Why is NOTHING ever explained?

Gigamesh

G
So I take a mission to assassinate some pirate. All requirments met cool off I go. Its my first planetary landing to scan...somthing to get the location. Ok guess Ill figure it out. Get to the planet and start approach. ok no Idea whats happening but sure is taking a year and a day. Figure out the dotted circle is where I gotta go (why isnt it blue like all other mission markers)? I have no clue the distances Im supposed to drop out of super cruise. So I end up going to SC and back to glide like 5 times inching closer and closer. At this point I must be an hour into the mission confused and irritated. Then it says tresspassing? huh why? I gotta land at the base too scan a thing. I get closer and land. Now Im hit with a bounty? No idea whats happening. I try to exit in the srv.....I dont have one? I thought I had all mission requirments? So now Im thinking I can scan from my ship??? take off and get closer and now th station is shooting at me and I die. I buy back my ship and am sitting in a detention center.

YOUR NEW PLAYER EXPERIENCE IS LACKING. You waisted my time and money. Im angry and still have NO IDEA WHAT I DID WRONG OR SHOULD DO DIFFERENT!!! You can do better than this.
 

TrangleC

T
I know how you feel.
Unfortunately, the game is almost 7 years old and as you can imagine, neither you nor me are the first or only ones complaining about the cryptic chaos this game is and the developers never cared enough to ever change any of this in those 7 years.
They are even proud of "not holding the player's hand" and letting people figure stuff out by themselves.
Everybody just accepts and got used to the fact that for the vast majority of people, this game would be outright unplayable without the help of community created tutorials and a ton of outside tools to help you play the game.

Why make the galaxy map in game function correctly if people have sites like EDDB and Inara to help them find stuff? ...For example.

I too unwittingly got myself a bounty for the first time on one of those annoying planetary scan missions.
I was grinding Federation rank by carrying data back and forth between two Federation systems and then one of those supposedly legit Federation factions gave me the job to scan a planet.
I don't like landing on planets, but it was one of those follow-up missions I thought I need to get promoted, so I accepted it.
The mission briefing just spoke of scanning the system's Navigation Beacon, which I did and only then I figured out what the briefing hadn't told me, that I have to land on a planet and scan some installation there.
So I had to go and get a SRV and then I landed and was trespassing and attacked by those hovering drones and suddenly I had a bounty on my head from the Federation, while doing a mission the Federation gave me and then I had to do more research outside of the game, to figure out how to get rid of a bounty and it turned out I had to travel like 400 light years to pay off a "Factor" in my combat ship with a jump range of less than 15 light years, because if I would have tried to switch to a different ship in a space station, I would probably have been shot and killed.

This game had so much potential, but it wasn't realized.
It is a mess and playing it makes me feel like a pathetic sucker and a glutton for punishment, which I am not.
All I wanted was a fun game and what I got was not just a unpaid second job as a data entry clerk, but one in a company where nobody explains anything to you and you need to constantly google everything you do and every time you find a way to make your life a little easier, management nerfs it.

Even the controls menu is batshit crazy in my opinion.
In every other game, even complicated simulations, when you have an issue with your controls, you just think to yourself: "I'll just go to the controls menu and change something." and then you do it and keep playing.
In Elite Dangerous, every time I have an issue with controls, I think to myself: "Is it worth the ordeal? Do I go searching for some key binding that won't be where it should be for 20 minutes and then start googling and reading through 4 year old, outdated tips and tricks to fix this problem, or do I just uninstall this insultingly inept garbage and write off the money I paid for it?"
 
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Dragsham

Dragsham
Ok so you learned that if it's a planet based scan jobby you need an srv. Usually these missions like their data equivalent are confusing and hard. So attempting with an unengineered ship isn't wise.
Keybindings are a pain but again you get used to it...
Playing in VR means no typing googling or you have to remove headset. So using the hotas bound correctly is vital. Using the galaxy and system maps also vital and more accurate than 3rd party appz.
It's your way of approach. Elite is hard....very hard on noobs.
Focus on hauling goods...or data missions. Easily done less hassle. Work up to assassinations and base scans cos their time consuming and complicated.
Followup missions are in two types. Faction ones ie the faction your fighting for at that time...and fed/empire alliance ones. They look the same but arnt.
You've not mentioned combat at all so I've no idea what ship you have. Smaller the better I say.
But rather than flame a beautiful game once mastered try asking questions here...we all help as we were once helped. Join a wing..wow that's a very good way to gitgud
 
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Dragsham

Dragsham
Seriously though.. just ask. You'll get lots of help. Googling also is a must hehe. It's just how it is. Most complex games are quirky.
Friendly community will happily help
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
Confused by getting to a planet surface? Sounds like doing the tutorials would help.

Exclusion zone are pretty well explained - how you get around them is up to you - the game is full of puzzles.

You don't need an srv, and the game expects you to take responsibility for your ship. Don't forget your limpets!

There are many things in the game that are very poorly explained. I don't think you've come across any of them yet :)
 

varonica

varonica
A question I have to ask is, why is one of your first experiences of planetary landing to take a mission to one? When I first started I just flew around testing things, landing on stations and planetary bases, dotted circles as opposed to solid yellow seemed pretty obvious, practicing landing on planets, taking off, testing the best way to get from one distant spot to anther. You just point straight up until you are in orbital cruise and fly around the planet until you are the right spot to drop down.

