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

[Colonel Kenney]

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?

Like I said - its the sweet spot we are looking for. Most activities are way outside the normal user's sweet spot. I love a challenge but I don't enjoy being the victim of some sado masochistic person's idea of fun is.

This is what happens. Person puts too much time in realizes its no fun person leaves. That is what you are seeing now. There should have been a huge spike in users after the long wait for engineers 2.1 .. but there wasn't and now its falling off..

There is no INCREASE IN CHANCE the harder you work.

 

[h347h]

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.

So what, I get infractions a lot too. I was just called a white knight. Wake up you are delusional.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Like I said - its the sweet spot we are looking for. Most activities are way outside the normal user's sweet spot. I love a challenge but I don't enjoy being the victim of some sado masochistic person's idea of fun is..

Instead everyone should subscribe to your idea of fun. Because disagreeing with it, means you're part of the yes men brigade. Thus making sure that any feedback you get about your ideas will always travel through this filter.

Disagree: part of the yes men brigade, which I can ignore.
Agree: part of sensible people who know what fun is.

This in a thread about feedback is rather ironic

More ironic is that you derailed your own thread, which had merit, with this nonsense:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=262970&p=4059096&viewfull=1#post4059096

 

[Colonel Kenney]

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

What do you want me to do .. post thousands upon thousand of lines of chat, personal back room chatter, private forum posts and other details? No its a breach of trust.

I'll give you a good example - I've seen plenty of players made into "ambassadors". As long as they are good role models and they tow the party line they are propped up, they have the ears of the devs. Kerrash (bless his soul he is a good chap) is a good example. All he was, was one of the streamers an a backer. He's privy to all sorts of stuff and probably has quite a bit of informal input he'd never admit to.

This is human nature. I have the ear of many developers in my trade. Because they value my opinion. I tell it like it is, I don't just say "ya thats awesome!" I'm sure they value his. But the sign of a good dev is to also value the opinions of people who are not "yes men". (I'm not calling Kerrash that).

Anyway this is off on a tangent - getting back on topic.

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Instead everyone should subscribe to your idea of fun. Because disagreeing with it, means you're part of the yes men brigade. Thus making sure that any feedback you get about your ideas will always travel through this filter.

Disagree: part of the yes men brigade, which I can ignore.
Agree: part of sensible people who know what fun is.

This in a thread about feedback is rather ironic

More ironic is that you derailed your own thread, which had merit, with this nonsense:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=262970&p=4059096&viewfull=1#post4059096

This is about hitting the sweet spot for every player. Being a yes man and a fanboy means = "everything is awesome!" and how dare you criticize or say they are doing anything wrong at all!

Advocating change in this game for the better benefits ALL players.

I'll give you another example .. Everquest 2 I believe initially was the first mmo that implemented an auto-scaling level feature so you could play with other people of a higher level or of a lower level. This is sort of the function they need to work on. Adding more feedback in the form of reward, and intrigue and or challenge.

 

[h347h]

What do you want me to do .. post thousands upon thousand of lines of chat, personal back room chatter, private forum posts and other details? No its a breach of trust.

I'll give you a good example - I've seen plenty of players made into "ambassadors". As long as they are good role models and they tow the party line they are propped up, they have the ears of the devs. Kerrash (bless his soul he is a good chap) is a good example. All he was, was one of the streamers an a backer. He's privy to all sorts of stuff and probably has quite a bit of informal input he'd never admit to.

This is human nature. I have the ear of many developers in my trade. Because they value my opinion. I tell it like it is, I don't just say "ya thats awesome!" I'm sure they value his. But the sign of a good dev is to also value the opinions of people who are not "yes men". (I'm not calling Kerrash that).

Anyway this is off on a tangent - getting back on topic.

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This is about hitting the sweet spot for every player. Being a yes man and a fanboy means = "everything is awesome!" and how dare you criticize or say they are doing anything wrong at all!

Advocating change in this game for the better benefits ALL players.

I'll give you another example .. Everquest 2 I believe initially was the first mmo that implemented an auto-scaling level feature so you could play with other people of a higher level or of a lower level. This is sort of the function they need to work on. Adding more feedback in the form of reward, and intrigue and or challenge.

Are you just belligerently gerrymandering the fact that they do indeed listen to some of their harsh critics too?

 

[Colonel Kenney]

So how can we improve

Ship Launched Fighters - This actually will be welcomed as long as they don't make the fighters too wimpy and cost too much. There is always a major drawback when they give us ANYTHING - make NO DRAWBACKS.

Passenger Missions - Please don't interdict us every 5 minutes

Multi Crew - better make it full of new features and options for each crew member. Make it so that a multi-crewed ship is more powerful than a solo ship and that each member has a FUN system to work. It needs to be rewarding for ALL members.

Commander Creation - don't forget a pilots log - being able to recall and watch all of your endeavors including trips in the galaxy map is a reward in itself. Including market prices.

The design is already decided so now is their chance to change it to be more in line with successful games.

 

[ick]

Good post with pretty good business principles.

