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Elite: Dangerous (Kickstarter)

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Are most people playing this multiplayer? I had mostly been playing solo, but entered 'Open Play' and honestly didn't notice any difference. I think I saw a few players around, but no one spoke or attacked or anything.

 

I guess it depends on where you are. I've been playing in Open mode and I've maybe seen 2 or 3 other pilots the entire time. My friend, on the other hand, was trying to dock and the base was completely full so he had to drop to solo mode eventually.

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So, I think I'm going to take a break for a while. I've been having a lot of fun, but I also blew an entire day of my vacation doing nothing but playing this, topped off with a pretty crappy mission experience. Apparently, a daily downtime was instituted during the Christmas break to stave off some server instability before the devs can come back from vacation and start patching again. I don't have a problem with this, but it's not announced anywhere on the launcher or in game, only on the forums. Even then, it's not a thread in the news section, but instead a stickied thread in the discussion section. So, I ended up grabbing my very first kill 6 pirates mission, with a 3 hour time limit, less than a minute before the in-game notification that there's 30 minutes to shut down. This is already 10:30pm, try as I might I only manage to tag three of them before I have to dock.

 

Fine, it's only a 15 minute downtime, so I wait 20 minutes, server still isn't up. I hop in the forums, no announcements. Then I read through the Christmas daily downtime thread to the end, and a few people are talking about how it's going to be an hour this time, instead of 15 minutes. I don't know where that information even came from, I still haven't seen an official announcement or anything. Fine, at this point that's only 30 more minutes, and then 30 minutes to kill 3 more pirates, and I can still be in bed at 12:30.  Server comes up, I kill one more pirate, then enter in to an unknown contact who offers me the deal to kill two cops instead. This changes the mission to an either/or setup, but also clears the counter of kills I've already gotten. So now I have to kill 6 pirates all over again.

 

None of this would have bothered me if it wasn't for the real time mission timer. I would have just gone to bed when the server first went down and finished it in the morning. Such a bizarre decision to include that.

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I keep goIng to investigate 'Unidentified signal sources'. When I get there there's nothing there, my last known contact board showing that I'm only a couple of clicks from the target.

Is that normal? Am I missing something? Scanning again does nothing and there is nothing on the radar. Any tips?

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I have never had that happen. Are you sure you're completely locked on with the "Safe to Disengage" message at the middle of your HUD? If you disengage near a target but don't have the safe disengage prompt, then you're not technically in the same instance.

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Yeah been through all that. Still Nothing. Clearly I'm doing something wrong! Just got my first kill after being interdicted. Woo Hoo!

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The only other thing I can think of is that your scanner is broken/de-powered/lousy? Usually signal sources are a few ships or a few containers floating in space, so I suppose it would be possible to jump in and not have things close enough to detect?

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I finally got a hit last night and walked into a battle between 5 police, an Adaconda and a Cobra. I barely escaped alive! Everything else there has been nothing there when I've come out of the frame shift drive. My scanner is the basic scanner but it works fine for everything else so at a bit of a loss. Is it worth reporting as a possible bug or am I still missing something?

Distance wise I'm generally jumping in between 20 to 2km from the target. That's normally close enough for everything else!

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I died for the first time last night. First, I did a stupid and was exiting a starbase, hit my boost, and then promptly plowed into the wall just below the exit. I'd had a few close calls here and there before that, so it's my own fault for goofing off.

Second, I got interdicted by a Viper and made two crucial mistakes. I tried for way too long to get a warrant scan on him, when I really should have been paying attention to how much of a raking he was giving me. Second, when my shields went down I continued to try and fight with him, until the front of my canopy was broken out. I did my previously practiced, flight assist off, boost then run silent strategy, but he had good enough scanners to keep a bead on me and finished me off with my jump meter 2/3 full.

Oh well, each lost cost about 20k, which is a decent amount for me, but not the end of the world. My net worth is around 400k, so I guess it was about 5% each time.

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I also died last night after I got into a station and the landing pad didn't light up. I cancelled the landing request only to be told I was tresspassing, and then got lit up like a Christmas tree trying to get out. I lost all my cartographic info too. Most annoying.

I also had a little incident trying to smuggle some 'stolen' goods into a federation station. I managed to get about 4km from the station without being scanned (a combination of silent running and turning off flight assist) before asking to dock. 1km out I was steaming in before a scan started, only for a Lakon hauler (a big one) to park itself in the entrance. I couldn't stop at that point, hit it, bounced and got stuck on the stupid guide frame outside the entrance. By the time is worked out how to extract myself I'd picked up 3 loitering fines and a 28k fine for the stolen goods. I couldn't figure out if that was normal or just dumb luck.

