Great, so engineering is not a grind. Glad we agree.
My new player experience (262 hours of play time) - It doesn't have to be this way
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Not really, it's grindy to the point Fdev has acknowledge it themselves, nerfed it into the ground thrice, and it's still annoying and grindy as hell because you need to drop everything you were currently doing for the entire day, if not several days at a time, and focus on nothing but engineering.
Per single ship.
So is it an "evening" or an "entire day" or "several days"?
Explain what you mean by "unlocking" material traders.
You're just making stuff up
In the first iterations of engineering you had to have Allied rep to use Material traders. Hi My account is very old.So is it an "evening" or an "entire day" or "several days"?
Explain what you mean by "unlocking" material traders.
You're just making stuff up
It really really depends on what you want and what you don't have because some people don't obsessively fill their inventory with stuff and just log into this game every few years and stop playing a while.
You know all this engineering debate could be settled if, perhaps, players could build up their own engineering skill and sell engineered modules on a marketplace. Keep the NPCs as a backup maybe but let players freely profit for their efforts. Maybe make it difficult to solo level engineering skill without other players bringing in lots of materials to do multiple upgrades, but not totally prohibitive. Players could decide where to specialize based on what they themselves need or based on market demand.
On second thought, no. That would encourage more player interaction in game and create a player-driven economy for modules. We can't do that now, can we. That might be fun and engaging. /s
On second thought, no. That would encourage more player interaction in game and create a player-driven economy for modules. We can't do that now, can we. That might be fun and engaging. /s
You know all this engineering debate could be settled if, perhaps, players could build up their own engineering skill and sell engineered modules on a marketplace. Keep the NPCs as a backup maybe but let players freely profit for their efforts. Maybe make it difficult to solo level engineering skill without other players bringing in lots of materials to do multiple upgrades, but not totally prohibitive. Players could decide where to specialize based on what they themselves need or based on market demand.
On second thought, no. That would encourage more player interaction in game and create a player-driven economy for modules. We can't do that now, can we. That might be fun and engaging. /s
I'd want to avoid player interaction at all cost on this dogwater peer to peer system. We have a 300+ post long port forwarding nightmare thread for a reason.
Wrong about what? You're just allergic to criticism and can't handle what other people perceive as being a grind. It's like saying someone's comitting a thought crime if they don't like your game or something. Actually not even the entire game, just a single part of said game. This is a very weird, stupid, toxic attitude that you space grandpa's all share.
It's like saying someone's wrong for using a cutter for mining or something.
You described yourself quite well there. Thanks for the clarification.
Yeah presumably a market or contract system could be handled through an enhancement to the starbase interface, but who knows what kinds of networking changes would be required. It's possible the networking is what's holding the devs back from doing anything interesting. Good point.
That said, why do I get disconnected 1-2 times per hour from this game if it's P2P and I'm all alone in a system? No other game disconnects me at all. Not Star Citizen. Not EVE. Not FPS games like Counter Strike.
I can't blame them, honestly. I'd be irritable too if my favorite game got the same consistent feedback from players for 10 years and FDev never even attempted to address it, so it just keeps coming.
- "Elite isn't taking advantage of its potential"
- "Mile wide and inch deep"
- "EVE did ____ in 2003"
- "Dead game" (It really is. For all the 2015 hype it has gone nowhere)
- Engineering.
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Extraordinary hubris.
It certainly isn't, it is the date of joining the forum.
I was playing for a year or so before joining the forum. YMMV, of course.
I'm the 1% who understands it better than them...
...don't you just love the Dunning-Kruger effect?
(Yes, I'm exercising some much needed levity, as usual!)
Given the choice - this isn't EVE, people really like their co-op - players would make a 12-way alliance for Powerplay to avoid having to worry about undermining.
In practical terms of where Powerplay actions are spent, they're doing that already; there are a few player groups - including some claiming to be "the official unofficial Powerplay communities" - trying to attack others but if "majority will" could by some mechanism enforce a peace treaty on them it would do: defensive/peaceful actions outweigh aggressive actions in Powerplay by a >15:1 ratio.
