Elite: Dangerous

[Bradylama]

I can sympathise with the people who cannot get a stable enough internet connection

I can never understand this. I live in a fucking post communist country, and our internet connection is rock solid. I get it if your internet is not super fast, or it disconnects sometimes, but it is hard to believe that the connection is lost so frequently that you cannot play a game like this. Or maybe they live in Etiopia I don't know.

I live in a never communist country, and they've given up on wiring most regions because they deem it too expensive. We don't treat the internet as a public utility here, which means in many places the fastest connection you can get is wireless.

Fortunately I'm in a region with Cable access.

 

[bonescraper]

months of grinding to get the best ships.

There is no such thing as "best ship", there are only more expensive ones. A 150,000 million cr Anaconda can be taken out in a moderately upgraded 120,000 cr Viper. And NPC Anacondas can be taken out in a stock Sidewinder.

Once again you show your total lack of knowledge about the subject at hand. Let me guess. You're trying to earn your Kool Kredits knowing that most people here didn't play the game, and can't confront your bullshit with actual facts, is that right? How does it feel to make stuff up every single time you post in this thread? If i were you, i'd be quite embarrased to know taht there are people who can call me out on this bullshit.

With that said, i'm done answering to you fools. Bottom line, if you don't like the game, don't buy it. Stop making your elaborate false rationalizations, and stop crying like little cunts. It's hard to have a proper conversation in here about the actual game.

 

[Raapys]

- I think you and a lot of the other upset people here have a rather strange take on this. I've been playing this for a while and it feels like a modern space sim with quasi-newtonian physics and great graphics. I can mess around in it and have fun on my own terms, so long as I am connected to the internet. Which I always am and pretty much anyone I can think of on my friends list also have stable, permanent connections.

What, exactly is it that makes you unable to load the game, select "solo" and then pretend you'r eplaying a single player game? sure, if you stumble upon a really good trade route, it might get depleted because someone else finds it. That just encourages exploration.

And what about if my wireless falls down for a short time(which is a common occurrence since wireless sucks)? What if a fuse blows or power is otherwise disrupted while I'm playing? What if someone's at the door? Dead, dead, dead. Multiplayer players expect this, solo players don't, but will have it nonetheless. What if I want to reload?

As you may recall, I've encouraged people who are genuinely upset to ask for a refund and don't play the game.

Yes, but going back to waiting for another 20 years tends to make people rage.

Solo mode and there's no MMO. That the game could be playing by MMO rules is speculation at best. Since FD is not getting monthly subscriptons they've no incentive to make the endgame a grindfest.

I should probably make this in nice coloured text so people who skim the posts notice it: If you play solo mode, there are no other players in your game. It is exactly the same as playing single player if you have an always-online connection. The bandwidth requirements for playing in solo mode are small enough that it will run on a crappy college dormitory network. Unless you're on a thirdworldian dialup, your argument is invalid.

Speculation? Really? Have you ever played a free to play game before? They have just as much incentive to keep their players playing as a subscription based service. That means making it time-consuming.

And about the nicely colored part; connection loss.

An anaconda takes about 2 weeks if you know what you're doing. That's the most expensive ship in the game.

Difficult to answer this one without knowing if it's two weeks with 24/7 grinding or just 2-3 hours a day. But for comparison, it didn't take days to get the most expensive ship in Elite/Frontier.

That's speculation again. If they do start fucking a lot of stuff up, we can agree it's bad. But so far their changes have consistently been for the better. Again, speaking from the experience I've had with patches in the betas.

That's great, and hopefully they'll keep it that way. But speaking from personal experience all devs of this kind of games make bad decisions sooner or later.

I'll grant you that one. I can count the # of games I felt needed modding on one hand, but I can see why other people would want that.

Fair enough. Personally I think a lot of great things have come from modding open-world games where content is more procedural than scripted.

There haven't been any for the entire beta period, save for 1-2 hours when they pushed out a major patch that added new star systems, ships, models and the like. Several months, no downtimes.

Presumably they'll need a weekly schedule once they actually get some players playing though?

If that doesn't appeal to people, they should totally go get a refund and stop crapping up the thread. But as you can see, several of your complaints are either speculation or completely disregarding what's actually going on in the beta.