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My friend and I have noticed the disappearing pad lights. I have a theory that it's related to landing gear, as I never had the problem until I started pro-actively extending my gear the moment I make it inside the base.

No that I've successfully smuggled anything, but I do practice just in case I come across a big haul. At about 1km I turn on full power and hit the boost to maneuver around any ships in the opening, but if the entrance is completely full, then you're kinda out of luck. Try a less crowded station I guess? The little independent bases are easier to park on and rarely have cops.

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Speaking of landing, one of my favorite things about Elite is how those little mechanical actions can be fun in the right context. At first docking can be really monotonous, but when you have a bounty or you're smuggling and every landing requires you to safely dock at full speed, and every takeoff you're hitting your afterburners to explode out of the gate, the muscle memory from those more tedious maneuvers kicks in and enables a moment where you feel like a real life badass space pirate. 

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A space game that has illegal parking tickets.  This just made the game so much more interesting to me. 

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I'm having trouble coming back to the game and having it stick. The fact that it has overarching goals but is basically unstructured has made it tough for me to figure out what I'm "supposed" to do, and nothing but shuttling stuff between stations is really surfaced very well. I enjoy the sensation of flying this spaceship, but I need it compounded with something else or it gets repetitive.

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I'm having trouble coming back to the game and having it stick. The fact that it has overarching goals but is basically unstructured has made it tough for me to figure out what I'm "supposed" to do, and nothing but shuttling stuff between stations is really surfaced very well. I enjoy the sensation of flying this spaceship, but I need it compounded with something else or it gets repetitive.

I know what you mean... this unstructured gameplay is one of the reasons that I could not recommend this game without reservation. I happen to absolutely love it, but even so I only log in if I have a particular goal in mind. I still mange a few hours per week though.

 

You're not "supposed" to do anything... one eventual goal might be to become Elite in one of the three disciplines: combat, trading or exploration; this will give access to special missions and other benfefits. You might want to check the news feeds to see if anything grabs you as worth checking out; news feeds might also make you interested in joining up with either the Empire or Federation. Maybe you fancy jum-starting a civil war by building up  a minority faction within a system (you'll need help with this one).

 

I try to think further than the next bit of equipment, but aiming for a new upgrade is good too. In one of my excursions out of well inhabited space I found a place with pristine metal reserves far from anyone else meaning that I can get gold, platinum or palladium in peace if I want to, for >10,000 credits a ton profit; mining is still in its infancy really and is definitely not recommended for long periods of time.

 

At the moment, art is imitating life as I am on a black hole hunt. I know of one in the Mintaka system, and made the ~650 light year treck out there before, but my instruments weren't good enough to pick it up automatically, and if there's one thing you can't find by eye it's a black hole :P! Now I have an advanced discovery scanner, I can pick up every celestial body in a star system, so I can track the little bugger down, and also do a hefty amount of exploration along the way. This is definitely podcast fodder, because out in deep space there's nobody around and it took a few hours to make the journey last time; now I have a better jump drive and the route planning is improved so that might cut down on travel time, but even so it's gonna take a while :P!

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The built in goals for Elite: Dangerous basically amount to:

1) Get to Elite rank in one (or all three) of the disciplines. There's a contest around this and to my knowledge no one is even close yet.

2) Make a lot of money

3) Get a high rank with the Empire/Alliance/Federation

4) Influence politics

Using that, I've set my personal long term goals to be:

1) Get Elite rank in Explorer

2) Fly an Imperial Clipper

3) Help tip at least one system to the Empire

From which I've built smaller goals:

1) Get a Surface Scanner, then an Intermediate Discovery Scanner, and finally an Advanced Discovery Scanner

2) Get an Adder, then Cobra, then ????

Which I've personally been trying to obtain via either Mining or Exploration, as fighting and trading in this game bore me to tears. Despite complaints, if you explore enough to find the right belt like Dr. Wookie mentions, you can make a pretty tidy profit mining. It's personally my best Credits/Hour yield at around 140k. Exploration is half of that at most, but it's something to break up the monotony.

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After about 10 hours or so I'm loving this. Decided to go into bounty hunting though of course I'm still flying my Sidewinder which isn't the best for that career. Having said that I actually really love the combat. I had an old Logitech Wingman Force 3D lying around so its easy to utilize all thrusters and use maneuverability to the fullest. I couldn't imagine playing the combat with the traditional X-Wing style circling and in that case I can understand how the combat can get boring. Also when it comes to weapons, I understand that you should take down shields with the lasers and then switch to multicannons to tear down the hull. Also in tougher fights you need to understand the weaknesses of your opponents ships and weapons so that you can stay at an optimal range and safely recharge shields and weapons. 

 

Im working to get that Viper for now. Also thinking of working for the Federation at first just to get my Sol system permit.

