Reduce the grind

[Schmack]

NMS is grindy too. You need a warp drive. You don't have one? Go get one. You now have a warp drive but guess what, you don't have any fuel for it. Find anti matter. Oh you found it? You don't have a container for it. Get a container. Cool now you have all the ingredients to watch a cut scene of you warping to basically the same place you just left, with some RNG differences.

It's busy work. It's not boring, but it's certainly not immersive unless you think learning alien language one word at a time is interesting. The stargate is interesting though. That indicates they went after a younger audience who cannot be bothered to repeat actions like returning to their base.

 

[Ignition]

Elite needs more gameplay mechanics, it should be possible to specialize in any activity with each activity having their own gameplay mehcanics.
ED is just a framework with very simplistic mechanics, the FSS is a good example of how to add another layer and more involvement and interaction to the game, sadly it was too little of an improvement but it was the right direction.
Imagine if we could have a much richer game, with every single activity with a deep interaction and mechanics, so you really feel you're doing something special and not a trivial tasks like we are doing since 2014.

For example, Bounty hunting should be about chasing X person for Y bounty through systems looking for clues through its path for example asking npcs. Is really stupid to go to an area where pirate ships spawn endlessly and get destryed for hours, LOL. Do you see Drug Dealers in real life going willingly to a police station for hours and days? It's ok for a demo version of a game but this game was released 5 years ago.
Or prospecting planets in the srv with proper mechanics and tools instead of SHOOTING STUPID rocks.

There're an infinite number of options to make the game less grindy, and the solution is not making the game simpler, but making it more interactive and complex.

 

[CMDR Egmont]

What annoys me is travel time and module transfer time. I wish there were a way to circumvent this mechanic... like paying more to expedite. We should also be able to transfer ships and modules to a system without being in that system. And make Fuel Scoop a core internal.

 

[CMDR Redcrest]

What reward? Credits? Materials? Ranks?

All of these are incredibly easy to come by, unless you're a lazy 47 relogging at Dav's thinking this is how you get materials, in which case, you've inflicted this on yourself, enjoy it.

The actual task of gathering raw materials takes too long and is not a fun game loop. Brain trees, fumeroles, rock shooting. Dull and feels like an obstacle rather than an aspect of the game to enjoy.
The game loop needs improving to made something enjoyable in it's own right.
Scooping after combat well I've a ship set up for that.
To be honest I wouldn't have a problem with an annual opportunity to purchase materials with CR. Provides a reason to still earn credits beyond increasing a number.
There's improvements that could and should be made.

 

[TheSynopticVision]

As suggested above, there are also temporary measures to de-grind the game (because they know it's there).

For example: do you remember the engineering weekend when all G5 rolls could be done with G4 materials? I played a LOT of hours that weekend to get my T10 fully G5d. A good idea.

So why in the name of all that is holy we NEVER saw anything like that again?? Everybody liked it. Everybody. It could've been an excellent event, like once every 2 months or so. But no. We get the Interstellar community goals instead.

 

[MPL3D]

Life is grind, everyday you get up, brush your teeth, go to work, eat and sleep.
Rinse and repeat.
Elite is quite realistic in my opinion, however it is a game. If you do the same everyday is your decision, not a game fault.
My advice, do not rush and let It flow. Do whatever you please and enjoy. Sooner than you think you'll look to the materials, for example, and discover that you have more than you need.

 

[Heater]

Hey Frontier, NMS reduced the grind and all players are happy. Please take note.

What grind OP? this is FDev's developing game play!.

 

[fu9ar]

The actual task of gathering raw materials takes too long and is not a fun game loop. Brain trees, fumeroles, rock shooting. Dull and feels like an obstacle rather than an aspect of the game to enjoy.
The game loop needs improving to made something enjoyable in it's own right.
Scooping after combat well I've a ship set up for that.
To be honest I wouldn't have a problem with an annual opportunity to purchase materials with CR. Provides a reason to still earn credits beyond increasing a number.
There's improvements that could and should be made.

Nah. You're not supposed to do it all at once. It is enjoyable in small doses. Drop by a few USS while running missions, bring a tourist around to see some fumaroles and instead of manically rushing through life, land and take the SRV out to gather some materials for a little while, always scoop your kills.

 

[AgentGB]

It’s funny what is considered a grind, isn’t it? For a short while I was pretty damn good at Red Dead 1 online. Was popping people all over the place. One day, it just became a chore.

Seen a few people on here asking for a shortcut to engineering so they can bypass mat collection (too repetitive) and get on with killing hundreds and hundreds of other PvPers (apparently not repetitive).

