Open-Only in PP2.0?

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

By whom?

The individuals who express their disatisfaction regarding their experience in Open?

.... or by those who wish to categorise those players who express their disatisfaction with their experience in Open or their preference for the other game modes?

.... or simply not wishing to have ones time wasted by another player choosing to do what they want to do with little or no consideration as to what their selected target wants to do.

Indeed, noting that some have already had their negative experiences as a result of player encounters in Open and have made their own mind up on the subject.

Whether dodging an unwanted encounter initiated by another player represents an "enhancement" to the player's gameplay, or not, rather depends on the player - and is not a in any way guaranteed.

I'm just talking about people who weren't sure about open and then realised they were worried about nothing, in fact that they were missing out. That's been my predominant experience of people in my orbit. "I was frightened of open and then I tried it and it's great I never looked back!". Soooo many times I've read almost exactly those words. Sometimes it goes the other way, but in the end we're talking about statistics of what the majority prefer. I spend a lot of time across a rather large and broad selection of Elite discord servers and I find the odd guy who swears off open to generally have been ganked once and took it badly, or to have believed the hype about open being a toxic wasteland. I think this debate is really polarised and the majority of players (a) aren't that bothered by occasional PvP they didn't expect/ask for and (b) aren't that fussed about spending all their time in open. Oh and (c) really can't be bothered engaging in this debate. Because busy enjoying the game.

 

[Morbad]

I don't know if I can properly explain my situation ....

(I'm not saying it's right or good, I'm just describing my condition).
The thing is that when I read a fiction book (I read only what I am interested in, otherwise I quit) I am totally in the story. I imagine myself there.
So with games, I play only games that are interesting to me, and I am entirely in the game. If my ship is shot down, I worry as if it were my own ship. Yes I agree, if I didn't take the game seriously (I certainly wouldn't play such a game) I would evaluate the game as a set of dots on the screen and I wouldn't care.
Everyone has a different attitude towards games.

I remember when they were looking for the Guardian bases and put forward different theories I was so much immersed that I constantly forgot that it was a game ...

How does the lack of loss, in a scenario that should result in loss, facilitate that immersion?

I try to be similarly immersed in my character and try to have my character behave as I think he would were he a real entity facing real scenarios...which is precisely why many aspects of the game have become increasingly frustrating, for me, as time has gone on. The game tells me one thing, but shows me something entirely different.

Risk is a big part of this. The setting has a veneer of risk, but it's a pretty thin one that has been further chipped away as the game has evolved. We are told it's a cutthroat galaxy where winding up destitute or dead are implicit possibilities...but the game's mechanism ensure a hyperbolic trajectory of progress for even the most inept of CMDRs. The stream of lore we're fed and the language used in how NPCs communicate with us leaves the impression that trade and economics are every bit as critical in the Elite setting as they are in the real world...but the we quickly discover that the numbers don't add up and that the setting is somehow functionally post-scarcity, but the culture arbitrarily clings to hyper-capitalistic tropes, for no discernible reason. Finally, our CMDRs are ostensibly threatened with all sorts of consequences for the myriad of possible failure (or less than perfect success) scenarios...but even the absolute worst of these amount to nothing.

I want to play a character who has to face and overcome challenges to survive, let alone thrive, but all challenges have been reduced to solipistic contrivances because the marginal consequence mechanisms we started with did not only fail to be fleshed out, they were diluted. Playing this game like an RPG (which is ultimately what I was after) is like trying to taste the imaginary flavor in some quack's homeopathic dilution. When I was five I pretended my toy spaceships could explode and their crew could suffer some horrific fate; now I watch my CMDR's spaceship explode and still have to pretend my CMDR is somehow worse off for it. Whole lot of hardware and software here that should be closing some of that immersion gap with the fantasy it's trying to sell me.

 

[SergMx]

How does the lack of loss, in a scenario that should result in loss, facilitate that immersion?

The thing is, to me, it's compensation for the wrong world of Elite.

From the big difference between NPCs and humans to the world building. Despite the fact that there are Powers, security statuses, etc. the whole Elite world is a complete Anarchy.

 

[Screemonster]

I remember the 'Egg' exploit in borann.
I don't know if anyone was banned for taking advantage of it. But my point is that gamers (cmdrs) take the risk ONLY if they know they can get away with it.
It's for the developers to curtail such activities.

The big problem there is that they swung the hammer and crushed LTD mining in general, rather than dealing with the singular hyperspecific instance that made the eg lucrative - that it was a persistent jackpot spawn close enough to a landmark that it could be reliably located and farmed over and over. The fact that these rocks generated at all wasn't actually a problem - the problem was that once someone found a specific one that they could tell everyone where to find it, the floodgates opened.

