Indecipherable? - nope
Posted badly? - nope
stupid? - not your actual posts, no. But clinging to something and refusing the evidence that says and shows contrary, then arguing over it... is kinda a little silly.
It has been explained many times, in many threads, how the game works and how we all have the same background sim.
The game itself, ignores modes - from the games point of view, the modes do not exist - that only comes into play when it wants to know if 2 people can see each other.
Apart from that, it's same game, it's same rules, it's same rewards for work done Vs the game (NPCs and related content / rewards/ goals).
If I earn 1 Million in bounties in Open, it is worth - 1 million
If I earn 1 Million in bounties in Solo, it is worth - 1 million
If I earn +50 Rep in Open, it is worth - +50 Rep
If I earn +50 Rep in Solo, it is worth - +50 Rep
The only thing that changes this - is if another human player can interrupt what I am doing - and by choosing Open, you are agreeing to let other players interrupt you.
Which — and this is the important thing about balance in community goals — those other players are doing
instead of furthering their own faction goals.
So, for those complaining about getting less rewards in open, it's to a certain extent a valid complaint, and perhaps the objectives need to be tweaked to not favor one mode or another. But this should be done by using smart game mechanics, and not by simply adding dumb bonuses.
But, for those complaining that players in solo can do more to influence the goals, that is patently false. If someone is hindering the opposite faction, he is doing that
instead of furthering his own faction. A player in open isn't just getting things done for his faction, he is directly preventing players in the opposing faction from contributing, which is just as effective as directly contributing to the goal.
So, sorry to those complaining, but the contributions to community goals are balanced between solo and open, even if the personal rewards aren't.
I've had a break from the thread, I'll take the wheel while you have a rest
After all, got to make it to 1000 - I've got £50 saying the forums break
I believe the size limit (under the default forum settings) is 667 pages, with only 10 posts on the last one. You will need to break the forums
before making it to 1000
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However, it's not in the case of a win/lose scenario. Which most of the new PP goals are appearing to be. Some conflict between two opposing groups with an outcome that puts one as a winner (whether a trade goal, combat goal, exploration goal, etc.) Basically, it will be the first side to meet the tiers required wins. There is no reason to play this, currently, in Open (if you are expecting to win). Any player can outkill, out trade, and out explore anyone in private mode, because you have no interference from other players in any given area of the game. This forces players that prefer Open, but want to compete for the win in a community goal, into Private modes.
This is why there has to be some level of balancing for this issue. If the balance issue doesn't fix this issue, the game will not live up to its potential. It becomes a 'play how you want until you have to go to Private mode to win' I have no idea how to fix this. I do not care how it gets fixed. I've seen some good suggestions...and bad. To claim there isn't a problem is not understanding the nature of the game and where it is going.
Sincerely, I think the powers will go down the same way factions go in other games: players will see which one ends on top, hop to it, and from then on there will be no competition. Most players aren't in it to play, but to earn rewards.
I might be wrong. Heck, I wish I'm wrong. But I've seen this happen too many times for me to believe otherwise; unless there's one heck of an incentive to fight for the underdog, the Power/Faction that starts on top will grow explosively until there is no competition anymore. Which will make this whole solo versus open discussion meaningless.
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Open and pvp players backed, researched and paid for the game in the exactly same way. Community goals weren't in the kickstarter but FD "changed the game" and added them so therefore as a new feature it's within my rights to point out it's short coming in regards to the mode I paid for. Nothing I've suggested would ruin the game for solo/pve players.
Actually,
Dev Diary Video #2 is about it. They were not called community goals back then, but were described and promised back during the Kickstart campaign.
I personally think that pve and pvp are the antithesis of each other and to continue trying to force to two together waters down the experience for both communities.
Not the antithesis. Rather, the combination is something different, that doesn't necessarily appease people that like PvE, PvP, or even both.
It's my case. I love PvE games. I love PvP games, as long as the game is pure PvP, without any pesky PvE to get in the way of the player combat. But I simply can't stand anything that mixes PvP with the PvE.
At the same time, while for the life of me I can't understand why they enjoy it, there are players that do enjoy the mix a great deal.
Yeah we're good m8.
The only thing I can't understand is the solo/group players who are against separate community goals for open, even if it's a duplicate of the same goal for solo/group and then the results of both are totalled up to give the outcome. Even if more players are in solo/group atleast the open players would know that any results made in their one were only influenced by players they could actually interact with and it wouldn't change anything at all for solo/group players.
If you mean just the tally and the awarding of rewards for being one of the top players being separate, with the goals themselves and the rewards being the same, then I kinda agree, though something would need to be done to avoid hindering players that keep jumping between modes. Ideally this shouldn't be needed, but at the same time in any situation where this wouldn't be needed it wouldn't harm anyone.
After the wing beacon exploit became well known it completely killed trading for me. I couldn't face working my ass off knowing there were people teleporting between stations and making insane amount of money. The fact that it was reported by several people in wings beta didn't help matters. If you go to the elitetraders reddit people happily offer themselves out for beacons whilst they're asleep and there's a still a video showing people exactly how to do it on this forum to this day.
My guess is that the devs didn't see a way to block the exploit without nerfing wing beacons, and wing beacons are needed if the game's co-op play is to catch; noting kills the idea of playing with friends faster than travel time.
Though I'm biased when it comes to that; I would rather convince a friend to log off and launch some other game where we could teleport to each other's position than waste 5-10 minutes in travel. One of the things that killed MMOs for me, as when it came to playing with actual friends, I nearly never did it in MMOs (except for WoW's Looking for Dungeon; all my max level characters were dual spec Tank/Healer, so getting into a random dungeon with a friend typically took less than a minute).
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You know, it's interesting.... in STO, there was a huge debate about death penalties. A vocal faction really wanted death penalties to be a lot higher. (As in, they would like ED's death penalty/paltry insurance!) Some even wanted permadeath! But when it was pointed out that they could just delete their character when they died... silence. Nothing. Not a response, and they just kept going on and on about how death should have more impact, death should have consequences, etc.
Some people just can't get over that sort of thing.
It happens in about every MMO forum before the game is launched; there are a number of players that think games can only be enjoyable if death is truly punishing, but for a number of reasons nowadays this is the exception (and a rare exception) rather than the rule. I remember the TOR devs actively posting the reasons why they wanted to keep death penalties low and, more specifically, why their game would never have player looting or gear breakage, for example.
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I certainly do not want to transform Elite into WOW. When I refer to bosses, I'm purely referring to npcs that have equivalent skill levels to players found in open. If you have preferred terminology for these npcs please let me know.
If you measure the actual average skill level of a player I believe the result would surprise you in a negative way. People have a tendency to remember a few memorable encounters and forget about the other ones; for those that hunger for challenging encounters, it means remembering the "worthy" opponents and forgetting about the ones that were average or below. In fact, I believe the top tier of NPCs is already reasonably above the average player.
lol. I think its merged because its such a continual hot topic it would engulf the entire forum if it wasn't merged
Hot topic was the removal of the offline mode, 10K posts in less than a week. This one is just persistent, a zombie that refuses to lie down.
What does arbitrary IQ measures have to do with this discussion?
Neneaalex saying that anyone with a two digit IQ can see that the future of space sims lies in a strong multiplayer element, or some such thing.
I respectfully disagree with him, though. Apart from Arena PvP games, I don't really see a strong multiplayer element as particularly desirable in space sims, and not all of the games he mentioned are purely focused on that. I got Star Citizen, for example, for the offline persistent universe and the advertised modding capabilities, and don't plan to even bother making an online character.
