Story events too far away for me to be any use (gameplay wise)

[IndexCase]

This is a fair point, some events will occur too far away for all players to participate. However once everything is up and running properly (we're still in the early days of the story driven content) we can widen the scope so that players have a greater chance of being involved. Naturally this won't always be the case, if you're off deep in the black then it's likely that there's nothing to happen.

Although you never know...

Michael

Will anything story related ever happen to a player without them choosing it. What i mean is, will a player ever just come upon an event or find themselves in the middle of it? Right now the only way to be part of the story is to seek out locations in a system or to do missions related to the situation. Right now the story feels strictly optional, meaning that if a player ignores it he might as well exist in a world where there is no story.

 

[SentineI]

The main challenge with procedurally generated game assets is that your generator must be complex enough to continously generate interesting and diverse things. ... I find ED somewhat disappointing in that regard thus far...

Lack of complexity/diversity isn't necessarily a problem, if you can tie (for example) missions to:
1. The player's past history.
2. Recent news stories.

Then those random missions are more easily interpreted by the player as part of:
1. Their personal story.
2. Larger events in the galaxy.
Without requiring excessive imagination on the player's part.

For example, when giving a mission to the player, make reference to:
1. Something the player previously did for the faction, as a reason for giving them this mission (whether they were impressed by what the player did, or this is a way for the player to make-up for what they did).
2. A news story that the mission could be loosely related to. This would be harder to do, so it'd make sense to only do it for generic things like civil war, famine, etc.

At the moment the player's past history (faction reputation), and the star system's status (which could cause minor news events), do effect what kind of missions they are offered, but in an impersonal/generic way. It shouldn't be too hard to extend the mission system to mention relevant things related to each mission. Just make sure to put it near the end of the text, so that people can skip the non-essential stuff if they want.

 

[Caspar]

Please take this as *helpful* criticism, which I hope Frontier will find useful in improving the game. (Anyone who thinks this is "whining" needs to take a good hard look at themselves.)

I was hopeful that "the story" starting on 16th December would liven-up Elite Dangerous, as I've been playing since Beta & it's got a bit samey... But current events are almost impossibly far from me, and I guess many other people:

Sorbago = 165 Ly
Kappa Fornacis = 115 Ly

Problems with this:

The route planner doesn't go anything like that far, so I'll have to manually fly there, and I could finding myself stuck in a "dead end" that requires me to back-track a long way. (e.g. There is a star just 9 Ly away (slightly beyond my jump range) that require 10 jumps in a circle to get to!) I don't understand why long distance planning should be so hard to program, as I've written an "A-star" search algorithm before & it doesn't need much memory or CPU time (and you can even reduce memory & CPU usage with a little trick, at the expense of slightly worse routes).

My little Eagle with a standard FSD is only capable of an 8 Ly jump at max, but it's unlikely stars will be exactly 8 Ly away. So I'm more likely to make 4-6 Ly jumps on average. That's 23 or 33 jumps, assuming I can fly in a straight line without any back-tracking (unlikely), with at least 3 stops for fuel (better say 6 to avoid the risk of running out of fuel miles from anywhere). More likely I'll have to fly in a wiggly line & back-track a bit, so I guess about double the number of 'perfect' jumps, meaning about 50 jumps with 12 refuelling stops.

50 jumps is a pretty insane number to require, especially as when I get there I might find the current events aren't suited to me for whatever reason. (And even if I'm OK with it, I can imagine many newbies finding the Combat Zones too hard.)


Sadly I can already imagine the unhelpful replies I'll get, with people defending the game (as if it were somehow perfect), rather than trying to suggest possible solutions. So I'll try to get things going in the right direction, by suggesting a possible improvement that I already made in a related thread:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=77678&p=1267584&viewfull=1#post1267584

Facing the same issue, I made mobility a priority. Jumping over 100 LY isn't an issue - just plot a midpoint and then recalculate the rest from there. I've done it loads of times. I invested in a reasonable FSD, a fuel scoop (C class is good enough for an Eagle) selected fastest route and hit the road. The experience of the game changes when you invest in these things and the galaxy opens up to you. 150 LY isn't an all night event any more.

If you pootle around with a class E FSD, the Galaxy will never be your oyster. I do agree though that it would be great if these events were easy to reference, including distance info. Perhaps as part of a Mercenary program.

 

[SentineI]

My little Eagle with a standard FSD is only capable of an 8 Ly jump at max, but it's unlikely stars will be exactly 8 Ly away. So I'm more likely to make 4-6 Ly jumps on average. That's 23 or 33 jumps, assuming I can fly in a straight line without any back-tracking (unlikely), with at least 3 stops for fuel (better say 6 to avoid the risk of running out of fuel miles from anywhere). More likely I'll have to fly in a wiggly line & back-track a bit, so I guess about double the number of 'perfect' jumps, meaning about 50 jumps with 12 refuelling stops.

50 jumps is a pretty insane number to require, especially as when I get there I might find the current events aren't suited to me for whatever reason. (And even if I'm OK with it, I can imagine many newbies finding the Combat Zones too hard.)

Just to follow-up with what I actually did do: I upgraded my Eagle's FSD drive as much a reasonably possible (iirc I spent 150,000 credits) to get a 14 Ly jump range, plus a fuel scoop. I then used a website someone suggested to roughly plan the whole route, and then I used the in-game route planner to take me along short sections of that route.

However, because in-game route planning seems to be bugged (if I select Fastest Route, I still get the Most Efficient (maximum number of jumps)), I still ended-up making a ridiculous number of jumps. I didn't count, but I estimate I made at least 40 jumps (approximately twice the number it should have taken), which took a long time (I didn't time it, but I guess at least an hour, or more likely two hours, of tediously doing nothing else).

BTW, according to the website, I could not even make the journey unless I had an at least 12 Ly jump range! So newbies would have NO chance.

In the end I'm not even sure the journey was worth it, because the Sorbago slave thing fizzled out before I even had a chance to take any missions related to it. Conclusion: News story events a long way away = very difficult for newer players, boring to travel there even if you can manage it, and may not even be worth it once there since the event won't last long.