Elite: General talk

Sakashiro
09 Dec 2023, 6:57pm
AmedievalmanDon’t pay any attention to INARA’s “best trade routes” involving the yupini system. Gold, silver and palladium are selling for 10x what INARA says, really irritating I flew 222 Lys here, based on reports saying they were updated 14 mins ago. BS. I’m looking at it now, eg Gold is selling for 44000/ton, inara claims it’s 4100/ton. Same with silver and palladium. I didn’t know this website was so completely useless.

Not the website's fault. Frontier has split Elite Dangerous into a live version (Horizons 4.0/Odyssey) and a legacy version (Horizons 3.x). Inara reflects the economy of the live version. If you play the legacy version, the data collected here don't apply to your game.
Amedievalman
09 Dec 2023, 7:15pm
Great, so are there any resources for us redheaded step kids on PS4?
Silvia Sharpe
09 Dec 2023, 8:37pm
AmedievalmanDon’t pay any attention to INARA’s “best trade routes” involving the yupini system. Gold, silver and palladium are selling for 10x what INARA says, really irritating I flew 222 Lys here, based on reports saying they were updated 14 mins ago. BS. I’m looking at it now, eg Gold is selling for 44000/ton, inara claims it’s 4100/ton. Same with silver and palladium. I didn’t know this website was so completely useless.


Idk why you'd want to complain about profits but to each their own I suppose. And no legacy severs i.e. consoles are on their own. Best to keep a logbook of your own and do it the old fashioned way
Kasumi Goto
09 Dec 2023, 9:47pm
Silvia Sharpe
Optimization is not the issue I have with odyssey. The issue I have with it is they tried to make an FPS and they clearly had no idea what they were doing. There are a ton of balance issues with the game.

The board meeting for Odyssey was probably just

“Does the game need an FPS?”

“Well, yes, but also not really.”

“Do it anyway. We want profits.”

And off the devs set to make it without any real guidance or thought how to bind it to the main game*, so we don’t even have stuff like detailed megaship or station interiors that could be used for missions, like poking around one of those dead ports in Thargoid territory within the Bubble. Unless you want to tell me they just magically keep themselves orbiting despite getting absolutely goddamn wrecked by a Titan’s invasion fleet.

*With some recent exception to the spire sites that don’t just exist in total isolation to the rest of the game while offering some interactible Odyssey stuff.

Silvia SharpeFoot soldiers can over power a fully engineered G5 prismatic cutter. They are nearly in vulnerable to ship damage, SRV are a wet noodle versus them.

What’s that? Ships are good at shooting down people walking on the ground? No no no, we can’t have that or actually relevant ground to air defenses! (which also magically regenerate instead of staying permanently disabled, while their shields are excessively powerful) Make it so those heat-detecting sensors can’t spot their heat signatures on a frozen rock near below zero! And give a squad of poorly equipped scavengers more damage output against ships than a class 4 plasma accelerator!

*The Scorpion’s surge repeater is also such a joke of a weapon, there’s no way that nonsense would ever have even passed pre-production testing, let alone be considered “military standard”. And I don’t need to be a gun nut to say that.

Silvia Sharpe the ridiculous Thargoid "war"

Do you want to make me rant today? Because the whole “war sampling” bullshit nonsense is on another level that makes me roll my eyes out of their sockets and want to puke even just writing about it. Urgh, and also turning it into a joke of a system because people can’t stand the idea that a species many millions of years older than humans(and also spacefaring for a few million of those years already) species is somehow not supposed to be a seriously threatening scenario, instead of the hedge trimming it turned into after just three or four months.

They couldn’t even be bothered to make the story progress at a semi-adequate pace. Or run any balancing checks on their sampling nonsense after adding it as a feature until it was used to cheese Titans out of their control sphere.

(Which was then met with more complaints because/when Frontier seemingly intervened to either fix a bug of Titans not placing alerts - which they could have known about for a good two or three months now, thanks to a player test if they could - or retroactively gave them that ability just this week.)

