Your least enjoyable Elite activity?

[Brrokk]

For all of you where combat is the least fun activity, I would recommend you try another space game with the initials NMS for now, while we wait for future features on this game.

It's too bad that this game seems to have a stark division between the warriors and the explorers.

Eh? I would say that it's one of ED's strengths that it attracts players of many different outlooks. That makes the player base bigger and funds development better.

In the spirit of this thread I think I could say, "Fixed weapons. I've tried to git gud with them and found that I don't enjoy waggling the joystick that fast, so I don't do it. Turrets all the way for me."

 

[Red Anders]

I have never known anything other than the FSS. How did exploration work before?

You pressed a button for five seconds and it then shows you every planet in the system.

By 'shows' what Max means is that it literally showed you just the system map, along with some very basic data about the planets (not the full info that you get now from the FSS)

To players like me who are primarily looking for visually interesting planets, the FSS is a huge backward step because it can now take me up to 10 minutes to simply be able to see a fully-populated system map in a system with a lot of bodies. I'd say in a particular amount of game time, I can quickly inspect somewhere between 10% and 20% of the number of systems I could before the FSS was introduced and since I need to see what the planets look like before I'll have any idea as to whether I want to actually fly to them, that's unavoidable. Since the vast majority of systems do not include anything unique, beautiful or otherwise of interest to me (which is the nature of the galaxy) the result of that change is that I can go for days wasting my time on 'discovering' systems that I have zero interest in then exploring.

Put it this way. I recently completed a trip to Beagle Point via Colonia and Sag A* before flying back around the 'back' of the core, down through Hawking's Gap, out to the next gap between the arms on that side (Its name escapes me at the moment) all the way to the Crab Pulsar and then back to the bubble. The whole journey was over 200,000 LY and took around five months. In that time, I landed on exactly eight planets. That's what happens when you can onl;y look at between a fifth and a tenth of the systems you used to be able to. Disappointment doesn't even cover it.

For players who are primarily concerned with making money from exploration, the FSS has made it as trivial as any other way of making money in the game. It used to be you had to fly to the planet to even get a 'discovered' tag on it and to get information such as what materials are present on it. Now people can just sit at the star and do all that unless they want to map a planet.

For players who always habitually scanned everything in every system they visited, the FSS has made the process a lot faster but when you consider that used to involve flying to every single planet, there weren't too many of those players to begin with.

FSS is certainly a good acronym for the thing but the one I usually think of isn't the one Frontier use...

 

[John Stoutbeard]

In VR, opening the system/galaxy map.
Because someone thought it was smart to disable mouse-clicking a object in the maps when you're in VR.
Clearly because using the mouse is working in all other menus and UI, hence it shall have no effect in the VR map.

 

[Sysmon]

Opening up Holo-Me in VR and staring straight into the crotch of my avatar...

S

 

[Wrecked]

SUPER
CRUISE

oh yea...and dealing with arx

 

[FurryFailure]

"Grinding" is not a game activity. it's something that you do (repeating some activities at nauseam) to achieve your goal ASAP.

80% of this game is grinding or farming in some form or another, technicalities aside, it's still something I carried out and didn't enjoy, no one forced me to do it but myself, it doesn't invalidate the fact it was my least enjoyable thing to do with Elite.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

By 'shows' what Max means is that it literally showed you just the system map, along with some very basic data about the planets (not the full info that you get now from the FSS)

But it was enough info for you to know what each planet was in a system.

To players like me who are primarily looking for visually interesting planets, the FSS is a huge backward step because it can now take me up to 10 minutes to simply be able to see a fully-populated system map in a system with a lot of bodies. I'd say in a particular amount of game time, I can quickly inspect somewhere between 10% and 20% of the number of systems I could before the FSS was introduced and since I need to see what the planets look like before I'll have any idea as to whether I want to actually fly to them, that's unavoidable. Since the vast majority of systems do not include anything unique, beautiful or otherwise of interest to me (which is the nature of the galaxy) the result of that change is that I can go for days wasting my time on 'discovering' systems that I have zero interest in then exploring.

The old way wasn't exactly.perfect either for what you were looking for. How many duds did you fly to in the old way?

Put it this way. I recently completed a trip to Beagle Point via Colonia and Sag A* before flying back around the 'back' of the core, down through Hawking's Gap, out to the next gap between the arms on that side (Its name escapes me at the moment) all the way to the Crab Pulsar and then back to the bubble. The whole journey was over 200,000 LY and took around five months. In that time, I landed on exactly eight planets. That's what happens when you can onl;y look at between a fifth and a tenth of the systems you used to be able to. Disappointment doesn't even cover it.