Personally, instead of all FDev's fixes to markets and nerfing hotspot overlaps and so on, I'd have included a week number in the random seed for generating asteroid yields and incremented it on the maintenance every thursday - meaning that even if someone got super lucky and found a jackpot rock first thing thursday morning, they'd have at most a week to goldrush it before everything got shuffled again.

 

[Screemonster]

Risk is a big part of this. The setting has a veneer of risk, but it's a pretty thin one that has been further chipped away as the game has evolved. We are told it's a cutthroat galaxy where winding up destitute or dead are implicit possibilities...but the game's mechanism ensure a hyperbolic trajectory of progress for even the most inept of CMDRs.

This is kind of an unresolvable problem.
Losing all your stuff, making rebuys more punishing, enforced iron man mode and so on, all these things would train the playerbase to be even more risk-averse than they already are.

Where death is punishing, any instance where players encounter it is treated as an unfair failure state to be avoided at all costs.

And what you get is shrieking protests and refusal to engage and calls for nerfs when any new activity is added where players stand a chance of losing.

Even in powerplay, where rebuys are cancelled and the majority of the time you're not even carrying cargo to lose, where merits are awarded instantly and cannot be lost, players still have, through force of habit, the sense that a player seeing the rebuy screen is a failure on the part of the developers, something that should not have happened or been allowed to happen. Hell, when odyssey launched people complained about getting killed on foot which literally costs nothing.

You can have risk and frequent player death, or you can have harsh failure penalties. You can't have both.

 

[Shurimal]

players still have, through force of habit, the sense that a player seeing the rebuy screen is a failure on the part of the developers, something that should not have happened or been allowed to happen

And on the other end of the spectrum: Souls-likes, rogue-likes and really difficult platformers (Super Meatboy-likes?) are very popular. Frequent failure is expected and the overall attitude of these communities seems to be a healthy "I died—so what?" where failure is not seen as something to fear or despise, but something to learn from. The attitude I strive to cultivate in myself, too, even if I'm not really a fan of all those -likes genres

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

And on the other end of the spectrum: Souls-likes, rogue-likes and really difficult platformers (Super Meatboy-likes?) are very popular. Frequent failure is expected and the overall attitude of these communities seems to be a healthy "I died—so what?" where failure is not seen as something to fear or despise, but something to learn from. The attitude I strive to cultivate in myself, too, even if I'm not really a fan of all those -likes genres

that is fair enough however i personally play elite dangerous as if it were me flying in those ships and as such - outside of CQC - destruction is something i absolutely want to avoid at all costs.

yes the reality is we lose little and cant die however IF it were real, destruction even with a remlok suit or an escape pod would still be something you use as a last resort and not something you would happily have willy nilly.

platformers with lives can be fun but i do not play them for versimilitude (ironically getting away from arcade like 3 lives and high scores was a key sales point of the original elite)

rogue/souls likes i can also enjoy but they are fantasy games where death means something different rather than elite which is mean to be a hardish scifi.

(all just from my perspective i do not claim to be right........ but it is why i play elite)

the onfoot portion raises a slightly different challenge.............. with no real ability to incapacitate and hide bodies and with numbers stacked against us, there is always the lkelyhood of things going sideways and death can be inevitable. For me the entire way the on foot combat works in elite dangerous is incompatible with the main part of the game and again, just me but , it feels like a totally different game bolted on.

as such i generally dont play the on foot content. i would have far preferred a slower on foot content with less about mass shootouts and a lot more emphasis on NOT getting killed.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

And on the other end of the spectrum: Souls-likes, rogue-likes and really difficult platformers (Super Meatboy-likes?) are very popular. Frequent failure is expected and the overall attitude of these communities seems to be a healthy "I died—so what?" where failure is not seen as something to fear or despise, but something to learn from. The attitude I strive to cultivate in myself, too, even if I'm not really a fan of all those -likes genres

Though permadeath roguelikes, at least, despite appearances don't have a particularly harsh failure penalty - yes, you die and have to start over, but they generally have a fairly front-loaded difficulty curve so you're not usually losing very much actual progress, and a winning run is over in relatively few hours too ... for which the quantitative reward is also starting over.

Checking my recent DCSS times, my two winning runs were about ten hours each (and the record for top players is well under two hours), while the median time for my last hundred losing runs is just under eleven minutes with a relatively small fraction exceeding even a single hour.

If the consequences of ship loss in ED were capped at "you might lose your last ten minutes progress, maybe an hour in unusual circumstances, and there's absolutely no way to end up further behind than if you hadn't tried in the first place" then it would in general be less consequential than it is now. (And I agree with your earlier point that Powerplay is generally attempting to keep it to that sort of level)

 

[Screemonster]

If the consequences of ship loss in ED were capped at "you might lose your last ten minutes progress, maybe an hour in unusual circumstances, and there's absolutely no way to end up further behind than if you hadn't tried in the first place" then it would in general be less consequential than it is now. (And I agree with your earlier point that Powerplay is generally attempting to keep it to that sort of level)

The funny part is that this would in fact be closer to the original Elite/Frontier experience - provided one remembered to save every so often.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The funny part is that this would in fact be closer to the original Elite/Frontier experience - provided one remembered to save every so often.