Meanwhile the actual action of killing Thargoids in those control systems requires such an absurd level of effort that basically nobody even bothers to do any fighting there. Probably not helped by the addition of the Glaive with its Guardian melter field that is just as potent as that of a Titan, which if you’re not equipped to deal with means hoping someone is and then waiting through a long repair cycle of your melted puddle of electronics that used to be (a) weapon/-s. Or abandoning the instance and hoping you don’t get Glaives dropping in.

I don’t usually want to complain, but some of that stuff is the kind where I could sit there and type a lot of unhappy comments about. While possibly losing hair or pulling it out. Which still results in said hair loss.
Amedievalman
09 Dec 2023, 10:13pm
Don’t complain about profits!? What else is there in life….
Sampi Ogonek
09 Dec 2023, 11:34pm
Kasumi Goto
[...] one of those dead ports in Thargoid territory within the Bubble. Unless you want to tell me they just magically keep themselves orbiting despite getting absolutely goddamn wrecked by a Titan’s invasion fleet.

Umm. No magic needed, orbital mechanics is fully sufficient. Once you get a station in a long-term stable orbit, it will stay there for millions of years, barring a really big nudge (or rather, a large number of small nudges, since a single nudge big enough would blow the station to pieces).

BTW, the real-life ISS is not in a long-term stable orbit, as it orbits within Earth’s thermosphere.

I generally agree with most of the rest of your rant, although I have to note that I find this passage:
Kasumi Goto
because people can’t stand the idea that a species many millions of years older than humans(and also spacefaring for a few million of those years already) species is somehow not supposed to be a seriously threatening scenario, instead of the hedge trimming it turned into after just three or four months

very confusing; what exactly did you want to say here?

Oh, and about this:
Kasumi Goto
(Which was then met with more complaints because/when Frontier seemingly intervened to either fix a bug of Titans not placing alerts - which they could have known about for a good two or three months now, thanks to a player test if they could - or retroactively gave them that ability just this week.)

As people noted on the Frontier Forums, so far the available evidence does not rule out the hypothesis that Titans have always had the ability to place alerts if and only if they had no Control systems. Further observations will be needed to figure out the actual rules regarding Titan-placed Alerts. (However, the increase of the maximum number of weekly Alerts looks very much like a manual intervention by FDev.)
Kasumi Goto
10 Dec 2023, 12:34am
As people noted on the Frontier Forums, so far the available evidence does not rule out the hypothesis that Titans have always had the ability to place alerts if and only if they had no Control systems. Further observations will be needed to figure out the actual rules regarding Titan-placed Alerts. (However, the increase of the maximum number of weekly Alerts looks very much like a manual intervention by FDev.)

The uncertainty about whether it is godhanded or not for the Titans themselves persists. I don’t particularly have an issue with it or the increased alert total per se, since it seems somewhat evident the war isn’t close to (supposed to) being over.

very confusing; what exactly did you want to say here?

To me, a fair few of the posts on the forums relating to the subject of a (possible) Thargoid pushback read like having an issue with not being able to continue winning the “war” like we have been for about half, if not most of its duration at this point. Or making it feel like it’s meaningful in some way. Some people seem to prefer viewing it as another chore to keep doing and stop the Thargoids from doing anything without pushing back further(hence “hedge trimming”), as if it’s just some menial BGS maintenance task, not a highly advanced species invading the Bubble.

And not even a fun maintenance task, as we’ve seen with the stopping of all invasions for a number of months, devolving things into a, frankly, quite boring stalemate. Yet I’ve mostly seen comments about “When do we get rid of the Titans so we can stop doing this nonsense” and “The Thargoids are obviously such an inferior opponent, allow us to defeat them already”, yada yada. Doesn’t feel like the kind of comment I would expect from someone actually interested in the content it has to offer.

