According to the steam chart the player number almost tippled in a years time, that doesn't seem dead.
The numbers have been higher in the past, but are on the rise again.
Also, a lot of people, including me, play the game through the stand alone launcher, or via Epic.
Yes. As I've said, it is encouraging that Colonization has brought back a lot of players. Myself included. Sadly, I think the poor execution of that feature is causing people, like myself, to slowly try other parts of the game and lose interest.
https://steamdb.info/app/359320/charts/#6m That's an execution issue though, not a design issue.
You're citing these games as examples but you don't have any experience in them. It's all your imagination.
I've been playing EVE since 2007 and yet it was all in my imagination. Please, sir. Take a moment to read and comprehend the warning from our moderators to stay on topic. Refusing to read what I've earnestly proposed and inventing reasons why I'm not qualified to discuss the topic are not on-topic:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...esnt-have-to-be-this-way.636509/post-10612964
You put very little effort into formulating a clear suggestion. You can't expect someone to read 200,000 words for a concept that can be explained in 1 paragraph.
You haven't read my suggestions, as you yourself stated. If you have something constructive to contribute, by all means let me know.
And yet you're comfortable using Eve as an example... when you don't know anything about Eve.
You're trying to shoot down my suggestions when you know nothing about them.
All player driven economies are based on finite resources. Full stop.
Wrong. It's not an all-or-nothing requirement. Take Elite, for example. Trailblazers hit the BGS pretty hard for some resources and there was a high demand for them in specific areas. Players have been putting carriers filled with these resources near places with high demand. Players are using what little ability they have to make other goods and services available to their peers. They've been trying to build facilities to create these resources themselves too, and it might have worked if Trailblazers was functional. Even WOW has a marketplace which allows a few minimal aspects of the game to be player-driven even though resources aren't finite.
If you want your ideas to be taken seriously then spend some time learning player driven economy systems. The best way to do that is to actually spend some time in those games. Otherwise your ideas won't make any sense to anyone but you.
Perhaps if you actually read and comprehend what I've proposed, you would have some constructive dialogue to provide.
Yes, but which obvious direction?
The one everybody here keeps telling me I'm not the first person to mention. "Build systems and features that facilitate and encourage player interaction." I've made several viable suggestions in this thread, many of which are also similar to what people have asked for over the past decade. Here is a 10 year old video where a player correctly identifies the #1 issue with Elite, "player interaction". He recommends improvements to the mission, squad, and instancing system, and FDev has implemented a few of these things, which is great.
Source: https://youtu.be/Lgu9XtQqaFg?feature=shared&t=324
Here's another video from 2 years ago where a player is lamenting the lack of player interaction and features to facilitate it. He specifically says FDev should take a look at EVE online (
) for inspiration on how to create systems for groups of players to collaborate. Thankfully, the Vanguards update for Elite appears to be a step in the right direction here.
Source: https://youtu.be/0Gumgk7db6Y?feature=shared&t=647
Here's another video from just two weeks ago where a player is learning about Trailblazers for the first time, not fully understanding the mechanics, but still getting excited for the possibility that the game is heading in a more player-driven direction with player driven colonization and economies.
Source: https://youtu.be/PxoA8wHpbZ8?feature=shared&t=845
Note that all of these players and many people in their communities are all hoping for a better experience in Elite and not just bashing the game. The same is true for me. FDev likely won't implement systems to encourage and facilitate player interaction exactly as we've described them, but that's ok. They just need to be nudged in the right direction; the direction obvious to so many players over the years.
And here is the fundamental problem.
- you want a game with multiplayer interaction, with things like a player-driven economy and construction and competition and so on
- you want a game with the physical scale of an entire galaxy filled with star systems the size of star systems containing planets the size of planets
The two aren't compatible. It's not "missed potential", it's "you can't do both of those things well in the same game".
I understand your argument. Indeed 300B+ star systems and the time it takes to travel across them is very large. But I wouldn't say it "can't" be done. We've already seen FDev add SCO drives and some ships with longer jump capabilities. I don't know what the upper-limit on that would be, but that is one small change that allows players to move about the large galaxy more quickly and meet up with each other for various interactions more quickly. New players should absolutely start with short jumps just to get that feeling of scale that Elite provides, but it might be worth pushing the jump distances up for more advanced ships or adding more advanced ships and modules beyond what we have.
There are other ways to encourage player interaction even with a large galaxy. Give them more reasons to meet and interact. Several of my suggestions are intended to do just that. I actually think the size of the galaxy is good because even if the game were to see a population explosion it would allow everybody to hide out in more remote regions and potentially create their own assets there. Right now there is a 15LY limit on colonization but perhaps that could be adjusted and limited in some other way. There was a video from
CMDR Mechan a while back that I can't find where he mentioned 15LY limits just creates a bunch of systems with a single outpost and it clutters up the galaxy, and he suggested some ideas for how to allow colonization at more remote systems but with a time-based cooldown relative to the distance. Something like that could work.
