The Wasted Potential of ED
- Thread starter Cosmo
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My biggest complaint about the engineering and the expansion of Horizons was all the extra gameplay is picking up little balls. You use little balls to make your ship better. So much of the game is collecting little balls.
You pick up space balls. Planet balls. You do missions to pick up balls to receive balls you thankfully don't need to pick up.
The game is so amazing and immersion sometimes wonderful and then the gamey moments like this bring it down. I don't think it would feel as grindy if the means to aquire advancement in gear wasn't so lame.
Let player economy form by being able to sell engineering materials. So we can progress with credits if we don't want to collect little balls for hours on end.
You pick up space balls. Planet balls. You do missions to pick up balls to receive balls you thankfully don't need to pick up.
The game is so amazing and immersion sometimes wonderful and then the gamey moments like this bring it down. I don't think it would feel as grindy if the means to aquire advancement in gear wasn't so lame.
Let player economy form by being able to sell engineering materials. So we can progress with credits if we don't want to collect little balls for hours on end.
Am i supposed to care about some random's opinion about a game he doesnt even play*?
Someone that thinks ED failed because the galaxy is too big and nobody will ever visit like 99.5% of it?
In a game that was (is) so proud about the setting - aka the 1-on-1 representation of the Milky Way?
Yeah, right... but no actually
*(As in, play it as a game, not as a pay-per-view source material)
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to be fair i think halo, cod and even fortnite have much worse starships. and their bgs isnt that good either. also dont forget to compare driving from halo, cod and even fortnite to forza...
Well, i can tell what Starfield will NOT be like: ED
They're 2 different games that have only one thing in common - the sci-fi setting
What a completely crazy sentiment! Who doesn't want to spend hours youtubing how just do the most basic things in a game?!?! Read what you said. You spent months playing before you knew about a site like eddb. So what did you do when you wanted to find a certain hard point, land at every station looking? That must have been fun, rewarding gameplay with lots of real effort!
This!
What ED really needs is meaningful gameplay.
Obsidian Ant has made a really good video the other day:
And he is spot on. Interiors would only mean something, if it had good gameplay associated with it. Unfortunately, Fdev is not known to create meaningful gameplay.
Look at the Exo Minigame. It was so bad, it had to be cut!
Well... they don't say No directly, they simply ignore everything players are asking for or resort to a very vague answer.This would all be lovely and FDev have not said no, they've just not done these things. Yes, we would like them.
Like interiors: They are not planned at this stage.
They don't say we won't get them, but they aren't saying will get them either.
The Dante's Inferno gate would be fitting with a minor adjustment: Abandond all hopes and wishes, ye who play this!
Yea, but meaningful gameplay doesnt mean ships, ship's interiors, planetary bases - those are just assets.
So you say ED need meaningful gameplay* but then you say This! to a list of assets
*(But what that even means in a sandbox game? - they do offer the sand, the box, and some tools to play with, but you have to make your own gameplay with those tools. I guess, what i'm trying to say is this: if you find yourself by the sandbox and you have no idea what to do with a beach shovel, a beach sand mold, a beach bucket etc - then playing in a sandbox is not for you)
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Ok... but...
... this would make it all about the balls you hate so much.
Credits are meaningless. They always have been ever since FD trashed the economy because, prior to engineering, players complained about, ironically enough, credit earning being too slow. Players will be paying hyper- inflated rates on materials, and when people notice just how much people can pay for materials, suddenly everything will be measured in materials.
That massacre mission offering 50m or 48m plus 5xG5 mats? Becomes a no brainer what option you go for if players are paying 50m per G5.
Instead of just running an assassination mission and turning it in, you're running an assassination mission and then scooping up all the bits after[1] since they're way more valuable than anything the assassination was offering. Yes, instead of ignoring materials, they become your complete focus of play instead.
The worst part of this is it does nothing for the credit problem. It doesn't sink any credits at all[2]. Instead, credits exchange hands between players and, thanks to expedited ways to trade them, consumption via engineering or synthesis increases dramatically. Meanwhile... most activities have you accumulate credits and materials simultaneously.
So what have we just done? Created a world with ever- increasing credit balances, and even less materials in it than before, thus, increasing the amount of ball-gathering due to the increased demand for materials.
Kinda the opposite of what you want to do.
[1] though, as far as i can tell, nobody does this for some inane reason, instead preferring some brain- numbing grindplay to get their mats.
[2] if this confuses anyone... lets say there's two players.. each have 25m credits.. one wants to engineer something using material X, other person has a unit of material X and is selling it for 25m.
Player buys it for 25m, engineerings the thing. One player has 0 credits, other player has 50m, but now no materials exist. No credits lost in the system, but materials are lost.
Cutting the minigame was the wrong move. It should've been two attempts... get it first attempt, get all three samples in one go. Miss the first attempt, get two. Miss all three, you get one sample.
FD is actually great at creating mechanics that can be used to support meaningful gameplay (for whatever that means)... but they just fail to orchestrate it into something meaningful or use it in a sane way.
The answer is yes. I remember before I knew about EDDB. I want a huge laser? Hmm, maybe it's a good idea to try a high-tech or military system, preferably with a big population.
In my early days another CMDR did me a huge favour: told me you could get Performance Enhancers for a good price in Zaragas. That gave me a huge boost in trade and fetch missions, and Zaragas turned out to be a good place to buy modules too.
Playing the game, not a spreadsheet.
