Player runs into alien life in Elite Dangerous (again) - General

I'd like to see an eventual lore-based countermeasure to the thargoid's AOE EMP that gives the opportunity to shoot and provoke one.

[QUOTE=Morbo!!!;52318267]I reinstalled Elite on a whim the other day. Booted up, configured my controls, then realised I'm at the arse-end of the galaxy with nothing to shoot, since the last time I played was during a community "PvP" (I use the term loosely - it was one of those things where you had to roleplay it in chat for an engagement to be "legit", snore) which failed spectacularly due to instancing. Anyway, I spent 2 hours getting to somewhere that wasn't nowhere, jumped in a nav beacon and found a guy with a bounty, then spent 15 minutes fighting a lone dumb AI ship whose shields just tanked whatever shots of mine would hit, only to eventually add 22k to my 3.1 million, and to then remember that everywhere in this game is the arse-end of nowhere. They somehow made combat boring. Maybe it's rose-tints seeing as I gained that 3 mil soloing anacondas in a Viper and there were some actual stakes, since it took a while to be able to afford a replacement should I have died. Even then it was hunting down bounties for the sake of hunting bounties. Once you're economically comfortable and you've upgraded your ship as far as it can go, there's no incentive to continue doing what you're doing. And I'm not interested in exploration or trading, nor am I interested in flying anything but fighters - and that's thrown out the window when it takes literal hours to get anywhere where anything remotely interesting is happening, and those places are just as barren and empty.[/QUOTE] I'm in the same boat. I have a fully kitted Imperial Clipper which hits way above its price tag. I have killed players in Anacondas which cost 10x what my ship costs, but something like an Anaconda is weeks or months of grinding away for me even if I wanted to upgrade. OK, so it only makes sense to keep the Clipper. So now I'm comfortable in a ship whose performance and visuals I like that can do anything I ask of it, and what do I have to do with it now? Grind towards a ship I don't want or need? There's no kind of story (forumdads say "MAKE UR OWN STORY :DDDD"), no sense of making a permanent mark on the universe, no sense of being part of anything no matter how many Imperial insignia I tack on my flight suit and ship.

This fidget spinner stuff is going too far

[QUOTE=Sgt Doom;52318061]It's gonna take quite a bit to get me back into E:D than some ultra-rare alien encounters that i'd need to grind my balls off to reach in an acceptable timeframe, when I can just watch youtube videos about it. It's a shame the game is so bloody gorgeous (in graphics, sound and overall immersion), and core combat and flight mechanics I enjoy (albeit w/ some tweaking here and there), when it's got this cancerous forumdad grind all around it like rotting whale blubber.[/QUOTE] Games that use grinding as the main mechanic suck grinding is NOT gameplay, all grinding does is artificially increase playtime in a dishonest way hell even a flawed game like elder scrolls online doesn't feel like you have to grind at all, its actually well paced in that regard. Whenever you see people grind it's never for leveling however, its pretty much always to mass-sell crafting materials [editline]6th June 2017[/editline] though I'm not aware of how bad the grind is in E:D but, it just isn't a mechanic

Part of me thinks the realistic feel of space being vast and needing to travel far to see anything pretty cool. In theory, it would make things really exciting when you finally came across it. I know if I tried this game though, I wouldn't get anywhere before just shelving it.

[QUOTE=J!NX;52318887]Games that use grinding as the main mechanic suck grinding is NOT gameplay, all grinding does is artificially increase playtime in a dishonest way hell even a flawed game like elder scrolls online doesn't feel like you have to grind at all, its actually well paced in that regard. Whenever you see people grind it's never for leveling however, its pretty much always to mass-sell crafting materials [editline]6th June 2017[/editline] though I'm not aware of how bad the grind is in E:D but, it just isn't a mechanic[/QUOTE]For example, for general combat and bounty-hunting to not be an exercise in self-flagellation and suffering (particularly against the AI), you need engineer-upgraded components to compete on the same level, rather than having to get the biggest ship to have a chance. Apart from being locked behind DLC, it also requires hideously-rare materials for the higher-level upgrades. These upgrades operate on RNG, e.g. an upgrade that increases power at the cost of heat and power will have +1 - +10% as the range for damage, +5-15% for heat and so on. You roll and see what happens, materials are consumed per roll. So to get a decent results can take many, many rolls. Which combined with rarity of materials at higher levels, and no place to store materials other than on the ship (no station-side storage of cargo), means a very long time. You also need to unlock engineers (requirements vary; some ask for just cash up-front, others want bounty vouchers, others want rare items etc.), and then grind rep with them to get access to their higher-level upgrades and be introduced to other engineers. To do so involves just rolling and rolling. Additionally there's potential special effects to things e.g. one might be extra armour-piercing for lasers. You can either rely on RNG, or trade in some of your rep to get the one you want. The credits grind to get high-end components to upgrade in the first place, particularly for larger ships, is quite the monumental beast in and of itself.

