Yes, apparently 
Player Retention
- Thread starter Red Rocket
- Start date
I was one of those who signed but didn't participate.
I was still in The Abyss returning from the first DW expedition when DW2 started.
I still remember the weeks before DW departure - the preparations, making new friends and deciding how and with who you are going to travel. Also the Barnacle rush just before the DW start was a really nice touch. It was really nice.
Nowadays to keep myself playing i am trying to create a fictional story for my CMDR with a reason why he is doing something particular and also write these down in my journey log. Before it was just - Ok, am an explorer i need to go out and explore. It doesn't matter where - just go somewhere.
Or i am a bounty hunter i need to go through my neighboring systems and blow some pirates up...
The spark is still not like when ED was released but it's still there. The actually hard part is the writing as i am not good at this, also doing it in English which is not my native language is raising the bar, but for now it is fun and engaging. We will see for how long.
Don't delude yourself into thinking that they exist. It'll only lead to disappointment.
If there was a dev team out there that combined both better vision than Frontier and better development competency than Frontier ... they could just make their own great spaceship-flying MMO for considerably cheaper than it would cost to buy the Elite Dangerous code and IP [1]. Apart from a few ultra-nostalgists no-one is playing this game specifically to fly a Cobra III past Lave.
Now, of course, given the forum consensus that Frontier have been getting Elite Dangerous wrong in terms of both vision and implementation for several years (since Powerplay? since Engineers? certainly since Multicrew anyway, right?) this competitor has now had 6-8 years to build their alternative, which is plenty of time for a highly-competent dev team to make a working and playable game. And yet ... there aren't any.
I mean, I have plenty of ideas for how to make ED "better" [2], but if someone gave me a skilled dev team, a £50M budget, and instructions to make a spaceship-flying MMO ... I wouldn't even try to clone Elite Dangerous. It'd be far more exciting to do something genuinely new in the area.
[1] Despite the multiple well-publicised drops in share price, Frontier the company is still worth over £500M. Even if Elite Dangerous is worth so much less than their other major games that it's only contributing 10% of that value ... the right team could easily make their own version and not be tied to any early ED design decisions their vision disagreed with for £50 million. You could fund a team of 100 for a decade with that sort of money.
[2] You'd hate them.
Reading about DW2 in the magazines was what brought me to Elite, but I was too late to take part. Last year I went back and read through a lot of the old threads that covered both Distant World adventures, as well a other events like the Premonition end game event, and re-watched those wonderful youtube montages that people made of their Distant Worlds journey. I can't help but feel that I missed out, and feel little disheartened that its unlikely Elite will see events like those again, unless somethings in the works I don't know about. I keep checking in from time to time to see what's happening but as time goes on, its evermore doubtful.I was one of those who signed but didn't participate.
I was still in The Abyss returning from the first DW expedition when DW2 started.
I still remember the weeks before DW departure - the preparations, making new friends and deciding how and with who you are going to travel. Also the Barnacle rush just before the DW start was a really nice touch. It was really nice.
Those of you who went on DW1, DW2, Gnosis, and Premonition experienced the best of what this game can offer, you are the lucky ones and should cherish those memories. There are new players now, a new generation on players, who never got to experience some of the mega events that have been mentioned in this thread.
Deleted member 182079
D
Honestly, if another dev came up with a game that contains completely different lore and ship/asset designs, but would offer the same premise of ED, I'd probably drop ED like a hot potato.
For me the main pull comes from the sandbox (particularly its size) and the flight model. Sure, the Cobra 3 offers some decent nostalgia but I find most of the other ships strangely toy-like as they don't seem to have been designed with Elite-Feet in mind from the beginning (i.e. they're all way too large - I believe this was done to make space combat a bit easier afaik).
But since Elite is still the only game that offers both, here I still am. X4 is its main competitor and outperforms Elite in terms of gameplay but also sense of scale (ships and stations), but even that doesn't quite tickle me in the same way Elite still does.
For me the main pull comes from the sandbox (particularly its size) and the flight model. Sure, the Cobra 3 offers some decent nostalgia but I find most of the other ships strangely toy-like as they don't seem to have been designed with Elite-Feet in mind from the beginning (i.e. they're all way too large - I believe this was done to make space combat a bit easier afaik).
