Why does it take so long to fix game issues?

I checked yesterday as part of another thread & I've done over 5,000 hours now, very little of that was a chore (only mining to unlock engineers come to mind as a dull activity I've felt I needed to do). I've never participated in any alien pew pew stuff, and don't habitually use external tools or how-to guides though.

What exactly did you do for those 5000 hours? I have 2500 hours into the game so far and 90% of it was a mindless, repetitive grind. Fortunately I run everything on my computer in windowed mode so I can alt-tab and actually do something else for some of that grind, but it's still a grind and has almost no meaningful gameplay content attached to it.
 
Sorry, but who actually enjoys mindless grind? "If you don't enjoy mindless grind, then maybe Elite isn't the game for you?" isn't an answer to the game having grind.

That is about as useful as asking your server why they haven't brought your meal after several hours, and having someone at another table tell you "If you don't enjoy waiting 3 hours for your meal, then perhaps eating at this restaurant isn't for you?"

You don't like ED. You, however, are not welcome to trash me or other people who enjoy ED. Call it whatever you want, or try to find associations to deride me or others, but that's really pointless. In the end you don't like ED, and you are here, and we do.
 
Sorry, but who actually enjoys mindless grind? "If you don't enjoy mindless grind, then maybe Elite isn't the game for you?" isn't an answer to the game having grind.

That is about as useful as asking your server why they haven't brought your meal after several hours, and having someone at another table tell you "If you don't enjoy waiting 3 hours for your meal, then perhaps eating at this restaurant isn't for you?"

This is assuming what you consider as grind it what everyone else thinks of grind. For example, some players love mining, I couldn't think of anything worse to do in the game it would bore me to tears - so I don't do it. Some players think it is great gameplay to fly around starter systems and CG, attacking the weak and defenceless, I don't. Some people thrive on Engineering, they might not like it, but dammit, no one is going to have a ship with better numbers than them, so they put up with the grind to achieve their goal (and yes, whine about it straight afterwards on here, but that's beside the point).

Just because you think aspects of the game are an unplayable grind, doesn't necessarily mean everyone else holds that same opinion. And before you jump down my throat, yes there is grind in the game, but I try not to let it effect me as I don't do those tasks that are in my opinion, a grindfest.
 
Sorry, but who actually enjoys mindless grind? "If you don't enjoy mindless grind, then maybe Elite isn't the game for you?" isn't an answer to the game having grind.

That is about as useful as asking your server why they haven't brought your meal after several hours, and having someone at another table tell you "If you don't enjoy waiting 3 hours for your meal, then perhaps eating at this restaurant isn't for you?"

Well I suppose different players want different things out of their free time, and sometimes (quite often) what I want is a bit of peace & quiet with a big target to achieve. Last week I drove across Belgium on the E40 for hour after hour, in an old sportscar with no cruise control, uncomfortable bucket seats and for a significant portion of the trip, the roof down. I could have gone in my SUV & it would have been easy & very, very dull. But because I could (I went alone) I took the sportscar.

The E40 is a dull, straight road, but it was still a memorable event because of the method I chose to tackle it. I appreciate most would have taken the SUV ;)

If anyone's interested it's a 2003 1.8 MX-5, my other choice would have been a BMW X-5. Both do similar mpg.
 
You don't like ED.

How exactly did you arrive at the conclusion that I "don't like ED" after playing over 2500 hours? I obviously enjoyed the core gameplay when it launched, that does not mean that I am happy with what Elite has become after over 3.5 years of neglected "development" and the numerous terrible game design decisions that have been made since then.

You, however, are not welcome to trash me or other people who enjoy ED.

How exactly was I "trashing" anyone? Why would you try to insist on viewing any criticism of the game as if it were directed at you personally in some way? That's an utterly nonsensical claim to make.

Call it whatever you want, or try to find associations to deride me or others, but that's really pointless.

I'm not "deriding" anyone. You are not the game, you have no reason to be "offended" because simply because someone criticizes Elite.

In the end you don't like ED,

How exactly did you arrive at the conclusion that I "don't like ED" again?

and you are here, and we do.

You are here, demonstrating why I have to add users to my ignore list.
 
This is assuming what you consider as grind it what everyone else thinks of grind. For example, some players love mining, I couldn't think of anything worse to do in the game it would bore me to tears - so I don't do it. Some players think it is great gameplay to fly around starter systems and CG, attacking the weak and defenceless, I don't. Some people thrive on Engineering, they might not like it, but dammit, no one is going to have a ship with better numbers than them, so they put up with the grind to achieve their goal (and yes, whine about it straight afterwards on here, but that's beside the point).

Just because you think aspects of the game are an unplayable grind, doesn't necessarily mean everyone else holds that same opinion. And before you jump down my throat, yes there is grind in the game, but I try not to let it effect me as I don't do those tasks that are in my opinion, a grindfest.

The issue here is that there are many activities required for game progression which have no gameplay value after the first few hours. There is no challenge or interest involved beyond that point, you are simply doing the same activity over and over for some sort of progression that is time-gated to require dozens or even hundreds of hours.

Carrying data between stations over and over again just to grind your Naval rank or local rep is mindless and has no gameplay value. You aren't even minimally engaged in the process like you are with trading where you follow buy/sell prices, cargo capacity and jump ranges and are trying to optimize your route. Doing those courier data missions over and over again has no actual gameplay value and is simply designed to grind activities over and over for rank/rep progression.

Driving the SRV on planets looking for very rare mats has no actual gameplay value after the first few hours, especially given that the wave scanner isn't particularly reliable (due to various bugs) and the SRV's engine sound drowns out the wave scanner which is an absurd situation since the vehicle uses an electric engine on an airless planet. Spending an hour driving on a planet to find maybe one or two metallic meteorites isn't gameplay content and simply involves driving around long enough to trigger the RNG spawns.

Even the recent Guardian ruin sites are still based on boring grindy gameplay. They have maybe 2 hours of actual gameplay content but require 12 hours to unlock all of the Guardian weapons and modules. There is nothing "enjoyable" about killing hundreds of Sentinels for mats or scanning hundreds of obelisks to get Epison data that has maybe 1 in 100 drop rate. It is just grind.

If you don't do those activities you are not getting any of the rank-locked ships, Engineering mats or Guardian mats that you need to obtain those items. You quite simply can't progress in the game in those areas without doing the various grinds. If you want to make any meaningful progress in the game you don't have any other option because the game is literally designed around grind.
 
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What exactly did you do for those 5000 hours? I have 2500 hours into the game so far and 90% of it was a mindless, repetitive grind. Fortunately I run everything on my computer in windowed mode so I can alt-tab and actually do something else for some of that grind, but it's still a grind and has almost no meaningful gameplay content attached to it.

Well I have three monitors & will regularly check this forum or watch youtube when travelling, yes. But I don't see this as much different from listening to the radio on a motorway.

My first year was spent working to get triple elite. This was hard work, took me out of my comfort zone & provided motivation to keep going where without the goal I might have given up. This is like running a marathon, where the technical description is dull (one foot in front of the other for 26 miles) but the motivation is key.

After that I was a little burned out & took a break for a couple of months, then returned & bummed about in an unarmed Cobra taking silly risks, trolling PvPers & generally enjoying the fruits of my labour (all the money I earned & ships I unlocked).

When 2.1 arrived I was frustrated by the new AI (in particular the endless stream of Elite Anacondas sent after me) & rather than stop playing went on a grand tour of the galaxy. One particularly memorable challenge (that you may consider a chore) was spending 3 months travelling the last 2,000ly to Beagle Point in my 19ly fully equipped Corvette, knowing only that it was theoretically possible but not the path to do it (it took me less than a day to retrace my steps back out again). It is arguably among the most heavily armed & armoured ships ever to visit BP, I am therefore possibly the most paranoid player in the community ;) I did it in Open of course.

Maybe it's not what you do but what motivates you that's the difference? I like this game, I only wish there was more of it.
 
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The issue here is that there are many activities required for game progression which have no gameplay value after the first few hours. There is no challenge or interest involved beyond that point, you are simply doing the same activity over and over for some sort of progression that is time-gated to require dozens or even hundreds of hours.

I can understand what you are saying, but I tend to mitigate this by trying to never do a single activity for longer than a hour at the most. Sure there are times when that isn't possible, like yesterday when I decided to take my new Krait for a spin of about 300lys to unlock a specific Engineer. I knew it was going to be boring, kind of self inflicted because I like doing a full DSS scan on any systems I encounter that are marked as Unknown to me. I broke that up into short 30 minute jaunts and had a break in between each run. Took me longer than some, but I ended up with a healthy payment from the Cartography department, a boost to my overall Explorer status and a new found respect for those that like heading out to the black.

Carrying data between stations over and over again just to grind your Naval rank or local rep is mindless and has no gameplay value. You aren't even minimally engaged in the process like you are with trading where you follow buy/sell prices, cargo capacity and jump ranges and are trying to optimize your route. Doing those courier data missions over and over again has no actual gameplay value and is simply designed to grind activities over and over for rank progression.