Its a grind in regard to engineering in ED, its not a matter of semantics. In the early days before engineering, i could get stuck into PvP, enjoy the thrill & adrenaline of the hunt & being hunted by other players. The only 'time wall' was credits & that was it. Since rebuys were costly & crime/punishment inflicted financial hurt. Now engineering as been included as a massive 'time wall', that acts as a barrier to the parts of the game i enjoy, i now have to 'grind' mind numbingly for items to do what i use to do & its not like these items scale with the ship class? e.g Corvettes requiring 10x the amount of items to engineer its modules compared to a Sidewinder. There no rhyme or reason for the grind involved in engineering other than to thwart that aspect of the game i'm interested in. In no other career of the game (Mining, Exploring, Trading) is there a stonewall grind by engineering that blocks you from doing these careers/game roles sufficiently. People who played Day Z initially did so for the adrenaline rush, the grind was a side show while in ED its the centerpiece of the flagship.

The grind of engineering in actuality seems to be a mechanic designed to stop 'weekend warriors', casual players & as resulted in fostering the same attitude comparable to zealotry i see here & sometime wonder what came first, the chicken or the egg in regard to whom drives the notion that grind is good? the Guardians of Grind or FD? I remember folks in the early days that would crush all opinions/suggestions deemed to sound anything like EVE.

I mean i'm not sure why people would not want the level of grind to be reduced in engineering, or even allow for faster progression of it in Open, it seems to me, that those defending the grind do so to protect their own 'time investment' or why else would they be so bothered? or use the excuse that "engineering would become trivial" with one hand & yet defend the grind with the other if not a form of protecting their own time investment which to me seems selfish to a potential whole wave of new players that could get stuck into this game.

 

[Old Duck]

Let's table all this grind talk until I get a gaming laptop and have to start ED from scratch. Then I'll be in a better position to tell you if the game is too grindy or not

That said, I wish there were more alternatives to let us pick our grind. The immediate example that comes to mind is raw materials. I can run missions, visit USS, visit certain settlements, or blow up ships to get manufactured mats. The only way I know to get raw mats is to shoot rocks or POIs - all which require me to drive around in my SRV, half the time aimlessly, and this is a "grind" I do not enjoy. Oh, and I can shoot asteroids and pray that a single mat falls out every 10 minutes. Where are the missions that offer Polonium, for example?

 

[CMDR Carbo]

Let me be blunt about it. For me, engineering is the culprit of the grind. FDEV increased payout over the years, money isn't really a grind anymore. At least for me.

Thus I will focus on engineering. I have a decent fleet on my main, and 4 ships on my alt. On my main, I fully engineered 3 ships for combat. The Rest, (about 7-8) have basic FSD increase and weight reduction.
I don't do engineering anymore with the exception of FSD and sensor weight reduction. Therefore, none of my ships have any additional engineering on my alt account. I basically don't care anymore about gathering mats, which either in combat or on planets is just a chore. I did it in the past, burned me out, now I play this game for fun.

What this means for me however is, unless I take out one of my dedicated combat ships, I don't play in open. There is no point for me.
Engineering resulted in me playing less and less in open. There is Mobius and Fleetcomm. And I don't think I'm a special snowflake. I assume there are plenty of other commanders that do the same.

In short, the engineering grind makes me not play in open very often. I firmly believe getting rid of said grind would make ED a better game, because more people would take part in the Multiplayer experience of the game. Engineering is an additional hurdle to get people into open, which makes less player take part in the multiplayer experience. Which is completely backwards for a multiplayer online game.

To me, I can see 2 reasons for this.
1. It's either done on purpose to save server costs
2. or the game design team is completely incapable of designing a multiplayer online game.

enjoy your Monday.
I'm out

 

[ChrisF0001]

So, mid-game NMS is actually one of the 'grindiest' games I've ever played.

I spend most of this weekend gathering resources, and gathering resources to build bases to gather more resources for me, so that when I've gathered lots of resources I can use them to make a thing and sell it to make money. Once I've done that maybe ten times I'll have enough money that I can go and fly somewhere else, perhaps taking a ridiculous number of jumps to get there - going to a place that I found out about on the internet of course, because there's no way to find such things in-game - where I can wait for the Best Ship Ever so spawn so that I can buy it, and then I can start to really play the game...

...does any of this sound familiar at all?

But the other point is - I actually had a really good time. Like I do in Elite. Because I like that sort of gameplay loop.

I also found a thread on an NMS forum where someone complained that there was nothing to do and the game was terrible, and someone else patiently pointed out that no, they just didn't like the game and might have better luck playing another one. I did find that amusing.

 

[cheesenbiscuits]

For every mat give 9,trades should be a much better deal.
Guardian sites should have FSD boosters just lying around on the floor. As it is FD have managed to make this aspect of the game infuriating,tedious and pointless. Why does the 1% of the player base who enjoy puzzles get the gameplay and the rest of us have to follow some instructions off the internet!
I held off the military grind until recently in the false hope FD would add an interesting story arc,they did not,internet to the rescue again.

