Engineers Why is Elite Failing (in my opinion)? Negative Feedback Loops - An Analysis

[Colonel Kenney]

I refer you to this well written document on careers and game design and how they overlap. How to be successful at engaging customers, and employees. I'll copy/paste some of it but if you want to read it yourself go here:

http://www.gamified.uk/2013/03/25/feedback-loops-gamification-and-employee-motivation/

To anyone involved in game design, feedback loops will be a well known concept. To those in gamification, they are often talked about, but not everyone will know what they actually are and how they can be used.

Feedback loops come in two main flavors; positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops.

Feedback loops are like this:

A positive feedback loop amplifies something, whereas a negative feedback loop will reduce something.

So, we have negative feedback loops as well. Whilst the player may be getting stronger and stronger, what if as their boosts multiply, their ability to find health packs or more powerful weapons was reduced, leaving more pickups for the less skilled players – giving them a slightly better chance of winning. This kind of balancing effect would help to keep them engaged with the game, rather than just quitting! It may seem unfair to the more skilled player, but you would not want them getting bored either!

Ideally you want to keep a balance of positive feedback loops going to keep gamers in the sweet spot.

This is how it should work

This is how it actually is

Now actually insert the random element into the game. The Engineers. This is what happened.

Take a Slot machine in a casino. Put money in, pull the lever, stand a chance of getting money out. Ignoring the random nature of the payout for a moment, most people are of the opinion that the more money there is in a slot machine, the more chance there is that it will pay out. So, here you have your positive feedback loop.

However, there is a random element here as well, the win comes at a seemingly random time. Whilst you know that your chances of winning are increasing, you don’t know when that win will happen. In gambling, this is often where the addiction lies – that element of chance, with the knowledge you have to win eventually!

Or people realize the game is rigged and you will need to sit there for hours blowing your money for no reason and you won't gamble. This is EXACTLY what we are seeing.

The same applies to employment.

Now here is how I see it. How things have gone wrong. The graph isn't entirely accurate and I'm not entirely sure how to portray it but you'll get the gist of what I'm trying to say.

CONCLUSION - Using feedback loops and shorter defined goals and checkpoints, we can help keep people far more engaged than just expecting them to repeat an action over and over again with no feedback or visible chance of a “win” at all.

I didn't want to put everything in. But this is a good start of a discussion.

My main points are this

Making something challenging does not mean making it tedious to obtain.

Example: Making 29 trips to get someone enough brandy is not challenging. It is tedious.

Qualifying for Engineer upgrades is not challenging. It is a job.

Advancing your naval ranking is not difficult, its tedious.

Doing missions in some cases are difficult and in many cases too difficult because of interdictions and AI cheating etc.

 

[Klab]

Interesting stuff, I do think however no matter what you do and how interesting you make it, sooner or later more or less everything becomes tedious in the end?

 

[DoctorDanny]

Good analysis, have some rep.

 

[Belthize]

+1 rep for trying to generate signal. -1 for using the term 'on-boarding', as soon as an organization starts talking about on-boarding you know mindless bureaucracy has set in.

But IMO there's not much there. You're essentially saying 'not fun things are not fun' and 'fun things are fun'.

It's easy to say things like 'Make the game more fun" or "make missions more engaging". It's much less easy to map that onto the code infrastructure they have, player expectations, etc etc. They've actually given us the tools to effect change.

Take Cigars. If they're spawning at 1T per update then yeah 50 of them sucks hard. If they're spawning at 10 to 15 it's not that bad. In their mind they've created a dynamic world and provided the tools to impact that world. Rather than complaining about 50 trips to collect cigars we could simply organize 10 to 15 people to push it in to a state where 10 to 15 are spawning. Sadly much of the player base isn't really interested in discovering how to bend the ED galaxy to their will, they'd rather try to bend FDEV to their will that results in a compliant ED galaxy.