This isn't inconsistent: Elite Dangerous was designed as a multiplayer-first project by a company which didn't know what that implied, sold to a group of 80s/90s nostalgia fans who largely didn't know either and were only really expecting "FFE, but you can fly with your friends if you want" (and that bit, they got)
So they had all sorts of grand plans in 2012-2014 for how multiplayer would work, very few of which survived contact with reality. The shared BGS is one of the few bits which sort-of worked. They figured out their mistakes eventually but by then it was far too late to do anything about most of them - and therefore future designs very much continued the "but actually meeting other players is entirely optional and not even all that useful" side because anything requiring multiplayer cooperation was never going to get much use.
For PowerPlay, as I RP as a law-abiding pilot, I find that reinforcement comes naturally but undermining will usually get me into dodgy stuff I don't want to do. Maybe activities could be diversified a bit (rares trading???).
The Thargoid war gave me my only experience of ad-hoc group co-op play. It was great to turn up at a Thargoid zone in Open and just fight alongside other players. Maybe the sheer size of the galaxy usually spreads us out too much for this to happen.
True, Elite is very much a continuation of the original Elite game. And that means its fundamentally bound to be a single-player experience no matter how much they try to make it shared. the best we get is contributing many people to a single grind target, like colonisation or powerplay objectives. Fair enough, but you can do all that in solo mode, hence still effectively a single-player game.
And that's not a problem. The problem for Frontier is that they try to stretch what they have into a grind, possibly with a mindset that "more time spent in front of the screen doing nothing counts as player engagement". And that's not true. Tediously sitting watching nothing for an hour, or grinding away at a task is not fun gameplay, and that only endss up driving players away - net eyeballs is much reduced. Elite could have a lot more players, if only thre gameplay was actually focussed on the engaging parts and not the tedious parts. Frontier can fix this by giving playerts the convenience functions we keep asking for, reducing the artifically-forced limitations and letting us get on with the fun gameplay parts.
And that's not a problem. The problem for Frontier is that they try to stretch what they have into a grind, possibly with a mindset that "more time spent in front of the screen doing nothing counts as player engagement". And that's not true. Tediously sitting watching nothing for an hour, or grinding away at a task is not fun gameplay, and that only endss up driving players away - net eyeballs is much reduced. Elite could have a lot more players, if only thre gameplay was actually focussed on the engaging parts and not the tedious parts. Frontier can fix this by giving playerts the convenience functions we keep asking for, reducing the artifically-forced limitations and letting us get on with the fun gameplay parts.
Indeed I am quite extraordinary and my fascination with how this game as a project managed to do so many things well and still fell short is also extraordinary. But let me yield the floor to you, good sir. What is your analysis of Elite Dangerous, its design, its history, and why it fails to capture a larger audience? What changes would you propose to try and make the game more appealing to a broader audience while still retaining the core components that made Elite compelling for the first year or so?
Or would you, like many here, prefer to maintain the status quo out of fear of... something I can't quite pin down yet? What exactly is it that makes this community so hostile to change or even the mere suggestion of improvements? Many of those suggestions are frequent and common. What do you have to lose? Colonization released and you saw a spike in players returning to the game. Are people not hungry for the kinds of features I propose? Yes many are:
But go ahead. Enlighten me. I would love to learn more from my betters.
Fair enough. I would have expected FDev to follow CCP's example for networking, but perhaps they didn't have the technical chops for it. That's also confusing because FDev managed so many other technically challenging aspects of Elite extremely well. CCP somehow did a global unified server architecture and they had to withhold paychecks to their employees for several months leading up to the release because they were out of cash. That was 2003 before anybody had done something of that scale in a game. When that architecture eventually ran into load issues because they were more successful than they could have imagined, they found some creative solutions and kept things going strong decades later.
It must have taken a while to get co-op multiplayer working through because in 2015 my friends and I were completely baffled as to why we couldn't get into the same mission or signal instances, and ultimately quit. Maybe it was just a UI issue. But even this year, it was impossible for me to get my friends to join me for more than 30 minutes before realizing "yeah not much has changed really".
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Projecting strawman with snide hyperbole.
I haven’t made any claims regarding these matters and whether or not I agree with all or some or none of your points. I merely observed that your implication that you understand these things better than 99% of the playerbase is extraordinary hubris. Which I maintain it is.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
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Material Traders were introduced long after the first iterations of engineering, and allied rep may or may not have been required when they were introduced but is rarely a problem to achieve.