Yes, a lot of it is speculation. But it's not wild speculation, it's educated speculation based on previous experience. Sound and logical. To hyperbole it a bit; you don't know for sure that the sun's gonna be there tomorrow, but you have a pretty good idea. Your approach seems a bit naive to me. I always expect the worst, and I'm almost never surprised.

At the end of the day, the people who've been actually playing the game all seem universally pleased with what they've gotten. You could put it down to us being invested in the game since we already paid. But maybe - just maybe - we're content because we're ahving fun and the game is actually good. Granted, to play the beta requires that you're ok with the online requirement, so most of us don't give a flying fuck about offline being axed. If a few thousand people decide they're so upset about it they aren't going to play, well, that just means it'll be fater for me to get a landing pad in Aulin Enterprise on the 22nd.

Yeah, parts of the game does sound great. But it's a bit like expecting a car and receiving a boat. Even if it's a really nice boat, it's not really what you asked for or wanted.

Anyway, only time will tell which of us ends up being more 'right'. My point is simply that this is shittily done by the devs, especially considering the timing and the delivery method of the news. Had they done this approach from the start and just said that no, there'll be no offline mode, then there wouldn't be this shitstorm(or at least it would have been over by now, since people would have resigned to go back to waiting for the next Elite). But then again, they might not have reached the funding goal either.

 

[Azazel]

This thread has become pathetic on levels which transcend Reddit, but not quite the official forums.

I am heartily disappointed with the Codex.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

This thread has become pathetic on levels which transcend Reddit, but not quite the official forums.

I am heartily disappointed with the Codex.

I'm way ahead of you, mate. I was heartily disappointed with the Codex before it was cool.

 

[Ulminati]

Going to cherrypick in a futile attempt to limit the walls of text

An anaconda takes about 2 weeks if you know what you're doing. That's the most expensive ship in the game.

Difficult to answer this one without knowing if it's two weeks with 24/7 grinding or just 2-3 hours a day. But for comparison, it didn't take days to get the most expensive ship in Elite/Frontier.

2-3 hrs/day. It requires you know what you're doing, but you can usually rake in 1-2 million an hour once you have a lakon. And you can trade in ships+upgrades when buying a bigger one. Once you have the biggest ship, there's not really anywhere else to go though, short of exploring new places and watching your credit balance get obscenely high. With that in mind, I'm a-ok with the biggest ships in the game not being obtainable in an afternoon.

There haven't been any for the entire beta period, save for 1-2 hours when they pushed out a major patch that added new star systems, ships, models and the like. Several months, no downtimes.

Presumably they'll need a weekly schedule once they actually get some players playing though?

Will they? I don't know the numbers playing the beta. Presumably there's a fair amount. The servers went for a month without any restarts while they were still working on the game. I don't see why they'd suddenly need weekly restarts once the game goes live. The MMO betas I were in in the past had servers going down all willy-nilly, so I'm assuming server stability in beta is worse than it will normally be.

- I think you and a lot of the other upset people here have a rather strange take on this. I've been playing this for a while and it feels like a modern space sim with quasi-newtonian physics and great graphics. I can mess around in it and have fun on my own terms, so long as I am connected to the internet. Which I always am and pretty much anyone I can think of on my friends list also have stable, permanent connections.

What, exactly is it that makes you unable to load the game, select "solo" and then pretend you'r eplaying a single player game? sure, if you stumble upon a really good trade route, it might get depleted because someone else finds it. That just encourages exploration.

And what about if my wireless falls down for a short time(which is a common occurrence since wireless sucks)? What if a fuse blows or power is otherwise disrupted while I'm playing? What if someone's at the door? Dead, dead, dead. Multiplayer players expect this, solo players don't, but will have it nonetheless. What if I want to reload?

Speaking from what I've experienced in the beta, this is what happens if your crappy wireless loses connection for an extended period of time:
- If you're at a station, shopping, you get disconnected and you can reconnect as soon as you have a connection.
- If you're flying around a star system, nothing happens until you try to jump. Then the game will tell you that you're offline and you can connect again. You'll spawn in a safe, empty pocket of space or docked at the nearest space station depending on when you were disconnected
- If you are fighting a bunch of ships, you can continue to fight them to your hearts content. If you try to jump, you'll get dumped to main menu
- If you're scooping shit up (mining, piracy) the game will tell you it's lost connection to server.

Going from the time I got the "lost connection" message while scooping to I got booted to the main menu, I'd say you'll have to remain disconnected for 3-4 minutes before the game boots you. Again, unless your internet is powered by potato, I firmly believe connectivity won't be an issue.

Since you like wild speculation, here's some speculation for you: There'll be single player eventually. But it'll be 3-4 months down the road when they're fairly certain they got all the sales they wanted out of ED and don't need the DRM to keep pirates at bay. If they're extra clever, they'll even time the good news to coincide with the expansion going on sale to milk whatever goodwill it generates to the max.


To use your boat/car analogy, ED is a bit like Frontier makign a KS for a really nice boat. A bunch of pople said "but I want to drive my boat on land" and FD went and said "We'll look into adding some wheels". I - and several other people - mostly want a boat so we don't paticularily care about the wheels. Close to release, FD say "Sorry, we couldn't fit the wheels on the boat after all" and now all the car people are going "I BET THE BOAT WILL SINK NOW THA TTHE WHEELS ARE GONE!" I don't paticularily care about the missing wheels, since I never intended to drive my boat on the road - and it is a very fine boat. But I do take issue with people claiming the boat will sink because it has no wheels, because the hull I've been trying out is pretty sturdy.
(That is, I haven't had any connectivity issues even though you people seem to believe we'll get disconnected every 30 seconds and our ships will explode whenever that happens).


But again. You're welcome to be upset and cancel your purchase. I just wish the last couple of pages hadn't been filled with whining based on wild speculation when there's plenty of whining to be done based on what's actually in the game.

 

[Nikaido]

ED's EULA :

8. In-Game Advertising
The Game may incorporate technology (which may be provided by Frontier or third party service providers engaged by Frontier (each a "Dynamic Advertising Provider")) which enables advertising to be uploaded into the Game on your PC, and changed while the Game is being played on-line. In order that the Dynamic Advertising Provider is able to direct advertising appropriate to your Game and geographic region, as well as to the correct location within the computer game, certain non-personally identifiable data and information may be retrieved and retained by the Dynamic Advertising Provider including your I.P. address, geographic location, in-game position, and information concerning the appearance of advertising visible during your gameplay (for example, the length of time an item of advertising was visible, the dimensions of the advertisements). In addition, the Dynamic Advertising Provider may assign a unique identification number which is stored on your PC and which is used to monitor and calculate the number of views of dynamic advertising during gameplay. None of the information collected for this purpose including the identification number can be used to identify you.

The technology employed by Dynamic Advertising Providers may be located outside your country of residence (including outside of the European Union).

Where a Game incorporates dynamic advertising technology, the technology which serves the provision of dynamic in-game advertising is integrated within the Game. This means that if you do not want to receive dynamic advertising, you should only play the game when you are not connected to the Internet.

They need to tell their legal dept about the changes. Also, lol@ in game advertising.

Scum.

 

[Space Satan]

SOme people at the boards and spacesim forums said that Elite: Dangerous is very boring. Can you comment on this? Was it fun to play by your experience?

 

[The Fish]

SOme people at the boards and spacesim forums said that Elite: Dangerous is very boring. Can you comment on this? Was it fun to play by your experience?

Once you've stopped learning the game and settle on a credit accumulating activity it can get stale. If there was more player interaction the staleness would be alleviated to some degree. Once some expansion packs come in and if they sort out the multiplayer problems (a big if) then it would be great as all the basic mechanics are there. There's probably no harm in waiting as this isn't the type of mmo in which you can really accumulate power over years as you might in something like EVE. Though if you have lots of disposable money than you shouldn't be too wary of trying it out. I can't think of many new games worth playing for extended periods of time to be honest so it's hardly unique in its lack of longevity.

The best way to get a sense of how it plays may be to just watch some videos online. Here's a long video of someone playing.