But since Elite is still the only game that offers both, here I still am. X4 is its main competitor and outperforms Elite in terms of gameplay but also sense of scale (ships and stations), but even that doesn't quite tickle me in the same way Elite still does.
![BigBANGtheory [VR]](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/71/71385.jpg?1644873788){kind=avatar}
Which probably means you're more about the pilot experience and still hold faith for what might be out there. Nothing wrong with that btw...
X4 kind of sits between Elite and Homeworld with its own emphasis on economics and production in the simulation.
To bring this thread back around to its original topic, I was thinking about what are my five biggest blockers to play this game more frequently than I do.
#5: The timers to complete missions that elapse in real time, rather than game time. ED is a game that requires me to have at least an hour to play the game, assuming I want a variety of mission objectives to complete during my play session, and a variety of systems and worlds to visit, and still have time for more spontaneous content like mission wrinkles, investigating USSs, and bounty hunting. I’m at a stage of my life right now where large blocks of uninterrupted game time are difficult to come by, so I just have half an hour to play a game, I’ll choose one I can save my game with, and continue later.
I suppose I could just grind away at one and only one activity, but IMO that just sucks the joy right out of the game.
#4: The Decaying Verisimilitude. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, verisimilitude is the appearance of truth. This is different from modeling reality, because this can include things like magic and sci-fi technologies. The important thing is to be internally consistent, and to think through potential applications of new tech/magic to the setting. If you ever find yourself thinking "Hyperdrives don't work like that!" or "Why don't they use the macguffin from two seasons ago?" that's a violation of verisimilitude.
When Elite Dangerous was still in development, it had very tight verisimilitude. The game was not only internally consistent, but also consistent with previous games in the franchise. I was especially pleased that the Frame Shift Drive was less a completely new technology to the setting, but instead a logical progression from the FTL technology from FE2 and FFE. True, there were some gameplay compromises, but Frontier never bothered to explain them via lore, which made it easy to headcanon away those inconsistencies.
After release, though, as the game changed leadership, maintaining verisimilitude stopped being a thing. History from previous games that had been established in game as having happened were retconned. We were all given pockets of holding for tons of material. Engineered modules were eligible for rebuy. The whole telepresence thing. Nonsensical prices and ridiculous demand. Each of these makes it harder and harder to make the world this game is set in make sense. Nothing takes you out of the moment faster than realizing "You could buy a ship for that! What do you need me for???"
#3 The Monty Haul Campaign. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, a "Monty Haul Campaign" is one where the game master rewards their players with excessive riches and power... usually in an attempt to bribe players uncertain about the game into continuing playing. This can also be a sign of an inexperienced game master, who doesn't know how to keep things balanced to make their game more interesting. Frontier has been in this mode for years.
Between credit reward inflation and power creep, I haven't gotten a decent sense of accomplishment in this game for years. Once you've learned the basics of this game, its really hard to fail at this game unless you deliberately try to fail, and its the possibility of failure that makes success so sweet.
#2 Decreasing Depth. Before delving into this topic, I think its necessary to define some terms. Depth is how many viable options you have available to you to accomplish your goals. Complexity is the amount of information a player has to keep track of. And for completeness's sake... grind is what you do when you have too few options to accomplish your goals.
Dangerous has a reputation of being an inch deep and a mile wide. While I don't think it's as bad as that, there is some truth to that statement. It wasn't always this way. While the game was in development, it had a lot more depth, but Frontier kept filling in the depth they created due to player complaints... who then complained about the grind.
This has led to Frontier to substitute complexity for depth, which is fairly common in the games industry. While this game hasn't yet reached the level of needing 3rd party websites, I think Frontier could remove 90% of the commodities currently in the game, because the function they once served in the game was effectively dummied out. There are other areas in the game (especially engineering) that could be streamlined without affecting the outcome.
#1 The Increasing Lack of Interesting Decisions. I don't play games to fulfil power fantasies. I play games to make interesting decisions. I want to weigh the pros and cons of the actions I'll take. When Elite Dangerous was in development, I really had to weigh the pros and cons of each action I took. Credits were tight, there was a functioning economic simulation in place, ships had operational costs... so the right mix of commodities; as well as how you outfitted your ship, could mean the difference between profit and loss.
