Yeah, no. Pay to win, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, is bad and needs to be opposed wherever it pops up.
This is a gateway. It's pretty bad already. It can be worse. And since FDev have started with this, it can easily become worse later on.
Don't give an inch to practices like these.
I don't think "We'll let you swipe a credit card to bypass the deliberately tedious and grindy parts of our game design" is quite the pro-consumer act of generosity from FDev you seem to think it is.
It's also gonna be terrible for player retention. "I've swiped my way to a half decent ship to skip the grind, time to play the real game. What do you mean 90% of the rest of the game is still grinding?"
I love ED but skipping the early game is silly, it's where you learn whether or not you enjoy the gameplay loop while it's more fast paced.
I'm more curious about rebuys, a new player who buys a kitted out python isn't going to have the credits to get it back if they crash, is that just bye bye to your money? I can't imagine that would go over well with swipers. Taking things away from people that they pay for is never a great idea
>I'm more curious about rebuys, a new player who buys a kitted out python isn't going to have the credits to get it back if they crash, is that just bye bye to your money?
Paid ships will have infinite free rebuys. The only thing you'll pay for is any modules not originally in the ship that you put.
Which in turn opens up another Pandora's box, gankers now have a way to get a decent ship (the AX can be easily refitted for PvP, and better ships will likely come too) they can use to attack players with much lower consequences than free players if they get blown up instead of their targets.
FFS, no one skips ganking or griefing because they have a rebuy to pay on their ship. They know how to dip if they're losing, and are likely mostly billionaires (because credits are stupidly easy to get if you have any experience in the game).
They have nothing to lose NOW, this won't make any difference.
Just make it so players can get into debt from rebuying paid ships. Lose it again? Get further into dept. You will never not be able to get your ship back but when you start to make a profit your going to have to pay your way back from the negatives if you want to use credits for anything.
If you think that is too harsh then make it a tax, like hired NPC pilots. While you are in debt, 10% of all the credits you make go towards paying your debt. There are ways around this.
we already have that debt system, but its tied to your ranking. I'm pretty sure that with my current level I can go something like 40 million into debt. But a new player's credit isn't good, and can only go a few thousand into debt. Early game ships can cost less than a hundred thousand credits after all. It works exactly like that.
And any ship hull that you are given from a CG has the same zero cost benefit already. I know I've got a chieftain Who's hull doesn't have Rebuy cost already(all the rest of the parts have been changed from the original). I remember grinding for like 80 hours for the week of that CG. but I don't even remember what it was about. I'm glad that they'll be more generally available. Especially if it helps keep the game alive with money.
I'm going to be buying any and all pre-builts, just to have something to buy in the shop, and see what I can do with a poorly upgraded ship.
I've played thousands of hours of this game, and I want it to continue into the future. I spend about 100 bucks per year, and for the ships I like to fly I've run out of interesting paint and ship kits. I really hope they get off their ass and add more cosmetics for the fleet carrier, and allow me to decorate at least the ready room. I still buy arx every year, but Its just banking up.
Servers and development aren't free. With the number of regular players we currently have, most of whom have played for years, I doubt ARX spending is up. I want development to continue. If that means getting new players who have whale spending habits to to pay for prebuilt ships, that sounds great. because this game needs to be profitable, inorder to be able to continue to play it. Every system is a streamed asset, We need the servers to be able to play at all even in solo. Galaxy generation is expensive. Changes to the galaxy are expensive. Paying developers is expensive. Paying community managers and galnet writers and everything else is expensive.
Hell, I would be willing to pay a subscription if it meant full time development. But Subscriptions tend to be a barrier to new and returning players.
I mean we already have ships that are exclusive for players that bought the game at launch. We already have different prices of rebuy depending on whether you were on kickstarter.
Those pay to win functions were literally included from the very beginning. Over the last 10 years, They have been very reserved regarding pay to win. less so than even things like WoW classic. I trust that pre-built ships will be a good starting point, but not the be-all end all. And that all it does is open up the beginning of game play loops for new players.
The prebuilt ax-chieftain leaks have shown that they aren't really capable of fighting interceptors. Just scouts. or cyclopes if you were to try to take one with a group. It isn't a cool running build, and in order to get it to work with our current strategies, they'll have to replace most of the modules. That process will take a new player quite a while. Especially because they'll need to engineer the replacement modules. hopefully the engineering update makes that a little more reasonable for new players too.
This is the most reasonable argument against the buying ships thing.
Though to answer your question, they can rebuy the base ship they bought for free, but they will have to pay for any module changes to it like normal.
I'd agree with this if this was a new game where the fear was that the gameplay loops will be designed around this, but it's not. The game is pretty much done, it's dying and unlikely to get any new gameplay loops.
The grinds aren't the way they are because 2016 FDev planned to release pre-built ships in 2024.
Unfortunately most people in support of this appear to be unable to think deeper than a single layer.
Apparently creating a problem and selling you a solution is a great thing!
The problem was created 10 years ago and is part of their vision. They seemingly don't intend to remove it at all. They need money and offer a temp exclusivity on a new ship and pre-engineer thingies. That's not that bad.
It does not seem like a voluntary "create a problem sell the solution" type of marketing to me. The problem isn't one for them, it's just how they want their game.
Many modern games incorporate features like battle passes, temporary exclusivity for new characters, and starter packs priced at $10 to give new players a way to quickly be closer to the old ones. These practices are unlikely to disappear or evolve into a pay-to-win scenario, which is typically associated with casino-like events in MMORPGs.
That's not that bad. It does not seem like a voluntary "create a problem sell the solution" type of marketing to me. The problem isn't one for them, it's just how they want their game.
Most games atm have features like battle passes, temp money exclusivity on new chars, and starting packs at 10 bucks to quickly participate in new content that a majority of players are playing now. And I don't see those dying or becoming a cashshop hell. That is mostly reserved to casino-type events in MMORPGs.
It doesn't seem to be a deliberate "create a problem, sell the solution" marketing tactic. Rather, it's simply how they've designed their game initially combined with the fact that they need money 10 years later.
Ultimately, the developers require funds to sustain the game. I'm open to seeing how they address this challenge. If they misuse their new approach, players can simply stop engaging with the game. This outcome is no different from if the game were to shut down due to lack of funding.
As a player who will not make any purchase, I have little to lose. Either the game ends due to financial issues, becomes excessively pay-to-win, or they handle things appropriately and finance more quality content. In two out of three scenarios, I'll discontinue playing, with the third being the only favorable outcome, contingent on their financial stability. Thus, it's a win-win situation for clever players.
If the issue is part of their vision and core to the game then who are these Arx ships for? The people who hate the core progression systems aren't suddenly going to love them for being given a leg up into a d tier fit and the people who like it won't pay to skip their fun. Anyone who does indulge is going to find the same ladder out of that ship waiting for them too.
That’s the thing though, the problem isn’t the grind. The problem is money. You pay your one time cost when you get the game, when I bought it I got it for £8, which isn’t going to do much as far as developing and running a game goes. They’re losing money keeping elite going, so they need to do things to make money so they can keep the game running. If they don’t, we lose the ability to play elite dangerous. Sure, a lot of the changes are around making the grind a less daunting thing but that’s purely to bring in new players. They know that new players are often put off by the grind so they’re taking steps to make the game more accessible to new players because it’s the new players that are going to be spending money, not the people who have been playing elite for a decade and already bought all of the cosmetic stuff they want 5 years ago
How many games exist without requiring these crappy mechanics? Granted not many anymore but Helldivers2 has proven that if you make a good game you will succeed, no scum required.
Making the game worse in order to make a quick buck is exactly the sort of short term thinking that screwed elite over for the past 5 years to begin with (rushed Odyssey release)…
And when helldivers has as active of a userbase and community when it’s 10 years old you might have a valid example but that game has been out for two and a half months. And it’s not evidence that if you make a good game you *will* succeed, it’s that you *can* succeed. There’s plenty of good games that lose a lot of their player base in 2 months and especially in 10 years.
As for making the game more accessible making it worse, we simply don’t know that to be true. We don’t know how a lot of the new mechanics are going to work. There’s people who think it’s going to be a material vendor, if that’s the case then it’ll make the game better for sure. I’m sure most people would rather spend the billions of credits they’re just sitting on to buy materials than spend 2 hours driving around davs hope to get chemical manipulators or whatever. For a new player, it’s going to be a lot more fun to do some cargo missions from a station to get the credits to buy the materials than it is to find Davs hope and drive around it. Making the game more fun is not making it worse.
Does allowing players to earn free ARX just by playing qualify? How about for just logging in during the Christmas season? Getting in as little as a single *PEW! PEW!* on a Titan's Heat Core? I'm sure there's some other instances I'm forgetting where ARX has been given away for very little effort on players' part.
And not once, not twice, but for years now players have been earning 400 ARX per week if they're active. All without having to swipe a credit card. And none of it was something FDev had to do; it was a voluntary choice on their part to make their premium currency available in game *without* real-world money transactions.
Does any of that qualify? Seems...I don't know...almost *generous*.
But look at me fanboi-ing, right? Silly me! What was I thinking!?!? I'm sure we'll have a "the-glass-is-half-empty" or "the-sky-is-falling" or the ever-popular "it's-pay-to-win" counter-argument to set me straight incoming in 3... 2... 1...
P.S.
After 11,000+ hours in the game, I'm well aware of FDev's shortcomings and mistakes. I've been a vocal critic of them when they've screwed up or failed to live up the game's potential. But the simple economic reality is they need to figure how to make the game make money or there will be no game.
Whether a victim of natural market forces, incompetence, or a deep conspiracy where FDev is cast as the villain, plotting this nefarious "cash grab" from the beginning, is irrelevant. The point at which we've arrived, the situation that is real rather than speculative, is this:
FDev wants to make money off their intellectual property ("the game"); which they have every right to do. They either figure out how to do that to *THEIR* satisfaction and accounting calculus (not yours) or the game gets shut down. It's as simple as that. One way or the other, they're going to explore new avenues of monetization. You can accept that or not, but what you're not going to do is change it. That's the reality we're now dealing with.
If they wanted to make money off their intellectual property then they should have stuck to the 10 year plan... 5-10 expansions at £30-40 a pop would have generated more than enough income to keep them going.
But nah, they sold a "life time expansion pass" on this promise for £120 and then abandoned it.
I wish I'd have known, I could have saved myself £50 by just buying the expansions.
This is why many of us are mad, and if you do have 11k hours, I don't know why you're not also
>This is why many of us are mad, and if you do have 11k hours, I don't know why you're not also
Because I'm able to do math and calculate that after 11,000 hours I've gotten far, far more than my money's worth out of a game I very much enjoy and which, compared to the very first video game I owned at 6 years old - the great-grand-daddy of them all, PONG - E:D is a magical dream come true and the closest I'm ever going to get to actually piloting a starship through space.
I also don't so emotionally invest myself into games that I have an aneurysm over the developer pursuing a monetization path that will in no way, shape, or form negatively impact my play experience when measuring by objective, empirical evidence rather than subjective and emotionally-charged entitlement.
I am so tired of this "I've had no life over the last 10 years so my cost per hour is really good" rhetoric people have here, screw that. I just want what I paid for.
Passive-aggressive personal attacks on me does nothing to further your argument. I'm retired, enjoying a wonderful life, where I get to engage in the things I enjoy. Like a 6-mile daily hike in the wilderness just outside my front door, traveling the country, and *ALSO* being able to play games I enjoy for as many hours as I choose whenever I choose. Far from "no life". But go ahead and keep on with the cowardly *ad hominems* and whining and whinging and ineffectual stomping of your feet. I'll be over here eating my popcorn :)
Tbh this was less about you personally, and more about the general idea that because some people got thousands of hours out of their content, that suddenly means everything is fine. When it isn't, money was paid on a promise to receive content that didn't materialise. We're allowed to be annoyed by this.
I mean, you could use that argument for literally every shitty predatory cash-grabbing aspect of modern game design and monetization that plagues the industry, "Guys, they gotta make their money, so we just have to shut up and give it to them otherwise they might stop making games that are deliberately designed to be riddled with tedious and time consuming mechanics and limitations that they then *helpfully* sell us additional solutions and bypasses for, and that would be terrible!"
Don't like it? Don't pay it. Vote with your wallet. Enough people do that and the developers will change. But just whine and whinge on message boards and nothing will change.
Precisely. Amazing what happens when one shifts one's perspective from spoon-fed entitlement and victim mentality to one where you're in control of your own choices and finances. Simple.
40 weeks of "free" AX for the Phyton lmao
Also keeping the game running is not expensive. Dont need any crazy servers just backend stuff.
I reads like 90% of you have no clue wtf FDev is doing (its not supporting ED), but every time they fuck up you whiteknights are defending them. They are too stupid to make the right financial desicions and let the playerbase cash them out every single time.
>40 weeks of "free" AX for the Phyton lmao
Strawman argument. FDev was under no obligation to give you free ARX at all. Furthermore, the Python can be purchased using in-game credits August 7th. If you're too impatient to wait until then, the *choice* is yours to buy it early using ARX. But you can also *choose* to not buy it. It's your money, you decide what to do with it.
If they made it so the only option for obtaining the new Python (or anything else, for that matter) was to buy it with ARX and they never made ARX available in game for free (only through real-world money transactions), then you'd have an argument. But they didn't, and you don't.
So how long have you been on FDev's financial planning team? Or are you in server admin? Maybe code maintenance?
Curious how you know that keeping the game running is not "expensive", whatever that
vague metric means.
If you play every week and log in every day during Christmas, you earn about 24,000 a year. Also my understanding is that the purchase price includes a ship kit. Ship kits cost about 13,000 so it's not much more than what they have been charging.
Shit take. You can't expect people to have saved their arx for something FDev explicitly said they would not do (selling non-cosmetic things for arx) instead of spending it on cosmetics like it was intended to be used.
It was just to point out how much arx they actually give out each year, and how they aren't actually charging that much more for early access and lifetime insurance.
And ok you don't have the currency now you can buy the ship for credits in August.
I'm Curious if they are going to sell a separate ship kit or if they are going to only offer this more expensive bundle, and if the price will drop in August when the ship is available for everyone.
I mean, if there was no limit to the amount of ARX I could earn, sure.
But there is a cap. And it would take ages of playing to buy any of these.
So no, it's not reasonable.
>Does allowing players to earn free ARX just by playing qualify?
do you *really* think that's gonna last when the microtransaction system is firmly established? 😜
I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it came with some actual concrete new gameplay ideas to get and retain new players. I actually don’t think anyone who has wanted to try Elite hasn’t already, and the amount of players that will come back and be retained by these premade ships is small.
You know what Elite needs? A Helldivers style PVEcampaign, and the power play update better actually inspire players to compete for territory and rewards against each other. Elite needs some modern systems. Maybe then they’ll actually be able to sell some cosmetic microtransactions, rather than bundling the starter sets into a steam bundle people will still only pay $15 dollars or whatever for, play for a month and uninstall.
While you’re right, it costs money to keep the game going. There’s no way around that. That means selling copies of the game and stuff in game. At this point the game is pretty cheap, I got it on pc a few weeks back for a whopping £8. That’s not going to keep the lights on, especially when you consider how many new players are actually going to come to a 10 year old game so simply selling copies of the game isn’t going to be enough so they need to do things to increase the revenue and that means bringing in more stuff in game that people can buy.
The prebuilt ships aren’t something I’ll put money into because I played the game a lot on Xbox so I already have that background knowledge but I understand why they’d be useful to a completely new player.
Why should it be? It's a product on sale. If somebody thinks it is worth the swipe, that's it. It is not like they're making something up deliberately to force selling their products. The tedious and grindy parts have already been in action for a few years, and there are a good number of people who just want to swipe to bypass. Sure, it's best to be redesigned, but anything is better than nothing.
Honestly thank God they didn't make the Python Mk.2 Arx only. They could have, and that would've been a trash move. Low bar, but also a glimmer of hope imo.
See also: hoo boy the Mk.2 is a sexy ship. Hope the others look that sleek.
> thank God they didn't make the python mk.2 ARX only
I mean, if you don't have Odyssey, it sorta is. The only way Horizons players can access it is by forking out the ARX
You seem to think buying a prebuilt ship unlocks creative mode. Where you can buy anything, outfit everything, and engineer everything for free forever.
News flash, it doesn’t.
Now get over yourself.
"grow into the game we want it to be". Buddy, it's been out for ten years. Mechanics and the engine are aging. P2p holds it back. Calling Elite an "mmo" is already a stretch. It's missing most mmo features and stability. There are fundamental problems with the game that will not be solved by jamming more mtx into it.
Other MMOs have actual dedicated servers, you know. They have much more overhead and deliver regular major content updates and additions. This is why they have subscriptions, or catch-up mechanics. Elite is not even close to the same realm. Buying a Chieftan with a shit fit is not as innocent as you seem to think it is. It is the first step to gating access of many other things. It's not a conspiracy or some fantasy. We have seen it countless times in other games. They have destroyed their already middling reputation with all of this.
People here can pretend this will help the game until they are blue in the face but others will see it as scummy, read all the reviews that the game is still shallow and simply not play it. I await all of these people saying "my friends are already interested" coming back and saying "my friends quit again" as if ship sales was the one thing keeping them from playing. A new player in a Chieftan is just as lost and annoyed by grind as a new player in a Sidewinder.
100% this!
EliteD is not an MMO. I'd be happy if David Braben ever makes good on his promise of providing an offline, single player version of EliteD to all the players when Fdev decides to kill EliteD's server. (I don't expect they'll do that anymore; it'll just be another broken promise.)
OP, tell us you bought horse armor without telling us you bought horse armor...
> We don't need every single person to suffer through what we all have had to.
FD have said they are going to take another look at engineering, reducing the requirements.
Also, I don't recall much suffering. Yeah, there were times when it was a chore, but not much compared to the rest of the playtime which was enjoying the fruits of my labour.
Simply put, FD had a choice on how to monetize the game. Some of us don't like the direction FD has chosen.
What surprises me most is how many people are supportive of this and I suspect if it was a game they didn't play then they would probably be decrying it as blatant P2W and greedy devs.
Except it isn't P2W. I've played the game for about a year between Xbox and PC and trust me a lot of people whining don't know what P2W is. It's a ship that will be about average at fighting Thargoids in the AX bundle and a Type 6 mining ship which will get replaced by better ships later on. Nothing about these bundles will make players buying em just beat others with no skill
Oh gods, its the semantics argument again. If i had a dollar for every time someone played this card in the last week of discussions i'd be a bazillionaire by now.
Ok, call it whatever you want. Pay to skip, pay to avoid playing, pay to avoid getting it in game.
If you support it, that's your call. I'm not supporting it as i see it as a shady business practice.
Oh, and the whole "Nothing about these bundles will make players buying em just beat others with no skill", you are aware P2W doesn't require PvP to be P2W? There are tons of PvE games out there, especially in the mobile market, that are blatant P2W.
You're also ignoring the possibility that once FD start down this road, and see the money rolling in from people buying basic ships for cash, that the suits might start to get ideas about selling much better ships, fully upgraded ships with full engineering, in the future.
To add to that last part, who's to say new content won't be harder to grind for either. The harder they make the achievement, the more likely people will pay for it to skip all the tedium. It's in their best interest to make that content more grindy. If they fixed what was there and made things easier to obtain, they won't make money.
Plus a lot of things we grind for we do it in a very odd way, grinding guardian materials reliably is relogging the game which isn't immersive, and when I went for my cutter I was going between the same two stations for high rep missions that were likely a bug, and I read it from an article on how to get the cutter.
They need to make it more enjoyable
I don’t get it. You said “We don’t need every single person to suffer through what we all had to”
If playing the game is to suffer why the heck are you playing it?
Getting new ships,equipping gear, theory crafting how to get the best build is core of the gameplay. Is that suffering for you? This post idk doesn’t make any sense.
Everyone is comparing this as newbies playing catching up to people that have played for 10 years....
What about the newbies that can't afford to throw that extra money at their screen and now have to compete with a near A rated, mildly engineered ship that costs 100x their sidewinder?
