Exploration should be as skillful and activity as high level PvE, successful trading, etc.
Neither requires skill. Killing brain dead AI does not require skill, just leveraging the pathetic power creep PvE players have balefully demanded over the last few years. Trading? Not a skill. Just determination in the face of Frontier trying to make that a redundant occupation, as they have done for Piracy.
Frontier are not introducing "skill" into exploration. They are making it a "process" with "procedures" that will consume time. The people who are concerned, aren't of the money making variety. They are of the "I have eyes, I would like to see" variety. Between "skill cap" comments from people who may not have explored in any extended fashion (where doing the same thing hundreds, or indeed thousands of times is not out of the ordinary) and wouldn't dare because it's not their bag anyway, and people for whom the perfect game, has absolutely nothing in it at all, Frontier have tried to deliver the impossible.
Frankly, until Beta, most of this sort of conversation is personal projection of what sounds cool but is completely unworkable. The
original guardian stuff was lauded as being all about skill and rewarding this and that, and it turns out it was just do the same thing
twenty-five times.
Frontier. Has. Form.
Beta will make it abundantly clear if Frontier have learned anything or not. I certainly, have long since stopped expecting the "forum base" to have done anything of the sort; because it's the same elitist nonsense every time. And the handful that believe, surely,
this is the time the developer will absolutely get it. Maybe? I hope so. But I've seen enough, lived enough of these changes to not just ignore Frontier's habitual approach to mechanics.
I look forward to Beta, with great interest. I hope it's held after the fact, as well. But maybe it's time to recognise the developer is only ever going to do a thing, a particular way. And that, as they say, is that.
I want to be blown away; I don't want to see the same outcomes as before. I want Frontier to have their Hello Games moment. And I won't be alone, in the slightest. The vast majority of players, who do not come here, are counting on Frontier; Q4 is exploration. This was the update that mattered.
Frontier are building for
the entire community - not just this corner of it. It's time the developer remembered that.
--
More than ever before, I firmly believe the
less Frontier listens to this place, and the
more they listen to the broader community, who can communicate just fine, the better the game will get. Because that's who they are doing all this for. The greater community. And I think Frontier should really own that, a hell of a lot better than they have in the past.
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