 

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

There no rhyme or reason for the grind involved in engineering other than to thwart that aspect of the game i'm interested in.

And that is the nub of it. In the game aspect that you are interested in, which is PvP. I’m not disagreeing with anything you said and am only going to say what has been said a thousand times before. I collect as I go, I’m not particularly interested in PvP so to engineer a ship I don’t hit that grind.

Having said that, I don’t get the game all my own way, there is some ‘grind’. If I want the Guardian FSD booster, that is not happening in one (non re-logging) run. One engineer requires 10 bonds from CZs, another requires 10 lumps of something mined. I neither enter CZs or mine. That has put parts of the game, pretty much, off limits to me. Thankfully for me I can enjoy the game without those aspects. I understand that PvP players, who purchased the game purely for that aspect are going to find it tough, grindy, boring and frustrating.

I agree with you that it’s probably there to stop ‘weekend warriors’ or people getting the best ship and modded to high hell within 6mins of owning the game.

That it is a game that so many people can play in a different way I suppose means it will throw up these problems.

 

[DeletedUser191218]

NMS is a lot like ED as game genres go. To insist on a level of granularity in genres is only being done as an attempt to ignore the areas NMS does better. By this definition, every genre would pretty much consist of one game. What matters is whether the games are direct competitors, which ED and NMS clearly are.

 

[CMDR Egmont]

I’ve come to view Frontier as the Bill Lumbergh character in the movie “Office Space”. “Yeah, I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday and mine some Void Opals, m’kay?”

 

[oscarolim]

Hey Frontier, NMS reduced the grind and all players are happy. Please take note.

Really? Hum. That must be why now we need to power our bases, with a crazy amount of oxygen and the grind that brings.

 

[NeilF]

A game only has grind if you let it become a grind.

Agreed, you can stop playing when you realise you have to Engineer (to be "competitive", PvE or PvP)

 

[JustJon]

I have to agree about the grind in NMS.

I did enjoy it but then find you spend huge amounts of time just trying to find stuff which you need to make other stuff which eventually you make into a warp core to jump 1 system.

Also it seemed difficult to get any decent amount of money but not sure if that has changed.

So NMS seems to be about - build a base - recruit some people - do some missions which involve finding stuff to mine - so they can complete a thing whilst you go find some other stuff for other people.

Also ooh look a big freighter - ohh it's now asking for help as someone is trying to shoot it - did ED do that first or was it NMS?

 

[Kudosbudo]

He absolutely is not, at best you dont understand what he is saying. Investing time means you do something now in the hopes of a future payoff. That is not pedantry, that is how many people genuinely play. That is why people want to know the future of a game; many literally say they will stop playing if they dont like the future plans. In other words, they dont have enough fun now, and they invest their time playing hoping it pays off in the future. And that absolute is a completely insane way to spend your free time. Playing a game should be fun now. There absolutely should be instant gratification. Having people have fun is the sole reason for entertainment products to exist in the first place.

If you 'invest time' in the hopes you may one day have fun with a computer game, you should stop right now. The very concept of 'grinding' exists solely because people voluntarily 'invest' their free time because they somehow cannot imagine they could do something that is fun now and rather spend their time doing something they readily admit is not fun at all.

The very concept of 'investing time' is a rotten festering wound in contemporary gaming culture, and rather than it 'getting in the way of discussion' it should be discussed openly far more often.

The thing i find most funny about this comment is how it completely ignores one fact.

"In other words, they dont have enough fun now, and they invest their time playing hoping it pays off in the future. And that absolute is a completely insane way to spend your free time."

Especially this bit. If you play ED you quickly realise that the grind for mats is essentially a barrier to a lot of the more fun elements of the game. Foir example PvP. The fact Skippy has forgotton this is quite hilarious. The way he comments like grind to access certain parts of teh game make sit seem he's not engaged in certain parts of teh game. Of course i could be wrong. Which means he's ignoring those parts purposely to make a silly point of argument.

I ended up uninstalling ED after 2k+ hours precisely because the so calle dnon existant grind barring entry to fun elements is very off putting.

Take say... any arena shooter ever made.

Your bar to entry to take part in PVP is buying the game. Thats it.

In Elite your talking hours and hours just to unlcok engineers to START building a PvP ship. Theres no jumping in.
This would be fine if you didn't have to go through this monumental process per module for every ship inclduing travel time even AFTER organising your pinned blueprints to be as efficient as possible.

So I laugh when folk say there no grind in Elite. They simply arn't playing teh same game. Or simply don't understand teh game they are playing...