[QUOTE=Sgt Doom;52319062]For example, for general combat and bounty-hunting to not be an exercise in self-flagellation and suffering (particularly against the AI), you need engineer-upgraded components to compete on the same level, rather than having to get the biggest ship to have a chance. Apart from being locked behind DLC, it also requires hideously-rare materials for the higher-level upgrades. These upgrades operate on RNG, e.g. an upgrade that increases power at the cost of heat and power will have +1 - +10% as the range for damage, +5-15% for heat and so on. You roll and see what happens, materials are consumed per roll. So to get a decent results can take many, many rolls. Which combined with rarity of materials at higher levels, and no place to store materials other than on the ship (no station-side storage of cargo), means a very long time. You also need to unlock engineers (requirements vary; some ask for just cash up-front, others want bounty vouchers, others want rare items etc.), and then grind rep with them to get access to their higher-level upgrades and be introduced to other engineers. To do so involves just rolling and rolling. Additionally there's potential special effects to things e.g. one might be extra armour-piercing for lasers. You can either rely on RNG, or trade in some of your rep to get the one you want. The credits grind to get high-end components to upgrade in the first place, particularly for larger ships, is quite the monumental beast in and of itself.[/QUOTE] They did remove part of the engineer materials requirements recently though, and changed how it affects your cargo space. As you can imagine, the Forumdads pitched an [I]almighty[/I] fucking fit about these changes but I loved them. made it much easier to access engineer upgrades, and some of them are just plain fun. Others, like FSD range increase, are just super useful and help reduce the warp-sun-warp-sun-warp cycle a bit I do love everything about the sound design in E:D though, from the sound FX to the different audio normalization options you get in the main menu. The "night time" mode is really useful on headphones, since it reduces the dynamic range so much

[QUOTE=J!NX;52317427]Tbh I'd love to see a horror game based around the idea of planet to planet travel where you're being hunted by the most fucking horrifying abomination possible You could be sent so deep into space that you'd be forced to rely on practically ancient multi-generational earth ships that have been dead for hundreds of years, in a region of space that humans mysteriously died a long time ago in. so far away from anyone able to help you that you're not just alone, you're possibly the only human that exists for hundreds of light years and even with your faster than light warp drive you're alone and being hunted, desperately hiding station to station as you read up on how a massive multi-planet human civilization was completely wiped clean[/QUOTE] Sounds like Knights of Sidonia to me.

I've never heard of a community making me want to play a game less than this and I thought about playing rust once.

Sounds like if the forumdads really got what they wanted then this would just be Wurm in space.

I think this is relevant for this thread. [video=youtube;FwoXcpqp3Ew]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwoXcpqp3Ew[/video]

from the comments [quote=ParanoeX] bleh, FD should've made the trailer more atmospheric.. now all the Call of Duty-kind fans will buy this game expecting some dimwitted fast-paced action game, giving negative reviews all throughout the internet ultimately reaching the devs in the end who then decide to make Elite Dangerous into something more straight forward, ruining the game and all of the future releases, thus turning the longtime fans away and welcoming 12 year olds into the community whose vocabularity only consists of "fucking noob" and 100 similar phrases•[/quote] forumdad detected

This is the first time I've heard the phrase "forumdad", the way you guys use it seems to be counter to the supposed definition [quote=Urban Dictionary]A male, usually with a wife, kids, and a job; who posts on video game related forums, reddit, and image boards. Forumdads usually complain about how hard things are in the game they're currently playing, because they only have 2 hours a week to play it. [I]Bro, have you seen all of the Forumdads complaining about not being able to afford a Vulture in Elite: Dangerous?[/I][/quote] whereas you all seem to be using it to describe the people that willingly sink literal years into the game and demand that it be a slow-paced grind for the sake of everyone's misery. Anyway, I'm all for sinking literal years into games I enjoy. Elite isn't one of them though. I don't like taking literally 20 minutes to get to the one station for lightyears to refuel, I don't like having no reason to participate in combat beyond gaining currency which I have nothing to spend on other than ships I don't want to fly and would take a lot more to afford. I don't care about the political landscape of the galaxy because it doesn't inform the gameplay beyond which systems have ships you're allowed to kill. I don't like pretty much the entirety of combat being condensed into nav beacons and asteroid fields, with the odd few events that then determine if you're allowed to shoot that sub-faction's ships or not. If they ditched the whole "Ooh, real-scale galaxy full of fuckin nothing" and condensed all the points of interest into maybe 100 Freelancer-style systems it'd be a million times more enjoyable. When 99% of gameplay is travelling from point A-B to perform mundane task X, Y or Z, enjoyable is on the other side of the spectrum. You can have depth and avoid instant gratification without having to resort to making the game boring.