Colonisation is a great feature in isolation (subject to implementation, bug fixes, polish, etc.) but it obviously massively exacerbates the "there are fewer online players than inhabited systems" problem. I've never seen another player in "my" system, and the traffic report suggests that I'm possibly missing a couple a week by not spending 24/7 sitting in supercruise watching out for them. I'm surprised that I still see as many other players as I do. Now, this is fine for ED as it stands - meeting other players is optional, you can make an appointment if you want to do so, it's not too difficult to meet up with your friends - but would be breaking the balance of any "you need to interact, at least indirectly, with other players" features in full chaos, if ED had any. And it makes it so much harder for ED to add any of those later, not that Frontier are likely to try.
Similarly a player-driven economy. The context of "Elite sequel" rather than "generic space game" means that there needs to be a way for players to (reliably!) make money by hauling cargo. The size of economy in terms of number of stations which could be supported purely by player hauling is tiny compared with the hundreds of thousands of markets there actually are. So even where player-driven economies exist in Elite Dangerous (Tritium, maybe some freight of colonisation supplies now) they're very much a sideshow.
(And also: it's easy to imagine a PDE for commodities and trading and maybe extending from that into ship-building. But what about for bounty hunting? Or exploration? Or salvage missions? Or passengers? Do those just largely vanish as paying activities because no other player has a motivation to pay you to do them, or do they stay as a static NPC-fed source of credits which pushes ridiculous inflation on the PDE trading side?)
You said you were disappointed to realise that most of the ships you met were NPCs; the alternative, given the scale of the galaxy, was for you to almost never see another ship (and the entire combat side of the game to collapse due to lack of targets, since no-one is going to volunteer to be "comedically incompetent RES pirate #33"). Dual Universe just had [1] a single star system (though again a realistically-sized one) and couldn't even fill that properly purely with real players even at its height despite implementing a full shopping list of "EDs missing features" to attract everyone.
Huge amounts of ED gameplay, especially on the multiplayer side, is constantly running into the "space is really big and therefore you need an appointment to meet anyone" problem. Conversely, a game with all the multiplayer interaction you desire couldn't have anything approaching ED's scale (certainly not for inhabited space; maybe uninhabited space; even realistic-sized star systems would be a tough thing to include)
Your points here are all valid. I would just encourage you to think outside the box a little bit. Player interaction is partially a scale issue as you have stated but it's also a design and UI issue. Players do rely on hauling and mining to make money in the game, but many players have made it clear they are tired of pressing J (especially after Trailblazers) and would like the ability to hire or coordinate NPC operated haulers. The game already lets players build facilities that create resources automatically (at least after they fix Trailblazers), so in theory if they get it working right there could be a small trickle of mined resources into systems with refineries and players could schedule trade routes of those resources to specific systems. The BGS is supposed to handle this now, but it's very hand-wavey and doesn't let the players make these decisions. You could keep some aspects of the BGS operating at a smaller level while allowing players to make larger trade and resource allocation decisions themselves. The simple act of opening up these mechanics to the players makes the game more compelling to a large audience who has been asking for this type of thing for years.
With the potential changes in Vanguards, they're using a few simple UI changes to help players find each other and collaborate in game. That's great. There are lots of other UI changes and mechanics you could add that would encourage players to find each other; see the video above from 10 years ago where a player asks for FDev to look at what EVE built and learn a few things from them. Maybe you could even gamify it in some way by using the D-Scanner or Nav Beacon to help you identify other systems with a player population heat map, or something similar to that. Maybe it doesn't work in remote or relatively uncolonized areas to let players hide out when they want to.
One player did say that Elite needs to cut its number of star systems down by half or more. I don't know if that is the right move today. People have invested a lot of time exploring and scanning remote systems so cutting down their number would hit a lot of dedicated players. Maybe there's some way to do it, but I think other mechanics are far preferable.
What games do you normally play? Is your real life full of super exiting things?
See my post here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...esnt-have-to-be-this-way.636509/post-10613249
And yes. I am grateful to have lived a good life.
Well, gents. This has been an interesting discussion, but it is time for me to take my leave. I learned a lot and certainly was surprised at the response. To those of you who engaged constructively, thank you. I appreciate your thoughtful analysis.
I look forward to seeing what FDev does in the next few years. If it is compelling, I would love to return and I'm sure many other players would also love to see this game be revived. Until then, fly safe (or dangerous). o7
