Newcomer / Intro What are you up to?

[The Own of Noon]

I just camp out a couple of jumps outside the mess lately and make little incursions and forays to see what's going on. I just see what trouble I can get into and what they do, and buzz them and shoot them and call them george. Before I change my ride any more, getting used to being in their midst and getting out

You see, I too like to live... dangerously...

View attachment 336493

Dangerous.. but frilly

*Unless on-foot 'goid missions and CZs become a reality.

That's what I figured was coming, and got my dominator suit upgraded and was right anxious to plug some bugs.

even if that's the case, then they've not done a great job of going about presenting it.

These experimental guns we have now were developed during the prior war, I guess.

And I think there is or was a community goal getting things to a pair of engineers that might be leading that way.

Science, save us!

 

[nemolomen]

These experimental guns we have now were developed during the prior war, I guess.

And I think there is or was a community goal getting things to a pair of engineers that might be leading that way.

Science, save us!

Yes, I think they're first gen Human AX weapons.

The CG says its an Aegis design for improvement of the tech... 2nd Gen???

Aegis got disbanded and can't do the work...or even run the project...but the design was available apparently...

 

[CMDR Timber McWolf]

Thought this was a cool screenshot.

1000%.

 

[CMDRQuainMarln]

Logged in to find my Chieftain docked at one of the rescue ships. The Levi-Strauss outpost in Imeut where I was docked last night fell under attack during the 'tick', so I guess the game moved me to the rescue ship. Amepere Dock I was doing my best to defend all week is burning and under full evacuation. Plenty of Federation Rep opportunity there now for Python pilots with cargo and passenger cabin capacity evacuating the wounded and refugees.

I noticed Operation Ida have stopped trying to coordinate a response as their focused efforts in the HIP system only advanced the defence bar half way and last nights tick reset it again. Meaning, we didn't do enough to defend it. Just like Imeut Ampere Dock. It looks like the player community does not have the capacity to repel the invasion before the last Stargoids arrive. FDev will have some number tweaking to do I think. Perhaps the new AX multi-cannons in the hands of NPCs and players will give them a reason to tweak the numbers.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

It looks like the player community does not have the capacity to repel the invasion before the last Stargoids arrive. FDev will have some number tweaking to do I think.

And rightly so. At this point of the story, humanity is unprepared and should not be able to gain back anything. Of course Frontier will rebalance the numbers, but not in such a way that we will be able to do anything significantly anytime soonish. This is the chance to really RP this game instead of just surfing the systems for maximum efficiency, as the player base tends to do.

 

[Nekozji]

FDev will have some number tweaking to do I think.

Frankly FDev should make it so that progress does not reset on the weekly tick, but make the thargoids more aggressive about taking new systems. Having a constant "win some, lose some" would be more interesting than "you tried and failed".

 

[CMDRQuainMarln]

And rightly so. At this point of the story, humanity is unprepared and should not be able to gain back anything. Of course Frontier will rebalance the numbers, but not in such a way that we will be able to do anything significantly anytime soonish. This is the chance to really RP this game instead of just surfing the systems for maximum efficiency, as the player base tends to do.

I whole heartedly agree. I write fiction as a hobby and have studied and practiced how stories are structured, especially for movie screen plays. I self-published a fantasy fiction novel using these techniques a few years ago. If FDev are trying to do more than just give the player base a new 'grind the numbers' experience, we will see many systems fall and be on the back foot for some time. If FDev are pitching this right, it will take a new approach and the player base doing something they have never done before to somehow win the day or figure out a new way to get by in the galaxy without the original bubble.
I'm all for it. After 15 months of engaging in player faction BGS play, I sadly conclude it is stale and boring. Player factions have made peace with each other to maintain their territories. No conflict. No conflict, no story, as they say. Or in this case, no conflict, no game play opportunity.
I've been crying out in my head for a while for something to happen in the game to give me something to do with the ships I've enjoyed crafting. Or even give me reasons to craft a new ship. I'm not bothered about on foot gameplay so much, but I do a little of it sometimes.
The only downside is, going out on an exploration trip feels like an indulgence I cannot afford to take, from a role play perspective. Maybe if exobiology data collection was science that could contribute to finding a way to defeat Thargoids it would make more sense to do it. The mess that Exobiology pay outs is right now means the business of rank in this discipline is now broken and valueless as an objective to pursue for me.

 

[nemolomen]

Last night I unlocked Marco Qwent...finally...after a couple of hours trying...I had to search the forums for how to do it because the in game information was less than accurate/complete...

 

[nemolomen]

Oh wait, now I have to find modular terminals...

 

[nemolomen]

Oh and more Maelstroms have arrived...

 

[Ashnak]

Oh wait, now I have to find modular terminals...