Once you get a station in a long-term stable orbit, it will stay there for millions of years, barring a really big nudge (or rather, a large number of small nudges, since a single nudge big enough would blow the station to pieces).

This is why you don’t rant when you’re tired. Although would an outpost or station placed at ~1,000 km from the planet’s surface be able to establish such a stable orbit? And considering they got wrecked by the Thargoids pretty badly prior to abandonment, maybe they were nudged in the wrong way just a little. I’m just saying.

(And there was some older GalNet about a station in the Pleiades - The Oracle in Delphi - risking to drop on the, I think it’s an ammonia world, it is orbiting after the goids wrecked it. Though, there was no time frame mentioned and it’s the only time I can recall any such thing at any point during the time that I played Elite.)

Even if it’s not ‘realistic’, it highlights the complete lack of stakes here. You got a port that’s been abandoned for a year, with corrosive substances continuing to melt away at it and whatever the internal condition is, and all that happens is it gets repaired in the exact same amount of time that one which was “only” left abandoned for a couple of weeks is. Which players don’t even have to do anything about. BGS population numbers magically return right back to original. And Frontier graciously nerfed the Thargoids a couple of times, only recently making the system numbers a bit higher, so they’d require a few decades of unfocused and unopposed expansion to get anywhere meaningful. (And Ram Tah really isn’t that vital of an engineer if you really think about it.)

At least it originally felt like a war. Currently it’s more like border maintenance and throwing thousands of limpets at a Thargoid to keep tissue samples on a carrier that never expire and have hardly any urgency in needing to be handed in. Can’t finish a system within the week? No bother, you just wait until the next day when the cycle ticks over and probe a few more Thargoids with absolutely no effort lost. Do you think Taranis or Leigong would’ve been cleared if that idiocy didn’t exist or actual combat(not slaughtering Orthrus with minimal opposition) needed to be done once the “periphery” clearance limit was reached?

Last edit: 10 Dec 2023, 12:41am
Silvia Sharpe
10 Dec 2023, 2:01am
Kasumi all of what you said is exactly why I feel like the war is just another failure of a hail Mary. I participated for all of I'd say 3 months then I gave up. I started Silvias story and haven't picked up the game for more than enough time to end up 4kly away from the bubble with no recollection as to what I was planning on doing.

Reading the forums on the current goings on and gripe and complaints for the general state of the game makes my head hurt and like Meowers I am running on fumes for content of which to write. I started the next entry for Silvia and honestly I can't be bothered to finish it.

I thought it was hilarious that people 3 months into the war were begging for them to fix it then when it got fixed they went to complaining about it being too easy. Can't please everyone. I say just let them overrun the bubble and have humanity flee into the galaxy. It's awfully big and there are enough stars for us to start another Colonia
Sampi Ogonek
10 Dec 2023, 2:19am
Kasumi GotoTo me, a fair few of the posts on the forums relating to the subject of a (possible) Thargoid pushback read like having an issue with not being able to continue winning the “war” like we have been for about half, if not most of its duration at this point. Or making it feel like it’s meaningful in some way. Some people seem to prefer viewing it as another chore to keep doing and stop the Thargoids from doing anything without pushing back further(hence “hedge trimming”), as if it’s just some menial BGS maintenance task, not a highly advanced species invading the Bubble.

And not even a fun maintenance task, as we’ve seen with the stopping of all invasions for a number of months, devolving things into a, frankly, quite boring stalemate. Yet I’ve mostly seen comments about “When do we get rid of the Titans so we can stop doing this nonsense” and “The Thargoids are obviously such an inferior opponent, allow us to defeat them already”, yada yada. Doesn’t feel like the kind of comment I would expect from someone actually interested in the content it has to offer.

Aha, now your point is much clearer. Yes, I fully agree with that last sentence above.

Kasumi Goto
Once you get a station in a long-term stable orbit, it will stay there for millions of years, barring a really big nudge (or rather, a large number of small nudges, since a single nudge big enough would blow the station to pieces).

