Offer triple-credit rewards for anyone who plays in OPEN mode and OPEN will explode with new players overnight, players who would happily accept massively increased risk for a chance at massively increased reward. What does it cost FDev? Dots?
General Remove private Lobby and single Player
- Thread starter Black White
- Start date
That would definitely work. It would be very educational too: looks of people would expand their knowledge of router settings. There would even be more use of in-game tools found under the "Social" menu.
That's before we come to the development of awesome combat skills like hitting "Escape" followed by rapid mouse movement.
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Credits are worthless, so what is the point of trippling rewards to a reward that is already more of less pointless? I don't think that would work, and you head down the path like previously mentioned in Elder Scrolls OL, with that PvP event, Pve folks will gritch about being "forced" into PvP. Honestly? It is a no win situation I think.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Apologies - I mixed two concepts in an attempt to put forward the idea that an Open only galaxy would be a very big playing area for fewer players than currently play the game. I have previously suggested an alternative to splitting the galaxy, i.e. the permit locked zone that it is only accessible in Open - which would be part of the same galaxy and would not then diverge.
by players who messes with their connection, making it "impossible" to instance with them, so they are still playing "solo" or with select friends...
And this would also go against one of the core statements, that all modes are equal.
Unless FDev invests into dedicated servers for non-peer-to-peer gameplay, that is bound to happen.
I do not follow, how would your suggestion (not bad, I have made similar suggestion in the past, it is baiscally to have the mimic what the players are doing) solve the issue with players tinkering with their network and firewall settings, that is outside of the game?
Because it is not that hard to make your computer mostly inaccessible to other players to instance with.
what it comes down to, are a few simple steps.
Figure out what IP subnet Frontier uses for the server part of Elite. So you can whitelist those IP's
Configure your game for a static port
Add a FW rule that block all incoming traffic on that port except from Frontier servers (see above)
Add a FW rule that block all outgoing traffic from Elite except for traffic going to Frontiers servers (see above)
And now your client should basically be an "island" regardless of what game you chooses to start in, and Open should more or less be the same as Solo...
And if you want to to play in Open with friends, just adds your friends IP's to the while list, as you have done with the Frontiers servers...
the hardest part is to figure out all the relevant subnets that Frontiers servers are located on, and if they changes..
this is why forcing players into open that do not want to be there, is such a stupid idea...
NOTE!
The same principle should work on consoles, but it is made much harder as we cannot easy target just a specific game traffic... as we can when we mess around with the local firewall on our windows pc.
Imagine the outcry if they made that into a subscription service?
*So they announced moving to an exclusive console open only, Elite Dangerous? Getting rid of the entire pc platform.
When minor factions and their influence changes the values of PP it is a part of PP. Both PP and BGS is there for players to change outcome of how Galaxies works. And I'm pretty sure that most people that go to private/solo to push the direction of a war is very aware of what they are doing. The large number of rounds that had to be done to push stats is very targeted action. And the mechanics are designed so we should be able to stop that attack by entering the same conflict zone and fight the war.
I've never heard causal players grind for influence, the always grind for reputation. And doing that in a conflict zone is one of the hardest ways to grind for reps.
Also don't forget that the PS, Xbox and PC players share the same galaxy.
So Just because one cannot see anyone on PC, be it for private or solo, doesn't mean someone in open Xbox or PS isn't doing what wants to be stopped by removing the solo/PG groups.
So Just because one cannot see anyone on PC, be it for private or solo, doesn't mean someone in open Xbox or PS isn't doing what wants to be stopped by removing the solo/PG groups.
I play in Open almost exclusively, you don't see many other players out in the black. The only real danger for explorers is some want to spread their data around to a certain faction which means flying around a lot. Some players do it by keep a hardened ship in some remote location and swapping to it, however you could just swap to solo entering the bubble, dock, swap to open, sell data, swap to solo, fly to next port, swap to open, sell data.
Personally I think you are wrong, all payers already get plenty of money, and taking the extreme case of an explorer risking losing say a billion credits or the potetnial to get 3b credits why bother? Really I have everything I want already, FC where I can dock and sell my data in complete safety, a fleet of ships, it makes no difference, credits are pretty much valueless in an economy with nothing to spend them on!
So let me get this crystal clear here.
You already play mostly in Open when out exploring, and you sell you data on your Fleet Carrier, that I guess moves along your path, so it is never that far away.
And with this suggestion, you would simply make 3 times the credits you do today, and the increased risk is virtually zero out there?
And if by some off shot that a player decides to track down your carrier, wait for you to come and dock and takes this opportunity to destroy you, then you would have a billion+ in exploration data, as you have already sold most of it before...so what would you loose 50 million? more? less?
