Patch Notes September Update - Downtime and Patch Notes

Well, after all.. It IS Elite: Pamperous these days.
I think those prompts and help functions are great for new players. For the first 2 weeks of play maybe. After that they are either ignored or incredibly annoying and a constant distraction.
I wonder what happened to the idea of customizing our experience. Like we can toggle almost every single line our COVAS says. Mine only tells me when there's an emergency, rest is off.

I don't really get why this kind of attitude is not still part of the whole awesome thing Elite is.

  • Want some helpful reminders how to play the game? Here's some prompts, toggled on by default for you!
  • Want to fly a space ship and want your holo displays to behave closer to how they actually would in the game world? Toggle off all the prompts and help functions and be a space pilot! Congratulations Commander, you're not a rookie anymore!
 
I think those prompts and help functions are great for new players. For the first 2 weeks of play maybe. After that they are either ignored or incredibly annoying and a constant distraction.
Having played other games with similar prompts I think what will actually happen is 99% will just not notice them most of the time. Sadly 1% will decide to be annoyed on principle. If the prompts do stay switched on there might be an update in the December patch to switch them off 🤷‍♀️
 
There's the thing. Some of its think it's extremely multi-player friendly.

That's likely because you don't understand it's implications.

Infinite weight blocking is the ultimate griefer tool. Undetectable, no in-game context, and potentially profound impact on other's ability to play and enjoy the game.

Elite: "Play with whoever you want".

Yeah, play with whoever you want, unless someone decides to block someone you want to play with.
 
C'mon WIll (and Frontier) Really? If anything.. the only thing blocking should apply to is comms if players are verbally harassing other players. How are Pvp'ers and those of us who play in Open mode in Powerplay supposed to find haulers or UM'ers or anyone to try and stop them if they decide all they have to do is "block" people to prevent instancing?

Its an abuse of the feature if people decide to use it in this manner (and they have, trust me).

I have no idea why people are still confused after half a decade, but let me spell this out: ED is a game about PvE grinding. There is no meaningful PvP, it is not part of the design and it plays no serious role when considering changes. You can have some cute agreed upon duels, some roleplay on discord and some noob-killing, but that is it. Blocking players facilitates PvE grinding and any damage done to the PvP part of the game is irrelevant.
 
That's likely because you don't understand it's implications.

Infinite weight blocking is the ultimate griefer tool. Undetectable, no in-game context, and potentially profound impact on other's ability to play and enjoy the game.



Yeah, play with whoever you want, unless someone decides to block someone you want to play with.
Oh blast, I should have just focused on bug fixing, but I allowed myself to be sucked in to the tediously familiar debate. I apologise for misdirecting the thread. All I'll say now is, I understand the implications fully and I still think fixing bugs is good.
 
I'm going to take a sharp-left and say, that mis-ordered station announcement bug... It was introduced in the last update and reported multiple times in the new bug system. If it's not fixed I intend making a thread about how the new bug reporting doesn't work. Hear that FD? If you don't fix it, I'll make a thread at you!
 
To be honest I expected A LOT more bug fixes.

Dissapoitning, I won't lie :(

I would say without fear of contradiction, that to make a lot of players happier, surely a large amount of bugs would have been fixed in this update? I mean i'm not going to go into a long list, numbering hundreds of bugs that have been around for years now, or the new ones they introduced in April, (some game breaking), but seriously, screw the new content if the game is still going to be unplayable for a number of players depending on what you are doing in the game.

This game is rapidly descending into impersonating a Ford Edsel, nice on the outside, horrific internals and sadly ED is going down this road at breakneck speed. Utterly disgraceful attitude from the company regarding ED. The game has more bugs than a petri dish. Fix the damn things for crying out loud !!!!! It's not funny anymore.
 
All I'll say now is, I understand the implications fully and I still think fixing bugs is good.

The fix either isn't one, or it's introduced new bugs. The feature strives to do mutually exclusive things...the better it works, the worse it works.

Both the game's manual (page 21) and previous developer statements all say that blocking is not supposed to be an absolute prohibition.

If it's being made an absolute prohibition against instancing, it will break other functionality, namely friends and wings.

If it's not, then some people are still going to be instanced with those they have blocked.

These opposing goals--to facilitate players having their CMDRs reliably be able to encounter each other and reliably allow players to exclude other CMDRs from the instance theirs is in--cannot be reconciled.
 
Open only PP and BGS is just a dream. Just imagine, what will happen if everyone play in open with these instancing problems. It is pointless until FDEV rewrite the whole network code (I hope this happening currently, and they will post it in 2020).

The netcode isn't the issue here.

The main issue is how most internet access providers, all around the world, are not neutral as they should, and decide to filter/bandwith-limit specific type of packets (p2p, youtube, twitch and so on) to maximise the number of people on their existing network, that way they don't have to invest as much to get more people in.
They even for some try to detect p2p specifically and block it, cause it's obviously illegal stuff. So Elite has to continuously try to reconnect players together when one player's ISP blocked the network port the p2p part of the Elite netcode was using.

Sometimes, it's just your router/modem that doesn't like uPnp (it's a piece of software that dynamically affect a network port to each app on your pcs, including Elite). In that case, setting a specific port redirection on your router to your PC's IP (5100 for Elite for example) and forcing that port (5100) in the network options of Elite can help get a way more stable connection.

Sure, a classic client/server model would have avoided those issues... but then the servers at Frontier would need to be way more powerful and they'd need way more of them to handle instances. Back when they were out of the kickstarter, they just didn't have the money for this. Also, don't think that model doesn't have issues, cause most MMOs do have issues from time to time with a client/server classic model.
 
Wait. An update starting while I'm still awake ???!?

143288


EDIT: Aw pants... I had a bunch of completed missions which I didn't hand in.... guess I've lost them?
 
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