Okay, well I guess I will start this as if I were in a self help group:
Hello, My name is Simon Sibbald, I am thirty four going on 35, and I like to play Elite Dangerous.
When I was a kid I played Elite on my old Amega 500, and then later, Frontier on my 1200. I played Frontier A LOT.
So, as you would imagine I was very excited when Elite dangerous came out.
I have been playing Elite now for...well, a very long time. I am Elite rank in everything, I have access to every ship and pretty much have everything engineered, I have multiple ships each tailored for specific activities, I am worth 2.something billion credits and have half a billion credits in my bank (that is not an amazing amount but we shall come to that later).
I am not bragging. I am simply setting the scene.
I have also run a player group for the last year and a bit. I have done this mainly to try to bring Xbox players together a bit more, and also because of my love of the BGS (which again, we shall come to later). I think it is safe to call myself a veteran of Elite without sounding too arrogant.
I have recently taken a little break from the game; partly due to a little frustration, partly also because I believe everything should be done in moderation, but mainly to compose my thoughts and give you guys a little feedback from my experiences.
I considered submitting this (soon to be) very long manuscript in Email form, but I eventually decided to put it up on the forums. Honestly I am interested in what other people might have to say about my feedback. Although the 'suggestions and feedback' section of this forum is somewhat underused... nevertheless.
at this point I just want to say to any other person reading this (not a dev that is) that I apologize in advance for the length of this document, and for my tendency to wander off topic. I try to limit myself doing this but it is in my nature and the oldest habits are the hardest to break.
the devs I am sure are most probably used to me by now, as they have a small novels worth of Emails from me in the past. especially poor Zac, who i practically harassed a while back during the lead up to our groups community goal. sorry about that Zac :S
so for those brave enough, and with enough free time, to continue.. you have been warned. but also thanks, I appreciate anyone taking the time to read my feedback and I hope I bring up some good points and leave you with a little food for thought... and of course, I always love comments.
Right, now with all that over and done with... on with the show.
I could prattle on for ages about all the things I love about the game, and as much as the devs would like to hear that, I don't think that is a particularly useful way to spend our time here and somewhat of a waste of all these words. So I am going to focus a little more on points i think could maybe be improved upon. That is not to say that I am having a go, because I am not; this is constructive criticism. I also appreciate that most of these points are already on your (the devs) radar so to speak, but here is my feedback, from my personal standpoint.
I previously wrote that my break from the game was partly due to frustration, and in case that piqued your interest, we shall start there. Now this frustration was partly from the running of my player group (Starship Enterprises .. represent!). This came from two directions: Xbox players tend to come and go, there is always a new game out to try and I believe Elite has problems holding on to (LONG TERM) its console player base. I might be wrong, but that is my experience. this means that ultimately I find it difficult to hold onto group members for any length of time, and I also find it especially hard to motivate them towards grinding influence for our faction.
The second problem, group wise, was that I was spending a LOT of time off the game updating websites, updating threads on forums, writing Emails, checking our facebook group, etc. Now don't get me wrong, I love making up the lore for our group on the website, and i love the research involved in the game but a lot of this is done on a PC and Xbox players are less inclined to use a PC. Now throw in the fact that I pretty much HAVE to use external resources to advertise for our group. Other than bumping into a player online (very unlikely and they will be gone before i can type anything), or being 'That Guy' at a CG event, spam advertising on local (and I dont want to be that guy) this is my only real way to find new players to grow my group. And as I say, that is especially difficult with console players.
I know Xbox probably brings shivers to anyone on the frontier team, I am told you have to re-code the whole thing to make it work on the Xbox but a newer one IS coming out (yey) and now with the Playstation rabble joining the frey, I believe these are still important points.
There is something lacking, something... missing, that is failing to hold the majority of the console players for any length of time. Some, yes. Some, like me, have been waiting their whole lives to play Elite, but most are just passing through and usually do exactly that.
And the cause of that I believe is the real reason of my frustration, because even I, avid addict of Elite had finally found the need to put down my pad, even just for a while.
I must admit it took a lot of time digging around inside my own brain until I really came down to the bones of it. And here I am going to use a couple of other games for comparison, namely, World of Warcraft (which I played religiously for three years about a decade ago) and Minecraft (because I find a lot of similarities between elite and minecraft).
