I can identify a little bit with the title of the thread. Have every ship I want and some I don't. Engineered them all and some times I find the vast empty environment a bit of a grind. The part I enjoy most is engineering my boats. Looking forwards to new boats to buy even if I don't like them. Credits? I have plenty of those so void opels or diamonds way out in nowhere take some of the mundane away. Its all about the environment for me now(VR),...visiting abandoned settlements,...surface mining for mats and a bit of Haz Res for manufactured mats. Why? so I can buy something and engineer it, customize it,...just fly it even if its for a few runs and then park them along with the other dust collectors. Im sorry that many find the game has run out of steam but for me I can't help but enjoy the view .
Probably done with this game
- Thread starter Axt0n
- Start date
Yeah, I can definitely also see where the OP is coming from. In games with a campaign mode there's a natural endpoint, but in open-ended games it's really on you how long you choose to play. But "I'm bored now, so I'm going to go play something else" is such a mundane thing for a gamer, that I really fail to understand the mindset that drives one person after another to make a forum thread about it.
Maybe we could just have a sticky thread a la the old "welcome newcomers" thread, for people to say "so long and thanks for all the fish" with a bit more dignity.
Maybe we could just have a sticky thread a la the old "welcome newcomers" thread, for people to say "so long and thanks for all the fish" with a bit more dignity.
Well the only one that really needs to care about these posts right now is FDev since it's another customer basically saying goodbye. You should care as eventually when enough people leave then your game enjoyment will be impacted.
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Not just that, but also bringing them back might be more difficult.
People have seen this with WoW: The game was at its peak at Lich King. With Cata, things went a lot south. Pandaria brought some back for a month or two, which they left shortly again. Warlords had some major improvements - people came back for 3+ months because it was good, some left again. The last 2 expansions was only catering to those who stayed, the influx of new players or old ones resubbing was negligible.
And this is for an MMO with a paid monthly fee.
A player that leaves is less likely to come back and spend money in the store than one that keeps playing. And one that left sure as hell won't spend a single buck in the store for a paint job. So that's much more lost revenue there.
So here’s my 2 credits...
BGS: It is pointless, because nothing of consequence changes. Ok, so maybe beer changes its legal status. So what? Now I do understand, there are those who feel Elite is a game of electronic Risk, and that’s fine for them. But for the rest of us, those with open eyes, we can see it really makes no difference who is listed first in the station menus.
CZ: Like above, CZ’s are a BGS function. I’ve blown up plenty of NPC’s. I “need” to blow up a few more to reach combat Elite, but it will happen when it happens.
Engineering: All my ships have long been Engineered. All my Engineers have long been unlocked, save those in Colonia, where I’ve never been.
Exploration: I’ve been doing it for months now. Out on the rim, circumnavigating the galaxy, because I’ve never done it. When I’m done, I’ll probably not do it again - or not for a very long time.
Thargoids: I’ve fought a few. Like any other NPC, it gets old blowing them up. It’s a long fight, and only interesting the first time. By the 3rd or 4th, the novelty has worn off. They’re tough solo, at least for a while, so teaming up does make it better.
Talking to People: There are voice comms built into the game anyone can use, at any time. No outside apps required, and I’ve never had a problem with them.
Overall: Elite is largely what you make it. There are a large number of various, though admittedly similar, activities you can engage in to occupy your time. There are a number of different ships you can use for these activities as well, and sometimes it can be fun to challenge yourself to do a familiar task in an unfamiliar ship.
But sooner or later, it does all become a bit old hat, and that signals a time for a break. There’s nothing wrong with some time away. Absence does make the heart... uh.. stop beating?
BGS: It is pointless, because nothing of consequence changes. Ok, so maybe beer changes its legal status. So what? Now I do understand, there are those who feel Elite is a game of electronic Risk, and that’s fine for them. But for the rest of us, those with open eyes, we can see it really makes no difference who is listed first in the station menus.
CZ: Like above, CZ’s are a BGS function. I’ve blown up plenty of NPC’s. I “need” to blow up a few more to reach combat Elite, but it will happen when it happens.
Engineering: All my ships have long been Engineered. All my Engineers have long been unlocked, save those in Colonia, where I’ve never been.
Exploration: I’ve been doing it for months now. Out on the rim, circumnavigating the galaxy, because I’ve never done it. When I’m done, I’ll probably not do it again - or not for a very long time.