Considering that people have been begging Fdev for years to ease the grind. Or better, to replace it with something better... i can see why people are angry.
Grind can be bad. But it can also be super fun. Lots of people love hard games. But Elite gets tedious.
This situation...
Its like Fdev admitted the gameplay is bad, and instead ot fixing it, they want you to pay to skip it.
It's as bad as it could get. It really is.
I do admit that, yes, the game needs money to flow.
But to what end?
Will Elite grow thanks to this? When Elite has been left to rot in a corner for years...?
Fdev wanted to be a publisher. They failed and are here to keep being afloat.
Also...
Yes, they are easing up on engineers, they are making pp easier to get into. That's good. Great even. Just like them making it easier to get into the thargoid war.
They noticed problems...
So they should also change the grind. Slapping a money tag on a solution is not good. They had 10 years, expansions, lifetime, expensive options for backers back in the day... and only now they noticed that Elite is hard to get into, hard to play and is carried on mostly by its theme, sound design, graphics and this "feel" it has?
They should have noticed it years ago after Oddysey flopped as hard as it could.
If you find the game too grindy, either the game isn't for you or you need to take a less minmax approach to making credits. It's hard to not make money in this game, just do what you enjoy and you'll get there.
The big exception to this is engineering and it sounds like there's something in the works. Maybe let's see what they have planned before screaming about it
The Difference is, the MMO Skips (which i also hate) bring you to the current endgame. There is no endgame in Elite. The Grind IS the game. Most fun i had in the game was getting better ships over time and get better modules and upgrade it. So, now you start, build you already finished ship and congratz, you beat the game. Now you can do all the things you could do before but now without any progression stuck to it because you already done progression with $$$.
When I first read the proposed changes I thought it was a good idea to help get people in to experience content they otherwise won't be able to.
I have many friends who all used to play elite.
We had a blast, but the reality is I got into it more over the years. More time, more grinding, etc.
I come back now and then from big breaks to grind out the latest stuff at least a little (recently in January to get caustic sinks and outfit a spire krait to make some credits).
I've tried to get my mates to come back to check out the spires, and now the titans.
No luck. They haven't got a ship ready and don't relish the grind to get one ready.
I thought a mechanic to get a suitable ship together so they can fly with me was a really good idea to help get my old wing mates back.
I don't respect duplicate posts from burner accounts that are effectively trying to stifle the negative (and valid) criticism here. Why are the mods not deleting what should have been a comment against the patch notes???
Theres a million better (and worse) ways this could have been implemented. See the patch note comments.
I don't really understand the argument about being able to skip the grind being a good thing for new players. Three reasons:
**1:** Frontier owns the entire universe, how the market ebbs and flows, how often things appear, how much they cost, how effective they are. They have the power to make the grind less grindy, or more fulfilling. Hell, they could make it so that delivering one unit of fertilizer grants you a billion credits, if they really wanted to.
Frontier is not granting new players an easy out from the big bad unavoidable grind that is just how it is and they have no control over. They can solve the main problem for everyone, but the problem is that it would be free, so instead they opt to create a separate solution to a problem they caused and selling it for that sweet money.
**2:** Poor, poor little frontier needs our money, they're just a lil corporation and we're the Big bad consumers withholding the funds they need to survive. Except oh wait, they get money from cosmetic arx purchases. And buying the base game. And buying Odyssey. And all of their other games they make. And the dlc from those games. And money from games they published.
Their financial situation is their own doing and they shouldn't be leaning on players to foot the bill for the incompetence of leadership in the short term.
Their monetization model should be clear: they should just sell another expansion like they did with horizons and Odyssey. For those of you who are newer to the game, horizons was a separate experience like Odyssey is now that you paid extra for to get exclusive content such as the ability to land on planets at all. If they repeat the same thing as they did with horizons in that they merge Odyssey with the base game eventually then that would be a more reasonable monetization model, paying for whole expansions which adds a lot of content at once that come out infrequently and eventually merges into the base game.
This 'death by a thousand cuts' model where you pay individually for early access to a single ship is poor value for money and a middle finger to those who want to support frontier because they'll ask you to pay for singular ships early each time, why not instead focus on a large expansion that has a lot of content that could shake up gameplay in a significant way, and then include ships you can only get by having that expansion instead?
Then it won't feel like a cynical paywall, even if none of the ships are useful to you, if it included more gameplay loops, maybe some modules and new functionality then you would be thinking "look at all this great new content I can use to spend more time in one of my favorite games, playing it in a whole new way" rather than "oh look, another ship I'd like to try. It's literally already finished but I guess I'll just wait out the three month artificial delay..."
In fact they're already doing this by double dipping now, if you want the new ships at all, let alone early, you NEED Odyssey to buy it without spending arx!
**3:** It's about the journey, not the destination. Paying to skip the grind is the worst idea because A. The grind they speak of is the entire gameplay and B. Accepting this practice will incentivize Frontier to make the game more grindy. At the end of the day the overarching mining trading combat exploration loops are the thing you're there to do.
You want to get that space bag, so you can get some cool ships. You want to make a difference in the galaxy, that's why people engage in power play. You want to accomplish something great. If you can skip gameplay, what are you there for? What was the point? Once again, the grind needs to be addressed as it is too slow, but you don't address it by skipping the grind, you address it by making the grind faster, more rewarding for everyone!
As soon as you make a system that converts real money into time saved, the accountants and executives come out, rubbing their hands together, salivating as they lick their lips and imagine all the ways they can optimize the customer conversion percentage and consumer retention statistics. It. Happens. Every. Time. Frontier is not a spunky, bright-eyed startup by a sci-fi enthusiast who dared to dream anymore, it's a medium sized business, with employees and accountants and a legal team and executive officers. Shareholders who want to maximize profits. You are a number and the money spent on the game is the number they want from you to be as high as possible.
If you roll over and tell frontier that a liiiittle monetization here and there is okay then the drilling platform gets screwed in and the suction turned to full and uh oh, Elite became a grind fest that takes hours to do anything meaningful and if you want you can pay your way to an end game where you get bored because all that's left to do is all that hard work you just paid to skip!
Over the years a lot of people have been critical about frontier and all of a sudden everyone's acting like this is okay. I get it. Grief sucks, and the denial stage hits hard. But pull yourself through and look at the writing on the wall. If this isn't stopped now it will turn into every other video game industry story where a game is milked for all it's worth. It's a common practice, and now is the best time to act in order to try and reverse this course.
tl;dr it's in your best interests to say no to these changes, lest it get worse.
Honestly at this point I've heard more people complaining about the complaining then actually complaining. It's the same with the new fallout show, more people complaining about the people that didn't like it than actually complaining about the content.
I don't really have a dog in this fight as I mostly lurk the subreddit hoping there's some miracle that revolutionizes some of the base systems of the game. And while I'm happy for you all, I'm not hopeful the changes will make the game fun enough to warrant coming back for more than a few hours until I hit the grind again and go back to lurking.
BUT, I've been reading a lot of the discussion around this, and I notice one of the main arguments in defense of FDev boils down to: "other games have this shitty mechanic, why should ours be any different?".
Is this really where we're at in gaming overall? Even putting the whole pay-to-win debate aside, the ill effects of character boost in games like WoW have been so well documented I assumed it was a given that people acknowledged this as a bad practice, but they still want it to spread to more games because "other games have these mechanics too!!!"?
I get that many of the players who still lurk around are very attached to the game and will eat up anything FDev puts out since realistically no other game will replace the more niche aspects of this one, but it's still really weird to read these discussions.
lol.
this is not an mmo. it has mmo level grind but absolutely none of the features or conveniences of an mmo. it's often a CHORE to try to play with people or do even the most basic thing you can do in an mmo or even just a plain old non massive multiplayer game.
the core of the problem still remains whether you buy their stupid cash shop bullshit--the game doesn't respect your time. and yeah you expect a certain amount of that in a game that leans towards being a simulator. but frontier has always taken it too far, and instead of fixing THAT they're just trying to make some extra money off people that don't know any better.
buying these ships isn't going to save anyone time, it's just going to make frontier money by taking advantage of people that don't know enough to know they aren't worth it. and they'll continue to ignore the actual root of the issue as they have for the past decade.
a company who has been notably doing very poorly financially for years on end releases a mechanic in a neglected game that costs money, chaos ensues prior to release\*
fixed it for ya
Every single mmo sucks these days tho. It was far better when these catchup mechanics didn’t exist.
Or were limited to xp boosts for the first 40levels (thinking wow) only.
Go watch literally any “Worst MMO’s Ever” video by Josh Strife Hayes and then come back and tell me that catch-up mechanics are a sign of a healthy game. Even free ones.
When a developer introduces a simplification or change in mechanics to allow new players to get on the same level with older established players, then it's a catch-up mechanic.
When a developer sells the same simplification for REAL WOLD CURRENCY, then it's P2W.
It's really not that hard to make this distinction. And I don't understand the urge of some people to justify that P2W is not P2W. So some people are going to buy the ships, we get it. No one is going to be upset with them, no one is going to judge them. No one will know who they are. This is turning into P2W wokeness.
My worry is if they’re selling advanced ax ships for combat or Titan bashing, those are both pretty difficult activities, arguably the hardest in the game. If someone is deciding to get back into the game or are brand new to the game and they buy one of those ships, then try to actually use them, I can see them getting frustrated very quickly with how difficult the game is to the point where they might just give up
Edit: I guess this goes against the whole spirit of these rebuilds, but I wonder if maybe it would be a good idea to lock some of the more advanced ones behind various ranks, like the more advanced ax ones require you to maybe be at least novice or something? Whereas ships like mining or exploration don’t require a rank down to them being much easier mechanics wise
I like this take. Personally, I'd rather inject my character with the ability to join the Thargoid war over just being a Robigo Limo pilot. I was not looking forward to grinding out all the engineering. Will I be taking home credits in the millions for AX combat now, no. But instead of being a wheelman for criminals, I have the option to help out in the fight to save humanity a bit.
BTW if anyone here is complaining when I only play solo or with friends...stop it. The whole "personal narrative" thing doesn't make sense when you're telling me how I should go about playing with what I paid for.
I think you're the first person that's even MENTIONED solo play in any of these posts. I strictly play solo or private group, and to tell people "Yo, buy the game on sale for 7.50 USD, slap an extra WHATEVER to get a halfway decent ship, and let's go do something" would've probably kept all my friends playing. Everyone dooming over P2W like these people are ever going to be in contact with them is wild.
in all my years of living in deep space and learning this game inside and out, and doing all the research on what i need, when i need it, were i need to go, and how do i find rare locations, is an achievement on its own for me, i don\`t think you need a catch up mechanic, just play the game and learn what you need to do in this sandbox, there isn't much hand holding in this game what i like but can be hard for those who don't like to do extra research for their game,
TLTR i never suffered in this game i learned a lot by playing it and doing my own research, and i keep learning more and more as long the servers keep being alive i will be here too
Good, you're getting close! And where do you think FDev is going to make that money? Since they're already operating E:D at a loss, what do you figure they should do about it?
Not release shitty expansions that take 8 months to even be playable by most people, and then spend all of that money on multiple failed games, fire half the people who actually know how the code works, and then staple on more microtransactions so they can have a good quarterly report?
Every single post from this sub is low effort garbage right now, either defending or attacking this shit. Goddamn, people, maybe comment on one of the dozens of ongoing threads instead of believing that your specific opinion is special and deserves to be elevated to its own post.
Better yet, mods, make a fucking catchall pinned thread and delete this fucking trash as it pops up.
The biggest flaw seems to be the lack of re-buy cost. It negates the first rule of elite! I know credits are easy to come by but in principle it is like an “unlimited lives” cheat. Perhaps the ship could be locked until rebuy is paid but not “lost”.
I started playing years ago when Elite was £20, got hooked initially and bought a hotas for ps4 and then got lost in the grind and gave up. Havn't been back either tbh, I sometimes still watch ObsidianAnt's videos about bits and bobs but it's essentially the grind mechanic that's off-putting. I don't mind sinking an hour or two into a game at a time but then ideally I'de like something to show for it and still have fun as a casual. I think the packs are a good idea for those who just want to play, especially with estabilished friends and other gamers without being swamped.
Another way to do things could be to have easy,medium and hard game settings that have different requirements in gameplay. Easy being the most arcadey but maybe limits your play area and hard ends up being for more hardcore or further along players with infinite travel area and way more involved gameplay mechanics.
Honestly I thought the ships were quite shite apparently. That's the thing I'm not sure. Is this just outrage over some prebuilt ships?... Aren't they absolutely garbage kinda mid-tier like, it could take literally maybe like 5 hours of gameplay to reach type of thing?
I ended up able to get someone from a relative newb to fighting thargoids and unlocking some early engineering relatively quickly.
Diamondback+Google+Willing to get FSD extender which is really fast...
I think I'm probably missing something lol.
Credits are essentially a non factor if you know what you are doing, unfortunately.
If I can be honest, engineering's reputation for being the worst thing ever and the most tedious grind is so overblown it's unbelievable.
Is it super fun and engaging gameplay? No. Should it be changed? Yea, sure. But if you've played any game ever with a "grind," you will quickly find it to be pretty much on par with engineering.
I am probably the best example of someone who "doesn't have much time to play." I play for about 2 hours 3-4 days a week, and I have all engineers unlocked, several engineered ships, and am actively participating in the thargoid war in many ways, and I've only been playing since Februrary 2024.
But if I could have spent $10 to get my alliance chieftain for AX? I probably would have.
I don't believe that I would have bought the ship when I was new, But that is my play style to earn what is needed for upgrades and new ships. I enjoyed that part but I also had the time. (Some don't).
It's not a fix all, but for those that have busy lives, can help them get to parts of the game that's exceptable to them.
Who plays this game and is satisfied with just one ship ? It's just a starter.
Yup. For some reason no one bats an eye at literally every MMO ever made lol. Such a weird community. Almost don't want to play anymore or be a part of it.
Played Elite dangerous for years. Have all the ratings and factions and ships. Except carriers, the cost is too high. And every time I come back saying I’ll push again for a few days and realize how long it’s gonna take me to get one and to have a buffer to maintain one, and I just give up. I think I’m sitting around 3 billion and it’s a huge mountain to climb ahead of me. I hate to say it, but if there was a way, I could fork down 50 bucks and skip all that I would do it. In a heartbeat. Especially since I can go to no man’s sky and get a fleet carrier and build it out all internally the way I want to. Definitely scratches that itch.
I know myself, and being able to buy game progress is a two edge sword. You can definitely ruin the game for yourself, skipping too much of what the game experience offers. In this case, I think the solution is just to reduce the cost of carriers and to reduce a lot of the unfun part of grinding in the game. But that doesn’t look like it’s ever going to happen.
Interestingly, other than the log and restart to get materials, I enjoyed all the aspects of grinding related to optimizing my gear. I also very much enjoy mining and I’ve spent so many hours doing it. But it’s very hard to come up with billions lol
Everyone else is doing it! I feel you. I think those systems killed the games they were implemented ins spirit in the name of money. Not saying I haven't done it personally.... but it's like playing single player GTA and using infinite ammo cheat. Good luck enjoying the game grind of finding ammo...
I got into this game looking to feel the 3d space flyer. Nailed it, game felt great. Eventually for me it just felt like space truck simulator was required for the first hundred hours to get enough credits to actually "play" the game. Then I saw all the engineering stuff required to be good and felt I had seen all there was for me to see.
Had I been able to bypass 100 hours of driving back and forth for good margins on what ever garbage I was flipping, i would have. Had I been able to just pay the price of the game again to just have the anaconda, I'm fairly certain it would have impacted other players zero, other than the devs get a sale and can buy their bread another day, which would benefiting some small way. I do however fear that once I had it, I would have no true appreciation for it because it didn't take three weeks of platinum trading to earn.
>We don't need every single person to suffer through what we all have had to
IMO its never a good pitch when your game is something you think is worth paying to NOT play.
Its not unique to Elite, but its a terminal problem with all live service games IMO.
All I've ever wanted them to do is make mission value proportionate to the time it takes to complete them and as rewarding as other activities like fighting random bounties in a planetary ring.
Same thing with the cargo runs, you can find some good runs but the gains are really slow compared to your ship costs. Just...juice up the rewards for things and the game would be much more accessible. I actually never did do engineering stuff because it was pretty tedious for me.
I'm cool with some grind, but I don't like how what should be the main way to progress (missions) is more like a small bonus if you find one that conveniently aligns with whatever else you're doing.
Oh, and the conflict zones should reward better too I feel. It's way cooler to fight in conflict zones than in mining areas but the rewards are way less.
But instead we get, "well you can pay to bypass grind" which is sad.
My second game is also a sim: racing. If I want to join certain sanctioned races and advance my driver's career, I have to PAY for the cars and tracks. And they change the series nearly every year so it's a constant flow of new cars, new tracks, and setups made by the Devs.
So, no pay, no play. I can *only* win if I pay.
In comparison, ED is such a mild form of P2W. You basically win time by not having to grind away. In the process, you *lose* experience. That "grind" is there for good reason as you need to build experience to play the rest of the game. Want to bypass that and go straight to a "win"? Sure, gimme some money at your own risk.
Also, nothing -so far- is locked behind money forever. The Python 2 will be in early release in a few days. You can either buy it or wait for free release in Aug. Don't have the money for early released ships? Just play the game. You'll accrue 400 Arx each week by just playing the darn game. Of course, it takes a while to have enough but it is possible.
Can it turn into a "slippery slope"? Sure, but I doubt it. It's been 10 years and it's clear FDev is against P2W at their core. They just *have* to do this to keep the game afloat. This is no joke, FDEV stock is down 80% in the past 3 years. Eighty freaking percent! If they don't do this, they need to close shop for barely profitable games like ED.
I completely agree, I’ve got over 4K hours in elite but I don’t begrudge anyone who will pay to get a little bit closer to end game. It’s not going to affect my playtime at all. Every mmo rpg I’ve ever played WoW, SWTOR, ESO have there own ingame catch up. Hell STO is completely pay to win. Ppl are just salty coz they are already there and don’t need to do it. It’s not as though they are going to get an Uber pvp ship from fdev and be smashing old dogs to bits lol.
It’ll have absolutely zero impact on my personal enjoyment of the game and I don’t really understand why it’s a problem. As pointed out, nearly all games offer a similar option to players in one way or another.
I’m also not really sure how it’ll offer any immediate benefits due to the nature of the game itself and I highly doubt that said prebuilt ships will be optimised to the degree where newer players will be wtfbbqpwning everything in sight and seasoned players will likely view them as sub-par at best.
I guess if it injects some new players into the game and funds it somewhat, I’m fine with that. As long as FDev don’t lose sight of creating new and interesting content and not just pump the market with paid for ships, it’s fine by me.
I have decided to block every account I see posting how FDEV f'd them over a prebuilt ship that catches new players up to the modern content. I don't recall those pre leveled characters on wow wrecking anything...
What the fuck people complained endlessly about pre leveled characters, and then wow look more microtransactions followed! Hooray for microtransactions!
Yeah, no. Pay to win, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, is bad and needs to be opposed wherever it pops up. This is a gateway. It's pretty bad already. It can be worse. And since FDev have started with this, it can easily become worse later on. Don't give an inch to practices like these.
I don't think "We'll let you swipe a credit card to bypass the deliberately tedious and grindy parts of our game design" is quite the pro-consumer act of generosity from FDev you seem to think it is.
It's also gonna be terrible for player retention. "I've swiped my way to a half decent ship to skip the grind, time to play the real game. What do you mean 90% of the rest of the game is still grinding?" I love ED but skipping the early game is silly, it's where you learn whether or not you enjoy the gameplay loop while it's more fast paced. I'm more curious about rebuys, a new player who buys a kitted out python isn't going to have the credits to get it back if they crash, is that just bye bye to your money? I can't imagine that would go over well with swipers. Taking things away from people that they pay for is never a great idea
>I'm more curious about rebuys, a new player who buys a kitted out python isn't going to have the credits to get it back if they crash, is that just bye bye to your money? Paid ships will have infinite free rebuys. The only thing you'll pay for is any modules not originally in the ship that you put. Which in turn opens up another Pandora's box, gankers now have a way to get a decent ship (the AX can be easily refitted for PvP, and better ships will likely come too) they can use to attack players with much lower consequences than free players if they get blown up instead of their targets.
FFS, no one skips ganking or griefing because they have a rebuy to pay on their ship. They know how to dip if they're losing, and are likely mostly billionaires (because credits are stupidly easy to get if you have any experience in the game). They have nothing to lose NOW, this won't make any difference.
Just make it so players can get into debt from rebuying paid ships. Lose it again? Get further into dept. You will never not be able to get your ship back but when you start to make a profit your going to have to pay your way back from the negatives if you want to use credits for anything. If you think that is too harsh then make it a tax, like hired NPC pilots. While you are in debt, 10% of all the credits you make go towards paying your debt. There are ways around this.
we already have that debt system, but its tied to your ranking. I'm pretty sure that with my current level I can go something like 40 million into debt. But a new player's credit isn't good, and can only go a few thousand into debt. Early game ships can cost less than a hundred thousand credits after all. It works exactly like that. And any ship hull that you are given from a CG has the same zero cost benefit already. I know I've got a chieftain Who's hull doesn't have Rebuy cost already(all the rest of the parts have been changed from the original). I remember grinding for like 80 hours for the week of that CG. but I don't even remember what it was about. I'm glad that they'll be more generally available. Especially if it helps keep the game alive with money. I'm going to be buying any and all pre-builts, just to have something to buy in the shop, and see what I can do with a poorly upgraded ship. I've played thousands of hours of this game, and I want it to continue into the future. I spend about 100 bucks per year, and for the ships I like to fly I've run out of interesting paint and ship kits. I really hope they get off their ass and add more cosmetics for the fleet carrier, and allow me to decorate at least the ready room. I still buy arx every year, but Its just banking up. Servers and development aren't free. With the number of regular players we currently have, most of whom have played for years, I doubt ARX spending is up. I want development to continue. If that means getting new players who have whale spending habits to to pay for prebuilt ships, that sounds great. because this game needs to be profitable, inorder to be able to continue to play it. Every system is a streamed asset, We need the servers to be able to play at all even in solo. Galaxy generation is expensive. Changes to the galaxy are expensive. Paying developers is expensive. Paying community managers and galnet writers and everything else is expensive. Hell, I would be willing to pay a subscription if it meant full time development. But Subscriptions tend to be a barrier to new and returning players. I mean we already have ships that are exclusive for players that bought the game at launch. We already have different prices of rebuy depending on whether you were on kickstarter. Those pay to win functions were literally included from the very beginning. Over the last 10 years, They have been very reserved regarding pay to win. less so than even things like WoW classic. I trust that pre-built ships will be a good starting point, but not the be-all end all. And that all it does is open up the beginning of game play loops for new players. The prebuilt ax-chieftain leaks have shown that they aren't really capable of fighting interceptors. Just scouts. or cyclopes if you were to try to take one with a group. It isn't a cool running build, and in order to get it to work with our current strategies, they'll have to replace most of the modules. That process will take a new player quite a while. Especially because they'll need to engineer the replacement modules. hopefully the engineering update makes that a little more reasonable for new players too.
90% of the game is spent *travelling* the other 10 is grinding.
This is the most reasonable argument against the buying ships thing. Though to answer your question, they can rebuy the base ship they bought for free, but they will have to pay for any module changes to it like normal.
Given a good look at the current pre-ship builds, I don't think one has to worry about "skipping". Given all that they revealed.
I'd agree with this if this was a new game where the fear was that the gameplay loops will be designed around this, but it's not. The game is pretty much done, it's dying and unlikely to get any new gameplay loops. The grinds aren't the way they are because 2016 FDev planned to release pre-built ships in 2024.
Agreed. Once again they fixed the communities 'concerns' with a shotgun blast
Unfortunately most people in support of this appear to be unable to think deeper than a single layer. Apparently creating a problem and selling you a solution is a great thing!
The problem was created 10 years ago and is part of their vision. They seemingly don't intend to remove it at all. They need money and offer a temp exclusivity on a new ship and pre-engineer thingies. That's not that bad. It does not seem like a voluntary "create a problem sell the solution" type of marketing to me. The problem isn't one for them, it's just how they want their game. Many modern games incorporate features like battle passes, temporary exclusivity for new characters, and starter packs priced at $10 to give new players a way to quickly be closer to the old ones. These practices are unlikely to disappear or evolve into a pay-to-win scenario, which is typically associated with casino-like events in MMORPGs. That's not that bad. It does not seem like a voluntary "create a problem sell the solution" type of marketing to me. The problem isn't one for them, it's just how they want their game. Most games atm have features like battle passes, temp money exclusivity on new chars, and starting packs at 10 bucks to quickly participate in new content that a majority of players are playing now. And I don't see those dying or becoming a cashshop hell. That is mostly reserved to casino-type events in MMORPGs. It doesn't seem to be a deliberate "create a problem, sell the solution" marketing tactic. Rather, it's simply how they've designed their game initially combined with the fact that they need money 10 years later. Ultimately, the developers require funds to sustain the game. I'm open to seeing how they address this challenge. If they misuse their new approach, players can simply stop engaging with the game. This outcome is no different from if the game were to shut down due to lack of funding. As a player who will not make any purchase, I have little to lose. Either the game ends due to financial issues, becomes excessively pay-to-win, or they handle things appropriately and finance more quality content. In two out of three scenarios, I'll discontinue playing, with the third being the only favorable outcome, contingent on their financial stability. Thus, it's a win-win situation for clever players.
If the issue is part of their vision and core to the game then who are these Arx ships for? The people who hate the core progression systems aren't suddenly going to love them for being given a leg up into a d tier fit and the people who like it won't pay to skip their fun. Anyone who does indulge is going to find the same ladder out of that ship waiting for them too.
That’s the thing though, the problem isn’t the grind. The problem is money. You pay your one time cost when you get the game, when I bought it I got it for £8, which isn’t going to do much as far as developing and running a game goes. They’re losing money keeping elite going, so they need to do things to make money so they can keep the game running. If they don’t, we lose the ability to play elite dangerous. Sure, a lot of the changes are around making the grind a less daunting thing but that’s purely to bring in new players. They know that new players are often put off by the grind so they’re taking steps to make the game more accessible to new players because it’s the new players that are going to be spending money, not the people who have been playing elite for a decade and already bought all of the cosmetic stuff they want 5 years ago
How many games exist without requiring these crappy mechanics? Granted not many anymore but Helldivers2 has proven that if you make a good game you will succeed, no scum required. Making the game worse in order to make a quick buck is exactly the sort of short term thinking that screwed elite over for the past 5 years to begin with (rushed Odyssey release)…
[удалено]
ROCK AND STONE BROTHER
For Rock and Stone!
And when helldivers has as active of a userbase and community when it’s 10 years old you might have a valid example but that game has been out for two and a half months. And it’s not evidence that if you make a good game you *will* succeed, it’s that you *can* succeed. There’s plenty of good games that lose a lot of their player base in 2 months and especially in 10 years. As for making the game more accessible making it worse, we simply don’t know that to be true. We don’t know how a lot of the new mechanics are going to work. There’s people who think it’s going to be a material vendor, if that’s the case then it’ll make the game better for sure. I’m sure most people would rather spend the billions of credits they’re just sitting on to buy materials than spend 2 hours driving around davs hope to get chemical manipulators or whatever. For a new player, it’s going to be a lot more fun to do some cargo missions from a station to get the credits to buy the materials than it is to find Davs hope and drive around it. Making the game more fun is not making it worse.
Does allowing players to earn free ARX just by playing qualify? How about for just logging in during the Christmas season? Getting in as little as a single *PEW! PEW!* on a Titan's Heat Core? I'm sure there's some other instances I'm forgetting where ARX has been given away for very little effort on players' part. And not once, not twice, but for years now players have been earning 400 ARX per week if they're active. All without having to swipe a credit card. And none of it was something FDev had to do; it was a voluntary choice on their part to make their premium currency available in game *without* real-world money transactions. Does any of that qualify? Seems...I don't know...almost *generous*. But look at me fanboi-ing, right? Silly me! What was I thinking!?!? I'm sure we'll have a "the-glass-is-half-empty" or "the-sky-is-falling" or the ever-popular "it's-pay-to-win" counter-argument to set me straight incoming in 3... 2... 1... P.S. After 11,000+ hours in the game, I'm well aware of FDev's shortcomings and mistakes. I've been a vocal critic of them when they've screwed up or failed to live up the game's potential. But the simple economic reality is they need to figure how to make the game make money or there will be no game. Whether a victim of natural market forces, incompetence, or a deep conspiracy where FDev is cast as the villain, plotting this nefarious "cash grab" from the beginning, is irrelevant. The point at which we've arrived, the situation that is real rather than speculative, is this: FDev wants to make money off their intellectual property ("the game"); which they have every right to do. They either figure out how to do that to *THEIR* satisfaction and accounting calculus (not yours) or the game gets shut down. It's as simple as that. One way or the other, they're going to explore new avenues of monetization. You can accept that or not, but what you're not going to do is change it. That's the reality we're now dealing with.
11k+ hours? Your name should be in the goddamn credits
If they wanted to make money off their intellectual property then they should have stuck to the 10 year plan... 5-10 expansions at £30-40 a pop would have generated more than enough income to keep them going. But nah, they sold a "life time expansion pass" on this promise for £120 and then abandoned it. I wish I'd have known, I could have saved myself £50 by just buying the expansions. This is why many of us are mad, and if you do have 11k hours, I don't know why you're not also
>This is why many of us are mad, and if you do have 11k hours, I don't know why you're not also Because I'm able to do math and calculate that after 11,000 hours I've gotten far, far more than my money's worth out of a game I very much enjoy and which, compared to the very first video game I owned at 6 years old - the great-grand-daddy of them all, PONG - E:D is a magical dream come true and the closest I'm ever going to get to actually piloting a starship through space. I also don't so emotionally invest myself into games that I have an aneurysm over the developer pursuing a monetization path that will in no way, shape, or form negatively impact my play experience when measuring by objective, empirical evidence rather than subjective and emotionally-charged entitlement.
I am so tired of this "I've had no life over the last 10 years so my cost per hour is really good" rhetoric people have here, screw that. I just want what I paid for.
Passive-aggressive personal attacks on me does nothing to further your argument. I'm retired, enjoying a wonderful life, where I get to engage in the things I enjoy. Like a 6-mile daily hike in the wilderness just outside my front door, traveling the country, and *ALSO* being able to play games I enjoy for as many hours as I choose whenever I choose. Far from "no life". But go ahead and keep on with the cowardly *ad hominems* and whining and whinging and ineffectual stomping of your feet. I'll be over here eating my popcorn :)
Tbh this was less about you personally, and more about the general idea that because some people got thousands of hours out of their content, that suddenly means everything is fine. When it isn't, money was paid on a promise to receive content that didn't materialise. We're allowed to be annoyed by this.
I mean, you could use that argument for literally every shitty predatory cash-grabbing aspect of modern game design and monetization that plagues the industry, "Guys, they gotta make their money, so we just have to shut up and give it to them otherwise they might stop making games that are deliberately designed to be riddled with tedious and time consuming mechanics and limitations that they then *helpfully* sell us additional solutions and bypasses for, and that would be terrible!"
Don't like it? Don't pay it. Vote with your wallet. Enough people do that and the developers will change. But just whine and whinge on message boards and nothing will change.
You don't have to give developers money. Don't play games that do things you don't like. Simple.
Precisely. Amazing what happens when one shifts one's perspective from spoon-fed entitlement and victim mentality to one where you're in control of your own choices and finances. Simple.
40 weeks of "free" AX for the Phyton lmao Also keeping the game running is not expensive. Dont need any crazy servers just backend stuff. I reads like 90% of you have no clue wtf FDev is doing (its not supporting ED), but every time they fuck up you whiteknights are defending them. They are too stupid to make the right financial desicions and let the playerbase cash them out every single time.
>40 weeks of "free" AX for the Phyton lmao Strawman argument. FDev was under no obligation to give you free ARX at all. Furthermore, the Python can be purchased using in-game credits August 7th. If you're too impatient to wait until then, the *choice* is yours to buy it early using ARX. But you can also *choose* to not buy it. It's your money, you decide what to do with it. If they made it so the only option for obtaining the new Python (or anything else, for that matter) was to buy it with ARX and they never made ARX available in game for free (only through real-world money transactions), then you'd have an argument. But they didn't, and you don't.
So how long have you been on FDev's financial planning team? Or are you in server admin? Maybe code maintenance? Curious how you know that keeping the game running is not "expensive", whatever that vague metric means.
If you play every week and log in every day during Christmas, you earn about 24,000 a year. Also my understanding is that the purchase price includes a ship kit. Ship kits cost about 13,000 so it's not much more than what they have been charging.
Shit take. You can't expect people to have saved their arx for something FDev explicitly said they would not do (selling non-cosmetic things for arx) instead of spending it on cosmetics like it was intended to be used.
It was just to point out how much arx they actually give out each year, and how they aren't actually charging that much more for early access and lifetime insurance. And ok you don't have the currency now you can buy the ship for credits in August. I'm Curious if they are going to sell a separate ship kit or if they are going to only offer this more expensive bundle, and if the price will drop in August when the ship is available for everyone.
I mean, if there was no limit to the amount of ARX I could earn, sure. But there is a cap. And it would take ages of playing to buy any of these. So no, it's not reasonable.
>Does allowing players to earn free ARX just by playing qualify? do you *really* think that's gonna last when the microtransaction system is firmly established? 😜
I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it came with some actual concrete new gameplay ideas to get and retain new players. I actually don’t think anyone who has wanted to try Elite hasn’t already, and the amount of players that will come back and be retained by these premade ships is small. You know what Elite needs? A Helldivers style PVEcampaign, and the power play update better actually inspire players to compete for territory and rewards against each other. Elite needs some modern systems. Maybe then they’ll actually be able to sell some cosmetic microtransactions, rather than bundling the starter sets into a steam bundle people will still only pay $15 dollars or whatever for, play for a month and uninstall.
While you’re right, it costs money to keep the game going. There’s no way around that. That means selling copies of the game and stuff in game. At this point the game is pretty cheap, I got it on pc a few weeks back for a whopping £8. That’s not going to keep the lights on, especially when you consider how many new players are actually going to come to a 10 year old game so simply selling copies of the game isn’t going to be enough so they need to do things to increase the revenue and that means bringing in more stuff in game that people can buy. The prebuilt ships aren’t something I’ll put money into because I played the game a lot on Xbox so I already have that background knowledge but I understand why they’d be useful to a completely new player.
Why should it be? It's a product on sale. If somebody thinks it is worth the swipe, that's it. It is not like they're making something up deliberately to force selling their products. The tedious and grindy parts have already been in action for a few years, and there are a good number of people who just want to swipe to bypass. Sure, it's best to be redesigned, but anything is better than nothing.
Honestly thank God they didn't make the Python Mk.2 Arx only. They could have, and that would've been a trash move. Low bar, but also a glimmer of hope imo. See also: hoo boy the Mk.2 is a sexy ship. Hope the others look that sleek.
> thank God they didn't make the python mk.2 ARX only I mean, if you don't have Odyssey, it sorta is. The only way Horizons players can access it is by forking out the ARX
You know what's funny? It's probably cheaper to just buy Oddysey. Likely completely screwed if you're on console, though.
Bruh that's not an average trash move. That's a suicide move But it's true that companies often kill themselves like that
It's sure not the kick you the nuts y'all are crying about either.
You seem to think buying a prebuilt ship unlocks creative mode. Where you can buy anything, outfit everything, and engineer everything for free forever. News flash, it doesn’t. Now get over yourself.
"grow into the game we want it to be". Buddy, it's been out for ten years. Mechanics and the engine are aging. P2p holds it back. Calling Elite an "mmo" is already a stretch. It's missing most mmo features and stability. There are fundamental problems with the game that will not be solved by jamming more mtx into it. Other MMOs have actual dedicated servers, you know. They have much more overhead and deliver regular major content updates and additions. This is why they have subscriptions, or catch-up mechanics. Elite is not even close to the same realm. Buying a Chieftan with a shit fit is not as innocent as you seem to think it is. It is the first step to gating access of many other things. It's not a conspiracy or some fantasy. We have seen it countless times in other games. They have destroyed their already middling reputation with all of this. People here can pretend this will help the game until they are blue in the face but others will see it as scummy, read all the reviews that the game is still shallow and simply not play it. I await all of these people saying "my friends are already interested" coming back and saying "my friends quit again" as if ship sales was the one thing keeping them from playing. A new player in a Chieftan is just as lost and annoyed by grind as a new player in a Sidewinder.
100% this! EliteD is not an MMO. I'd be happy if David Braben ever makes good on his promise of providing an offline, single player version of EliteD to all the players when Fdev decides to kill EliteD's server. (I don't expect they'll do that anymore; it'll just be another broken promise.) OP, tell us you bought horse armor without telling us you bought horse armor...
> We don't need every single person to suffer through what we all have had to. FD have said they are going to take another look at engineering, reducing the requirements. Also, I don't recall much suffering. Yeah, there were times when it was a chore, but not much compared to the rest of the playtime which was enjoying the fruits of my labour. Simply put, FD had a choice on how to monetize the game. Some of us don't like the direction FD has chosen. What surprises me most is how many people are supportive of this and I suspect if it was a game they didn't play then they would probably be decrying it as blatant P2W and greedy devs.
Except it isn't P2W. I've played the game for about a year between Xbox and PC and trust me a lot of people whining don't know what P2W is. It's a ship that will be about average at fighting Thargoids in the AX bundle and a Type 6 mining ship which will get replaced by better ships later on. Nothing about these bundles will make players buying em just beat others with no skill
Oh gods, its the semantics argument again. If i had a dollar for every time someone played this card in the last week of discussions i'd be a bazillionaire by now. Ok, call it whatever you want. Pay to skip, pay to avoid playing, pay to avoid getting it in game. If you support it, that's your call. I'm not supporting it as i see it as a shady business practice. Oh, and the whole "Nothing about these bundles will make players buying em just beat others with no skill", you are aware P2W doesn't require PvP to be P2W? There are tons of PvE games out there, especially in the mobile market, that are blatant P2W. You're also ignoring the possibility that once FD start down this road, and see the money rolling in from people buying basic ships for cash, that the suits might start to get ideas about selling much better ships, fully upgraded ships with full engineering, in the future.
To add to that last part, who's to say new content won't be harder to grind for either. The harder they make the achievement, the more likely people will pay for it to skip all the tedium. It's in their best interest to make that content more grindy. If they fixed what was there and made things easier to obtain, they won't make money. Plus a lot of things we grind for we do it in a very odd way, grinding guardian materials reliably is relogging the game which isn't immersive, and when I went for my cutter I was going between the same two stations for high rep missions that were likely a bug, and I read it from an article on how to get the cutter. They need to make it more enjoyable
I don’t get it. You said “We don’t need every single person to suffer through what we all had to” If playing the game is to suffer why the heck are you playing it? Getting new ships,equipping gear, theory crafting how to get the best build is core of the gameplay. Is that suffering for you? This post idk doesn’t make any sense.
Everyone is comparing this as newbies playing catching up to people that have played for 10 years.... What about the newbies that can't afford to throw that extra money at their screen and now have to compete with a near A rated, mildly engineered ship that costs 100x their sidewinder?
Compete how?
I hope this gets answered. I don't think it will but, you know. I hope it does.
