what else are they making harder for new players? How many hours it is taking now?

[metatheurgist]

You know, the amusing thing is I've never had to farm HGEs, ever. I discovered long ago that they spawn in deep space (aka where you go to travel quickly and relatively safely in Supercruise), so as I run missions, or simply travel from point A to point B for other purposes, I'll keep my eyes open for them, and drop into any I find along my route.

Same goes with raw materials. Whenever I do a surface based mission, there's almost always a metallic meteorite cluster within wave sensor range. I just follow the signal in my SRV, having fun flyving in the process, and pick up several dozen materials from the cluster since I was in the area already.

Data isn't all that hard to come across as I play either. As I'm flying in Supercruise, I'll scan the ships ahead of me, primarily to see if they're a target of opportunity. Same if there's any leaving a station. There's also plenty of wakes I can scan as I fly out of mass lock range.

Yep, if you're just playing the game and keep your eyes open, heaps of mats just come to you. The game does not reward single minded obsession with one purpose. If you are grinding something because you want something Naow!, yes, you will get frustrated.

As for the topic, I wish I'd kept a screenshot of when Anacondas gave you 800 CR in a CZ kill. If they made anything harder, it's the ability to fail.

 

[Sighman]

Someone mentioned that to me in another thread. (I'm new, been playing about 6 weeks now.)

I was able to grind to Duke for the Empire in just over 7 hours. He had mentioned that when he did it back in the day it took him a couple of months.

I am finding the grind on the Federation to be a lot longer. I've been at it for three days now and I'm at Warrant Officer. I'm just not getting the stacked missions to the same base for the Federation grind that I did for the Empire.

Go to Sosong and check the 'bring these materials to repair the station' missions. Each requires 6-9 t of goods, so if you have a T9 or a Cutter you can sit there with a hold full and just keep taking and filling missions with the fed factions. If you have a carrier it's even more trivial.

I got an Alt account to Corvette in an afternoon when the repair station was in a distant nebula. A repair station in the bubble is trivial work.

 

[Marvin the Martian]

Go to Sosong and check the 'bring these materials to repair the station' missions. Each requires 6-9 t of goods, so if you have a T9 or a Cutter you can sit there with a hold full and just keep taking and filling missions with the fed factions. If you have a carrier it's even more trivial.

I got an Alt account to Corvette in an afternoon when the repair station was in a distant nebula. A repair station in the bubble is trivial work.

I tried that. At first, it was working out well. But then I started getting interdicted 5 to 8 times per trip out. I'm not kidding. I was interdicted 8 times in less than 40Ls this last time out and that was it for me. Finished that mission and left.

 

[aRJay]

I tried that. At first, it was working out well. But then I started getting interdicted 5 to 8 times per trip out. I'm not kidding. I was interdicted 8 times in less than 40Ls this last time out and that was it for me. Finished that mission and left.

Station repairs in Horizons, not sure about Odyssey, had a list of items required in the station/galnet news feed, the trick was to see what was wanted on that, fly your T9 or Cutter to the nearest source of Beryllium* (sorry all) about 900Ly away, fly back and then take the missions and fulfil them from what's in the hold. That way you only get random NPCs while in flight.

This was all before FCs of course.

Beryllium was always the item with the largest tonnage required which lessoned the chance of arriving with yet another full load and finding no one wanting to buy it. Many commanders were burnt out hauling the B word out to the Witch Head Nebula to repair the stations yet again.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Tell me how many users bought another copy straight from FD in the sale, and decided not to play via the added layer of Steam. You don't know. Now there's a thought. I've never had a problem running ED H: or O: in VR. Maybe Steam itself is a feature to the woes. Who knows? You? Again, Steam numbers mean squat.

Why do you think the Steam playerbase is significantly different to the Frontier base? What makes them so different that the Steamchart numbers can't be used to draw certain inferences?

Why do you think mice are used in medical research? It's not because they can explain qualitatively the effects of trial medications; it's because they're very good analogues for humans, in certain respects, so a great many sound inferences can be drawn from the experiments, provided you ask the right questions.

In a similar way, Steam player numbers are a good analogue for the rest of the community in certain respects, and absolute numbers of sales on each platform do not matter for the point I was making. A sample of 5000 can be used to draw inferences about millions of people if the sample is representative of the broader population and the questions you ask are appropriate . Using the Frontier launcher exclusively doesn't make you special; nor does having an Elite account on Steam.

