Open only content?

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Jack Schitt

Jack Schitt
If FD had followed through on the DDF NPC Proposal and given us a game with proper persistent AI that could be injected as part of a customisable mission system, this part of the storyline could have played out in every instance of every mode simultaneously and everyone could have "played their own way."

Instead we had a rush to release and further development effort concentrated on CQC and Powerplay (neither in the DDA) rather than core features, leading to limited non-persistent AI and a mission system that's not versatile enough to accept manual additions.

The end result was FD staff having to act like NPCs, thus forcing people into a single mode in order to have a limited chance of interacting with them, and a desperate eleventh hour appropriation of the inadequate CG mechanism in order to publish information in the most confusing way imaginable. What an utter shambles.

Just think about that first part for a second. This is a game whose core is so underdeveloped that staff members have to log in and play the role of non-player agents just to drive the plot forward. How tragic is that?

Only this morning I was praising the folks over on the Canonn thread for their tenacity in trying to unravel the seeds of this unfolding drama, and hoping that whatever transpired would be worthy of their efforts. From what I've read here and elsewhere the whole thing has been a major disappointment, notable only for highlighting -- yet again -- the ridiculous lack of consequence for indiscriminate murder in Open Play. I now feel sorry for anyone who dedicated significant time and effort to this mess, except SDC who seem to have got out of it exactly what they aimed for.

I know I run hot and cold on this game, and I try not to be too cynical, Lord knows I try. But FD are making it increasingly difficult. Their PR machine is writing cheques their software can't cash, and as the divide widens between where they want the story to go and what the game is capable of delivering, I worry that it can only get worse.

All of their corner-cutting chickens are now coming home to roost, and they're covering everything in a lovely thick layer of chicken manure.
 

Faybs

Faybs
Jack Schitt said:
If FD had followed through on the DDF NPC Proposal and given us a game with proper persistent AI that could be injected as part of a customisable mission system, this part of the storyline could have played out in every instance of every mode simultaneously and everyone could have "played their own way."

Instead we had a rush to release and further development effort concentrated on CQC and Powerplay (neither in the DDA) rather than core features, leading to limited non-persistent AI and a mission system that's not versatile enough to accept manual additions.

The end result was FD staff having to act like NPCs, thus forcing people into a single mode in order to have a limited chance of interacting with them, and a desperate eleventh hour appropriation of the inadequate CG mechanism in order to publish information in the most confusing way imaginable. What an utter shambles.

Just think about that first part for a second. This is a game whose core is so underdeveloped that staff members have to log in and play the role of non-player agents just to drive the plot forward. How tragic is that?

Only this morning I was praising the folks over on the Canonn thread for their tenacity in trying to unravel the seeds of this unfolding drama, and hoping that whatever transpired would be worthy of their efforts. From what I've read here and elsewhere the whole thing has been a major disappointment, notable only for highlighting -- yet again -- the ridiculous lack of consequence for indiscriminate murder in Open Play. I now feel sorry for anyone who dedicated significant time and effort to this mess, except SDC who seem to have got out of it exactly what they aimed for.

I know I run hot and cold on this game, and I try not to be too cynical, Lord knows I try. But FD are making it increasingly difficult. Their PR machine is writing cheques their software can't cash, and as the divide widens between where they want the story to go and what the game is capable of delivering, I worry that it can only get worse.

All of their corner-cutting chickens are now coming home to roost, and they're covering everything in a lovely thick layer of chicken manure.
Click to expand...

I think the problem is that it's literally impossible for there to be a single storyline and it not play out in open. Imagine they did this with an NPC and two players interacted with it, in their own instance. The first blows it up on sight and the second interacts with it and gets a clue. What will galnet say the next day? whatever it is, it will be wrong for one of those two.
 

Kubicide

Kubicide
Jack Schitt said:
If FD had followed through on the DDF NPC Proposal and given us a game with proper persistent AI that could be injected as part of a customisable mission system, this part of the storyline could have played out in every instance of every mode simultaneously and everyone could have "played their own way."

Instead we had a rush to release and further development effort concentrated on CQC and Powerplay (neither in the DDA) rather than core features, leading to limited non-persistent AI and a mission system that's not versatile enough to accept manual additions.