I picked up the term from elix so if he's misusing it it's not my fault...

[QUOTE=SirJon;52318154]I've tried numerous space games because it seems like my kinda thing, but i've only been hooked on Darkstar One, which is like babbys first space game :v: I tried to get into X3 but couldn't get past the learning curve[/QUOTE] Have you ever played Freelancer? It's basically the game that Darkstar One was emulating and has the same control scheme plus similar mechanics. It was actually criticized by the space sim crowd in its day for being too simple compared to what its contemporaries in the genre had become. (Freespace 2 is a good example, which is [I]excellent[/I], but a very different game.) With hindsight though, I feel like Freelancer was very forward looking with its design. Games to this day emulate Freelancer's control scheme and portrayal of space flight with Everspace being the most recent and polished example. But yeah, if you liked Darkstar One you'll like Freelancer. Fun story, great universe with a lot of character, a ton of stuff to explore, and solid gameplay.

When the word's used in [URL="https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1457319"]the Elite thread[/URL] and in the greater ED community, the forumdads are the guys who were there in 1984 with BBC Micros, and when the Kickstarter rolled around in 2012, they were now middle-aged (or older) and financially stable and well-off enough to let nostalgia steer their credit cards. They're the ones who insist on the game being kept "pure", i.e. basically a remake of the 1984 original. For example, this means there's no in-game solution for checking trading markets remotely; you're expected to [I]compile the data by hand like you did with a notepad and pen in the 80s[/I] or, more realistically, use one of several community-made websites that automate this tedious bullshit. Now, you'd think this wouldn't be that big of a deal, except Frontier did something particular with their Kickstarter. The higher your pledge tier, the earlier you got access to development builds (if you paid enough to get pre-launch release access at all), with access to the first public playble builds held ransom for the most. Paying more means being able to give feedback to the devs at more nascent, formative stages of beta and alpha. Now remember how the original's fans are middle-aged with cash to spare, and you can see how wish-fulfillment sets in early and deep. The forumdad term is basically used to describe the segment of the playerbase that is ruining it for everyone else. Only a forumdad (in my definition) would define "not wanting to inexpertly grind for 20 hours in my pleb sled for a ship" as being the behaviour that is ruining the game. I can't prove a forumdad wrote that definition, but that's the first time I've seen it mean the opposite of the meaning I understand it to have.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;52322010]When the word's used in [URL="https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1457319"]the Elite thread[/URL] and in the greater ED community, the forumdads are the guys who were there in 1984 with BBC Micros, and when the Kickstarter rolled around in 2012, they were now middle-aged (or older) and financially stable and well-off enough to let nostalgia steer their credit cards. They're the ones who insist on the game being kept "pure", i.e. basically a remake of the 1984 original. For example, this means there's no in-game solution for checking trading markets remotely; you're expected to [I]compile the data by hand like you did with a notepad and pen in the 80s[/I] or, more realistically, use one of several community-made websites that automate this tedious bullshit. Now, you'd think this wouldn't be that big of a deal, except Frontier did something particular with their Kickstarter. The higher your pledge tier, the earlier you got access to development builds (if you paid enough to get pre-launch release access at all), with access to the first public playble builds held ransom for the most. Paying more means being able to give feedback to the devs at more nascent, formative stages of beta and alpha. Now remember how the original's fans are middle-aged with cash to spare, and you can see how wish-fulfillment sets in early and deep. The forumdad term is basically used to describe the segment of the playerbase that is ruining it for everyone else. Only a forumdad (in my definition) would define "not wanting to inexpertly grind for 20 hours in my pleb sled for a ship" as being the behaviour that is ruining the game. I can't prove a forumdad wrote that definition, but that's the first time I've seen it mean the opposite of the meaning I understand it to have.[/QUOTE] Yeah, I got that impression. The funny thing is, I'm one of those people who would be lobbying for maintaining a game series' purity. I perceive many of my favourite franchises (Eg. Rainbow Six) to have been "ruined" by catering to a different or watered-down style of gameplay to appeal to a wider demographic, and it's a shame the original niche formula of such games are lost to that. Though I consider myself pretty patient when it comes to the pace of games in general, Elite's is glacial, but I can empathise with their viewpoint. I'll never stop regretting paying £40 for this vast expanse of nothingness, I think the only real reason I did despite what people were saying about it is because I was looking at it from the same viewpoint - Kids new to the series or genre wanting instant gratification and no depth. I guess I'll just have to wait for Star Citizen and see how that turns out, but I don't have my hopes up for it either. [QUOTE=Why485;52321959]Have you ever played Freelancer? It's basically the game that Darkstar One was emulating and has the same control scheme plus similar mechanics. It was actually criticized by the space sim crowd in its day for being too simple compared to what its contemporaries in the genre had become. (Freespace 2 is a good example, which is [I]excellent[/I], but a very different game.) With hindsight though, I feel like Freelancer was very forward looking with its design. Games to this day emulate Freelancer's control scheme and portrayal of space flight with Everspace being the most recent and polished example. But yeah, if you liked Darkstar One you'll like Freelancer. Fun story, great universe with a lot of character, a ton of stuff to explore, and solid gameplay.[/QUOTE] Both Freelancer and Freespace 2 are still the top dogs in space games if you ask me. FS2 is entirely combat-focused and mission-based, while FL is open-world with trading and all that. Both are extremely accessible, easy to pick up but hard to master, and both have single-player storylines. Excellent games, the pair of them. I've been meaning to try out a relatively obscure one, Tachyon: The Fringe. It seems half-way between the two mechanically. And if you're looking for something different, try Starsector. It's a top-down affair, with all kinds of cool shit like ships that can phase-jump around the battlespace, all manner of ships from supercarriers down to scrap-frigates, and it has a very dedicated modding community who've put out multiple entire factions. This video's outdated, the game has a boatload more features at this time - Scavenging, exploration, procedural generation of the universe outside the core worlds, a simplified (For the better, trust me) skill tree. But, it should give you a good impression. [video=youtube;UTCpVY80Bpc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTCpVY80Bpc[/video]

