[SUGGESTION] How to Attract New Players and Keep Current Players!!! Elite Dangerous is Dying!!!!! Here's How to Change That!!!

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When new players start playing Elite Dangerous, it won't take very long for them to discover that under all the beauttiful visuals and epic sound effects of this awesome & unique game, (there is NO other game like Elite Dangerous that has REAL star systems and distances and beauty and sound effects!) lies a HUGE amount of grinding and to become ELITE in all categories/roles it can take more than 1500 hours! Take deep-scanneing for an example: I want to earn credit not only by trading, but as I travel to other markets, I deep-scanned every star system..to earn more credits by selling system data! It took me over 1 hour to deep scan a star system with over 30 'bodies" and I had yet 20+ star systems to go to! I needed to super-cruise 10+ minutes to a set of planets that are 250.000Lys away in the same star system multiple times just to surface scan them. No matter how much (temporary) "fun"
shooting probes to planet surfaces may be!

SOLUTION 1:
Add a new and expensive component for sale: D-Scan Version 2.0 that will make the "normal" D-scan AND the Surface Scan OBSOLETE! One Scan with the D-Scan 2.0 and you'll hear: "All System Surfaces scanned!" So everything will been scanned through and through! Under 5 seconds! Off to the next star system!

We want a game, not another 8-hour job! After my work I come home to play ED but find myself doing some activites that take also 8 hours, if I want to complete these activites! And combat (my favourite activity) is not even involved! In its curent state ED feels like a job, loaded with chores! No wonder New Players abandon the game quickly! This is also the reason why SEASONED Commanders left the game! "Odyssey" added even more grinding to the already grindy objectives!!!


SOLUTION 2:
Reduce the need to grind THOUSANDS of components, data, chemicals, etc. for the Engineers.
Example: Instead of 350 crystal shards, commanders need only 35! Instead of 200 Enhanced Armor Plates, Commanders need to scavenge for 20! Yes, I'm talking about the "loot" and scavengable components found at the multiple Unidentified Source Signals!

SOLUTION 3:
Give new players (and current commanders) the opportunity to RANK UP quickly, purchase Bigger, Better, Bad-Ass ships faster and let us UPGRADE our ships faster with the Engineers!
Increase the speed at which all players reach Elite levels!
It shouldn't take more than 1 year to reach "Elite" on all areas: Combat, Exploring, Trade, etc!

Reducing these grinds WILL increase the numbers of (new!) players significantly and in no time ED will be filled with multiple pilots and squadrons in "the bubble" and other areas like it used to be 5 years ago, before the Engineers added even more HUGE grinds!


TIP For Frontier Developments:
The MOST FUN of Elite Dangerous is in the COMBAT, which has a very short duration...everytime! Not in hours of deep-scanning, hours of trading, hours of mining, etc. Those are other directions players choose to go into, but their final objectives also shouldn't take real-life hours...as mentioned above! Combat is done usually in 5 minutes, tops! (unless if the player is in the middle of a Faction War!) The duration of other activities...well, you know!
 
TIP For Frontier Developments:
The MOST FUN of Elite Dangerous is in the COMBAT,

I have never done combat, never will, on foot or on ship, I have many thousands of hours in the game, combat is not for everyone, I don't particularly find it fun and it just gets in the way of my playing when it's forced on me. That's the beauty of Elite, you can just NOT do stuff.

These New players will notice, hey, Elite dangerous has virtually No Grind at all! I ranked up one level as Trader and Explorer in just 2 hours!

Hmm, new player, "I have achieved Elite in all four professions in 3 weeks, I have finished the game, now to look for a new game." Now that's a much more likely scenario, games with nothing to achieve and easy to reach targets tend to attract players with very short attention spans rather than long term players, you might get one time purchase of the game but that's it. Make a game easy and it becomes easy to just discard it and go on to the next game.
 
I have never done combat, never will, on foot or on ship, I have many thousands of hours in the game, combat is not for everyone, I don't particularly find it fun and it just gets in the way of my playing when it's forced on me. That's the beauty of Elite, you can just NOT do stuff.



Hmm, new player, "I have achieved Elite in all four professions in 3 weeks, I have finished the game, now to look for a new game." Now that's a much more likely scenario, games with nothing to achieve and easy to reach targets tend to attract players with very short attention spans rather than long term players, you might get one time purchase of the game but that's it. Make a game easy and it becomes easy to just discard it and go on to the next game.
So you mean, you'll abandon Elite Dangerous after "finishing the game"?
 
