I agree with the OP on this one. My most longstanding frustration with ED is how sloooooooow Frontier acts to address obvious and acknowledged bugs. I could understand such a crawling pace when it comes to "edge case" bugs, but not when it comes to bugs that are front and center on the mission board. The last three days of gameplay have been particularly frustrating to me because of this reason. Cases in point:
I recently took an assassination mission which went off without a hitch. However, the assassination mission triggered one of those "chained missions" - yup, this is where the problem occurred. As lots of other people have griped about in the past, my follow-on target never triggered when I scanned the NAV beacon. No matter what I did - log out, leave the system and return, cruise around the system for a while, etc. - could get the target to appear, so I was forced to abandon it. Annoying. The next day I took another assassination mission. This one also went off without a hitch, but then also triggered a chain mission. And like the previous chain, nothing happened when I scanned the NAV beacon. After flying around a bit, I just abandoned the mission in annoyance. However, here something interesting happened: my target spawned behind me and interdicted me. But because I had already abandoned the mission, thereby removing the point of its existence, all it did was fly around aimlessly and just sat and spun when I attacked it. Again, annoying. Here, we have a good idea - chained missions - being ruined by a combination of a longstanding bug (e.g., failure to spawn a target) and poor implementation (i.e., the idea of having your target ambush you is a good one, but apparently nobody at Frontier thought it was worthwhile to inform the player of this switcheroo. Why not just inform the player via an inbox message that triggers when the NAV is scanned that the target cannot be located and we should be on our guard as we patrol the system?).
Okay, two frustrating experiences but I wasn't going to allow that to damper my gameplay! So I persisted on with a massacre mission....Yeah, yeah! I know. Bad move based on all the complaints I have seen here. [big grin] I had already experienced the clearly broken pirate massacre mission whereby legitimate targets are not counted towards mission goals - how many
months has this been going on now? - but I found a small (4 targets) non-pirate massacre mission, so I figured how bad could this be? Bad. [big grin] My first attempt to get kills resulted in me finding zero targets in the local NAV, no matter how many times I dropped in there, and never once finding a target in a USS. As the system lacked any REZ sites, I was thereby forced to endlessly lap the system looking for targets in SC. The same thing happened every time: two targets would spawn simultaneously, and I would have to rush to get into position and interdict them before they left SC to dock at a station (i.e., despawn). I managed this twice over a few hours before I gave up in frustration. Sure, my lack of interdiction skills are part of the problem, but the bigger problem is that these massacre mission templates are just poorly implemented, as plenty of others have pointed out. They are designed to frustrate. Why not have at least one target spawn every time the player drops into a NAV? And why not have a mission target USS pop up as they do in other missions instead of forcing the player to drop into random USS instances? And while having targets cruise around the system is a good idea, why have two spawn simultaneously and then despawn until the player leaves SC and later returns (at least that is the way it seemed to work for me. The SC targets never spawned again until I dropped out of SC and then reentered SC). Just spawn one at a time, and when the first despawns, trigger another spawning.
In both cases - the chained missions and the massacre mission templates - clear bugs and poorly implemented templates have been plaguing the game for
months now, with the community being very vocal about how unsatisfactory this state of affairs is. And these aren't "edge case" missions, but routine activities found on or triggered by the mission board. Yet here we are, suffering with this stuff for months and months. That is bad on its own, but what makes it even worse is that 2018's "Beyond" was supposed to be all about addressing this "QoL" stuff as a priority over new content. While the first content drop was a good one, the second addressed little QoL stuff (if any), and I am not optimistic about next week's drop.
It is
very frustrating.
Coincidentally, I had a similar experience to the OP, but in my case it was with
Eve Online. My frustration with ED actually drove me to awaken my relatively new Alpha clone over there as a means of escape from the teeth grinding caused by Elite. Sure, Eve has its own problems, but the first thing I noticed about the game upon my return was how polished everything is. My heart actually leaped for joy when I saw CCP's monthly patching schedule. [big grin] I am sure that game suffers from its own plethora of bugs - Eve's own forum has its fair share of grumblers - but from my end everything seemed to work the way it was supposed to work. Nothing made me feel like I was wrestling with unaddressed bugs or poorly implemented gameplay templates that felt like stale leftovers from the beta testing days.
Don't misunderstand: this is not a "pox on your house!" rant against Frontier, nor a "Space Game X is so much better!" diatribe. I will remain a loyal player for some time as ED is my favorite space game of all time. HOWEVER, I have to be honest: Elite 2018 is starting to remind me of Elite 2015 when the game seemed to be held together by duct tape and fervent prayers. 2018 was supposed to make the game more polished, but instead it feels shabbier than it has in some time. Yes, I do appreciate the new content and ships, but none of that can make up for gameplay content that remains poorly developed or just outright bugged in a very noticeable way. I don't think any of the problems I encountered above would require a huge investment of time to fix, but yet they persist month after month after month; quarterly release after quarterly release after quarterly release....
So, no, you can't have my stuff. I am not going anywhere. For the long term. But I do suddenly find myself needing to take a break from Elite for a few days because those bugged/poorly implemented missions left a bad taste in my mouth, and Eve Online seems so shiny and professional by comparison (Oops! Did I say that out loud?
). But Frontier does need to start getting on the ball in the patching department because even a devoted fan like me is starting to feel put-off by Frontier's disinterested attitude towards improving the base game. Honestly, I was prepared to spend some money on the store in Elite, but I really think I might redirect some of that money to make my Alpha clone into an Omega. Frankly, this would never have happened if Elite felt as polished as Eve.
