Newcomer / Intro The Crippling Debt

[toretorden]

To OP(Toretorden)

I'm not quite sure why you want "a new kind of mission" to pay you debts(other than making it easier/faster than it's today), I mean as the game is now when you die(and was stupid enough to fly without having enough for insurance) you have 2 choises
A) take a loan(whitch you pay back over time while doing missions) or
B) Refuse the loan and get a brand new sidey instead of what you had(remember if you choose option B and have another ship stored somewhere it will still be there for you to go fetch in your new Sidey)

So why would you want yet another kind of mission just to pay of debt?, isn't that just something you can already do with the missions we already have...?

I must admit I've never tried out the loan thing myself, but it seems unfair to me if people who have debts should have access to higher payloads-missions than the rest of us, so if the game should have new High risk, high payloads mission I would like the oppotunity to do them(even though I'd never have to loan anything) just like those people who doesn't care about having enough credits to pay for their ships/upgrades insurence...

So all in all I still see no good argument for changing the mechanics of the Loan option, The only thing I've seen in this thread whitch I could support of change is an option to payback a loan earlier than the 10% of you income to get rid of it sooner rather than later..

But it's just my opinion....

I can already see from your attitude that your opinion of people who get into debt is that they're stupid people who got themselves into trouble and it's their well-deserved punishment. You even mention the word "stupid". This is why you don't get it and you won't ever get it if that's the perspective you wanna come from. It's just not the level where the constructive discussion on this could be.

In order to get it, you have to lay your personal judgments aside for a bit and think about the game in an objective way. This isn't personal or about who's stupid or not. It's about what makes a good game. How do game mechanics impact people's enjoyment of the game and is it gonna make the game sell more or less? Wanting to punish people for being what you consider stupid just isn't constructive thinking. You ask me why change stuff? The purpose of changing the mechanics is, of course, to make people enjoy Elite more and possibly make the game sell better.

This thread is already corrupted by various judgmental posts, so I'll ask a mod to close it and perhaps start a new thread with a more properly presented suggestion in a more appropriate forum.

 

[the100thmonkey]

I don't think there is a constructive discussion to be had. The proposed is a mechanic that rewards bad choices with missions unique to the bad choice.

Games aren't about rewarding poor decisions; they punish them.

 

[CrispyLeper]

I don't think there is a constructive discussion to be had. The proposed is a mechanic that rewards bad choices with missions unique to the bad choice.

Games aren't about rewarding poor decisions; they punish them.

The most precise post in this thread. +1

OP, consider your opening posts more carefully if you want to encourage discussion rather than response.
Also if you are not a "raging newbie" then this thread shouldn't have been posted in newcomers forum, people will assume you are a "newcomer".
I understand the point you are trying to make and I think maybe there could be alternative options for the debt management, but probably only worse ones tbh.
At the end of the day this isn't a FPS it's a space sim and you should be rewarded for not dying rather than more interesting gameplay when you do.

 

[toretorden]

I don't think there is a constructive discussion to be had. The proposed is a mechanic that rewards bad choices with missions unique to the bad choice.

Games aren't about rewarding poor decisions; they punish them.

There's little reward in it, really. I think of it more as creative punishment. As I wrote, it's about adding content to the game to make it more interesting and hence, more enjoyable.

There's still consequences for bad decisions. How you don't get that, I don't know, but if you think there's no constructive discussion to be had, why add your non-constructive thoughts to it at all?

 

[toretorden]

I don't think there is a constructive discussion to be had. The proposed is a mechanic that rewards bad choices with missions unique to the bad choice.

Games aren't about rewarding poor decisions; they punish them.

There's little reward in it, really. I think of it more as creative punishment. As I wrote, it's about adding content to the game to make it more interesting and hence, more enjoyable.

There's still consequences for bad decisions. How you don't get that, I don't know, but if you think there's no constructive discussion to be had, why add your non-constructive thoughts to it at all?