Okay so basically it boils down to a matter of Time Vs Challenge, and also Rewards. these are my three key points.
In my experience in Elite, pretty much anything and everything is obtainable given enough Time. and time really is the emphasis here as more often than not, as you guys (the devs) yourselves admit, it takes A LOT of time: wanna get elite in combat... go kill X amount of ships, want that nice cutter... go grind quests between two stations for 3 weeks, how do you get those cool looking drunken missiles, click a button and wait for one month. the point I am try to make is that there is not necessarily a Challenge to overcome to get to your goal, simply a matter of Time.
I think that this is at the core of why it may be hard to hold onto console players. Once players realize that there is little challenge offered, just daunting amounts of time and patient grinding to get that level five drive mod or that cool looking corvette, they are put off and gravitate away to explore new games.
As I say I played wow (world of warcraft) for ages. Mainly because it was the first real, big game where players were forced to work together against AI mobs, rather than PVP based games. I have always preferred PVE personally. I love the idea of roles, and reliance on your fellow team mates; builds trust and all that. But really at the core of what kept bringing me back to wow was the challenge of it. learning the instances and the bosses and especially learning to work together as a team. I still think there is nothing more satisfying than being part of a well oiled machine.
That is not to say that it did not take time to complete these challenges. It would take a couple of hours to do a big instance and all week to clear a raid dungeon but after you completed the challenge (and this I think is important) you were Rewarded for your efforts.
Okay. stop right there! some of you may think. You get rewarded in Elite... you get that new ship, or you get that level five drive FOR your new ship. But that's not what i mean. Sure that is true, but there is nothing stopping the next guy from also getting that ship and that level five drive, given enough time and the correct information, anyone can get anything and that means that nothing is special.
Enter Minecraft, a game many will be puzzled to discover I think is a lot like Elite. Both games drop players into a massive open world with very little information on what to do, both games have no leveling system as such but instead require players to collect resources and learn about the world around them to progress. Information is the key to success and although the challenges each game presents differ massively, I believe at their cores, the two games have a lot in common. However, the thing Minecraft has over Elite are those little hidden gems of rewards. now that is not to say that Elite has NO hidden gems.. I myself have stumbled across twin Earth-like worlds inside a never before mapped nebula, and found massive geysers upon a distant uncharted potato moon, and it WAS cool at the time, albeit a very personal experience, but I did not get anything to take home with me to show the folks and there is very little chance anyone would ever set foot there again, and even if they did I would never know about it.
here.. I shall give you a rather glib, but highlighting example of the point I'm trying to make:
Minecraft: Found a Witches Hut! ... got a saddle for my horse.. FINALLY!! ... 2 weeks later... still riding my horse weeeee
Elite: Found Giant Mushroom Things!...got 25,000 hits on youtube!! ... 2 weeks later... yesterdays news moo
I personally think that if you made some of the objectives on Elite take a little less Time, but present more of a Challenge then that would make it a lot more attractive. Especially if you offered some kind of rare rewards, be it weapons, mods, ships, engineering recipes, titles, permits, or vanity items. Again I would personally recommend something that you could show off to your friends, something that LOOKED cool. players invariably love that kind of thing.
and what exactly do i mean by 'Challenge'? well there is so much to do on Elite that i am brimming with ideas, but i will spare you all the verbal avalanche. Just to toss you a couple of ideas:
"Survive at least X consecutive waves of attacks from pirates/police ships."
"Ferry some prisoners/cargo along a difficult route where you get interdicted by ships that stall your FSD drives and force you to fight them."
Or just because I love being an explorer... "Locate three undiscovered water worlds to rehouse some humpback whales"
again, at the core of this, these activities should present quite a challenge but still be fairly quick to complete (in one play session say) with the more difficult challenges rewarding players with things they can show off to their friends.
