So you agree with me then.
This is why I worry about the future of ED - it's FDev themselves
- Thread starter FatFreddysCoat
- Start date
So you agree with me then.
I specifically called out why it's better with the suggestions I've stated previously.
Reusing content is better for the game because it's studio effort that isn't wasted after 1 use. Anytime they have to create content for a one off event, it's completely wasted on a player who joins the game 1 week after the "event". That new player can't make any use out of that previous content.
Everything I've stated as being better than what we currently have i have explained why it is better. You've not explained a single reason why the current way is better....just that you have accepted the current way and are fine with it. That's not an explanation that matters to anyone.
A mystery in the game that can only be really "solved" once is useless to the playerbase who isn't playing at that particular time that it was solved. This is mostly impactful to new players, as opposed to players who may have chosen not to participate.
This is not a "claim". It's simple facts and reality. If all the excitement and lore you're building comes and goes in realtime, then you're left with either having to continuously create more excitement and lore 24/7 or you run out. Running out is what Elite has done so far every single release. You get some new content, some lore, some excitement and then nothing until the next release because Fdev can't keep up with how fast the new content is consumed. THIS IS NOT A CLAIM... this is documented fact that occurs regularly in every single release cycle of the game so far. A mystery/event will progress to a certain point and then everyone is left having to wait until Fdev can catch up and progress the story.
This is the direct result of the game being massively multiplayer. Such content ends up having a very short half-life and so becomes very costly for minimal (temporary) value.
A better strategy for a massively multiplayer game is having content that doesn't expire and become useless after 1 player consumes it. Instead of having mysteries / content etc that is shared amongst all players simultaneously, you would be better served by creating content that becomes specific and independent to each individual player.
That's where all the emphasis and effort should be made, so that Fdev isn't constantly battling the consumption rate of tens of thousands of players with a studio team that only measures a few dozen. You can still have such universal content here and there but they should be very few and far between.
In other words, the narrative needs to become personal to the player instead of focusing on a narrative that is based on the shared galaxy. The story that Fdev should be focusing their time on should be a dynamic story that revolves around me / you as a player ....where everything they create around it can be experienced by EVERY player no matter when they decide to start playing the game... leaving the overall narrative of the galaxy to be something they can create and progress at a much longer interval without impacting the gameplay experience by running out of all content.
You have been dismissing any statements i've made not out of any objective reasoning ...you've given none. You've just been dismissing them for the purpose of being contrary or because you honestly can't see the game outside of your tiny personal experience of it. Which is fine, i dont need to convince you of anything if you dont want to be, but I'm not sure why you'd care enough interject if you're not going to bother backing up anything unless all you're after is trolling.
Here's a little list to make things easier. There are more examples for each claim, but i'll stick to one for each (Single and multiplayer) to make this shorter.
Claim: Shared bgs hinders the ability to create better single player or better multiplayer versions of the game
Evidence: A shared bgs pits the efforts of a single player against multiple other players, effectively putting a single player at a disadvantage they can't circumvent alone.
A shared bgs allows single players to bypass any sort of in-game construct created by player groups or other single players, making them rather impotent.
Claim: The realtime shared narrative is restricted due to having to deal with the shared universe between modes.
Evidence: The single player can't progress their narrative on their own timetable like they would be able to in a true multiplayer game. Further, the narrative can't focus on the particular activities of the player because those activities are being mirrored by thousands of other players.
Multiplayer is hobbled by the shared narrative because it can't break out of the limitations that the story imposes. The playerbase can't reshape the bubble due to the sandboxy activity among the various factions/powers etc... because the narrative is canon and so Fdev wont allow such activity to occur. Activity that would be expected since we can see such activity in games that don't have a shared single player mode.
Claim: Realtime content is a high cost low value mechanic in Elite dangerous. The game would be much better served by spending time creating content that can be re-used.
Evidence: Players who join the game now, experience none of the excitement of discovering the purpose of unknown artifacts, the existence of aliens, solving any previously solved mysteries or excitement around other one time events like jaques's mission etc. They only have what is yet to come.
