Official Forums = Depressing

[Loriath]

I really think that they chose their words poorly when they said "3-D Printing" as far as fighters go.

It is more like your purchasing a bay that has a fighter and enough spare parts to build X amount more, then you will have to restock. Restocking is what we are used to. Run out of Multicannon ammo, restock. Destroy your Buggy, restock. Run out of Chaff, Restock.

They have also mentioned that in the future we will be able to have Buggy Bays that will have enough parts to create X amounts of replacements.

If they just stayed away from the "Printing" idea, there would not be the same response to this idea. Yes, it is the easiest way to explain it, but does not work well in the established mechanics we already had.

As far as the rest of the forums, take a look at how many people actually have registered accounts on the forums, compared to the approximate number of players. It is a small amount, just as Mobius is a small amount of the player base. And as usual, the whiniest, loudest, complainers are the most prominent.

FD is well aware based on THEIR numbers who is doing what as far as Solo/Group/Open, how many participate in CG's, CqC and all the other stats that show what people are actually doing in game. Based on this I trust what they have planned based on their "Plan" for the future as well as their love for the game.

I bitch about the game all the time with the rest of the A-Team. Its normal for us. But that does not mean we don't love the game or want to keep playing. I am sure that there are mechanics or details that everyone here can complain about. Unfortunately, there seems to be a huge wave of Negativity on the internet in general that is Loud and Prevalent even though it is a small portion, but it level of prominence is much larger than its numbers.

FD has changed the way things work based on feedback before, and will do it again. They have continuously adjusted the Engineer blueprints and such with each patch based on feedback. It is the way they have done it since day one. They will tweak everything as they go, and they should. It makes it better, not easier, but better. Yes, the short Beta's and seemed issues that get ignored are a pain, as are re-occurring bugs and other things that affect the game that you play (and trust me, the issues that one person has with the game may never pop up for someone else, or something that you never see is killing game play for another and is normal in games today).

Things like Crime and punishment need an overhaul, on that I think even FD can agree, as do many other parts of the game. That is the beauty of it though. Unlike a game that is released, bug patched and then next couple of years a new, unconnected game called the same "+ number" is released and the old stuff is forgotten, FD is iterating the game. Take the Outfitting and Mission boards in Engineers. One look at that and you can see that the rest of the station menus needed an overhaul to make it feel cohesive and less old and janky. Now we are getting it. They are constantly improving the game for all of us. Yes, we can expect issues, but I can see that they are working towards a goal.

Instant Ship transfers may sound like busted, but it is better than NO ship transfers. Same with Module Storage. First lets get these sorts of features into the game, then tweak them. Better than not having them at all in my opinion. They left us a loophole for transfering modules because of the fact we had no storage. That was better than nothing and people were pissed when, at one patch, we suddenly lost 10% on selling modules back (Like you do with ships) until we spoke up and said that it was not a good idea, and they changed it back. They do listen, and it is not even the loud screamy voices that get heard sometimes.


Even with all that being said, Elite is still amazing. Remember, they are not using an off the shelf game engine, but developed the Cobra Engine on their own, and as such, sometimes the changes they need to make to get things tweak can be huge. Star Citizen is based on the Cryengine, but I bet they have ripped it apart and rewrote so much of it by this point that I would be surprised if more than 25% of it is original code base. Cobra was designed from the ground up to allow FD to do all this. Cryengine was never designed for things such as spaceflight physics.

They are also developing for 2 platforms now (regardless of the fact that XBox is now PC architecture and seems to run windows 10) and they have committed to keeping the platforms in sync. That means they have to follow MS rules for updating and patching and pushing to servers and getting all the telemetry back to improve that side, so though we might see it as slow on the PC side for fixes, remember that they now have to test for 5+ environments now (Mac, PC Horizons, Non-Horizons, Xbox, Internal Next Patch build, internal Next Release builds and maybe even more development environments such as 2.3, 2.4, etc..) to make sure that their "Fix" or change does not hose everything else. This is as well to changes they are making to Cobra Engine to allow them to do what they want in the future without breaking things down the line.

They may be an "Independent" Studio, but their undertaking just for Elite is a HELL of a lot larger than most people realise. On top of that, they are also making Planet Coaster, which is a separate development team from Elite, but also uses the same engine. And though you may not be interested in Planet Coaster, it is going to be as Big as Elite is for the fans of that Genre. So this "Independent" studio is not as small as one may think.

[smartroad]

. Instead of magically getting transported to a station when you "die", have some escape pod game play - be captured by slavers or rescued by S&R or other players, or rescue other players.