As for your (strange and frankly irrelevant) comments about Odyssey, VR and Steam, I wouldn't care to venture an opinion as I've never bothered with Odyssey in VR. I could if I wanted to, but I'm comfortable with Odyssey on a panel. I could even, if I chose to, do a long investigation of VR Odyssey on both Steam and the Frontier launcher - I have several accounts spread over both platforms - but I have better things to do.

To close, I will ask you to reflect on why you are so profoundly uncurious that you don't even think to ask why someone might claim that certain valid inferences might be drawn from samples that you think so heterogeneous, and just reject the concept outright. Do have a think.

 

[varonica]

Why do you think the Steam playerbase is significantly different to the Frontier base? What makes them so different that the Steamchart numbers can't be used to draw certain inferences?

No, the question is, what makes you think they aren't. This is not a troll question. Polls, when done, need to account for bias in age, income and other important factors that would affect the answers. To determine whether Steam Charts are a valid base for inference we would need to compare the demographics of players who purchased through Steam with the demographics of players who purchase through Epic Store and direct through the FDEV store and determine what differences, if any, there were. Without that data the only information Steam Charts gives us is about Steam Players, and no others.

Steam Charts are an inherently unreliable source simply due to the fact that they are biased to players who purchased through Steam, and without accounting for that bias we can't use them to project across the entirety of the base. So while we can't say the are significantly different, we can't say they aren't.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

No, the question is, what makes you think they aren't. This is not a troll question. Polls, when done, need to account for bias in age, income and other important factors that would affect the answers. To determine whether Steam Charts are a valid base for inference we would need to compare the demographics of players who purchased through Steam with the demographics of players who purchase through Epic Store and direct through the FDEV store and determine what differences, if any, there were. Without that data the only information Steam Charts gives us is about Steam Players, and no others.

Steam Charts are an inherently unreliable source simply due to the fact that they are biased to players who purchased through Steam, and without accounting for that bias we can't use them to project across the entirety of the base. So while we can't say the are significantly different, we can't say they aren't.

Just my opinion...

The Steam playerbase will naturally be under-represented in those players who have been with ED since the very beginning - Kickstarter backers and the earliest adopters. Some of those may have switched to Steam accounts, but that's probably a very small proportion of them. Thus it will be slightly over-represented in more 'casual' ED players, who are those more likely to be stop/start in their playing time, or to abandon the game completely.

Given that those longest of long-term players are more likely to view ED positively than the casuals (they've been playing the game for nearly 10 years, so they clearly like it) I'd suggest that Steam trends more accurately indicate the overall 'quality' of the game (bugs, popularity of new features, overall 'state of the game') then they would if they included the hardcore players. Conversely, Steam is a much less reliable indicator of the long-term 'health' of the game (ie. it can't be used to indicate 'doooom') because it's missing a chunk of the playerbase who are active and most likely spending money on cosmetics.

As a side note, I'd posit that this forum is over-represented in exactly the subset of the playerbase that Steam is under-represented in - because this was originally the primary place to come for ED news and information. Gamers who play ED as an option, rather than their primary/sole game are much more likely to gravitate to Reddit - simply because they're used to using it for game information and probably already have an account. Why sign up for the forum if you can get the same information in the place you're already visiting.

Taken together, it somewhat explains why some people here can't understand why Steam shows 'bad' things when they and their friends (likely also long-term players) are having such a great time with ED.

Anyhow, I'm off to bed, so everyone feel free to chime in with your personal anecdotes about how everything I said makes no sense at all. I look forward to ignoring you all in the morning

 

[varonica]

Just my opinion...

The Steam playerbase will naturally be under-represented in those players who have been with ED since the very beginning - Kickstarter backers and the earliest adopters.

It's also likely that Epic accounts represent a large base of Alt accounts of existing users, due to the free offer, and a lot of short term players who were never going to be long term, with a small proportion of new players who have stayed with the game. Like it or not no single account type, Steam, FDEV or Epic will represent a generic player base sample suitable for projections to the rest of the player base.

 

[Marvin the Martian]

Station repairs in Horizons, not sure about Odyssey, had a list of items required in the station/galnet news feed, the trick was to see what was wanted on that, fly your T9 or Cutter to the nearest source of Beryllium* (sorry all) about 900Ly away, fly back and then take the missions and fulfil them from what's in the hold. That way you only get random NPCs while in flight.

Doesn't work that way in Odyssey. The materials change every mission. You typically get two or three for one material, then another material, then maybe two of the same material for a third, etc.