This is why you don’t rant when you’re tired.



Kasumi GotoAlthough would an outpost or station placed at ~1,000 km from the planet’s surface be able to establish such a stable orbit? And considering they got wrecked by the Thargoids pretty badly prior to abandonment, maybe they were nudged in the wrong way just a little. I’m just saying.

Orbital stability depends mainly on how deep the orbit is inside the parent body’s Hill sphere, how well away you keep from planet’s moons (if it has any), and whether the orbit is well clear of the planet’s atmosphere, if the planet has one (and of course clear of the planet’s topography as well). Almost all station/outpost orbits I’ve seen in ED look safely long-term stable. (One notable exception is stations (usually asteroid stations, but not always) hovering above/below planetary rings; those would need to burn a lot of fuel constantly to avoid colliding with the rings. Which, in reality, would be a spectacularly stupid idea in the first place, of course.)

As for Thargoids — if they kept nudging the station consistently for an extended time, sure, they could deorbit it, or send it flying between planets… but just wrecking the station is extremely unlikely to do that. (It would be cool if stations’ orbits changed a bit after the attacks, e.g. to visibly elliptical… but that surely would be way too much effort for FDev for something that only a small fraction of players would even notice.)

Kasumi Goto(And there was some older GalNet about a station in the Pleiades - The Oracle in Delphi - risking to drop on the, I think it’s an ammonia world, it is orbiting after the goids wrecked it. Though, there was no time frame mentioned and it’s the only time I can recall any such thing at any point during the time that I played Elite.)

Yes, I remember that one. It was one of those things that push my suspension of disbelief to its limits

Kasumi GotoEven if it’s not ‘realistic’, it highlights the complete lack of stakes here. You got a port that’s been abandoned for a year, with corrosive substances continuing to melt away at it and whatever the internal condition is, and all that happens is it gets repaired in the exact same amount of time that one which was “only” left abandoned for a couple of weeks is. Which players don’t even have to do anything about. BGS population numbers magically return right back to original. And Frontier graciously nerfed the Thargoids a couple of times, only recently making the system numbers a bit higher, so they’d require a few decades of unfocused and unopposed expansion to get anywhere meaningful. (And Ram Tah really isn’t that vital of an engineer if you really think about it.)

I agree. The stakes didn’t seem all that high even early in the war, once you compared Thargoid progress rate with the size of the Bubble, but lately things really have looked about as exciting as hedge trimming.

Well, now that it appears that some of the people got a bit burned out by all that hedge trimming that turned out to lead ultimately to nothing important, perhaps we can cautiously expect things to become a little bit more interesting (at least invasions are returning).

Kasumi GotoCurrently it’s more like border maintenance and throwing thousands of limpets at a Thargoid to keep tissue samples on a carrier that never expire and have hardly any urgency in needing to be handed in. Can’t finish a system within the week? No bother, you just wait until the next day when the cycle ticks over and probe a few more Thargoids with absolutely no effort lost. Do you think Taranis or Leigong would’ve been cleared if that idiocy didn’t exist or actual combat(not slaughtering Orthrus with minimal opposition) needed to be done once the “periphery” clearance limit was reached?

Oh, I’m perfectly aware that clearing the Titans had very little to do with actual combat. I well understand the fun that people have decoding the system and then using strategy to achieve goals, but the way it all has gone thus far feels rather off to me (even though I have been mostly absent from the game for a couple of months this year, and AX stuff has not been a major part of my play time).