Nope, that's what happens when you don't adapt to the new mechanics, instead of desperately trying to play the same way as before. I'm still out there after DW2 and have landed on lots of interesting planets. Time really shouldn't be an issue when it comes to exploring. I'm looking forward to the day when it's worth spending days in one system.

For players who are primarily concerned with making money from exploration, the FSS has made it as trivial as any other way of making money in the game. It used to be you had to fly to the planet to even get a 'discovered' tag on it and to get information such as what materials are present on it. Now people can just sit at the star and do all that unless they want to map a planet.

Making money while exploring has always been trivial. You just get more now. Not that I'm bothered about the money.

For players who always habitually scanned everything in every system they visited, the FSS has made the process a lot faster but when you consider that used to involve flying to every single planet, there weren't too many of those players to begin with.

That's just plain wrong. You still have to fly to each planet to DSS it if you are interested in tagging which was the only reason to do that in the old way too.

FSS is certainly a good acronym for the thing but the one I usually think of isn't the one Frontier use...

I doubt many people use it either. Whatever it is.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

80% of this game is grinding or farming in some form or another, technicalities aside, it's still something I carried out and didn't enjoy, no one forced me to do it but myself, it doesn't invalidate the fact it was my least enjoyable thing to do with Elite.

Grind is a choice in this game. I haven't done any grind to get anything I wanted and I have ranks, engineered modules and tech broker modules and pushed the BGS. Grind isn't an in-game activity, it's a playstyle.

 

[Red Anders]

Stuff

Max. I'm not telling you you're wrong to like the thing. We did this at length in the thread back when they announced it.

Please do me the courtesy of not telling me I'm 'doing it wrong' or 'failing to adapt'.

How many duds did I discover with the old system? Plenty. The difference was that it took less than a minute to discover them. What you never seem to have grasped is that like you, I play games for enjoyment. An entire play session discovering nothing of any interest to me is not enjoyable, or at least significantly less enjoyable than it used to be and it is the significant reduction in the number of systems it's possible to get an overview of that is the cause of that for me. There is nothing at all that I can do to increase that number.

I don't care how many planets you have found fascinating because it should be clear by now that maybe we just don't find the same things interesting. I'm happy that you're having such a great time with it, really I am, but stop talking about 'adaping to new mechanics' as if there's something I can do to change the issue that I have explained very clearly on more occasions than I care to remember. There isn't - the game has changed and I'm well aware of that. I can't suddenly start to find things interesting that I don't actually find interesting just because of that though.

I have no idea how much time you spend exploring, if you did DW2 I imagine it's quite a lot. I don't care in the slightest how my stats stack up against yours for exploration but I'm coming up on 20,000 systems visited, have just gone over a million light years travelled and have earned just over a billion credits from exploration (with about another 500m of data to sell as of today), the vast majority of it earned before exploration payouts got increased and before passenger missions gave exploration rank. I already had my Elite rank by then. I'm not some noob at it, nor am I someone whose opinion deserves to be invalidated just because it doesn't happen to coincidce with yours.

I'm sick to the back teeth of condescending replies from people about this. If that's all you have, do me a favour and don't bother responding because believe me, I already know what you have to say about it. I remember it freom the month or two that you and a few others spent pouring scorn on those of us who had our gamplay experience destroyed by it, not to mention the gloating that followed it. I wish I could take such satisfaction from knowing other people's game experience had been ruined but I'm not really wired up like that.

Oh, I almost forgot. In case you missed it, the only reason I replied to your post was that you answered a question from someone who had not experienced exploration prior to the FSS with a deliberately disingenuous answer, since you failed to note that the old 'honk' scan didn't actually reveal everything that the FSS does now. In fact, it used to reveal virtually nothing other than the system map, whereas your 'answer' would have left someone thinking that it was a five second shortcut to what the FSS now provides. It wasn't. You know that, the person you replied to would not have known that. Next time you get excited about a chance to parade your ssuperiority complex across the forum, at least temper it with a little honesty and openness.

Oh and...

That's just plain wrong. You still have to fly to each planet to DSS it if you are interested in tagging which was the only reason to do that in the old way too.

No it isn't. You need to fly to it and map it to get 'first mapped' tags. You get a 'first discovered' tag from just an FSS scan with a DSS equipped, without having to fly to the planet. Maybe you should pay a bit more attention. If you're going to dispute that let me know, I can send you screenshots of about 1,000 systems to prove it.

Edit: In fact here you go, I just cashed this in as a little treat for you.

Spoiler

Tell me, bearing in mind what I said above, do you imagine that I flew 4,000 ls into that utterly unremarkable system to detail scan the most distant planet? Yet amazingly enough it has a first discovered tag.

 

[aRJay]

You pressed a button for five seconds and it then shows you every planet in the system.

You then flew close to each planet to get the rest of the information the FSS gives us, there was no mapping.