My first time out in the cutter, I bought up 100 of every material. Then the missions never used those materials again. It switched every time to something else.

I just went back home to Deciat and am running shipping missions there. I get interdicted about once every 8 or 9 missions which is easy to live with. It'll take a while, but I'll get there.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

No, the question is, what makes you think they aren't. This is not a troll question. Polls, when done, need to account for bias in age, income and other important factors that would affect the answers. To determine whether Steam Charts are a valid base for inference we would need to compare the demographics of players who purchased through Steam with the demographics of players who purchase through Epic Store and direct through the FDEV store and determine what differences, if any, there were. Without that data the only information Steam Charts gives us is about Steam Players, and no others.

Steam Charts are an inherently unreliable source simply due to the fact that they are biased to players who purchased through Steam, and without accounting for that bias we can't use them to project across the entirety of the base. So while we can't say the are significantly different, we can't say they aren't.

We're talking generally about a major distribution channel for entertainment products. I don't think there are significant differences between groups that shop for games at Steam or somewhere else (like Epic store or Gog) and that is mostly due to Steam's massive market penetration. I have no indication to believe that Steam's customers constitute major differences in composition than the average buyer of games overall. Steam had a long time to collect a heterogenuous mix of customers.
That is not true for customers buying directly at Frontier store or kickstart ppl. But why would I want to derive any statistics from average users and apply that to a very particular subset of customers (kickstarters and early adopters of a game)? Steam is much better to analyze for average user base and you get info about the majority of users there.
If you want to know how hardcore users behave Steam is not optimal but you need that for particular questions only

 

[Marvin the Martian]

Why do you think the Steam playerbase is significantly different to the Frontier base? What makes them so different that the Steamchart numbers can't be used to draw certain inferences?

Because Steam numbers are never anywhere near the number of people shown on the server in any game I've ever seen.

War Thunder: In Game - 97,000 / On Steam: 35,000
World of Tanks: In Game - 9,500 / On Steam: 3,800
Eve Online: In Game - 22,500 / On Steam: 3,100

The Steam numbers, at best, represent 33% of the player base of any given game. At worst, they're less than 15% of the player base.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Steam is fine for suggesting trends, at least for any game that is launched on multiple platforms... Which incidentally, averaged out, shows a pretty stable trend, although, no doubt, average players might have been thought to rise with the addition of Odyssey, but, since steam doesn't give stats for which launcher is used, we don't know if that 'steady' number is actually representative of the actual EDH / EDO players.

Easy for me to say, of course, all bar 1 account launch on the Frontier launcher, the other is Epic...

 

[varonica]

Doesn't work that way in Odyssey. The materials change every mission. You typically get two or three for one material, then another material, then maybe two of the same material for a third, etc.

Which is why I did landmines in an outbreak system, there are certain things in demand that change depending on system state, and in an outbreak landmines are always in demand. Of course they are usually illegal, so having full rep with all factions in the system means you don't get scanned and pinged for smuggling illegal goods!

 

[Marvin the Martian]

having full rep with all factions in the system means you don't get scanned and pinged for smuggling illegal goods!

Good to know!

 

[the100thmonkey]

Because Steam numbers are never anywhere near the number of people shown on the server in any game I've ever seen.

War Thunder: In Game - 97,000 / On Steam: 35,000
World of Tanks: In Game - 9,500 / On Steam: 3,800
Eve Online: In Game - 22,500 / On Steam: 3,100

The Steam numbers, at best, represent 33% of the player base of any given game. At worst, they're less than 15% of the player base.

But with those numbers you're still looking at a significant enough portion of the broader population to draw some inferences. Concerns about inferential validity primarily arise when you're talking about small sample sizes; the probability of flipping a coin and getting tails four times out of five is orders of magnitude higher than the probability of getting tails 400 times out of 500 flips. With regard to the series, I actually took the largest sample over time available - from Steam release until present day - as this smooths out big peaks and troughs such as we saw with 2.0 and 3.0.

You know you can draw inferences about millions of people from a sample of less than a thousand, right? None of us are that special, unfortunately, from a quantitative perspective. Qualitatively, yes, we are all beautiful and unique, just like snowflakes, but here we're talking large numbers and what we can know about them.

