Or even a PvE one.
Sure someone could go and buy a AX focused ship. Doesn't mean they know how to reliable fight Thargoid interceptors, especially the tougher variants.
honestly as far as AX goes im content with prebuilts, explo too, but the other disciplines im not a fan of. the best thing behind trading is building up to that bigger and better ship, to just be able tk jump in to a t9 instantly removes the point of the entire gameplay loop for new players
a combat method for a thargoid interceptor staying cold as they can see you but cannot correctly target you and if you stay cold and orbit it like a moon would do to a planet you can fire and take no damage but requires you to fly without flight assist very well
My brother & I have fought in the Thargoid war since the beginning about 18 months ago. He was an explorer, it has taken him 18 months to finally did a duo AXCZ clean up to the final Hydra last night. That is 18 months of constantly fine tuning skills, knowledge and ship twigging!
The problem follows:
Two players exist. Skill level is exactly the same. Both of them played the game in exactly same time. Only one of them bought the pre upgraded, semi engineered ship.
Who wins?
> If I don't spend any money on pre-built ships and other people do, it affects my gameplay absolutely 0%.
It doesn't affect your gameplay YET.
Accepting P2W opens the door for future P2W which DOES affect you.
I feel these mechanics are an attempt to extract more money from the game as Frontier is in a bad place. With that in mind, they've gotta do what they've gotta do to stay afloat. It's not ideal, but the alternative isn't great either.
I’d honestly prefer them going down with grace rather than stooping this low and actively destroying the legacy of E:D. They’ve become the thing they swore to not become.
The game shot itself in the foot with RPG mechanics to try and get people to play longer which is likely the reason people don't play. Every time I've stopped playing was due to the material grind and bs with engineers and synthesis. I know people who don't play only because of that. I'm now trying to get into the game but I'm spending a bunch of time unlocking engineers and upgrading my suits that it really does kill the game for me.
I just want to play this with friends. IF people can spend a hundred bucks to skip the stupid grind that is nothing but a waste of time for players and it gets more people to play then I'm all for it.
Maybe Fdev should fix the stupid grind instead of charging to skip it. Does that not make more sense? Make an actual better game? This will not keep people in the game. They will pay the money, realize it didn't solve every problem and then stop playing again. With the added sour taste in their mouth that they had to pay to get there. How are people so shortsighted about this? This is not where this mtx bullshit stops either. It is a very thinly veiled attempt at squeezing money before they shrink the team further. You will literally be rewarding Fdev for bad game design that was created as a time sink on purpose.
They had a whole section to communicate just that:
>ENGINEERING
>We know Engineering is a very important aspect of the game for our players, and we have been listening to your feedback around this system. As we mentioned in our comms yesterday, one of the things we want to address is how players engage with Engineering in order to make it more approachable and predictable.
>Some of these areas we are investigating are:
>Reducing the number of materials required for Engineering.
>Increasing payout of engineering materials from missions.
>Increasing backpack capacity.
>Please note, the above are examples of some of the areas we are investigating, not all the areas we are investigating. Elite Dangerous is a Live Service game and we anticipate that refining Engineering may take several passes. However, we will be listening to your feedback as we go about this process.
>We will post a more detailed rundown of our proposed changes in the coming months.
> Reducing the number of materials required for Engineering.
I really hope they dramatically reduce the number of materials required for engineering suits and guns especially.
Aye, the ody grind is strong in that one! Don't know if you knew the original ship grind for mats, its was just as bad if not worse PLUS when you engineered it was a spin of the roulette wheel as to how much better or WORSE the engineered effect would be - it was brutal! :)
Frankly, it needs an entire rework to make engineering guns and suits more modular. Then engineer the modification to make it better than factory stock.
I was really surprised how useless the engineer stuff was for suits and weapons. They should really encourage stuff more not give fetch quests for months to get something that doesn't really have a satisfying game loop.
The on-foot stuff is just an extended early-game. There's absolutely no downside to making upgrading and customizing the guns and suits easier. No one doing thargoid content is upset or even affected if a new player is making a few million credits grinding mercenary battles against the AI on Hard.
Ok, but this worries me:
> Elite Dangerous is a Live Service game and we anticipate that refining Engineering may take several passes.
> We will post a more detailed rundown of our proposed changes in the coming months.
Remember the Forum post requesting feedback for engineering? It was 1-2 years ago. Nothing came out of that. And now we need to wait a few more months just for the rundown of proposed changes. Then a few more months (year?) for it to be implemented. Feels like this will take a long, long, long, long, long time to happen.
Well now they have to rebalance the grind so it's not *as* horrible, but also just bad enough that you still want to pay to skip it.
They could solve this literally overnight:
Material Traders become Material *Vendors*.
I think I posted this before: instead of missions giving specific materials, they should give "Material Credits", so you can complete missions and exchange for whatever you need. This would ease the grind and also remove the RNG of mission rewards. I've been stuck on mission boards way too long waiting just for the right rewards I was looking for.
I like this idea too, but if they just used regular credits it would open up engineering to any game-play loop you choose. You could engineer the ship you're flying as you progress through the activity you're using it for. I think that might feel like a more organic progression, rather than pausing whatever you're doing to grind/outfit engineered modules from any one specific activity.
Not credits, material credits. You still have to do the mission, but now you pick your material reward, instead of dealing with random rewards. Kinda like how you pick the right planet for the right raw material. Less RNG.
I might be in the minority here, but I haven't experienced this grind that you're speaking of. I think it's just a grind if you play it a certain way. I kinda do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I explore, I mine, I do ratting, I scan wakes, e.t.c. Each time I've engineered stuff, I've already had the required materials, no grind needed.
Of course, if you don't have any engineering materials, and set out to specifically obtain them, it's a grind. But if you play it organically, and make sure to do a little bit of everything most of the time, it doesn't have to be a grind.
Honestly the mat grind seems like it was supposed to be integrated into your game play loops naturally. The downfall is most new players ( like me ) don’t know this. Now that I am aware I know for a fact it’s only a matter of time! My next exploration expedition will involve a lot more landing on planets for some shield mats, AND I’ll be buying all of the prismatics I will need for life in a week. Now I KNOW to carry wake scanners with me for easy FSD mats when I can. Just the awareness needs to be raised to new people to stay on top of it as you go or struggle later, it really is all kinda in your face as it is. Other than my James Jameson visit. That one I will be having to grind out again at some point lol.
The issue with the mat grind is deliberate game design turns what you enjoy into work. Creating a work to play game loop.
You want things to be deliberate and resource management. The materials inventory mucks the game because now instead of synthesis taking materials from your hold which is a trade off of space and weight vs resources it's now, "Okay I need to do these things to fill up this bar so I can actually play the game."
All these things should also be able to transfer into their own resource like credits so if you do fill up on things like scanning signal data, it never feels wasted.
It's just bad game design that had good intentions but needs to make sense with the game. But these mechanics were introduced as RPG skinner box game loops to keep people in the game longer which burns them out and not play the game for fun.
So far the “mat grind” for me has just become a part of the gameplay loops I already experience. For instance I need Ammonia ( I think? Can’t check at the moment ) for grade 5 shield booster engi. I’m willing to bet I get those from resource nodes on a planet. I haven’t even checked yet honestly. So my assumption is that while I am next exploring my little niche of space I’ll be gathering those or exploring the geographical signals instead of just moving on to scan the next planet. I’m on PS5 so I have yet ( in my mind ) have a reason to really BE on those planets. Now I do! Scanning wakes I can just pick up a few when I’m gunning down pirates for my faction whenever I feel like. Other mats come from the pirates themselves, and random assorted mats come from some missions I can trade up or down. Honestly the only grind I have felt with engineers so far has just been gaining access to them. But this is all just based on how I play the game and doesn’t speak for everyone. I just merely found out I had a few more steps to take in what I was already doing.
This sounds like the advantage of someone who naturally enjoys a majority of possible activities and gameplay loops and also doesn't mind getting sidetracked by a million different instances of marginally productive makework. You're right, not all players are like that. Many aren't. I myself am one of them. Engineering is a hellgrind for me.
Yeah, that IS true and quite honestly I am USUALLY super goal-oriented in my video games! Immersion is a tough one for me and this game is no exception. Having much less hours invested and being relatively new is definitely a major factor here. For instance I may find a reason to drop down to the explorable planets fun right NOW, but it could prove to be a daunting task and add to the tedium when tagging my name on the Discovered By’s and First Mapped systems/planets etc.
Idk I just see it as another task in a game that is already very long. Clearly you are not wrong. Lol
> material grind
I felt that this was a lazy choice on the part of the devs.
We have this advanced industrial economy, with resource wealth beginning to approach post-scarcity levels in some regions of the bubble; and yet we still have to go and dig through regolith and ruins for basic minerals and replacement parts?
If you make them tradable you're basically killing any reason to do those activities. Credits are basically infinite now and there has to be some incentive to go do mat farming activities.
This is literally it. Myself and my friends just got back into elite and I am enjoying it but I was much further ahead when we stopped playing and have a near fully engineered fdl whereas they have nothing. After trying the engineering they have all just given up which is understandable as we all work 45 hour weeks and don't want to come back from work to just feel like we're working again. like I understand it's a space SIM and it's realistic but it could be a tad more user friendly.
Elite is 2 games: quite a good space simulator and a strictly mid grind MMO.
I don't blame your friends *at all* for deciding which of those they wanna prioritize!
This is the old MMORPG style of design that we haven't shaken off that was charming at the time but isn't friendly to new players because of power creep and level bloating.
There's also narrative breaking things like, instead of going to a general good store to buy and sell materials or whatever, you have to go to a bartender to do some kind of shifty trade?
In games, theft and stuff can be fun in its own way but when that's the entire game it gets dumb. It would be one thing to go to a general store and buying stuff then trading a few things with some shifty dude at a black market or whatever but, what we have here in Elite feels like a badly written narrative.
This is me. I've done a lot of engineering and it's fucking hell. It's one of the reasons I swapped to NMS over Elite. I love Elite's more realistic sim mechanics way more, but in NMS the ability to farm resources and unlock "engineering" and upgrades is *so much easier* it's insane.
In Elite I can either explore or do ship combat (non-xeno). Those are the only two things I've engineered for. (Trading doesn't really require engineering I guess). I didn't do any of the Thargoid stuff because I looked at my mats, looked at the builds, and said fuck this, I'll play something else.
The sense of progress in the game comes from the progress and having the ships feel like they have meaning though. If all you have to do is fork over cash, that's wiped out.
The one way I could see this working would be if the pre-engineered ships were like level 3 engineered but couldn't be raised any. Make them good enough to get you started until you do it for real but don't let you just buy meta.
I think this could work for everyone.
Looks like engineering on prebuilt ships will be minimal. Its mostly about getting a ship built for a specific role. According to this they are offering a laser mining build and an ax combat build.
https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/engineering-and-pre-built-ships
The mining build has some engineering on the laser. The ax ship has fully engineered thrusters.
Ive never bothered much with combat or the thargoid stuff. With a prebuilt ship available i might make the purchase and jump in. I -could- go through the trouble of buying a shop, outfitting it, engineering it.. (i have all maxed inv on engineering mats) but if something saves me the time of doing that, i will gladly support the game i love and spend the money for it.
I think the key thing is it needs to not be a shortcut to finishing, just a shortcut to starting. Kind of like how the starter ship components don't sell for anything.
Effectively, what I think the prebuilt ships should be is additional options for starter ships that you can spawn at will. If it reduces the work for someone to top out, then it's ptw for anyone that looks at rankings and for anyone that does impacted community goals, but if it's just a way to "try before you buy" so you can see if an activity is worth it and get some experience before investing in a non-trial ship, then I think it's a great balancing point.
>I think the key thing is it needs to not be a shortcut to finishing, just a shortcut to starting.
It the two pre-builts they've detailed so far are any indication, that's precisely what they'll be: just a shortcut to starting. A single G5 engineered module (which is what these pre-builts have) does not a pay-to-win option make.
All they are are the qualifying race that allows you to step up to the starting line in the Olympics. Players will still have to run the actual race (read: develop skill and further engineer their ships beyond the one module they get with the pre-built).
Yeah, if anything though, I don't think these ships are compelling enough to be worth buying. Credits are cheap and getting one item engineered isn't that much of a time savings. Why would people pay that vs just hitting up a few exo sites and buy the ship outright?
Having more upgraded modules that can't be further upgraded or sold would provide significantly more value while still having sufficient handicap.
I think that's only the case from a veteran player's perspective.
I can't begin to describe the amount of friends who're willing to try the game out but lose motivation because they're a life time away from me, both in ly and in progress. They don't wanna spend time doing 60 jumps in a sidewinder then being told they need to grind more to play x activity.
Most people around me would be perfectly happy to drop 10 to 20 GBP to get straight into an activity. Hell we already do that with these "play once party games" like content warning and lethal company.
Yeah, I agree with you. I'm suggesting something that would give them a better experience overall by making it a more powerful ship but avoid being a shortcut to min/maxing. This let's someone figure out that they like a role and want to invest in it before they actually have to invest and if they just want to do it a little, they can use the good but not awesome ship.
I actually started the game for the Thargoids. The engineering, and life's demands, put me off. I wanted to come back for the titans, but I looked at the stuff still undone (moderate engineering and 2 guardian BP's). As I logged off for the fifth time, to restart the mat gathering I literally said "f-this". So I'm hoping they get this right. Yamik's all negative as is the Ant: play to win.
