Pay2Win made it to Elite
- Thread starter Einar Donarsson
- Start date
This is the first I'm hearing about a serious rebalancing of the engineering grind. Haven't FD been talking about this for years? But they now have a monetary incentive to "make engineering easier" by adding a Pay2Win option to skip it.
It's in one of the recent news articles. But I bet folks like the Latvian either don't read that far or don't read the actual press releases at allhttps://www.elitedangerous.com/news/engineering-and-pre-built-ships said:
.Edit: Sorry, quoted the wrong article.
Have a read?
Engineering and Pre-Built Ships
Greetings Commanders, We wanted to give you a heads up on our plans for Engineering coming later this year and share a first look at two of the Pre-Built ships that will be hitting the Gamestore in May. Read more: https://elitedangerous.com/news/engineering-and-pre-built-ships
Oh dear... Yamiks again?
Mind you, saying that, another youtuber reckons an E rated chieftain can be better used by a new player than the pre-built... So youtube may be just a little apocryphal...
What will that cost? 20k ARX?It's in one of the recent news articles. But I bet folks like the Latvian either don't read that far or don't read the actual press releases at all
The desire for a fully balanced, entirely congruent and integrated game is something I can see as a wonderful dream; I too would love to see it one day if only to see it as an achievable thing. I guess I'm just too cynical to believe it's a possibility, let alone that a company would make financial compromises to achieve it. There's always a meta, always an imbalance, always the have and have nots.
While there is something, grounding (if that's the right word) to knowing the world you're inhabiting is consistent for all players, I don't personally feel it has a massive impact to me or my enjoyment of the game. If me and mates can do what we want together, everyone else is basically background noise. Whether they can or cannot do what we can because they've bought the latest DLC, or not, or we're all in a game that gives everyone everything, it all fades into obscurity behind us enjoying what we're doing in the moment. We're not generally relying on them to provide any gameplay, nor do we expect to be relied on to provide gameplay. If there is content that does rely on random interaction, as long as there's somebody there to do it with, it matters little whether everyone can or just a subset of the population.
I think this is very much a case of priorities, and preferences when engaging in a shared world. We clearly have different ideas as to what makes that world enjoyable to inhabit.
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That's the unfortunate part.
The interesting thing is that they didn't really mention that specifically ship engineering will be changed, now did they? They talked about reducing material cost and increasing mission rewards as well as backpack capacity. To me that sounds as if they mean on-foot engineering and not the ship counterpart. I expect them to "balance" it by means of increasing the ship costs and reducing the on-foot costs until they somehow match.
funny.
This statement is wrong. Experienced cmdr could know better as this
But a fact, nevertheless.
Any player has 2 option with any game - I've exercised the "don't play" one with more I've purchased than I like, but, if I'm not enjoying myself playing any game, it no longer gets my time. Should ED go that way, that is life, it won't be the first, and probably not the last game I've abandoned.
As it is today (the important bit) I'm not going to have my game affected by the current offerings, apart from grabbing the P2 on 5th May because I can, and, should FD go the route of putting everything in game on their store, even G5 engineered modules, for Arx, that won't tip me out... Only when anything that can't be built in normal play (I'm on the fence over Horizons 4.x Live, admittedly) is sold for Arx will I look twice at the game, then decide.
But, I'll be honest, I tend to play with a small group, don't care much for the social aspect of meeting all of those other players, and have zero interest in PP of any number.
Others would be expected to have a massively opposite opinion to mine over any of the above.
Die2Win
We're on the same page. I'm indifferent toward pay2win "time savers" until it evolves into pay2win exclusives. I think its inevitable from a business perspective.
"More predictable" implies it too, since the suit engineering process is already fixed price and outcome.
The earlier https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/python-mk-ii-updates-gamestore also says
"Our focus will be on making Engineering more accessible and predictable, allowing you to focus on your ship build rather than the materials needed."
Which doesn't sound like it's going to be "actually, we decided that mid-Horizons change to drop commodity requirements was a bad idea".
My impression from what Frontier are doing is that their main concern with Elite Dangerous isn't sales of the base game, but converting those sales into regular players who'll
- keep the game looking alive
- spend ARX
- (optimistically) be a potential audience for the "next big DLC"
They sell hundreds of thousands of base game copies a year but most of them don't "stick". Partly that's normal - "play for a little while, have fun, move on" is what most people do with most games. And partly it's because Elite Dangerous is not an easy game to get into, if you're not familiar with the genre conventions.
So from that perspective it makes sense to both allow pay-to-quickstart and make the in-game processes more user-friendly. (Also things like Thargoids and PP2 to try and get more established players to spend more time in game, of course)
Well, suit engineering itself might be fixed outcome, but material gathering sure is not. The RNG drop rates there are already memes (settlement defense plans, opinion polls, etc.). However, this early part about "focus on your ship build" certainly implies that ship engineering will at least not be untouched. Then again, it is better to take newer information over older one when it comes to FDev, because - as I wrote already - they don't seem to have a plan for what they do up front. It evolved quite a bit from announcement to sort-of-final feature in the past, so you can extrapolate that this will hold true for this one as well.
We will see. At least Elite going Pay2Win ensures many popcorn threads and maybe a youtube beef here and there. Entertaining...
So lifetime doesn't actually MEAN lifetime ... despite the fact that the LEP was sold as being part of ED's life + expansions and content. So ED doomed?
He's only been away four months. He has been playing the game for seven years.
So, he's fully entitled to hold an opinion. As, in fact, is anyone.
The forum rules agree...
... somebody who has not played for 7 years and (effectively) trolls the posts with complaints over the introduction of engineers, which apparently forced them away, from the game, or with obviously incorrect information over things they have no experience with, is very welcome here, which is probably a good thing, inclusion and all that...
In fact, it appears that one doesn't even need to own any particular game to post in their forum section, which is very inclusive.
Frontier are a beacon in equality, in a murky internet world, well done them!