Maybe its just me but i also think that it would benefit Elite if the game forced players a bit more to work together to complete difficult challenges. so I am just throwing this one out there as an example... Wing Missions: obtainable from the bulletin board ranging from 2 to 4 and I guess this would also apply to multicrewing as I believe the game cannot tell the difference between wing and multicrew wing... but that's okay for this example. objectives that would be almost impossible to complete alone, maybe graded in difficulty. It doesn't matter, the point is that this is an online game, and yet often I find myself flying alone, even when in a chat channel with several people all playing elite as well. and I understand that powerplay, the BGS (influence grinding) and CG's all require HUGE amounts of players working together.. I am talking about fully utilizing wings to complete challenges, getting all three of my mates and me, currently grinding bulletin board quests, each alone, and force us together to do a quest to eject an imperial battle cruiser from federation space, thus earning us a ton of influence and some fancy titles we can prefix before our names instead of CMDR. It might take us two and a half hours to complete and one of us might have to refit our ship into a healer modification and we might all have to get torpedoes and co-ordinate our attacks but in the end it would be WORTH it. When someone else asks "OMFG where did you get that crazy scatter beam lazer", or "how do I get that AMAZING paint job" I can tell people that I will give them the information but it is also exceedingly difficult to actually kill that boss or make that prisoner run or find that lost probe. Then the game offers players the opportunity to feel special and unique for completing their achievements.
I really hope there are plans to apply these kinds of rewards to player factions too. As I found that for all my work that I put into running my player group, the GROUP did not receive much in return. I did. I got a CG, SE Corp is an official in game faction and we have information on the galaxy map! all that is great.. but really just for me. what about all the hard work the other players do for my group. I think they should be rewarded in some way as much as I have. I hear there are plans in the pipeline for some kind of minor faction reward system and whether that comes in the form of permits to otherwise locked stations (or megaships), discounts, special quests only obtainable at allied rank, DECALS!!, whatever... anything. I am really holding my breath for this one but I will refrain from going into any greater detail on the topic.
Apart from saying that one of the main focus of our group is to grind influence for our faction, and this is the main reason why I am not as rich as I could potentially be in game. In fact it is insanely easy to make money if you know where to go and what to do but I see no real challenge in that. I DO however see a good challenge in the BGS and grinding influence. Although I admit that we chose a very difficult system to live in (one home to nearly 14 billion inhabitants). Unfortunately I find it very difficult to motivate other players to help me and on my own it is an almost impossible task. I believe that the lack of any real rewards for grinding influence is the real kicker here, and the reason most people are put off. maybe having some kind of triggers for the minor factions at certain %, that any players who are allied with that faction would receive or maybe modifiers on the faction itself... better prices at a market the faction owns at 25% influence, a shipyard opening in a station at 40%, etc. I think some kind of goals attached to the BGS would be a really fantastic addition to the game and the icing on an already delicious cake. I will definitely say that grinding influence presents a Challenge in game, a slow but steady mountain to climb that requires team work, but many players are in the dark regarding the BGS or find it repetitive and without any real reward.
I would also like to bring up the thargoids thing as a point (especially for console players). Now i just wanna start by saying that all the artwork and the sound is absolutely amazing and blew my socks off and that particular mystery WAS EXTREMELY challenging although slightly long winded for most peoples liking. I loved the realism surrounding cracking the thargoid language, or beginning too at any rate. I believe it is probably very close to the truth of how we would first encounter aliens (if at all), and I know that Lord Braben is at heart a scientist; so am I, but from a GAMERS perspective, I felt that the thargoid challenges were unfair due to the fact that one HAD to use external software to decipher the clues. this meant that 99.9% of people could not directly participate in the challenge and had to rely on videos and websites telling them co-ordinates to places people had already been. So I DO admit that Elite has some very difficult challenges to offer, but so far these have been almost unfairly difficult and so inaccessible to the majority of players.
the Solome event was really great. But I bet it was a complete nightmare for you guys (the devs) that still keeps some of you awake at night even now. I would of course love more of this kind of thing.. role playing is great and I am a massive advocate of that but I appreciate that it must be a mammoth task behind the scenes and everyone would apply for holidays directly afterwards. automation is obviously the way to go there with maybe the odd special event when its Lord Braben's birthday.
Right.. enough. I will stop there. I think i have said enough for now. And I think I have said everything on my mind that is important. Again. I would like to confess my love of this game. I hope that my criticism has been received graciously and maybe turned a few cogs in the old brain.