Plus if you had been to cheap when outfitting to fit the Advanced version of the module you couldn't get the whole system in one go just the nearest 500Ls or 1000Ls IIRC depending on module.

 

[Florenus]

80% of this game is grinding or farming in some form or another, technicalities aside, it's still something I carried out and didn't enjoy, no one forced me to do it but myself, it doesn't invalidate the fact it was my least enjoyable thing to do with Elite.

I was trying to say that "grinding" is more a gameplay style than activity.
You're basically saying that your least enjoyable Elite activity was the way you were playing the game.

If you're just enjoying game activities, doing all kinds of stuff for the sake of doing it and then you reach some "milestone", then it's hardly grinding. If you set yourself to reach some goal by repeatedly and mindlessly doing one thing, because it's the most efficient way of achieving what you want, then it is grinding and it has little to do with game activities, but a lot with how you approached the game.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

For all of you where combat is the least fun activity, I would recommend you try another space game with the initials NMS for now, while we wait for future features on this game.

It's too bad that this game seems to have a stark division between the warriors and the explorers.

Nah, I like it a bit advanced, but without the crazy grindwall they goalposted in front of the action in ED. It was good enough before the power creep - after it just became a busy job.

 

[Riverside]

I was trying to say that "grinding" is more a gameplay style than activity.
You're basically saying that your least enjoyable Elite activity was the way you were playing the game.

If you're just enjoying game activities, doing all kinds of stuff for the sake of doing it and then you reach some "milestone", then it's hardly grinding. If you set yourself to reach some goal by repeatedly and mindlessly doing one thing, because it's the most efficient way of achieving what you want, then it is grinding and it has little to do with game activities, but a lot with how you approached the game.

That definition seems fair enough to me. I think the phrase means different things to different people. Lots of stuff is repetitive, that's a gameplay element game designers call Grind. Doing something you don't enjoy to unlock something for the sake if it is probably the glass half empty definition many players mean, including Max (and me tbh).

 

[House0fDerp]

I was trying to say that "grinding" is more a gameplay style than activity.
You're basically saying that your least enjoyable Elite activity was the way you were playing the game.

If you're just enjoying game activities, doing all kinds of stuff for the sake of doing it and then you reach some "milestone", then it's hardly grinding. If you set yourself to reach some goal by repeatedly and mindlessly doing one thing, because it's the most efficient way of achieving what you want, then it is grinding and it has little to do with game activities, but a lot with how you approached the game.

Efficiency is certainly a factor, but I tend to find it's a factor incentivized by how milestones are laid out and comparative effort to get them. If a player can run 1 massacre in an hour for 2% rank or 100 data missions that same hour for 3 full ranks I'd say the design is probably going to influence play decisions, moreso if the milestone unlock is desirable. Not sure if it's still as bad as that post board flipping but it was that realization that got me all in on the "grind" for a bit.

And it's still a bit of a (thankfully rare) grind for surface mats to me as there is no alternative solution to mining or surface prospecting.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

You then flew close to each planet to get the rest of the information the FSS gives us, there was no mapping.

Mostly pointless information. The only reason to fly up to none landables in the old method was for photos and tags, that hasn't changed. The only reason to fly to landable planets are the above as well as exploring the surface, again that hasn't changed. You still need to fly to them to do that

Plus if you had been too cheap when outfitting to fit the Advanced version of the module you couldn't get the whole system in one go just the nearest 500Ls or 1000Ls IIRC depending on module.

That's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Mostly pointless information. The only reason to fly up to none landables in the old method was for photos and tags, that hasn't changed. The only reason to fly to landable planets are the above as well as exploring the surface, again that hasn't changed. You still need to fly to them to do that


That's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing.

I'll never understand the salt dispensed over this. People can still fly up to planets and 'discover' them if they dont like the fss. This who would prefer to see if the system is worth deeper inspection before flying all the way through it can. Its like they have this mindset of 'if i dont want to use this, you shouldnt have the option to use it'. Its like some kind of spoiled kid syndrome to an extent

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Max. I'm not telling you you're wrong to like the thing. We did this at length in the thread back when they announced it.

Please do me the courtesy of not telling me I'm 'doing it wrong' or 'failing to adapt'.

How many duds did I discover with the old system? Plenty. The difference was that it took less than a minute to discover them. What you never seem to have grasped is that like you, I play games for enjoyment. An entire play session discovering nothing of any interest to me is not enjoyable, or at least significantly less enjoyable than it used to be and it is the significant reduction in the number of systems it's possible to get an overview of that is the cause of that for me. There is nothing at all that I can do to increase that number.