Thargoids: I’ve fought a few. Like any other NPC, it gets old blowing them up. It’s a long fight, and only interesting the first time. By the 3rd or 4th, the novelty has worn off. They’re tough solo, at least for a while, so teaming up does make it better.
Talking to People: There are voice comms built into the game anyone can use, at any time. No outside apps required, and I’ve never had a problem with them.
Overall: Elite is largely what you make it. There are a large number of various, though admittedly similar, activities you can engage in to occupy your time. There are a number of different ships you can use for these activities as well, and sometimes it can be fun to challenge yourself to do a familiar task in an unfamiliar ship.
But sooner or later, it does all become a bit old hat, and that signals a time for a break. There’s nothing wrong with some time away. Absence does make the heart... uh.. stop beating?
Thing is, WoW is designed to suck your wallet inside out, like all subscription-based garbage. Elite is not. They’ve already got your money. The store is just incidental.
Its called feedback. Its the major reason for the forums existence. Please at least make a pretense of trying to keep up.
THANK YOU!
Finally someone who sees it like me.
The BGS could have so much more effect on the game if better implemented.
You’re welcome. It took me about 10 minutes to realize there was no difference between Imperial, Federation, Alliance, Independent or even Anarchy* space. The stations don’t care, NPC’s don’t care, even if you’re in Hostile PP space, no one cares. They don’t even fly on the wrong side of the stars in Imperial space.
I agree with some of this, but possibly for different reasons. Despite ED being styled as an MMO I don't want to see player agency making direct and sweeping changes to the galaxy. The player as the "little cog" has always been at the heart of the franchise, and ED is aimed as much at casual players as the hardcore. While little cogs can group together into slightly bigger machines, allowing them too much influence on the galaxy as a whole might risk disenfranchising the casuals. Logging in after a couple of months away from the game only to find the entire political landscape radically rearranged around you would be like going into a coma every time you logged out.
Having said that, I would love to see more variety in NPC numbers and behaviour across the regions controlled by the various superpowers and factions. Corporate democracies should feel safe, anarchies should be terrifying. (And yes, I know that's an oversimplification and arguably borderline misuse of those terms, but that too is a staple of Elite). If FD could pull that off, some players might even begin to feel as though they have more agency without actually changing how the BGS works, if the little levers they pulled on were having a more noticeable effect over time beyond just changing some names on the station welcome screen.
First thing IMO is to get rid of the ridiculous mechanic whereby NPC ability scales mostly with the pilot's combat ranking and hardly depends at all on the political or military structure of a given system. If pushing a system into anarchy meant a bigger and more meaningful NPC threat, manipulating the BGS might have the effect of "corralling" trade routes through certain systems by making the others excessively dangerous to cross. And even if players didn't always change their routes accordingly, NPC convoys could be made to (or the spawn rates could be tweaked so they appeared to).
At least the different systems would feel different. Everything is still far too homogeneous at the moment, and players have been requesting more variety for literally years.
Or here would be some more examples how the missions could have an effect on the BGS:
- You assassinate a pirate lord - interdiction frequency drops by 10%. Security rises.
- You kill pirates in a RES site - the odds of you being interdicted drop even further, security rises more.
- you take that cargo hauling mission with possible pirate/interdiction encounter, but because you killed off so many pirates, there won't be any of that
Or:
- someone did a wet work job and killed off 50 system security ships.
- Security dropped from High to medium
- people killed them off more - dropped to Low
- and more killings - System went to Anarchy
- Black market goods become normal goods, station turns into a pirate station (ship new goods to transform station to a pirate station with guns and hookers and blackjack)
- You might get scanned a lot more when coming and going into these stations and the patrol ships wouldn't be system authority. They would be pirates and you better have a good standing with them. If you are friendly or higher, they won't attack you, else you might be subject to "voluntairy donation of goods".
Considering the game is in its fifth year, the reason for why it remains so limited in gameplay driving some players away has to be due to the Cobra engine itself and the crazy non-persistence instancing architecture. It simply can't do much more than what it is doing today. This is further supported by FDev needing two years or more to release some sort of 'major' change. Anyway, it is what it is. Which to many is a shallow "inch deep and mile wide" with gameplay that gets boring and seriously repetitive very quickly.
