Should we be that angry or annoyed about carriers? game development has changed!

There's no doubt that development is far more complex than it ever has been, and business demands rarely allow the busy work required to truly unravel technical debt, and enable new code to be built on older code flawlessly.
The other important factor is that game studios get away with paying their developers less because it's 'cool' to work in the business.

I work in the industry too and the biggest mistake was when programmers started being calling engineers.
If they want to do that, then they need to hold themselves to the same standards, rigor, and quality control demanded by 'real' engineering.

However, the business needs usually dictate that not being practical.
 
A lot of that is probably wishful thinking tbh..

It's a logic deduction, not a wish.

My real wishes are on a higher level tbh.. but learning of what happened in these last years in Elite Dangerous i think
that what i wish is only a childish dream and nothing more.
 
Originally Posted by Chrystoph View Post (Source)
This little bit right here tells me that your crowd has the same problem, across three platforms no less, as Frontier. That is lack of communication with the community that is their customer base.

If you only talk to the customers when you need to perform damage control, you cannot manage their expectations because you let the customers create them in the void of your lack of communication.

You see that day in and day out in this forum. Frontier releases some "pretty", with NO actual information, and speculation runs rampant. Then, when the material doesn't match the speculation, there is massive disappointment which was entirely avoidable.

Then........


FDev 12 months previously: "Seasons 2 & 3 will be smaller updates"

Many Players: "This update is really poor, nothing in it for me, game is dead"
See, the problem here is that what you have demonstrated is not communication.

Communication is a loop process, statement > thought > response > thought > response

In the consulting business, you use this to find out what the customer wants, make certain that you and the customer are on the same page, make certain the customer knows what you can and cannot do, etc.

Frontier is notorious for hiding everything so that there are surprises. Unfortunately, they do it so much that they don't talk about features because they have gotten into an almost Intelligence Community level of keeping secrets for the sake of keeping secrets.

Think about the last five major community related releases from Frontier. Most of them have been videos that tell you NOTHING. They leave you with some visual impressions, and even those are vague.

Frontier does nothing about managing expectations, then, when the damage control because of (pick as many make you happy or justify your frustration): overly optimistic projections, failure of a partner to deliver on time, departure of a critical employee, competing demands on limited resources, etc

occurs, you are dealing with your own lack of managing customer expectations as well as whatever the technical issue is.
 
It’s not a great signal of how the ‘game’s’ going. I thought FD recently bragged about ED was in a ‘really great place’?
Seems incongruous.

Maybe not annoyed, just bored of the waffle & disappointed as usual.

It isn't a signal of how the game is going at all. If it is a signal at all it is one that says that developing this stuff is tough and is taking longer then they thought.
 
Again this raises my point of expectation and the era we are in. I can name you loads of mass multiplayer games that are "work in progress".

We all expected Elite as a game to launch with epic space combat, several careers, working multiplayer with atmospheric planets, walking around and an amazing universe to follow quickly. This is what Star Citizen has promised us and look where that is. In essence look at No Mans Sky that's taken over a year or so to get near it's promised content. Games like this launch as a shell now.

World of Warcraft took 2-3 years to have good working PvP. I could reel off loads of games that haven't taken years to get near the level they wanted. Star Trek Online... uh Grand Theft Auto 5 Online... Minecraft had no working multiplayer on launch. Literally any online multiplayer game takes years to make. This is why I feel as gamers and customers we expect too much and get far to angry and disappointed. If you want a finished product you pay for a single player game if you go online you're supporting a project or company to deliver long term.

None of the games above had amazing development cycles did they? GTA 5 launch was horrendous.

GTA5 was late. Red Dead II is late not because it's not finished, but because of the sheer number of bugs in it (upwards of 500k - my memory says 1m but I might be misremembering)

Edit: And there's no template for making Elite. There's no Elite I, II, III, IV, V to fall back on and learn from, it's being made on the fly and whatever is added has not only got to be 'fun' it must be on time, not break the game and keep people interested/buying the next content. Sometimes it's hard to appreciate what's being made in the whole. Thankfully there's a raft of other universe simulators attempting the same things as Frontier and doing it better, so we can all go play them instead (sarcasm).
 
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Where have all my fellow rage quitters gone, I expected far more than NONE!

Even the ones that 'declare' are probably ... secret lemonade drinkers.
[video=youtube;A9_cCdKRNhk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9_cCdKRNhk[/video]

Nice post OP. It seems that the cream does rise to the top after all.
 
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verminstar

Banned
Where have all my fellow rage quitters gone, I expected far more than NONE!

Currently building my new hydroponics farm with the business end of things built underwater and access via a small island in the middle of nowhere. Jeez you people are never happy...

¨Dont play anymore? Get lost we dont wanna see yer salt¨

¨¨verm takes advice¨¨

¨Where is everyone?¨

Really?

On topic...couldnt care less about the content itself...thats not what this season was supposed to be about after all. That alone is why I didnt uninstall last October because we had these exact same discussions last year...and a year on its more like an inane form of deja vu...

Thats why its easy to ignore about 90% of the current ¨debates¨ surrounding the content itself...cos none of that relates to why Im waiting on Q4...that would be the not talked about QOL and bug fixes.