Hello, My name is Simon Sibbald, I am thirty four going on 35, and I like to play Elite Dangerous.
When I was a kid I played Elite on my old Amega 500, and then later, Frontier on my 1200. I played Frontier A LOT.
So, as you would imagine I was very excited when Elite dangerous came out.
I have been playing Elite now for...well, a very long time. I am Elite rank in everything, I have access to every ship and pretty much have everything engineered, I have multiple ships each tailored for specific activities, I am worth 2.something billion credits and have half a billion credits in my bank (that is not an amazing amount but we shall come to that later).
I am not bragging. I am simply setting the scene.
I have also run a player group for the last year and a bit. I have done this mainly to try to bring Xbox players together a bit more, and also because of my love of the BGS (which again, we shall come to later). I think it is safe to call myself a veteran of Elite without sounding too arrogant.
I have recently taken a little break from the game; partly due to a little frustration, partly also because I believe everything should be done in moderation, but mainly to compose my thoughts and give you guys a little feedback from my experiences.
I considered submitting this (soon to be) very long manuscript in Email form, but I eventually decided to put it up on the forums. Honestly I am interested in what other people might have to say about my feedback. Although the 'suggestions and feedback' section of this forum is somewhat underused... nevertheless.
at this point I just want to say to any other person reading this (not a dev that is) that I apologize in advance for the length of this document, and for my tendency to wander off topic. I try to limit myself doing this but it is in my nature and the oldest habits are the hardest to break.
the devs I am sure are most probably used to me by now, as they have a small novels worth of Emails from me in the past. especially poor Zac, who i practically harassed a while back during the lead up to our groups community goal. sorry about that Zac :S
so for those brave enough, and with enough free time, to continue.. you have been warned. but also thanks, I appreciate anyone taking the time to read my feedback and I hope I bring up some good points and leave you with a little food for thought... and of course, I always love comments.
Right, now with all that over and done with... on with the show.
I could prattle on for ages about all the things I love about the game, and as much as the devs would like to hear that, I don't think that is a particularly useful way to spend our time here and somewhat of a waste of all these words. So I am going to focus a little more on points i think could maybe be improved upon. That is not to say that I am having a go, because I am not; this is constructive criticism. I also appreciate that most of these points are already on your (the devs) radar so to speak, but here is my feedback, from my personal standpoint.
I previously wrote that my break from the game was partly due to frustration, and in case that piqued your interest, we shall start there. Now this frustration was partly from the running of my player group (Starship Enterprises .. represent!). This came from two directions: Xbox players tend to come and go, there is always a new game out to try and I believe Elite has problems holding on to (LONG TERM) its console player base. I might be wrong, but that is my experience. this means that ultimately I find it difficult to hold onto group members for any length of time, and I also find it especially hard to motivate them towards grinding influence for our faction.
The second problem, group wise, was that I was spending a LOT of time off the game updating websites, updating threads on forums, writing Emails, checking our facebook group, etc. Now don't get me wrong, I love making up the lore for our group on the website, and i love the research involved in the game but a lot of this is done on a PC and Xbox players are less inclined to use a PC. Now throw in the fact that I pretty much HAVE to use external resources to advertise for our group. Other than bumping into a player online (very unlikely and they will be gone before i can type anything), or being 'That Guy' at a CG event, spam advertising on local (and I dont want to be that guy) this is my only real way to find new players to grow my group. And as I say, that is especially difficult with console players.
I know Xbox probably brings shivers to anyone on the frontier team, I am told you have to re-code the whole thing to make it work on the Xbox but a newer one IS coming out (yey) and now with the Playstation rabble joining the frey, I believe these are still important points.
There is something lacking, something... missing, that is failing to hold the majority of the console players for any length of time. Some, yes. Some, like me, have been waiting their whole lives to play Elite, but most are just passing through and usually do exactly that.
And the cause of that I believe is the real reason of my frustration, because even I, avid addict of Elite had finally found the need to put down my pad, even just for a while.
I must admit it took a lot of time digging around inside my own brain until I really came down to the bones of it. And here I am going to use a couple of other games for comparison, namely, World of Warcraft (which I played religiously for three years about a decade ago) and Minecraft (because I find a lot of similarities between elite and minecraft).