Unfortunately that is what exploration has always been about. It's not instant gratification. Do you think explorers of old new exactly what was there before they went. Of course not, they had to discover it. Now we have to do the same. Exploration should never have been the wizzbang thing it was originally.

As to how you are exploring, your the one that's saying you are not enjoying it anymore, all I am saying is maybe change the way you explore instead of desperately trying to keep it the same as before. At the end of the day the choice is yours, it's not my problem, it's yours.

I don't care how many planets you have found fascinating because it should be clear by now that maybe we just don't find the same things interesting. I'm happy that you're having such a great time with it, really I am, but stop talking about 'adaping to new mechanics' as if there's something I can do to change the issue that I have explained very clearly on more occasions than I care to remember. There isn't - the game has changed and I'm well aware of that. I can't suddenly start to find things interesting that I don't actually find interesting just because of that though.

If you pigeon hole yourself, then that's what's going to happen unfortunately. I probably do find what you like interesting, but I also like to find a whole heap of other stuff too. I'm not sure why you only like a tiny part of exploration, but again that's an issue you have.

I have no idea how much time you spend exploring, if you did DW2 I imagine it's quite a lot. I don't care in the slightest how my stats stack up against yours for exploration but I'm coming up on 20,000 systems visited, have just gone over a million light years travelled and have earned just over a billion credits from exploration (with about another 500m of data to sell as of today), the vast majority of it earned before exploration payouts got increased and before passenger missions gave exploration rank. I already had my Elite rank by then. I'm not some noob at it, nor am I someone whose opinion deserves to be invalidated just because it doesn't happen to coincidce with yours.

I'm still on my way back from DW2, so I've been out for over a year. As to your cash amount or your rank, that's not my concern.

I'm sick to the back teeth of condescending replies from people about this. If that's all you have, do me a favour and don't bother responding because believe me, I already know what you have to say about it. I remember it freom the month or two that you and a few others spent pouring scorn on those of us who had our gamplay experience destroyed by it, not to mention the gloating that followed it. I wish I could take such satisfaction from knowing other people's game experience had been ruined but I'm not really wired up like that.

The words Pot, kettle and black come to mind. But as it goes I'm not trying to be condescending. Your the one that replied to me.

Oh, I almost forgot. In case you missed it, the only reason I replied to your post was that you answered a question from someone who had not experienced exploration prior to the FSS with a deliberately disingenuous answer, since you failed to note that the old 'honk' scan didn't actually reveal everything that the FSS does now. In fact, it used to reveal virtually nothing other than the system map, whereas your 'answer' would have left someone thinking that it was a five second shortcut to what the FSS now provides. It wasn't. You know that, the person you replied to would not have known that. Next time you get excited about a chance to parade your ssuperiority complex across the forum, at least temper it with a little honesty and openness.

There was nothing disingenuous about it. I said it how it is. You pressed a button for five seconds and you had the whole system mapped out and exactly what type of planets where there. That's what happened in the old way.

No it isn't. You need to fly to it and map it to get 'first mapped' tags. You get a 'first discovered' tag from just an FSS scan with a DSS equipped, without having to fly to the planet. Maybe you should pay a bit more attention. If you're going to dispute that let me know, I can send you screenshots of about 1,000 systems to prove it.

Edit: In fact here you go, I just cashed this in as a little treat for you.

Spoiler

Tell me, bearing in mind what I said above, do you imagine that I flew 4,000 ls into that utterly unremarkable system to detail scan the most distant planet? Yet amazingly enough it has a first discovered tag.

Difficult to tell. My home internet is down so can only see a tiny image on my phone.

As to tags, first mapped gets you more cash, takes more effort therefore has now taken over from the old first discovered tags. I dont give a rat's backside about the new first discovered tags, but if I see someone has mapped a really distant planet, then I take my hat of for themnas they have made the effort, like the old first discovered tags.

But as it goes, I do enjoy discovering the system myself using the FSS, but I would much prefer if some of the information was left for the new DSS. I'm not happy the the new DSS is only used for finding POIs and mapped tags.

 

[SciTrekker]

Interacting with any list within any of the game's UI.

 

[Riverside]

I'll never understand the salt dispensed over this. People can still fly up to planets and 'discover' them if they dont like the fss. This who would prefer to see if the system is worth deeper inspection before flying all the way through it can. Its like they have this mindset of 'if i dont want to use this, you shouldnt have the option to use it'. Its like some kind of spoiled kid syndrome to an extent

What you describe works in tagged systems, it doesn't work in untagged systems any more (unless parallax searching by eye). I completely agree that if it worked that way throughout the galaxy I would not have an issue with it, because that would be the same or a buff compared to what we had before the 3.3 update.

 

[Winterwalker]

Least enjoyable elite activity .. ?

REBUY !!!!

It's scary .. and you're already in shock. Do I win five credits?