Unfortunately, thanks to #2 and #3, as time went on, the number of interesting decisions I had to make decreased. Missions went from augmenting trade to replacing trade, and from having pros and cons to weight, to just having pros. BGS manipulation went from a delicate act of balancing credits, influence, and reputation between various factions to achieve your goals, to not having it matter what you do, because you'll get all three while still achieving your goals.
Even exploration has reduced the number of interesting outfitting decisions you need to make. At the start of the game, you had to balance operational costs with jump range and outfitting choices. Then operational costs were removed, so you didn't have to balance between jump range and outfitting choices anymore. Horizons introduced the SRV, and the necessity of having shields to land on planets safely, which did reintroduce compromising between ship cost, jump range, and outfitting choices again... until credit reward inflation grew to the point where it removed ship cost from the equation again. And then the number of exploration modules decreased, while the number of available slots increased, which meant that even a lowly Hauler could fit everything you needed to explore, while still allowing for some optional extras.
What I most wanted from Elite Dangerous was to play a struggling commander, who made hard, and sometimes morally dubious, decisions about getting ahead in a cutthroat galaxy. For years, I've been playing a wealthy dilettante whose decisions are more at the level of "What do I want for dinner?"
At least I still have the pleasure of trying to optimize my flight path afterwards. And EDO has helped personalize those morally dubious decisions, at least for me.
#5: The timers to complete missions that elapse in real time, rather than game time. ED is a game that requires me to have at least an hour to play the game, assuming I want a variety of mission objectives to complete during my play session, and a variety of systems and worlds to visit, and still have time for more spontaneous content like mission wrinkles, investigating USSs, and bounty hunting. I’m at a stage of my life right now where large blocks of uninterrupted game time are difficult to come by, so I just have half an hour to play a game, I’ll choose one I can save my game with, and continue later.
I suppose I could just grind away at one and only one activity, but IMO that just sucks the joy right out of the game.
#4: The Decaying Verisimilitude. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, verisimilitude is the appearance of truth. This is different from modeling reality, because this can include things like magic and sci-fi technologies. The important thing is to be internally consistent, and to think through potential applications of new tech/magic to the setting. If you ever find yourself thinking "Hyperdrives don't work like that!" or "Why don't they use the macguffin from two seasons ago?" that's a violation of verisimilitude.
When Elite Dangerous was still in development, it had very tight verisimilitude. The game was not only internally consistent, but also consistent with previous games in the franchise. I was especially pleased that the Frame Shift Drive was less a completely new technology to the setting, but instead a logical progression from the FTL technology from FE2 and FFE. True, there were some gameplay compromises, but Frontier never bothered to explain them via lore, which made it easy to headcanon away those inconsistencies.
After release, though, as the game changed leadership, maintaining verisimilitude stopped being a thing. History from previous games that had been established in game as having happened were retconned. We were all given pockets of holding for tons of material. Engineered modules were eligible for rebuy. The whole telepresence thing. Nonsensical prices and ridiculous demand. Each of these makes it harder and harder to make the world this game is set in make sense. Nothing takes you out of the moment faster than realizing "You could buy a ship for that! What do you need me for???"
#3 The Monty Haul Campaign. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, a "Monty Haul Campaign" is one where the game master rewards their players with excessive riches and power... usually in an attempt to bribe players uncertain about the game into continuing playing. This can also be a sign of an inexperienced game master, who doesn't know how to keep things balanced to make their game more interesting. Frontier has been in this mode for years.
Between credit reward inflation and power creep, I haven't gotten a decent sense of accomplishment in this game for years. Once you've learned the basics of this game, its really hard to fail at this game unless you deliberately try to fail, and its the possibility of failure that makes success so sweet.
#2 Decreasing Depth. Before delving into this topic, I think its necessary to define some terms. Depth is how many viable options you have available to you to accomplish your goals. Complexity is the amount of information a player has to keep track of. And for completeness's sake... grind is what you do when you have too few options to accomplish your goals.