They can usually be found (in high quantities) as mission rewards in the general area around Sirius.
If you have little time and too many crediits, there are also some FCs who sell them.

 

[]M[]

The only downside is, going out on an exploration trip feels like an indulgence I cannot afford to take, from a role play perspective. Maybe if exobiology data collection was science that could contribute to finding a way to defeat Thargoids it would make more sense to do it. The mess that Exobiology pay outs is right now means the business of rank in this discipline is now broken and valueless as an objective to pursue for me.

Exobiology used to feel like a hobby one supported with substantial credit input and minimal financial (though considerable experiential, if it appeals to you) reward - and so a rather enjoyable indulgence with respect to core game career. Buffing the rewards so generously has turned it into the icing on the cake for explorers - a good idea imo, making Exo much more relevant to the game in general and putting in-game (motivational) value to content (the biologicals) that has taken quite a bit of careful work, with great result. The rank requirements have thus been increased with the patch and it will be interesting to see by how much - at present I can still just find the U14 list before yesterday's patch, but I suspect it won't be possible to just add a leisurely star a day now :]

 

[Marvin the Martian]

Well, it's nail in the coffin time, folks.

FDEV has just posted that ALL progress we've made this week in repelling the Thargoids will be reset to zero at the tick tomorrow. None of it carries over to the next week, it's like it never even happened.

The Thargoid War: System States Clarifications

Greetings Commanders, We wanted to take this opportunity to clarify some details about system states within the Thargoid War: The UI provides time in weeks: this is how long the system will remain in a given state. If the state isn't pushed back it will progress (Alert to Invasion or...

forums.frontier.co.uk

People are not taking it well, and I don't blame them. People are going to just quit trying, and even if FDEV changes the way it works later, they won't be back.

I'm amazed at this design choice.

And I was in the middle of trying an Anaconda build.

I'm half way through it, so I'll go ahead and fly around to finish it to test it, but yeah. That's just horrific design. I had thought that the progress would be carried over and there would be back and forth in each system - more input from us, the progress advances. Less, the Thargoids slowly take over the system and it becomes harder and then eventually impossible to defend.

This is just...wow. Not good at all.

 

[nemolomen]

Personally I think everyone is taking the wrong message from all of this...but that's just me.

Its time for a reevaluation of tactics and strategies and preparation for the future rather than just wholesale giving up (which may not be the case but it sure looks that way).

I'm much MUCH more disheartened by the response from the community than I am by the news from FDev...

Hmmm, it might be time for me to take an extended forum vacation...

 

[Cmdr Sharky]

All those thargoids killed -- didn't matter. We resurrected them. Try again and kill faster this time.

To be fair, they also resurrected all the CMDRs that the Tthargoids killed, and much sooner.

 

[Nekozji]

Its time for a reevaluation of tactics and strategies and preparation for the future rather than just wholesale giving up (which may not be the case but it sure looks that way).

I'm much MUCH more disheartened by the response from the community than I am by the news from FDev...

The problem is, the game design is demotivating. Your progress is reset every week unless you make the bar. Logically we should focus on one system; which we largely did. AXI published the same system for the entire week and it got vast focus, but didn't make the threshold. Instead of us now being in a stronger position to keep the pressure on, we're now reset back to baseline. Since we didn't flip a single system, the net effect is identical to nobody having participated.

Which is terrible gameplay.

Unless they're going to literally have the game say "this is the only system anyone can assist" then there's no practical way of getting more focus on a single target. I can see why the big groups are giving up already, and it's because the mechanic is dumb.

It needs to NOT reset progress and allow players to free systems over a span of several weeks. Pair with making the thargoids more grabby about getting new systems, and we get an interesting round robin where we retake one system but lose another. We'd also have potential for affected factions to take say 10-20 players and work on one of their own invaded systems and actually free it given enough time.

This may still result in a slow loss of territory, but there would be much more player agency about how it happens, and nobody would ever be left feeling like their many hours the previous week were totally wasted.

Hopefully FDev will change the system into working in a way that doesn't waste our time. They really need to, else they're going to go from one of the biggest influxes of returning players to one of the biggest exoduses, all within a month.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

[Sorry, longish rant and probably too much white knighting coming in. Feel free to ignore me.]

I've had a thought. Maybe the game masters are just as fed up as I am with the fact that the players, and especially the "big" organized player groups, practically steam roll over everything they implement as new or mysterious into the game. One example would be how long it takes for any mysteries or puzzles to be solved or brute forced by Canonn practically instantly. Go comb a 30 ly sphere for a lost ship? Canonn does it in 30 minutes. Most mysteries are solved before a majority of the non-organized players even had a chance to log in after the work day.

