A lot of us did raise the issues during the beta, loudly, over and over and over again. We begged and pleaded with Sandro to not put the new grade grind into place because it only served to undo the positives which the rest of the (very good) engineering changes did. He didn’t agree, and now we have a new engineering system which is both better yet more time consuming at the same time.
With the Guardian stuff though we didn’t get to test it as thoroughly during the beta, we had no idea just how grindy it was going to be. The final product does fit in with Sandro’s design philosophy though, which is time consuming grind walls.
Believe me though, we tried very hard. We even did time studies and created spreadsheets and flow charts, we were just met with resistance or silence at every turn.
I’d love to see this design philosophy of grindwalls change at Frontier, but I fear that after all this time it just isn’t going to happen. Frontier has their preferred way of implementing content, and contrary to what they say in public it is very often NOT to respect how valuable the player’s time is. Just look at the new wing missions, they could have easily been balanced to be attractive for both solo and wing players, but Frontier didn’t want that, they only created them for one subset of players, not everyone. Much of Frontier’s content is created with a narrow vision like this instead of taking the whole game into consideration, and it’s why Elite feels like so many separate features bolted beside each other. There isn’t a grand vision, just a lot of individual unconnected things fastened to the same core.
The only unified vision in Elite is that it needs to feel grindy and waste a lot of the players time. Scanning objects could be faster, transferring ships could take less time, Power Play could be less of a second job, Engineering could be less of a grind, Tech Broker unlocks could be SOOOOO much more reasonable, synthesis could not have been changed to make you sit and watch a progress bar for half a minute first. There are just so many time wasting aspects to the game that literally half or more of everyone’s total playtime is spent waiting for something to happen, NOT actually playing the game.
I just wish it wasn’t so. I’d rather the game be engaging and fun than passive and frustrating. I’d love to be so included while playing the game that I didn’t need NetFlix to make it bearable. That’s my greatest wish for the Q4 Exploration changes: that it makes exploration so engaging and fun and engrossing that I’ll no longer need NetFlix to tolerate it. Note that this does NOT mean grindy and time consuming!!!!!!