I have never done combat, never will, on foot or on ship, I have many thousands of hours in the game, combat is not for everyone, I don't particularly find it fun and it just gets in the way of my playing when it's forced on me. That's the beauty of Elite, you can just NOT do stuff.



Hmm, new player, "I have achieved Elite in all four professions in 3 weeks, I have finished the game, now to look for a new game." Now that's a much more likely scenario, games with nothing to achieve and easy to reach targets tend to attract players with very short attention spans rather than long term players, you might get one time purchase of the game but that's it. Make a game easy and it becomes easy to just discard it and go on to the next game.
I bet you're in the minority who don't like combat in elite dangerous. The majority of the players WANT combat! That's why they grind for months to get the bigger and better and combat capable ships in the game!
 
I bet you're in the minority who don't like combat in elite dangerous. The majority of the players WANT combat! That's why they grind for months to get the bigger and better and combat capable ships in the game!

You speak for the majority? Maybe you should do a poll to test that claim out.....oh sorry you can't can you! I grinded for months to increase jump range and reduce power usage and make my ship lighter, not everyone wants combat capable ships, in fact in many uses they are less than optimal.
 
I bet you're in the minority who don't like combat in elite dangerous. The majority of the players WANT combat! That's why they grind for months to get the bigger and better and combat capable ships in the game!

When the game launched i spent most of the first year doing nothing but exploration.

Lots of people play ED for the exploration or for working the BGS or other non-combat related activities.

Consider your poll thread where I talked about manufacturing opinion. You're basically presenting your own opinion as fact.
 
When the game launched i spent most of the first year doing nothing but exploration.

Lots of people play ED for the exploration or for working the BGS or other non-combat related activities.

Consider your poll thread where I talked about manufacturing opinion. You're basically presenting your own opinion as fact.
"I talked about manufacturing opinion. You're basically presenting your own opinion as fact."

And I can say the same about you: YOU too are basically presenting your own opinion as fact!
 
Commanders, just ask yourself these questions:

WHY ARE COMMANDERS LEAVING? WHY ARE (SOME) NEW PLAYERS ASKING FOR A REFUND?

HOW TO MAKE THE GAME MORE FUN AND LESS GRINDY???
 
Commanders, just ask yourself these questions:

WHY ARE COMMANDERS LEAVING? WHY ARE (SOME) NEW PLAYERS ASKING FOR A REFUND?

HOW TO MAKE THE GAME MORE FUN AND LESS GRINDY???

1) Because people have had their time playing ED and its time to move on. I stopped playing about a year ago. I might revisit it one day, maybe not. Had many thousands of hours of fun, but there are other games out there. Maybe if FD add new content that is interesting for me, like full atmospheric worlds, i might take a look. I'll tell you what won't get me playing again... making the game easier or removing grind. Its not like i already don't have everything i want in game, I achieved that years ago.

2) You always get people who buy a game then decide its not for them. That's where refunds come in. Steam has a pretty good refund policy for example. Some people have refunded BG3, which is possibly the best game of the year (for some at least).

3) Lots of suggestions have been made over the years as to how to make it more fun and less grindy. You're not presenting anything new here. Fun is very much subjective so what makes the game more fun for one person might make it less fun for another. Also, grind in itself isn't inherently bad. Take a look at games like Diablo 2, which was a huge success, and the whole game is designed around the grind. Its not a question of if there is grind, its whether the activities associated with the grind are fun to do. But again, making the game easier and removing the grind and has been suggested a thousand times before. If FD were going to do that, they would have already done it a long time ago. Who knows, maybe when they take the decision to shut down the servers they might have a final month where everything is free and all engineering requires no components to do and there will be a final big bang event.
 
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1) No need to shout.
2) The game is not "dying".
3) Doom thread.

doomed.png
 
Commanders, just ask yourself these questions:

WHY ARE COMMANDERS LEAVING? WHY ARE (SOME) NEW PLAYERS ASKING FOR A REFUND?

HOW TO MAKE THE GAME MORE FUN AND LESS GRINDY???
Stop shouting at us it doesn’t help your arguments at all.

I have not asked commanders why they are leaving but I suspect that for those who have played for more than a hundred hours there are many different reasons.

Because those new players found that the game was not to their taste possibly because it is a game for the long term.

You make the game more fun by playing the parts you enjoy, you make it less grindy by not doing repetitive stuff continually in pursuit of a short term target. Instead of aiming to get x in a week of play aim to get x in 2 months of play. Unless of course you like repeating something constantly in which case call it something else as grind has a negative association.
 
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