FDev Why

The September patch introduced Arx - a medium of exchange with a loss leader element to drive people to the store to look at and spend more money on shipkits. A capped amount of Arx can be earned via gameplay - enough to get you thinking of how to spend them but not enough for anything consequential. It also introduced a new tutorial which is no better than the existing tutorials, just has some of the info in them in one place, and doesn't teach people anything about the really vital mechanics and mostly encourages people to let computer assists run the show.

ARX being implemented by itself isn’t too big of a deal for me. I’m upset that they hide the real numbers behind a premium currency that most don’t bother converting, and I’m upset that you can only buy set packs of ARX so you almost always have to buy a bit more than you need but what really made me angry at FDev is their absolute failure to implement the mechanic without breaking the game and never fixing it.

I don't mind paying for new content. I don't mind paying a reasonable amount for additional cosmetics. I dislike that they broke the game for 3 weeks or more (station lag still a huge issue) to introduce a medium of exchange to drive sales on cosmetics during an all time lull in narrative development and content additions. New cosmetics being introduced are 50%+ more expensive than the old ones, the free Arx cap is to push footfall into the store to drive desire for paintjobs and shipkits so that they're bought anyway - with an imperfect exchange to actual currency so you have to buy more Arx than you'd spend. And somehow people slurp this up as if FDev is doing us a favour.

That patch broke a LOT of things including, but not limited to, module priority panel, mission boards, passenger lounges, engineering screens, a visual bug where all your engineered modules in storage looked like they weren't engineered, a shipkit for the clipper caused a crash to the menu
There has been a hotfix, another patch and another hotfix (plus another patch?) which has broken as much as it fixed each time.

They also introduced a new commodity with a "introductory offer" that they told CMDRs to take advantage of in Galnet. They'd dropped the price to buy, and buffed the price to sell, but not made sure that the buying station had the sell price adjusted - so you could sit in station and cycle buy/sell for a profit. The algorithm they wrote to correct people's credit balance if they participated in the market mechanics they implemented is overly aggressive and has been taking billions extra from people, leaving them bankrupt with their accounts zero'd and patchy at best responses from support simply saying they're cheats and closing the ticket in some cases.

Oh and they've been slowing up content around community goals to the point where we haven't had a meaningful one for months - after they said they'd be introducing Interstellar Initiatives to fill the gap, month long community events. So far we've had two, which were glorified CGs with spaced out content and a meaningless function of picking one side or another for a reward that nobody wanted. With events taking place way outside the bubble so if you do want to participate you're basically stuck there for a week. Since those a few months ago the Thargoid content has dried up and no narratives have further come from it. Burning stations, AX Conflict Zones etc just aren't in the game now - back to the basic NHSS for scouts and interceptors in the Pleiades.

One of the interstellar initiatives put an engineer (template clone of Palin) and some bases/stations in the Witch Head Nebula. These were accidentally wiped in the September patch and afaik are still not back there (oops).

FDev is focusing on licensed IPs per the investor report
the profit increase was due to Dino game
they also have a tencent investment to make good on
and RIP them if that flops
so im guessing Elite is getting less than 10% of the total dev time at FDev
which explains the crap patches, and the major content this december is something the promised a long time ago and held back

The game has been currently modeled around handicapping new players with things like the Docking Computer and SuperCruise Assist to allow them to avoid learning the core mechanics of the game. Therefore they will stay inexperienced for longer while chasing the false progression system of credit grinding and hopefully buying microtransactions in the form of their premium currency before they realize the unacceptable amount of game-breaking bugs and quit.

It's not even just PvP - even PvE is broken. For instance repair limpets don't work, at least on console, after the first one. It requires a relog for them to function properly, one per relog. This makes thargoid hunting super duper 👎 Oh, and you want to have a few separate wings hunting non human signal sources in the same system at once? Prepare for dozens of disconnect errors and even complete crashes. Woo!

Most of the leading PvE squads on PC just use cheat engines in solo to stack their mining/thargoid killing/bounty hunting/whateva anyway so why bother?

FDev is not taking their time and doing it right. They are taking their time *and doing it wrong*.

Ganking is popular because Elite is no longer Dangerous.
NPCs are easy and any player with half a brain can easily avoid/defeat them.
Players run around in big ships with horrible fits because they grinded money for a few hours thinking they made some sort of progression. We kill them and make them realize that they are not ready for the galaxy in their badfit conda. Ganking is showing the other player that the game is dangerous, and they should fit their ships and learn to fly them correctly. If the Developers won't implement mechanics that promote mastery of the game's own mechanics, then we'll promote the mastery by gonking.

An example of a game that has meaning to it is a game that promotes mastery of its mechanics.
You die in Dark Souls a whole lot because it's dangerous, for example.
You are encouraged to become good at those mechanics.
You have a hunger and a health bar and hostile mobs in MineCraft.
You are encouraged to become good at fighting the mobs, avoiding them, reducing their spawn around your area etc...
We gank people because we love the game and we are in protest of how it has been treated.
A game should have challenge, and that challenge should encourage you to gain mastery to overcome that challenge. Otherwise it's not even a game.

"I highly recommend playing in Open only and throw yourself into this, attempting to survive.  Ship rebuys are cheap and the money you can make these days doing double painite mining offsets the cost 100%.
...
For sure, and that's a great plan.  You'll run into people trying to kill you for fun.  Enjoy that - it's a great part of the game.  People tend to whine about it but it gets your blood pumping.  I do 100% PvP now but I didn't always and even when I was trading or doing pax missions, nothing is more intense than trying to survive a player gank (or players!).
...you can look for people to wing up w/ in the #general
...
Also, since you're new, my guide can be a great resource for the first 100 hours of gameplay.  It's linked below.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRmIc4GUWgI2CUWTkiz7iNv17IZHIOK_paT1k7_E4nkdthRfzoOSay3d3KBNoslZd7dxDtPlfBZnaXy/pub" -x Scarecrow x


GZafGeorge Shepard (filthy rich retired cmdr)2d
The problem is that open galaxy is shared with group/solo Galaxy.

Nothing works with this abomination of game design.

Power Play: Everybody undermining your systems in solo, because they freely can. You just watch bars. You cannot defend your power, you just participate in a shallow and boring gameplay.

Community Goals: People do it mostly in solo also, because they freely can. Why to transfer 720t of cargo in open and risk to lose it to a "Ganker"? Why to fight in a RES in open and share the space and targets with some others? And also risk to be attacked? If it was Open Only then You should join a squadron and do the community goal under protection by some members of your squadron.

Trading: As above.

Exploration: Very few things you can find and everything is about seeing something. You cannot find an alien weapon to bring to an engineer to attach it to your ship, that will give you 15% better stats as a reword that actually did exploration and find it.

You cannot find a special device (cloaking device, hacking device, better engine, better FSD, maybe in the form of blueprints, or parts).

You cannot find an Alien in a crashed ship and save him/her, by traveling to the nearest station, while he/she can propose to work for you as a copilot that occupy one of the chairs in the bridge and can land, travel, refuel and use the turrets of fly the fighter. The code to display an avatar in the bridge is already in the game for multicrew. Why I cannot see my copilots?

Shallow and boring gameplay again, Nothing useful to find while exploring.

Bounty Hunting: Again a shallow and boring gameplay. You just destroy eternal spawning NPCs just to earn rank and money. And when you are Elite in combat and have 20billion? why to do any BH? Now Imagine:

Open played in its own servers (like Beta is played in isolated servers)

You enlist (paying a fee) to the Bounty hunters guild

Then you have access in [bring to justice the criminal "George Shepard" mission, Bounty 1mil credits, last seen in Sol system.

If you accept the mission, then the game will inform you for the whereabouts of George Shepard every time he jump in a non anarchy system (in a monitored, secure system) and when he is docked to a station. If the criminal jumps in an anarchy system you just get his/her last system and a notification that he/she left, so you can actually explore the neighbor systems to find him/her.

But now? a criminal can switch freely to solo. Go find him.

And I can continue in more detail, but I am really bored with ED and FDevs. Lost any hope that they Actually fix the boring and salow gameplay, bored to death to fight in Reddit PVP with "Casual players that want to relax while they are stoned", "Forum dads". "Braben Army boys" and many of the same kind of people that they just love their Space Wallpaper simulator.

I think I have more than 6 months to play and I lost any hope for the 2020 content.

Because the main problem of the game is the open solo sharing and this I know that it will never going to change. So the game is dead already for me.

I am just waiting to see the second time delayed Carriers because it will be a free update and this is the first reason ED is still on my HD. The second reason is that an MMO Elite was a 30 years dream (from playing Elite 1 on my zx spectrum back at 1984).

I can definitely say that ED is NOT an MMO. And nothing will change my mind. MMO for me is actually seeing and interact with the other players.

Ganking is not a problem. When you can freely switch to solo there is NO ganking. Also ganking is the only meaningful interaction the game let you do with another Human. Or you just play to open to see some hollows and send an O7. Maybe you can have a conversation with someone (sometimes) but well, I can have a conversation in Facebook and I can meet in Elite page other cmdrs, also getting more info about them, than the basic in game chat.

Everyone who doesn't agree with me in this wall of text, are my targets and you will have an 3ple Elite enemy with 25Billion credits to spend on re-buys. So before you take a part of this wall of text and try to defend FD, think what can I do to you in your favorite wallpaper simulator (if you play in open of course and IF I ever login again. :-) :-P /s

Clearly the last paragraph is me trying to make humor.

Sorry about my English, is not my native Language. I am trying though.


Use powerplay only to acquire modules. Otherwise it's just a bamboozle.

Acquire them in approximately this order (first few strongly recommended, last few can be skipped): Prismatics, Grom/FSD Resets, Pacifiers, Packhounds, Imp Hammers, APAs, Enforcer Cannons, Cytos, Retributor, Mining Lances.

To acquire, do the following:

1. Be rich from painite.

2. Pledge to appropriate imaginary space power and wait until pledged 3 weeks.

3. During week 3 start solo mode in a shit t-9 with >= 750 tons cargo. Go to power capital system as noted in the bad right hand galactic power menu somewhere. Buy 750 tons of fortify thingies by repetitively pressing a sequence of buttons 75 times.

4. Deliver them to nearest fortify target system. These are also found somewhere in the dumb galactic powers menu on the right. Make sure L pad because you're in a stupid stupid t-9

5. Get out of the retarded t-9 and back into a real ship and back into open

6. When week 4 rolls around, at Jameson stock up on about a dozen of the modules (for prismatics, at least one of each size and suggest a few of common sizes) and put into storage ships.

7. If still need other modules, goto step 2.

8. Pledge to pirate guy, cultguru dude, asian space nerd, or bland alliance man and stay there forever. This will allow you to kill other players more often and receive less notoriety and bounties due to bgs features.

There is literally no other use for powerplay than this.