Dangerous has a reputation of being an inch deep and a mile wide. While I don't think it's as bad as that, there is some truth to that statement. It wasn't always this way. While the game was in development, it had a lot more depth, but Frontier kept filling in the depth they created due to player complaints... who then complained about the grind.
This has led to Frontier to substitute complexity for depth, which is fairly common in the games industry. While this game hasn't yet reached the level of needing 3rd party websites, I think Frontier could remove 90% of the commodities currently in the game, because the function they once served in the game was effectively dummied out. There are other areas in the game (especially engineering) that could be streamlined without affecting the outcome.
#1 The Increasing Lack of Interesting Decisions. I don't play games to fulfil power fantasies. I play games to make interesting decisions. I want to weigh the pros and cons of the actions I'll take. When Elite Dangerous was in development, I really had to weigh the pros and cons of each action I took. Credits were tight, there was a functioning economic simulation in place, ships had operational costs... so the right mix of commodities; as well as how you outfitted your ship, could mean the difference between profit and loss.
Unfortunately, thanks to #2 and #3, as time went on, the number of interesting decisions I had to make decreased. Missions went from augmenting trade to replacing trade, and from having pros and cons to weight, to just having pros. BGS manipulation went from a delicate act of balancing credits, influence, and reputation between various factions to achieve your goals, to not having it matter what you do, because you'll get all three while still achieving your goals.
Even exploration has reduced the number of interesting outfitting decisions you need to make. At the start of the game, you had to balance operational costs with jump range and outfitting choices. Then operational costs were removed, so you didn't have to balance between jump range and outfitting choices anymore. Horizons introduced the SRV, and the necessity of having shields to land on planets safely, which did reintroduce compromising between ship cost, jump range, and outfitting choices again... until credit reward inflation grew to the point where it removed ship cost from the equation again. And then the number of exploration modules decreased, while the number of available slots increased, which meant that even a lowly Hauler could fit everything you needed to explore, while still allowing for some optional extras.
What I most wanted from Elite Dangerous was to play a struggling commander, who made hard, and sometimes morally dubious, decisions about getting ahead in a cutthroat galaxy. For years, I've been playing a wealthy dilettante whose decisions are more at the level of "What do I want for dinner?"
At least I still have the pleasure of trying to optimize my flight path afterwards. And EDO has helped personalize those morally dubious decisions, at least for me.
Deleted member 182079
D
I find both games complement each other quite well if you're into space games - Elite is focusing on the sole insignificant CMDR perspective (and not much else) whereas X4 allows that also, but adds empire building and fleet management to the mix. Some of the stuff I've experienced in X4 has been truly epic (see some of my posts in the relevant thread on this forum) despite only playing it for less than 100 hours.
Elite does certain things that X4 doesn't, and vice versa - if we had a game that mixes the best features of each (I'd be more than happy making Elite a single-player only game if that was the price to be paid) I'd be in gaming heaven.
This story is exactly what motivated me to post this topic, I was lucky enough to be playing Elite during that era.Reading about DW2 in the magazines was what brought me to Elite, but I was too late to take part. Last year I went back and read through a lot of the old threads that covered both Distant World adventures, as well a other events like the Premonition end game event, and re-watched those wonderful youtube montages that people made of their Distant Worlds journey. I can't help but feel that I missed out, and feel little disheartened that its unlikely Elite will see events like those again, unless somethings in the works I don't know about. I keep checking in from time to time to see what's happening but as time goes on, its evermore doubtful.
Those of you who went on DW1, DW2, Gnosis, and Premonition experienced the best of what this game can offer, you are the lucky ones and should cherish those memories. There are new players now, a new generation on players, who never got to experience some of the mega events that have been mentioned in this thread.
There is no reason that there can’t be more exciting events.
This is one the worst parts of being a lover of the space-genre.Don't delude yourself into thinking that they exist. It'll only lead to disappointment.
If there was a dev team out there that combined both better vision than Frontier and better development competency than Frontier ... they could just make their own great spaceship-flying MMO for considerably cheaper than it would cost to buy the Elite Dangerous code and IP [1]. Apart from a few ultra-nostalgists no-one is playing this game specifically to fly a Cobra III past Lave.