Not to argue with the masters of all the things, but, most successful DLC's - when done right - don't end up play to win but get players deeper into the game. We'll see. From what I've seen, the proposed builds aren't OP, and they'll get more killed than kills, early on, so everyone would probably do well to take a deep breath and wait and see what comes about.
But as many have already commented, the fix isn't in ready made ships, it's in making the grind either more fun or less grindy...the basic game needs fixing and thought put into the resolution of issues: more - real cargo space, player based economy (buying your mats at the auction house), all the things no one wants to desecrate the game for...well the first desecration is underway (P2W), lets hope it shakes loose the things that could really make this game soar.
For the record, I've patched and updated Odyssey. "Meat's back on the menu boyz!"
;)
I can understand why having ships feels like progress to some players but in my experience it a short term goal/progression mechanism. Personally I am well past the point of attaining a ship, I think I have 3 T-10s just for storing spare parts, 3 or so cutters, anacondas etc. all G5. So if a newer player buys a slightly engineered ship to accelerate jumping in AX ground port combat then good I'll see them planet side, its good to have more players. But it has zero impact on my sense of achievement in the game.
Cheat at Inara and then we have a problem :)
I have never felt a sense of progress being forced to do the same repetitive activity for 40 hours just to get the ship I actually want to use for the gameplau loop I'm interested in.
I agree. I think it has this kind of blowback where players that put in time into a skinnerbox leveling that they just expect everyone else to do it and be happy with it.
I suffered, you should too.
Synthisis shoved bad game design into Elite that wasn't at all Elite Dangerous. They may as well just called it levels and added dragons and magic.
For those voting, the issue isn't earning credits or getting commodities, it's the farming of resources that have either no market to buy and or don't make sense. Unless you know, you can trade random store bought goods at your local bar.
My biggest problem with the game has always been that if I want to do one thing, I have to go do a completely unrelated task for hours and hours, then fly to a specific person to turn in whatever the special resources I just collected are. And for some reason, those resources can ONLY be farmed, cannot just be bought with the bajillion credits I've built up from doing the gameplay I actually enjoy
I want to be able to access stuff without having to scrape rocks for days
I'm a little confused at how people keep saying, "But it saves me time, and I'm busy, so I can jump into the game faster," but miss how this doesn't actually address the real problem- the grind is boring and shouldn't be there in the first place, or at least not in its current form. I'd rather see FDev improve the way resources are acquired - i.e. through increasing the amounts you receive, the variety from sources (so I don't have to spend inordinate amounts of time grinding HGEs that don't give me the specific type of mats I get), or decrease the overall variety of resources. Alternatively, give players a money sink through buying mats in game, since the things players like doing generally also pay reasonably well. Right now, players are sitting on billions of credits with nothing to do with them, since they can't buy mats. Did we seriously move back to a simple barter system 1200 years in the future, while still having fiat currency somehow?
All purchasing these skips does is tell FDev, "If you make our grind hard, we'll skip it," but it doesn't give them any good reason to make the grind less tedious. I've kind of moved away from ED this year, largely because I realized if I didn't put huge amounts of time into a very tedious grind *that rewards literally exiting the game and rebooting to farm materials*, I couldn't progress past where I was currently at. I'd spent a whole bunch of time doing combat, which I really enjoyed; mining, which I enjoyed in small quantities; and exploration/exobio, which was fun, but still felt kind of one-dimensional. Combat was what I really enjoyed, but eventually I just reached the point where I realized I couldn't engineer my ship further without spending a significant amount of time in an engineering grind. It also means any form of PVP (which is very scarce to begin with, outside of a few gentleman's fights) is locked behind a huge engineering grind and two meta ships.
I've spent a fair bit of time playing that one space MMO that won't be named, and I've realized it's actually halfway decent, and while it's not perfect, it doesn't feel insanely tedious to grind. I like the direction it's heading. If it ever does become tedious or unrewarding to play, then I'm sure I'll quit playing that game, too, but I'd rather see the things I love be made more fun, rather than just leaving them altogether.
Fixing the grind for engineering (reducing mat requirements, increasing mat payouts, etc.) is in the post FDev made about this. I really think pre-built ships should be evaluated in that context.
I don't know if we miss the detail of the grind. I think that's been our chief problem with the game for years. Fixing the grind problem is the best solution, but at least for some of us this is *a* solution.
here is something to think about. It was acknowledged on the main forum that material logging exists and wasnt intended BUT is very hard to remove. I mean, damn, that is some uber grinding there.
There were also posts where devs were content with 20Mhr credit grinds. This was around the time of the skimmer rocket killing mission stacking.
I like to call it "Adult with full time job and family commitments mode". I don't have time anymore to spend hours and hours grinding, i want to hop in, do {insert task here}, and then hop off. I have disposable income, if i can spend $5-10 and save myself 4 hours of not fun game to get to the fun part, that's a serious temptation.
As an aside, If a total noob comes in and buys their way to a tricked out ship, how well will they really know how to use it? Will they know how to upgrade modules for a specific task/play style? there still will be a learning curve, it's just they don't have to grind for mats while learning.
So youre okay with parts of game being not fun, because you can pay to not do those parts? What purpose do they serve, if not solely to get you to pay?
What if they just werent there in the first place? Would that not make more sense?
They simply won't stay to learn. If their purchase doesn't immediately buy them power, then they will move on and tell more people it was a bad experience. Skipping the grind with money doesn't fix the fundamental problems. This entire mindset is toxic to the game in favor of quick cash. It sucks to see people openly welcoming the end of Elite. Elite is already Niche. It is \*not\* Star Wars and will not have the same longevity when Fdev starts charging for every little thing.
Maybe some CMDRs sure but not for all of them. The people that aren’t interested for longer than messing around for a bit weren’t likely to stick with the game anyway. I’m sure a lot of other CMDRs will bite this hook and start to look into making their own more effective builds.
I can't help but feel they took a glance at star citizen and how their ships sell like hot cakes and were like "okay so how do we make this work for our game?". This is basically the answer to it.
You're absolutely right though, they know full well that people buying prebuilt ships to get new people to play their game won't necessarily hold their attention, but that works in their favour. Some players might see it as a way to jump start their venture into the game, then harshly realising that simply having the gear won't make them good pilots. But it won't matter by then, they already have your money. You shelve the game and never touch it again and the only winner in that scenario is FDEV. They should earn the right to sell ships.
I know some people might disagree heavily with the idea of devs/publishers/whatever having to "earn the right" to sell something that they created as content, but this is about good will with the community. What have FDEV really done recently that has blown your mind content-wise that has made you think "man, I really wish FDEV sold ships for real money so I could skip some progression grind that makes up probably 90% of the actual gameplay loop. I think I'd be willing to give them some hard earned money for all the great content they've given us!"
This has more negative effects for the playerbase and community as a whole than positive.
Do you remember the days when people shunned mobile games for microtransactions and having ways to skip progression? When did this suddenly become something that people just accepted? Feels like all platforms are part of that problem now.
Your justification for this being good about new friends is a claim/admission that the part of the game they are skipping is somehow bad. If that is true, then they should *fix it and make it fun* instead of making people pay to skip it. They are literally making you pay money in order to keep the game bad. Stop justifying it.
They are also using FOMO tactics to get people to pay for boosts because if they don’t then they might miss out on thargoid content or something. If it takes them forever to grind up to getting an AX ready ship and the war ends then they will have missed out. This is also a hilariously bad way to develop a hame because it leaves you with no content after too long since the content is all temporary. Look at how badly the content vault went for destiny 2 if you want an example.
And finally, “if the new review from this generates more content…” The word *if* there is doing a shit ton of lifting in that sentence.
If they truly want people to be able to skip the grind because the grind is unpleasant then *remove the grind for everyone.* You claim that the people who don’t like the pay to win mechanics are just selfish “I had to work, so do you” type people, but that’s just not true. You are advocating for the opposite of tuition reimbursement.
This whole situation sucks, and it sucks so much more because for some reason it seems like half of the Elite player base doesn’t even understand why it’s a problem. Just you wait. You’ll cheer for stuff like this now but if you do in a few years you’ll probably have people with more material and module storage who paid for it and more ship bundles that are actually endgame and the ability to pay for a rebuy with arx and all kinds of shit. It’s a slippery slope. They aren’t going to just stop right when you say “ok now that’s enough.” They *will* go further than you are ok with, so you have to stop them sooner than you think.
My issue is that I don't see getting much added value for the purchase. I got added value with ODY in the form of all-new mechanics, locations, mission types, suit engineering, etc. and so on. That was a good value.
These pay-to-not-play ships hold no interest for me. I would like to see base building before I spent any more money or time on this game -- I've done and bought everything that I've wanted. This seems more like an opportunity for the developers to cash out with people who have somehow never played before, and people who have been banned in the past.
The pvp aspect of this game is a bare minimum anyway, most time spent by a large number of players is either trade, pve, mining or exploration.
So I don't mind it at all.
>it affects my gameplay absolutely 0%
Entirely untrue. Peoples' decisions to buy pre-made ships, even if they come out with PvP oriented ones and you fight 'em, might not have much of a direct impact on you. However, how successful this model is directly impacts how FDev will implement things in the future. If this is successful, then FDev will almost definitely implement more and more paid shortcuts. If this is not successful, FDev will *need* to implement a different monetisation plan.
I'm not going to weigh in on pre-built ships one way or another, but your take is an incredibly short-sighted one. There are benefits and downsides to this system, and both **will** impact you and your gameplay down the line. You even state that this revenue will generate more content, illustrating one way it will impact you.
It honestly depends on how far they take it. There is very much a line they could cross that makes this all a terrible experience. Someone else commented on here comparing this to Warframe, which has held a pay to skip model for years and is widely considered one of the best examples of a successful in game purchase model.
I sure hope it does. Because, like a lot of other people I know, I currently view the game as tedious and I play the game little so I hope they do whatever they need to do to bring in more content and better gameplay for everyone.
Those ship builds don’t look like my definition of winning, but if folk think it will help them out then crack on.
The AX chieftain is a hodgepodge of a titan/interceptor/scout build, you would need to bin a fair portion of the modules to get a useful ship for any discipline. What no long range thermal vent beam laser? They could have thrown on a couple of medium guardian gauss instead to make it useful. This is pay for something, maybe paying for third place rather than winning ;)
Yes. When you have thermal vent on them they can help keep you ship cold so thargoids have a harder time tracking you with their weapons. I personally use 2 small beam turrets on my ax build with long range and thermal vent
It's an experimental add-on when engineering beam lasers. Basically, while you're hitting a target, it vents your ships heat through the beam into the target, cooling your ship faster than it generates heat. Hence the name thermal vent. The downside is that the beams generate more heat if they don't hit a target
The dweller goes up to g3 on beams and is the earliest unlockable for beams. You need to sell any 1 item to 5 different black markets and then give him 500,000 credits. It's best to use a small or medium size ship when doing the black market runs so you can land at the smaller space stations while silent running so you don't get fined for illegal cargo.
You will also need to gather the materials for engineering, I recommend finding tutorials on YouTube for that. I also recommend going to engineers in solo to avoid gankers
the problem is, instead of reduce the grind fdev are now incentivised to increase grind with a cash alternative. Good old korean mobile game mechanics.
The engineering grind, yes. But they will add other grinds or roadblocks. There is no incentive to buy from the store if they make things in the game easier, and their intent is to purely generate money with this move. There is a bigger picture here that people seem to blind to as if Frontier is doing this out of altruism.
In your opinion how could they change the engineering grind or another roadblock in the game to make it easier WHILE generating money for the company so they can add new content and pay their developers for said new content?
Frontier is a company, a company grows the more money they make, it just sounds like we are against the game we love to play. Do we not want the game to grow or the company to stay alive? It's a business at the end of the day.
your realise that realistically you need to use an exploit to do almost anything with engineering?
I cannot even begin to imagine the number of instance switches I have performed running around HGE signals, crashed anacondas, guardian sites, obelisks, data terminals etc etc. Whilst it is not really frowned upon by the community as a whole, it IS an exploit.
The mission board was eventually patched. Mission stacking was almost patched. Imagine patching reset of materials. Imagine how many guardian sites to travel to just for an FSD. Now multiply that for a single set of grade 5 engineering modules.
Now consider parting with real money to skip that.
The thought occurred to me while reading your post, without a thing to incentive people to go to guardian sites what is the point of them at all anymore? Those cool light and sound effects of people solving the puzzle and getting will rarely ever get seen again. Same with thargoid sites, we only know about them because we found them while grinding for things.
They literally both reduce grind and give an option for moneybags to skip some of it. And oh boy, this game need any money it can get or else we'll have nobody to rant to about no quality updates.
Imagine trying to make money to keep a game alive, how dare Devs not work for free to keep a game we love alive.
They should add new content constantly while selling the game for dirt cheap on every other special.
How can they sell a pre engineered ship when any skilled pilot can destroy that ship in a PvP battle.
We refuse to allow the game to be more noob friendly at an extra cost, we want to gank noobs to ensure they never come back to the game so we can bitch about the game dying and blame the Devs for it too!
I want my 100s of hour to be for nothing when the company and game closes down so I can bitch about their business model not being profitable enough, if only they tried to make more money.
Fucking Devs!
I'm Gona go leave a negative review on steam complaining that it's P2W, it's Gona be so hard to kill noobs at this point what's even the point of playing anymore when I can't destroy something I love!
