My first week playing Elite Dangerous
16 Dec 2021Amoni Panala
I always worry when I join a game, get into the community, and as soon as I voice my aspirations people are quick to tell me that that won't happen."The game is broken!"
"FDev won't fix the exploit!"
"... killed the game..."
I want to be clear that people have legitimate complaints. Frontier developers seemed to have created Odyssey without any thought as to how that would split the already small and loyal community and why this would have a negative impact on the experiences of both games. It is also true that being able to log out in the middle of combat is a major exploit that I should think would not be difficult to fix and yet FDev either can't or won't fix it. It is also true that because there is Open, PGS, and Solo that means that people are very unlikely to run into each other unless they want to.
All of these and more are true and yet waiting around for FDev to fix these is going to make people miserable and bitter. Might as well quit now. Seriously, the last thing you should do is play a game with bitterness in your heart over how you feel wronged about the way some company who does not know you from any other hairless ape on this planet chooses to upkeep their game. Life is way too short for that. We don't have to let FDev off the hook though. If enough people made a public statement saying they wouldn't spend another cent on the game until they fixed certain things, FDevs would have a lot more incentive to fix the things we want fixed, right? We the players have that power and we don't even have to be assholes about it either.
I'm an old EVE Online player that won the game. People may not know this because the fanbase is loyal as hell, but that game is really and incredibly broken. The earliest versions of the game were made by other people who are no longer with the developer and the game has a lot of what programmers call, "legacy code." It's extremely easy to break certain things about the game because there are aspects of the code the current developers simply won't touch since they can't redo that old stuff that was put in place. And yet, EVE Online maintains a vibrant and passionate community complete with people who make podcasts, stream, record themselves doing cool stuff... EVE Online is also one of the most challenging games to get into and it takes even longer to get good at it (combined with the fact that the game punishes you by time-gating skills with which you'll have to pay if you want to get past without waiting a long time).
Elite Dangerous is hard to get into, but not impossible. The fact that you can buy the game and get all the expansions included is a plus. The fact that you don't have to pay a monthly sub is huge. The fact that I had to ask around in order to find the New Pilots Initiative [NEWP] is a problem. We've got to get all the new-pilot friendly and active squadrons in a list and put that list everywhere someone might hear about Elite Dangerous: forums, social media, reddit, etc. We also need more activities to do... Together... I saw someone talk about Sidewinder derby which sounds like a good laugh. Meme fleets were extremely popular and fun in EVE Online. There's no reason not to make our own fun in Elite Dangerous. What if we did a contest to see who could make the most high grade mats in a limited time and called it the Great Milky Way Bake Off? There's so many possibilities and I'm brand new to this game so I'm just shooting from the hip here.
It also seems like there's a lot of fanfiction writers here? Like, people use these logbooks to write in character? That's amazing! We could have contests for that. But also, it would be really sweet if we could somehow organized some big battles and have people write after action reports about it. For those who don't know, after action reports are basically summaries of events as recollected by either someone in a position of authority or someone who participated in the event in question. These are great ways to get people excited about annual events. It's also a great way to come up with weird and fun things to do, share the experience, and watch as other people try it.
People are always going to whine and complain about games like these even while they play them. I get that. I've complained about every MMO I've ever played. I think there's a lot that can be done keep the game fun and interesting and it doesn't involve sitting around waiting for FDev to fix something.