Now, of course, given the forum consensus that Frontier have been getting Elite Dangerous wrong in terms of both vision and implementation for several years (since Powerplay? since Engineers? certainly since Multicrew anyway, right?) this competitor has now had 6-8 years to build their alternative, which is plenty of time for a highly-competent dev team to make a working and playable game. And yet ... there aren't any.
I mean, I have plenty of ideas for how to make ED "better" [2], but if someone gave me a skilled dev team, a £50M budget, and instructions to make a spaceship-flying MMO ... I wouldn't even try to clone Elite Dangerous. It'd be far more exciting to do something genuinely new in the area.
[1] Despite the multiple well-publicised drops in share price, Frontier the company is still worth over £500M. Even if Elite Dangerous is worth so much less than their other major games that it's only contributing 10% of that value ... the right team could easily make their own version and not be tied to any early ED design decisions their vision disagreed with for £50 million. You could fund a team of 100 for a decade with that sort of money.
[2] You'd hate them.
The market - while it exists - is a drop in the bucket to "the" market of gamers. So, right off the bat, 99% of developers (big and small) know that if you choose this genre...you're intentionally gimping potential income unless you happen to have 'that' title, which is literally 1 in thousands.
No Man's Sky is such a unicorn because it happens to have that kind of developer...but it's also a very specific kind of game that isn't remotely like Elite. Is it great? Absolutely. Will it scratch the, "Look Ma! I'm flying a spaceship!"...no. Not really. Not like Elite does (did). So, yeah, we're stuck hoping FDev reignites the vision but well aware the economics of that vision probably don't match investor expectations.
That's just business (which you get, I'm just reiterating for others). It's a shame, but it is what it is. I'm a HUGE Homeworld fan...the fact Homeworld 3 is being crowdfunded makes me sick. Stoked for the game, don't get me wrong, but...c'mon! There is nothing like Homeworld out there. HW2 was a success, Cataclysm became a cult hit years later, and even the weird ground RTS did ok.
But for the many fans the game has, it's not enough to coax a well-funded developer to bite off the pricetag on the IP. It's business.
And Elite is now in the business of maximizing profit and minimizing development costs, which really doesn't fly.
Pun intended, thanks to EDO.
Why not go ahead and organise an event yourself? Present it well and in an interesting manner, plan things carefully, it could snowball!
cough
Community Event / Creation - The Buckyball Racing Club Presents: Back to Pareco (Magic 8-Ball Championship, Race 1)
Welcome to Back to Pareco! Like the original, Full Throttle at Pareco, this is a Buckyball time-trial race. It's also the first of eight fan-favorite races in a series - the Magic 8-Ball Championship - to determine who is the biggest, baddest, buckyball-iest racer in the entire galaxy. RACE...
It's very simple. Give us stuff to go out into the black for... Exploration. Not settlement pew pew.
My game time in the last year can be measured in just a few hours - for the whole year! Compared to 10,000+ hours played before Odyssey launched.
That's the thing: 200b star systems and 99.9% is empty rock and ice (RICE).
I'd love to go explore, but FSSing a system just for more RICE makes me want to quit faster than you think.
What's really bothering me is getting SOS signals of crashed ships on unchartered planets. No one has been here before, but I see 3 distress signals.
Don't delude yourself into thinking that they exist. It'll only lead to disappointment.
If there was a dev team out there that combined both better vision than Frontier and better development competency than Frontier ... they could just make their own great spaceship-flying MMO for considerably cheaper than it would cost to buy the Elite Dangerous code and IP [1]. Apart from a few ultra-nostalgists no-one is playing this game specifically to fly a Cobra III past Lave.
Now, of course, given the forum consensus that Frontier have been getting Elite Dangerous wrong in terms of both vision and implementation for several years (since Powerplay? since Engineers? certainly since Multicrew anyway, right?) this competitor has now had 6-8 years to build their alternative, which is plenty of time for a highly-competent dev team to make a working and playable game. And yet ... there aren't any.
I mean, I have plenty of ideas for how to make ED "better" [2], but if someone gave me a skilled dev team, a £50M budget, and instructions to make a spaceship-flying MMO ... I wouldn't even try to clone Elite Dangerous. It'd be far more exciting to do something genuinely new in the area.
