Pay2Win made it to Elite

Lobstris

Lobstris
Ian Doncaster said:
This I think is very much down to supercruise - as a way of freely exploring a system (especially an uninhabited one), it's great, but it just doesn't work for the "encounters along the way" style of gameplay that would have been expected from the previous games [1].

With the original microjumps idea, you'd have appeared at the nav beacon (a natural bottleneck) and then could also have had encounters as you jumped to the planet, and then to the station (appearing, as in the early builds, a lot further out). So it would have been really easy to have Anarchy systems - as in the previous games - involve a lot more encounters, as well as a lot more hostile transient signal sources to investigate if you were into the bounty-hunting side of things. Combine that with the original idea that the "honk" would make you superluminally visible and therefore even just the act of doing that to check out the system might get a bunch of pirates down on your head, and distinguishing systems by security level is very straightforward.

Supercruise has multiple disadvantages:
- the acceleration curve means that a vaguely competent pilot can only be intercepted at the start or end of the journey
- fixable in theory, but the lack of NPC pre-population if you're the one creating the supercruise instance (which is almost all the time) means "at the start" is unlikely for non-mission enemies
- a fast spiral approach has a good chance of losing interdictors at the end of the journey too
- you can also (unlike the previous games) win the interdiction to skip the fight entirely [2] and submit to the interdiction [3] to allow a quick escape.

So if you look at the general supercruise NPCs in a low-sec or Anarchy system compared with a high-sec one, all the zoning is there: the low-sec has more pirates, they're in bigger ships, they're higher-ranked ... but if you're just dashing straight to the station the chances are that you'll have got there before any of them can notice, get a suitable intercept course, and interdict. You have to really work at stacking mission enemies (and also deliberately submit and fight each time) to get to the "five or six fights to get to the station" that an Elite or FFE-style Anarchy system would have had.

[1] While of course still enforcing multi-minute gaps between the "seek out POIs" encounter gameplay that most ED professions have ended up as. Trade is basically the only bit of the game where the travel time is still important, but instead of being as in the old games "you make a profit on the goods because you had to spend 10 minutes getting them past pirates", it's reversed so that "the travel time is how the profit is limited to be in line with other professions".
[2] And as a measure of how different ED is to the previous games, now people have got used to that, the possibility of not being able to win an interdiction as the defender - Thargoids, PvP attackers - is highly controversial. (My view: first interdictions should auto-succeed and always have the long drive cooldown, but if you escape any subsequent re-interdiction by anyone from that instance has a massive bonus for the defender giving them essentially free choice of escape or submit)
[3] This wasn't an original part of ED either. It got introduced to allow clean players interdicted by security forces for checkpoint scans to submit, be scanned, and be quickly on their way again ... without I think the impact on players being interdicted by actively hostile NPCs being fully thought through. And then of course even with that the frequency of checkpoint scans got toned down a lot anyway.
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I remember the original DDF discussions over whether Elite would be Elite still if it was just microjumps. rather than allowing free travel - hence the introduction of SuperCruise.

I've argued on multiple occasions that SuperCruise, in its implemented form has always been a bit of mistake - precisely because it doesn't allow for encounters 'along the way'. And the new SCO drives compound the mistake IMHO. Elite is, for me, a space flight game, and interactions with enemies should take place in the flight between arrival at the star, and reaching you destination station. Coming from a flight sim background, I've always felt that SuperCruise in E: D has been a bit of a wasted opportunity.

Personally, I'd have liked to have seen SC be much slower, with lower top speeds and a far shallower acceleration curve, to allow for more NPC and PC interdiction gameplay, but also with stealth/speed coming into play - i.e. tying SC visibility into factors such as current speed, type of hull coating and overall heat generation, and SC speed into ship mass and FSD size. I'd have also liked to have seen elements of weapons in SC (e.g. FTL/FSD equipped missiles, with the ability to force a low wake drop) etc. You could also add things like ships with large range 'interdiction field' modules with a radius of 50ls or so, or static weapons platforms/anomalies to avoid that act in supercruise. Anyway, I'm spit balling as none of that is ever going to happen. FWIW I've also never had anything against in-system micro-jumps between stars as a way to making gameplay more interesting in big systems. And from previous discussions on the forum, the moment you say 'SC should be slower' people look at you like you broke wind in an elevator. :D

At the moment if feels like we're cutting the 'space' out of a 'space' game because Frontier never got round to... er... 'filling the void' as it were. It's becoming a 'warp to the next box' game - which is a shame.
 