Okay so basically it boils down to a matter of Time Vs Challenge, and also Rewards. these are my three key points.
In my experience in Elite, pretty much anything and everything is obtainable given enough Time. and time really is the emphasis here as more often than not, as you guys (the devs) yourselves admit, it takes A LOT of time: wanna get elite in combat... go kill X amount of ships, want that nice cutter... go grind quests between two stations for 3 weeks, how do you get those cool looking drunken missiles, click a button and wait for one month. the point I am try to make is that there is not necessarily a Challenge to overcome to get to your goal, simply a matter of Time.
I think that this is at the core of why it may be hard to hold onto console players. Once players realize that there is little challenge offered, just daunting amounts of time and patient grinding to get that level five drive mod or that cool looking corvette, they are put off and gravitate away to explore new games.
As I say I played wow (world of warcraft) for ages. Mainly because it was the first real, big game where players were forced to work together against AI mobs, rather than PVP based games. I have always preferred PVE personally. I love the idea of roles, and reliance on your fellow team mates; builds trust and all that. But really at the core of what kept bringing me back to wow was the challenge of it. learning the instances and the bosses and especially learning to work together as a team. I still think there is nothing more satisfying than being part of a well oiled machine.
That is not to say that it did not take time to complete these challenges. It would take a couple of hours to do a big instance and all week to clear a raid dungeon but after you completed the challenge (and this I think is important) you were Rewarded for your efforts.
Okay. stop right there! some of you may think. You get rewarded in Elite... you get that new ship, or you get that level five drive FOR your new ship. But that's not what i mean. Sure that is true, but there is nothing stopping the next guy from also getting that ship and that level five drive, given enough time and the correct information, anyone can get anything and that means that nothing is special.
Enter Minecraft, a game many will be puzzled to discover I think is a lot like Elite. Both games drop players into a massive open world with very little information on what to do, both games have no leveling system as such but instead require players to collect resources and learn about the world around them to progress. Information is the key to success and although the challenges each game presents differ massively, I believe at their cores, the two games have a lot in common. However, the thing Minecraft has over Elite are those little hidden gems of rewards. now that is not to say that Elite has NO hidden gems.. I myself have stumbled across twin Earth-like worlds inside a never before mapped nebula, and found massive geysers upon a distant uncharted potato moon, and it WAS cool at the time, albeit a very personal experience, but I did not get anything to take home with me to show the folks and there is very little chance anyone would ever set foot there again, and even if they did I would never know about it.
here.. I shall give you a rather glib, but highlighting example of the point I'm trying to make:
Minecraft: Found a Witches Hut! ... got a saddle for my horse.. FINALLY!! ... 2 weeks later... still riding my horse weeeee
Elite: Found Giant Mushroom Things!...got 25,000 hits on youtube!! ... 2 weeks later... yesterdays news moo
I personally think that if you made some of the objectives on Elite take a little less Time, but present more of a Challenge then that would make it a lot more attractive. Especially if you offered some kind of rare rewards, be it weapons, mods, ships, engineering recipes, titles, permits, or vanity items. Again I would personally recommend something that you could show off to your friends, something that LOOKED cool. players invariably love that kind of thing.
and what exactly do i mean by 'Challenge'? well there is so much to do on Elite that i am brimming with ideas, but i will spare you all the verbal avalanche. Just to toss you a couple of ideas:
"Survive at least X consecutive waves of attacks from pirates/police ships."
"Ferry some prisoners/cargo along a difficult route where you get interdicted by ships that stall your FSD drives and force you to fight them."
Or just because I love being an explorer... "Locate three undiscovered water worlds to rehouse some humpback whales"
again, at the core of this, these activities should present quite a challenge but still be fairly quick to complete (in one play session say) with the more difficult challenges rewarding players with things they can show off to their friends.