Yes - a basic "checkpoint on hyperjump/logout" mechanism which restored you to your previous checkpoint if you died would be very close to that indeed.

The original design of what you did and didn't lose with your ship was actually pretty close to the Elite/Frontier model as adapted to a multiplayer game (things likely to have been obtained before your previous "checkpoint" are kept, things likely to have been obtained since are lost), with two significant differences:
- rebuy, potentially inflated with mission fines/bounties/rep loss which places an effective (and potentially recurring) cost on reloading a save game, so a failure can and will put you behind where you started
- exploration data, which could be accumulated over an arbitrarily long period without chance to checkpoint it, and of course wasn't in the previous games at all

Ship crew being lost with the ship was a complete break away from the original model - most of their experience is obtained outside the current session, so you should obviously keep them if you lose the ship - and one that they did eventually fix.

And then much later the Odyssey consequence that you don't lose combat bonds if you lose your ship, which goes in the other direction.


How much of that was intentional I'm not sure. The original Elite/FE2/FFE model for combat payouts was that they were instantly credited to your balance. You couldn't do very much with that until you docked, but there was none of this "voucher, which you have to remember to cash in and possibly find the right station to do so" thing going on. I strongly suspect that they were set up as vouchers to enable the DDF draft proposal that data of this sort would be player tradeable ... and it's hung around for a decade with all these things not being instantly credited despite the actual justification being something that will never be implemented and would be largely irrelevant if it was.

Switching to a model where all exploration data (including first discoveries) instantly credits you on scan, all combat actions do likewise, and the other miscellaneous voucher types instantly cash in as well (and missions payout on completion of the active portion, rather than needing you to press "complete mission") would allow substantially simplifying the interface without changing much about the actual outcomes. Powerplay of course does work exactly like that, which does make me wonder if the intent is to move other things to that model over time.

 

[Screemonster]

Switching to a model where all exploration data (including first discoveries) instantly credits you on scan, all combat actions do likewise, and the other miscellaneous voucher types instantly cash in as well (and missions payout on completion of the active portion, rather than needing you to press "complete mission") would allow substantially simplifying the interface without changing much about the actual outcomes. Powerplay of course does work exactly like that, which does make me wonder if the intent is to move other things to that model over time.

Notably first footfall tags are credited immediately.

One of the things I've seen argued for continuing to lose all your data on death is "but what if someone selfdestructs to get back to a station before someone else and beats them to the tags?" - which may have been relevant in the early days when all the obvious interesting sites like nebulas hadn't been tagged, but given that the game is a decade old now it's pretty safe to say that someone saving a few hours on a return trip isn't really something that's going to make or break the first discovery race.

There's also the bgs/powerplay angle, but imo stockpiling assets over time to dump them (especially piecemeal as you can with exploration data) isn't particularly something that should be encouraged.

One thing that would be interesting to see is that, instead of losing your vouchers/discoveries/scans/whatever on death, they were instantly realised then and there - immediate award of the full credit value of your claims and discoveries, tags assigned and so on, but the transaction happens in a null location outside the BGS and powerplay. That would make it a tactical setback for those doing that activity for those purposes, while not being so punishing to people who are just doing their own thing.
And getting blown up on the way to jameson memorial in your exploration ship wouldn't be such a big deal.

 

[Morbad]

This is kind of an unresolvable problem.

For the overly broad market Frontier has chosen to pander to with this game, I agree. However, implying an irreconcilable mix of experiences are all possible has also been an unresolvable problem. The should have named the game Elite: Equivocation.

You can have risk and frequent player death, or you can have harsh failure penalties. You can't have both.

There are examples of games that have both and are better off for it. The Isle is a good example of a fairly popular game where player characters tend to die early and often, with each death resulting in one starting over.

Not all games would work with such a system, but Elite's utter lack of consequences is at least as problematic, IMO, just in the opposite direction.

The funny part is that this would in fact be closer to the original Elite/Frontier experience - provided one remembered to save every so often.

Any rational expectation of an experience duplicating the prior titles died with the cancellation of an offline mode.

 

[SergMx]

Souls-likes

If I understand you correctly, your defeat does not accumulate in these games. Yes, the first time you lose something (but you can pick it up), but then you can do it 100 times and stay in the same place. You learn how to overcome it.
In Elite, every time you lose, 50 million is deducted and if you don't make up for it, at some point in time you'll have 0 and you could lose your ship.

 

[SergMx]

There are examples of games that have both and are better off for it. The Isle is a good example of a fairly popular game where player characters tend to die early and often, with each death resulting in one starting over.

