It's been said before, It'll be said again, and I'm sure many will see this and say to themselves "Oh, it's THIS thread again." Indeed, they may even comment as much below.
But it still needs to be said:
Guys... you don't have a multiplayer game with freedom to "blaze your own trail" here. You have a background sim like a stage set and actors flitting and flying about without being able to interact in any way but talking or shooting at each other.
You burned a lot of goodwill early on with the "always need a connection" requirement, and then you removed any reason for it other than the almighty background sim while totally ignoring the foreground players.
Put simply: Frontier... you seem afraid of the multiplayer aspects of a multiplayer game.
I get it, you didn't want gold grinders sitting outside every major station going "$10 for 100 million credits!" I GET that. But then the baby got thrown out with the bath water: when people started getting around that by racking up massive bounties on their heads, you simply limited how much bounty a person could have on their head.
I... what?
That didn't open the door to the abuses we see today. That door was already open, but then you decided to drive a bulldozer through it, in the name of arbitrary time sink.
I just can't help but think that many player requests are apparently implemented via monkey's paw.
When I thought of multicrew, I thought of a friend riding shotgun in my exploration ship, where they handle the scanners and sensors. Honking the horn, maybe putting the detail scanner on a swivel--like you did with mining lasers--so a star and bodies could be scanned while the pilot busies themselves with not hitting the star or burning up while scooping. Maybe it's beyond the game engine to put discovery co-credit on previously undiscovered systems, but it would have been nice to give the co-pilot and other crew a cut. Not only do they take up some of the workload, but they provide extra power to the ship, and I for one would like my boiler stokers to be paid a fair wage.
And if that can't be handled directly through the multi crew system (Sign on for x hours or jumps or % of exploration profit) then I would like to handle it though direct means: I want to pay my crew.
This is not hard. This is not revolutionary. This is basic. This is player interaction 101 here.
Picture the following: I want to start a flight school. I want the Donovan Flight Academy. Or Donovan Academy of Flight Training. I want to teach DAFT applicants proper technique for long-distance navigation. Using the in-game and 3rd party tools to plot ultra long courses. I want a curriculum. I want an in-game version of my "So, you want to..." video series.
And at the end, if I want to gift my top student of that class with enough cash to buy and fit an Asp Explorer or an Exploraconda, I want to do that too. Why? Because they're my credits and I can do whatever I want with them.
And for the players who say "Well why should new players get it easier?!" Well... for the exact same reason I do NOT write letters with inkwell pens, ride on vehicles powered by steam, or catch preventable diseases the old fashioned way as intended by God and nature. This is also why we're not using the 7 light year jump drive, the cloud drive, or the hypergate systems anymore in-game.
Look... it used to be that the Anaconda was the top-end, all-singing-all-dancing capstone: It's a transport, it's an explorer, it's a combat barge. Then came the capstone faction ships, and suddenly you needed rank for those too. So there's a second grind in addition to the money grind. Then the engineers added the third grind, with constantly-shifting materials requirement on a per-patch basis, and a constantly-shifting material rarity to go on top of it.
I hear you saying "That's all optional. You don't NEED faction ships. You don't NEED engineered ships." That's true. But when Frontier makes it the featured focus of the game, you should kind of expect people to focus on it. Horizons patch 2.1 wasn't called "THE OPTIONAL CONTENT". Faction ships are less important, but the increasing, stacking number of time sinks should not be ignored. Especially when they are all essentially solo endeavors set in a nominally multiplayer game.
Everything IN the game is solo mode. It just depends on how much access you want to give other players while you do it.
If shortcutting players from a sidewinder or eagle to an asp-X or vulture somehow causes the game and/or player base to collapse, then the game was built on really shaky ground to begin with.
tl;dr version:
Turn this game into a proper simulation and let me actually transfer money to people for services, deeds, or because I was struck by the whim to do so. There are innumerable important roles which have no form of proper compensation, but would make things more dynamic and actually generate more of that emergent gameplay that gets Elite mentioned in articles. Except maybe without the first words of said article's headline being "Notorious troll..."