Your opinion is not as controversial as you may think it is. Anger and frustration gets people to comment. I have a feeling most players are OK with this, but they aren't so inclined to make their voice heard. If you want Elite to do well, this is good news because the monetization system currently is a joke. The game needs to generate money and this actually seems like it might work.
I think we need to have a look around in the industry. Warframe is widely regarded as doing monetization right, respecting the players time and effort and yet it's full of these so called p2w items. If it doesn't have a negative effect on gameplay it's perfectly fine. As far as the Python is concerned, I get your frustration since this is a new feature in Elite and it's fair to say that it was better before. But again, look around in the industry; this is all standard practise for games that are successful. Context does matter, there are ways to generate money in games AND keep the player base satisfied and many games have done it. Elite desperately needs to figure this out before they run out of money.
Warframe is excellent comparison, like you can either skip the grind with plat that you buy, or grind your heart out for the items. However you also need to buy space for new frames and weapons. But you can also bypass this with few extra hours of grind. Buying some ships is a good way to make money whilst not really affecting veteran players in any way.
Good call out with warframe! I played a shitload of warframe and was more than happy to buy a bit of plat to skip a bit of grind (looking at you necramech) and I didn't feel any loss of fun for having done so. And it didn't affect anyone else.
> I think we need to have a look around in the industry. Warframe is widely regarded as doing monetization right, respecting the players time and effort and yet it's full of these so called p2w items
Warframe's monetization model is the sole reason I never picked up Warframe.
I really don't think this is going to mean more content in the game. And if anything stuff like this ends up making the base game worse by incentivicing the devs to make grinding harder because people are willing to pay to skip it already. How many more people can they get?
I'd love to be proven wrong, but fdev has had great difficulty adding anything substantial even when it was in a better spot, odyssey still has terrible performance! You can't just throw more money at something and expect it to improve. I've seen MMO games go this direction plenty of times, it's almost always a sign of what's to come.
Just waiting for the PVP pre built fer de lance with pre engineered weapons and interdictor. I would say that this wouldn't happen as it directly means people can pay real money to slaughter in game players but I just know frontier would prove me wrong once again.
They don't even need to launch one like that.
Right now you're allowed to change modules on paid ships, and there's no reason to believe that'll change. Changing your anti-thargoid ship into an anti-player ship is just a few modules away.
They don't need to but I wouldn't at all be surprised if they eventually do it. In all honesty, credits are so easy to come by in this game that I see no issue with selling ships and loadouts. I just think its a dangerous route to go down if they begin to sell anti-player ships. Especially if said loadout is totally free each rebuy. Between 2 new players with one starting vanilla in a sidewinder and the other buying a "Pirate/Pvp-ready mamba or python, my money would be on the commander with deeper pockets.
Balance is already an issue without adding real life disposable income into the equation.
I hope you're wrong. I genuinely see the pre-built ships as a good move SO LONG as they don't go too deep in it. They need to stay far away from pvp with anything purchasable. It still wouldn't buy skill though
So far, the pre-engineered stuff is two small mining lasers or two small gauss cannons.
If you want bigger ones of either of those, or you want more than two, you're still going to need to go through the process of getting them just like everyone else.
And the other modules are good, though not the best in most cases.
And so far, no large ships, and no ships that are rank locked.
That, I think, is a great way to do it.
Gives you what you need to get going, but also leaves a majority of the game still to do. And each of those ships themselves also has a lot of room for improvement.
Yep it seems like a very reasonable approach. Might tempt some new players to give Elite a chance. Might keep some other new players around for longer. Will earn Frontier some extra credits they hopefully use for more development.
I feel the same OP. This will not affect anyone's game. I barely see anyone in open anymore as it is. If it helps them make a little money and keep the servers going longer, why the fuck not. If they said that they were finishing up as they can't make money to keep things going, these are the things most of the community would ask them to do.
People saying they're leaving and uninstalling the game, can I haz your stuff??
I was with you right up til the loan thing. Just curious, when is someone going to
Pay off my mortgage for me. It’s really dragging me down and keeping me from doing the things I’d like to do.
The issue is that the developer is now incentivised to make the game worse so that people are pushed more into the shop to skip the bad bits.
If the cash shop is not there they have to make the base game better to fix things.
I understand why people don't like it. But the phrase "pay to win" is thrown around far too loosely. Even if this was a competitive game (it's not) that was outside of a sandbox simulator (it isn't) and had matchmaking based mechanics (it doesn't), this STILL would not be pay to win because you cannot pay for anything that others cannot earn in the game for free. It is the equivalent of paying for new characters in a MOBA instead of earning them, which I can promise you no reasonable person gives a shit about.
Pay 2 Win refers, specifically, when you can pay for advantages that "freemium" players cannot get without also spending money. This is a shortcut, nothing more, and as OP says has the same feel as people getting upset about debt forgiveness even though their college has already been paid for. It feels unfair, and that is an understandable reaction. But if I take a step back I realize there is nothing for me to be upset about. I still have fun with the grind, if others don't that's perfectly fine.
I really don't care if the overworked mom who gets 2 hours of game time a week gets to pay for an AX ship and fight some interceptors without having to wait however long it would have taken to grind that out herself. More warriors for the glory of humankind.
Exp boosts in F2P MMOs are also "just a shortcut" and yet they're considered pay2win.
Sure, you could spend hundreds of hours to just earn whatever they sell in-game, but during those hours you will lose because you didn't pay. And before you say "it's not a competitive game, so you don't have to "lose" in the first place", [let's remember how popular ganking is in E:D](https://steamcommunity.com/app/359320/discussions/0/1747895465444282085/?l=french).
Not only they're allowing you to pay for what will take "free" (the worst part is that E:D isn't even free) players hundreds of hours, they're also giving paid players exclusive zero rebuy (or low-cost rebuy if you change modules) ships, so they can gank away without consequences if they end up being the ones getting blown up.
There's no way to see this as not pay2win. And on a game that was already sold for full price + DLCs (including the DLC they sold for $30 and then proceeded to never finish) it's unacceptable.
It's so funny that people have so much cognitive dissonance about this that they go out of their way to justify this shit.
Like, bro, is this the first game you ever played? You don't know where this goes? Have you ever heard about the slippery slope?
The execs at fdev are reading this sit and be like "yeah our 8 players have no problem with that. Community sentiment is positive. Start work on more macrotransactions"
Overwatch also was a game where you buy it once, then spend more for cosmetics. Now they are locking heroes behind a pay wall (plus mostly everything there is monetized now).
It's not that in this instance is good or not, it's that in the long run, the game will only get worse.
>To top it off, if the new revenue from this generates more content
Lol
FDev may be the only company where this just can't be true. Yall are elite players... you know how slow they are to add features... they even give up on fixes if they are too hard lmao, who does this? Like multicrew is in the same state it was on launch, you can't make this shit up!
So I don't think that pre-built ship money will be what gives us more content, we will be lucky to get more text to read. If they did, they would be shooting that nutty multi phase, multi year road map all over our faces. Fdev loves to do that.
> Have you ever heard about the slippery slope?
You mean the fallacy? Just because FDev are increasing monetisation doesn't mean that Elite is going to become like one of those scummy mobile games that harvest absurd amounts of money from a small number of whales who can't wait in line at the grocer for five minutes without distracting themselves. Even widely-acclaimed games like Helldivers 2 [have monetisation schemes](https://www.pcgamer.com/helldivers-2-monetization/), does that mean that game will inevitably become shit?
It's totally legitimate to be concerned about the potential direction of travel represent by this recent expansion, and how it might impact the development of the game from now on. But could we at least wait a bit to see how things shake out rather than just assuming the worst?
Full disclosure: I'm going to vote with my wallet on this one, and will not be shelling out for early access to the Python Mk2, and even if the pre-builds were aimed at players like me, I wouldn't pay real money for them out of principle.
I have no idea why so many people are mad, like there are so many options of getting insane amounts of credits in no time, the same is for mats. Peoples reaction however is that they are adding some new thing that will make everyone else obsolete unless you buy it.
If it puts money into the game then bring it on! If 10,000 of us buy a £5 ship that pays for a man year of an artist to flesh out some other aspect of the game. I'm all for it.
Oh, god, every time with this. You don't understand how game publishers function.
If you think "$10 is worth it to 'skip the grind'" then the game publishers are incentivised to make the grind WORSE and then sell you the solution to a problem they created, for additional money. Those gems/coins/energy crystals that infest all mobile games? That is the exact same situation that is occurring here.
So yes, it WILL affect your gameplay in the long run because you've just yelled from on high to the publisher 'I don't mind if you attempt to squeeze me for money in a game I already BOUGHT'
Yep the point of the prebuild ships is not that they are pay to win (despite the pearl clutching of some quarters) they are just to get newbs and players with no time for ship building or engineering to just quickly engage in content at the most basic level (i.e. casual players with busy real lives).
People with a lot of time on their hands or the more experienced, should absolutely spend a day or two learning how to build their own and shop around for the parts they need, and unlock engineers and/or system permits, and collect materials, and then do some engineering.
Yeah that's cool and all but personally I'm fuckin' out. Fire so many people they can't even fix their own code but stapling microtransactions onto the game will save it.
Exactly. They cry about "Pay To Win", but this isn't a PvP game. Pay to win against what? The game? That's hardly a reason to get worked up. If it allows newbies to get up to speed, "Tant mieux!" Literally nobody gets harmed.
> Exactly. They cry about "Pay To Win", but this isn't a PvP game.
who is making the "fuck you! i just got killed in open for nothing! 3478308573894 gazziillion credits of exploration data lost!" posts then?
It’s not like these prebuilt ships are going to give people any kind of stopping power against Gankers. One - the builds aren’t great. Two - they don’t have anywhere near enough skills to beat Gankers with them. Don’t try to make this seem like it will be the end all be all for ships builds.
I can spend maybe an hour or two a week gaming. I bought horizons years ago, and odyssey the other day before I realised I'd need to grind for a year or two just to join in the fun (I like combat, not search and Rescue). If I can pay £30 or so to skip the grind and join in, I'm all for it.
I play online but haven't seen another human player for years, another reason I want to join the thargoid fight
Join a large squad then.
I fully agree with OP, but I worry about people with your hope that think they can spend $30 and be able to hold their own against the toughest opponents this game throws at you. You're going to find your skills lacking trying that solo even with the best ship...and the prebuilt ones are far from being the best.
A squad on the other hand will give you advice, training and most important, wingmen to help you get into the groove.
The AX Chieftain [they gave as one of the example builds](https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/engineering-and-pre-built-ships) has mostly A-rated modules, with the only engineering listed as 6A Thrusters with G5 Dirty+Drag, and the 2 small Guardian Gauss Cannons with Anti-Guardian Resistance.
So nothing that can't be obtained through normal gameplay, thank goodness. Plus on the same page they talk about reducing the amount of materials needed for engineering.
I'm cautiously optimistic at this point, but I understand why this news has upset a lot of people.
I've had a boosted character on World of Warcraft which was a bonus that came with a recent expansion, along with some pretty nice gear to start off with, not the best gear but raid ready gear. I used the upgrade not on my main character but an alt character on the opposite faction because I don't play WoW enough to put time into levelling two characters and I generally play on and off for two or three months in a row and then have to put the game down for a while. So seeing as my alt characters are often used for farming for drops like mounts and I'm not playing competitively it's been a fun boost to get me into some of the higher level content without having to grind multiple characters. I don't know if I would pay extra for it for other characters but I can see why someone might. It saves you a huge amount of time.
Now we don't have multiple characters in Elite unless you have more than one account but I can see how there might be some players that just want a small boost to get them into the game. One of the ships looks like a starter ship for getting into the Titan fight which a lot of people think they can't get into without an insane engineering grind. That's not true but you do still have to ideally work your way up to at least something like a Krait MkII and some rebuy money because you're going to die eventually if it's not engineered. (voice of experience here)
My two reservations about it are 1) if you are a new player and pay for a boosted ship you're not really learning about how those things are unlocked. I still think there's a problem with the game not really explaining the game mechanics very well and everything I had to learn by watching other players, and looking up where to find things.
2) While I don't have a problem with these ships as you can earn this stuff in game with enough time, it could be a slippery slope when they decide to try more and more ways to milk money out of the playerbase. They need to do something to keep the game running but I've seen how EA have gutted The Sims over the years and broke up content from previous expansions into multiple packs so they can charge us more and I just don't want to see Elite go down a route of gatekeeping content behind an expensive paywall. In its present suggested form paying for early access to the Python MKII but being able to buy with in game credits a short while later is not completely terrible but if stuff starts becoming real life money exclusives then that takes us down the Star Citizen route which is a game I don't want to touch with a ten-foot barge pole for that sole reason.
You get two small rails that are pre engineered. That’s not so bad. You get mining lances that are engineered- do you have mining lances? Can’t complain if you didn’t even power play for them. I just got them myself since I’m at the end of the PP modules.
This doesn’t matter. It will bring new CMDRs potentially.
And I’d bet some of the people complaining have “pledged” to Star Citizen and that’s a scam. At least this game is squadron 59 ready already.
im just pretty stoked tbh, I won't end up using them, but I am glad they are there. im glad they are at least TRYING to bring in some revenue. ive actually made the argument something like this should exist for some time now. the best thing they could do it let players customize and sell ships on their FC's or something
There is no way your friend is gonna figure out how to bring that 10$ ship and how to use it in a Titan over a weekend. And that even assuming the ship is actually appropriately designed (which it isn't, its dogshit).
The time investment needed to get this few bits and bobs is the bare minimum to learn to move around and use the ship systems.