A good book from 1993:

[h=1]Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service[/h]

 

[Lordxenu]

Are you just belligerently gerrymandering the fact that they do indeed listen to some of their harsh critics too?

They clearly don't that's why were going to get the option to choose our special effects! Because all the yes men....wait wasn't that because of constructive feedback from those that didn't like the design feature?

Oh yeah we only use examples that support what we say....

 

[ick]

This, in particular, illustrates the balancing act.....

http://i.imgur.com/gH7WTi8.png

 

[Colonel Kenney]

This is how it is.

 

[Eera]

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.

Agree, am almost triple ELITE, so repetition in ELITE DANGEROUS, I know it. Girding for ELITE rank was not a matter for me, as it was a way to discover the game in many different aspect. What's disappointing me with POWER and ENGINEERING are too much effort for not definitive rewards. Have to grind and grind again to keep RANK 5 in power. So, in fact, power gave me no time to do others things in ED, like CG, so I gave up.

ENGINEERING is the same, GRIND and GRIND to update ship modules. In a way am agreeing with this system, but at the end, there is a wheel of fortune, 1 luck to lose materials, and then time spent in grinding for those materials. Here what's annoying me. The RNG sincerely must be removed, to, at least, prevent player frustration. ENGINEERING is too much effort for a wheel of fortune game. Prefer to give up and see what's going on with this module.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

This, in particular, illustrates the balancing act.....

That is why I edited that photo - it shows how skewed the professions are.

 

[RoLnD79]

I've only been playing a couple months, but already have a ton of hours in. Too many for the time I've been playing, but I enjoy the game. From what I see with some players, especially new ones, is that they expect to have great stuff after 10 hours of playing. This game doesn't work that way. If you want anything great ship wise or great engineered mods, you're going to have to put a ton of time in. That's how it is with everything in this game, you can't just play it for 40-50 hours and have everything.

I think that's why we are seeing the complaints about the engineers, some people expect to have all level 5 mods in one weekend of play. Sure, there are some things that can be better when it comes to drop rates and the RNG, but it's really not that bad. If everything was so easy to get right away, there's no way Elite will come close to being around for ten years like is planned.

I also don't understand the complaints still going on about the AI. It's way toned down from right after the update. Yeah, that first weekend was a bit over the top. I think too many people just sat at Nav beacons or haz RES sites, shooting fish in a barrel before the update, and got complacent with combat.

I do do think the interdictions were over the top, but the past couple days they've seemed to get a little less. I felt bad for new players trying to trade and make money, getting interdicted all the time by elite FDLs and Condas couldn't have been enjoyable when just learning the game. Some people play this game to explore and trade, they aren't so much into combat. That's totally fine, there's no right or wrong way to play ED, and no one should ever criticize anyone for the way they play. I just think for those people who want to explore and trade, they shouldn't have to put up with that amount of interdictions, especially from top notch AI doing the interdicting. There's plenty of places and ways that those who want that challenge, can get it, it shouldn't be shoved down anyone's throat.

Those are just my thoughts, I never tell anyone how to play, but anyone playing this game expecting to get everything nice with ease, or not much time and effort, well they are playing the wrong game.

 

[Bomba Luigi]

This is highly confusing, I can guess its about looting and modding but other then that I have no clue. I guess its OP saying he does not think its fun trying to present that as fact where as fun can't be fact. Its 100% subjectiv.

 

[Ironwolf]

<snip>
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.
<snip>
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.
<snip>

Look at their Design Team, make you own mind up if they are up to it.

The fans they should've listened to were part of the DDF.

 

[Glock_N_Load]

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.

Could not have said it better myself. You run a poll and about a thousand people vote. If Elite has sold 1.5 million games where are the other 99% and what do they think. You are not taking sides you are stating a position on how to improve the game and that improvement doesn't favor any aspect of the game. +rep to you Cmndr.

 

[Delilah]

Well done.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

OP, why do you think the game is failing when the player numbers are very healthy?

 

[Crimson Kaim]

This article covers some good points but when I compared it to myself I couldn't find any true statement. I am not really affected by the lenght to the next goal. See I literally spend months grinding credits day after day to get a fully A-graded Corvette. If I have a goal I do my best to achieve it. What did bother me were the ways I had to do it. The utterly boring grind is present in ELite and there is no single alternative.

Take the frustration/boredom diagram. I am faaaaaar down the high skill - low challenge feeling part. I feel bored. NPCs are not a challenge at all, heck not even the majority of the players are regarding combat. There is no riddle, no quiz, no difficult question to answer to achieve something valueable. There are just a variety of incredible easy to do tasks that have a really low payout and have to be repeated. Since they are not challenging they are boring. I would rather try over and over again to complete an extrem mission and get a fat payout so I would first save alot of time doing the challenging tasks compared to the easy ones and secondly wouldn't fall asleep while hauling some palladium from A to B.


So my critique would probably be more related to the other article about "the flow".

 

[Derath]

OP, why do you think the game is failing when the player numbers are very healthy?

Nobody has any idea if the player numbers are healthy or not except FD themselves so people tend to have a guess based on their own experiences