players from Europe and even my own country as well. Four digit pings are pretty common since the last ~ 10 patches.
[video=youtube;wR1js7Z0BjA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR1js7Z0BjA[/video]
As you can see, it is not only immersion breaking and annoying, no, it is also limiting my ability to outmanouver my opponent. As soon as we get instanced together, this latency is applied to all characters (PCs and NPCs) which makes it impossible to dodge non-hitscan shots, limiting playability even further.
Case 4: Exploits
Last but so-not-least are the exploits that come with this architecture. The most obvious one is combat logging. Frontier have officially stated that combat logging is an exploit and not working as intended, however, as described previously in the "failure" section they failed to fix it even after more than two years which is 180° away from the direction of professionalism. There are no words of describing how wrong that feels. The only thing that can be said is that Frontier is ignoring certain flaws ingame and/or are refusing to solve harder problems tha trequire more resources than usual. To clarify my statement I'd like to mention that I define their behavior by their actions and not by their communication. "Working on it." or "SoonTM" are of no value here. Actual patches and/or hotfixes are the only thing that are considered in my statement and the lack of those patches underline my previous points.
Furthermore modeswitching is a common exploit too, many use it to generate more missions that are of better value. It's like having unlimited more turns/rolls on the mission board in order to pull higher value missions out of the RNG.
An official dev statement (which I am not willing to search now as it is tied deep down in the big forum of Elite: Dangerous) claims that modeswitching is not working as intended (just as combat logging). Said developer even gives the playerbase the fault for using it. The argument would be that there is no exploit if noone uses it. True, if we are all honorable and social players then noone would make use of combat logging or modeswitching. Furthermore there would be no player killing or war on planet earth in general. However, the reality looks different and simply hoping for a phantasy world won't help.
What Has To Be Done
Alot. A real lot of work. Basically the work that hasn't been done for the past two years since Elite has been oficially released. We players really don't care how you do it, Frontier. What we care about is the quality you deliver. You can use your P2P architetcure as long as the connectivity quality can be compared to other triple A++ games out there but the current reality is different to say the least.
First you have to improve general stability of the connections. The frequent DCs and crashes make it unplayable fro mtime to time, especially on server-sundays. Secondly is to improve the connections themselves. High pings and long loading times are not only annoying in their current state but limit playability as a whole. As a third thing to do you have to keep the achieved quality long term. There is no use improving something and screwing it all over again (Hello rare material reward bugs!). The result is once again a wasted resource as invesments have been made just to break it again.
And even though I claimed to not suggestion on how to do it I am still not understanding why we don't have servers. I simply do not believe Frontier that Elite has so much workload to be calculated that there is no top notch server capable of doing this. But even then why isn't there a central server for each instance that is populated with atleast 9 players that sends and recieves all the information from the players? Establish a really fast connection to the server so players only have to connect to a single end device instead of multiple once. This would take networkload away from the players and place it on a brand new device that soley is build to recieve and send information, not calculate the movements and other code stuff. The clients send the calculated information to the server which then passes it to all other players and does the same with all these other players in one instance. The server wouldn't be the key element of that, the connection between players and server would be plus the workload would be handle more efficiently.
I believe it is way easier said than done but we can all agree that in its current state the multiplayer connectivity is below today's standarts.
There Is Still Hope
Moving on, Frontier has announced that they want to focus now on improving the core game mechanics which also covers other issues such as powerplay being meaningless and the crime and punishment system being ridiculous.
Hoping that the netcode recieves a good amount of attention and love is the only thing I and others could possibly do now. And our repetetive request for Frontier to "Fix their damn game already!" have been heard.
Next thing to do is to re-establish the peek of the week link in the newsletter. I haven't read a newsletter ever since it has been removed even though they claimed to continue posting it after Horizons has launched.
My hope doesn't count towards the improvements themselves ... instead I hope tha tFrontier stops disappointing the players in insulting ways. It is obvious that game developement never meets 100% of the planned goals and that changes are being made such as the exclusion of an offline mode (which I would like to have seen as willingly as others) but certainy easy and basic disappointsments are the ones with the most impact. The termination of the peek of the week as well as general communication towards the player base adds heat to the debate in impacts the trust negatively.
Frontier, there is no possible way you can dodge or avoid negative criticism like this one (let it be constructivbe or not) and by refusing to communicate and exclude the player base you are just delaying the criticism and farming even more negativity due to the lack of information given to the community. It's a bad deal long term.
The game has changed in many ways and it is only logical to adapt to the new environment and circumstances. Change requires change and it's about time that Frontier finally changes its developement priorities so bug fixing and improvements are a top priority. Even meaningless bugs such as the FAS having the bottom right alarm light dispalced by 0.05 meters should be fixed. It just shows a high level of quality and professionalism to fix all know bugs and an acceptable seized timeframe.
As a little example, inside the spoiler below is a video showing player traffic from release to the end of year two.
You can see the increasing amount of players over time populating the milky way (aka player base grows) which also increases the workload for the multiplayer connectivity architecture. I have been one of these dots from the beginning and I am still present as of today so I experienced the growing population of the milky way.
[video=youtube;TBD7txMVbxs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBD7txMVbxs[/video]
The increased workload requires an improved netcode or a netcode that is more suited for managing larger quantities of players. However, nothing has been developed so far to counter the issues with a larger playerbase and hence we are experiencing alot of issues.
[video=youtube;TBD7txMVbxs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBD7txMVbxs[/video]
The increased workload requires an improved netcode or a netcode that is more suited for managing larger quantities of players. However, nothing has been developed so far to counter the issues with a larger playerbase and hence we are experiencing alot of issues.
Lastly I'd like to recommend something I have recommended before: Resilience. The community will watch every step you do and will try to find any reason to complain. It is their right to do so. If you are in need for compliments or are easily discourage by negativity which might impact your work then you are also in need for resilience. This throws up the debate of "Hardcore vs Carebear" and as a game developer of a potnetionally triple A++ game resilience is a minimum requirenment, especially with a growing player base as Elite. But remember: the quantity of players is not everything.
To come to an end I'd like to say thank you for your attention and as usual for my longer but rare essays ... I gonna fix the typos later as I am now not in the mood after a long period of time writing it.
Let's hope Frontier will do a great job fixing and improving Elite. Hoping is the only thing we can do besides writing too long-ish essays only a hand full of people read 100%.
Have a nice day
EDIT: First minor typo fixing
Last edited:
