5521

Then you should never, ever accept a mission to deliver anything to Hutton Orbital in Alpha Centauri: 0.22 Ly. Or buy an advanced discovery scanner if you’re even remotely OCD. ;) I keep a book next to my throttle, and when I’ve got a long ways to go like that I’ll typically just point my ship in the right direction and read some until I get close.

5522

Oh, this was for the Clauss Port community goal.

But holy crap. .22 LY. I would positively rage quit :)

5523

I arrived at the CG in Dahan this morning to work on the bounty hunting goal. There is a decent Haz Res in Rakapila (15.5 LY away) at Rakapila 3, it seems, that should supply some fed decent bounty targets.

I hope to be around the next few days some fighting there when I have time.

5524

The only way I would go to Hutton Orbital would be as part of a bigger event like one of the CGs, and then preferably in a wing. Of course, half of the banter would be “are we there yet” jokes.

5525

You’re a better man than I am. There’s no way I could do m+k (and trackpad+k would be worse).

5526

I dont have a HOTAS, but after a lot of back and forth, I prefer M+K over gamepad for Elite… just too many combos to stuff onto a gamepad to remember all the time.

5527

True, if it has to be one or the other. I still love my cheapo Thrustmaster HOTAS X to death. Even it doesn’t have enough buttons, but if I assign one button to shift it covers most things, and as long as I have that sitting on a lapboard and a keyboard on the desk I’m good.

5528

This game is a lot of fun! Well, it was until yesterday when I finally got enough cash for a Type-9 and tried my hand at trading. First run went ok, made about 800k, second run I got interdicted by a Pirate Anaconda and could not get away in time, 8 million credits down the tube. Barely had enough to cover insurance costs, but no capital to purchase trade goods now. Hopefully that was a fluke being interdicted by something so nasty.

Anyways, anyone have any trade routes they want to share? ;)

5529

Not exactly, but, if you want to make that 8M CR loss back in a few hours here’s something you can do: There’s a community goal you can pick up at Clauss Port in Santa Meurta delivering Personal Gifts, a rare good, from Frost Dock in Njambalba. The reward for being in the top 15% bracket is currently 5M, and should go up to at least 7.5M by the end of the goal. Now, one round trip delivering 20 tonnes in an asp takes me about 35 min, and nets 400k in profit, but you can make that 40 tonnes in 45 min by dumping your cargo outside the no-fire zone of Frost Dock, picking up a fresh allocation of 20 Personal Gifts after the 10 minute timer on the commodity market elapses, and then scooping back up the load you dropped. Do this 3-4 times and you should be in the top 15%.

A quick word of warning: both ends of the loop are outposts, so small and medium pads only.

5530

I don’t have strong (or basically any) opinion on this one, but I remember a reviewer on Massively OP (they are kinda pro-SC) describing it as “a mile wide, but an inch thick” which, together with couple other similar hints, made me kinda forget about it.

On the other hand, I like ESO which is far from being their favorite…

5531

Awesome, thank you for the tip. I have been curious as to what Community Goals and Powerplay (I am assuming it has something to do with that?) is all about, will definitely check that out.

5532

That about covers it. While absolutely an audiovisual feast, ED is grimly old-school when it comes to actual gameplay. If you’re the kind of player who likes a spend a great deal of time creating their own fun, you’re in for a treat. Otherwise, I’d stay away.

5533

My brief googling/searchboxing for the original review gave nothing but couple echoes, such as this one (interesting, he wrote that in the “Biggest Disappointment of 2015” article, as his pick - after all the bad things that 2015 brought us!?):

"Though it officially launched in December 2014, it was too early to tell by the end of the year whether the game would live up to the promise of a massive procedurally generated galaxy. The game at launch was best described as “a mile wide and an inch deep” and I recently delved back into it again in the hope that the past year of development had changed that fact.

The power play update has certainly made the universe more dynamic and put a face on the various factions vying for power in the colonised corner of the galaxy, but the fundamental flaws that were in the game at launch still exist. Unidentified signals are still spawned right in front of your ship on a timer rather than being actually located somewhere within a star system, and everything from the mission board to NPCs in a star system still re-generate when you log out and in again or enter and exit supercruise. All the NPCs needed for your missions even spawn right on top of you when you enter supercruise, which is incredibly immersion-breaking (especially if you’re in deep space with nobody around for thousands of lightyears).

I should clarify that I really do enjoy Elite’s moment-to-moment gameplay and it’s very addictive, but the fundamental lack of world persistence in Elite breaks the whole concept of an immersive sandbox and the fact that it hasn’t been addressed in a full year is a huge disappointment."

5534

Those are all very valid points. Yet is still am head over heels in love with elite. I’ll post some screens from my current exploration trip later.

5535

Same here. It has a certain ‘je ne sais quois’ for me.

5536

Agreed with both. I can understand why some folks do not care for it, but Elite Dangerous has been an event for me.

I cant think of another work of art or entertainment that conveys scale and vastness of our galaxy as well as Elite Dangerous does.

5537

Celestia is one that I can think of, off the bat, that better conveys scale and vastness of our galaxy, and, indeed, our universe. Especially when packed with add-ons from eager amateur astronomers.

Not to shit all over ED, which it seems like I’m doing, but ED’s universe is filled with lots of shaded spheres, stations that all look alike after a while, and not much else. No comets, no asteroids, no mysteries. You shoot and you trade in a non-persistent universe where everything is randomly rerolled after every jump. I respect Frontier for what they’ve been able to do, but it doesn’t change the fact that I can no longer play the game for more than an hour or so at a time before my mind begins wandering.

5538

mind wandering… i like letting my mind wander. I listen to a lot of podcasts while flying elite (or playing wargaming.net titles), preferably ones that give food for thought. Dan Carlin’s stuff for example.

meh about the lack of persistence. I hope they will upgrade the game to have more persistency. That aint a sexy bullet point thing tho.

Witcher3 to contrast, needs headphones and a couple of unbroken, undisturbed hours. It demands and deserves attention. It is meticulously persistent also. I have left bits of loot and gotten back days later to find them in the same spot, let alone the way all the story cogs grip together. Its great. Not much wandering of the mind tho. More like focussing it. It provides its own food for thought.

Is witcher a better game? perhaps. Its a different one.

5539

So the ‘A Time for Giving’ community goal is getting a little crazy. The rewards, as of right now, stand at:

Top 5%: 35M
Top 15%: 20M
Top 30%: 10M
Top 60%: 500k (???)
Top 90%: 2.5M
Top 100%: 800k

121 tonnes gets you into the top 30% by a fairly large margin, so using conVurt’s cargo dumping trick, that’s only ~3 round trips of 45 minutes to net ~13M in credits. That’s a heck of a lot more than I can make bounty hunting right now.

5540

That 500k for the top 60% looks like a typo. Also, reported tonnage required for the top 5% reward is currently around 450t, and as of last night, the top 15% bracket starts at around 200t. Also, there’s a very good chance that the reward will increase at least one more tier before all this is done, so if you’re looking to get some easy CR, you’ve got about 2 more days to left.