Rebalancing older content. Enabling new players to "catch up" to the veterans.

So, with Elite Dangerous: Odyssey just around the corner and the stat, scope, and time creep going up and up and up with every new item we have to engineer, I think it would be a good time to speculate on what quality of life changes and rebalances could be applied to some of the "older" content.

For a new player starting fresh today, they are at a distinct disadvantage to a player who has poured countless hours in to Engineering, Credit gathering, unlocking the myriad engineers and advanced tech through brokers.

In order for these newer players (and any existing player that may not have spent the hundreds of hours grinding out all this stuff), I believe that Frontier should look at a way to streamline some of this older content. It is not uncommon when a new expansion is released that older content has requirements reduced, as it allows newer players to catch up and helps to promote the latest new features.


EDIT

Perhaps I came up with this idea from the wrong angle. This is not about giving new players everything served on a silver platter. This is a way to look at some of the systems in the game and how they can be improved by streamlining some cumbersome and time consuming mechanics.

It is not a way to invalidate any veteran player's achievements

It is not a way for a new player get a fully engineered anaconda in a couple of days. (I'm pretty sure that's already mostly possible anyway...)

It is a way to reduce the overall number of different things there are to collect, given that we'll be having another entire game worth of materials and collectibles in Odyssey.

END EDIT



On Credits:

Credit gains have increased so, so much since launch. I don't think there is much to be done on this front. A new player can get access to all the ships pretty quickly, but since the real focus is on engineering upgrades these days I don't think it's such a bad thing. Whatever balance passes FDev do, it's going to annoy someone. Personally I think credit gains are too high, and could be done with a nerf across the board. But overall I believe people are comfortable with this.


On Unlocking Engineers:

If we compare a couple of engineers:

  • Unlock Todd McQuinn by giving him 100K in bounties. That's 10 mins in a REZ.
  • Tiana Fortune requires 50 Decoded Emission Data. That's sitting and scanning a load of ships hoping for the right drop.
  • Didi Vatermannn. 50 Lavian Brandy. They sell in batches of 6. Why not just ask for 6. That's a lot of brandy...

I'd opt for a reduction of unlock requirements. Some are a bit easy to unlock like Todd - especially after combat reward rebalancing, so he's fine. Some could be eased up on. 50 of a rare good that only stocks in batches of 6, a lot of unnecessary back and forth.


On Engineering:

Purely focusing on applying engineering upgrades, and not looking at balancing at all (That is a whole other thing). I think it's fairly ok. When you have the right materials that is. I think my ideas around streamlining engineers will be more affected by the Material Gathering section.


On Material Gathering:

There are currently 3 types of material. Within each material there are around 8 classes of mats. And each class has around 5 tiers. So that makes... around 120 different types of materials to collect. Plus there's going to be a whole bunch more come Odyssey. That is a lot of currency bloat.

There are also the Material Traders which allow you to transfer materials around, which kind of renders a lot of low level material gathering pointless. Why gather a bunch of T1 mats when you can go find a higher grade and trade down for dozens of them.


I'd do one of two things:

1.
  • Remove the bottom tier mats. Keep Tiers 3 and above. 120 currencies becomes 72. Nearly halved the amount of stuff you have to worry about.
  • Redistribute the remaining materials across the engineering blueprints and synths.

2.
  • Collect all materials of each class into a single currency. 120 becomes 24.
  • You gather materials as they are, but they're converted into a currency value. Tier 1 gives you 3 "Encoded materials", Tier 2 gives you 6, and so on. Now you're not having to go find a trader and swap up and down mats every time you need a specific material for an upgrade.

In both instances, keep the traders. Solution 1 they'd behave exactly as now but with less tiers. Solution 2 they still allow you to trade across classes. Just with a simpler UI.


On Advanced Tech Brokers:

I guess if the material gathering stuff was implemented, these blueprints would be affected in a good way, so there's less gathering up of materials for specific ones.

I think the obvious one is the Weapons that require each tier and frame to be unlocked separately. There are 9 Shock Cannon unlocks. Why? Same with the Guardian unlocks, 6 different variations of each weapon. Just make them 1 per. Unnecessary time wasting.