I only did this once, took my Courier which I enjoy flying, stacked the missions as one does, and had some fun doing it. Got to the required rank, then did some more because I was actually enjoying getting interdicted by larger ships in my little speedster. Had this wonderful little image of an irate NPC Anaconda pilot shaking his fist at me every time I beat his interdiction :D The rest of the time, I have not worried about rank, it just comes naturally as I do missions and the like. This could be because I am not focused on getting some uber ship to show my manhood err skill. Yep I will never own one of the big four :D


Driving the SRV on planets looking for very rare mats has no actual gameplay value after the first few hours, especially given that the wave scanner isn't particularly reliable (due to various bugs) and the SRV's engine sound drowns out the wave scanner which is an absurd situation since the vehicle uses an electric engine on an airless planet. Spending an hour driving on a planet to find maybe one or two metallic meteorites isn't gameplay content and simply involves driving around long enough to trigger the RNG spawns.

Now this one I do disagree with. For starters you must be landing in the wrong areas or not looking at the specs of the planet first. I find I am locating rocks to shoot about every five to ten minutes max, normally quicker than that. As for the wave scanner, now that I understand it, never had a problem with it, it guides me to where I need to go just about every time. I actually admit I enjoy hooning around the surface in my little moon buggy, I find it very relaxing. But as I said before, I set myself limits as well. For this type of activity, it is when one of the three self imposed criteria are met: 1 hour, I max out in at least 3 grade one mats or find a set quantity of the mat I am after. There is a fourth, but that again is a personal thing - if I find enough containers to fill my ship I leave when it is full, simple as that.


Even the recent Guardian ruin sites are still based on boring grindy gameplay. They have maybe 2 hours of actual gameplay content but require 12 hours to unlock all of the Guardian weapons and modules. There is nothing "enjoyable" about scanning hundreds of obelisks to get Epison data that has maybe 1 in 100 drop rate. It is just grind.

I will have to submit to you on this one, once I read about what is required, I decided I didn't need to do it. But now I am thinking it might be nice to have that Guardian FSD booster so I will attempt it, but just the once to get that, I have no interest in anything else.


If you don't do those activities you are not getting any of the rank-locked ships, Engineering mats or Guardian mats that you need for those unlocks. You really can't progress in the game without doing the various grinds, if you want to make any progress in the game you don't have any other options because the game is designed around grind.

That is assuming you have to have the rank locked ships, that module Engineers to the max, or those special weapons or modules. You can progress the game without them, no where is it specified you have to have them, there is no penalty if you don't have them - except if you PvP and that is solely a personal choice isn't it.

Remember I am not saying there isn't grind, it is how you address the grind that is the issue. For some it grates on them, like running a rasp over there neither regions. For others, it is something to think about and come up with ways to make it less grindy or even enjoyable.
 
You don't like ED. You, however, are not welcome to trash me or other people who enjoy ED. Call it whatever you want, or try to find associations to deride me or others, but that's really pointless. In the end you don't like ED, and you are here, and we do.
He actually loves ED, otherwise he wouldn't have put 2500 hours into it. He is just not very good at saying it.
 
What exactly did you do for those 5000 hours? I have 2500 hours into the game so far and 90% of it was a mindless, repetitive grind. Fortunately I run everything on my computer in windowed mode so I can alt-tab and actually do something else for some of that grind, but it's still a grind and has almost no meaningful gameplay content attached to it.

I mean, why do that to yourself? Surely after those 250 hours of 'fun' you'd realise fairly soon after that you found it boring? Think of the fun stuff you could have done in those 3 months of grind. I've had periods of boredom with Elite and I just don't play it.

Edit: for maths.
 
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Used to be that Elite was the game with the rapid and frequent bug fix releases.

Then they decided to become multi-platform with consoles.

Ever since that point of time, updates have slowed down...a lot.

Complains about slow bug fixes existed way before the console releases.
 
Updates have to be reviewed on consoles, this takes time and makes it hard to release a quick patches.

Quick patches aren't always best idea anyway. Biggest issue about FD not fixing things is they do not do cherry pick back ports. After several point releses they just move on to new branch. Which makes sense all things considered. But it is annoying because some issues will have to wait till next major release.

Beyond is doing new plan with doing four releases a year. Let's hope it sticks.
 
Updates have to be reviewed on consoles, this takes time and makes it hard to release a quick patches.

Which is why normal companies that don't consist of mostly incompetent pencil movers usually patch the PC version, then wait some time to fix all reported issues in it and only AFTER said reported issues have been fixed deploy the now fixed patch version to consoles. Which allows for lightning fast patching and fixing of even trivial bugs such as typos immediately after a bigger content patch. That is - instead of going to the no-QA-dumbo approach of releasing a barely tested patch, then doing a few knee-jerk patches on all platforms and leaving the rest of the bugs, however aggravating or even game-breaking, to fester until the next big release, even if it is six or more months down the line.
 
