Repeat the same Guardian unlock 18 times? Really?

[Enderby]

I don't understand as well why was it designed that way, to make me repeat getting the blueprints so many times. 4, 5 times is OK, but after that it becomes boring repetition, which is shame because all procedure of opening the GS is quite interesting .
If someone wants to find all systems by himself and get only 1 blueprint from each, then it will take probably 6 months if it is even doable.

I don't complain to often about Elite, but this one is really shame, spoiling interesting experience with grind

Because it seems FD don’t know what else to do. This is it. This is the level.

Or maybe this is all they are willing to do at present (which is very little indeed) while they work more on other titles.

Either way, it seems that they are really taking the mickey and have been for almost a couple of years now.

 

[Genus]

Either way, it seems that they are really taking the mickey and have been for almost a couple of years now.

Four years.

I think it's beyond doubt now. The Elite Dangerous Kickstarter campaign, was more about kick-starting Frontier Developments than bringing the "game for the ages" to market.

Since then and it seems for the foreseeable future, they'll throw the bare minimum at it to keep the justification going.

 

[avow555]

More senseless grind.

I'm off to play Jump to Lightspeed an enjoyable space game.

 

[Mengy]

The design is flawed from the get go. Creating an obscure puzzle with a simple game mechanic around it, creates just what you described. People are just following some guide, while doing the very simple tasks. It is a bit like we need to solve a crossword puzzle in order to get the blueprints. But since the questions a too hard, people are just putting in words they found on the internet, 24 times in a row. While most other games make the task per se challenging, ED does it the other way round in general. It is more about figuring out how things work, than doing the things. If you figured it out, the challenge is gone most of the time (apart from some combat scenarios) and leaves only repetition and time effort.

I disagree, somewhat. The actual design of the ruins and orb event themselves is fairly awesome, the art and sound teams did a fantastic job with them. The problem only arises with the mechanics of how these ruins are integrated into the gameplay loop. The mechanics are what require us to grind a ruin for a dozen or so times to pass through a “time gate”, needing 8 blueprints for this and 12 blueprints for that.

The problem could have easily been solved by doing the following:

• Instead of just two kinds of blueprints have a dozen or more types of blueprints
• Every ruin orb event drops one specific type out of those dozen
• Tech Brokers would only need three or four unique blueprints to unlock each item

This accomplishes a few things. For one, now to unlock that Shard Cannon you need to visit three individual ruins but only complete the orb event once at each site. This replaces time grinding by mode flipping with time spent flying between planets and even locating new ruin sites. Break up the time gate with various activities instead of simply performing one even over and over again ad nauseum.

The ruins themselves aren’t the problem, the mechanics associated with them is.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

Four years.

I think it's beyond doubt now. The Elite Dangerous Kickstarter campaign, was more about kick-starting Frontier Developments than bringing the "game for the ages" to market.

Since then and it seems for the foreseeable future, they'll throw the bare minimum at it to keep the justification going.

Hmmm.

Thing is, I don't think the development team have been doing bare minimum effort at all. The art & sound dept. are simply awesome. The code writing team have actually been working very, very hard.

It takes a lot of effort to produce those Thargoids, Thargoid wrecks, Guardian sites, and all the rest. As far as creating the environment goes, Elite: Dangerous is absolutely fantastic - and it's clear a lot of time and effort is spent on those.

The absolute real failing is not the environment and universe of Elite: Dangerous. The real failure is the game design. That's not at all the fault of the coders, art, and sound dept. Frankly, the game design enveloped inside the game environment is IMO utterly disappointing - at least personally speaking. After 4 years of, say, the mission system not changing in a basic sense since release, one gets tired of it. After 2 years of basically nothing happening in terms of driving an SRV around (apart from additions like Goid wrecks, Guradian sites), one gets tired of it. Then there's the amount of time squandered in continuously trying to balance combat - PvE & PvP included. Imean there's only so many times I feel like piloting one of the ships just to sample the pleasure of the environment, and for me, I'm taking an extended break, with the hope that the game design will be somehow improved.