There are no excuses at all that will work if thats not in Q4...I couldnt care less if yer a programming god or not...wont make a squats bit of difference to me at all. Just about everyone I know in the building trade agrees...building on dodgy foundations is a recipe fer disaster later on down the line...shame this logic doesnt extend to games...not this game anyway.

Yer welcome...have a nice day interlopers...gonna get out now before the salty fanbois accuse me of being salty again...not sure my ribs can take another laughing fit like that again.
 
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Honestly, I do not care about all the dropped features.

The major issue is the massive lack of the core gameplay, if the coregameplay would be a wholesome interconnected experience, we would be so damn busy with PP and other stuff (since it then would matter) we would be surprised about new stuff and no one would ask FD for new stuff. Without this proper core gameplay fleet carriers and all that will just be a short mildly entertaining experience.
 
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Optimistically, I can kind of see why Carriers might have been suspended.

Creating "Squadrons" but then not adding a lot of actual activities (I find myself using that word a lot these days) for them to do probably isn't the best way to make a good first impression.

Presumably, it was fairly straightforward to create a means for players to form a Squadron but it probably wasn't worth spending the time creating Carriers until there's also a reasonable amount of things for Squadrons to do.
FDev promised "Squadrons" so we'll get a bare-bones iteration of them, but until they're able to add content related to them there's probably more important things to be working on.

I honestly think that FDev are working on some kind of all-encompassing "guild system" (they seem to have a thing for co-op gameplay at the moment) which will incorporate stuff related to superpowers, factions, the BGS and PP with Squadrons so that's probably going to become a proper "project" so it makes sense that the Carriers would be designed in conjunction with all that stuff.
 
Optimistically, I can kind of see why Carriers might have been suspended.

Creating "Squadrons" but then not adding a lot of actual activities (I find myself using that word a lot these days) for them to do probably isn't the best way to make a good first impression.

Presumably, it was fairly straightforward to create a means for players to form a Squadron but it probably wasn't worth spending the time creating Carriers until there's also a reasonable amount of things for Squadrons to do.
FDev promised "Squadrons" so we'll get a bare-bones iteration of them, but until they're able to add content related to them there's probably more important things to be working on.

I honestly think that FDev are working on some kind of all-encompassing "guild system" (they seem to have a thing for co-op gameplay at the moment) which will incorporate stuff related to superpowers, factions, the BGS and PP with Squadrons so that's probably going to become a proper "project" so it makes sense that the Carriers would be designed in conjunction with all that stuff.

It might be noted that there was never a Focussed Feedback discussion about Carriers, it was meant to follow after the general specifics of the Squadrons were outlined but it didnt. Probably a good thing it didnt as any ideas would now be broken dreams :)
 
Honestly, I do not care about all the dropped features.

The major issue is the massive lack of the core gameplay, if the coregameplay would be a wholesome interconnected experience, we would be so damn busy with PP and other stuff (since it now matters) we would be surprised about new stuff and no one would ask FD for new stuff. Without this proper core gameplay fleet carriers and all that will just be a short mildly entertaining experience.

I think you're missing the point a little bit because 'surface wing missions' ARE core gameplay.

You're talking about the presentation of content .. but putting that before the core mechanics, is putting the cart ahead of the horse.

Horizons was ALWAYS going to be a rough ride imo. If FD feel the game's in a good place now that's probably because they feel they might be able to weather the storm.
 
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Just reminded myself of buying Repton 2 for the BBC B+ on tape. Loaded it up and when an egg dropped and broke to let a monster out, the game crashed. Every time. Worked fine on the 32k version. Disappointed? Much?! *sigh*
 
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Iv past caring now. FD announce what they announce in advance, but I wait until I'm reading the patch notes, to see what's ACTUALLY in the update.

Q4 is apparently all that explorers have been waiting for in years.....let's see what those patch notes say!!!
 
Honestly, I do not care about all the dropped features.

The major issue is the massive lack of the core gameplay, if the coregameplay would be a wholesome interconnected experience, we would be so damn busy with PP and other stuff (since it now matters) we would be surprised about new stuff and no one would ask FD for new stuff. Without this proper core gameplay fleet carriers and all that will just be a short mildly entertaining experience.

Absolutely 100% totally agreed.

We've had 2+ years of development that has seemed fixated on:-
1) Valid ship upgrade grind loops, just to add more pew pew to your ship, so you can then go about the same old gameplay, just now with more pew pew.
2) A significant lack of effort at actually offer more involved core gameplay mechanics, and instead shallow simplistic bolt on gameplay.

This has meant things like Multicrew and the Thargoid Invasion (both of which FD had years to plan for) had little/no mechanics to leverage to make them interesting.

I raised this a year and half ago - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...is-now-coming-back-to-bite-ED-in-the-boosters!

I'm hoping Q4 and the content to follow, finally see FD raising the bar, with them demonstrating some wiser design choices and them actually add some impressive mechanics worthly of a four+ year old space game in 2018/2019 etc... Because the past two or so years have been poor IMHO.
 
To the Op, neither frankly.

Things get changed/delayed in this industry constantly, no problem.

The spin, smoke and mirrors and carrot are a little excessive though.

Come on Frontier, less spin, more 'carp happens'.
 
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