 

[J_C]

ED's EULA :

8. In-Game Advertising
The Game may incorporate technology (which may be provided by Frontier or third party service providers engaged by Frontier (each a "Dynamic Advertising Provider")) which enables advertising to be uploaded into the Game on your PC, and changed while the Game is being played on-line. In order that the Dynamic Advertising Provider is able to direct advertising appropriate to your Game and geographic region, as well as to the correct location within the computer game, certain non-personally identifiable data and information may be retrieved and retained by the Dynamic Advertising Provider including your I.P. address, geographic location, in-game position, and information concerning the appearance of advertising visible during your gameplay (for example, the length of time an item of advertising was visible, the dimensions of the advertisements). In addition, the Dynamic Advertising Provider may assign a unique identification number which is stored on your PC and which is used to monitor and calculate the number of views of dynamic advertising during gameplay. None of the information collected for this purpose including the identification number can be used to identify you.

The technology employed by Dynamic Advertising Providers may be located outside your country of residence (including outside of the European Union).

Where a Game incorporates dynamic advertising technology, the technology which serves the provision of dynamic in-game advertising is integrated within the Game. This means that if you do not want to receive dynamic advertising, you should only play the game when you are not connected to the Internet.

They need to tell their legal dept about the changes. Also, lol@ in game advertising.

Scum.

Slowpoke. This had been poste a few pages ago.

 

[Ulminati]

SOme people at the boards and spacesim forums said that Elite: Dangerous is very boring. Can you comment on this? Was it fun to play by your experience?

I got 87 hrs clocked according to the beta and I don't see myself stopping anytime soon. That said, i enjoy playing tourist and flying around planets to admire them as well as the space trucker going-between-stations-to-exchange-goods bit. If people expect a 24/7 white knuckle ride or lots of emotional engagement, I can totally see them getting bored with ED quick.

 

[praetor]

The single player game is still there, it just requires you to be online.

screw you, that's messed up and you know it. only on the 'dex (not really):

*D3 always online = omg worst thing ever, lololol won't touch it, why do i have to be online in my SP game?! wtf is this idiotic shit?! (pretty much everyone except goudaOST)

*E:D always online = 'tis not a big deal... it's the way it was intended! just ignore that they promised it in their kickstarter and that's how every prequel worked! it's a great thing! all hail our great overlord braben! if you complain about it you're a dumbfuck

what the fuck am i reading here? kotaku? always on DRM is shit and should not be condoned for mostly SP games. oh, and wanna bet the servers will be down/inconsistent on launch day 'cause of unexpected load?

(btw: a) i did not want to pirate the game. i want to play it online and that's how i would/will do it if i get it [and i very very likely will 'cause the anaconda and viper are sexy as fuck and i have a hard on for the proper space porn in game] for 90% of the time. but there will be a time when i'll move to another apartment and that means at the very least 2-3 weeks without internet, up to a couple of months if the ISP fucks up [not unlikely] b) only norfleet wants this ITT, c) always on DRM is in game under the pretense that an offline version would be "empty" or whatever the fuck it's their excuse from that interview. carebears gonna carebear but that's by far the tiniest portion of whiners ITT)

 

[Ulminati]

Don't get the Viper man. Down that road lies disappointment. Its FSD is arse, even when upgraded. Get a Cobra instead.

 

[Runciter]

(...)

I don't see how you could even argue against that rage. These people are now being forced to join in on a wannabe-mmo thing which could quickly end up playing by full MMO-rules; months of grinding to get the best ships, updates that mess up the game with poor developer decisions, no modding opportunities, server downtimes, etc. This just doesn't appeal to a lot of people. Alternatively they can (maybe) get a refund and go back to waiting another 20 years for a new Elite/Frontier.

Judging by the posts on their forum[1][2], FD are refusing to refund a lot of people. Some have filed PayPal disputes or credit card chargeback requests and many are just pissed off. Watch the ensuing shitstorm, this has only just begun.

 

[J_C]

Publishers not funding niche games

vs.

kickstarter funded games where the developers have to adhere to every word they say ever, or they are called a fraud.

Which is better and why?
Seriously, I thank kickstarter that it makes a lot of niche games possible, but I absolutely hate its transparency. Whether we are talking about Divinity OS, Eternity, Elite or some others, it is ridiculous that the developers can't say a word, because everybody will take it as a promise, disregarding the fact that during development, stuff might turn out otherwise.

 

[Raapys]

This is a fairly big thing though.. Always online or not is most definitely a core feature of any game. There's a reason there's been so much discussion about it previously, like with the aforementioned Sim City. So at which point do you call it fraud or at least false advertisement? What if it had been the online portion that got scrapped because of whatever? Would the multiplayer crowd be any more forgiving?