Or look at some CGs, especially the last one. Granted, the last CG had a really low bar to make sure it suceeded... but come on. Less than two days for a CG that offered nothing in terms of bribery?

Or some AX-CGs: Large groups of players strategically hoarding bonds and dropping them for near instant tier 1 wins... all of this, I say it again, steamrolling is ridiculous and often very annoying. So part of me thinks: "Yeah, well done" in terms of slowing them down.

I've said it before, large parts of the player base, and much more so the organized ones, are too fixated on the "manipulate the systems to their advantage" and the winning side. I would imagine alot of the AX pilots do AX combat because they enjoy it? They earn copious amounts of money with it, they get to pop flowers, and they spend their game time doing what they enjoy (I would think). How is that "betrayed" and "in vain" just because they don't get to win a game mechanic? All this "neh, we retreat and go on strike until we get a guarantee to be able to win" attitude is annoying to me. For a motivated AX pilot, this war must be like a ball pool for a toddler - pure heaven. And no more long journeys out to the Pleiades or Coal Sack, too!

If you RP the war just a little you can still enjoy popping Thargoids, make a crapload of credits and get to enjoy being on the losing side of a seemingly impossible alien invasion war. How boring would Battlestar Galactica have been if there hadn't been 11 of them destroyed in the pilot episodes.

Personally, I am not capable of killing Interceptors. But I very much enjoy the rescue missions with the elevated threat of Thargoid interdictions and all. And I am stocking up my G5 mats pretty well, too. I am not going to stop doing that just because an overarching game mechanic doesn't move a bar to my liking. I enjoy the rescue missions, so I keep doing them until I don't anymore. No BGS mechanic can stop me from doing that.

I say: Chill out a little and enjoy not being allmighty for a while.

There you have it.

 

[Marvin the Martian]

I'm much MUCH more disheartened by the response from the community than I am by the news from FDev...

As much as people were already complaining about the lack of any real direction of the whole Thargoid thing, one would think that FDev would have known the response they would get when they simply reset everything you did each week.

That, by definition, is a grind...something that up to this point didn't really exist in this game. And let me define that:

This whole Thargoid war is something that we, in reality, have no choice in. It's here. And it's going to destroy all of the systems most of us have spent our entire gaming experience in.

So to take that and essentially make us fight in it and then simply dry erase the progress (or lack thereof) each week is a grind beyond any common sense. Why bother? You're literally pushing the bolder up the hill only to show up the next morning to find it right back at the bottom again.

What's more, with a system like that, there's no real way to form a strategy of any kind to fight it because there is literally zero progress or loss anywhere. It's either still there or it's gone. Full stop.

So one doesn't know if they should stay in the system they're in fighting or move on to another one that's in more danger. That is the very premise of war, something FDev obviously gave absolutely ZERO thought to at all.

To be fair, I am with you in that we should give it a few weeks to see how FDev respond to all the criticism. Maybe they change the way it works, or bring in new metrics of some kind. Who knows?

But one thing is certain: NOBODY is going to give it more than a couple to few weeks when every game session they have for a week is literally wiped out as if it never happened every Thursday morning.

Ultimately, it will result in one of two things:

• Everybody with a fleet carrier getting the hell out of dodge and just doing exploration and exobiology.
• Everybody simply uninstalling the game and moving on.

Full disclosure - I'm in the first camp. But I really did want to get back in to the on foot missions, which is now nigh on impossible since every system I've played in is now under Thargoid threat, so it's bound to not last very long at all.

 

[Codger]

Why bother? You're literally pushing the bolder up the hill only to show up the next morning to find it right back at the bottom again.

This is it. The war is clearly rigged and will play out in the way FD wants it to play out, regardless of our participation.

A huge amount of players turned out last week, it was wild and exciting. Chat was full of noise. We pushed hard and got a single system to the 40% line.

All that has been erased and progress has gone back to zero.

This is the same result as if we hadn't done anything at all. Our effort makes no difference. We can sit on our hands and it's the same as fighting tooth and nail.

There is no player agency involved. It's just FD pulling the strings behind the scenes so we can have a make-believe war that goes exactly as FD wants it to go.

I'm amazed that they've done it this way, but there it is.

I'm just going to goof around doing whatever seems fun to me and try to ignore the 'war' that isn't one.

 

[CMDRQuainMarln]

Oh wait, now I have to find modular terminals...

If I ever find Modular Terminal mission rewards, I grab them and put them up for sale on my fleet carrier for 25K credits each. They always sell fast, usually in less than 24 hours. I don't have any right now, and it seems other carrier owners and busy and also not collecting the Modular Terminals right now. I'm afraid you're going to have to run missions in high tech systems for a while to find them as mission rewards. Passenger missions and regular missions have them.