Look I know it's easy for me to say this, but it wasn't easy to learn, this is years of practice and experience, surface scanning entire moons from SC, to get good at this stuff you practice, because the skills required aren't given to your pilot, they are learned by you. In traditional MMO's your character levels up, gets given more skills as its level increases, that doesn't happen here. Even if I explained step by step how to move from one surface location to another halfway around a planet you would still be only at most 1 tenth as good as me, but that may be good enough for you for now.

The skills you need in this game are skills you need to learn for yourself. Never be afraid to ask for help, my first trip to the guardian ruins to get a Guardian booster was a complete disaster and all I could do was blunder around in the dark wondering where everything was, until a friendly CMDR turned up and walked me through it.

And why did no-one and nothing tell you that a dotted circle indicated the target was hidden by the body of the planet/moon? Because an assumption has been made that everyone already knows this, that it appears so obvious to the rest of us that it doesn't seem an important piece of information to convey.

I would suggest stop with the more advanced missions, just take delivery and courier missions to stations and planetary surface bases, do the easy stuff, ask questions and learn stuff, then start hitting the harder stuff. You'll get there eventually, and there's one thing you already know, dotted circles are blocked by other bodies. There will be other stuff in the future you won't know, I am sure there is still stuff I don't know. But take it easy, don't rush to much into the harder missions just because they pay more, practice!
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
Gigamesh said:
So I take a mission to assassinate some pirate. All requirments met cool off I go. Its my first planetary landing to scan...somthing to get the location. Ok guess Ill figure it out. Get to the planet and start approach. ok no Idea whats happening but sure is taking a year and a day. Figure out the dotted circle is where I gotta go (why isnt it blue like all other mission markers)? I have no clue the distances Im supposed to drop out of super cruise. So I end up going to SC and back to glide like 5 times inching closer and closer. At this point I must be an hour into the mission confused and irritated. Then it says tresspassing? huh why? I gotta land at the base too scan a thing. I get closer and land. Now Im hit with a bounty? No idea whats happening. I try to exit in the srv.....I dont have one? I thought I had all mission requirments? So now Im thinking I can scan from my ship??? take off and get closer and now th station is shooting at me and I die. I buy back my ship and am sitting in a detention center.

YOUR NEW PLAYER EXPERIENCE IS LACKING. You waisted my time and money. Im angry and still have NO IDEA WHAT I DID WRONG OR SHOULD DO DIFFERENT!!! You can do better than this.
Click to expand...

Isn't this all explained in the in-game Pilots Manual AND also in the PDF game manual? Did you read either?

Just wait until you hear about Telepresence :D
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
varonica said:
I would suggest stop with the more advanced missions, just take delivery and courier missions to stations and planetary surface bases, do the easy stuff, ask questions and learn stuff, then start hitting the harder stuff.
Click to expand...
I was thinking this - though then you hit the issue that there is no way to know what is an "easy" mission and what is "hard". I guess the advice is - if you fail badly at a mission try a different type, ask someone or have a search on the internet.

some are just broken (but not many :) )
 

FrogsFriend

FrogsFriend
Gigamesh said:
NO IDEA WHAT I DID WRONG OR SHOULD DO DIFFERENT!!!
Click to expand...
Well, there's a few thing's you've definitely learned and could do different next time, just from your description:
  • It's probably better to fly around the planet in space to get much closer to the base, then fly down towards it.
  • Ground bases have a 'no fly' zone around them. They warn you to leave first then issue a Bounty against you if you don't take the hint. You could land a little further out to avoid that, preferably using the terrain to keep out of line-of-sight of the guns you discovered later.
  • To get out of your ship you need to have equipped an SRV (vehicle). You can buy a vehicle bay for your ship, and SRVs for it, at most starports.
  • Ground bases have guns and will defend themselves against trespassing ships.
  • Getting killed is an inconvenience but it doesn't stop you trying again and applying all the things you've just learned.
  • This space adventure game rewards curiosity and problem solving skills, it provides in-game instruction in the basic game mechanics of flying, outfitting, trading, fighting, etc. but doesn't give you step by step instructions for every possible situation you can find yourself in.
  • Improvise, adapt, overcome :)
 

Sashamorning

Sashamorning
OP is definitely not wrong, though. Take Powerplay, for example. Without the wiki, I'd have no idea how the thing even works. Fortunately, I don't HAVE to care about that so much.

It took me a while to figure out how to land. It doesn't seem intuitive at first and it really needs more explanation.

Solving problems is a good way to look at it, but first you need to know that there's a problem to be solved, and then you need to know what the problem looks like when everything is black.
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
Sashamorning said:
OP is definitely not wrong, though. Take Powerplay, for example. Without the wiki, I'd have no idea how the thing even works. Fortunately, I don't HAVE to care about that so much.

It took me a while to figure out how to land. It doesn't seem intuitive at first and it really needs more explanation.

Solving problems is a good way to look at it, but first you need to know that there's a problem to be solved, and then you need to know what the problem looks like when everything is black.
Click to expand...

Again, it's it all laid out in the Codex and game manual. Granted the latter was not updated since 2017, which is just shocking to me (I mean did LITERALLY nobody at FDEV in the last 3 years went "Maybe we should update game manual"? :O smh ). But Codex is really good at providing sound information and to be fair I'd think most of the info from the PDF manual is also still valid (lack of any updates since 2017 is still shocking!).
 
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Fattboy

Fattboy
I'm still fairly new. Had some experiences kinds like that as well. I'm just now really starting to get used to ALL the controls. Lots and lots of key binds to setup. However once you get alll that done this game is a lot of fun. I am now getting ready to look into joining a wing or what not. Still have no XP with other players.
 
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