The end result was FD staff having to act like NPCs, thus forcing people into a single mode in order to have a limited chance of interacting with them, and a desperate eleventh hour appropriation of the inadequate CG mechanism in order to publish information in the most confusing way imaginable. What an utter shambles.

Just think about that first part for a second. This is a game whose core is so underdeveloped that staff members have to log in and play the role of non-player agents just to drive the plot forward. How tragic is that?

Only this morning I was praising the folks over on the Canonn thread for their tenacity in trying to unravel the seeds of this unfolding drama, and hoping that whatever transpired would be worthy of their efforts. From what I've read here and elsewhere the whole thing has been a major disappointment, notable only for highlighting -- yet again -- the ridiculous lack of consequence for indiscriminate murder in Open Play. I now feel sorry for anyone who dedicated significant time and effort to this mess, except SDC who seem to have got out of it exactly what they aimed for.

I know I run hot and cold on this game, and I try not to be too cynical, Lord knows I try. But FD are making it increasingly difficult. Their PR machine is writing cheques their software can't cash, and as the divide widens between where they want the story to go and what the game is capable of delivering, I worry that it can only get worse.

All of their corner-cutting chickens are now coming home to roost, and they're covering everything in a lovely thick layer of chicken manure.
Click to expand...

Lol well stated! And add to this the fact that even after moving the plot forward nothing was triggered in-game such as new content, etc.

Wish FDev would start thinking of Elite 2.0 and just dead-end this version of the game replacing it with one that has real multiplayer support, real persistence, real content and without the P2P based issues and limitations. Oh and a story arc of some sort that actually supports the Elite lore. :cool:
 

BostromNZ

BostromNZ
Jmanis said:
The issue is the instancing and the fact my Australian internet is utter weaksauce. Not FD's fault per-se, but it should definitely be a consideration if they're going to make you meet up with RP'ed players to get at content.
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Australian internet is woeful but even on a 200mb fibre connection in New Zealand instancing is a serious issue. The sad fact is that we're so far away from everyone else that our ping will be high regardless of the bandwidth we have available.
 

VR jefranklin18

VR jefranklin18
Maybe, just maybe, the actions of SDC may wake up Frontier and their completely gutless response to those that are out just to spoil it for others. It's not emergent content, it's juvenile <filtered>  acting like utter <filtered> .
 
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Plaxinov

Plaxinov
Open can be pretty daunting. Mobius, Private, and Solo exist for the faint of heart.

You're a fool to be missing out on this, though.

0xecKmK.jpg
 

AdmiralFloof

AdmiralFloof
Just come out into Open, meet players, wing up, make new friends. I made 6 new friends yesterdays just by fooling around in Cail and Pic Tok. People will Wing up with smaller ships because we all want to protect each other.
 

Falcon_D

Falcon_D
jasonbarron said:
Now if they'd just make all the rest of the game Open only we'd be getting somewhere:)
Click to expand...

Yup. Nowhere. Lol...

As the game was marketed as Open/Group/Solo. So open only content would cut that by two thirds. Population wise not so sure.

Anyway. It had to be open cause FDev decided in their wisdom that the clues should be given out by a real "actor" instead of an NPC. So group and solo were effectively cut off from the hunt. Unfortunately, no one told people about this ingame. And that's the point.

If people in solo and group were trying to figure things out for themselves instead of trying to read the forums and have it figured out for them, they would be scratching in the dark.

Edit: Lol... And now come all the open kiddies, spouting how cool they are to be playing Elite Dangerously.
 
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kofeyh

kofeyh
BostromNZ said:
Australian internet is woeful but even on a 200mb fibre connection in New Zealand instancing is a serious issue. The sad fact is that we're so far away from everyone else that our ping will be high regardless of the bandwidth we have available.
Click to expand...

This isn't the connection local, so much as distance between peers, as expressed in latency. Arguably, the amount of data shipped is actually trivial. I've watched it and it's very low rates. The issue is P2P is reliant on each peer being able to connect to the next peer. Frontier have made a decision to set an artificial constraint on how latent peers can be, this is expressed in game as seeing a wing mate as an FSD wake moving around. The game is quite literally refusing to instance because the latency is greater-than a set amount between two peers.