Incidentally, when people were speculating on the forums what would happen once a Titan was depleted of control systems, the first thing that came to my mind was “it will place alerts on its own”, because to me (being a seasoned programmer) it was such an obvious boundary condition and an obvious way to deal with it; I was rather surprised that no one seemed to suggest it, and when it actually happened, I was like “well, duh”. I think it is quite clear that whatever Frontier is planning to happen next w.r.t. Thargoids, it is far from being ready yet, and they will not let players force a change in their plans at this point. (The latest Galnet article from 7 Dec is a case in point: it appears to be published according to a pre-determined schedule, even though the first Spires have been shut down weeks ago.)
Meowers
10 Dec 2023, 3:07am
Silvia Sharpeand like Meowers I am running on fumes for content of which to write. I started the next entry for Silvia and honestly I can't be bothered to finish it.
My brain is too dead at the moment to read all the stuff that's genuinely interesting for me, especially the orbital mechanics, but I can totally say that now, surprisingly, I have lots of stuff to write about and my 'posting schedule' is completely stuffed, up to the late February, lol. :p
Silvia Sharpe
10 Dec 2023, 3:09am
Interesting more Meowers content! That's a win in my books
Kasumi Goto
10 Dec 2023, 3:17am
Silvia SharpeInteresting more Meowers content! That's a win in my books

You can partially ‘blame’ me for that one.

And I’ll give the other stuff a proper response when my brain says it will let me.
Meowers
10 Dec 2023, 11:10am
Silvia SharpeInteresting more Meowers content! That's a win in my books
More of totally wild experimental stuff should start coming soon. :p
This murky bog of a game is hurtling to its demise, its community is slowly dissolving, so it's a perfect time to be even more wack. :p

Sampi OgonekAs for Thargoids — if they kept nudging the station consistently for an extended time, sure, they could deorbit it, or send it flying between planets… but just wrecking the station is extremely unlikely to do that. (It would be cool if stations’ orbits changed a bit after the attacks, e.g. to visibly elliptical… but that surely would be way too much effort for FDev for something that only a small fraction of players would even notice.)
You'd have to apply a stupidly large amount of force to send something big like Elite spaceport travelling between planets, overpowering the 'main' planet's gravity. More likely its orbit will turn into something less circular. Though mainly distances between spaceports and planets in Elite are enough to keep them from skimming the higher atmosphere (if there's any) even if the orbit is destabilised. Planets leave a certain 'trail' of the atmosphere behind as they move around their stars, but I think in most cases it's negligible and requires minimal amounts of fuel to compensate.

But then there's another sci-fi element: modern day space stations don't have anything really super explosive on them, yet those 34th Century sci-fi things are full of thrusters, reactors and all that stuff that could, much likely, shift them quite significantly in case of explosion. Of course we don't have exploding station pieces in the game because the devs are a bunch of lazy juniors, stations just pop into existence in their damaged or functional state on the same orbits, but, in theory, in terms of RPs and fanfics, I think that a reactor malfunction or thruster bad misfire/explosion could possibly deorbit the station, whilst giving everything inside a funny jolt of Gs, possibly destroying a lot of stuff. But then my ship accelerates to 550m/s in something that looks like a second...

Uh. So. I think that making stations 'fall' via slowing them down and making them go through the upper atmosphere to further slow down (instead of one big push of a space brake pedal which will send it straight to the ground) during an accident, not a planned descent, is... somewhat possible, if several variables end up falling into a certain range. Chances to see it even in Elite are still slim but certainly higher than in modern day space stuff.

And asteroid stations are a complete sci-fi wack but they look cool, lol. :p
Out of all imaginary jobs and possibilities in 34th Century, imagine working as a goalie on the ring station, shoving the rocks out of their collision vectors. But it still beats being a biowaste hauler. And any other job where the only space you could see is a patch of night sky picture in your little slave/wageslave pen window. :p

Last edit: 10 Dec 2023, 11:21am
Sampi Ogonek
10 Dec 2023, 4:44pm
Meowers
Sampi OgonekAs for Thargoids — if they kept nudging the station consistently for an extended time, sure, they could deorbit it, or send it flying between planets… but just wrecking the station is extremely unlikely to do that. (It would be cool if stations’ orbits changed a bit after the attacks, e.g. to visibly elliptical… but that surely would be way too much effort for FDev for something that only a small fraction of players would even notice.)

You'd have to apply a stupidly large amount of force to send something big like Elite spaceport travelling between planets, overpowering the 'main' planet's gravity. More likely its orbit will turn into something less circular. Though mainly distances between spaceports and planets in Elite are enough to keep them from skimming the higher atmosphere (if there's any) even if the orbit is destabilised.

Yeah, that was my point. BTW, if the station’s orbit is wide enough (some are in ED, I believe) you actually need less force to make it leave the parent body’s sphere of influence (and enter a long-term unstable orbit around the grandparent body) than to deorbit it & make it crash into the parent body immediately (rather than perhaps a thousand years later).

Planets leave a certain 'trail' of the atmosphere behind as they move around their stars, but I think in most cases it's negligible and requires minimal amounts of fuel to compensate.

Indeed, for planets that have been around for billions of years (like in our own Solar System) this atmospheric ‘trail’ is fully negligible; note that our own Moon passes through it, and the effect is, AFAIK, not measurable (it certainly is orders of magnitude less than the slow widening of Moon’s orbit caused by tidal interactions with the Earth’s rotation). In very young systems, OTOH, some planets may be losing their atmospheres fast enough for the effect to be noticeable. (Not that ED makes any meaningful distinction between young and old systems, it seems.)

But then there's another sci-fi element: modern day space stations don't have anything really super explosive on them, yet those 34th Century sci-fi things are full of thrusters, reactors and all that stuff that could, much likely, shift them quite significantly in case of explosion.

Again, an explosion big enough to change station’s orbit visibly would likely turn the station itself into a lot of pieces. However, thrusters firing out of control for days might quite well do the trick. Ocellus stations, in particular, have been said to be actually adaptable to inter-orbital travel. (AFAIR, FDev stated some time before the event that led to the establishment of Colonia — I don’t remember if it was Galnet or the forums — that Jaques Station was fitted for conventional travel between planets, as it was too big to enter supercruise.)

And asteroid stations are a complete sci-fi wack but they look cool, lol. :p

Well, the concept of stations in hollowed-out asteroids is quite realistic in itself. What is not is having such asteroids somehow hover a few km above/below a ring (of course, what is above and what is below is a matter of convention). But then, the way planetary rings are presented in ED has everything to do with the Rule of Cool and precious little with reality.

In a real planetary ring, each piece is on its own orbit, and pieces further out move slower (the exact opposite of ED’s mechanics, which treats each whole ring as a rigid body). And of course the vast majority of a ring’s mass is tiny pieces; boulders like we see in ED are very rare, and are located in gaps between ringlets, where they do not collide with anything other than occasional fine dust particles. Asteroids big enough to hollow them out and turn into stations would fall in the same category (for asteroids within rings, that is; asteroid belts, where individual asteroids are at least hundreds of thousands of kilometres apart, look like a better place to make stations of this type). Coriolis-type stations could be relatively safely placed within rings, I think, in larger gaps, in L4/L5 points of the shepherd moons that maintain those gaps.

I think FDev would have been able to make the ED model of rings more realistic (e.g. rigid-body ringlets a few km wide with gaps a few hundred m wide) if they really had wanted to. But they hadn’t, so they (and we) are stuck with what there is.
Kasumi Goto
10 Dec 2023, 11:14pm
Sampi Ogonek
Well, now that it appears that some of the people got a bit burned out by all that hedge trimming that turned out to lead ultimately to nothing important, perhaps we can cautiously expect things to become a little bit more interesting (at least invasions are returning).

I'm not sure whether to hope for it, but I'd prefer it. The people that "just want the Thargoids off their turf"(and as such probably don't care much for the war or associated story elements once it's over... though some might anyway) still seem to be more interested in keeping it at the 'hedge trimming' state until they can be rid of the Titans. I'm of the belief they're not the group Frontier should be listening to when it comes to developing the war scenario(as in, moving it along), though I'm sure there will be some kind of 'Go shoot the Titans' spot at some point. Not many illusions about how that's going to go, as much as I'd like for those idiotic perfectly sensible humans to get slapped to the next reality for their absolute stupidity "ideas". If the Titans were placed there because of something only partially related to us and we're the ones off worse after it if they are "driven off", well, won't be me who's looking so stupid...