OP, consider your opening posts more carefully if you want to encourage discussion rather than response.
Also if you are not a "raging newbie" then this thread shouldn't have been posted in newcomers forum, people will assume you are a "newcomer".

Yes, valid. I honestly thought the things I'm proposing were in place in the game, hence the bad start. Also, I wasn't aware of the extent people would be strawmanning the crap out of this.

I've already asked the mods to close this.

I understand the point you are trying to make and I think maybe there could be alternative options for the debt management, but probably only worse ones tbh.
At the end of the day this isn't a FPS it's a space sim and you should be rewarded for not dying rather than more interesting gameplay when you do.

I think people have a hard time grasping the concept that even penalties can be fun because they probably haven't encountered them. I wrote an example from an earlier game a post or two up. Perhaps you might understand where I'm coming from better if you read it?

to illustrate a death system which I found interesting in a different game, I can refer to Shadow of Mordor which I recently finished. It's a Lord of the Rings game and you fight orcs in it. Most orcs are just orcs, but some are captains or even warchiefs with captains serving under them. If you get killed by a normal orc, that orc will get promoted to captain. He'll rise in levels and become more badass. The next time you meet him, he'll throw an insult your way, probably about how he kicked your ass earlier. None of these things take away the penalty for dying or any of the responsibility. Possibly it adds a bit of penalty by rewarding your killer .. But what it really does is create some really interesting consequences for dying, consequences that are gonna impact your actions later in the game.

It's not about taking away consequences from loans or debts. It's about adding more of them. I mean, right now, it's just a -10% income debuff that goes away after a while. Basically, it's simply something bad that happens with no interesting side to it.

In a game, you shouldn't add stuff that dull and clearly, there have been ideas to spice it up laying around a long time. I think it's time they brush the dust off those ideas.

edit :

The reason you wanna focus on penalties is because they're typically gonna target players in an early phase, like reviewers or casual gamers or just newbies. If you're targetting them with a penalty that's basically just tedious and boring, that's gonna get into reviews, stories about the game, forum posts and it could affect sales in a big way. Just saying.

 

[the100thmonkey]

So effectively what you're saying is that anyone who disagrees with you shouldn't post.

Echo chambers rarely lead to fruitful discussions.

There's already plenty of fruitful and interesting gameplay to be had, without turning making bad choices into a minigame. There's no need to add another mechanic that will only affect a very small proportion of the playerbase.

As a case in point: I'm not an elite player by any stretch of the imagination, but I certainly don't tiptoe around risky situations - I spent more than 5 hours in a high-intensity conflict zone last night in a damned expensive ship which I'd have been totally unable to cover with a 600kcr bridging loan if I hadn't kept my rebuy many times over.

Your premise that the current system induces risk-averse behaviours is debatable at best. What it does do is punish players who think they're Luke Skywalker and can pilot a ship like an ace with little practice or training. I appreciate the desire to add more "fun" to the game (although you've shifted the goalposts from your initial position, by the way), and I appreciate that it's your right as a player to display suicidal tendencies -- you can play any way you wish as far as I'm concerned (within limits) -- but you're effectively saying that because your playstyle is to do things that cause you multiple deaths in quick succession, there should be a mechanic to make recovering from the debt more interesting! Why don't you just adjust your playstyle and do some of the many interesting things that are already in the game. The fact that recovering from a (really very small) debt isn't fun and you've not given any compelling reason why it should be.

I put it to you that your suggestion is, in the most charitable light, a minority preference that the devs should only ever even consider implementing if and when they've sorted out the far more pressing bugs, such as the game-breaking ones that plague the background simulation. From a less sympathetic perspective, what's wrong with playing the game as it was designed rather than suggest the developers waste many man-hours on a mechanic to make the game interesting for people who play badly (by the standard of how often their in-game behaviour kills them) - this quote, attributed to Einstein, springs to mind: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

 

[Aleksej]

Closed at OP's request.