Why not have an escape capsule like Elite 2/3. It could have an insane FSD range (I am thinking 100ly) given it has such a low mass and fuel scoop so you can get back to a station and then rebuy. Once multi crew comes around then there could be the option to board that ship and be rescued.

[smartroad]

Personally I think a lot of the problems here are due to DB originally going on about how Elite was based in science. It was the reason why we don't have artificial gravity (other then spinning stations) or tractor beams etc. All because DB seemed to want a believable universe.

Sure there are always going to be something's that have to be altered time wise for the sake of the game, instant loading of supplies or repair of the ship. However remember how FDEV have pretty much refused an auto-pilot because they wanted the player to feel the vastness of space? This instant ship transfer goes totally against it, let alone the point many have made on how this could be abused. Even a small delay, 1 second per LY could have added a real sense that the ship is travelling real distance, something that was important at the launch of the game. Transfer a ship 300LY? Wait 5 minutes for it to turn up, probably something you can do in the meantime, a mission, grabbing a cup of your favorite hot beverage. Hell they could have even had it appear on radar and you could watch it fly in and land in station! How cool would that have been!

Same with the fighters and as Loriath mentions, 3D printing is totally the wrong thing to call it. Saying that there is a bay of parts and hanger can use then to repair/(re)build a fighter or SRV would be much more believable given the current state of the apparent science in ED.

The whole conversation that is going on about all of this, for me, has nothing to do with science or fiction or fantasy, it is to do with believability within the established universe and these new additions do nothing to make them believable (for me) in their current state.

[GlobusDiablo]

...Because the world is full of dicks!

Amen Commander.

And, well, statistically speaking, roughly 50% are for sure... Right?...

[TorTorden]

I think we give FD too much credit.
I honestly think they are too incompetent to do better.
Interdictions suck because they don't know how to fix them.
Same with npcs and every other broken mechanic.

RNG, BGS isn't the hard complicated solution it's the opposite. An easy cop out.
The BGS might seem incredibly complex but it is really a fairly simple system that seem complex since it has been running in a large scale masquerading as complexity (which also explains why it never really worked in the first place)
Fd like most game devs don't take broken shit back to the drawing board and rethinking it but instead are playing hide the bugs.

[TorTorden]

If we want something more involved we can always switch to evochron.

Now that's a small development team

[Early Bird]

As smartroad said: "it is to do with believability within the established universe and these new additions do nothing to make them believable". That is the main point of the big majority of those who are against instant ship transfer. And for me also.

[Cometborne]

One tip for those worrying that instant ship transfers will break their immersion: Land on a random moon or planet, deploy your SRV. From within the SRV, launch the galaxy map and check how many of your ships are at the last station/outpost where you docked.

Dismiss your ship, and check that station/outpost again in the galaxy map after you get the "contact lost" message.

Issue a ship recall, and check that station/outpost again.

Feel free to repeat this test when several kLY outside the bubble.

This has been around since 2.0, and is just as believable as buying a Sidewinder at Jaques, hitting self-destruct, choosing the free Sidewinder, and being back in the bubble in a second. Or instant ship transfers.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

Personally I think a lot of the problems here are due to DB originally going on about how Elite was based in science. It was the reason why we don't have artificial gravity (other then spinning stations) or tractor beams etc. All because DB seemed to want a believable universe.

Yup. They had a premise and were heading down a path. Then they started veering off the path into the ridiculous. While I was expecting the game to become more of a simulation, and even harder and more detailed to play, instead it's becoming more arcadey and easier to go pew pew. It's not an immersion thing for me. It's just disappointing.

[Walter]

When getting involved with any form of fiction we’re on a spectrum of disbelief. At the one extreme we accept everything, forget everything else and get taken up by what’s being presented. At some point on the track to the other end of the range we close the book without finishing it, walk out of the movie or theatre, move on to the next album. Or stop playing the game.

Towards the end of the Kickstarter process David Braben said of the alpha version: “This is the game I want to play . . . it doesn’t feel like a game, it feels like a world I’m being brought into.” But he may have been biased.

The implementation of instant ship transfer is not, necessarily, a bad thing in itself, although it does stretch credulity. Those who are finding fault with parts of 2.2 are concerned not only with the essential suspension of belief, but also the knock-on effects on the logic and lore. Objectors include Obsidian Ant, Slopey and other forum moderators among others (hardly “whiners”, an expression that says more about the accuser than the accused). Suddenly they are finding themselves nearer to the other end of the disbelief spectrum where credibility can be stretched little further.

The lack of ferric commodities in the markets can be explained by one of Braben’s other comments in the same video : “All of these things we need to do right - it would be very easy to do them very poorly, and that would be my fear.”

All the irony was used up.