Feel free to add me if you like :). CMDR Atoll Tone

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It looks like ED is doing well, which can only be a good thing when it comes to future content being added: Frontier have made 14.1 million GBP (about $20 million) from >300,000 sales so far. The original budget was quoted as 8 million GBP, but was "substantially increased" later on; even so, ED may close to making a profit already. Not that scores really matter, but meta-critic has 22 reviews ranging from 70-90 /100 with a weighted score of 79; they all seem to say similar things... a very good foundation but more content is needed as the universe can feel empty (spoiler alert, it IS pretty damn empty :P).

 

The latest newsletter has new concept art for one of the 15 ships still to be added, the Fer-de-Lance. There were Fer-de-Lances in the original game, as luxurious bounty hunting vessels, but they looked pretty different (then again the current game is set >200 years later).

fer_de_lance_amend_Comp.jpg

 

 

The newsletter also states that the Mac version is expected to go into beta in around 3 months' time :).

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All my friends are outpacing me in this due to a combination of more time and more willingness to grind the same activities over and over. I just hit 1.5 million credit net worth last night after a particularly lucrative mining run (180k in 1hr 10 minutes) while my friends are starting to shop for ships up around the 10 million mark. Still I've avoided grinding bounties or trade runs and have made most of my money either mining or exploring, so that's cool. At some point I need to run some more missions for the empire though. I got stuck with the illegal goods stuff they want you to do. One of my friends is already a count  :wacko:

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I'm at around the 4 million cr mark, and don't grind anything really... I'm just touring points of interest around the galaxy, getting exploration data along the way. Looking at the system map after the initial discovery scan  can tell you whether it's worthwhile doing surface scans of planets before moving on... high metalicity or Earth-like worlds are provably worth a punt, and I made about 150 k selling data while going from Barnard's Star to 17 Draconis (a system highlighted in the behind closed doors E3 demo: it's well out of the plane of the galaxy so the Milky Way looks very different).

 

Speaking of exploration, there's a very nice Kotaku article on the Great Expedition: http://kotaku.com/one-thousand-gamers-embark-to-explore-the-entire-galaxy-1677603818

It turns out that one of the members of the team that hopes to explore every star in the game was a mission planner for NASA, and he's found the experience very similar

 

Last time I visited the Ayethi system (home to my space station and planet), the main faction was at the tipping point for an economic boom. So I am thinking of heading back there to do missions and trade in order to tip them over and see what happens :).

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Does anyone know the relatively density of rare commodities? I'm playing about 200 light years out from Sol (clearly somewhere where not a lot of people are - I saw my first other commander last night in about 10 hours of game play) as that's more or less where the game started me out. I reckon I've visited around 100 star systems now and I've still yet to see anything selling rare items. I did pick up some from a USS but that's all I've had.

The only systems I've been to that I've seen referenced in the various trading websites and Galaxy maps is Everate and I'm about another 70 light years from there I think. Are there noticeably more rare producing stations closer to Sol?

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Does anyone know the relatively density of rare commodities? I'm playing about 200 light years out from Sol (clearly somewhere where not a lot of people are - I saw my first other commander last night in about 10 hours of game play) as that's more or less where the game started me out. I reckon I've visited around 100 star systems now and I've still yet to see anything selling rare items. I did pick up some from a USS but that's all I've had.

The only systems I've been to that I've seen referenced in the various trading websites and Galaxy maps is Everate and I'm about another 70 light years from there I think. Are there noticeably more rare producing stations closer to Sol?

 

Using Thrudd's Elite Dangerous trading tools you should be able to sort for rare commodities and find areas where they're concentrated.

 

http://www.elitetradingtool.co.uk/

 

Simply Select "Rares" from the page and tell it what system you're in. Lists that system and all systems within a couple hundred light years of it that has known rare trading goods. Fill your hold with rares and select a target system ~150-160 light years away to maximize rare trading good value (rare goods increase in value the farther they are sold from the home system. They're essentially "Luxury Goods".) I usually choose another system with rare goods 160LY away and fly there. Perform Cartography scans as you jump, fuel scoop off of suns when you can, and watch your back for interdiction. Good luck!

 

ProTip: When fuel scooping around red giant suns, watch out for those tiny white dwarf sun binary partners and don't run into them.

 

Tools Link in the Frontier forums: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=52248

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Yeah like I said I've tried most of the online trading tools and none of them have any details

Of the star systems near me! They mostly detail the systems in and round Sol and Lave where I guess most of the beta players started?

Took down a Adaconda last night at a nav beacon (with some police help) and netted 119k bounty. Alas I then got interdicted and shot up by an viper before I had a chance to cash it in. This game is so brutal at times

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