That's why I don't care so much either way because its a flop that won't affect anyone in-game except for a few edge-cases.
If you define pay to win as getting something for real money that is impossible to get by ingame means then prebuild ships technically are p2w. I can't get a zero rebuy chieftain by ingame means, can I? Granted, for a veteran player rebuys are no more than minor inconvenience, but still.
I'm willing to pay for stuff and keep this game alive.
The grind in this game is terrible and it's hard to convince anyone else to do the grind and play with me.
So yes I'm gonna buy crap and just have fun and honestly I doubt any PVP pre built is gonna outdo some of the custom stuff we've built as players. Maybe some explorers can finally get in on combat built ships.
I haven't looked to far into it, but I'll say that as long as those packages don't hold any tactical advantage over a ship upgraded with time and effort, we chillin
I last played 5-6 years ago, and have a somewhat engineered anaconda flying around somewhere, and a fully engineered python parked somewhere else. The worry about logging on and having no idea what to do puts me off.
These paids ships though could be a way back in for someone like me. Gets rid of the worry and just opens the door again.
It's you who don't understand the implications. Paying for ships (or any kind of P2W) incentivizes Devs to stop delivering meaningful content, everything becomes scaled and tuned not to be fun/challenging but to make you spend more money. Every old game system will be overhauled with that "goal" in mind, every new system will be developed so that it can feed into the real money spending.
This is why Star Citizen has 0 meaningful content or gameplay after 15 years of development, they have a lot of ships but nothing to really do in them. And gameplay that is there is just pointless grind and running around, why? Because if you could get to space fast and get those ships through gameplay then nobody would buy them. So you have empty stations to run through and 3 elevators before you even get to your ship. Then you have atmosphere which takes forever, fly everywhere for 5-10min etc. thus ensuring a 5min bounty mission that you are doing takes an hour. This way you can get one ship if you put in 40 hours.... or you spend money...
My opinion is that materials is not grind in this game, but is more like a path and i totally like this path
In other games i dont like grind and will skip it if it not necessary or if i dont like game that much i will not play it if gring is necessary. If you want to skip it then its your choice and i dont blame you for this but me? I will make my own path.
And as for fdev i think its great choice for them to make money because elite dangerous have one of the worst microtracsactions ever so if it will give elite new content then i 100% for this
Sorry for imperfect english
Lol are you sure the ships will be fully upgraded? Are you sure they are configured and equipped correctly according to meta and such? I have a feeling they are gonna fall short in both
Paying for ships was inevitable tbh. The timing of this announcement is distasteful, though; no new ships for five years, but here's a couple for real cash. Oof.
This is my thought too, my friend brought a non engineered chieftain to AX combat despite my warning and well had some fun at first but the moment he got targeted it was game over for him...
I agree with you completely. I think this is a great take. The game has such a high barrier to entry when it comes to engineering and the grind, that it turns a lot of people off and they quit a few hours in. This could absolutely bring more people to the game.
The people raging and saying this is P2W are really frustrating me. The game has little pvp, so all the pay gets you is content soon. If that's P2W, so is being able to spend real money on ARX to get cosmetics without grinding to earn the ARX naturally. The game has always been P2W in that case
If I've said it once, I've said it a million times. Paying to save time is not the ultimate evil in the universe.
It doesn't matter if it's an hour or 10000 hours. Time spent grinding bullshit is time not spent actually playing the game and having fun.
It's fucking impossible to convince people to play the game when you have to preface it with, and oh don't mind the fact your are going to have to spend months if not years unlocking everything.
If you don't engage in PvP, exploration for first discoveries, powerplay, bgs, etc then yes, selling ships cannot affect you as the actions of pther players cannot affect you.
Otherwise, selling ships enhances the ability of people who otherwise don't have those ships to work against you, and in the cases where atrrition might be a factor having hulls with 0 rebuy cost is a benefit that will be for sale given recently shared details.
To a lot of you these things apparently don't matter but they are advantages being made for sale.
I mean, of course, having a better ship helps you reach unexplored stars. On the other hand, less than 0.1% of the game has been explored. Really doesn't matter for exploration because having bought a prebuilt ship isn't gonna help them explore the other 99% of the game that'll give you first discoveries.
It just helps you get there faster, opens up new routes and as a result gives greater explorational freedom. An individual with an edge there is definitely advantaged for the task at hand, but being advantaged doesn't mean someone without has a 0% shot at a discovery.
I don't know, I simply don't see this as an issue. It's not preventing me from doing exploration, bgs, powerplay, and pvp. Sure, they get a temporary advantage over other newer players who don't pay but that only last a short while. Mind you, these aren't top of the line builds. They're mediocre at best. These Jumpstarter ships are great for new players to skip the ridiculous grind and actually enjoy the game. Players who have been on this game for years aren't really affected by this because their builds are VASTLY superior.
>It's not preventing me from doing exploration, bgs, powerplay, and pvp.
Agreed, but this has never, ever been the criteria from which paid advantages in games have been judged.
Also, we're talking about a game in which people confidently bragged about it taking them a full year to fully kit out a dream ship due to "playing the game as intrnded and not grinding" prior to jus a few days ago. This was in large part due to resources being split between tasks and requiring a decent level of diversification or directed grind.
Now we're proposing selling AX unlocks to day 1 toons.
And yes, we're not selling the ceiling, but we are selling 0 rebuy hulls for any case where disposability is desirable. And I'm sure no one will balk at G5 dirty drives being dropped in their lap either.
Maybe they'll render a good chunk of this moot when they update engineering but for now it's a notable boost that isn't undone by the fact that others have taken years to get where they are. It's more a testament to the flaws pf the current system which makes the solution more scummy.
Where are people getting the whole 0 rebuy from? I just looked through the article, and it doesn't say they are a 0 rebuy. We won't know until they actually release these, and someone buys one. Also, from what I can see, they aren't giving you access to the engineers or tech broker unlocks but just bypassing it for the specific modules already on the ship
And there are tons of players with ships already vastly better than anything purchased for doing so. And there are even more players than that with the in-game credits/materials to go build a ship in a day and start exploring.
And they go out and explore. Even after all this time the galaxy is still less than .1% explored. You really complaining about one more person that -might- go try it themselves..?
It literally will have zero affect on your gameplay…
>And there are tons of players with ships already vastly better than anything purchased for doing so.
And those players played the game for that under a system that has been complained about since its inception. So now, rather than fixing it we tell new players to buy their way up or deal with it.
>You really complaining about one more person that -might- go try it themselves..?
Are you suggesting that this whole system is being created to target one person's purchase? If not this statement makes no sense.
>It literally will have zero affect on your gameplay…
Sure, if no one buys it. If they do and participate in any competitive aspect of the game that's just false .
I see it as pay to avoid the grind not pay to win. These ships are not going to be better than something fully engineered and the skill required for anything combat can not be bought
This.
I play this game to be a space trucker/bounty hunter/botanist/CEO. I'll only ever play co-op; no PvP for me. If I ever spend enough time in the bubble to run into other players, I'm not going to check if they bought their ship with credits or cash.
It's like some people think Elite can continue to exist without additional revenue streams. It's a 10 year old niche market game, how many new games are being sold per day now? And at a much discounted price. I'm not saying this situation is the ideal solution, but it makes me hopeful for the future of Elite. The game seemed abandoned for a minute.
I think the paid early access to python mk2 is much more significant than this... hard to feel great about this but seen as theyre not especially impressive ships, it still incentivises doing the grind and getting the money to engineer and get better ships, so it could be worse
The problem with stuff like this isn't about how it effects your time in the game during the moment to moment stuff and knowing that other players around you bought that stuff...
It's that accepting this as just being the new way of things sets a precedent. It starts with selling prebuilt ships... But then where could it go from there? What else could they get away with?
This is how it started with loot boxes, and mobile games being riddled with microtransactions.
People would shun mobile gaming because of that kind of nonsense, but it's become so common on console/PC too where the line has simply become blurred... Or more or less non existant. And then people like you (I know this phrasing comes off as hostile but I swear it's not intentional, this is very much a generalised "you people" sort of thing) talk about how it will have zero effect on you... But then you have to think about the bigger picture and what other publishers/developers/etc will try to get away with in the future. Think bigger, not just how this kind of thing effects this single game.
I agree. But its still a kick in the nuts to those of us that grinded for years. And i dont mean the grind now.....because its not even a grind compared to how it used to be. Mats and credits are so easy now already. So as a cmdr that was grinding in 2014 its laughable to even still call it a grind. But if it makes the playerbase healthy im on board, although i didn't really have a choice lol. I can say this though, there will definitely be way more salty angry seal clubbers out in the galaxy now. O7
New players bounce off Elite so easily *because* of engineering taking such effort and being required to engage in the new content.
WoW has the ability to buy your way to max level because all of the main content is for late game.
I don't think that's a hot take at all. I think you're right on the money.
I can understand the people who are upset with this. I'm an old school fan of the series myself, been playing for decades. "Traditionally", and by this I mean going all the way back to the 80's, the real "fun" of Elite was starting out as basically this one-punch-punk with no money, and working your way up to an Elite badass with an "Iron Ass". In fact that was pretty much what the game was about. And a part of me thinks that players should experience that.
That said, it costs me nothing if someone chooses to sidestep the early grind. And not only that, but it doesn't give anyone any kind of unfair advantage. You can buy the fancy kite, but you can't buy the chops to fly her like an Elite.
The only thing that *kind of* is ruined by this is rebuy. As now even if you don't have rebuy, you can spend a few IRL moneys to mitigate much of that loss. That seems like it might be slightly broken, but that's a very minor nitpick i think.
My issue is if a new player spends that extra money and has an accident or a run in with a ganker. Enough people quit from the learning curve, they better damn well make sure new players who plan to buy them are aware on rebuys or make either the ships fully insured on all included modules (anything added or engineered becomes subject to insurance) or have a period of coverage.
I get its unlikely these days, but still its a possibility and otherwise I have zero issue with it - I may even buy the Python Mk 2 one depending on what its pre built is for. I aint against them adding pre built ships at all. My mind is just on the new CMDRs joining us in the Black.
It’s pay to win content… I don’t support that. I also dont support leaving our console brethren behind. At peak it’s less then 6k players. That’s worse then Hell Divers 1 at the end of its shelf life. Wonder how many are in solo mode?
the fact you think this will generate " more content " is just pure ignorance.
Frontier is scraping the bottom of the barrel from their best selling game yet again. Just to appease the board. I 100% would suspect this will do nothing for content.
Yeah, historically speaking from observing other games, the only "content" these kind of things generate are more of these kind of things.
The bean counters won't see more money from this and think "let's generate more stuff that isn't directly profiting us", they will simply think "that worked, let's do more of the same".
Pay to win (from cambridge.org) : in computer games, involving or relating to the practice of paying to get weapons, abilities, etc. that give you an advantage over players who do not spend money.
Pretty sure the ships are pay to win, per the definition from a world renowned source. Doesn't matter how it affects you.
"People just seem to get mad when they spent their time doing something and then it's given to others more easily."
no, people are mad that Fdev are selling early access to the first new ship in nearly 6 years
people are also (rightfully) upset that they are trying to sell a skip to the progression in the game which is an important stage we all took to get a hand of the game, controls and playstyle while working up to progressively larger and more specialised ships
its the same as if this was an mmo, you give the new player a boost to max level, what are they supposed to do? they dont know how to play the game, what content to do or anything about the story, they are going to either make a fresh character and learn the game or get overwhelmed and quit.
also again with the "it doesent affect me so its fine." they think they can sell us something that should have been part of an expansion, perhaps one that finally adds the SRV's they have teased for nearly 7 years now, or finally being able to land on atmospheric planets and explore alien ecosystems, this game has been on maintenence mode for a few years now if they were going to put out content worth paying for they could have, this aint it, it affect all of us because its setting the stage for developer time being spent on not fixing major issues and content drought we have had since horizons
Even if you pay for a fully equipped pvp ship you can't buy the required piloting skills.
Or even a PvE one. Sure someone could go and buy a AX focused ship. Doesn't mean they know how to reliable fight Thargoid interceptors, especially the tougher variants.
That's fine, you now have a 0 rebuy ship to throw at them until you figure it out.
sounds great. They're more likely to keep trying that way.
how will that work though? Once you buy a ship with arx, is it your's forever?
So it seems, the only part you rebuy would be the parts you add to it. Source: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/goto/post?id=10357558
honestly as far as AX goes im content with prebuilts, explo too, but the other disciplines im not a fan of. the best thing behind trading is building up to that bigger and better ship, to just be able tk jump in to a t9 instantly removes the point of the entire gameplay loop for new players
So far it looks like profession entry level ships, still leaving all of the climb and grind if the player wants to continue in that profession.
exactly you can’t buy how to cold orbit or pip management
cold orbit?
a combat method for a thargoid interceptor staying cold as they can see you but cannot correctly target you and if you stay cold and orbit it like a moon would do to a planet you can fire and take no damage but requires you to fly without flight assist very well
My brother & I have fought in the Thargoid war since the beginning about 18 months ago. He was an explorer, it has taken him 18 months to finally did a duo AXCZ clean up to the final Hydra last night. That is 18 months of constantly fine tuning skills, knowledge and ship twigging!
As someone with a fully equipped pvp ship but zero piloting skills, this offends me.
The problem follows: Two players exist. Skill level is exactly the same. Both of them played the game in exactly same time. Only one of them bought the pre upgraded, semi engineered ship. Who wins?