Lobstris

Lobstris
Commander Biscuit said:
If you're a Krait 2 pilot, you lost an SLF hanger, your optional internals, and gained 2 utility slots and a large hardpoint. People thinking this ship is P2W need to fly it.
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I'll recant my former belief that the Python II Stellar is P2W, though the lack of rebuy still disturbs me. Having now flown it, I'd definitely say it was 'Pay-to-skip-quite-a-bit' but that's about it. It looks great, but I still prefer may engineered Krait 2 or almost stock FdL.
 

Lobstris

Lobstris
metatheurgist said:
Especially after a lot of drinking.


The idea of safe/dangerous parts of the galaxy are already built into the game and are frankly common ideas from any space fiction you want to read. The idea that EvE originated that is hilarious. This leads back to my main complaint about the game, the background sim is too simplistic, just not credible. Without that base to work from the game has always felt off to me. Game was built on wobbly foundations and no amount of monetization is going to fix that.
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Er - I think Elite originated it in PC gaming, and Bell and Braben nicked the idea from the Traveller PnP RPG. :) The BGS to me is just fine - it's there to provide a backdrop to a space flight game, and it's dynamic enough to allow elements to change, but I'd like it to have much more visible impact on things like in-system traffic.
I don't have a grievance with the BGS, but I do have an issue with PowerPlay - that's always struck me as an unnecessary 'boardgame' layer over the minor factions of the BGS. Indeed, one of the primary motivators for most of my squadron quitting Elite was our minor power, which we were having fun expanding, having to come to 'arrangements' with a certain faction's PowerPlay players, who disliked our form of government conflicting with what was best for their power's expansion. Ah well...
 

Planewalker

Planewalker
Lobstris said:
At the moment if feels like we're cutting the 'space' out of a 'space' game because Frontier never got round to... er... 'filling the void' as it were. It's becoming a 'warp to the next box' game - which is a shame.
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While i don't disagree it is still fully possible to fly normally in SC without SCO, hence keeping the the option for more interruptions.

It also needs to be said that a lot of players asked for shorter SC travel times over the years, which is the reason it was added.

Conversely, SCO also opens up a lot more "system-fringe" gameplay due to it no longer taking half an hour or more to reach.
 

Lobstris

Lobstris
Planewalker said:
While i don't disagree it is still fully possible to fly normally in SC without SCO, hence keeping the the option for more interruptions.

It also needs to be said that a lot of players asked for shorter SC travel times over the years, which is the reason it was added.

Conversely, SCO also opens up a lot more "system-fringe" gameplay due to it no longer taking half an hour or more to reach.
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Yeah - but to someone like me, who thinks interdictions whilst travelling should be (should have been) the main gameplay loop of Elite, I'm against making SC optional, and many players may have asked for faster SC travel over the years, but that doesn't stop me thinking that they're missing something. Cutting flight out of a flight sim seems like a bad idea (see Starfield for an extreme example). Micro-jumps in system between stars would also achieve the same 'system-fringe' gameplay (at the disadvantage of increasing the feeling of 'space being a series of interconnected boxes' even more than SCO, and making all systems feel more homogeneous).
 

Markov Chaney

M
SCO does not cut the flight out of the flight sim. It only cuts out the part where you are already aimed and you're safe using full throttle. All the interest in flying the ship is in all the other phases of getting from A to B. The part where you are mashing full throttle and doing nothing else are now replaced by fighting with the squirming overboost. It's put more flight IN to the flight sim.

(This is separate to the interdiction discussion.)
 

Cmdr. Numa

Cmdr. Numa
Rat Catcher said:
Wonder what the steam charts are saying about concurrent players in the last hour? (and how many of them are in Python Mk II ships?)
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1715121178819.png

Not much change there, well under 5000 still, but the weekend is yet to come.
 

metatheurgist

metatheurgist
House0fDerp said:
I don't think I can be bothered, certainly not all at once. Maybe as their use cases come up but this may be the best excuse to trim down the fleet.
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I'll be doing them at need. This new "respecting player time" by offering us the opportunity to redo stuff (that many call tiresome) seems a bit double-edged. :unsure:
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
Cmdr Dreamer said:
Well now a brand new player can go from a sidewinder and 1000 credits directly to a A-rated python MKII
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They never need to even get in the Sidewinder, Isn't that something!
Cmdr. Numa said:
Worse, the new player can't even lose it through insufficient funds for rebuy.
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And that is a negative point?
The P2 Stellar is an OK ship, not a great ship.
I'm certain the newish player will soon learn about the rebuy, but, if they are fortunate, they may even have sufficient credits to pay it.

Never understood such a negative attitude... Possibly as I'd like to see folk enjoying the game and learning as they go, after all, the starter sidey is zero rebuy too!
 
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