Dear Frontier,
I've been playing the game for almost 5 years now, I am triple Elite, I have 25 ships, including all the big ones, and plenty of money. I still love playing the game. And this goes to show you really don't need to waste our time to "convince" us to keep playing. All those bumps on the road all over the place are truly unnecessary.
Elite is a unique game. There's no other game like it. As someone else said, it's not a game, it's a life style. Personally, my main draw is trying new builds. But the sad part is that I try them on Coriolis more than in-game. The time it takes to actually have a build in place, after I have designed it on Coriolis, is simply too long. Even if I own the engineered modules required for a build, I need Inara to find them, and it takes ages to use a ship, remove a module, jump to another ship, remove another module, run out of storage capacity, buy a ship, haul a bunch of modules on it, etc. It's such an awkward and poorly designed system.
So here's my suggestion. Make homage to EVE Online and rip off their outfitting system. Just like that. Call it a homage. Heck, give them credit for it in the intro screen. They will send you a thank you email, and we will all be happier for it. I am sure you know exactly how EVE handles outfitting, but I'll share a screenshot anyway.
The idea is simple, but we would need to make some changes.
First, engineering should be reworked. Again. Make them work like physical blueprints that you keep on your station storage. Once you have unlocked them, they can be applied to any module by paying a small fee in materials. Make it easy for us, and we'll buy more ships (which means more consumables) so we can try new stuff on them.
Once we have made that change, outfitting would become a real treat. Your whole storage, full of modules and blueprints, would be visible in one single screen. You would drag and drop modules from your storage into those nice ship slots. Engineering blueprints would be applied on top of the equipped modules. You could even drag and drop modules you don't own, but are available at your station. Once you are happy with the build, you press save, and all relevant costs would be paid for.
People would be spending much more money and materials on crazy new builds. People would actually try them in-game.
It would be a win-win.
I've been playing the game for almost 5 years now, I am triple Elite, I have 25 ships, including all the big ones, and plenty of money. I still love playing the game. And this goes to show you really don't need to waste our time to "convince" us to keep playing. All those bumps on the road all over the place are truly unnecessary.
Elite is a unique game. There's no other game like it. As someone else said, it's not a game, it's a life style. Personally, my main draw is trying new builds. But the sad part is that I try them on Coriolis more than in-game. The time it takes to actually have a build in place, after I have designed it on Coriolis, is simply too long. Even if I own the engineered modules required for a build, I need Inara to find them, and it takes ages to use a ship, remove a module, jump to another ship, remove another module, run out of storage capacity, buy a ship, haul a bunch of modules on it, etc. It's such an awkward and poorly designed system.
So here's my suggestion. Make homage to EVE Online and rip off their outfitting system. Just like that. Call it a homage. Heck, give them credit for it in the intro screen. They will send you a thank you email, and we will all be happier for it. I am sure you know exactly how EVE handles outfitting, but I'll share a screenshot anyway.
The idea is simple, but we would need to make some changes.
First, engineering should be reworked. Again. Make them work like physical blueprints that you keep on your station storage. Once you have unlocked them, they can be applied to any module by paying a small fee in materials. Make it easy for us, and we'll buy more ships (which means more consumables) so we can try new stuff on them.
Once we have made that change, outfitting would become a real treat. Your whole storage, full of modules and blueprints, would be visible in one single screen. You would drag and drop modules from your storage into those nice ship slots. Engineering blueprints would be applied on top of the equipped modules. You could even drag and drop modules you don't own, but are available at your station. Once you are happy with the build, you press save, and all relevant costs would be paid for.
People would be spending much more money and materials on crazy new builds. People would actually try them in-game.
It would be a win-win.
's current UI, so I can imagine it may not make it, but please let us have the ability to save and then recall favoured configurations.