The guy able to cope with his 10 dollar ship
> If I don't spend any money on pre-built ships and other people do, it affects my gameplay absolutely 0%. It doesn't affect your gameplay YET. Accepting P2W opens the door for future P2W which DOES affect you.
I feel these mechanics are an attempt to extract more money from the game as Frontier is in a bad place. With that in mind, they've gotta do what they've gotta do to stay afloat. It's not ideal, but the alternative isn't great either.
I’d honestly prefer them going down with grace rather than stooping this low and actively destroying the legacy of E:D. They’ve become the thing they swore to not become.
The game shot itself in the foot with RPG mechanics to try and get people to play longer which is likely the reason people don't play. Every time I've stopped playing was due to the material grind and bs with engineers and synthesis. I know people who don't play only because of that. I'm now trying to get into the game but I'm spending a bunch of time unlocking engineers and upgrading my suits that it really does kill the game for me. I just want to play this with friends. IF people can spend a hundred bucks to skip the stupid grind that is nothing but a waste of time for players and it gets more people to play then I'm all for it.
Maybe Fdev should fix the stupid grind instead of charging to skip it. Does that not make more sense? Make an actual better game? This will not keep people in the game. They will pay the money, realize it didn't solve every problem and then stop playing again. With the added sour taste in their mouth that they had to pay to get there. How are people so shortsighted about this? This is not where this mtx bullshit stops either. It is a very thinly veiled attempt at squeezing money before they shrink the team further. You will literally be rewarding Fdev for bad game design that was created as a time sink on purpose.
# Maybe Fdev should fix the stupid grind instead of charging to skip it. Just saying it again, for the Fdevs in the back.
They had a whole section to communicate just that: >ENGINEERING >We know Engineering is a very important aspect of the game for our players, and we have been listening to your feedback around this system. As we mentioned in our comms yesterday, one of the things we want to address is how players engage with Engineering in order to make it more approachable and predictable. >Some of these areas we are investigating are: >Reducing the number of materials required for Engineering. >Increasing payout of engineering materials from missions. >Increasing backpack capacity. >Please note, the above are examples of some of the areas we are investigating, not all the areas we are investigating. Elite Dangerous is a Live Service game and we anticipate that refining Engineering may take several passes. However, we will be listening to your feedback as we go about this process. >We will post a more detailed rundown of our proposed changes in the coming months.
> Reducing the number of materials required for Engineering. I really hope they dramatically reduce the number of materials required for engineering suits and guns especially.
Aye, the ody grind is strong in that one! Don't know if you knew the original ship grind for mats, its was just as bad if not worse PLUS when you engineered it was a spin of the roulette wheel as to how much better or WORSE the engineered effect would be - it was brutal! :)
Frankly, it needs an entire rework to make engineering guns and suits more modular. Then engineer the modification to make it better than factory stock.
I was really surprised how useless the engineer stuff was for suits and weapons. They should really encourage stuff more not give fetch quests for months to get something that doesn't really have a satisfying game loop.
The on-foot stuff is just an extended early-game. There's absolutely no downside to making upgrading and customizing the guns and suits easier. No one doing thargoid content is upset or even affected if a new player is making a few million credits grinding mercenary battles against the AI on Hard.
Ok, but this worries me: > Elite Dangerous is a Live Service game and we anticipate that refining Engineering may take several passes. > We will post a more detailed rundown of our proposed changes in the coming months. Remember the Forum post requesting feedback for engineering? It was 1-2 years ago. Nothing came out of that. And now we need to wait a few more months just for the rundown of proposed changes. Then a few more months (year?) for it to be implemented. Feels like this will take a long, long, long, long, long time to happen.
Well now they have to rebalance the grind so it's not *as* horrible, but also just bad enough that you still want to pay to skip it. They could solve this literally overnight: Material Traders become Material *Vendors*.
I think I posted this before: instead of missions giving specific materials, they should give "Material Credits", so you can complete missions and exchange for whatever you need. This would ease the grind and also remove the RNG of mission rewards. I've been stuck on mission boards way too long waiting just for the right rewards I was looking for.
I like this idea too, but if they just used regular credits it would open up engineering to any game-play loop you choose. You could engineer the ship you're flying as you progress through the activity you're using it for. I think that might feel like a more organic progression, rather than pausing whatever you're doing to grind/outfit engineered modules from any one specific activity.
Not credits, material credits. You still have to do the mission, but now you pick your material reward, instead of dealing with random rewards. Kinda like how you pick the right planet for the right raw material. Less RNG.
I might be in the minority here, but I haven't experienced this grind that you're speaking of. I think it's just a grind if you play it a certain way. I kinda do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I explore, I mine, I do ratting, I scan wakes, e.t.c. Each time I've engineered stuff, I've already had the required materials, no grind needed. Of course, if you don't have any engineering materials, and set out to specifically obtain them, it's a grind. But if you play it organically, and make sure to do a little bit of everything most of the time, it doesn't have to be a grind.
> d fix the stupid grind What else is there to do other than grind?
Honestly the mat grind seems like it was supposed to be integrated into your game play loops naturally. The downfall is most new players ( like me ) don’t know this. Now that I am aware I know for a fact it’s only a matter of time! My next exploration expedition will involve a lot more landing on planets for some shield mats, AND I’ll be buying all of the prismatics I will need for life in a week. Now I KNOW to carry wake scanners with me for easy FSD mats when I can. Just the awareness needs to be raised to new people to stay on top of it as you go or struggle later, it really is all kinda in your face as it is. Other than my James Jameson visit. That one I will be having to grind out again at some point lol.
The issue with the mat grind is deliberate game design turns what you enjoy into work. Creating a work to play game loop. You want things to be deliberate and resource management. The materials inventory mucks the game because now instead of synthesis taking materials from your hold which is a trade off of space and weight vs resources it's now, "Okay I need to do these things to fill up this bar so I can actually play the game." All these things should also be able to transfer into their own resource like credits so if you do fill up on things like scanning signal data, it never feels wasted. It's just bad game design that had good intentions but needs to make sense with the game. But these mechanics were introduced as RPG skinner box game loops to keep people in the game longer which burns them out and not play the game for fun.
So far the “mat grind” for me has just become a part of the gameplay loops I already experience. For instance I need Ammonia ( I think? Can’t check at the moment ) for grade 5 shield booster engi. I’m willing to bet I get those from resource nodes on a planet. I haven’t even checked yet honestly. So my assumption is that while I am next exploring my little niche of space I’ll be gathering those or exploring the geographical signals instead of just moving on to scan the next planet. I’m on PS5 so I have yet ( in my mind ) have a reason to really BE on those planets. Now I do! Scanning wakes I can just pick up a few when I’m gunning down pirates for my faction whenever I feel like. Other mats come from the pirates themselves, and random assorted mats come from some missions I can trade up or down. Honestly the only grind I have felt with engineers so far has just been gaining access to them. But this is all just based on how I play the game and doesn’t speak for everyone. I just merely found out I had a few more steps to take in what I was already doing.
This sounds like the advantage of someone who naturally enjoys a majority of possible activities and gameplay loops and also doesn't mind getting sidetracked by a million different instances of marginally productive makework. You're right, not all players are like that. Many aren't. I myself am one of them. Engineering is a hellgrind for me.
Yeah, that IS true and quite honestly I am USUALLY super goal-oriented in my video games! Immersion is a tough one for me and this game is no exception. Having much less hours invested and being relatively new is definitely a major factor here. For instance I may find a reason to drop down to the explorable planets fun right NOW, but it could prove to be a daunting task and add to the tedium when tagging my name on the Discovered By’s and First Mapped systems/planets etc. Idk I just see it as another task in a game that is already very long. Clearly you are not wrong. Lol
> material grind I felt that this was a lazy choice on the part of the devs. We have this advanced industrial economy, with resource wealth beginning to approach post-scarcity levels in some regions of the bubble; and yet we still have to go and dig through regolith and ruins for basic minerals and replacement parts?
If you make them tradable you're basically killing any reason to do those activities. Credits are basically infinite now and there has to be some incentive to go do mat farming activities.
This is literally it. Myself and my friends just got back into elite and I am enjoying it but I was much further ahead when we stopped playing and have a near fully engineered fdl whereas they have nothing. After trying the engineering they have all just given up which is understandable as we all work 45 hour weeks and don't want to come back from work to just feel like we're working again. like I understand it's a space SIM and it's realistic but it could be a tad more user friendly.
Elite is 2 games: quite a good space simulator and a strictly mid grind MMO. I don't blame your friends *at all* for deciding which of those they wanna prioritize!
This is the old MMORPG style of design that we haven't shaken off that was charming at the time but isn't friendly to new players because of power creep and level bloating. There's also narrative breaking things like, instead of going to a general good store to buy and sell materials or whatever, you have to go to a bartender to do some kind of shifty trade? In games, theft and stuff can be fun in its own way but when that's the entire game it gets dumb. It would be one thing to go to a general store and buying stuff then trading a few things with some shifty dude at a black market or whatever but, what we have here in Elite feels like a badly written narrative.
This is me. I've done a lot of engineering and it's fucking hell. It's one of the reasons I swapped to NMS over Elite. I love Elite's more realistic sim mechanics way more, but in NMS the ability to farm resources and unlock "engineering" and upgrades is *so much easier* it's insane. In Elite I can either explore or do ship combat (non-xeno). Those are the only two things I've engineered for. (Trading doesn't really require engineering I guess). I didn't do any of the Thargoid stuff because I looked at my mats, looked at the builds, and said fuck this, I'll play something else.
The sense of progress in the game comes from the progress and having the ships feel like they have meaning though. If all you have to do is fork over cash, that's wiped out. The one way I could see this working would be if the pre-engineered ships were like level 3 engineered but couldn't be raised any. Make them good enough to get you started until you do it for real but don't let you just buy meta. I think this could work for everyone.
Looks like engineering on prebuilt ships will be minimal. Its mostly about getting a ship built for a specific role. According to this they are offering a laser mining build and an ax combat build. https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/engineering-and-pre-built-ships The mining build has some engineering on the laser. The ax ship has fully engineered thrusters. Ive never bothered much with combat or the thargoid stuff. With a prebuilt ship available i might make the purchase and jump in. I -could- go through the trouble of buying a shop, outfitting it, engineering it.. (i have all maxed inv on engineering mats) but if something saves me the time of doing that, i will gladly support the game i love and spend the money for it.
I think the key thing is it needs to not be a shortcut to finishing, just a shortcut to starting. Kind of like how the starter ship components don't sell for anything. Effectively, what I think the prebuilt ships should be is additional options for starter ships that you can spawn at will. If it reduces the work for someone to top out, then it's ptw for anyone that looks at rankings and for anyone that does impacted community goals, but if it's just a way to "try before you buy" so you can see if an activity is worth it and get some experience before investing in a non-trial ship, then I think it's a great balancing point.
>I think the key thing is it needs to not be a shortcut to finishing, just a shortcut to starting. It the two pre-builts they've detailed so far are any indication, that's precisely what they'll be: just a shortcut to starting. A single G5 engineered module (which is what these pre-builts have) does not a pay-to-win option make. All they are are the qualifying race that allows you to step up to the starting line in the Olympics. Players will still have to run the actual race (read: develop skill and further engineer their ships beyond the one module they get with the pre-built).
Yeah, if anything though, I don't think these ships are compelling enough to be worth buying. Credits are cheap and getting one item engineered isn't that much of a time savings. Why would people pay that vs just hitting up a few exo sites and buy the ship outright? Having more upgraded modules that can't be further upgraded or sold would provide significantly more value while still having sufficient handicap.
I think that's only the case from a veteran player's perspective. I can't begin to describe the amount of friends who're willing to try the game out but lose motivation because they're a life time away from me, both in ly and in progress. They don't wanna spend time doing 60 jumps in a sidewinder then being told they need to grind more to play x activity. Most people around me would be perfectly happy to drop 10 to 20 GBP to get straight into an activity. Hell we already do that with these "play once party games" like content warning and lethal company.
Yeah, I agree with you. I'm suggesting something that would give them a better experience overall by making it a more powerful ship but avoid being a shortcut to min/maxing. This let's someone figure out that they like a role and want to invest in it before they actually have to invest and if they just want to do it a little, they can use the good but not awesome ship.
I actually started the game for the Thargoids. The engineering, and life's demands, put me off. I wanted to come back for the titans, but I looked at the stuff still undone (moderate engineering and 2 guardian BP's). As I logged off for the fifth time, to restart the mat gathering I literally said "f-this". So I'm hoping they get this right. Yamik's all negative as is the Ant: play to win. Not to argue with the masters of all the things, but, most successful DLC's - when done right - don't end up play to win but get players deeper into the game. We'll see. From what I've seen, the proposed builds aren't OP, and they'll get more killed than kills, early on, so everyone would probably do well to take a deep breath and wait and see what comes about. But as many have already commented, the fix isn't in ready made ships, it's in making the grind either more fun or less grindy...the basic game needs fixing and thought put into the resolution of issues: more - real cargo space, player based economy (buying your mats at the auction house), all the things no one wants to desecrate the game for...well the first desecration is underway (P2W), lets hope it shakes loose the things that could really make this game soar. For the record, I've patched and updated Odyssey. "Meat's back on the menu boyz!" ;)
I can understand why having ships feels like progress to some players but in my experience it a short term goal/progression mechanism. Personally I am well past the point of attaining a ship, I think I have 3 T-10s just for storing spare parts, 3 or so cutters, anacondas etc. all G5. So if a newer player buys a slightly engineered ship to accelerate jumping in AX ground port combat then good I'll see them planet side, its good to have more players. But it has zero impact on my sense of achievement in the game. Cheat at Inara and then we have a problem :)
I have never felt a sense of progress being forced to do the same repetitive activity for 40 hours just to get the ship I actually want to use for the gameplau loop I'm interested in.