But it still needs to be said:
Guys... you don't have a multiplayer game with freedom to "blaze your own trail" here. You have a background sim like a stage set and actors flitting and flying about without being able to interact in any way but talking or shooting at each other.
You burned a lot of goodwill early on with the "always need a connection" requirement, and then you removed any reason for it other than the almighty background sim while totally ignoring the foreground players.
Put simply: Frontier... you seem afraid of the multiplayer aspects of a multiplayer game.
I get it, you didn't want gold grinders sitting outside every major station going "$10 for 100 million credits!" I GET that. But then the baby got thrown out with the bath water: when people started getting around that by racking up massive bounties on their heads, you simply limited how much bounty a person could have on their head.
I... what?
That didn't open the door to the abuses we see today. That door was already open, but then you decided to drive a bulldozer through it, in the name of arbitrary time sink.
I just can't help but think that many player requests are apparently implemented via monkey's paw.
When I thought of multicrew, I thought of a friend riding shotgun in my exploration ship, where they handle the scanners and sensors. Honking the horn, maybe putting the detail scanner on a swivel--like you did with mining lasers--so a star and bodies could be scanned while the pilot busies themselves with not hitting the star or burning up while scooping. Maybe it's beyond the game engine to put discovery co-credit on previously undiscovered systems, but it would have been nice to give the co-pilot and other crew a cut. Not only do they take up some of the workload, but they provide extra power to the ship, and I for one would like my boiler stokers to be paid a fair wage.
And if that can't be handled directly through the multi crew system (Sign on for x hours or jumps or % of exploration profit) then I would like to handle it though direct means: I want to pay my crew.
This is not hard. This is not revolutionary. This is basic. This is player interaction 101 here.
Picture the following: I want to start a flight school. I want the Donovan Flight Academy. Or Donovan Academy of Flight Training. I want to teach DAFT applicants proper technique for long-distance navigation. Using the in-game and 3rd party tools to plot ultra long courses. I want a curriculum. I want an in-game version of my "So, you want to..." video series.
- Class field trips for material gathering: Where and how to get what.
- Jump Boosts and You: The ten "do's" and ten thousand "don't's" of approaching a collapsed star.
- How to break interdictions.
- What silent running can and can't do for you.
- Basic combat techniques for self defense: How not to loop back into your attackers.
- Self-care: AFMU, reboot, and you
And at the end, if I want to gift my top student of that class with enough cash to buy and fit an Asp Explorer or an Exploraconda, I want to do that too. Why? Because they're my credits and I can do whatever I want with them.
And for the players who say "Well why should new players get it easier?!" Well... for the exact same reason I do NOT write letters with inkwell pens, ride on vehicles powered by steam, or catch preventable diseases the old fashioned way as intended by God and nature. This is also why we're not using the 7 light year jump drive, the cloud drive, or the hypergate systems anymore in-game.
Look... it used to be that the Anaconda was the top-end, all-singing-all-dancing capstone: It's a transport, it's an explorer, it's a combat barge. Then came the capstone faction ships, and suddenly you needed rank for those too. So there's a second grind in addition to the money grind. Then the engineers added the third grind, with constantly-shifting materials requirement on a per-patch basis, and a constantly-shifting material rarity to go on top of it.
I hear you saying "That's all optional. You don't NEED faction ships. You don't NEED engineered ships." That's true. But when Frontier makes it the featured focus of the game, you should kind of expect people to focus on it. Horizons patch 2.1 wasn't called "THE OPTIONAL CONTENT". Faction ships are less important, but the increasing, stacking number of time sinks should not be ignored. Especially when they are all essentially solo endeavors set in a nominally multiplayer game.
Everything IN the game is solo mode. It just depends on how much access you want to give other players while you do it.
If shortcutting players from a sidewinder or eagle to an asp-X or vulture somehow causes the game and/or player base to collapse, then the game was built on really shaky ground to begin with.
tl;dr version:
Turn this game into a proper simulation and let me actually transfer money to people for services, deeds, or because I was struck by the whim to do so. There are innumerable important roles which have no form of proper compensation, but would make things more dynamic and actually generate more of that emergent gameplay that gets Elite mentioned in articles. Except maybe without the first words of said article's headline being "Notorious troll..."
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