Moreover, Steam's market share is huge - so large, in fact, that there are pending antitrust cases against Valve in both the US and EU. FD wouldn't give Valve 30% of the money from their sales if it weren't worth their while. This implies that Steam players of the game are drawn from a wide population of gamers, wide enough to put the burden of reasoning and evidence, in my opinion, on those who claim that FD launcher users or Epic customers are somehow sufficiently different to render invalid the inference that Steam player numbers are broadly stable and that no, the game is not dying because D2EA said so. For instance, I have all three ways to access the game. Indeed, I'd suggest that Steam is probably the primary platform for Elite: Dangerous simply based on market reach.

Additionally, I was very careful to only claim that certain inferences are possible. In my post, I showed the largest possible sample over time from Steamcharts and noted that the concurrent player numbers haven't really changed since the game was released on that platform in 2016. If the game were really dying (an absolute claim), then it would be reflected in the number of concurrent players in Steam, but the numbers don't support that assertion.

 

[Daniel Cloudsifter]

Getting meta alloy is certainly harder now than ever before
Robigo was nerfed, demand across systems nerfed trade and mining because selling is stupid hard now.
The prices you can sell at are nerfed.
You can't even share more than one mission with a friend now.
What else am I missing?
How many hours is it now to unlock the engineers?
How many hours now to be able to Thargoid hunt?
Any other reasons why the population is dying?

edit: one guy posted the game is getting easier....for obvious reasons, he didn't have examples
Even Down To Earth Astromy guy said the game is dying...
Half the youtubers left..

If someone says the game was easier before Horizons, I totally agree.

Normally I ignore posts like these, but this one is so laughably wrong, I can help but reply and take it apart.

1. Meta-alloys are harder to get now: Are they? They used to be harvest-able in the Pleiades and then sites were added in Coal Sack nebula and a couple of other places. Can you not still buy them, in small batches, at Darnielle's Progress (and you only need one to unlock the Engineer that asks for them)?
2. Robigo was nerfed: Really? If so, I'm surprised I haven't heard any of the streamers complain about that. They still recommend it.
3. Prices nerfed: Ok, what are you even talking about now? What prices?
4. You can't even share more than one mission with a friend now: Uh, it's always been that way. You can have more than one shareable mission in your list, but you can only share one at a time. At least, that's how I remember working. Heck, they've even made ALL ground missions shareable from the get-go, versus only "Wing" missions are shareable in ship.
5. What else am I missing? How many hours is it now to unlock the engineers?: Plenty and it varies. It doesn't take any LONGER to unlock the engineers than it did before. If you are referring to the ground engineers being more of a grind than the ship based ones, that does seem to be true.
6. How many hours now to be able to Thargoid hunt? Uh, what does it matter OR it varies, take your pick. It's gotten easier to gear up and fight Thargoids with every passing year.
7. Any other reasons why the population is dying? Is it? Prove it. And I don't want "Steam statistics" I want the hard data from Frontier, who surely has the statistics for ALL active players.
8. Half the youtubers left: They didn't have anything new to cover and they get more ratings off DOOM. Seriously, whatever...

And my favorites: "edit: one guy posted the game is getting easier....for obvious reasons, he didn't have examples" and "If someone says the game was easier before Horizons, I totally agree." to which I say:

How long have you been playing? Seriously? I started in December 2015, right after Horizons launched. I came into a much nicer forum back then with a lot of people having good discussions and willing to help. The consensus was the game had already gotten much easier over the year since launch due to reduced repair costs. At Horizons launch, mission payouts were really low by the standards today. It was AMAZING when you would run across a transport job paying around 1 million credits. Most of the time it was around 300k. Courier jobs typically paid 10k and I never saw one for more than 30k. Bounty hunting missions were so low paying - plus the Signal Source system was more random and buggy back then - that it made more sense to farm combat ships in resource sites than do missions.

The real way to make money was in trading commodities and most used tools like eddb.io to find the most lucrative routes. You had to act quickly because others were doing the same thing and the routes got less and less profitable as other players satisfied the demand. I played a lot and it took me until April of 2016 to get my Anaconda (for trading). I ground up the rank and bought a Corvette and cutter 3-4 months after that. And people back then were complaining the game was too easy and you were getting to the end game ships to quickly.

Fast forward to even just 2-3 years ago, and there were numerous guides of how to go from a sidewinder to an Ananconda in less than a day. And you think the game got harder for new players? Seriously?

Every year, barring Odyssey (which I like, but I get others disappointment), they've improved the core game mechanics: eliminating bugs; increasing standard earnings for exploration, bounty hunting, and missions in general; and adding features. Heck, engineering used to be an RNG game where you could never be sure what you were going to get and had to roll over and over hoping for a good result instead of the steady progression now.

