It only needs one bad thing. The countless interesting and altruistic things players have done over the years don't make for good click-bait.
So where do RP bad guys stand?
- Thread starter Oddball1975
- Start date
Nah, it's not. Just a snag brught about by carriers and some over enthusiastic internet rhetoric. Never seen that before!
If you've ever noticed there's an description of the difference between game modes when you continue the game (open/solo/group). That doesn't exist for fleet carriers which exist across all game modes and it's not obvious where to put warning without disrupting game flow every time you land. Effectively even if you dock in solo, when you land on someone else's carrier, you're entering a form of open mode .. and that might be different from the game mode you chose to play in.
The question is (1) where do you put the disclaimer without making fleet carriers miserable to dock with and (2) how do you effectively and fairly sanction people who exploit the differences in the carrier's game modes and jump range.
People talk about "exploiting new players" like people new to the game are all naïve children or elderly dotards being fleeced of their funeral savings by some flinty-eyed, shark-toothed psychopath. Completely helpless, incapable, doe-eyed victims who will either be emotionally crushed by this terrible experience and never return to the game, or just keep mining forever in an enslaved vacuum.
It's a load of tosh. The vast majority of new players are intelligent adults who have played games before, can use a search engine, problem-solve just as well as any of us, can figure out when they've been scammed, and communicate amongst themselves.
How it should have gone (and probably did for some):
So I started playing Elite, some guy said he had a great way of making money in the game so I did what he said, he took me to a remote system in his fleet carrier. But then I slowly realised I was trapped there. Word started spreading around the other miners in the system: the guy was a slaver and he'd kidnapped us to mine for him. A few of us banded together, reached out to other player groups to strike a bargain to break us out. Now I'm part of an underground railroad movement trying to disrupt the slavers' activities. Such a wild ride. This game is great.
How some pearl-clutchers reacted:
Mum! Muuuuuum!
It's a load of tosh. The vast majority of new players are intelligent adults who have played games before, can use a search engine, problem-solve just as well as any of us, can figure out when they've been scammed, and communicate amongst themselves.
How it should have gone (and probably did for some):
So I started playing Elite, some guy said he had a great way of making money in the game so I did what he said, he took me to a remote system in his fleet carrier. But then I slowly realised I was trapped there. Word started spreading around the other miners in the system: the guy was a slaver and he'd kidnapped us to mine for him. A few of us banded together, reached out to other player groups to strike a bargain to break us out. Now I'm part of an underground railroad movement trying to disrupt the slavers' activities. Such a wild ride. This game is great.
How some pearl-clutchers reacted:
Mum! Muuuuuum!
Dunno, IMO there has been a lot of positive gaming news about ED. I'd say one about DW even sold me the game.
Only problem being .. in the Federation slavery is 100% illegal and this is not what Imperial slavery looks like!
I don't think the carrier owner should be banned myself .. though I do think they could use an ATR "escort".
FDEV designed the mechanics that made these events possible.
Players use the mechanics as designed and are banned.
I don't really care what the RP motivations are.
The blame lies squarely on FDEV.
Better to hire better designers that build appropriate counter mechanics for players faced with this situation. Allow for pilot station to station transport - problem solved in advance.
Same goes for ganking with no meaningful in-game consequences. Lock murderers out of high security systems - problem solved.
FDEV bakes antisocial gameplay mechanics into the cake without effective counters, and is backpedaling on this one because of nasty Discord posts.
Odyssey will be epically rife with this sort of thing. With aimbots, speedhacks, undermeshing, p2p shenanigans, etc. etc. it's only going to get compounded.
So in answer to the OP, yeah go ahead and RP however you want with the in game mechanics. You should be safe as long as you don't say something stu pid on Discord.
Players use the mechanics as designed and are banned.
I don't really care what the RP motivations are.
The blame lies squarely on FDEV.
Better to hire better designers that build appropriate counter mechanics for players faced with this situation. Allow for pilot station to station transport - problem solved in advance.
Same goes for ganking with no meaningful in-game consequences. Lock murderers out of high security systems - problem solved.
FDEV bakes antisocial gameplay mechanics into the cake without effective counters, and is backpedaling on this one because of nasty Discord posts.
Odyssey will be epically rife with this sort of thing. With aimbots, speedhacks, undermeshing, p2p shenanigans, etc. etc. it's only going to get compounded.
So in answer to the OP, yeah go ahead and RP however you want with the in game mechanics. You should be safe as long as you don't say something stu pid on Discord.
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RP bad guys are fine. RP is when you play roles which you've agreed, and the game is to do so consistently. Being a bad guy in RL is not so good and can be a violation of ToS as we've learned.
Add (Odyssey) APEX travel to Fleet Carriers? Nice. +1
To be fair a number of carriers (made possible by FDev's designs) did head out to rescue.
Would they have known about rescue possiblities without 3rd party tools?
Yeah, I was hoping for a situation akin to what happened in EVE Online a few years back; a massive fleet of players heading out to liberate people in a similiar-ish situation to this one.
Here's a link to the story: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-a-scam-...nto-its-greatest-rescue-mission/#comment-jump
I don't really understand the bans after Frontier put a report in game on GalNet, it seems this was a starting point towards a much larger community response that would have created a very engaging and interesting piece of emergent gameplay that would have made headlines guaranteed. Frontier dropped the ball here, imo.
Remember the rescue mission for the guy who got trapped in a crag for the longest time and ED found ever more inventive ways to rescue him? That was emergent content, no scamming, no horrible attitudes, just pure gameplay. Mario something it was I think.
Or the support given to that poor child who was dying and the whole community rallied around to make his time on Earth just that little bit more bearable...
It enrages me...
Probably not without an official reference to Fuel Rats or Hull Seals in game. Both of those are also emergent groups though, like the piracy was, and I'm not sure how well they operate in Chinese or other supported languages. They're informal.
Oh man that would be awful.
I agree- those sorts of things make for good video game journalism. There's a deliberate differentiation.
I think it's that, make firing on a carrier a criminal offence so you respawn in jail, or find a place to put a warning about carriers and some information on how making the mistake puts you back in a startwinder.
So in-game communication mechanics to request help from other players - absent.
This is an FDEV design issue not a player playing the FDEV designed game issue.
"Trusted" players .. or it's a ganker's charter, no?
But only for the Xbox community?
Wasn't the whole shebang all Xbox players - no other platforms could have 'interacted' with the 'baddies', or even the 'goodies'
Heh, I actually missed that. Puts the hilarious bit about greatest noob army in ED to another light.
FDev should ban all "slaves".
- First learn how to play the game, noob. Now back to your starter zone for two more weeks!
Imho this is the expected result of all those "Earn 400 mil/hour by mining" vids and lack of in-game hints and tips, so people rush-in and start crying.
This all went too far.
- First learn how to play the game, noob. Now back to your starter zone for two more weeks!
Imho this is the expected result of all those "Earn 400 mil/hour by mining" vids and lack of in-game hints and tips, so people rush-in and start crying.
This all went too far.