Postby Lee Archer » Fri Apr 28, 2017 3:36 pm
Who wins, who's loses, follow the money.
Valve is desperate to monetize the extraordinary mods and services their player community has evolved into.
Much of the mod community prefers independence even in lieu of partnership income.
Whilst Valve cannot supply he manpower required to create the communities expansive playable mods.
Frontier can supply the services provided by most third party spread sheet sites. They have the first hand data...
Why don't they?
Strange situation for a new user googling to make sense of this game/ sim.
Kind of a childish, work the dungeon master, behind big daddy's back, situation where the community collates information to shorten hunting and pecking resource management / time sink activities- and also some straight up asset comparison / ship/ equipment/ module analysis and manual replacing training.
Why doesn't FD supply this themselves?
Well, I see some gambling- esque, free to play slot machine aspects creeping in, and definitely with no boots on the ground fps mode and no historical campaign there's pressure to produce more and more expensive new content that may get stale sooner than later so....
Do these third party services work for or against FDs development strategy?
Facilitating player advancement, shortening the grind, creating a strange emergent gameplay that is a bit of player character revolution.
Such a huge amount of playable hours would come with player to player to npc interaction. Then the asset managed is conversation not entire ships.
We can't even exchange commodities without some sexy ejecting and scooping, why not, what does that tell you about FD game dev strategy.
I don't know, but I spent ~$200 to try out ED and the total amount of real content is relatively small and time consuming to access.
Not A Complaint. I'm retired, got time, got VR, haven't even got to combat yet and I'm still fairly engrossed in the discovery process.
That said it would be less entertaining without the community smoothing out some of the rougher stretches of trial and error, blind searching through a very large Galaxy.
Oh, many of these third party sites are income earning and do not require the enormous time a true game mod would imply. They collate community info like any forum.
I'm optimistic that the final chapter will blow the doors off these issues
But what do youse think, I've spent quite a bit now time with creatives and coders so I have a backstage perspective to most of this.
Without the third party sources I simply wouldn't have bothered with the engineers beyond first or second level- silly wake exceptionals and such, hah, really, sounds like warcrafting...heh. But still loving the spaceships stars and asteroid fields- oh my.