The thing is I think you can maintain Elite's core classic gameplay without making it so mindnumbingly [I]boring.[/I] The original Elite was pushing the boundaries of the systems it was running on and it was [I]fun[/I] because the scale of it was new. That's what made the game special. That's what Frontier needed to take away from the originals - the innovation and the (relative) depth. E:D could be much much more than it is. The framework is there, but they won't do anything with it because they'd rather lose the majority of their playerbase than piss off a specific minority. I really want to like E:D and I keep giving it second and third and fourth chances but nothing meaningful has changed about the gameplay since the game was new except they "tweaked" it to make progression take even longer. Star Citizen will be everything I wanted out of Elite and more. Maybe in 2034, but eventually...

Sounds a lot like eve used to be, until CCP finally said fuck off and made it all much easier and fun for everyone. Not saying its perfect for everyone or that some decisions arent questionable but its had more players than years before and its more enjoyable than its ever been. Same thing will happen with elite. Just wait. [editline]7th June 2017[/editline] Talking about asshole vocal hardcore players.

I've been playing E:D since the early beta a few years ago. Picked it up around 2014. The problem with Elite right now is there's tons of simple quality of life changes that could be implemented but so far haven't because of these bittervets shitting up the forums. I can understand where they're coming from but come the fuck on, it's the future with spaceships, why do I have to GO TO A STATION light years away to find out they don't have a gun I want? Why can't I just check it remotely? Why do I have to supercruise ____EVERYWHERE____ when I land in a system? Why can't I just do a little micro-jump to get through most of the gap? Why not have supercruise for a little bit around the destination just to give players a chance to interdict you. What's with the retarded acceleration mechanics behind supercruise? Why does it take AGES to reach any reasonable speed and then no sooner than you hit a good speed you're now slowing down like a net caught you? Why is it that I overshoot literally everything in supercruise if I don't throttle down at the exact right time? They don't even need to change supercruise mechanics if I could just search for trade inventory remotely. The very fact that it is a real, actual chore to travel anywhere is honestly, ridiculous. ONLY because of this. Why the fuck would I want to spend 25 minutes heading somewhere just to find out they don't even have what I want? Who the fuck would want to do this? Why would you want to do this? My only other complaints is how ultimately lifeless the game feels. I don't particularly mind the vastness of the game, I think it's a novel concept. My problem with it is there's very little reason to get people out there. If we could remotely search for inventory, and more importantly, if people could BUY outfittings for ships at one station and SELL them at another station light years away to provide a stock for that station...that would be awesome. That would be the first step in making this game actually feel alive, and it would give a reason for players to branch out of the capsule. The "capsule" being the initial grouping of around 200 systems from the early beta. It seems people still haven't moved out of there, outside of explorers. If they just let me search station stock remotely...that'd be a big plus for me and I bet for a lot of other people. If they implemented a system where actual players could buy actually useful items like ship equipment and sell it elsewhere at their own prices, that would give the forumdads something to do. They could still make their stupid ledgers and be a fundamentally useful and necessary piece of the game. It could be just like EVE. Certain stations sell specific goods but players can pollinate other stations with those goods, and sell them at whatever prices they want. It would create a convenience/cost model. Would you rather go 150ly