If some kind of pass like this was done, it would lessen the enormous time required to get to the stage that existing and veteran players are currently sat at. It helps to level the playing field in PvP, as a newby can build up ships capable of going nose to nose with a vet PvP ship.

And finally, if the time required to earn these things are less, maybe people won't relog Jameson's crash site as much. Poor guy, let him rest in peace.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.
 
Last edited:
There are currently 3 types of material. Within each material there are around 8 classes of mats. And each class has around 5 tiers. So that makes... around 120 different types of materials to collect. Plus there's going to be a whole bunch more come Odyssey. That is a lot of currency bloat.
Of your entire argument, I believe this is the only salient point (emphasis mine)
 
Last edited:
If some kind of pass like this was done, it would lessen the enormous time required to get to the stage that existing and veteran players are currently sat at. It helps to level the playing field in PvP, as a newby can build up ships capable of going nose to nose with a vet PvP ship.

And finally, if the time required to earn these things are less, maybe people won't relog Jameson's crash site as much. Poor guy, let him rest in peace.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.

The concept that new players "have to advance to the level of veteran players ASAP" is a false one, any game that goes down this path is on the road to extinction, I have seen it happen time and again on games that are on the way out and I can assure you it's a bad idea. New players already get huge bonuses in the amount of money they can collect in such a short period of time, changing the way mats are gathered to makes that the same, players with 3 weeks in the game flying Conda and complaining their powerful ships get wasted by a vulture, because they have never bothered to learn how to fly it let alone take part in combat or studied how to properly set it up for combat.

Most MMO games that have been around a long time don't do this because they know what a bad idea it is.
 
So, with Elite Dangerous: Odyssey just around the corner and the stat, scope, and time creep going up and up and up with every new item we have to engineer, I think it would be a good time to speculate on what quality of life changes and rebalances could be applied to some of the "older" content.

For a new player starting fresh today, they are at a distinct disadvantage to a player who has poured countless hours in to Engineering, Credit gathering, unlocking the myriad engineers and advanced tech through brokers.

In order for these newer players (and any existing player that may not have spent the hundreds of hours grinding out all this stuff), I believe that Frontier should look at a way to streamline some of this older content. It is not uncommon when a new expansion is released that older content has requirements reduced, as it allows newer players to catch up and helps to promote the latest new features.

On Credits:

Credit gains have increased so, so much since launch. I don't think there is much to be done on this front. A new player can get access to all the ships pretty quickly, but since the real focus is on engineering upgrades these days I don't think it's such a bad thing. Whatever balance passes FDev do, it's going to annoy someone. Personally I think credit gains are too high, and could be done with a nerf across the board. But overall I believe people are comfortable with this.


On Unlocking Engineers:

If we compare a couple of engineers:

  • Unlock Todd McQuinn by giving him 100K in bounties. That's 10 mins in a REZ.
  • Tiana Fortune requires 50 Decoded Emission Data. That's sitting and scanning a load of ships hoping for the right drop.
  • Didi Vatermannn. 50 Lavian Brandy. They sell in batches of 6. Why not just ask for 6. That's a lot of brandy...

I'd opt for a reduction of unlock requirements. Some are a bit easy to unlock like Todd - especially after combat reward rebalancing, so he's fine. Some could be eased up on. 50 of a rare good that only stocks in batches of 6, a lot of unnecessary back and forth.


On Engineering:

Purely focusing on applying engineering upgrades, and not looking at balancing at all (That is a whole other thing). I think it's fairly ok. When you have the right materials that is. I think my ideas around streamlining engineers will be more affected by the Material Gathering section.


On Material Gathering:

There are currently 3 types of material. Within each material there are around 8 classes of mats. And each class has around 5 tiers. So that makes... around 120 different types of materials to collect. Plus there's going to be a whole bunch more come Odyssey. That is a lot of currency bloat.

There are also the Material Traders which allow you to transfer materials around, which kind of renders a lot of low level material gathering pointless. Why gather a bunch of T1 mats when you can go find a higher grade and trade down for dozens of them.