[1] Despite the multiple well-publicised drops in share price, Frontier the company is still worth over £500M. Even if Elite Dangerous is worth so much less than their other major games that it's only contributing 10% of that value ... the right team could easily make their own version and not be tied to any early ED design decisions their vision disagreed with for £50 million. You could fund a team of 100 for a decade with that sort of money.
[2] You'd hate them.
Of course one can create a new game. But the reason people stick with this is because of the lore and established franchise.
1. good point.
2. hit me, I'm curious.
To bring this thread back around to its original topic, I was thinking about what are my five biggest blockers to play this game more frequently than I do.
#5: The timers to complete missions that elapse in real time, rather than game time. ED is a game that requires me to have at least an hour to play the game, assuming I want a variety of mission objectives to complete during my play session, and a variety of systems and worlds to visit, and still have time for more spontaneous content like mission wrinkles, investigating USSs, and bounty hunting. I’m at a stage of my life right now where large blocks of uninterrupted game time are difficult to come by, so I just have half an hour to play a game, I’ll choose one I can save my game with, and continue later.
I suppose I could just grind away at one and only one activity, but IMO that just sucks the joy right out of the game.
#4: The Decaying Verisimilitude. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, verisimilitude is the appearance of truth. This is different from modeling reality, because this can include things like magic and sci-fi technologies. The important thing is to be internally consistent, and to think through potential applications of new tech/magic to the setting. If you ever find yourself thinking "Hyperdrives don't work like that!" or "Why don't they use the macguffin from two seasons ago?" that's a violation of verisimilitude.
When Elite Dangerous was still in development, it had very tight verisimilitude. The game was not only internally consistent, but also consistent with previous games in the franchise. I was especially pleased that the Frame Shift Drive was less a completely new technology to the setting, but instead a logical progression from the FTL technology from FE2 and FFE. True, there were some gameplay compromises, but Frontier never bothered to explain them via lore, which made it easy to headcanon away those inconsistencies.
After release, though, as the game changed leadership, maintaining verisimilitude stopped being a thing. History from previous games that had been established in game as having happened were retconned. We were all given pockets of holding for tons of material. Engineered modules were eligible for rebuy. The whole telepresence thing. Nonsensical prices and ridiculous demand. Each of these makes it harder and harder to make the world this game is set in make sense. Nothing takes you out of the moment faster than realizing "You could buy a ship for that! What do you need me for???"
#3 The Monty Haul Campaign. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, a "Monty Haul Campaign" is one where the game master rewards their players with excessive riches and power... usually in an attempt to bribe players uncertain about the game into continuing playing. This can also be a sign of an inexperienced game master, who doesn't know how to keep things balanced to make their game more interesting. Frontier has been in this mode for years.
Between credit reward inflation and power creep, I haven't gotten a decent sense of accomplishment in this game for years. Once you've learned the basics of this game, its really hard to fail at this game unless you deliberately try to fail, and its the possibility of failure that makes success so sweet.
#2 Decreasing Depth. Before delving into this topic, I think its necessary to define some terms. Depth is how many viable options you have available to you to accomplish your goals. Complexity is the amount of information a player has to keep track of. And for completeness's sake... grind is what you do when you have too few options to accomplish your goals.
Dangerous has a reputation of being an inch deep and a mile wide. While I don't think it's as bad as that, there is some truth to that statement. It wasn't always this way. While the game was in development, it had a lot more depth, but Frontier kept filling in the depth they created due to player complaints... who then complained about the grind.
This has led to Frontier to substitute complexity for depth, which is fairly common in the games industry. While this game hasn't yet reached the level of needing 3rd party websites, I think Frontier could remove 90% of the commodities currently in the game, because the function they once served in the game was effectively dummied out. There are other areas in the game (especially engineering) that could be streamlined without affecting the outcome.
#1 The Increasing Lack of Interesting Decisions. I don't play games to fulfil power fantasies. I play games to make interesting decisions. I want to weigh the pros and cons of the actions I'll take. When Elite Dangerous was in development, I really had to weigh the pros and cons of each action I took. Credits were tight, there was a functioning economic simulation in place, ships had operational costs... so the right mix of commodities; as well as how you outfitted your ship, could mean the difference between profit and loss.