So what kind of ganker, flies thousands of LY, for the hope to catch an explorer docking on his FC? Sounds like alot of work for one kill. and that assuming ganker is online when you come to dock, and play in the same continent as you, or the match making will not really instance you, and of course, be on the SAME platform... and if you jump the carrier to you, and then just dock when it arrives, the then ganker have to chase it down, unless you allowed the ganker to land on your FC, at which point the ganker would just tag along, and we are back at the being online at the same time..
Yeah, sounds like the premise for the 3 times pay for the extra danger in Open are not very well thought through.
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The problem with offering increased rewards for Open play is that Open simply isn't dangerous enough to justify it. You can travel to 99.9% of inhabited systems in Open and never see even the faintest hint of another player, and even when you do, most of them just ignore you to do their respective tasks.
If you truly wanted to compensate people for the additional challenge of Open, you'd be looking at something like a 1% increase to income. This obviously isn't enough for any sort of serious change. The problem is you need to reward players for actual DANGER, which only comes when they actually get attacked. But if you reward people for getting attacked, you open the door wide open to exploiting the mechanic.
The best you can hope for is a PVP league with ELO ratings and weekly or monthly rewards. That's the only way you can actually get players to engage with one another in a setting reliant on p2p connections. Beyond that, all you can really do is make Open appealing enough and safe enough for players to want to play there, and then make being attacked entertaining enough people are willing to allow it to proceed rather than just menu logging.
- Make higher security systems safe enough players can play in them in Open in relative safety.
- Add features that makes Open more welcoming, like ways to find friendly players more easily, and better wing missions.
- Make lower security systems rewarding enough people want to go to them.
- Make piracy more viable than ganking, encouraging theft rather than outright murder.
Do that and you'll likely see a marked uptick in players interacting in Open. You'll never be able to force ALL players into Open, but you can open the door wide to those with even the slightest inclination towards doing it voluntarily.
1) Which won't attract most people who play in PG/solo anyway. They already get a better experience in PG/solo
2) Will also improve PG, no incentive to fly in open.
3) Improves all game modes, no incentive to switch to open
4) Won't stop gankers ganking. Gankers don't gank because piracy isn't profitable. They gank because they enjoy it.
The way to test OP's hypothesis would be for FD to create an open only server for a few months parallel to the existing game. Like they do with alphas/betas.
Then see how popular it is. See how long it is before people complain that there is hardly anyone playing it and there are no targets to kill and how empty the whole game feels.
Then see how popular it is. See how long it is before people complain that there is hardly anyone playing it and there are no targets to kill and how empty the whole game feels.
Ask distant worlds, or people who have been ganked at Beagle Point.
The entire point being.......which you seem to have missed entirely, that increasing the payout by 3x makes no different to most long term players, they already have all the money they need or want and can play solo/open/pg however and whenever they want. The only players it will affect are new players seeking to max profit, players who haven't engineered their ships to the max and have a small bank account, who stand to lose everything after a few ganks because most new players don't understand the concept "never fly without a rebuy". They aren't magically going to all pop out of solo into open!
What you would basically do with this idea is drive away all the new players because they will play in open and get destroyed over and over again by experienced and uber armed PvP'ers while they ship goods around trying to get enough money to buy a T7 or Python. Increasing the payout in Open 3x won't bring players who already play in solo to Open because there are others reasons than money why most players play in solo.
I personally couldn't care less, but the point of my post is that after 5 years I am in a position to not care one way or the other, I have my FC, my fleet of ships, all engineered for exploration, not a single weapon among them or in storage, I can go open, solo, pg and getting 1/3rd of the payout for being in solo isn't a big issue, or getting 3x the payout for being in open. All I need, and all I have accumulated since the FC dropped, is enough to refuel after each trip, and I do that by exploring.
Money isn't the driver and incentive you seem to think it is!
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
PvP - Distant Ganks 2 Week 1 Update
Hi all, Just wanted to share the week 1 progress from the Distant Ganks 2 Expedition. Attached is the updated dashboard with progress through 11am UTC. Highlights: Total kills since expedition launch: 1,715. Averaging nearly 156 kills a day, we are making a considerable dent in our "Road to...
The leaderboard of kills that was published caused a bit of a stir on the forums - because it could be used as a proto-blocklist - and some players didn't react well when they realised this, calling the block feature an exploit that must be removed (spoiler: it wasn't).
One good thing came about after Distant Ganks II - Private Group management was improved to session kick a player if they were playing in the Private Group at the time their membership of the Private Group was rescinded (which stopped PG killing sprees going on as long as the transgressor wanted them to).
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Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
What we have is designed for all modes equally - it doesn't require PvP though.Well, design it for all modes equally then. That encompasses a lot of the suggestions that have been made in here.
The game modes are simply settings on the matchmaking filter, e.g. match with: no players (Solo); players playing in the same Private Group; players who selected Open. There's no rational reason to limit access to particular content to Solo or Private Groups (as the vast majority of the galaxy is identical in all three game modes) - nor is there a compelling reason to limit access to content that requires PvP (if such were introduced) to Open only.