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By the time i needed to actually care/ could afford having good fitouts and such, i could get by very easily. High Tech systems one jump away generally had all i needed... a couple B- rates substitutes here and there but it all worked, and achieved everything i needed to do.
By the time i started needing to care about that sort of thing for some of the new content, I'd hit Elite and could hit up SD for an exhaustive list... but the neighbouring high tech systems are still good for most bits. I don't think i ever needed to hit more than two stations to find what i needed in those early days.
I can understand that might not seem plausible... if you've played according to the next great self-uppercut guide to grinding and 3rd party tools constantly open just to scratch yourself... getting by without must seem like witchcraft...
But i guess that does inverse-reflect my own viewpoint that being completely incapable of doing anything in the game without these tools seems absolutely absurd.
It would mean you could do the things you enjoy (Combat in my case) to make credits and or pertinent balls and then buy the balls from the activities you don't like (Srv / Mining in my case) with credits earned / balls sold.
It would give players more incentive to use their it carriers as trading hubs and communicate with each other. It would also provide a credit sink.
The game would be better with it than without it. Being able to focus on the things you like and still make progress is a good thing. Bringing players together is a good thing. Finding more uses for carriers and additional credit sinks is a good thing.
My Frontier low effort compromise would be the material trader just selling the materials.
But the best way to make credits is getting those balls, if player trading of mats were a thing. You literally get access to those balls while doing the thing that gets you credits.
You're telling me in your quest for credits to purchase materials, you would literally walk past your best source of credits (being the materials themselves)? You'd leave behind 50m in materials to run off and do another assassination worth 5m faster?
More power to you if you did. Most players wouldn't, and that matters more here. The opportunity cost is the same, and you're just deciding to cut off your nose to spite your face if you're truly just about the credits.
It would not provide a credit sink, that is outright wrong.
Credit sinks remove credits from the game. Player trading just shuffles it between players.
Now, if you could buy off NPCs, that would be a credit sink as the credits just fly off into a non existent NPC wallet... but that's a whole other bag of wrong.
It really wouldn't. i focus on the things i enjoy and get plenty of materials to do what i please.
That players go out and actively pursue things they don't enjoy, just to do engineering and go back to the same activities they could've done without engineering anyways... that's just inane.
The only thing player trading of materials would do is accelerate the realisation for some they they simply don't enjoy the game.
Certainly a lot of materials have a "substitution price" for NPCs which is way below their actual value in either utility or time to obtain (and which, being set before NPC material traders were available, would allow ridiculous money loops if it was an actual price: buy G5 at 500k, trade for 81 G1, sell those for considerably more than 500k, repeat
On the other hand, the materials which can be obtained readily as side-effects of missions would probably end up fairly cheap. Biotech Conductors? Trivial to get a whole bunch as mission rewards; only used for long range and short range weapon mods which are somewhat specialist. Downtraded to 3 Conductive Polymers or 9 Conductive Ceramics they're rather more useful, of course, but at the point you don't need many Biotech. Plus, because they're available as mission rewards, you can already get them by doing the things you'd probably be doing to get the credits to buy them from other players...
That market would probably end up flooded pretty quickly with prices fairly low - the floor likely not set by the usefulness of Biotech Conductors themselves but by the ability to trade them 1:6 for something else.
It'd be really interesting to see where the prices did end up if Frontier implemented this trading plus reasonably efficient markets (i.e. globally searchable and usable, no need to fly for thirty minutes and hope that FC off Inara still has stock by the time you get there to make the transaction) - on the one hand, you'd have people doing it because they were trying to earn money that way: if you can earn X credits per hour directly, you'd expect the materials obtained in that hour by doing material farming instead to also get a combined price of X. But on the other hand, materials of the sort you do pick up regularly stop being useful to you fairly quickly (especially the ones below G5) so you may as well dump them on the market at a few credits below whatever the current minimum is, and get some compensation for them.
I'm thinking of the one "player market" that has existed reasonably well - Tritium in Colonia. You'd get buyers at a bit over 100k/tonne, which is the amount you'd need to sell at to not make a loss taking a tanker up from the bubble, and well below the opportunity cost point for mining locally. You wouldn't get buyers at 400k/tonne - the sort of amount needed to make a decent hourly profit on taking a tanker from the bubble, or mining Tritium instead of Painite/gems locally. And that's partly because no-one wants to pay ten times the NPC rate for Tritium, and partly because "doing it for a bit of fun" 100k sellers would regularly undercut you. So the actual quantity on the market has remained fairly thin, and the demands for better NPC sources out there continues.
Maybe the "grind problem" is YouTubers grinding for clicks?
So, that cross- trading is where they would get their value. Any G5 would be worth 1/6th (i thought you could cross- trade at the same grade for 1:3? I always mix them up... )
Whatever value was placed on the most valuable G5, the going rate of anything else would be the fractional proportion to that.
So either:
- we end up being in a position where material value is huge among players, and any pursuit of credits is rooted in getting these mats to sell to players; or
- flooding of the more readily accessible materials brings the price of something like a PI down substantially... but how anyone that plays the game isn't already swimming in them anyway...
Oh it's definitely an interesting thought experiment. Mix in the bat
-crazy credit economy... I've seen people suggest they'd pay 100m for a G5 on here before. Tritium is such an interesting one to watch like that... the NPC market and general scarcity, particularly Colonia-way, combined with the opportunity cost post by mining trit... but you need trit.
The wasted potential was FD not keeping credit earning low on milk run stuff, while making illegal stuff lucrative.