Unfortunately, thanks to #2 and #3, as time went on, the number of interesting decisions I had to make decreased. Missions went from augmenting trade to replacing trade, and from having pros and cons to weight, to just having pros. BGS manipulation went from a delicate act of balancing credits, influence, and reputation between various factions to achieve your goals, to not having it matter what you do, because you'll get all three while still achieving your goals.
Even exploration has reduced the number of interesting outfitting decisions you need to make. At the start of the game, you had to balance operational costs with jump range and outfitting choices. Then operational costs were removed, so you didn't have to balance between jump range and outfitting choices anymore. Horizons introduced the SRV, and the necessity of having shields to land on planets safely, which did reintroduce compromising between ship cost, jump range, and outfitting choices again... until credit reward inflation grew to the point where it removed ship cost from the equation again. And then the number of exploration modules decreased, while the number of available slots increased, which meant that even a lowly Hauler could fit everything you needed to explore, while still allowing for some optional extras.
What I most wanted from Elite Dangerous was to play a struggling commander, who made hard, and sometimes morally dubious, decisions about getting ahead in a cutthroat galaxy. For years, I've been playing a wealthy dilettante whose decisions are more at the level of "What do I want for dinner?"
At least I still have the pleasure of trying to optimize my flight path afterwards. And EDO has helped personalize those morally dubious decisions, at least for me.
5. ED required a whole heap more than just one hour. If you want to do missions, you'll sink a few hours into this.
4. The common sense and "making sense" thing has gone out the window long time ago. Since you can Telepresence to Beagle Point from SOL, but you can't telepresence to your fighter 30km away.
You can't query commodity prices or a mission board content from outside the station.
You can't talk to a station over 7.5km. (We can talk to a rover that is several 10000s KM away on Mars now!)
I can keep on going.
3. Very true about the inability to fail. Unless you blow up your ship with LTDs on it that you just bought for 1m/t, you WILL make money. Cost and upkeep has been trivialized too much. Fuel is too cheap to matter, repairs are negligible. I used to fuel scoop to arrive at a station with as little fuel usage as possible, since it did cost a lot. Now it's 10-200Cr. I think it will be a long time until I'll be broke to those expenses. My biggest repair bill was for my AX cutter after a medusa encounter and few caustics to my face. 780k.
2. Very true about the commodities. Who here hauls Biowaste for a profit? Or clothes or non fruit and vegetables? Other than for a mission?
I haven't touched those ever since passenger missions came to be.
1. I think there is really not much left to decide on these days. Pretty much every build is the same for the same purpose.
A hauling cutter will most likely be 792t of cargo space. And a mining ship will feature 6-12 collector limpets, an A rated prospector and a 10 bin refinery.
I can relate to that. The only login time I've done in the past 6 months is to move the merits for power play just to get the modules and called it a day.
DW2 was organized by a dedicated team that worked over a year.
Erimus said they were working on DW3 for 2 years before being indefinitely postponed.
I do have some thoughts on a event but putting together a dedicated team seems daunting.
I think the first step in creating a successful event is having a talented dedicated team.
This is the thing. And I guess it depends on what kind of event you're talking about. Its easy for people to say 'go make your own event', as on paper it seems straight forward. Have an idea, create a thread, ask people to sign up, and off you go. But most people have little clue in what it takes to make something like Distant Worlds and Premonition work for thousands of players and keep them invested for months of their gametime (in the case of DW1 & 2 at least). That takes a lot of pre-planning.
As others have said, I don't think we'll see that kind of thing again because there's too much uncertainty with Elite these days and no one in their right mind will spend months planning an event for a game that's still unplayable for many, and has content that the console players can't even access. Smaller events sure. They happen all the time. But if people are still expecting headline making events that take months and months to set up and attract thousands of players, I've come to accept those days are long gone.
