Elite: Dangerous 'billionaire' gamers are being 'antisocial', moan players A set of disgruntled owners of Elite: Dangerous have formed a Customer Action Group in order to pressure Frontier Developments over bugs, broken promises and a decision to allow players to retain unfairly acquired in-game gold. Elite: Dangerous' woes started last year when it cancelled a promised offline mode, angering some …
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MOST ELITE:DANGEROUS PLAYERS OKAY WITH EVERYTHINGNothing to see here, move along.
....
Seriously, go away. ®
Probably not much in the way of revenue on that one.
*EDIT - FFS guys, turn off the automated carriage return linefeed thingy. Formatting is all but impossible.
No of course not.
But other IT rags published this story far more objectively, for example PC Gamer: http://www.pcgamer.com/frontier-investigating-elite-dangerous-exploiters/
Simon Sharwood's repeated negative (and in several cases factually incorrect) coverage of Elite Dangerous over the last sixteen days shows a journalistic standard unbecoming of the otherwise mighty fine Register and shows a level of bias and one-sided opinionistic crusading that I'd come to expect from the likes of the Daily Mail.
Sorry Simon, I would just much rather see you speak to Frontier directly and get more information straight from the horses mouth than post links to forum trolls below a picture of Scrooge McDuck.
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The old "But it works for me so I don't see the problem" well thousands of other people do have problems, I'm pretty sure very few other areas can get away with the number of defective products software companies can without being faced with an embarrassing recall and compensation.
a) if 2 thousand people have problems, and 200 thousand people have no problems, is the product defective, or is the player-provided environment defective (this is running on customer computers over customer connections, and in my experience not everyone maintains their PC to the same standard that I do)? Exactly how many people are having connectivity issues, versus exactly how many people are not having connectivity issues? I'm not seeing verifiable figures on either side of this argument; nobody has concrete numbers and thus everyone is using weasel words to exaggerate their position (for instance, saying "thousands of other people" without providing one shred of supporting evidence that there is more than 999 people with current issues, or people like me stating that "all of my friends" are working fine so the percentage of issues must also be small)
b) you only need to recall physical goods that have a physical defect, software can be fixed or even completely replaced via download. I completely agree that everyone releases unfinished software these days, every single game I have bought recently had day one patches (6 pre-ordered XBox One games, 6 day one patches of over 200MB each). Taking one company to task for something that everyone does is disingenuous though; nothing short of a consumer boycott is going to convince EA or Activision to change working practise, and you try convincing people not to pre-order CoD: The Next One or FIFA <one every year> as soon as it gets announced.
It is not so much that software is released unfinished (though that sometimes happens), but rather that software is released without being adequately tested. Which is in fact perfectly acceptable for software that is not going to harm anyone physically or financially if it misbehaves. To test every aspect of complex PC software under all possible situations and on all the possible hardware/software combinations it will be used on would take years and cost millions. The consumer would then get bug-free software but it would be extremely expensive and grossly out of date - and so few people are likely to buy and nobody gains. Using the initial wave of customers to effectively test the product and find the bugs is therefore the most sensible thing to do.
Will I've still never been able to logon and have not had a single reply to any email or msg on the forum
As far as I'm concerned they were only interested in getting my cash a year ago and now don't give a flying !"£$!"£ about me being able to actually play the game I helped pay to be developed!!!
Fineable stuff would be relatively easy to deal with - fines as a percentage of wealth is easier to implement in a game than real life.
I'd be more concerned about non-finable stuff. For example is there anything to stop a disproportionatly wealthy player single-handedly unbalencing trade routes? Not the sort of nonsense I'd want screwing me over if I was playing the suposedly single-player solo mode.
Ah, that helps. I must admit I've not investigated what is and isn't possible in detail. As long as they can't turn up with a fleet of Anacondas and buy an entire planet's stock of it's main export then things perhaps won't be so bad.
I have to say that the possibility of the in-game economy being affected by other people's actions in solo mode is one of the main things putting me off buying it - I don't want to have a rubbish time getting started because the starter trade routes are already milked dry.
I know Diablo 3 improved massively once they killed the auction house and made getting loot for yourself realistic. Trying to keep up with inflated auction prices driven by people with more time to play than me was no fun at all.
That lack of time to play is why I worry about the influence of other players on the solo game. I don't want to feel like I'm standing still or even going backwards just because I have other stuff I need to do. Which is unfortunate, because as a teenager playing Elite for the first time (PC, CGA version) I always thought that an online version with enough players could be the best game ever. In a way I still do, it's just I don't have time for it anymore and would therefore prefer something that pauses when I have to deal with the real world instead.
I play for around an hour a night. I'm nowhere near an Anaconda yet but I'm having great fun just bounty hunting, trading rare goods and exploring. I'm friendly with the controlling faction in Lave and I've got involved in a couple of conflicts. You don't need to put hours a night in to have fun - owning the 'best' ship with the best weapons is a goal but it's just one of many.
I've not played the game myself, but it's popular amongst my group of friends and they're playing it without issue and find all of the negative press orbiting the game puzzling (my inability to get onto PSN over Xmas caused them much amusement).
My lack of involvement is due to the lack of offline mode, but that notwithstanding it seems to this observer to be one of the most cleverly crafted MMOGs since the days of Ultima.
"It's not meant to be fair - its a dog eat dog universe."
If that's what you are looking for then play EVE Online. E:D was touted as being different from EVE.
Oh and by the way CCP, the developers of EVE, come down like a ton of bricks on anything regarded as an exploit, which the snafu on E:D most decidedly was. It doesn't matter whose fault it is, anyone taking advantage gets hammered.
nematoad,
I agree. I much prefer CCP's response to exploits. You knew it was an exploit when you did it. Sure you might not the first time, but after you've rinsed+repeated for the 100th time to make you that billion you certainly did. So tough luck, you lose the lot. That is the fairest response. And the system ought to have logs that can allow them to check up on this sort of stuff - so there's no excuse. All you're effectively doing is database work.
If on the other hand you do something nasty through sneakiness and duplicity... Well it's a tough old universe out there. Well done you!
EVE could be frustrating at times. But I had lots of fun, spoke to some really nice people - and there's no other game where I've had such an adrenaline rush during a battle that I was sitting at my computer with my hand shaking for a couple of minutes afterwards. You'd analyse a battle with your mates, and so much had happened it seemed to have lasted half an hour, then look at the logs to see it was only 90 seconds. Great game, but could be an absolute time-sink, if you wanted to be any good.
Oh the adrenalin rush of Eve. I remember my 4 man corp being war-decced over our POS. We managed to get the POS down and take out two of their battleships with no losses on our side. None of us got any sleep that night, just shaking too much. We'd never fought a war before either.
Great times.
Spartacus,
"If on the other hand you do something nasty through sneakiness and duplicity... Well it's a tough old universe out there. Well done you!"
I agree, I probably should have expanded my argument to point out that in EVE at least, you are supposed to be competing against the other players and not the game. A sandbox is how EVE is usually described and to me that's pretty near the mark.
What the players in E:D seem to have done is game the system and been rewarded for it. No wonder there is a bit of a stink.
@Marcus Aurelius
"It's not meant to be fair . . ."
Fairness is not about there being no crime, it's about there being a level playing field. And, Frontier are very much going against themselves on this one. Take this from Braben on one of the reasons for making the game online-only:
"We were also looking at how people could cheat and those sorts of things. It’s a problem for a lot of games—for instance with exploration—the cheating spoils it for everybody. If someone does a blanket discovery of everything, that spoils things."
Right, so either gaining an unfair advantage "spoils it for everyone" or it doesn't.
As @I ain't Spartacus said, above:
"So tough luck, you lose the lot. That is the fairest response. And the system ought to have logs that can allow them to check up on this sort of stuff - so there's no excuse. All you're effectively doing is database work."
Couldn't agree more and this is also one of the reasons why an online single-player mode is just not the same as an offline mode. Cheating in an offline mode harms no one, except possibly yourself. If you want to exploit a bug so you can buy a powerful ship earlier and skip straight to destroying things rather than having to tediously earn the money then you should be able to. Offline.
Online, you have to clamp down to keep it fair for people but offline players get the freedom to play however they want, even if that involves 'cheating'. I sometimes play Civ3 with a mod that removes the nearly-crippling corruption and waste your cities experience when you have too many of them - something that makes larger maps a bit annoying. But that's my choice.
Tangent - sorry!
Frontier's Support system shows 20,000 tickets since the game was launched only a few weeks ago.
That's a lot when you consider that Frontier haven't even delivered the game yet to many customers.
When Frontier actually gets around to sending the game to the 25,000 Kickstarter backers, things are going to get really tough.
> When Frontier actually gets around to sending the game to the 25,000 Kickstarter
> backers, things are going to get really tough.
They have, I was a Kickstarter backer. I'm also unable to play the game I've downloaded (v1.03). Once I get out of the menus all I get is blank screen.
I raised a ticket (numbered in the eleven thousands) more than 2 weeks ago. I wasn't expecting an instant reply, or even one within 2 days - it being Christmas and so on - but waiting 2 weeks and hearing nothing makes me wonder how far along the now 20,000+ tickets they've gone.
They could always give some statistics (# raised, # duplicate issues, # fixed in next release, # fixed by changing Users PC config), but I suspect that would just be giving us a stick to beat them with.
I'm not sure where you got your number from, but in the pre-release Gamma stage there were over 170,000 players and a lot more have joined since. The game has been delivered to everyone who has paid for it. Apart from a few glitch cases, as far as I can tell the vast majority of players are happy.
I've backed the game on day 2 of the Kickstarter and have been testing and playing since Alpha 1. Yes, there are issues, just like any other major online release, but I feel that they are getting slated a little too much. I've gone to LaveCon and the launch party and spoken at great length to a number of the developers. The impression I have formed of the devs I spoke to and the company in general is that they genuinely care about making the very best game they can. Of course money is an issue but it's far from the only driving force.
It's probably more accurate to say it's targeted at those who were kids 30 years ago when the original Elite came out.
I remember getting a copy for Xmas when I was 11 or so, and it had a very steep learning curve, that almost made it too hard to get a start in at the time. E:D has a steeper curve.
Besides which, most games are played by adults, and the gaming industry is one of the largest industries on the planet (larger than the film industry, for instance).
So in response;
1) No it isn't (for several reasons).
2) I did.
Grow up!
You are seriously out of touch with the interactive entertainment market if you think computer games "are for kids", or that computer games are created with kids in mind. :P
A quick look at the shelves of any game retailer will show you what proportion of games are 18 rated, and I'd estimate it'll be approaching half (if you include 16 rated games it'll easily be the majority). The majority of new games are squarely aimed at the adult market and that is unlikely to change, because adults have more money to spend ;)
Well one of you can spot a joke. To the rest, thanks for your informative posts and many downvotes! I'm here all week. Try the fish!
Hey, I wouldn't downvote a comment like yours that could just as easily be parody rather than serious, but I can't resist also providing a rebuke, for the edification of those people who agree with what you said, rather than what you meant ;)
That's why you need smileys in forum posts (and especially in sarcasm), because you lose so much of the contextual nuance when you can't see the wry smile or cheeky grin over the internet.
You got waaaaay too many downvotes on that one though. I've upvoted you to try and even the balance a little ^^;
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