I'd do one of two things:

1.
  • Remove the bottom tier mats. Keep Tiers 3 and above. 120 currencies becomes 72. Nearly halved the amount of stuff you have to worry about.
  • Redistribute the remaining materials across the engineering blueprints and synths.

2.
  • Collect all materials of each class into a single currency. 120 becomes 24.
  • You gather materials as they are, but they're converted into a currency value. Tier 1 gives you 3 "Encoded materials", Tier 2 gives you 6, and so on. Now you're not having to go find a trader and swap up and down mats every time you need a specific material for an upgrade.

In both instances, keep the traders. Solution 1 they'd behave exactly as now but with less tiers. Solution 2 they still allow you to trade across classes. Just with a simpler UI.


On Advanced Tech Brokers:

I guess if the material gathering stuff was implemented, these blueprints would be affected in a good way, so there's less gathering up of materials for specific ones.

I think the obvious one is the Weapons that require each tier and frame to be unlocked separately. There are 9 Shock Cannon unlocks. Why? Same with the Guardian unlocks, 6 different variations of each weapon. Just make them 1 per. Unnecessary time wasting.




If some kind of pass like this was done, it would lessen the enormous time required to get to the stage that existing and veteran players are currently sat at. It helps to level the playing field in PvP, as a newby can build up ships capable of going nose to nose with a vet PvP ship.

And finally, if the time required to earn these things are less, maybe people won't relog Jameson's crash site as much. Poor guy, let him rest in peace.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.
Suck all challenge and toss all the work it takes to get up there. Straight up easy play eh?
Cool story bro
 
Most MMO games that have been around a long time don't do this because they know what a bad idea it is.

Well that is just not true at all.

World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14, two of the most popular and successful MMOs of recent times frequently do streamlining of older content so that newer players do not have to stare down a daunting grind to get to the current content.


I'm not advocating giving every new player a free G5 Anaconda. I'm arguing that streamlining some older content would allow a new player the opportunity to catch up and play on the same level as a vet who's put thousands of hours into this. There is still a learning curve in flying their ship, sure. But that's a skill requirement, not a time sink for unlocking the huge amount of systems and content that is required to be on a stat level that veteran players are.



No.

Work for your toys like all the old dogs had to.

Thanks for the insightful contribution.
 
How about allowing us to buy a fully levelled character from the ARX store like all the p2w games do? The more you pay the more ships with fully engineered modules you can start with.

No levelling, No grinding, No gameplay, and most importantly - no skill... but you will have a fully worked up toon.

Seriously, why does the game need to be dumbed down so that people can play for a week, say they achieved everything and move on?
 
How about allowing us to buy a fully levelled character from the ARX store like all the p2w games do? The more you pay the more ships with fully engineered modules you can start with.

No levelling, No grinding, No gameplay, and most importantly - no skill... but you will have a fully worked up toon.

Seriously, why does the game need to be dumbed down so that people can play for a week, say they achieved everything and move on?

Yeah, that is exactly what I am asking for.

Can I just pay 3000 Arx for an I win button?

Jesus man come on. I'm seeing how people would receive a streamlining of older content so that newer players can get up to speed a bit quicker and not be turned away by a grind.

Clearly the pillars of this community don't want new people playing with their toys.
 
It's because so many people promote this game as a PvP game rather than what it is - a space sim - so people view progression as only being towards making them better killing machines.

This game supports PvP, and encourages it in Open Play.

The fact that when you are in the game you can shoot at another player indicates that Frontier WANT PvP to be a part of their game. If they didn't there would be no way to damage another Commander's ship.

If you don't want PvP, sure, you can go play in a Private Group or solo. But the fact is that it is available, and there are communities that frequently engage in it.
 
No. As far as Odyssey content is concerned, we all start at the same place - no weapons or suits engineered, no new engineers unlocked. There is very little advantage for existing players over new players - our ships may jump further possibly making unlocking the new engineers bit quicker, but that's about it.

