Mystery event disaster review

[tarragon]

Few assets that barely look like a crashed ships to which we were lead by arbitrary merry chase, that was done for "fun" plot wise, no deeper drama or motive, no narrative enhancing and expanding ed lore, nothing. Hints were fine logical puzzles requiring thought. Crossword level entertainment, variation on old Einstein puzzle, yet simpler at that.

Nothing to interact with, no tangible or intangible reward like titles, special engineering mod or at least cargo that could be sold. Who wouldn't just collect the whole alien debris? Secret is out, yet galnet is silent.

No cordons being erected around it by Imperial xenocorps. No Feds arriving with cruisers, no hastily erected tent structures in the vicinity of the crash site - of religious fanatics expecting some sort of miracle.

The execution was poor, the concept was badly thought out, puzzles were acceptable. FailedDevelopments should get a hint and try harder. This is level of questing you would expect of people running pirated WoW shard in their basement.


FailedDev treats everything they do for this game with the "minimal viable product" mentality. There is no love in this beyond work of audio and simulation team. Game design guys are the worst here. Funny enough, this is not the case with Planet Coaster. They put in quite a lot of extra work and far more passion.
Leads one to speculate, that FDev has already given up on ED and leaves only skeleton crew. Shiplaunched fighters are honestly not a gamescom level key announcement and rest of the features took even less time...
Such a waste.

 

[SheepDip82]

Inclined to agree. Very disappointing.

 

[Luponator]

Since launch, have you seen anything else, anywhere? So this is totally par for the course and won't change in the future, either. Can't wait to get 'new' Thargoid missions on the mission board- fly X units of Y to a new type of USS, or fetch from said USS. Etc Etc. Sad, but probably the way things keep going.

 

[Siranui]

no tangible or intangible reward like titles, special engineering mod or at least cargo that could be sold.

Tangible?

There are no tangible rewards: This is a computer game. No amount of credits or mods are tangible. We play for fun.

I haven't heard any words of complaint from the people who were first to the wreck site regarding rewards.

Personally, I had a lot of fun with this. If I wanted credits I'd have been doing the CGs instead.

Secret is out, yet galnet is silent. No cordons being erected around it by Imperial xenocorps. No Feds arriving with cruisers.

It's been about three hours. You expect the military to be able to respond that fast with capital ship deployment, 500LY outside of the Bubble, based entirely on independent pilot scuttlebut?

 

[tarragon]

Tangible?

There are no tangible rewards: This is a computer game. No amount of credits or mods are tangible. We play for fun.

I haven't heard any words of complaint from the people who were first to the wreck site regarding rewards.

Personally, I had a lot of fun with this. If I wanted credits I'd have been doing the CGs instead.



It's been about three hours. You expect the military to be able to respond that fast with capital ship deployment, 500LY outside of the Bubble, based entirely on independent pilot scuttlebut?

Tangible in the sense of something you get ingame. Even a stupid bobblehead with piece of wreckage mounted on top of it.. kind of I WAS THERE AND ALL I GOT IS AN ALIEN BOBBLEHEAD reward. Obviously, this one would glow with cheap led light and would be visible by others in they get to your windshield.


Yes, I expected Galnet flash message to be present the moment this hit forums and some serious effects afterwards.
It is sad to see people settle for so little. Maybe your view of FDev is already so low, even this exceeded your expectations?

 

[Mark Zima]

xxxxx

 

[thormadragon]

Tangible?

There are no tangible rewards: This is a computer game. No amount of credits or mods are tangible. We play for fun.

I haven't heard any words of complaint from the people who were first to the wreck site regarding rewards.

Personally, I had a lot of fun with this. If I wanted credits I'd have been doing the CGs instead.



It's been about three hours. You expect the military to be able to respond that fast with capital ship deployment, 500LY outside of the Bubble, based entirely on independent pilot scuttlebut?

Dont bother, click through tarragons forum posts and you will see a spectrum of negativity that is unmatched. Forums get flooded by all those "but i have an opinion and i wanna be heard" whiners. Tarragon just quit the game if you hate it so much that you need to insult its developers jeez... And dont come back.

 

[Siranui]

Tangible in the sense of something you get ingame. Even a stupid bobblehead with piece of wreckage mounted on top of it.. kind of I WAS THERE AND ALL I GOT IS AN ALIEN BOBBLEHEAD reward. Obviously, this one would glow with cheap led light and would be visible by others in they get to your windshield.

Yes, I expected Galnet flash message to be present the moment this hit forums and some serious effects afterwards.
It is sad to see people settle for so little. Maybe your view of FDev is already so low, even this exceeded your expectations?

Oh, you mean a 'completely intangible few bytes of data' tangible award.

I don't think that material reward is the reason people get involved with these things. It is not their motivation.

Plus, people were annoyed enough not to have managed to participate fully on Sunday and viewed it as unfair that they could not all meet all the NPCs. Imagine how much worse that would be if one, or several players actually got something from it?