Maybe its just me but i also think that it would benefit Elite if the game forced players a bit more to work together to complete difficult challenges. so I am just throwing this one out there as an example... Wing Missions: obtainable from the bulletin board ranging from 2 to 4 and I guess this would also apply to multicrewing as I believe the game cannot tell the difference between wing and multicrew wing... but that's okay for this example. objectives that would be almost impossible to complete alone, maybe graded in difficulty. It doesn't matter, the point is that this is an online game, and yet often I find myself flying alone, even when in a chat channel with several people all playing elite as well. and I understand that powerplay, the BGS (influence grinding) and CG's all require HUGE amounts of players working together.. I am talking about fully utilizing wings to complete challenges, getting all three of my mates and me, currently grinding bulletin board quests, each alone, and force us together to do a quest to eject an imperial battle cruiser from federation space, thus earning us a ton of influence and some fancy titles we can prefix before our names instead of CMDR. It might take us two and a half hours to complete and one of us might have to refit our ship into a healer modification and we might all have to get torpedoes and co-ordinate our attacks but in the end it would be WORTH it. When someone else asks "OMFG where did you get that crazy scatter beam lazer", or "how do I get that AMAZING paint job" I can tell people that I will give them the information but it is also exceedingly difficult to actually kill that boss or make that prisoner run or find that lost probe. Then the game offers players the opportunity to feel special and unique for completing their achievements.
I really hope there are plans to apply these kinds of rewards to player factions too. As I found that for all my work that I put into running my player group, the GROUP did not receive much in return. I did. I got a CG, SE Corp is an official in game faction and we have information on the galaxy map! all that is great.. but really just for me. what about all the hard work the other players do for my group. I think they should be rewarded in some way as much as I have. I hear there are plans in the pipeline for some kind of minor faction reward system and whether that comes in the form of permits to otherwise locked stations (or megaships), discounts, special quests only obtainable at allied rank, DECALS!!, whatever... anything. I am really holding my breath for this one but I will refrain from going into any greater detail on the topic.
Apart from saying that one of the main focus of our group is to grind influence for our faction, and this is the main reason why I am not as rich as I could potentially be in game. In fact it is insanely easy to make money if you know where to go and what to do but I see no real challenge in that. I DO however see a good challenge in the BGS and grinding influence. Although I admit that we chose a very difficult system to live in (one home to nearly 14 billion inhabitants). Unfortunately I find it very difficult to motivate other players to help me and on my own it is an almost impossible task. I believe that the lack of any real rewards for grinding influence is the real kicker here, and the reason most people are put off. maybe having some kind of triggers for the minor factions at certain %, that any players who are allied with that faction would receive or maybe modifiers on the faction itself... better prices at a market the faction owns at 25% influence, a shipyard opening in a station at 40%, etc. I think some kind of goals attached to the BGS would be a really fantastic addition to the game and the icing on an already delicious cake. I will definitely say that grinding influence presents a Challenge in game, a slow but steady mountain to climb that requires team work, but many players are in the dark regarding the BGS or find it repetitive and without any real reward.
I would also like to bring up the thargoids thing as a point (especially for console players). Now i just wanna start by saying that all the artwork and the sound is absolutely amazing and blew my socks off and that particular mystery WAS EXTREMELY challenging although slightly long winded for most peoples liking. I loved the realism surrounding cracking the thargoid language, or beginning too at any rate. I believe it is probably very close to the truth of how we would first encounter aliens (if at all), and I know that Lord Braben is at heart a scientist; so am I, but from a GAMERS perspective, I felt that the thargoid challenges were unfair due to the fact that one HAD to use external software to decipher the clues. this meant that 99.9% of people could not directly participate in the challenge and had to rely on videos and websites telling them co-ordinates to places people had already been. So I DO admit that Elite has some very difficult challenges to offer, but so far these have been almost unfairly difficult and so inaccessible to the majority of players.
the Solome event was really great. But I bet it was a complete nightmare for you guys (the devs) that still keeps some of you awake at night even now. I would of course love more of this kind of thing.. role playing is great and I am a massive advocate of that but I appreciate that it must be a mammoth task behind the scenes and everyone would apply for holidays directly afterwards. automation is obviously the way to go there with maybe the odd special event when its Lord Braben's birthday.
Right.. enough. I will stop there. I think i have said enough for now. And I think I have said everything on my mind that is important. Again. I would like to confess my love of this game. I hope that my criticism has been received graciously and maybe turned a few cogs in the old brain.