In short - if E: D was a sandwich, the bread would be freshly baked and awesome, the garnish would be freshly prepared and excellent, but the filling would be very thin and disappointing. You might want to eat that sandwich, but after a few bites you'd just have to put it back on the plate and come back to the restaurant some time later to see if they've improved.

 

[Wolf Starslayer]

Agreed, expecting me to grind out 40 weapon blue-prints for all the guardian weapons is too much, just becomes a dull relog-fest after the first few runs.

Shame I actually enjoyed the content until I realised how many times I was expected to repeat the same task...

 

[Blackcompany]

The game-design here is awful.

It's as bad as the number of Strawman erected to try and deflect from it.

There are a number of ways this could have been done:

Blueprints for weapon PARTS. One part per Ruin. One run each. Encourage visitation to different ruins. No grind.

One Blueprint per item, then a treasure hunt for list parts. With clues and persistent sites...not just eyeball scouring of planets.

Data gathering. Visit each ruin. Collect data samples. Once. When sufficient samples are collected, by the entire community, unlock the weapons for sale, for all.

Run unique missions to unlock the weapons as gifts from major powers to help fight the alien threat.

Fdev chose poorly. This is lazy and repetitive and boring and it didn't have to be.

 

[Old Duck]

I've ignored the vast majority of 'content' like this. We humans think we need the latest iPhone, Shard Cannon, or FSD Booster, when in reality we were happy with what we had until these things came along. Someday I may visit these ruins just to see them, but I'm not falling for the "I need the next best thing" trap, especially when there's painful grind involved.

 

[Blackcompany]

Four years.

I think it's beyond doubt now. The Elite Dangerous Kickstarter campaign, was more about kick-starting Frontier Developments than bringing the "game for the ages" to market.

Since then and it seems for the foreseeable future, they'll throw the bare minimum at it to keep the justification going.

Nailed it.

 

[Stealthie]

It's as bad as the number of Strawman erected to try and deflect from it.

There are a number of ways this could have been done:

Blueprints for weapon PARTS. One part per Ruin. One run each. Encourage visitation to different ruins. No grind.

One Blueprint per item, then a treasure hunt for list parts. With clues and persistent sites...not just eyeball scouring of planets.

Data gathering. Visit each ruin. Collect data samples. Once. When sufficient samples are collected, by the entire community, unlock the weapons for sale, for all.

Run unique missions to unlock the weapons as gifts from major powers to help fight the alien threat.

Fdev chose poorly. This is lazy and repetitive and boring and it didn't have to be.

Is there a reason why there's no option to give Blackcompany rep'?

But, yeah. This.

 

[RagingxPenguin]

The scary part about that...they hadn't noticed the beigefication of everything. They had to be told.

If only they played their own game.

I know they had a 10 year goal but it certainly isn't 10 years of content. I'd rsther have a 5 year game with lots to do vs a 10 year game with a I.V drip stringing its players along

 

[Conch]

im curious to see with what kind of reaction Fdevs will come regarding this topic..

 

[2plex]

im curious to see with what kind of reaction Fdevs will come regarding this topic..

The usual one: ignore it.

 

[Conch]

The usual one: ignore it.

ahh the worse type of damage control.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

ahh the worse type of damage control.

You can gauge the average response time with how long it took to adress some of the engineer's worst cancer.

 

[Conch]

You can gauge the average response time with how long it took to adress some of the engineer's worst cancer.

i would have discribed it differantly..

 

[vidslo]

It's as bad as the number of Strawman erected to try and deflect from it.

There are a number of ways this could have been done:

Blueprints for weapon PARTS. One part per Ruin. One run each. Encourage visitation to different ruins. No grind.

One Blueprint per item, then a treasure hunt for list parts. With clues and persistent sites...not just eyeball scouring of planets.

Data gathering. Visit each ruin. Collect data samples. Once. When sufficient samples are collected, by the entire community, unlock the weapons for sale, for all.