Whether that's a 'bug' as a consequence of the limitation, or actual expectation I cannot say. Frontier are busy and this issue really won't be addressed as it's not really considered important, despite Wings being a potential core mechanic of Open, or Private Group! Indeed, this is easily exposed by using a VPN that terminates in the US, because the peer is now 'local' the rules magically allow connection. So, I can VPN in to the US and wing up with any US based player, as much as I like; disconnect VPN and half of those commanders vanish. Apparently, this is "working as expected" because every time it's raised, frontier do not admit there is a limit, and blame ISPs or peering.

That I can trivially bypass this unspoken limit, by cranking up a VPN tail that technically actually increases latency because of the inherint delay induced by the overhead of encryption and decryption, never mind the VPN tail may not be operating over an optimal hop count, doesn't seem to support that it's an ISP peering or 'end user' problem. It's the nature of P2P and constraints.

I would argue that bandwidth is almost never an input cause (unless a commander decides to potentially breach ToS by artificially inducing huge lag for competitive advantage).

Never mind the game defaults to using uPnP and half the consumer routers/ modems on the planet have a very very broken/ unreliable implementation means peering can be spotty, or nonexistent. Again, this doesn't really impact Open beyond seeing less commanders in any given instance.

However, this isn't really a reason why one cannot be in open; because this doesn't impact AI, BGS or any other client-driven, or server-based activity. At all. In practice, open is simply less populated for those on a highly latent connection. That's it. In fact, those trying to engage a highly-latent commander are going to struggle as hit-box detection will be sporadic at best. Ships teleport and phase in/ out of the instance at will.

So - using latency isn't really a great example of not flying in open and hasn't been for the best part of a year or so; arguably since Alpha, actually. Frontier has also introduced more strict instancing rules for matchmaking. This, being their "fix" for said issue, means open is at worse less full of other commanders.

Not sure if that's the point you are making? Either way - points stand. I'm in Australia for the record, recently moved to fibre-based NBN which has helped somewhat, but I am none-the-less forced to use VPN to wing up with some US based friends, or simply not wing up with them. Either way, has basically zero reason as to why Open would be an invalid option.
 
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Aewarin Jameson

Aewarin Jameson
Jack Schitt said:
If FD had followed through on the DDF NPC Proposal and given us a game with proper persistent AI that could be injected as part of a customisable mission system, this part of the storyline could have played out in every instance of every mode simultaneously and everyone could have "played their own way."

Instead we had a rush to release and further development effort concentrated on CQC and Powerplay (neither in the DDA) rather than core features, leading to limited non-persistent AI and a mission system that's not versatile enough to accept manual additions.

The end result was FD staff having to act like NPCs, thus forcing people into a single mode in order to have a limited chance of interacting with them, and a desperate eleventh hour appropriation of the inadequate CG mechanism in order to publish information in the most confusing way imaginable. What an utter shambles.

Just think about that first part for a second. This is a game whose core is so underdeveloped that staff members have to log in and play the role of non-player agents just to drive the plot forward. How tragic is that?

Only this morning I was praising the folks over on the Canonn thread for their tenacity in trying to unravel the seeds of this unfolding drama, and hoping that whatever transpired would be worthy of their efforts. From what I've read here and elsewhere the whole thing has been a major disappointment, notable only for highlighting -- yet again -- the ridiculous lack of consequence for indiscriminate murder in Open Play. I now feel sorry for anyone who dedicated significant time and effort to this mess, except SDC who seem to have got out of it exactly what they aimed for.

I know I run hot and cold on this game, and I try not to be too cynical, Lord knows I try. But FD are making it increasingly difficult. Their PR machine is writing cheques their software can't cash, and as the divide widens between where they want the story to go and what the game is capable of delivering, I worry that it can only get worse.

All of their corner-cutting chickens are now coming home to roost, and they're covering everything in a lovely thick layer of chicken manure.
Click to expand...

Jack - as always - you sum up the problem elegantly so have some rep.

You're correct in that staff members having to play NPC is pathetic - FD are trying their best I am sure, but "reap what you sow" comes to mind and your chicken analogy is spot on :)
 
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[VR] Frank_G

[VR] Frank_G
A properly scripted chain of events and a few hint dropping NPCs would have been nice for all playstyles. I like, that Frontier wants to take part in such events and make it special, but as experienced, the trigger happy faction and the lack of proper instancing to arrange organized protection for key characters, makes decent RP events in open no fun.
 
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