That's not to say there aren't some areas where things are a bit grindy and there's really not much a player can do about it but most of the complaints about it, in my opinion, are the result of folks getting spun up into a form of mass hysteria.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

Interesting stuff, I do think however no matter what you do and how interesting you make it, sooner or later more or less everything becomes tedious in the end?

Not if you randomize the outputs.. they want everything to be procedural. If the loot were more like borderlands where you have an infinite amount of variation you can always get a chance of getting something unique but within constraints.

I have also not mentioned the RISK - REWARD feedback loop.

This game has only a few rewards. ALL Of them are difficult to obtain. Credits being one. The only free rewards are the "screenshots" or eye candy. We don't want rewards for free - we want our time NOT to be wasted. We want to have FUN while we are playing. We want there to be some impact or benefit for whatever action you are doing.

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+1 rep for trying to generate signal. -1 for using the term 'on-boarding', as soon as an organization starts talking about on-boarding you know mindless bureaucracy has set in.

But IMO there's not much there. You're essentially saying 'not fun things are not fun' and 'fun things are fun'.

It's easy to say things like 'Make the game more fun" or "make missions more engaging". It's much less easy to map that onto the code infrastructure they have, player expectations, etc etc.

Take Cigars. If they're spawning at 1T per update then yeah 50 of them sucks hard. If they're spawning at 10 to 15 it's not that bad. In their mind they've created a dynamic world and provided the tools to effect that world. Rather than complaining about 50 trips to collect cigars we could simply organize 10 to 15 people to push it in to a state where 10 to 15 are spawning. Sadly much of the player base isn't really interested in discovering how to bend the ED galaxy to their will, they'd rather try to bend FDEV to their will that results in a compliant ED galaxy.

That's not to say there aren't some areas where things are a bit grindy and there's really not much a player can do about it but most of the complaints about it, in my opinion, are the result of folks getting spun up into a form of mass hysteria.

Good points. My point is they haven't set any tools up in the galaxy to make life easier .. to make it more fun. If having fun = doing repetitious things and there is no way around it .. I think their definition of fun is skewed. I want to have fun.. and as a BONUS there are good rewards on top of it. Sometimes rewards are fun. But the act itself of PLAYING a game needs to be FUN... NOT TEDIOUS.

 

[Sylow]

Interesting stuff, I do think however no matter what you do and how interesting you make it, sooner or later more or less everything becomes tedious in the end?

Likely. But if a game gets boring after hundreds of hours of playing, I am perfectly fine with that. It means I have to take a break, do something else. If my motivation and fun returns, I can also return and continue playing, and this game in the base version, just flying spaceships and doing stuff has the absolute potential for that. But in contrast, if the new part of a game, which among other things should fresh it up and make it interesting again for those who already spent a lot of time in the game, turns out to be boring and tedious right from the start, something went wrong.
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There's been many good suggestions around how to fix that, I see no point in bringing them up again here, but despite my experience telling me differently, I still faintly hope that Frontier picks up one of them and actually turns Engineers around, making it fun to use.

 

[2plex]

I find PowerPoint presentations boring.
The more of them the more boring they become.

 

[Belthize]

Good points. My point is they haven't set any tools up in the galaxy to make life easier .. to make it more fun. If having fun = doing repetitious things and there is no way around it .. I think their definition of fun is skewed. I want to have fun.. and as a BONUS there are good rewards on top of it. Sometimes rewards are fun. But the act itself of PLAYING a game needs to be FUN... NOT TEDIOUS.

I think the problem at this point is signal to noise. I'm willing to bet that a poll asking which would you like more: tedium or fun, will come down heavily in favor of 'fun'. So as a community we're probably pretty agreed on that. If on the other hand you post a poll that asks specifically "Is X activity fun or tedious" that could easily be a 50/50 split. What's fun for one person is tedious to another and vice versa.

The signal to noise comes from 100s of hyperbolic threads exaggerating the severity of the problem that completely drown out the few posts that had really good suggestions in them. It started in beta where numerous people were posting suggestions and within an hour those were on page 2 buried by random "ahhhhhh' type posts.