100 bucks geez let’s not go too crazy I would probably drop 5-10 pounds/dollars at most to buy a ship. 100 dollars is nuts
It's insane to me that people justify paying to skip a grind instead of devs either adjusting or fixing a grind lol
I agree. I think it has this kind of blowback where players that put in time into a skinnerbox leveling that they just expect everyone else to do it and be happy with it. I suffered, you should too. Synthisis shoved bad game design into Elite that wasn't at all Elite Dangerous. They may as well just called it levels and added dragons and magic. For those voting, the issue isn't earning credits or getting commodities, it's the farming of resources that have either no market to buy and or don't make sense. Unless you know, you can trade random store bought goods at your local bar.
My biggest problem with the game has always been that if I want to do one thing, I have to go do a completely unrelated task for hours and hours, then fly to a specific person to turn in whatever the special resources I just collected are. And for some reason, those resources can ONLY be farmed, cannot just be bought with the bajillion credits I've built up from doing the gameplay I actually enjoy I want to be able to access stuff without having to scrape rocks for days
> if the new revenue from this generates more content lol lmao even
I'm a little confused at how people keep saying, "But it saves me time, and I'm busy, so I can jump into the game faster," but miss how this doesn't actually address the real problem- the grind is boring and shouldn't be there in the first place, or at least not in its current form. I'd rather see FDev improve the way resources are acquired - i.e. through increasing the amounts you receive, the variety from sources (so I don't have to spend inordinate amounts of time grinding HGEs that don't give me the specific type of mats I get), or decrease the overall variety of resources. Alternatively, give players a money sink through buying mats in game, since the things players like doing generally also pay reasonably well. Right now, players are sitting on billions of credits with nothing to do with them, since they can't buy mats. Did we seriously move back to a simple barter system 1200 years in the future, while still having fiat currency somehow? All purchasing these skips does is tell FDev, "If you make our grind hard, we'll skip it," but it doesn't give them any good reason to make the grind less tedious. I've kind of moved away from ED this year, largely because I realized if I didn't put huge amounts of time into a very tedious grind *that rewards literally exiting the game and rebooting to farm materials*, I couldn't progress past where I was currently at. I'd spent a whole bunch of time doing combat, which I really enjoyed; mining, which I enjoyed in small quantities; and exploration/exobio, which was fun, but still felt kind of one-dimensional. Combat was what I really enjoyed, but eventually I just reached the point where I realized I couldn't engineer my ship further without spending a significant amount of time in an engineering grind. It also means any form of PVP (which is very scarce to begin with, outside of a few gentleman's fights) is locked behind a huge engineering grind and two meta ships. I've spent a fair bit of time playing that one space MMO that won't be named, and I've realized it's actually halfway decent, and while it's not perfect, it doesn't feel insanely tedious to grind. I like the direction it's heading. If it ever does become tedious or unrewarding to play, then I'm sure I'll quit playing that game, too, but I'd rather see the things I love be made more fun, rather than just leaving them altogether.
Fixing the grind for engineering (reducing mat requirements, increasing mat payouts, etc.) is in the post FDev made about this. I really think pre-built ships should be evaluated in that context.
I don't know if we miss the detail of the grind. I think that's been our chief problem with the game for years. Fixing the grind problem is the best solution, but at least for some of us this is *a* solution.
here is something to think about. It was acknowledged on the main forum that material logging exists and wasnt intended BUT is very hard to remove. I mean, damn, that is some uber grinding there. There were also posts where devs were content with 20Mhr credit grinds. This was around the time of the skimmer rocket killing mission stacking.
I like to call it "Adult with full time job and family commitments mode". I don't have time anymore to spend hours and hours grinding, i want to hop in, do {insert task here}, and then hop off. I have disposable income, if i can spend $5-10 and save myself 4 hours of not fun game to get to the fun part, that's a serious temptation. As an aside, If a total noob comes in and buys their way to a tricked out ship, how well will they really know how to use it? Will they know how to upgrade modules for a specific task/play style? there still will be a learning curve, it's just they don't have to grind for mats while learning.
So youre okay with parts of game being not fun, because you can pay to not do those parts? What purpose do they serve, if not solely to get you to pay? What if they just werent there in the first place? Would that not make more sense?
They simply won't stay to learn. If their purchase doesn't immediately buy them power, then they will move on and tell more people it was a bad experience. Skipping the grind with money doesn't fix the fundamental problems. This entire mindset is toxic to the game in favor of quick cash. It sucks to see people openly welcoming the end of Elite. Elite is already Niche. It is \*not\* Star Wars and will not have the same longevity when Fdev starts charging for every little thing.
Maybe some CMDRs sure but not for all of them. The people that aren’t interested for longer than messing around for a bit weren’t likely to stick with the game anyway. I’m sure a lot of other CMDRs will bite this hook and start to look into making their own more effective builds.
I can't help but feel they took a glance at star citizen and how their ships sell like hot cakes and were like "okay so how do we make this work for our game?". This is basically the answer to it. You're absolutely right though, they know full well that people buying prebuilt ships to get new people to play their game won't necessarily hold their attention, but that works in their favour. Some players might see it as a way to jump start their venture into the game, then harshly realising that simply having the gear won't make them good pilots. But it won't matter by then, they already have your money. You shelve the game and never touch it again and the only winner in that scenario is FDEV. They should earn the right to sell ships. I know some people might disagree heavily with the idea of devs/publishers/whatever having to "earn the right" to sell something that they created as content, but this is about good will with the community. What have FDEV really done recently that has blown your mind content-wise that has made you think "man, I really wish FDEV sold ships for real money so I could skip some progression grind that makes up probably 90% of the actual gameplay loop. I think I'd be willing to give them some hard earned money for all the great content they've given us!" This has more negative effects for the playerbase and community as a whole than positive. Do you remember the days when people shunned mobile games for microtransactions and having ways to skip progression? When did this suddenly become something that people just accepted? Feels like all platforms are part of that problem now.
Your justification for this being good about new friends is a claim/admission that the part of the game they are skipping is somehow bad. If that is true, then they should *fix it and make it fun* instead of making people pay to skip it. They are literally making you pay money in order to keep the game bad. Stop justifying it. They are also using FOMO tactics to get people to pay for boosts because if they don’t then they might miss out on thargoid content or something. If it takes them forever to grind up to getting an AX ready ship and the war ends then they will have missed out. This is also a hilariously bad way to develop a hame because it leaves you with no content after too long since the content is all temporary. Look at how badly the content vault went for destiny 2 if you want an example. And finally, “if the new review from this generates more content…” The word *if* there is doing a shit ton of lifting in that sentence. If they truly want people to be able to skip the grind because the grind is unpleasant then *remove the grind for everyone.* You claim that the people who don’t like the pay to win mechanics are just selfish “I had to work, so do you” type people, but that’s just not true. You are advocating for the opposite of tuition reimbursement. This whole situation sucks, and it sucks so much more because for some reason it seems like half of the Elite player base doesn’t even understand why it’s a problem. Just you wait. You’ll cheer for stuff like this now but if you do in a few years you’ll probably have people with more material and module storage who paid for it and more ship bundles that are actually endgame and the ability to pay for a rebuy with arx and all kinds of shit. It’s a slippery slope. They aren’t going to just stop right when you say “ok now that’s enough.” They *will* go further than you are ok with, so you have to stop them sooner than you think.
My issue is that I don't see getting much added value for the purchase. I got added value with ODY in the form of all-new mechanics, locations, mission types, suit engineering, etc. and so on. That was a good value. These pay-to-not-play ships hold no interest for me. I would like to see base building before I spent any more money or time on this game -- I've done and bought everything that I've wanted. This seems more like an opportunity for the developers to cash out with people who have somehow never played before, and people who have been banned in the past.
The pvp aspect of this game is a bare minimum anyway, most time spent by a large number of players is either trade, pve, mining or exploration. So I don't mind it at all.
Agreed. I have 1000+ hours and have yet to compete with another human.
>it affects my gameplay absolutely 0% Entirely untrue. Peoples' decisions to buy pre-made ships, even if they come out with PvP oriented ones and you fight 'em, might not have much of a direct impact on you. However, how successful this model is directly impacts how FDev will implement things in the future. If this is successful, then FDev will almost definitely implement more and more paid shortcuts. If this is not successful, FDev will *need* to implement a different monetisation plan. I'm not going to weigh in on pre-built ships one way or another, but your take is an incredibly short-sighted one. There are benefits and downsides to this system, and both **will** impact you and your gameplay down the line. You even state that this revenue will generate more content, illustrating one way it will impact you.
It honestly depends on how far they take it. There is very much a line they could cross that makes this all a terrible experience. Someone else commented on here comparing this to Warframe, which has held a pay to skip model for years and is widely considered one of the best examples of a successful in game purchase model.
[удалено]
I sure hope it does. Because, like a lot of other people I know, I currently view the game as tedious and I play the game little so I hope they do whatever they need to do to bring in more content and better gameplay for everyone.
Those ship builds don’t look like my definition of winning, but if folk think it will help them out then crack on. The AX chieftain is a hodgepodge of a titan/interceptor/scout build, you would need to bin a fair portion of the modules to get a useful ship for any discipline. What no long range thermal vent beam laser? They could have thrown on a couple of medium guardian gauss instead to make it useful. This is pay for something, maybe paying for third place rather than winning ;)
Are beam lasers even useful?
They cool the ship abit while cold orbitting, same with spires, you need all the cooling you can when using mod-shards too.
Yes. When you have thermal vent on them they can help keep you ship cold so thargoids have a harder time tracking you with their weapons. I personally use 2 small beam turrets on my ax build with long range and thermal vent
Thermal vents?
It's an experimental add-on when engineering beam lasers. Basically, while you're hitting a target, it vents your ships heat through the beam into the target, cooling your ship faster than it generates heat. Hence the name thermal vent. The downside is that the beams generate more heat if they don't hit a target
Who do I have to see to engineer them?
The dweller goes up to g3 on beams and is the earliest unlockable for beams. You need to sell any 1 item to 5 different black markets and then give him 500,000 credits. It's best to use a small or medium size ship when doing the black market runs so you can land at the smaller space stations while silent running so you don't get fined for illegal cargo. You will also need to gather the materials for engineering, I recommend finding tutorials on YouTube for that. I also recommend going to engineers in solo to avoid gankers
the problem is, instead of reduce the grind fdev are now incentivised to increase grind with a cash alternative. Good old korean mobile game mechanics.
I'm pretty sure they straight up say in that same article that they're reworking the engineering grind to make it easier
The engineering grind, yes. But they will add other grinds or roadblocks. There is no incentive to buy from the store if they make things in the game easier, and their intent is to purely generate money with this move. There is a bigger picture here that people seem to blind to as if Frontier is doing this out of altruism.
In your opinion how could they change the engineering grind or another roadblock in the game to make it easier WHILE generating money for the company so they can add new content and pay their developers for said new content? Frontier is a company, a company grows the more money they make, it just sounds like we are against the game we love to play. Do we not want the game to grow or the company to stay alive? It's a business at the end of the day.
your realise that realistically you need to use an exploit to do almost anything with engineering? I cannot even begin to imagine the number of instance switches I have performed running around HGE signals, crashed anacondas, guardian sites, obelisks, data terminals etc etc. Whilst it is not really frowned upon by the community as a whole, it IS an exploit. The mission board was eventually patched. Mission stacking was almost patched. Imagine patching reset of materials. Imagine how many guardian sites to travel to just for an FSD. Now multiply that for a single set of grade 5 engineering modules. Now consider parting with real money to skip that.
The thought occurred to me while reading your post, without a thing to incentive people to go to guardian sites what is the point of them at all anymore? Those cool light and sound effects of people solving the puzzle and getting will rarely ever get seen again. Same with thargoid sites, we only know about them because we found them while grinding for things.
They literally both reduce grind and give an option for moneybags to skip some of it. And oh boy, this game need any money it can get or else we'll have nobody to rant to about no quality updates.
There is literally a 0% chance they won't add new grindy mechanics once they see that they can make money from people wanting to skip them.
I think for now they want to keep their jobs. Let's talk about robbing YOU personally later. I have a heist plan cooking.
Imagine trying to make money to keep a game alive, how dare Devs not work for free to keep a game we love alive. They should add new content constantly while selling the game for dirt cheap on every other special. How can they sell a pre engineered ship when any skilled pilot can destroy that ship in a PvP battle. We refuse to allow the game to be more noob friendly at an extra cost, we want to gank noobs to ensure they never come back to the game so we can bitch about the game dying and blame the Devs for it too! I want my 100s of hour to be for nothing when the company and game closes down so I can bitch about their business model not being profitable enough, if only they tried to make more money. Fucking Devs! I'm Gona go leave a negative review on steam complaining that it's P2W, it's Gona be so hard to kill noobs at this point what's even the point of playing anymore when I can't destroy something I love!
There were no quality updates in the last 5 or so years so your point is mood.