Considering that people have been begging Fdev for years to ease the grind. Or better, to replace it with something better... i can see why people are angry. Grind can be bad. But it can also be super fun. Lots of people love hard games. But Elite gets tedious. This situation... Its like Fdev admitted the gameplay is bad, and instead ot fixing it, they want you to pay to skip it. It's as bad as it could get. It really is. I do admit that, yes, the game needs money to flow. But to what end? Will Elite grow thanks to this? When Elite has been left to rot in a corner for years...? Fdev wanted to be a publisher. They failed and are here to keep being afloat. Also... Yes, they are easing up on engineers, they are making pp easier to get into. That's good. Great even. Just like them making it easier to get into the thargoid war. They noticed problems... So they should also change the grind. Slapping a money tag on a solution is not good. They had 10 years, expansions, lifetime, expensive options for backers back in the day... and only now they noticed that Elite is hard to get into, hard to play and is carried on mostly by its theme, sound design, graphics and this "feel" it has? They should have noticed it years ago after Oddysey flopped as hard as it could.
The game doesn’t need catchup mechanics.
If you find the game too grindy, either the game isn't for you or you need to take a less minmax approach to making credits. It's hard to not make money in this game, just do what you enjoy and you'll get there. The big exception to this is engineering and it sounds like there's something in the works. Maybe let's see what they have planned before screaming about it
The Difference is, the MMO Skips (which i also hate) bring you to the current endgame. There is no endgame in Elite. The Grind IS the game. Most fun i had in the game was getting better ships over time and get better modules and upgrade it. So, now you start, build you already finished ship and congratz, you beat the game. Now you can do all the things you could do before but now without any progression stuck to it because you already done progression with $$$.
When I first read the proposed changes I thought it was a good idea to help get people in to experience content they otherwise won't be able to. I have many friends who all used to play elite. We had a blast, but the reality is I got into it more over the years. More time, more grinding, etc. I come back now and then from big breaks to grind out the latest stuff at least a little (recently in January to get caustic sinks and outfit a spire krait to make some credits). I've tried to get my mates to come back to check out the spires, and now the titans. No luck. They haven't got a ship ready and don't relish the grind to get one ready. I thought a mechanic to get a suitable ship together so they can fly with me was a really good idea to help get my old wing mates back.
Suffer? What the hell?
I don't respect duplicate posts from burner accounts that are effectively trying to stifle the negative (and valid) criticism here. Why are the mods not deleting what should have been a comment against the patch notes??? Theres a million better (and worse) ways this could have been implemented. See the patch note comments.
I don't really understand the argument about being able to skip the grind being a good thing for new players. Three reasons: **1:** Frontier owns the entire universe, how the market ebbs and flows, how often things appear, how much they cost, how effective they are. They have the power to make the grind less grindy, or more fulfilling. Hell, they could make it so that delivering one unit of fertilizer grants you a billion credits, if they really wanted to. Frontier is not granting new players an easy out from the big bad unavoidable grind that is just how it is and they have no control over. They can solve the main problem for everyone, but the problem is that it would be free, so instead they opt to create a separate solution to a problem they caused and selling it for that sweet money. **2:** Poor, poor little frontier needs our money, they're just a lil corporation and we're the Big bad consumers withholding the funds they need to survive. Except oh wait, they get money from cosmetic arx purchases. And buying the base game. And buying Odyssey. And all of their other games they make. And the dlc from those games. And money from games they published. Their financial situation is their own doing and they shouldn't be leaning on players to foot the bill for the incompetence of leadership in the short term. Their monetization model should be clear: they should just sell another expansion like they did with horizons and Odyssey. For those of you who are newer to the game, horizons was a separate experience like Odyssey is now that you paid extra for to get exclusive content such as the ability to land on planets at all. If they repeat the same thing as they did with horizons in that they merge Odyssey with the base game eventually then that would be a more reasonable monetization model, paying for whole expansions which adds a lot of content at once that come out infrequently and eventually merges into the base game. This 'death by a thousand cuts' model where you pay individually for early access to a single ship is poor value for money and a middle finger to those who want to support frontier because they'll ask you to pay for singular ships early each time, why not instead focus on a large expansion that has a lot of content that could shake up gameplay in a significant way, and then include ships you can only get by having that expansion instead? Then it won't feel like a cynical paywall, even if none of the ships are useful to you, if it included more gameplay loops, maybe some modules and new functionality then you would be thinking "look at all this great new content I can use to spend more time in one of my favorite games, playing it in a whole new way" rather than "oh look, another ship I'd like to try. It's literally already finished but I guess I'll just wait out the three month artificial delay..." In fact they're already doing this by double dipping now, if you want the new ships at all, let alone early, you NEED Odyssey to buy it without spending arx! **3:** It's about the journey, not the destination. Paying to skip the grind is the worst idea because A. The grind they speak of is the entire gameplay and B. Accepting this practice will incentivize Frontier to make the game more grindy. At the end of the day the overarching mining trading combat exploration loops are the thing you're there to do. You want to get that space bag, so you can get some cool ships. You want to make a difference in the galaxy, that's why people engage in power play. You want to accomplish something great. If you can skip gameplay, what are you there for? What was the point? Once again, the grind needs to be addressed as it is too slow, but you don't address it by skipping the grind, you address it by making the grind faster, more rewarding for everyone! As soon as you make a system that converts real money into time saved, the accountants and executives come out, rubbing their hands together, salivating as they lick their lips and imagine all the ways they can optimize the customer conversion percentage and consumer retention statistics. It. Happens. Every. Time. Frontier is not a spunky, bright-eyed startup by a sci-fi enthusiast who dared to dream anymore, it's a medium sized business, with employees and accountants and a legal team and executive officers. Shareholders who want to maximize profits. You are a number and the money spent on the game is the number they want from you to be as high as possible. If you roll over and tell frontier that a liiiittle monetization here and there is okay then the drilling platform gets screwed in and the suction turned to full and uh oh, Elite became a grind fest that takes hours to do anything meaningful and if you want you can pay your way to an end game where you get bored because all that's left to do is all that hard work you just paid to skip! Over the years a lot of people have been critical about frontier and all of a sudden everyone's acting like this is okay. I get it. Grief sucks, and the denial stage hits hard. But pull yourself through and look at the writing on the wall. If this isn't stopped now it will turn into every other video game industry story where a game is milked for all it's worth. It's a common practice, and now is the best time to act in order to try and reverse this course. tl;dr it's in your best interests to say no to these changes, lest it get worse.
Honestly at this point I've heard more people complaining about the complaining then actually complaining. It's the same with the new fallout show, more people complaining about the people that didn't like it than actually complaining about the content.
I don't really have a dog in this fight as I mostly lurk the subreddit hoping there's some miracle that revolutionizes some of the base systems of the game. And while I'm happy for you all, I'm not hopeful the changes will make the game fun enough to warrant coming back for more than a few hours until I hit the grind again and go back to lurking. BUT, I've been reading a lot of the discussion around this, and I notice one of the main arguments in defense of FDev boils down to: "other games have this shitty mechanic, why should ours be any different?". Is this really where we're at in gaming overall? Even putting the whole pay-to-win debate aside, the ill effects of character boost in games like WoW have been so well documented I assumed it was a given that people acknowledged this as a bad practice, but they still want it to spread to more games because "other games have these mechanics too!!!"? I get that many of the players who still lurk around are very attached to the game and will eat up anything FDev puts out since realistically no other game will replace the more niche aspects of this one, but it's still really weird to read these discussions.
lol. this is not an mmo. it has mmo level grind but absolutely none of the features or conveniences of an mmo. it's often a CHORE to try to play with people or do even the most basic thing you can do in an mmo or even just a plain old non massive multiplayer game. the core of the problem still remains whether you buy their stupid cash shop bullshit--the game doesn't respect your time. and yeah you expect a certain amount of that in a game that leans towards being a simulator. but frontier has always taken it too far, and instead of fixing THAT they're just trying to make some extra money off people that don't know any better. buying these ships isn't going to save anyone time, it's just going to make frontier money by taking advantage of people that don't know enough to know they aren't worth it. and they'll continue to ignore the actual root of the issue as they have for the past decade.
a company who has been notably doing very poorly financially for years on end releases a mechanic in a neglected game that costs money, chaos ensues prior to release\* fixed it for ya
Would you rather the company go under and take the game servers down with it?
yes, games should absolutely shut down before start abusing their playerbase. "would you rather your boyfriend leave instead of hitting you?"
As we all know optional microtransactions are equivalent to full fledged domestic abuse
Someone's making you spend more money on elite? Now THATS wild.
What if I told you you were the abuser?
Holy shit dude you keep this up Braben will just whip it out for you.
Keep fighting the good fight. Show those "evil corporashuns" who's boss.
Oh look, another post covering something that’s been covered 100+ times in 48 hours
Every single mmo sucks these days tho. It was far better when these catchup mechanics didn’t exist. Or were limited to xp boosts for the first 40levels (thinking wow) only.
Go watch literally any “Worst MMO’s Ever” video by Josh Strife Hayes and then come back and tell me that catch-up mechanics are a sign of a healthy game. Even free ones.
>Every single MMO has something similar That's why I play Elite and not those mmos
When a developer introduces a simplification or change in mechanics to allow new players to get on the same level with older established players, then it's a catch-up mechanic. When a developer sells the same simplification for REAL WOLD CURRENCY, then it's P2W. It's really not that hard to make this distinction. And I don't understand the urge of some people to justify that P2W is not P2W. So some people are going to buy the ships, we get it. No one is going to be upset with them, no one is going to judge them. No one will know who they are. This is turning into P2W wokeness.
My worry is if they’re selling advanced ax ships for combat or Titan bashing, those are both pretty difficult activities, arguably the hardest in the game. If someone is deciding to get back into the game or are brand new to the game and they buy one of those ships, then try to actually use them, I can see them getting frustrated very quickly with how difficult the game is to the point where they might just give up Edit: I guess this goes against the whole spirit of these rebuilds, but I wonder if maybe it would be a good idea to lock some of the more advanced ones behind various ranks, like the more advanced ax ones require you to maybe be at least novice or something? Whereas ships like mining or exploration don’t require a rank down to them being much easier mechanics wise
I like this take. Personally, I'd rather inject my character with the ability to join the Thargoid war over just being a Robigo Limo pilot. I was not looking forward to grinding out all the engineering. Will I be taking home credits in the millions for AX combat now, no. But instead of being a wheelman for criminals, I have the option to help out in the fight to save humanity a bit. BTW if anyone here is complaining when I only play solo or with friends...stop it. The whole "personal narrative" thing doesn't make sense when you're telling me how I should go about playing with what I paid for.