Content that is designed to be unique per player is content that can be experienced by any player regardless of when they start playing the game and regardless of if any other player has already completed similar content. If designed carefully, players wouldn't even be able to predict what they will discover or find at the end of their little journey based on reading about other people's.
Feel free to bring up any other claims that need examples and evidence. I'm not worried about being able to back up the stance that the game would be better if it was disconnected between modes. That's essentially a given because all we have by connecting the modes is a compromised vision of a single player game and a compromised vision of a multiplayer game with no real value or benefit to both other than being able to opt-out of instancing with other players at will. Everything else about it is some limitation compared to a fully single or fully mmo game. I've given plenty of examples of these limitations, i've yet to see any real examples of how the connected modes creates something bettter than it's absence.
I just personally did the first stages of the guardian ruins content last week for the first time and was glad for Canonn's great work cataloging the sites to make it easier for me and I just started dipping my toes into AX combat during the Thargoid assault on Otherni, so there goes your whole thesis about how people who are "new to the game" don't get to "experience the content" which is basically what you said with your thousand word screed.
edit: Oh, and also you're mad about Solo and PG affecting Open for some reason, even though being able to choose my peering options in a never-before-seen style of peer-to-peer MMOG is also one of my favorite things about Elite. I can either play a relaxed casual session or open the floodgates to who-knows-what depending on how I feel that session, while still supporting my allied minor factions and advancing my personal narrative one jump at a time.
I don't need to back up my dismissal of your points. You wrote a lot more words on the subject, but still did not offer any significant evidence as to WHY the developers SHOULD fundamentally restructure the game into a singleplayer game. You just repeated yourself with more words this time. For you to get what you want out of this dialogue, you need to argue with sufficient weight to convince the developers of Elite to alter the entire structure of the game to suit your tastes. I just need to refute you, which isn't difficult because your argument is fundamentally based on false generalizations and axiomatic value statements that you falsely claim are "facts and reality".
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The Elite franchise had sold 3.25m franchise copies as of 31st Dec 2017. "Franchise Copies" doesn't include cosmetic or merchandise purchases, just in case anyone's wondering (I can find the link if it's wanted).
Prior to SteamSpy's stats being nerfed by Steam's GDPR changes, they had the owner count at 1.3 million.
This analysis is very on-point, bar the NMS sale estimate - it sold a ton on PS4 (no real stats available though), definitely better than Elite Dangerous, due to the enormous marketing in both 2016 and 2018 by Sony.
Steam-stats-wise, it's been interesting how far NMS' playerbase has tanked: by 95% in less than 3 months. And agreed, it'll drop below Elite's when the latter's Q4 update drops if not before.
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Ah hahha ha... no. NMS kicked ED's butt in sales AND online players. So what does that say about ED? Try again Stig… Seriously, your post is the best "WK" post in a long time.
NMS sales were fantastic indeed.
Peak online players, yes.
Regular online players, no.
No Man's Sky had two monstrous peaks of concurrent players - a fantastic demonstration of extensive AAA marketing by a console manufacturer - between huge swathes of very-low player counts, as SteamCharts clearly shows:
- No Man's Sky (image): average concurrent of 4,354 players between Aug 2016 & Sep 2018. Daily peak High of 212k, low of 1.0k.
- Elite Dangerous (image): average concurrent of 4,355 players between Apr 2015 & Sep 2018. Daily peak High of 18k, low of 5.3k.
Elite Dangerous hasn't had the benefit of similar marketing, yet has maintained a consistent playerbase throughout. It's newest update arrives this quarter, with livestreams and betas starting soon; I suspect you've heard about it.
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I'm not gonna teach you reading skills, Steam sales != Total sales.
Except when you or any of the other doomers want it to be, then Steam Sales are the be all of finite analytical proof.
Right but that still doesn't adress the fact that NMS numbers published by SteamSpy are only for Steam so NMS has sold between 1 to 2 million copies in Steam alone which coincides with ED sales on that plattform. I've not seen whole sales numbers though my bet is that they outnumber ED since NMS is more console centric while ED got their console ports after its release.
It helps if you read comments already in this thread:
Extra info on NMS' Steam sales figures are provided courtesy of ArsTechnica's csv file: 1.4m as of June 2018.
Not reading prior comments and making redundant statements results in you looking rather silly.