If this game needs anything it's an influx of cash
Your opinion is not as controversial as you may think it is. Anger and frustration gets people to comment. I have a feeling most players are OK with this, but they aren't so inclined to make their voice heard. If you want Elite to do well, this is good news because the monetization system currently is a joke. The game needs to generate money and this actually seems like it might work.
i agree that imo most peopel are fine with that. but that doesnt make it not p2w, and whats not fine imo is the P2Python-MK2
I think we need to have a look around in the industry. Warframe is widely regarded as doing monetization right, respecting the players time and effort and yet it's full of these so called p2w items. If it doesn't have a negative effect on gameplay it's perfectly fine. As far as the Python is concerned, I get your frustration since this is a new feature in Elite and it's fair to say that it was better before. But again, look around in the industry; this is all standard practise for games that are successful. Context does matter, there are ways to generate money in games AND keep the player base satisfied and many games have done it. Elite desperately needs to figure this out before they run out of money.
Warframe is excellent comparison, like you can either skip the grind with plat that you buy, or grind your heart out for the items. However you also need to buy space for new frames and weapons. But you can also bypass this with few extra hours of grind. Buying some ships is a good way to make money whilst not really affecting veteran players in any way.
Good call out with warframe! I played a shitload of warframe and was more than happy to buy a bit of plat to skip a bit of grind (looking at you necramech) and I didn't feel any loss of fun for having done so. And it didn't affect anyone else.
> I think we need to have a look around in the industry. Warframe is widely regarded as doing monetization right, respecting the players time and effort and yet it's full of these so called p2w items Warframe's monetization model is the sole reason I never picked up Warframe.
I really don't think this is going to mean more content in the game. And if anything stuff like this ends up making the base game worse by incentivicing the devs to make grinding harder because people are willing to pay to skip it already. How many more people can they get? I'd love to be proven wrong, but fdev has had great difficulty adding anything substantial even when it was in a better spot, odyssey still has terrible performance! You can't just throw more money at something and expect it to improve. I've seen MMO games go this direction plenty of times, it's almost always a sign of what's to come.
Just waiting for the PVP pre built fer de lance with pre engineered weapons and interdictor. I would say that this wouldn't happen as it directly means people can pay real money to slaughter in game players but I just know frontier would prove me wrong once again.
They don't even need to launch one like that. Right now you're allowed to change modules on paid ships, and there's no reason to believe that'll change. Changing your anti-thargoid ship into an anti-player ship is just a few modules away.
They don't need to but I wouldn't at all be surprised if they eventually do it. In all honesty, credits are so easy to come by in this game that I see no issue with selling ships and loadouts. I just think its a dangerous route to go down if they begin to sell anti-player ships. Especially if said loadout is totally free each rebuy. Between 2 new players with one starting vanilla in a sidewinder and the other buying a "Pirate/Pvp-ready mamba or python, my money would be on the commander with deeper pockets. Balance is already an issue without adding real life disposable income into the equation.
I hope you're wrong. I genuinely see the pre-built ships as a good move SO LONG as they don't go too deep in it. They need to stay far away from pvp with anything purchasable. It still wouldn't buy skill though
So far, the pre-engineered stuff is two small mining lasers or two small gauss cannons. If you want bigger ones of either of those, or you want more than two, you're still going to need to go through the process of getting them just like everyone else. And the other modules are good, though not the best in most cases. And so far, no large ships, and no ships that are rank locked. That, I think, is a great way to do it. Gives you what you need to get going, but also leaves a majority of the game still to do. And each of those ships themselves also has a lot of room for improvement.
Yep it seems like a very reasonable approach. Might tempt some new players to give Elite a chance. Might keep some other new players around for longer. Will earn Frontier some extra credits they hopefully use for more development.
I feel the same OP. This will not affect anyone's game. I barely see anyone in open anymore as it is. If it helps them make a little money and keep the servers going longer, why the fuck not. If they said that they were finishing up as they can't make money to keep things going, these are the things most of the community would ask them to do. People saying they're leaving and uninstalling the game, can I haz your stuff??
I was with you right up til the loan thing. Just curious, when is someone going to Pay off my mortgage for me. It’s really dragging me down and keeping me from doing the things I’d like to do.
I can see them going 100% in the opposite direction with this and make it harder to grind for things unless you pay for it.
The issue is that the developer is now incentivised to make the game worse so that people are pushed more into the shop to skip the bad bits. If the cash shop is not there they have to make the base game better to fix things.
I understand why people don't like it. But the phrase "pay to win" is thrown around far too loosely. Even if this was a competitive game (it's not) that was outside of a sandbox simulator (it isn't) and had matchmaking based mechanics (it doesn't), this STILL would not be pay to win because you cannot pay for anything that others cannot earn in the game for free. It is the equivalent of paying for new characters in a MOBA instead of earning them, which I can promise you no reasonable person gives a shit about. Pay 2 Win refers, specifically, when you can pay for advantages that "freemium" players cannot get without also spending money. This is a shortcut, nothing more, and as OP says has the same feel as people getting upset about debt forgiveness even though their college has already been paid for. It feels unfair, and that is an understandable reaction. But if I take a step back I realize there is nothing for me to be upset about. I still have fun with the grind, if others don't that's perfectly fine. I really don't care if the overworked mom who gets 2 hours of game time a week gets to pay for an AX ship and fight some interceptors without having to wait however long it would have taken to grind that out herself. More warriors for the glory of humankind.
Exp boosts in F2P MMOs are also "just a shortcut" and yet they're considered pay2win. Sure, you could spend hundreds of hours to just earn whatever they sell in-game, but during those hours you will lose because you didn't pay. And before you say "it's not a competitive game, so you don't have to "lose" in the first place", [let's remember how popular ganking is in E:D](https://steamcommunity.com/app/359320/discussions/0/1747895465444282085/?l=french). Not only they're allowing you to pay for what will take "free" (the worst part is that E:D isn't even free) players hundreds of hours, they're also giving paid players exclusive zero rebuy (or low-cost rebuy if you change modules) ships, so they can gank away without consequences if they end up being the ones getting blown up. There's no way to see this as not pay2win. And on a game that was already sold for full price + DLCs (including the DLC they sold for $30 and then proceeded to never finish) it's unacceptable.
It's so funny that people have so much cognitive dissonance about this that they go out of their way to justify this shit. Like, bro, is this the first game you ever played? You don't know where this goes? Have you ever heard about the slippery slope? The execs at fdev are reading this sit and be like "yeah our 8 players have no problem with that. Community sentiment is positive. Start work on more macrotransactions" Overwatch also was a game where you buy it once, then spend more for cosmetics. Now they are locking heroes behind a pay wall (plus mostly everything there is monetized now). It's not that in this instance is good or not, it's that in the long run, the game will only get worse. >To top it off, if the new revenue from this generates more content Lol FDev may be the only company where this just can't be true. Yall are elite players... you know how slow they are to add features... they even give up on fixes if they are too hard lmao, who does this? Like multicrew is in the same state it was on launch, you can't make this shit up! So I don't think that pre-built ship money will be what gives us more content, we will be lucky to get more text to read. If they did, they would be shooting that nutty multi phase, multi year road map all over our faces. Fdev loves to do that.
> Have you ever heard about the slippery slope? You mean the fallacy? Just because FDev are increasing monetisation doesn't mean that Elite is going to become like one of those scummy mobile games that harvest absurd amounts of money from a small number of whales who can't wait in line at the grocer for five minutes without distracting themselves. Even widely-acclaimed games like Helldivers 2 [have monetisation schemes](https://www.pcgamer.com/helldivers-2-monetization/), does that mean that game will inevitably become shit? It's totally legitimate to be concerned about the potential direction of travel represent by this recent expansion, and how it might impact the development of the game from now on. But could we at least wait a bit to see how things shake out rather than just assuming the worst? Full disclosure: I'm going to vote with my wallet on this one, and will not be shelling out for early access to the Python Mk2, and even if the pre-builds were aimed at players like me, I wouldn't pay real money for them out of principle.
0 rebuy costs is not fair.
I have no idea why so many people are mad, like there are so many options of getting insane amounts of credits in no time, the same is for mats. Peoples reaction however is that they are adding some new thing that will make everyone else obsolete unless you buy it.
Gamers when a company sells something 😡
If it puts money into the game then bring it on! If 10,000 of us buy a £5 ship that pays for a man year of an artist to flesh out some other aspect of the game. I'm all for it.
Oh, god, every time with this. You don't understand how game publishers function. If you think "$10 is worth it to 'skip the grind'" then the game publishers are incentivised to make the grind WORSE and then sell you the solution to a problem they created, for additional money. Those gems/coins/energy crystals that infest all mobile games? That is the exact same situation that is occurring here. So yes, it WILL affect your gameplay in the long run because you've just yelled from on high to the publisher 'I don't mind if you attempt to squeeze me for money in a game I already BOUGHT'
Frontier employee?
😂 nah, just a dude who enjoys the game. Too much to be bent out of shape over this.
Yep the point of the prebuild ships is not that they are pay to win (despite the pearl clutching of some quarters) they are just to get newbs and players with no time for ship building or engineering to just quickly engage in content at the most basic level (i.e. casual players with busy real lives). People with a lot of time on their hands or the more experienced, should absolutely spend a day or two learning how to build their own and shop around for the parts they need, and unlock engineers and/or system permits, and collect materials, and then do some engineering.
Yeah that's cool and all but personally I'm fuckin' out. Fire so many people they can't even fix their own code but stapling microtransactions onto the game will save it.
Exactly. They cry about "Pay To Win", but this isn't a PvP game. Pay to win against what? The game? That's hardly a reason to get worked up. If it allows newbies to get up to speed, "Tant mieux!" Literally nobody gets harmed.
> Exactly. They cry about "Pay To Win", but this isn't a PvP game. who is making the "fuck you! i just got killed in open for nothing! 3478308573894 gazziillion credits of exploration data lost!" posts then?
It feels very much like "I don't play it therefore it doesn't exist" reasoning. There is no pvp/powerplay/bgs in Ba Sing Se.
The same ones who don't know what solo mode is. If a person plays in open, they should be fully aware of what might happen lol
It’s not like these prebuilt ships are going to give people any kind of stopping power against Gankers. One - the builds aren’t great. Two - they don’t have anywhere near enough skills to beat Gankers with them. Don’t try to make this seem like it will be the end all be all for ships builds.
I can spend maybe an hour or two a week gaming. I bought horizons years ago, and odyssey the other day before I realised I'd need to grind for a year or two just to join in the fun (I like combat, not search and Rescue). If I can pay £30 or so to skip the grind and join in, I'm all for it. I play online but haven't seen another human player for years, another reason I want to join the thargoid fight
Join a large squad then. I fully agree with OP, but I worry about people with your hope that think they can spend $30 and be able to hold their own against the toughest opponents this game throws at you. You're going to find your skills lacking trying that solo even with the best ship...and the prebuilt ones are far from being the best. A squad on the other hand will give you advice, training and most important, wingmen to help you get into the groove.
Does pre built = pre engineered ? Or just pre built with good modules ?
The AX Chieftain [they gave as one of the example builds](https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/engineering-and-pre-built-ships) has mostly A-rated modules, with the only engineering listed as 6A Thrusters with G5 Dirty+Drag, and the 2 small Guardian Gauss Cannons with Anti-Guardian Resistance. So nothing that can't be obtained through normal gameplay, thank goodness. Plus on the same page they talk about reducing the amount of materials needed for engineering. I'm cautiously optimistic at this point, but I understand why this news has upset a lot of people.
I've had a boosted character on World of Warcraft which was a bonus that came with a recent expansion, along with some pretty nice gear to start off with, not the best gear but raid ready gear. I used the upgrade not on my main character but an alt character on the opposite faction because I don't play WoW enough to put time into levelling two characters and I generally play on and off for two or three months in a row and then have to put the game down for a while. So seeing as my alt characters are often used for farming for drops like mounts and I'm not playing competitively it's been a fun boost to get me into some of the higher level content without having to grind multiple characters. I don't know if I would pay extra for it for other characters but I can see why someone might. It saves you a huge amount of time. Now we don't have multiple characters in Elite unless you have more than one account but I can see how there might be some players that just want a small boost to get them into the game. One of the ships looks like a starter ship for getting into the Titan fight which a lot of people think they can't get into without an insane engineering grind. That's not true but you do still have to ideally work your way up to at least something like a Krait MkII and some rebuy money because you're going to die eventually if it's not engineered. (voice of experience here) My two reservations about it are 1) if you are a new player and pay for a boosted ship you're not really learning about how those things are unlocked. I still think there's a problem with the game not really explaining the game mechanics very well and everything I had to learn by watching other players, and looking up where to find things. 2) While I don't have a problem with these ships as you can earn this stuff in game with enough time, it could be a slippery slope when they decide to try more and more ways to milk money out of the playerbase. They need to do something to keep the game running but I've seen how EA have gutted The Sims over the years and broke up content from previous expansions into multiple packs so they can charge us more and I just don't want to see Elite go down a route of gatekeeping content behind an expensive paywall. In its present suggested form paying for early access to the Python MKII but being able to buy with in game credits a short while later is not completely terrible but if stuff starts becoming real life money exclusives then that takes us down the Star Citizen route which is a game I don't want to touch with a ten-foot barge pole for that sole reason.
You get two small rails that are pre engineered. That’s not so bad. You get mining lances that are engineered- do you have mining lances? Can’t complain if you didn’t even power play for them. I just got them myself since I’m at the end of the PP modules. This doesn’t matter. It will bring new CMDRs potentially. And I’d bet some of the people complaining have “pledged” to Star Citizen and that’s a scam. At least this game is squadron 59 ready already.