When that 500 hours consists of 450 hours of mindless grind to earn credits/mats/rank/Engineering unlocks and maybe 50 hours of actual gameplay content, that is not particularly good value.
True. Why anyone would play something they don't enjoy past 20 hours is beyond me though, let alone 10hr per day for 50 days. I clearly don't understand insanity development.

If I spend 3 hours watching a movie that turns out to be boring, poorly written and with a terrible ending that does not give me better "value" than a well-made 1.5 hour movie that I actually enjoy watching. It actually just ends up wasting several hours of my time that I could have spent doing something else that was more enjoyable.
Agreed.

What would then be completely insane is to repeatedly watch that boring movie over and over and over for 500 hours, then make complaining about the bad film part of your daily life for years.

A sane person says "it was bad" and moves on, perhaps says "if X was changed to Y it might have been better".
 

verminstar

Banned
Personally I prefer to have an opinion with some basis of fact and understanding to back it up. If I have none of that, then my opinion is just uneducated guess work.

So as to FDev taking their time to fix bugs, well they fix the game breaking ones pretty quickly, the none game breaking ones I assume they have a hierarchy of which gets done first, but they have fixed 1000's of them over the years.

NMS is still full of bugs and issues. Every game I have played has some kind of bug.

But I don't let them effect me. Some people seem to fly into a rage when ever they encounter one. I find it bizarre myself.

The bug I gave an example of is, as far as Im aware, a console specific bug and doesnt appear to affect pc players. What happens is the that when landing on a planet, the camera view in the HUD changes to a distorted point of view that makes deploying the SRV nigh on impossible without logging outta the game entirely and doing a full restart of the console and empty the cache.

In my opinion, any bug that forces one to take such drastic actions to rectify, is the definition of game breaking. Which contradicts yer claim they fix game breaking bugs as first priority...ah so that must be why this bug has persisted fer well over a year now.

Maybe its because its a console bug and doesnt have the same urgency it might have had if it affected everyone...sorta makes ye feel like a second class player doesnt it?

When I say Im waiting fer bugs to be fixed, what I really meant was that Im waiting until that extends to all platforms as it currently doesnt appear to apply. Perhaps it does and Im being overly salty about it...but if so then explain why a gamebreaking bug has persisted fer over a year...and then make the claim they fix all gamebreaking bugs as a priority.

Thats the problem with facts...sometimes they can be damned inconvenient to yer argument no?
 
The bug I gave an example of is, as far as Im aware, a console specific bug and doesnt appear to affect pc players. What happens is the that when landing on a planet, the camera view in the HUD changes to a distorted point of view that makes deploying the SRV nigh on impossible without logging outta the game entirely and doing a full restart of the console and empty the cache.

In my opinion, any bug that forces one to take such drastic actions to rectify, is the definition of game breaking. Which contradicts yer claim they fix game breaking bugs as first priority...ah so that must be why this bug has persisted fer well over a year now.

Maybe its because its a console bug and doesnt have the same urgency it might have had if it affected everyone...sorta makes ye feel like a second class player doesnt it?

When I say Im waiting fer bugs to be fixed, what I really meant was that Im waiting until that extends to all platforms as it currently doesnt appear to apply. Perhaps it does and Im being overly salty about it...but if so then explain why a gamebreaking bug has persisted fer over a year...and then make the claim they fix all gamebreaking bugs as a priority.

Thats the problem with facts...sometimes they can be damned inconvenient to yer argument no?

Regarding the described bug - I've had this happen to me on PC as well - so, there.
 
Are we listing out every bug in the game now?

Oooooo.... what about the old "Kill X number of particular faction" missions and only 1 out of 5 of them in the area are actually Mission Targets, even when winged up?
 

verminstar

Banned
Looks like some better communication is in order on some of the longer standing bugs.

On this we agree...shame however that its been a sticking point that players have been agreeing with fer years...cos communication has been utter tripe fer years. Twice Ive heard them claim they are aware of it and are working to rectify it...nowadays I just resign meself to the fact that they dont care enough to make the effort...

Which in turn means I dont make any effort to be nice to them and judge them on actual results instead. Since last October, their delivery has been somewhat underwhelming in the bug fixing department which means all hopes and dreams have since all but evaporated.

Fear not the wave of salt from me if Q4 doesnt live upto expectations...cos I quite literally wont be here at all, and Im not the sorta person who makes idle threats cos that aint a threat...its a statement of fact cos I know fer a fact I wont care enough to argue after that, whereas I do now...just ^
 
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