I haven't heard of this game.
So you're in favor of starting over in Elite if you get killed?

 

[Dragsham]

Much as l hate to admit it, that other game has consequences for ganking sussed.
So i gank a poor sod. Immediately im wanted. And im crystal clear seen across the whole system. Even in Grim Hex. The missions list details me as a wanted bounty. And off the do gooders go enmasse. Soon I'm either dead, in jail busting rocks, or In a cave/bunker.
Fact is there's no consequences in elite to ganking. And until that issue is resolved open only is never going to happen.

 

[SergMx]

Much as l hate to admit it, that other game has consequences for ganking sussed.
So i gank a poor sod. Immediately im wanted. And im crystal clear seen across the whole system. Even in Grim Hex. The missions list details me as a wanted bounty. And off the do gooders go enmasse. Soon I'm either dead, in jail busting rocks, or In a cave/bunker.
Fact is there's no consequences in elite to ganking. And until that issue is resolved open only is never going to happen.

As I wrote above in Elite for some reason they mix humans and NPCs, then separate them. It is unclear what purpose it was done for.

In fact, notoriety should be an internal mark of the pilot federation. I.e. it should be given only to FP members for killing the same FP members. But why did they make it apply to everyone and people who take a mission in single mode must then sit for hours on the station to reset the notoriety.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Notably first footfall tags are credited immediately.

One of the things I've seen argued for continuing to lose all your data on death is "but what if someone selfdestructs to get back to a station before someone else and beats them to the tags?" - which may have been relevant in the early days when all the obvious interesting sites like nebulas hadn't been tagged, but given that the game is a decade old now it's pretty safe to say that someone saving a few hours on a return trip isn't really something that's going to make or break the first discovery race.

There's also the bgs/powerplay angle, but imo stockpiling assets over time to dump them (especially piecemeal as you can with exploration data) isn't particularly something that should be encouraged.

One thing that would be interesting to see is that, instead of losing your vouchers/discoveries/scans/whatever on death, they were instantly realised then and there - immediate award of the full credit value of your claims and discoveries, tags assigned and so on, but the transaction happens in a null location outside the BGS and powerplay. That would make it a tactical setback for those doing that activity for those purposes, while not being so punishing to people who are just doing their own thing.
And getting blown up on the way to jameson memorial in your exploration ship wouldn't be such a big deal.

I have always championed a half way house. on destruction you lose everything...,however a personalised waypoint only visible to you is given and you get to fly back and rescan your black box of your wreck to get all your stuff back. (excluding cargo)

 

[SergMx]

I have always championed a half way house. on destruction you lose everything...,however a personalised waypoint only visible to you is given and you get to fly back and rescan your black box of your wreck to get all your stuff back. (excluding cargo)

Oddly enough, I've never worried about my data, awards, and cargo. Always tried to turn everything in at the station faster and convert it to credits ... so if I lost something, it was a short-term accumulation of future credits.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Oddly enough, I've never worried about my data, awards, and cargo. Always tried to turn everything in at the station faster and convert it to credits ... so if I lost something, it was a short-term accumulation of future credits.

with mega ships littering the galaxy with universal cartography maybe it isn't so much ab issue but back in the day players would come back from deep space exploration with months worth of systems. I remember 1 specific incidence where a player (foolishly) announced such a jaunt on here and loads of people logged in to see him arrive. (completely predictably) a troll thought it was funny to take him out as he was coming into dock. months and months of gameplay wiped.

but the thing is that loss is so one sided. I could build a meta ship and just fly around blapping explorers. they stand to lose loads. I have zero risk from an explorer and even if security gets me (or a player bounty hunter) so what? I lose a few credits and maybe a bit of notoriety which won't effect me if I move on and will disappear after a few hrs.

this is what some players seem to ignore. just because their play style is not really affected by the odd ship loss, for others it is catastrophic.

 

[SergMx]

with mega ships littering the galaxy with universal cartography maybe it isn't so much ab issue but back in the day players would come back from deep space exploration with months worth of systems. I remember 1 specific incidence where a player (foolishly) announced such a jaunt on here and loads of people logged in to see him arrive. (completely predictably) a troll thought it was funny to take him out as he was coming into dock. months and months of gameplay wiped.

but the thing is that loss is so one sided. I could build a meta ship and just fly around blapping explorers. they stand to lose loads. I have zero risk from an explorer and even if security gets me (or a player bounty hunter) so what? I lose a few credits and maybe a bit of notoriety which won't effect me if I move on and will disappear after a few hrs.

this is what some players seem to ignore. just because their play style is not really affected by the odd ship loss, for others it is catastrophic.

Yeah, well, it's a different situation now, even if you don't use your FC, they're all over the galaxy.
And I remember that time, I think he was killed by some commander with a nickname from a Harry Potter movie series.