89 replies to this topic

[Frigidman™]

Haha. You mean April 1st?

[Janichsan]

Frigidman™, on 19 March 2015 - 09:40 AM, said:

Haha. You mean April 1st?

Almost. March 31. A Tuesday.

[Frost]

Janichsan, on 19 March 2015 - 09:21 AM, said:

Anyone want to take a guess on which weekday the Mac beta will be released?

Febtober!

[macdude22]

THAT IS ALL

[Frost]

macdude22, on 19 March 2015 - 02:33 PM, said:

https://farm8.static...b397b0308_z.jpg

THAT IS ALL

Sadly I live under a rock and didn't even know it existed until about two weeks ago.

Fortunately it pays to have friends in low places. Turns out I was one of the original backers and didn't even know it!



Now to use my DeLorean on Elite: Dangerous. If I can just find some plutonium...

[Frost]

LOL

Elite: Dangerous bug becomes community event

Now that is just plain awesome and makes me want to try Elite: Dangerous even more.

clocknova, on 19 March 2015 - 07:33 AM, said:

My bad.  I saw Chris Roberts' name all over the Elite kickstarter page and assumed it was his game.  Which makes sense, I think.  Confusing.

David Braben and Chris Roberts have both been hyping each others' games a lot apparently, so that's probably why.

[Janichsan]

Frost, on 21 March 2015 - 12:00 AM, said:

LOL

Elite: Dangerous bug becomes community event

Now that is just plain awesome and makes me want to try Elite: Dangerous even more.

"Blimey, that wasn't supposed to happen." "Aw, bugger. Just roll with it."

I also like how they turn what began as relatively small community driven experiment with the background simulation into a big event: very early on, even before the official launch, a group of players picked a system called "Lugh" to test whether they can affect the faction influences enough to make the system change affiliation. Originally, the Federation controlled Lugh. The players picked the independent Crimson State Group (CSG), declared it the descendants of Irish colonists ("Lugh" is an old Irish god), and began to do everything to increase that faction's influence. The developers first watched interestedly, treating it as welcome test for the background simulation. Later, they even began to make the whole "Irish vying for independence" thing canon, with newsfeed reports for instance about the groups leader pleading to the Federal parliament to let them out of the Federation, and barely escaping an assassination attempt while on Earth.

With time, the players managed to increase the CSG's influence enough that several civil wars broke out and about half of the stations changed hand from the originally ruling Federation affiliated faction to the CSG, with the whole conflict simmering for months now. They never managed to make the whole system change affiliation, though, because the whole community experiment seems to have lost a bit of its drive, and also because many players began to work against them. Recently, the developers escalated the whole thing and turned it into a system-wide war with massive Federal intervention. Combat zones popped up all over the system, including one with a Federal capital ship (the one that decided to duke it out with the station was intended to be deployed in Lugh).



In addition, the devs created several community goals: some for traders to provide necessary supplies for the warring factions, one where the players are to intercept a transporter with military intelligence and then smuggle that intelligence to a CSG spy, and two competing ones for fighting in the combat zones, with the latter two basically deciding the outcome of the war.

I have to point out that the whole thing is far from perfect: the supply run community goals simply boil down to grinding the same trade route over and over. The military intelligence mission is the closest to standard MMO combat quests I've seen in ED so far, with the same group of opponents respawning every couple of minutes. While the combat zone missions have several thousand of players contributing, you'll rarely see more than a handful at the same time fighting, due to the instancing systems ED uses (there are a lot of AI ships, though). The capital ship turned out not to be very well thought through, since it made for an easy exploit for players siding with the Federation to rack up kills. And the calculation of the faction influence seems to have gone completely haywire momentarily, with the warring factions influence dropping to almost 0% for a few days (from which another Federation affiliated faction profited, although not controlling a single station in the system).

And still: the whole thing is fun. Yesterday, I teamed up with three random dudes to form a wing, fought for two hours or something at the location of the intelligence mission, and we all had a ball. We cleared the area of enemy vessels over and over, snatched drifting canisters with the military intelligence while under fire, and scared a bunch of other players away that jumped in and thought they needed to side with our enemies. It was glorious.

(And not to say profitable: all things taken together – combat bonds from kills in the conflict zones, profit from delivering the captured military intelligence, and rewards from partaking in the community goals –, I'm currently about 15 million credits richer.)

Unfortunately, the war doesn't go very well for the CSG: due to the capital ship exploit mentioned, the Federation has a significant advantage. Since the whole thing seems to be wrapping up at the moment, the CSG will probably lose.

[Frost]

Janichsan, on 21 March 2015 - 09:52 AM, said:

Unfortunately, the war doesn't go very well for the CSG: due to the capital ship exploit mentioned, the Federation has a significant advantage. Since the whole thing seems to be wrapping up at the moment, the CSG will probably lose.

Ah, but is it an exploit, or is it the tactical advantage brought by a strategic deployment? If you have bunch of corvettes and patrol craft facing off and a battleship is deployed to the scene, that's going to tip those scales. Might be intentional; make them really have to fight if they want independence.

In any case, it sounds like they're off to a good start with the community events. That's one thing that's totally disappointed me in Destiny is Bungie's absolute fumble of community events. 6 months and they never graduated to anything more than "fight a random mini-boss or defend a random objective for 4 minutes somewhere in the game world." Meh. It's fun the first 30 times.