to save a couple thousand credits or just go buy the more expensive thing that's only 10ly away? This change would be seriously monumental. I mean, think about it. Eventually people would figure out what trade routes are popular, imagine how many traders would be getting ganked. It would create actual emergent gameplay, you're ganking that trader to get those sweet C4 multicannons he's carrying. You want that shit for yourself. Imagine it, traders start hiring actual players to protect them. Right now that doesn't happen...there are actual player traders but what they buy and sell are....useless items outside of generating money only for them. It has no tangible impact on the actual game. I don't particularly mind the combat, I actually thoroughly enjoy it. I would like it a lot more if there were more opportunities to be creative in how you use your equipment and the ship itself. I remember seeing videos of some PVPers using torpedos on Sidewinders I think, they basically had them fit out to generate as small of a thermal profile as possible and hid in an asteroid belt with silent running, occasionally flipping the thrusters on so they could stay behind asteroids and avoid visual acquisition from their target (their target was some other player in an Anaconda). They waited for the shields to go down and then got out of silent running and went straight for the anaconda and popped it. Because of silent running the player had no idea they were there until it was too late. I want the game to give me reasons to do shit like that. I don't care if it's against NPCs, I want more to do than these arbitrary binary choices of "who will you fight for". I want more than these "community goals". Despite all of my problems, I can not deny that the game has definitely improved since the beta. And IMO, for the better. It'll probably happen sooner or later. Regardless of the bittervet forumdads. Those people are NOT the majority of the playerbase anymore. Frontier should be paying less attention to this and focus more on the stuff they want to do with the game at this point. There have been a number of features planned from the Kickstarter that simply got thrown out because of the bittervet forumdads complaining. They knew these features would be there when they backed it, I don't understand it. Micro-jumping was one of them.

I still enjoy ED. I'm an explorer ship and I just play the game as a cool space sight seeing game with occasional scuffles with pirates. Its a good thing to relax to. However that being said, it takes me FOREVER to get new things for my ship as, being an explorer with no cargo space and an unwillingness to fight often, money is SO SLOW. I still have fun, but oh man that grind.

I gave up on this game when I realized the only way to make money easily was to be a space delivery boy. If you play the game solo like me then the "kill this dude" missions are fucking impossible because you're always outnumbered and outgunned and the ones that AREN'T like that have shit payouts. "Hey go kill this guy 5 star systems away for 10k credits" Fuck you. Meanwhile you can make 100x that just by shipping illegal shit which is easy as fuck.

[QUOTE=joshuadim;52317562]Is the game any good? This makes me interested[/QUOTE] The game is very good, but it's definitely nothing like what this video paints it to be. When people say it's a grindfest, they can't overstate how much of a grindfest it is. You have to enjoy the simple mechanics and gameplay loops of the game to play it more than a week. You grind tedious tasks to get money to get a new ship so you can do the same tedious tasks but probably better payouts to get a more expensive ship. With that said, I fucking love the game. I just feel like I need 4-5 hours straight if I want to accomplish anything worthwhile. That and trying to play with a friend is somehow less fun than by yourself.

I keep wanting to get back into the game but as a space pirate and just cause havoc and chaos everywhere. Maybe even hunt down forum dads who are trading. The only problem with that though is that I can't lose my vulture more than a few times and I have to really make a profit from it.