I'm unable to play for the forseeable future for reasons™ but nevertheless figured I'd drop this in here in the hope that if and when I ever do get to play again, it'll be worth the effort.
For a start, many of us complain of the grind. I'm going to go ahead and say that for the most part, those that complain of it are those that have endured it - so it is not like we don't know what we're talking about. The thing is we damn well DO endure it, because we can't help ourselves. We want 'that' ship, 'that' mod, 'that' little bit of kudos that attaches to this or that 'achievement'. And why? Because we like the game. Or more exactly, because we like the game that we dream of playing, and which Elite: Dangerous persists in feeling like it almost is.
Except that (I suspect), in our heart-of-hearts we really know that it isn't. And is starting to look like it never will be.
"Blaze your own trail".
Sounds good to me. Except the game itself doesn't track MY trail. Or yours. "Welcome back Commander", so says your Allied station. And that's about the limit of your worth, OUR worth in the pantheon of Commander-dom.
'Gankers', 'Griefers', name them as you will. I used to think they were the sine qua non of 'bad sportsmanship' and the bane of the everyday Commander.
These days I sort of think that without them the whole point of schlepping about a 'dangerous' galaxy is null-and-void. The NPCs are a joke. Anarchy systems are just somewhere we don't get paid for offing the baddies, and generally the whole thing is pointless: Go here, take this mission/buy this commodity/scan this system. Go there, cash in that mission/sell that commodity/sell the cartographic data (that the swodding buyer already has, in spades), move on, rinse, repeat ad nauseam. Without PROPER baddies, why bother?
There came a point in the early days of development that it was decided (or realised) that an 'offline' version, for whatever reason wasn't going to work. Fair enough. But having decided to go with persistent online (and this here is not the place to discuss the relative merits of dedicated servers versus peer to peer), the developers waded in, right from the get-go with a massive, MASSIVE fail: consequences. Unfortunately (I not having been among the 'alpha group'), it is readily apparent that early testing was done by fans. People who wanted the game to succeed. People who were explicitly not testing how the game might be used (and abused) by 'randoms'. And so, murderers and cutthroats hold sway in open play today (well, not quite, but if you've stuck with me this far, I hope you'll allow me some licence). To those who say "but I've never been ganked (or so infrequently as not to matter) in open", I say, "join a CG in open".
Now, I am absolutely NOT against the - and I'm going to stick to the term, even though it isn't really what I mean - gankers. If there exists a section of the playerbase who have deigned that it would be fun to see the objective of the CG fail, well, in an ideal world, what ought to happen is that all the non-ganker-leaning players would be flocking to the system in order to oppose the gankiness. And then we'd have a bloody fantastic bit of battling and win or lose we would all go away happy, having fought the good fight, all that good stuff.
But sadly, NO.
Frontier, in their infinite (or should that be 'blinkered') wisdom, have made 'Commander killing' about the same as 'NPC killing', with the 'consequences' of each being essentially zero. Plus, and perhaps most importantly of all, seeing as the stupid game does not recognise us as individuals, nor track our 'behaviour', it CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOODIES and BADDIES: YOU are wantonly killing in a sector. I am trying to thwart your efforts. On the assumption that as a 'CG-Supporter', I am a goody, then my 'Commander-killing-consequences' ought to be somewhat less onerous than yours.
Throw in the (in my view) catastrophic consequences of 'losing' a major ship, massive rebuys et, complex, cetera, and what we have ladies and gentlemen, is a mass exodus to 'other modes' to the wider detriment of the game.
Now at this point, I should say this: If you're an unshielded trader, you're an idiot. If you're an unshielded explorer, then you'd better have some friends. Oh, and the 'training scenarios' need an upgrade: RULE ONE, RULE. BLOODY. ONE!!! (I couldn't find any flaming underlines, or bleeding daggers, with which to make the point), RULE.ONE. HAS to be, SURVIVABILITY! You MUST be able to RUN, and your loadout MUST give you the time in which to do it.
Mind you, and again, here Frontier HAVE to take some heat: there are PvP builds that can tank just about ANY non-PvP build, if it hasn't been designed up-front for survivability.
This has got to stop. There NEEDS to be some hand-holding, and the engineers-stuff needs review. Not a nerf. A review. With massive feedback from the people who really know how this stuff works. AKA the PvP community.
PvP needs to be a) survivable by a reasonably competent Commander in a suitably equipped ship (i.e. he can run away), b) completely consequence-free between consenting players (fight-clubs, challenges, whatever), and EXTREMELY consequence-laden otherwise.
People have questioned recently the 'narrative' offering from Frontier re: the Thargoids. Well honestly? It's fun, and I know that a great many, many Commanders have been having a high old time trying to decipher this, decode that, and generally try to figure out the other - whatever the hell that might turn out to be.
But all in all, the very survivability of the game as a whole, in, for whatever it might be worth, MY opinion, is that if the PvP thing (See how I moved away from 'ganking' there?), isn't fixed or at the very least modified such that it becomes a normal part of the day-to-day considerations of the average Commander, whereupon private groups might become superfluous, and solo mode just a non-updating backwater for hard-core loners, I rather think that the long-term future of E: D is rather bleak. Currently I certainly don't see it surviving beyond (if it reaches) its ten-year goal.
What do you think?
Mike
P.S. I am absolutely useless in ship-to-ship combat against real people. NPCs I just kill. Simples. Currently the game gives me NO incentive whatsoever to change: fighting NPCs generally makes me rich, fighting other Commanders generally makes me MUCH poorer, or, if I could win (which I can't), a teensy-tiny bit richer. How is that FUN Frontier? How??