We need one or two *maintained* threads with measured suggestions. Saying 'scrap the mission system and start over' is a non-starter. It's a pointless suggestion because it will never ever happen, doesn't matter if it should or not, it simply won't. So we need measured suggestions, focus on low hanging fruit that could easily be done by the next update and go from there. Personally I suspect if such a post were made and FDEV released their punch list there'd be a lot of overlap.

Right now that list should be something like: Fix progression blocking bugs (permit missions, USS missions), re-examine engineer rare unlock requirements, double check very rare material (surface mined and ship parts) drop rates, verify blue print effects vs rank progression (e.g. overlap of grade 4 and 5 results).

 

[Muetdhiver]

Good post. I would add that in general, if you plan to go sandbox/open world type of play in RPG (speaking from my GM Pen&Paper experience here),
using railroading is an efficient way to kill the campaign. (As railroading is the kryptonite of sandbox). Asking 200t of X with only one way of doing it is the essence of railroading.

• For every problems you want to plan at least 3 ways of solving it, if possible. (i.e. allow players to play with sandbox+tools to solve the problem, maybe you plan 3 solutions, players find a fourth way. That is good.)
• Repetition and routine is Broken by bangs! and complications. (bangs! is in your face, cannot ignore stuff that you use to push/pull the players). Complications is : instead of having "do I find polonium ?" => "nope/yup", you go with "do I find polonium ?" => "Nope, but..." or "Nope, and..." or "Yes, but..." or "Yes, and..."

In ED this is rarely done. Say you need polonium : well you got to go to the surface or pray the RNG gods for a mission. What would be much smarter is : game sees that you pined a blueprint with polonium in.
You get on a planet with SRV => start shooting rocks. no polonium, but the game spawns a ship crash sites => investigate, no polonium but contains information about a hidden cache of materials and stuff in the planet rings
=> invesitate cache, yes ! polonium, but triggers an alarm => buddies of the smuggler show up and think you killed him => ???.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

The bottom line is all of the activities involve tedium. They've definitely inserted challenge into combat, but the rest of it is tedium. It is a negative feedback loop.

 

[Ian Skippy]

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[Muetdhiver]

The problem is not repetition, it is repetition without variation.

Why do people play chess for 100's of games ? It is repetitive, but there is variation.
TicTacToe on the other hand is repetitive but has little variation. => once the small variations are explored, the game becomes boring.

The best definition of a "grind" for me is : putting a reward behind a repetitive action with no variation.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

Another issue is they surround themselves with like minded people with the same boring interests and not enough diversity of opinion. They are not boring to all people just the majority. I find some nerdy things very exciting that 90% of the people out there don't. But I also love some of the mainstream games that ARE done right. (Witcher, Fallout, GTA etc)

But this game was supposed to be the sandbox allowing us to blaze our own path but its also the most restricted game that forces you to do mundane and tedious tasks. Its a game that claims freedom but restricts everything except your ability to go where you want. Which way do they want it?

The issue is they have a brigade of people they listen to.. who are yes men. They are fans. Instead of listening to their critics who are the people who will make them the best they could be.

A customer in a restaurant who critisized the food - you don't boot them out or ignore them. You take into consideration their beefs and if you hear the same issues over and over again you'd think they'd change the menu / recipe.

The recipe is above - read it and learn where you went wrong. Stop listening to the brigade, the vocal minority, the IRC fanboys.

 

[Lupin]

It is as I suggested in my poll (Closed by forum Admin). We now have an arms race, keep up or die.

 

[Belthize]

The issue is they have a brigade of people they listen to.. who are yes men. They are fans. Instead of listening to their critics who are the people who will make them the best they could be.

The recipe is above - read it and learn where you went wrong. Stop listening to the brigade, the vocal minority, the IRC fanboys.

And then the wheels fall off.

Sometimes you strike me as relatively astute and then you post something like that. There's no conspiracy going on.

Oh well, another thread that might have triggered rational discussion and suggestions will now descend into random name calling till it blissfully slides to page 3 and oblivion.