There is no reason to 'level any playing field'. Let new Cmdrs be new. Nothing whines more than a new Cmdr gifted a PvP ship who then gets battered by experienced pilots who have put in the flight/combat hours to get there.
 
I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.
imo it is an error to think of the material gathering as a "progression". you do get stuff and boosters but that's not really what makes you progress, learn and turn into a "veteran". it's just stuff to be had. unless you want to minimax there is no real "path", nor "story". also, as an evolving game, and particularly with the ongoing puzzles (good or bad) the experience that older players had is simply lost to new players forever. this is not wow where you have to herd everyone to the latest (upper) tier. there are no tiers.

the whole currency bloat is just filler to hide the fact that there is actually no other gameplay, so i would welcome any proposal like yours that diminishes the relevance of that. but i would go all the way to zero if at all possible: imo engineering has 2 problems: senseless power creep and grind. my simple approach would address both: make the power creep the new normal by eliminating the grind and selling all modifications and special effects in regular outfitting for credits (a single currency). synth should just go away, it is cheesy in combat and removes gameplay making things like limpets and life support irrelevant.
 
No. As far as Odyssey content is concerned, we all start at the same place - no weapons or suits engineered, no new engineers unlocked. There is very little advantage for existing players over new players - our ships may jump further possibly making unlocking the new engineers bit quicker, but that's about it.

There is no reason to 'level any playing field'. Let new Cmdrs be new. Nothing whines more than a new Cmdr gifted a PvP ship who then gets battered by experienced pilots who have put in the flight/combat hours to get there.

Yes, we all will be level playing field for Odyssey. Everyone starts with their flight suit and a pistol. For on foot gameplay.

My original post is about how we'd rebalance everything before that, so that players can have an easier time getting their spaceships up to scratch AND engage in upgrading their suits too.

Existing players have already had all this time to gear up their ships. Easing up on how long this process takes is simply going to make a newer player's journey a little easier to get up to that level.

As for your comment on whining new players in PvP. Well, you'll still have the pleasure of that if there is a skill difference, so I don't see why that is a problem.
 
This game supports PvP, and encourages it in Open Play.
no, that's just a misguiding label.

any mention of pvp by frontier is just empty marketing babble, they were never serious about it. the game lacks necessary pvp infrastructure (network reliability, instancing consistency, anitcheat), it couldn't host a sizable pvp community even if they wanted, which they don't. there are some dedicated diehards doing pvp because space combat is cool in the game, but they either compromise (eg, fight for fun) or gank newbs to post it on youtube.

besides, what open encourages, solo does discourage! :D
 
Well that is just not true at all.

World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14, two of the most popular and successful MMOs of recent times frequently do streamlining of older content so that newer players do not have to stare down a daunting grind to get to the current content.

That's a bit different; those MMOs rely on the Expansion business model, where players need to buy a new one every few months/year, and that's where all the focus is. Players need to kill bosses multiple times to get the best gear, and need to spend huge amounts of time leveling up at the top end, so skipping previous content still leaves most of the game to play.

Elite doesn't really do that. It's one contiguous game, and even the new content tends to be backfilling rather than extending the end. You don't NEED an anaconda to get a good combat suit, for example, so there's no reason to help players skip one type of content to facilitate getting to another. There's no loot grinding or boss killing.

Frankly, helping players to skip so much content would be an actively bad decision, because unlike other games, where getting to max level is just a burdensome grind, in Elite it's about 90% of the actual fun part. Unlike those games where most content happens at the end, in this game, most content is getting there in the first place, with not that much to do once you're there.

Completely different games require different approaches.
 
So, with Elite Dangerous: Odyssey just around the corner and the stat, scope, and time creep going up and up and up with every new item we have to engineer, I think it would be a good time to speculate on what quality of life changes and rebalances could be applied to some of the "older" content.

For a new player starting fresh today, they are at a distinct disadvantage to a player who has poured countless hours in to Engineering, Credit gathering, unlocking the myriad engineers and advanced tech through brokers.