For a start, many of us complain of the grind. I'm going to go ahead and say that for the most part, those that complain of it are those that have endured it - so it is not like we don't know what we're talking about. The thing is we damn well DO endure it, because we can't help ourselves. We want 'that' ship, 'that' mod, 'that' little bit of kudos that attaches to this or that 'achievement'. And why? Because we like the game. Or more exactly, because we like the game that we dream of playing, and which Elite: Dangerous persists in feeling like it almost is.
Except that (I suspect), in our heart-of-hearts we really know that it isn't. And is starting to look like it never will be.
"Blaze your own trail".
Sounds good to me. Except the game itself doesn't track MY trail. Or yours. "Welcome back Commander", so says your Allied station. And that's about the limit of your worth, OUR worth in the pantheon of Commander-dom.
'Gankers', 'Griefers', name them as you will. I used to think they were the sine qua non of 'bad sportsmanship' and the bane of the everyday Commander.
These days I sort of think that without them the whole point of schlepping about a 'dangerous' galaxy is null-and-void. The NPCs are a joke. Anarchy systems are just somewhere we don't get paid for offing the baddies, and generally the whole thing is pointless: Go here, take this mission/buy this commodity/scan this system. Go there, cash in that mission/sell that commodity/sell the cartographic data (that the swodding buyer already has, in spades), move on, rinse, repeat ad nauseam. Without PROPER baddies, why bother?
There came a point in the early days of development that it was decided (or realised) that an 'offline' version, for whatever reason wasn't going to work. Fair enough. But having decided to go with persistent online (and this here is not the place to discuss the relative merits of dedicated servers versus peer to peer), the developers waded in, right from the get-go with a massive, MASSIVE fail: consequences. Unfortunately (I not having been among the 'alpha group'), it is readily apparent that early testing was done by fans. People who wanted the game to succeed. People who were explicitly not testing how the game might be used (and abused) by 'randoms'. And so, murderers and cutthroats hold sway in open play today (well, not quite, but if you've stuck with me this far, I hope you'll allow me some licence). To those who say "but I've never been ganked (or so infrequently as not to matter) in open", I say, "join a CG in open".
Now, I am absolutely NOT against the - and I'm going to stick to the term, even though it isn't really what I mean - gankers. If there exists a section of the playerbase who have deigned that it would be fun to see the objective of the CG fail, well, in an ideal world, what ought to happen is that all the non-ganker-leaning players would be flocking to the system in order to oppose the gankiness. And then we'd have a bloody fantastic bit of battling and win or lose we would all go away happy, having fought the good fight, all that good stuff.
But sadly, NO.
Frontier, in their infinite (or should that be 'blinkered') wisdom, have made 'Commander killing' about the same as 'NPC killing', with the 'consequences' of each being essentially zero. Plus, and perhaps most importantly of all, seeing as the stupid game does not recognise us as individuals, nor track our 'behaviour', it CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOODIES and BADDIES: YOU are wantonly killing in a sector. I am trying to thwart your efforts. On the assumption that as a 'CG-Supporter', I am a goody, then my 'Commander-killing-consequences' ought to be somewhat less onerous than yours.
Throw in the (in my view) catastrophic consequences of 'losing' a major ship, massive rebuys et, complex, cetera, and what we have ladies and gentlemen, is a mass exodus to 'other modes' to the wider detriment of the game.
Now at this point, I should say this: If you're an unshielded trader, you're an idiot. If you're an unshielded explorer, then you'd better have some friends. Oh, and the 'training scenarios' need an upgrade: RULE ONE, RULE. BLOODY. ONE!!! (I couldn't find any flaming underlines, or bleeding daggers, with which to make the point), RULE.ONE. HAS to be, SURVIVABILITY! You MUST be able to RUN, and your loadout MUST give you the time in which to do it.
Mind you, and again, here Frontier HAVE to take some heat: there are PvP builds that can tank just about ANY non-PvP build, if it hasn't been designed up-front for survivability.
This has got to stop. There NEEDS to be some hand-holding, and the engineers-stuff needs review. Not a nerf. A review. With massive feedback from the people who really know how this stuff works. AKA the PvP community.
PvP needs to be a) survivable by a reasonably competent Commander in a suitably equipped ship (i.e. he can run away), b) completely consequence-free between consenting players (fight-clubs, challenges, whatever), and EXTREMELY consequence-laden otherwise.
People have questioned recently the 'narrative' offering from Frontier re: the Thargoids. Well honestly? It's fun, and I know that a great many, many Commanders have been having a high old time trying to decipher this, decode that, and generally try to figure out the other - whatever the hell that might turn out to be.
But all in all, the very survivability of the game as a whole, in, for whatever it might be worth, MY opinion, is that if the PvP thing (See how I moved away from 'ganking' there?), isn't fixed or at the very least modified such that it becomes a normal part of the day-to-day considerations of the average Commander, whereupon private groups might become superfluous, and solo mode just a non-updating backwater for hard-core loners, I rather think that the long-term future of E: D is rather bleak. Currently I certainly don't see it surviving beyond (if it reaches) its ten-year goal.
What do you think?
Mike
P.S. I am absolutely useless in ship-to-ship combat against real people. NPCs I just kill. Simples. Currently the game gives me NO incentive whatsoever to change: fighting NPCs generally makes me rich, fighting other Commanders generally makes me MUCH poorer, or, if I could win (which I can't), a teensy-tiny bit richer. How is that FUN Frontier? How??
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