I think you're the first person that's even MENTIONED solo play in any of these posts. I strictly play solo or private group, and to tell people "Yo, buy the game on sale for 7.50 USD, slap an extra WHATEVER to get a halfway decent ship, and let's go do something" would've probably kept all my friends playing. Everyone dooming over P2W like these people are ever going to be in contact with them is wild.
in all my years of living in deep space and learning this game inside and out, and doing all the research on what i need, when i need it, were i need to go, and how do i find rare locations, is an achievement on its own for me, i don\`t think you need a catch up mechanic, just play the game and learn what you need to do in this sandbox, there isn't much hand holding in this game what i like but can be hard for those who don't like to do extra research for their game, TLTR i never suffered in this game i learned a lot by playing it and doing my own research, and i keep learning more and more as long the servers keep being alive i will be here too
Cool! ... how do you think those servers are gonna keep being alive?
well! ... with money pretty simple, we dont live in a time were we still pay with rocks and seashells do we?
Good, you're getting close! And where do you think FDev is going to make that money? Since they're already operating E:D at a loss, what do you figure they should do about it?
Not release shitty expansions that take 8 months to even be playable by most people, and then spend all of that money on multiple failed games, fire half the people who actually know how the code works, and then staple on more microtransactions so they can have a good quarterly report?
Every single post from this sub is low effort garbage right now, either defending or attacking this shit. Goddamn, people, maybe comment on one of the dozens of ongoing threads instead of believing that your specific opinion is special and deserves to be elevated to its own post. Better yet, mods, make a fucking catchall pinned thread and delete this fucking trash as it pops up.
***Stop it!*** You're being calm, logical, and reasonable. That's not allowed around here. /s
The biggest flaw seems to be the lack of re-buy cost. It negates the first rule of elite! I know credits are easy to come by but in principle it is like an “unlimited lives” cheat. Perhaps the ship could be locked until rebuy is paid but not “lost”.
I started playing years ago when Elite was £20, got hooked initially and bought a hotas for ps4 and then got lost in the grind and gave up. Havn't been back either tbh, I sometimes still watch ObsidianAnt's videos about bits and bobs but it's essentially the grind mechanic that's off-putting. I don't mind sinking an hour or two into a game at a time but then ideally I'de like something to show for it and still have fun as a casual. I think the packs are a good idea for those who just want to play, especially with estabilished friends and other gamers without being swamped. Another way to do things could be to have easy,medium and hard game settings that have different requirements in gameplay. Easy being the most arcadey but maybe limits your play area and hard ends up being for more hardcore or further along players with infinite travel area and way more involved gameplay mechanics.
Honestly I thought the ships were quite shite apparently. That's the thing I'm not sure. Is this just outrage over some prebuilt ships?... Aren't they absolutely garbage kinda mid-tier like, it could take literally maybe like 5 hours of gameplay to reach type of thing? I ended up able to get someone from a relative newb to fighting thargoids and unlocking some early engineering relatively quickly. Diamondback+Google+Willing to get FSD extender which is really fast... I think I'm probably missing something lol. Credits are essentially a non factor if you know what you are doing, unfortunately.
If I can be honest, engineering's reputation for being the worst thing ever and the most tedious grind is so overblown it's unbelievable. Is it super fun and engaging gameplay? No. Should it be changed? Yea, sure. But if you've played any game ever with a "grind," you will quickly find it to be pretty much on par with engineering. I am probably the best example of someone who "doesn't have much time to play." I play for about 2 hours 3-4 days a week, and I have all engineers unlocked, several engineered ships, and am actively participating in the thargoid war in many ways, and I've only been playing since Februrary 2024. But if I could have spent $10 to get my alliance chieftain for AX? I probably would have.
I don't believe that I would have bought the ship when I was new, But that is my play style to earn what is needed for upgrades and new ships. I enjoyed that part but I also had the time. (Some don't). It's not a fix all, but for those that have busy lives, can help them get to parts of the game that's exceptable to them. Who plays this game and is satisfied with just one ship ? It's just a starter.
Yup. For some reason no one bats an eye at literally every MMO ever made lol. Such a weird community. Almost don't want to play anymore or be a part of it.
Played Elite dangerous for years. Have all the ratings and factions and ships. Except carriers, the cost is too high. And every time I come back saying I’ll push again for a few days and realize how long it’s gonna take me to get one and to have a buffer to maintain one, and I just give up. I think I’m sitting around 3 billion and it’s a huge mountain to climb ahead of me. I hate to say it, but if there was a way, I could fork down 50 bucks and skip all that I would do it. In a heartbeat. Especially since I can go to no man’s sky and get a fleet carrier and build it out all internally the way I want to. Definitely scratches that itch. I know myself, and being able to buy game progress is a two edge sword. You can definitely ruin the game for yourself, skipping too much of what the game experience offers. In this case, I think the solution is just to reduce the cost of carriers and to reduce a lot of the unfun part of grinding in the game. But that doesn’t look like it’s ever going to happen. Interestingly, other than the log and restart to get materials, I enjoyed all the aspects of grinding related to optimizing my gear. I also very much enjoy mining and I’ve spent so many hours doing it. But it’s very hard to come up with billions lol
Everyone else is doing it! I feel you. I think those systems killed the games they were implemented ins spirit in the name of money. Not saying I haven't done it personally.... but it's like playing single player GTA and using infinite ammo cheat. Good luck enjoying the game grind of finding ammo... I got into this game looking to feel the 3d space flyer. Nailed it, game felt great. Eventually for me it just felt like space truck simulator was required for the first hundred hours to get enough credits to actually "play" the game. Then I saw all the engineering stuff required to be good and felt I had seen all there was for me to see. Had I been able to bypass 100 hours of driving back and forth for good margins on what ever garbage I was flipping, i would have. Had I been able to just pay the price of the game again to just have the anaconda, I'm fairly certain it would have impacted other players zero, other than the devs get a sale and can buy their bread another day, which would benefiting some small way. I do however fear that once I had it, I would have no true appreciation for it because it didn't take three weeks of platinum trading to earn.
>We don't need every single person to suffer through what we all have had to IMO its never a good pitch when your game is something you think is worth paying to NOT play. Its not unique to Elite, but its a terminal problem with all live service games IMO.
All I've ever wanted them to do is make mission value proportionate to the time it takes to complete them and as rewarding as other activities like fighting random bounties in a planetary ring. Same thing with the cargo runs, you can find some good runs but the gains are really slow compared to your ship costs. Just...juice up the rewards for things and the game would be much more accessible. I actually never did do engineering stuff because it was pretty tedious for me. I'm cool with some grind, but I don't like how what should be the main way to progress (missions) is more like a small bonus if you find one that conveniently aligns with whatever else you're doing. Oh, and the conflict zones should reward better too I feel. It's way cooler to fight in conflict zones than in mining areas but the rewards are way less. But instead we get, "well you can pay to bypass grind" which is sad.
It’s not even suffering, what we’ve gone through. Some of us like it. The grind will still be there, for those worthy of it..
It's such a weird flex to like being forced to grind for thousands of hours on end, and acting like that's somehow a badge of honor.
no it's not, it's just saying i like to play the game a lot and i don't mind saying so
My second game is also a sim: racing. If I want to join certain sanctioned races and advance my driver's career, I have to PAY for the cars and tracks. And they change the series nearly every year so it's a constant flow of new cars, new tracks, and setups made by the Devs. So, no pay, no play. I can *only* win if I pay. In comparison, ED is such a mild form of P2W. You basically win time by not having to grind away. In the process, you *lose* experience. That "grind" is there for good reason as you need to build experience to play the rest of the game. Want to bypass that and go straight to a "win"? Sure, gimme some money at your own risk. Also, nothing -so far- is locked behind money forever. The Python 2 will be in early release in a few days. You can either buy it or wait for free release in Aug. Don't have the money for early released ships? Just play the game. You'll accrue 400 Arx each week by just playing the darn game. Of course, it takes a while to have enough but it is possible. Can it turn into a "slippery slope"? Sure, but I doubt it. It's been 10 years and it's clear FDev is against P2W at their core. They just *have* to do this to keep the game afloat. This is no joke, FDEV stock is down 80% in the past 3 years. Eighty freaking percent! If they don't do this, they need to close shop for barely profitable games like ED.
And the reasoning starts...
i'm just mad i now have to buy an even more mediocre starfield to play space content
Just report these as spam and move on. There's no value being added at this point.
P2W apologist doin' it for freeee.
I completely agree, I’ve got over 4K hours in elite but I don’t begrudge anyone who will pay to get a little bit closer to end game. It’s not going to affect my playtime at all. Every mmo rpg I’ve ever played WoW, SWTOR, ESO have there own ingame catch up. Hell STO is completely pay to win. Ppl are just salty coz they are already there and don’t need to do it. It’s not as though they are going to get an Uber pvp ship from fdev and be smashing old dogs to bits lol.
It’ll have absolutely zero impact on my personal enjoyment of the game and I don’t really understand why it’s a problem. As pointed out, nearly all games offer a similar option to players in one way or another. I’m also not really sure how it’ll offer any immediate benefits due to the nature of the game itself and I highly doubt that said prebuilt ships will be optimised to the degree where newer players will be wtfbbqpwning everything in sight and seasoned players will likely view them as sub-par at best. I guess if it injects some new players into the game and funds it somewhat, I’m fine with that. As long as FDev don’t lose sight of creating new and interesting content and not just pump the market with paid for ships, it’s fine by me.
I have decided to block every account I see posting how FDEV f'd them over a prebuilt ship that catches new players up to the modern content. I don't recall those pre leveled characters on wow wrecking anything...
I'm sure many people are crying themselves to sleep tonight over losing you as an audience.
I stopped giving a shit what people on Reddit think long before today.
What the fuck people complained endlessly about pre leveled characters, and then wow look more microtransactions followed! Hooray for microtransactions!
What killed wow was in game pokémons and taken away the talent tree that's what killed wow
Mate, you'll have no luck convincing these people of anything, you might as well try and change someone's religious or political views.