In order for these newer players (and any existing player that may not have spent the hundreds of hours grinding out all this stuff), I believe that Frontier should look at a way to streamline some of this older content. It is not uncommon when a new expansion is released that older content has requirements reduced, as it allows newer players to catch up and helps to promote the latest new features.

On Credits:

Credit gains have increased so, so much since launch. I don't think there is much to be done on this front. A new player can get access to all the ships pretty quickly, but since the real focus is on engineering upgrades these days I don't think it's such a bad thing. Whatever balance passes FDev do, it's going to annoy someone. Personally I think credit gains are too high, and could be done with a nerf across the board. But overall I believe people are comfortable with this.


On Unlocking Engineers:

If we compare a couple of engineers:

  • Unlock Todd McQuinn by giving him 100K in bounties. That's 10 mins in a REZ.
  • Tiana Fortune requires 50 Decoded Emission Data. That's sitting and scanning a load of ships hoping for the right drop.
  • Didi Vatermannn. 50 Lavian Brandy. They sell in batches of 6. Why not just ask for 6. That's a lot of brandy...

I'd opt for a reduction of unlock requirements. Some are a bit easy to unlock like Todd - especially after combat reward rebalancing, so he's fine. Some could be eased up on. 50 of a rare good that only stocks in batches of 6, a lot of unnecessary back and forth.


On Engineering:

Purely focusing on applying engineering upgrades, and not looking at balancing at all (That is a whole other thing). I think it's fairly ok. When you have the right materials that is. I think my ideas around streamlining engineers will be more affected by the Material Gathering section.


On Material Gathering:

There are currently 3 types of material. Within each material there are around 8 classes of mats. And each class has around 5 tiers. So that makes... around 120 different types of materials to collect. Plus there's going to be a whole bunch more come Odyssey. That is a lot of currency bloat.

There are also the Material Traders which allow you to transfer materials around, which kind of renders a lot of low level material gathering pointless. Why gather a bunch of T1 mats when you can go find a higher grade and trade down for dozens of them.


I'd do one of two things:

1.
  • Remove the bottom tier mats. Keep Tiers 3 and above. 120 currencies becomes 72. Nearly halved the amount of stuff you have to worry about.
  • Redistribute the remaining materials across the engineering blueprints and synths.

2.
  • Collect all materials of each class into a single currency. 120 becomes 24.
  • You gather materials as they are, but they're converted into a currency value. Tier 1 gives you 3 "Encoded materials", Tier 2 gives you 6, and so on. Now you're not having to go find a trader and swap up and down mats every time you need a specific material for an upgrade.

In both instances, keep the traders. Solution 1 they'd behave exactly as now but with less tiers. Solution 2 they still allow you to trade across classes. Just with a simpler UI.


On Advanced Tech Brokers:


I guess if the material gathering stuff was implemented, these blueprints would be affected in a good way, so there's less gathering up of materials for specific ones.

I think the obvious one is the Weapons that require each tier and frame to be unlocked separately. There are 9 Shock Cannon unlocks. Why? Same with the Guardian unlocks, 6 different variations of each weapon. Just make them 1 per. Unnecessary time wasting.




If some kind of pass like this was done, it would lessen the enormous time required to get to the stage that existing and veteran players are currently sat at. It helps to level the playing field in PvP, as a newby can build up ships capable of going nose to nose with a vet PvP ship.

And finally, if the time required to earn these things are less, maybe people won't relog Jameson's crash site as much. Poor guy, let him rest in peace.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.
My thoughts are, why do beginning players need to advance to long term vets asap. The game is all about the journey, not the end goal. All you would be doing there is destroying the game for them.
 
Didi Vatermannn. 50 Lavian Brandy. They sell in batches of 6. Why not just ask for 6. That's a lot of brandy...
It may be base pedantry, but I’m almost certain that when bought Didi’s booze there were 49 units available, which I thought typical of Sod’s Law! But it’s practically a stone’s throw away, so it was just an extra jump there and back again for the last one she insisted on. I’m not clued up on what affects the availability of rare commodities though and as ever, I’ve been wrong before and I’ll be wrong again...
 
Top Bottom