On the subject of player retention, that seems straight forward and its something I think everyone already knows don't they? Frontier need to keep evolving their game, adding interesting content that has DEPTH and LONGEVITY to it. Adding more grind isn't the way imo. One of the biggest selling points for Elite when it was first announced was its 1:1 scale galaxy and all the endless possibilities it could have. It was something no one else had done. Yet years after release, its still the most neglected aspect of the entire game. Give us an evolving galaxy full of mystery, discovery, civilizations to encounter and to trade with and interact with other than shooting them in the face, give us proper player driven expansion, and that will keep the players' imaginations going for years.
The main ones I would have much preferred and I think would be generally disliked, which form a set:
- Fixed and low jump ranges (~10LY), low capacity fuel tanks, hyperspace arrival avoids large masses rather than being attracted to them
- Adjust the interdiction mechanic to one which is hard to fail for the attacker, but if the defender does escape having been pulled down it's very hard to re-interdict them
- Massively increase the number of aggressive NPCs in inhabited systems, switch piracy back to the old "blow them up and scoop the bits" model, make most pirate enemies dangerous through numbers rather than individual ships (Odyssey - at least once you've got access to G3 gear yourself - actually gets this bit right, I think), make system authority mainly defend the ports.
Basically I think the point that the series really went wrong was FE2 - it's additions were great, but it threw out the key bits of the original Elite which gave it a proper sense of distance and scale.
Don't aim to match DW2. You don't need to. (If it happens in the end, great)
I've been on a couple of exploration expeditions with participant numbers around 300. That's still enough to support multiple (timezoned) meetups at the way points, with sufficient people at each that about all you can do is sit quietly in your ships and take screenshots because anything more active will cause so much lag people on weaker networks will disconnect.
If there'd been more people on those trip, then more people would have had fun, but the fun-per-person wouldn't have changed. It was still absolutely worthwhile to do with "just" 300 people (and would still have been great fun even with 100).
Similarly, it'll be easier to get a team together if you advertise the vision - if that's good, people will want to sign up and help. Remember that DW1 - which is still the second biggest mass expedition - started as Erimus and Kaii saying "we're going on a sightseeing trip, anyone else want to come?" and only had a lot of the structure and team put around it after it became clear just how many people were interested.
Having the event you plan be remembered for the rest of the history of the game is mainly luck. DW1 could have easily ended up in other circumstances being ten people, who'd have had a great time but not been remembered forever. But those ten people would still have had fun. Go for that and let the rest sort itself out.
Actually it started with even more humble beginnings. If I recall correctly, it was just Erimus on his own who mentioned in a unrelated thread comment that once Horizons comes out he plans to do a rerun of his Distant Suns expedition (the one where he discovered Beagle Point). Kaii and few others saw it and asked to tag along, and the rest is history.
But yes, you're spot on. One person with a throwaway idea can end up having that idea lead to things no one imagined. And if you think about how that one idea has lead to so many other things in Elite, its shows how the butterfly effect can work (I guess lol). Without that initial idea, DW1 wouldn't have happened. Whole teams of people wouldn't have come together to create something epic. Without DW1 would Jaques have attempted his jump to Beagle Point to meet the DW1 fleet there? Without players learning about Jaque's intended jump and UA bombing the starport, would he have not misjumped and ended up at Beagle instead of the Eol Prou nebulae, would something like Colonia have happened? Without DW1, there's no DW2 and the Explorer's Anchorage etc etc..
It just takes an idea.
Things like this just shows how amazing this game was, a time when players could steer the way things panned out, not by design, but just by circumstance. But as I mentioned previously, I'm not sure that's possible anymore. For instance I don't think we'll see another Colonia be born organically just by a string of circumstances and player actions all coming together like that. I hope I'm wrong though!
I didn't know what to expect. So, naturally, my CMDR prepared for the worst...fuel scoop, AFMU, plenty of guns, 6k hull, decent shields. Gnosis was a blast.
I can sympathize with those who are irked at the arbitrary permit locks or special treatment Canonn got, but not those who deliberately set off into the great unknown and were offend when they found something unexpected.
Never felt these things were at odds, let alone mutually exclusive.
Sounds like an RPG to me.
I'm sure not!
These things took more than circumstance and player action, they required direct developer intervention. The game has no mechanisms for these things to happen otherwise, which is what keeps it from being a more interactive sandbox.