[Janichsan]

Frost, on 21 March 2015 - 02:28 PM, said:

Ah, but is it an exploit, or is it the tactical advantage brought by a strategic deployment? If you have bunch of corvettes and patrol craft facing off and a battleship is deployed to the scene, that's going to tip those scales. Might be intentional; make them really have to fight if they want independence.

The whole thing went unfortunately further than just having a tactical advantage: the players siding with the Feds could actually claim kills by the battlecruiser as their own without having to do much. They just needed to equip their ship with turreted weapons, set these to "fire at will" – which makes them shoot at any hostile target in range –, park their ship close to the battleship, and wait. Their turrets nicked some enemy ships automatically, and when the battleship killed these ships with its massive firepower within the next 10 seconds, the kill got attributed to the player, no matter how little damage he had done. Ironically, that way of kill attribution was implemented to prevent AI ships to steal kills and hence rewards from players…

Due to this, the Federal players could rack up kills and so fulfill their community goal much faster than the CSG players that actually had to fight to get their kills.

[Janichsan]

For those interested: in the Lugh war (which is now over), the CSG managed to turn things around in the last couple of days by fulfilling their other community goals faster than the Federation, especially the supply runs. The outcome is that some stations changed hands, the CSG is now the controlling faction in the system, but it's overall a stalemate, with both warring factions relatively close together in influence.

Spoiler

Truth to be told: I believe that was the result the developers intended. Since the whole event didn't run completely automatically, they probably gently pushed the result in the desired direction.

Still, it was fun. I need some break from the fighting, though, so I took my spoils of war (ultimately almost 20 million credits) to buy a fully outfitted exploration ship, and started a longer expedition into deep space.

[the Battle Cat]

Janichsan, on 27 March 2015 - 02:52 AM, said:

I need some break from the fighting, though, so I took my spoils of war (ultimately almost 20 million credits) to buy a fully outfitted exploration ship, and started a longer expedition into deep space.

Just don't take Cortana with you because the head will constantly be filled with holographic nylons hanging up to dry.

[Janichsan]

the Battle Cat, on 27 March 2015 - 08:43 AM, said:

Just don't take Cortana with you because the head will constantly be filled with holographic nylons hanging up to dry.

My ship's computer regularly asserts me that our friendship drive is charged. So I guess I'm fine.

So, Mac beta. Here we go:





That download might take a while…

[Janichsan]

And there it is:


Quite a bunch of bugs and graphical glitches, the framerate fluctuates from 60 fps to 5 fps depending on the situation, but it's mostly playable and it recognised my Saitek X52 Pro immediately and seems to support it completely.

[Spike]

Finally!

I think Ill wait further into Beta before diving in.

[Janichsan]

Somewhat surprisingly, Elite: Dangerous is now also available on Steam.

[Frigidman™]

And I dont have to micromanage my own space stations and fleets and I can sit in the pilots seat and not stare at tiny ships auto-aiming and circling each other shooting little streaks of light????????

SOLD!

er... well... when its on sale. I never (NEVER) pay > $30 for ANY game these days.

[Frost]

Frigidman™, on 03 April 2015 - 12:33 PM, said:

And I dont have to micromanage my own space stations and fleets and I can sit in the pilots seat and not stare at tiny ships auto-aiming and circling each other shooting little streaks of light????????

So much this.

Also, like some games have been doing lately, having to build your own ship, because spending 3 hours figuring out half of that popsnizzle before you can play is so "fun."

[Frigidman™]

Frost, on 03 April 2015 - 07:06 PM, said:

Also, like some games have been doing lately, having to build your own ship, because spending 3 hours figuring out half of that popsnizzle before you can play is so "fun."

Haha, yeah.

Brings back memories though of StarWarsGalaxies, with the Jump to Lightspeed part. Sure, at first, I wanted a nice ship I could use to get through the missions and earn my pilots ace rank... but once I did that, and became a Shipwright, I spent the better part of the entire game 'building ships'. Making the best parts, and crunching the numbers to fit custom built items into every last inch a chassis could hold. It was a massive game in and of itself. I mean, I was already a 9 time Ace fighter pilot (in every squad the game had to offer)... so what was I gonna do when nothing in space could bring me down?

However that was a completely different ballgame.

In some respect, its kind of fun to min/max parts once you get way up there... trying to find the next nice piece of equipment... but early on, it sucks so bad when they force that crap onto you when you're just trying to make ends meet!

[the Battle Cat]

Frigidman™, on 03 April 2015 - 07:12 PM, said:

... so what was I gonna do when nothing in space could bring me down?

::tBC Q's Frigidman's space corsair into the lap of a Borg fleet::

[Frost]

Frigidman™, on 03 April 2015 - 07:12 PM, said:

In some respect, its kind of fun to min/max parts once you get way up there... trying to find the next nice piece of equipment... but early on, it sucks so bad when they force that crap onto you when you're just trying to make ends meet!

Oh yeah, I totally agree, the mechanic can be fun once you know the universe. God knows I spent a crapload of time speeding around the galaxy trying out ways to min-max my ships in Escape Velocity, and actually building your own ships from the ground up can be doubly so if you're into that.

If I want to go to Nate's Used Ship Store and buy "that thing over there that looks awesome" and not muck about with building my own stuff though, I want that option.

the Battle Cat, on 04 April 2015 - 11:56 AM, said:

::tBC Q's Frigidman's space corsair into the lap of a Borg fleet::

http://static.comicv..._cube_00340.jpg

Too bad for them FM's corsair comes with a pre-made deployable Tholian web consisting only of round holes!