It would be a more interesting outcome than "Blah blah the Thargoids were just there to shoot everyone and everything but didn't come prepared and humans were right about everything all along even though they were the ones who started blasting without a reason first". Emphasis on without a reason, "defending" your operation to steal resources from the Thargoids is not one. Or not a valid one, anyway.

But I don't dare suggest a more advanced species might have a higher goal than purely exterminating another species and that it might not actually be to wipe us out that they're here for(though they're understandably cranky and not interested in talking after that nonsense with the Proteus Wave and other things), elsewhere. Too much conviction that the Thargoids are bad and couldn't possibly have ulterior but not badly-meant motives - the deaths and abductions, well, they probably view most humans entirely differently than us seeing an individual in each one of them.

If they simply cared to kill, I don't think they would have stopped to hold space at the edge of the Bubble, and instead progressively moved their fleets inward along with the Titans, leaving the populated space behind them desolate and devastated. Or bothered to take prisoners and keep them alive, for that matter.

But hey, it's easier to blast the "bad/mindless bug" like the propaganda's been telling you to than to question why the supposed invasion hasn't really been an invasion, and think critically.

Sampi OgonekOh, I’m perfectly aware that clearing the Titans had very little to do with actual combat. I well understand the fun that people have decoding the system and then using strategy to achieve goals, but the way it all has gone thus far feels rather off to me (even though I have been mostly absent from the game for a couple of months this year, and AX stuff has not been a major part of my play time).

Incidentally, when people were speculating on the forums what would happen once a Titan was depleted of control systems, the first thing that came to my mind was “it will place alerts on its own”, because to me (being a seasoned programmer) it was such an obvious boundary condition and an obvious way to deal with it; I was rather surprised that no one seemed to suggest it, and when it actually happened, I was like “well, duh”. I think it is quite clear that whatever Frontier is planning to happen next w.r.t. Thargoids, it is far from being ready yet, and they will not let players force a change in their plans at this point. (The latest Galnet article from 7 Dec is a case in point: it appears to be published according to a pre-determined schedule, even though the first Spires have been shut down weeks ago.)

In what way does it feel off to you, the strategies applied or just the direction it has taken?

Because I'm of the impression that it's... well, kind of not been feeling like a war and maybe Frontier's hiding something behind that(as alluded to above), but I haven't got the slightest clue what, unless they're planning to open up the flood gates for something(which I equally... don't really believe, given the slow pacing thus far and certain recent events). There's the matter of the spire sites only getting placed in unpopulated systems, when populated ones absolutely do have appropriate candidate bodies, and that GalNet hinting at their abandonment seemingly having no obvious effect on the Titan they were - supposedly - made for. Or the way the Titan glyph markers just disappear from them when they are not in use.

(I feel like I'm supposed to doubt this "contaminant" - which totally isn't a poison or anything - actually really being that 'effective'. The report feels more like a mockery of 21st century "Going to this dangerous or abandoned place with a history for the views with no scientific/historic insights or study" trends.)

And yeah, it's quite obvious Frontier doesn't want to change whatever their narrative plan is, and honestly? I don't blame them. You can cry "BUT MY PLAYER AGENCY!!!!!!!" all you want, I - if I were a professional writer working at a company - would not bother or want to rewrite entire aspects of the story just because you decided to cheese something with a broken, overpowered mechanic that never got fixed for many months and was abused like hell by the box ticking players. Or the, in my opinion, poorly made interaction spire sites have with war progress where slaughtering (tens of) thousands of Orthrus with minimal resistance causes the Thargoids to largely abandon surrounding systems while creating progress at not just the spire site where said slaughtering is taking place, but any others remaining almost - or entirely - untouched, just because they happen to be part of the "10 furthest systems from the Titan" metric.