 

[kalniel]

Original theory good. But then you go and say this:

The issue is they have a brigade of people they listen to.. who are yes men. They are fans. Instead of listening to their critics who are the people who will make them the best they could be.

There's no evidence for that at all - you've just made an assertion about how a professional company performs their user-testing with nothing to back it up.

Forums may or may not be an accurate representation of a user base, but the devs will have a much bigger picture than we do and presuming they take use of the well established field of user-experience analysis/testing they'll be well placed to fill in the real facts.

 

[Bacalao]

My main points are this

Making something challenging does not mean making it tedious to obtain.


Example: Making 29 trips to get someone enough brandy is not challenging. It is tedious.

Qualifying for Engineer upgrades is not challenging. It is a job.

Advancing your naval ranking is not difficult, its tedious.

Doing missions in some cases are difficult and in many cases too difficult because of interdictions and AI cheating etc.

I won't disagree with the message you're sending, it's pretty common sense stuff. The quoted portion seems like a contradiction. You want a challenge and then claim it's too challenging and you highlight the non-challenging gameplay and claim it isn't challenging enough. Make up your mind. You're conclusions ignore the actual state of the game and the options on offer.
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Meanwhile you ignore the fact that you can accelerate your progress in the "tedious" things by increasing the difficulty of the game yourself. Want it easy? Find parts in degraded signal sources, no challenge at all, just a relaxing flight, but it will take you longer. Or you can blow up lots of low ranked ships at nav beacons. If you want to progress faster, look for high ranked ships and difficult missions, jump into threat 3-4 signal sources, high/haz res. You'll get those rare components faster. Or go for the middle ground! All of this on a sliding scale with 9 different rankings that are broadcast constantly in ship ranking, mission ranking, red text outlining the risks, areas with distinct difficulty levels (high sec vs med sec vs ..., hazRES vs hiRES vs ..., nav beacon vs comp nav beacon....)and just plain intuition that risk/effort=reward. All of which you can use to tailor the experience to what you're looking for.
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Aside from that the things you list as tedious are only tedious because you make them so, just play the game, you've set an arbitrary and imaginary timeline on having certain things. I did like 4 upgrades last night in an hour or two. They weren't rank 5, they gave me a nice little boost to my FSDs, other than that I just played the game the way I usually do. I'll get to level 5 eventually, which will be nice but for now the rank 3 upgrade is nice too, my FAS jumps 20 light years (damn rewarding)! I'm not going to play till my fingers bleed because it can't jump 22Ly this second. The only problem I can see having from engineers is if I treat it like work by giving it a deadline, it will turn it into a job, what else would you expect?

 

[CMDR Mr S]

Where my 'git gud' comments at?

 

[Colonel Kenney]

And then the wheels fall off.

Sometimes you strike me as relatively astute and then you post something like that. There's no conspiracy going on.

Oh well, another thread that might have triggered rational discussion and suggestions will now descend into random name calling till it blissfully slides to page 3 and oblivion.

No conspiracy. Human nature. People who are nice to them will be welcomed embraced, their ideas taken and they'll be propped up - and people who are vocal critics like me are watched like hawks for any slip up and then I'm gone. (yeah I got a long list of infractions people waiiit for me to slip up) I'm not the only one. I know a dozen people like it.

They've outright said they want all feedback positive and negative (Sandro a dozen times) but then continue to disregard and dismiss it and penalize people who are trying to sway it in the right direction. Not a conspiracy. Its a fact. They do listen though I can give you that. They definitely do read and if its within their power to do immediately they've done a great job of fixing things.

The issue is in the design stages.

 

[h347h]

And then the wheels fall off.

Sometimes you strike me as relatively astute and then you post something like that. There's no conspiracy going on.

Oh well, another thread that might have triggered rational discussion and suggestions will now descend into random name calling till it blissfully slides to page 3 and oblivion.

That's what happens when some one who is projecting tries to talk facts with out facts I guess.