If you aren't happy with that progress, that is your right. If you don't like the game, that is your right. If you think the game is dying, you are entitled to that opinion.

But if you are arguing that this game has gotten harder for new players, rather than staying the same or easier with each passing year, you are dead wrong.

I have over 5000 hours logged playing this game since I started in 2015... and that's just my main account. How long have you been playing?

Thanks for the laughs OP, it was great...

 

[Marvin the Martian]

But with those numbers you're still looking at a significant enough portion of the broader population to draw some inferences.

No, you're not.

Why do you think political polls are almost always wrong? Because very small samples cannot reliably predict the results of a much larger majority.

 

[the100thmonkey]

3800 out of 9500 is not a small sample size.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Getting meta alloy is certainly harder now than ever before
Robigo was nerfed, demand across systems nerfed trade and mining because selling is stupid hard now.
The prices you can sell at are nerfed.
You can't even share more than one mission with a friend now.
What else am I missing?
How many hours is it now to unlock the engineers?
How many hours now to be able to Thargoid hunt?
Any other reasons why the population is dying?

edit: one guy posted the game is getting easier....for obvious reasons, he didn't have examples
Even Down To Earth Astromy guy said the game is dying...
Half the youtubers left..

If someone says the game was easier before Horizons, I totally agree.
Your ship was effective when you bought it, and you didn't have to grind hundreds of hours for engineering.
There wasn't a huge vacuum sucking up items required for engineering like meta alloy now.
I am not recommending to make the game like another time when the player count was low.

I also want to again clarify that this isn't really holding me back or the cause of my personal concern or frustration.
The real cause of my core frustration, I bought the game for 6 people, and only one of them plays because of how bad the game is for new players and playing together...

sharing one mission only with friends?
Basic coop games are better for coop than Elite right now. Worse, because you can only share the one mission, people share like a 50 million mission where the friend does almost nothing, and just gets money. No value in gameplay is added.
In other cases, sure you group up and massacre some pirates. But the difference between your ship and the new player ship, they are useless and feel useless in the fight.
They aren't going to stay in the game.

A couple people are saying that at some point when there were few players, it paid only 40k to kill a pirate.
afaik, sometimes when I kill a pirate today, it only pays 40k. I don't understand that point.

lol harder? you hae got to be having a laugh are you not?

sure there are more areas you can upgrade now because there is more content and i get it can be overwhelming to learn at 1st... but every individual feature in the game which involves what some consider grind is easier.... and not just a little easier, its an order of magnitude.

and as for the "for obvious reasons the guy who said it is easier now didnt have examples"....... what obvious reason is that?

you are not only wrong but you are hugely wrong, examples

for materials we find in space, we get 3 instead of 1 - we used to get 1
engineering upgrades are a guaranteed progression. before it was random chance, same with the effects, we can choose them now, before it was chance,
repair costs, maintanence costs and fuel costs are massively cut.
some ship costs have been reduced - ie vulture and FDL, add to that systems which sell for 20% off.
exploration payments are up by..... what?.... 10 fold?
mission payments and pirate kill payments are up by 10fold - more if you get allied in a system.
on ship destruction your crew is returned to you - they used to die.
black markets now show on the map, historically we had to find them ourselves before we could see them (a much better and more believable system imo)

if you are going to intimate people are lying and unable to back up their argument, you should really do even a little research

(btw there was a competion a race to elite in each of the 3 core tiers as well as 1st to triple elite...... each of these took over a month to get to,, now adays it can be done in days if that does not prove credit earning is trivial now.

same with ships, it took me 20hrs to fully A rate my sidey and move to my 2nd ship (an eagle) back in the day (admittedly i had strict rules to eeek it out as that is the best part of the game imo)

I do fully concede there are a lot of areas of the game which are, I would say MVP and ..... that do not function is a good way, and if you check my post history sadly i have not been a white knight for some time.... but one of my issues with the game is that some areas HAVE been made trivially easy and i think spoils the game.

(other areas are inexplicably convoluted, such as how i go about getting a few tonnes of Iron or Sulphur for instance) but for me it isnt that they are hard, more that they are nonsensical.

 

[He$$eeTant]

When I first played Commander Jamesons Crash site was only found using GPS coordinates - which was quite tricky to do. Now it’s just a selectable POI on my nav panel. I seem to remember Davs Hope was similar but I am not 100% sure.