I also only partly buy the "shared progress" metric at that, since a 5 ly system goes at the exact same progress with spire actions as one at 15, despite a tenfold increase in difficulty for the 5 ly system. Or that those spire sites are progressed at the exact same rate as those "peripheral" systems when they claim to have their defense "prioritized" by the surrounding Thargoids, instead of only progressing once those are cleared(or the spires are instead what's capped at 85% until the 'periphery' is clear).

... I'm just gonna leave that there because I only get more annoyed and it makes my thoughts even more scattered. TL;DR is I find the way spire progress is handled stupid, if only because of the point that hitting one spire site can somehow have the effect of clearing 1-3 others at the same time, instead of those needing attention separately. And tons upon tons of Orthrus for an "important logistical operation", but there are no ships guarding it until sabotage or destruction of logistical/recon vessels within it occurs.

Silvia SharpeKasumi all of what you said is exactly why I feel like the war is just another failure of a hail Mary. I participated for all of I'd say 3 months then I gave up. I started Silvias story and haven't picked up the game for more than enough time to end up 4kly away from the bubble with no recollection as to what I was planning on doing.

Reading the forums on the current goings on and gripe and complaints for the general state of the game makes my head hurt and like Meowers I am running on fumes for content of which to write. I started the next entry for Silvia and honestly I can't be bothered to finish it.

I thought it was hilarious that people 3 months into the war were begging for them to fix it then when it got fixed they went to complaining about it being too easy. Can't please everyone. I say just let them overrun the bubble and have humanity flee into the galaxy. It's awfully big and there are enough stars for us to start another Colonia

Maybe you were going to Beagle Point? *innocent sideways/upwards look*

Haven't been too active on the main either aside from shooting up some Azimuth ships/people in conflict zones here and there, or participating in that travesty of an Alliance CG because who cares about lore? Not the sheep that immediately rush out for your multi billion credits per hour gold rush, clearly. Or half of the remaining playerbase because why would a game have a story that's worth getting interested in, just give me more things to shoot at(should I wish my brain worked in such simplistic ways? I'm not sure ...) and shiny toys to do it with.

Sure glad I decided to give myself some autonomy from Frontier's main plot with my character, because would I ever be stuck with nothing to write without that flexibility. I mean, it's not far from a year that they made Nemesis appear as a plot device, and it's been left as a cold, meat-less turkey on the side ever since. They barely even dug into it, nor gave players the opportunity to find those files themselves. How would I be supposed to write anything about that? So you got... well, some of the stuff you did, between VR madness and someone going rogue on behalf of the Thargoids. I do also already have some ideas on where things will go after when it's all dealt with, but anyway.

I'm not sure about wiping the Bubble(Frontier upsetting players that much? they removed Scythe interdictions entirely and only now left some hyperdictions in only when you leave an alert/invasion while doing evacs). I'm not even sure - as per above - whether to expect them doing what they should and making the Thargoids slam down a hammer... or five... on humanity's collective stupidity. If they wanted to make the story more interesting, they absolutely should not be listening to the BGSers and whoever all stuck in their comfort zone that want none of it messed with in any way or under any circumstance so they can keep 'maintaining' it until the end of time with only some interference from other players. Because they're not the ones interested in the Thargoid story, most likely, yet they're like a giant road-blocking wall just waiting to be smashed down.

All wishful thinking, of course. As long as there eventually are some interactions to the Thargoids beyond primitive cargo 'donations' or shooting them in the face... fun as AX might be, I also see it as simply a short-term satisfaction(and hence don't engage with it on my main... I may or may not have an alt soon though).

Post a reply

You must be signed in to post here.
Anything at least partially related to the Elite:Dangerous, but doesn't exactly fit the Game talk thread. Elite community, astrophysics and so on...