And that's another issue: Who gets the reward? The person who stumbled across it? Their Wing? The people who narrowed down the system search? The people who made spreadsheets? Solved one of the clues several days ago? Which clue do they have to solve to get a prize? The entire Cannon crew get something? What about people who aren't Cannon but contributed?

As to official response, FD have already stated that they wish to speak to the people involved and get things first hand and properly attributed... y'know: So people can be *rewarded* [as you desire] by a namecheck. Or would you prefer a canned, pre-prepared news item saying 'independent pilots found this blah'?

 

[cheesenbiscuits]

And just for good measure,i have no idea where i'm supposed to go.

 

[dannysquid]

I've been watching the threads and it seemed fun to me. Isn't it just a nice little preview of coming attractions? Maybe just play something else until there's an addition you like the look of. We're not forced to take part.

 

[SheepDip82]

If you're going to have a mystery/treasure hunt, the first rule is probably to have the payoff be greater than the clues/hype. There was a substantial amount of stuff released over Gamescom - leading all to conclude (almost universally) - it's an alien ship. There was the clues in the binary, the broken image of the crashed ship, and the damaged Cobra amongst wreckage.

At this point - I don't think anyone was doubting that it was alien. Hell - day one of gamescom came with news that there's aliens in the press teaser.

What followed was a trail of (underwhelming, by Sunday's standards) breadcrumbs that lead to - the same activities we've been doing since forever (bring lots of x to location y) and - a crashed alien ship - as depicted in the broken image. No interactivity, no great revalation, nothing. So the clues led to the thing everyone had already concluded, that FD had made abundantly clear? Great treasure hunt!

When Elite generates a buzz like it did at Gamescom my friends ask me about what's going on - and then I explain as it unfolds - they say "is that it?".

We aren't forced to take part - we're compelled to - it's exciting - it's interesting. Only it isn't.

Was that it?

 

[Leo Sagan]

To me, the objectives of the event were 1) To tease the aliens further 2) To give the CANONN minded tinfoil hats some kicks 3) To advance the main story (with Drew covering the thing through his coming book)

All these objectives were achieved.

But the whole realisation was a mess, because the event had to be played through the current mechanics of the game, so no real crime & punishment system (the dev NPC was griefed ... LoL woot !?) and no real way to do anything but watch youtube / twitch podcasts.

FD needs to find a way to involve the player base in these events in a meaningful way, not only one or two CMDRs. Of course, only one should find the first wreck (?). But once this was done, there should have been *many* more "wrecks" to find, using scanners tuned to match some technobabbly frequency discovered thanks to the first alien thingy analysis for instance. A real scanning game mechanics would help in that regard but that's another story.

This is the main weakness of FD's story telling, and it is a recurring problem : not everyone can save the princess, I get it, but not everyone (except very few) will enjoy watching and find nothing.

While I think the OP is way too harsh (the event had a few good points), I have to agree that it was, overall, a failure.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[koop26]

I think the ship is a super cool reveal. I do agree they probably could have had a different way of leading us to it.

 

[Chris Simon]

Is reward really that important to people?

I never saw anyone who scaled a mountain to be peeved that they didn't "get anything for it" They did. They scaled the mountain!
Imagine the interview with a runner who just won a marathon - "No, I really don't care about running, I just really wanted that medal"

I suspect it is the generation of the day, corrupted by all those Steam and Xbox "Achievements", obsessed with collecting and hoarding meaningless trophies.

Personally, I couldn't care less about "What do I get out of it". It's interesting. It's an exciting adventure (if you have even a glimpse of playfulness and imagination in your blood) and that is rewarding enough for me.

 

[Deathwatch]

I do think it would be more dramatic if imperial, federal capital class vessels and alliance carrier class dropped in on its first discovery, would have made it interesting.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

So ... what's the result? Winter has been cancelled?

 

[Leo Sagan]

So ... what's the result? Winter has been cancelled?

Not a chance.
Listening to djtruthsayer's podcast right now and I must admit the guy has a pretty convincing theory for the upcoming story.

 

[Cosmo]

I think the ship is a super cool reveal. I do agree they probably could have had a different way of leading us to it.

The eventual reveal of the Thargoid ship is very cool. Not so much the puzzles a few days beforehand. That could've been mitigated if they updated all pilots in-game on time whenever a new discovery was made. Then they wouldn't be confused, wasting their time looking for stuff that was already solved.

 

[Privata]

I did not like the plot (about the gang finding it first and playing a game) because it felt gamey.

However I love the ship , it looks very alien and somewhat scary.
its far better than a lot of MMO or online events , just I hope FD stop with the gamey events , rise to power was horrible this was less so , but still a bit wonky

That being said , I found the ship amazing

 

[CMDR Kantos Kan]

I watched from the sidelines. Read about the various clues and the clue givers but was not tempted to participate. I don't know, it just didn't pick my curiosity. Now, the shipwreck has been found. I'll probably go find it myself, take a few screenshots then will go back home. I don't know if many others felt like me. There are so many nuts in the Cannon group that immediately jumped on the crumbs that I didn't even think competing with them to be the first ONE. That was OK. I'm not upset or anything but I agree that this whole thing was not particularly appealing to me.