Run unique missions to unlock the weapons as gifts from major powers to help fight the alien threat.

Fdev chose poorly. This is lazy and repetitive and boring and it didn't have to be.

Well said!

My perception of the issue is that the devs feel that if anything is too 'easy' then the solution to fix it is 'do more/collect more of it'

Missions any payouts are another example of this. With the gold rushes, it's 'too easy' to make money, so they reduce the payout so your left with doing more of that task to reach the same goal. I'm not trying to justify insane payouts, but rather the methodology they use to address the issue as opposed to questioning why people flock to massive payouts and work to address the balance.

At the end of the day, I hope they're reading this thread and taking some of what's said to heart.

 

[tolm]

For me, the problem is very simple. There are two "halves" to Elite Dangerous:

1. Primary Gameplay - this is the core mechanics of the game:

- Trading (Buy Low, Travel Somewhere, Sell High)
- Exploring (Travel, Scan, Sell Data)
- Missions (Transport Stuff / Transport People / Kill Stuff / Scan Stuff)

This is your bread-and-butter - the main part of the game - where you rank up to access better missions and earn credits to buy bigger/better ships.

Then theres ...

2. Supplemental "Side Quest" Gameplay: in other words ... the bits that got added on to "fill space" when people got bored of the above ...

- SRVs Exploration
- Material Collection
- Engineering

Now, there's nothing wrong with the #2 stuff but it's not the core of the game. So ... when adding a major element from Elite lore into the game (i.e. Thargoids) why, oh why, oh why would you lock that behind non-core gameplay? It's just non-sensical ... to fight against Thargoids I *have* to play the "fetch stuff repeatedly" side-quest style gameplay rather than it becoming introduced to the players as part of the main game. Surely it would make more sense to get an "invitation to join the resistance" at certain combat ranks or even Imperial / Federal Navy ranks? How cool would that be - you hit Ensign with the Federal Navy and receive the "call up" to help combat the Thargoid menace?

If every new piece of content gets hidden behind grindy "go fetch stuff for hours" side-activity the game is going to go nowhere.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

For me, the problem is very simple. There are two "halves" to Elite Dangerous:

1. Primary Gameplay - this is the core mechanics of the game:

- Trading (Buy Low, Travel Somewhere, Sell High)
- Exploring (Travel, Scan, Sell Data)
- Missions (Transport Stuff / Transport People / Kill Stuff / Scan Stuff)

This is your bread-and-butter - the main part of the game - where you rank up to access better missions and earn credits to buy bigger/better ships.

Then theres ...

2. Supplemental "Side Quest" Gameplay: in other words ... the bits that got added on to "fill space" when people got bored of the above ...

- SRVs Exploration
- Material Collection
- Engineering

Now, there's nothing wrong with the #2 stuff but it's not the core of the game. So ... when adding a major element from Elite lore into the game (i.e. Thargoids) why, oh why, oh why would you lock that behind non-core gameplay? It's just non-sensical ... to fight against Thargoids I *have* to play the "fetch stuff repeatedly" side-quest style gameplay rather than it becoming introduced to the players as part of the main game. Surely it would make more sense to get an "invitation to join the resistance" at certain combat ranks or even Imperial / Federal Navy ranks? How cool would that be - you hit Ensign with the Federal Navy and receive the "call up" to help combat the Thargoid menace?

If every new piece of content gets hidden behind grindy "go fetch stuff for hours" side-activity the game is going to go nowhere.

Lol, that's a good one. "Supplemental" - it just feels like enginners pushed away the primary gameplay altogether. With 2.1 the whole design refocussed.

 

[tolm]

Lol, that's a good one. "Supplemental" - it just feels like enginners pushed away the primary gameplay altogether. With 2.1 the whole design refocussed.

Well, sure, Engineers started to be treated like the main gameplay by anyone who'd been playing for a while in order to (a) do something new and (b) get some upgrades but that doesn't mean that form of play should become the whole game, which it feels like is now happening. You wanna do any of the new stuff? It's repetitive treasure hunt time!