The catastrophic 95% drop in Steam playerbase that NMS has encountered during 2.2 months is clear.
Sorry if that upsets you.
I did read those but I'll adress them if you wish.
1º 1.3 million is still within the 1-2 million range.
2º I already adressed Stigbobs post, read the thread.
3º I'm not talking about active players but sold copies, I don't care about cosmetical sales.
You said it yourself pal though that's actually higher than the 1.3 million of ED you posted.
I'm redundant if the point I wish to convey just flies right past your ears.
Well, that drop ocurred since they simply had an enourmous spike, in other words, what goes up ends up going down but this is more of an opinion, they still have higher current player numbers as we speak.
Snark confirmed. In all seriousness, what upsets me is repeating myself if you are curious but well, playing chess with a pigeon can't be fun.
Ermm no, this is a very different metric & I wasn't the one commenting on numbers first, follow the rabbit hole & for the record, I don't think ED is doomed.
That's neither here nor there. It's wholly up to individual personal choice. And it's not what you said.
I disagree with you telling other people "get out if you don't like it". That ought to stop, and every time I see that pop up it's a sign that someone's run out of rational thought to argue with.
I actually agree here, because no patch or DLC is going to fix what's going on behind the scenes where decision-making and vision for the game is concerned.
'Course, if it turns out these patches and DLCs suddenly start containing things like removing NPC crew permadeath and XP splitting and combat balance and overhauling Engineers - then it'll be pretty easy to read between the lines there.
Except that 'bit of space magic' never needed to be defined. It most definitely did not need to be written in to the game lore, and most *certainly* did not need to even be included in the voice lines contained ingame. It's completely foolish.
And you're wholly missing the point of my mentioning "ship transfers", something I've publicly argued against many, many, many times on these forums. The game was never supposed to be Pokemon with spaceships. I feel it was a flat-out dumb move to even foot the suggestion on live air like Fdev did, and it still shocks me that the idea even made it past the suggestion table internally - that speaks to me quite loudly that whomever is making the game direction decisions, or whomever they are listening to when making these decisions, does NOT know what they are doing. They lack the vision, the clear sight of the purpose and direction, that this game so sorely needs.
Get used to seeing it. You see video games are an entirely optional entertainment thing. The whole point of them is having fun, when that stops or isn't a thing in the first place its time to move on.
Any other approach is either being willfully ignorant as to what a video game is, trolling or an overly emotional fib to create drama. Whichever way time to pop off or stop making silly claims.
Perfectly rational.
None of those things bother me at all. I like the base game DLC's and patches just improve it.
You pay someone to pilot your ship somewhere for you, the only lore explanation needed for that is that credits exist. There you go problem solved.
Polling the players means they knew exactly what they were doing and how it would be received with that particular decision. You might not like it, but you are clearly in the minority and can't do anything about it. So maybe adapt to the game as the majority like it.
Not getting this.... How can the LOW be higher than the average?
This. With how many games there are on the market, I don't understand why anyone would waste their time playing a game that they don't enjoy. That's why I always suspect that people arguing for feature changes (or for features not to change, or especially hearkening DOOM of Elite) are either Star Citizen fanboi trolls or account sellers, and read arguments through that lens (and a few others that I won't exhaustively list) as well as at face value.
Yep the take home fact is that NMS lacks any player retention longevity beyond less than a thousand players. Base game and now Next from the looks of it. You're probably spot on with PS4 I've never looked at it.
Another thing that's very relevant to current ED numbers but has to be approached as an assumption is lots of people always say they've stopped playing and are waiting prior to a big patch. We are currently waiting for the imminent biggie so that's definitely a thing right now people are openly saying so in the forum, there's also a lot of hype building for it in the forum. So a lull followed by huge uptick is to be expected.
I don't think there is no need for conspiracy theories. It is quite simple - people don't like being "wrong" about something. So if they don't like game, they don't take it as subjective evaluation, but almost like being "wrong side of history". If they don't like game, then game must be doomed, it must be disliked by everybody else.
This comes mostly from obviously new kids in town...it is twenties maximum approach to things. They still have lot to learn. Like, not wasting time on hating things they don't like.