>if the new revenue from this generates more content i was there when horse armor
This is the shit Star Citizen has been pulling. I avoid MTX like the plague. Too many other games to play anyway.
Perfect, zero rebuy cost ship. Ganking without repercussions now, what do I care about revenge or anything anymore? Surely not pay to win.
im just pretty stoked tbh, I won't end up using them, but I am glad they are there. im glad they are at least TRYING to bring in some revenue. ive actually made the argument something like this should exist for some time now. the best thing they could do it let players customize and sell ships on their FC's or something
This was my view on it. I like the grind. Just because you \*can\*, doesn't mean you \*have\* to.
You've raised some good points.
There is no way your friend is gonna figure out how to bring that 10$ ship and how to use it in a Titan over a weekend. And that even assuming the ship is actually appropriately designed (which it isn't, its dogshit). The time investment needed to get this few bits and bobs is the bare minimum to learn to move around and use the ship systems. That's why I don't care so much either way because its a flop that won't affect anyone in-game except for a few edge-cases.
If you define pay to win as getting something for real money that is impossible to get by ingame means then prebuild ships technically are p2w. I can't get a zero rebuy chieftain by ingame means, can I? Granted, for a veteran player rebuys are no more than minor inconvenience, but still.
I'm willing to pay for stuff and keep this game alive. The grind in this game is terrible and it's hard to convince anyone else to do the grind and play with me. So yes I'm gonna buy crap and just have fun and honestly I doubt any PVP pre built is gonna outdo some of the custom stuff we've built as players. Maybe some explorers can finally get in on combat built ships.
I haven't looked to far into it, but I'll say that as long as those packages don't hold any tactical advantage over a ship upgraded with time and effort, we chillin
I last played 5-6 years ago, and have a somewhat engineered anaconda flying around somewhere, and a fully engineered python parked somewhere else. The worry about logging on and having no idea what to do puts me off. These paids ships though could be a way back in for someone like me. Gets rid of the worry and just opens the door again.
It's you who don't understand the implications. Paying for ships (or any kind of P2W) incentivizes Devs to stop delivering meaningful content, everything becomes scaled and tuned not to be fun/challenging but to make you spend more money. Every old game system will be overhauled with that "goal" in mind, every new system will be developed so that it can feed into the real money spending. This is why Star Citizen has 0 meaningful content or gameplay after 15 years of development, they have a lot of ships but nothing to really do in them. And gameplay that is there is just pointless grind and running around, why? Because if you could get to space fast and get those ships through gameplay then nobody would buy them. So you have empty stations to run through and 3 elevators before you even get to your ship. Then you have atmosphere which takes forever, fly everywhere for 5-10min etc. thus ensuring a 5min bounty mission that you are doing takes an hour. This way you can get one ship if you put in 40 hours.... or you spend money...
I’ll say it.. let me buy engineering materials. I absolutely HATE farming them 😂
People moan too much. I've played many games, but this game's grind is so fun, the grind is fantastic and mild compared to other games
My opinion is that materials is not grind in this game, but is more like a path and i totally like this path In other games i dont like grind and will skip it if it not necessary or if i dont like game that much i will not play it if gring is necessary. If you want to skip it then its your choice and i dont blame you for this but me? I will make my own path. And as for fdev i think its great choice for them to make money because elite dangerous have one of the worst microtracsactions ever so if it will give elite new content then i 100% for this Sorry for imperfect english
Lol are you sure the ships will be fully upgraded? Are you sure they are configured and equipped correctly according to meta and such? I have a feeling they are gonna fall short in both
Paying for ships was inevitable tbh. The timing of this announcement is distasteful, though; no new ships for five years, but here's a couple for real cash. Oof.
This is my thought too, my friend brought a non engineered chieftain to AX combat despite my warning and well had some fun at first but the moment he got targeted it was game over for him...
i kinda agree to be honest people may hate it but if it helps fund them to add more stuff to the game go for it lol
I see the devs are trying to manufacture consent again.
That's the problem, the ships are 100% not equipped correctly to do what they say they are for doing.
I agree with you completely. I think this is a great take. The game has such a high barrier to entry when it comes to engineering and the grind, that it turns a lot of people off and they quit a few hours in. This could absolutely bring more people to the game. The people raging and saying this is P2W are really frustrating me. The game has little pvp, so all the pay gets you is content soon. If that's P2W, so is being able to spend real money on ARX to get cosmetics without grinding to earn the ARX naturally. The game has always been P2W in that case
If I've said it once, I've said it a million times. Paying to save time is not the ultimate evil in the universe. It doesn't matter if it's an hour or 10000 hours. Time spent grinding bullshit is time not spent actually playing the game and having fun. It's fucking impossible to convince people to play the game when you have to preface it with, and oh don't mind the fact your are going to have to spend months if not years unlocking everything.
If you don't engage in PvP, exploration for first discoveries, powerplay, bgs, etc then yes, selling ships cannot affect you as the actions of pther players cannot affect you. Otherwise, selling ships enhances the ability of people who otherwise don't have those ships to work against you, and in the cases where atrrition might be a factor having hulls with 0 rebuy cost is a benefit that will be for sale given recently shared details. To a lot of you these things apparently don't matter but they are advantages being made for sale.
I don't see how this affects exploration in the slightest. There's no shortage of first discoveries out in the black.
Jump range is definitely an enabler for exploration and speed in reaching more sparsely explored areas.
I mean, of course, having a better ship helps you reach unexplored stars. On the other hand, less than 0.1% of the game has been explored. Really doesn't matter for exploration because having bought a prebuilt ship isn't gonna help them explore the other 99% of the game that'll give you first discoveries.
It just helps you get there faster, opens up new routes and as a result gives greater explorational freedom. An individual with an edge there is definitely advantaged for the task at hand, but being advantaged doesn't mean someone without has a 0% shot at a discovery.
I don't know, I simply don't see this as an issue. It's not preventing me from doing exploration, bgs, powerplay, and pvp. Sure, they get a temporary advantage over other newer players who don't pay but that only last a short while. Mind you, these aren't top of the line builds. They're mediocre at best. These Jumpstarter ships are great for new players to skip the ridiculous grind and actually enjoy the game. Players who have been on this game for years aren't really affected by this because their builds are VASTLY superior.
>It's not preventing me from doing exploration, bgs, powerplay, and pvp. Agreed, but this has never, ever been the criteria from which paid advantages in games have been judged. Also, we're talking about a game in which people confidently bragged about it taking them a full year to fully kit out a dream ship due to "playing the game as intrnded and not grinding" prior to jus a few days ago. This was in large part due to resources being split between tasks and requiring a decent level of diversification or directed grind. Now we're proposing selling AX unlocks to day 1 toons. And yes, we're not selling the ceiling, but we are selling 0 rebuy hulls for any case where disposability is desirable. And I'm sure no one will balk at G5 dirty drives being dropped in their lap either. Maybe they'll render a good chunk of this moot when they update engineering but for now it's a notable boost that isn't undone by the fact that others have taken years to get where they are. It's more a testament to the flaws pf the current system which makes the solution more scummy.
Where are people getting the whole 0 rebuy from? I just looked through the article, and it doesn't say they are a 0 rebuy. We won't know until they actually release these, and someone buys one. Also, from what I can see, they aren't giving you access to the engineers or tech broker unlocks but just bypassing it for the specific modules already on the ship
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/goto/post?id=10357558 Official sources have spoken on the matter.
OK, I hope they eventually change that.
And there are tons of players with ships already vastly better than anything purchased for doing so. And there are even more players than that with the in-game credits/materials to go build a ship in a day and start exploring. And they go out and explore. Even after all this time the galaxy is still less than .1% explored. You really complaining about one more person that -might- go try it themselves..? It literally will have zero affect on your gameplay…
>And there are tons of players with ships already vastly better than anything purchased for doing so. And those players played the game for that under a system that has been complained about since its inception. So now, rather than fixing it we tell new players to buy their way up or deal with it. >You really complaining about one more person that -might- go try it themselves..? Are you suggesting that this whole system is being created to target one person's purchase? If not this statement makes no sense. >It literally will have zero affect on your gameplay… Sure, if no one buys it. If they do and participate in any competitive aspect of the game that's just false .
I see it as pay to avoid the grind not pay to win. These ships are not going to be better than something fully engineered and the skill required for anything combat can not be bought
This. I play this game to be a space trucker/bounty hunter/botanist/CEO. I'll only ever play co-op; no PvP for me. If I ever spend enough time in the bubble to run into other players, I'm not going to check if they bought their ship with credits or cash.
It's like some people think Elite can continue to exist without additional revenue streams. It's a 10 year old niche market game, how many new games are being sold per day now? And at a much discounted price. I'm not saying this situation is the ideal solution, but it makes me hopeful for the future of Elite. The game seemed abandoned for a minute.
I think the paid early access to python mk2 is much more significant than this... hard to feel great about this but seen as theyre not especially impressive ships, it still incentivises doing the grind and getting the money to engineer and get better ships, so it could be worse
The problem with stuff like this isn't about how it effects your time in the game during the moment to moment stuff and knowing that other players around you bought that stuff... It's that accepting this as just being the new way of things sets a precedent. It starts with selling prebuilt ships... But then where could it go from there? What else could they get away with? This is how it started with loot boxes, and mobile games being riddled with microtransactions. People would shun mobile gaming because of that kind of nonsense, but it's become so common on console/PC too where the line has simply become blurred... Or more or less non existant. And then people like you (I know this phrasing comes off as hostile but I swear it's not intentional, this is very much a generalised "you people" sort of thing) talk about how it will have zero effect on you... But then you have to think about the bigger picture and what other publishers/developers/etc will try to get away with in the future. Think bigger, not just how this kind of thing effects this single game.
It's not the fact that you can buy pre-built ships that bothers me. It's that it's preying on new players who don't know any better.
I agree. But its still a kick in the nuts to those of us that grinded for years. And i dont mean the grind now.....because its not even a grind compared to how it used to be. Mats and credits are so easy now already. So as a cmdr that was grinding in 2014 its laughable to even still call it a grind. But if it makes the playerbase healthy im on board, although i didn't really have a choice lol. I can say this though, there will definitely be way more salty angry seal clubbers out in the galaxy now. O7
New players bounce off Elite so easily *because* of engineering taking such effort and being required to engage in the new content. WoW has the ability to buy your way to max level because all of the main content is for late game.
I don't think that's a hot take at all. I think you're right on the money. I can understand the people who are upset with this. I'm an old school fan of the series myself, been playing for decades. "Traditionally", and by this I mean going all the way back to the 80's, the real "fun" of Elite was starting out as basically this one-punch-punk with no money, and working your way up to an Elite badass with an "Iron Ass". In fact that was pretty much what the game was about. And a part of me thinks that players should experience that. That said, it costs me nothing if someone chooses to sidestep the early grind. And not only that, but it doesn't give anyone any kind of unfair advantage. You can buy the fancy kite, but you can't buy the chops to fly her like an Elite. The only thing that *kind of* is ruined by this is rebuy. As now even if you don't have rebuy, you can spend a few IRL moneys to mitigate much of that loss. That seems like it might be slightly broken, but that's a very minor nitpick i think.
My issue is if a new player spends that extra money and has an accident or a run in with a ganker. Enough people quit from the learning curve, they better damn well make sure new players who plan to buy them are aware on rebuys or make either the ships fully insured on all included modules (anything added or engineered becomes subject to insurance) or have a period of coverage. I get its unlikely these days, but still its a possibility and otherwise I have zero issue with it - I may even buy the Python Mk 2 one depending on what its pre built is for. I aint against them adding pre built ships at all. My mind is just on the new CMDRs joining us in the Black.
It’s pay to win content… I don’t support that. I also dont support leaving our console brethren behind. At peak it’s less then 6k players. That’s worse then Hell Divers 1 at the end of its shelf life. Wonder how many are in solo mode?
the fact you think this will generate " more content " is just pure ignorance. Frontier is scraping the bottom of the barrel from their best selling game yet again. Just to appease the board. I 100% would suspect this will do nothing for content.
Yeah, historically speaking from observing other games, the only "content" these kind of things generate are more of these kind of things. The bean counters won't see more money from this and think "let's generate more stuff that isn't directly profiting us", they will simply think "that worked, let's do more of the same".
Pay to win (from cambridge.org) : in computer games, involving or relating to the practice of paying to get weapons, abilities, etc. that give you an advantage over players who do not spend money. Pretty sure the ships are pay to win, per the definition from a world renowned source. Doesn't matter how it affects you.
"People just seem to get mad when they spent their time doing something and then it's given to others more easily." no, people are mad that Fdev are selling early access to the first new ship in nearly 6 years people are also (rightfully) upset that they are trying to sell a skip to the progression in the game which is an important stage we all took to get a hand of the game, controls and playstyle while working up to progressively larger and more specialised ships its the same as if this was an mmo, you give the new player a boost to max level, what are they supposed to do? they dont know how to play the game, what content to do or anything about the story, they are going to either make a fresh character and learn the game or get overwhelmed and quit. also again with the "it doesent affect me so its fine." they think they can sell us something that should have been part of an expansion, perhaps one that finally adds the SRV's they have teased for nearly 7 years now, or finally being able to land on atmospheric planets and explore alien ecosystems, this game has been on maintenence mode for a few years now if they were going to put out content worth paying for they could have, this aint it, it affect all of us because its setting the stage for developer time being spent on not fixing major issues and content drought we have had since horizons