Fact of the matter is that they received a lot of cash by saying, and later confirming and reconfirming, the part about the offline mode.

 

[praetor]

Don't get the Viper man. Down that road lies disappointment. Its FSD is arse, even when upgraded. Get a Cobra instead.

but it's the sexiest small ship in game how big of a difference is the FSD between the Viper and eagle/sidewinder/cobra? how about parking one in a lawless or whatever system just for ship hunting? any indication there could be a big ship like the anaconda that could fit a viper? any other small ships other than a sidewinder that could fit in the anaconda bay?

 

[Ulminati]

If you kit out the viper for combat, you'll be stuck int he same 4-5 systems close to each other with no way of getting anywhere else. The anaconda description says it can carry a sidewinder (smallest playable ship in the game), but I don't know if that's actually implemented. I haven't bothered going for one in beta3. I think the Anaconda is meant to be the biggest ship in the game, but that's speculation on my part.

 

[SmartCheetah]

I can sympathise with the people who cannot get a stable enough internet connection

I can never understand this. I live in a fucking post communist country, and our internet connection is rock solid. I get it if your internet is not super fast, or it disconnects sometimes, but it is hard to believe that the connection is lost so frequently that you cannot play a game like this. Or maybe they live in Etiopia I don't know.

My internet connection back in Poland was even better than rock solid. Not mentioning high download rates and low prices. Here, in the UK, I'm paying pretty similiar money for something which shouldn't even been called Internet Connection. I'm constantly disconnecting, having terrible pings in most games and guess what? A lot of my British friends got the same problems. Freaking Virgin Media. And they're one of the biggest ISP's over here :-/ Even western civilizations got problems with solid connections.

 

[Perkel]

I worked for Telekomunikacja Polska for a bit time and and i can tell precisely why.

First off Polish infracture before 89 was top of the line. Gov bought newest hot stuff mainly because it gave ability to survilance people better. After 89 for a long time this procedure was continued. Then internet blow big and since then people were nagging gov for better internet access. Perfect chance to sell it. So gov sold tp to france telecom and oh boy what a ride it was ! French basically stripped the good stuff and send it to france where stuff from france was brought over to poland. This set back polish infrastructure few years back. And now when things like vDSL starts to surface tech staff can't basically install because infrastructure is shit. So they install on site servers to handle transfer. Problem is that naturally small server can't handle distance as main station so people not living in cities hell even in different parts of city will not get fast internet from orange/tp.

As i know similar stuff is in different parts of eastern europe as it was based on poles design.

Latest upgrade for most people was basically buying stronger DSL cards still using old infrastructure.

 

[bonescraper]

Don't get the Viper man. Down that road lies disappointment. Its FSD is arse, even when upgraded. Get a Cobra instead.

I'm pretty sure ship stats aren't set in stone yet. Same goes for prices.

 

[praetor]

Don't get the Viper man. Down that road lies disappointment. Its FSD is arse, even when upgraded. Get a Cobra instead.

I'm pretty sure ship stats aren't set in stone yet. Same goes for prices.

i really hope so, because outfitting a combat ship for combat meaning said ship can't get out of a cluster of 4-5 systems is majorly fucked up

 

[Ulminati]

If they upgraqde my viper when we go gamma on sat, I'll be pleasantly surprised. But srsly, everyone should have a Cobra. You can give it a full combat loadout and still have 13 LY jumps.

praetor - the viper was originally designed for in-system defense, which is why it has a shitty FSD. If you cram an A-rating FSD in it it gets a little better, but that module will set you back 1½ cobras worth of credits on its own. And combat performance isn't noticably better than the cobra either. You have a higher top speed, but turning rate is more or less the same. Same goes for weapons hardpoints. If you're lookign for maximum maneuverbility, eagle's where it's at.

 

[SmartCheetah]

Any ideas what ships are they gonna add on Gamma release? Or no word on it?

 

[bonescraper]

praetor - the viper was originally designed for in-system defense, which is why it has a shitty FSD.

What does it even mean? Origilally, the Viper was the most OP ship in the game (beta 1).

Any ideas what ships are they gonna add on Gamma release? Or no word on it?

No idea. Tomorrow we're getting the 3.9 beta release. I guess that's just an early gamma version, so we'll see.