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That just seems a bit contradictory, as casual players will not care how the borders change, so I don't know how changes to the map or whatever will disenfranchise them since they do not have a stake in either the BGS or Powers anyway? They'll be there to shoot at stuff, make money, or just fly off out of the bubble.
The ones who are affected will be those invested in the BGS or powers. And quite often, those are the type of players who want more agency in the game. Otherwise, as noted by a few players before, why play the game in that manner if you don't have an impact at all???
I found this game boring many times now. I also found not playing it boring. Go figure.
It's frustrating, but from experience of the early builds and odd bugs that occurred I get the feeling that a lot of this telemetry is being recorded, possibly even processed to some degree, under the hood. But for some reason it's never surfaced into the game in any significantly noticeable way. Or, when it happens by accident or design, it's nerfed back into the world of meh as quickly as possible. I could be very wrong, because much of this is gut interpretation, but it seems as though FD have a determination to make ED as universally accessible as possible, which is laudable, but are doing so by making the entire thing as uniformly vanilla as they can.
And I don't understand that strategy at all. None of the earlier games worked like this. If you went somewhere too dangerous and got killed, you stayed away until you had more hardware or experience. There wasn't much in the way of player agency -- you couldn't really change how the game interacted with you beyond getting faster at killing the bad guys -- and so states didn't change as they do in ED. But at least there was a sense that the galaxy wasn't a single uniform backdrop. Those games were no less accessible. I can't understand why ED is the way it is.
I'm not so sure. The game is heavily instanced by design but that's nothing that can't be worked around. Silly little things like non-mission NPCs generally not having consistent names, ships or loadouts between instances is trivial to solve. Push the relevant data onto local storage prior to instance destruction (if you don't mind opening up a potential cheat window) or server-side (if you don't mind a bandwidth hit) and pop it back for the next instance. That's not difficult. I can't imagine an engine architecture that would prevent this. It's effectively a parallel process. Hell, many significant interactions between players and NPCs occur in places or modes where other players aren't present, so in many cases there'd be no need even to share the stored flags. It could all be done locally.
Honestly, I don't think the engine is the problem. I think the lack of desire to make such changes is the problem. I just don't understand the lack of desire.
But I thought we were talking in terms of giving players more agency, so everyone would have a stake in what the BGS is doing in response to this amplified player agency? I'm thinking of the guy who docks his paper trade ship in the middle of a safe trade hub and logs in two weeks later to find it's the home system of a 250ly-wide pirate-infested cluster.
If you want to play a raw numbers game, I guess you could argue that disenfranchising or even losing that player as a potential cosmetic-buying customer would be a price worth paying if it maintains engagement with the larger group of players who've been exercising their agency for the previous fortnight. Maybe FD will see it that way, one day. But right now the game, for all its flaws and lack of dynamism, does appeal to a very broad spectrum of players and play styles and there aren't many games that can boast that. I'd hate to see that eroded.
FD will be the first to admit (or they once did; it's been a while since I've seen official comment) that the BGS was never meant to be invested in or actively played. That was a massive misjudgement on their part; give players levers to pull, especially ones they can pull while working together, and they will work together to pull them. Whether it means there are internal limits on just how much BGS manipulation can be done before it falls apart, or if it's just another case of FD enforcing their limited vision, we may never know unless or until they introduce some changes.
Historically FD would answer your question of "Why play?" with "Don't try to play the BGS, that's what Powerplay is for," which is pretty hollow given that Powerplay has similar issues to the BGS, if not worse. They've also undermined that policy with the introduction of player factions, which basically require you to play the BGS. It's all very messy.
Tikanderoga is right with that list of causes and effects. Relatively small tweaks -- or integrations between currently separate mechanisms -- that give the illusion of consequential change are the way to go IMO. In a game like this there will always be players who want to go to extremes, blow up space stations or bombard planets from orbit. I think we can be reasonably confident that ED is never going to be that sort of game, partly from legacy policy but mainly because it's something the engine is most definitely not capable of. But the fact that it feels so homogeneous is incredibly disappointing, given the data processing and player input the game has to work with. I wouldn't want to see it turn into an EVE-like, with whole sectors dominated by the actions of a few player megacorps, but other than emptying a station of goods or slowly depleting a ring of resources it's hard to point to any activity in the game that feels like we're having a day-to-day effect on it at all.
With that regard would you rather design a game for people not actually playing it?
