Elite Dangerous - Galactic Woes - Episode 1: Exploration 

Best VR experience if you haven't tried that.

Thank you very much good sir! There's a lot to do, but the problem is you've got this amazing galaxy, endless possibilities, all stifled because the designer went to the Kim Il Sung school of sociology.

@@Laobi i'll sure i'll understand the reference once i see the entire video edit . I dont get it. the devs are basically averse to success i guess is what you are saying

someone should just make a campaign in the game cause right now there are so many mechanics that are new that i want to try and see if they hold up as a good challenge. Sort of like "can this new wright brothers..flying thing... fight?" and then dogfighting became a thing. basically i want to actually do things to win

I agrree with you. Theres so much cool stuff with intercepting players robbing here and there but it all is kind of meaningless. There is no real player influence.... imagine you could fight over spacestations. Build up empires and control space to gather its resources. That would be so cool... but its all left out.

Thank you very much good sir! I totally agree, it's so enjoyable and only ruined by a duality that eats itself, on the one hand it says 'be you, do whatever you want!' and on the other 'Ha, what are you trying to do, you need this, this, and that, otherwise you will have a miserable time'. So you have people just doing endless milk runs to gain the exact same things as everyone else, uniformity ensues. It's a pity, because with a little more attention and a little less hands on manipulation of the galaxy it could be so great. Without going too far into a future video, take engineering, imagine buying a car then spending months learning how to tweak the engine to go a little faster when you could simply find someone who has invested time in those skills and pay them to do it? It doesn't make sense on that level, it's like the people who designed the civilisation/society element had it described to them by a member of a south pacific cargo cult.

@@Laobi Somebody actually looked at the engineering gameplay loop, saw that *quitting the game and going back to the menu repeatedly* is the recommended strategy for using it and decided "yes, this is okay. Not playing the game is how you play the game." and if that's not Frontier in a nutshell I don't know what is

@@Laobi Not only are you spending months to tweak the engine, it has to be done with commodities everyone else seems to have in small amounts but you can’t seem to buy them anywhere in the entirety of the galaxy! Core Dynamics composites anyone? Nope, not even future-amazon carries that!” So it would be like trying ram other cars off the road or being some mechanical vulture at crash sites to pilfer off the parts you need but can’t buy anywhere. “Where the hell did everyone else get these components?!”

Thank you very much good sir! Well done! I am so glad that little aside was spotted by someone, you have restored my partial faith in humanity.

Thank you very much sir! I suppose there are so many people shouting at them they've just stuck their fingers in their ears.

Thank you very much sir! I wouldn't let my jaundiced view put you off, there's a lot to enjoy, they just seem to have locked themselves into very outmoded ideas when it comes to how one is allowed to approach the enjoyment.

Thank you very much good sir! You are totally correct, I just see so much opportunity if they only added a few things that 1 or 2 people could work on in the background. It's not so much progression, but the way elements are linked that have no place being linked. There's no room for emergent gameplay or non developer driven evolution, it promises the galaxy, but kind of delivers North Korea on a galactic scale. I love it, but they're so close to getting it right.

"Its a good place to explore. Its a terrible place to get a proper sense of accomplishment" well said. but what confuses me.. is everyone knows this.. yet they go "More than most games, you have to find what works for you in ED" even tho they know "There is no joy in "winning the game" you know what that is? ... Its a bad game.. with good graphics and sometimes.. randomly generated terrain... its not even a game. Its just good assets and a camera... people should have ditched the game the first chance they got. its not a game. Its worse than britanica's "colosseum exploration" software in their digital encyclopedia

Thank you very much sir! Oh crap, that is exactly where I was going to go when I got to trade, I guess I'll have to use the prostitute analogy now.

Thank you very much sir! I love the game and have a few ideas how they could remove the grind while adding gameplay.

Thank you very much good sir! That's what pisses me off so much, it's beautiful, amazing, and vast. It's all there, then they completely mess up progression, trade and civilisation, the parts that could be fixed on a shoestring.

Thank you very much sir!

Thank you very much sir! Exactly this, I shouldn't be able to circumvent it. It should be about expanding knowledge, not a repeated milk run.

Thank you very much sir! Sometimes I think I have become the worm.

Thank you very much sir! Neither did I until I tried it (on both counts). Being the first, perhaps turning in routes with refueling etc., should be the only way to rank it. Selling the data seems fine if you're the first, but after the first it seems forced. Even if the rank is achieved through selling of data I imagine this: Some jaded old public servant sitting in the back office of a station with a barely functioning computer. 'What have you got for me? Oh great, another scan of Orion, well done _explorer_ Now, what does the list say?..oh here's your 20,000 credits'. It's a bit like being a mall santa.

It takes at minimum 1,780 kills to reach Combat Elite. It wouldn't be Elite if everything didn't take five times as long as it should for literally no reason. Apparently Thargoids give more combat XP but that also requires making a specialty AX ship and trucking all the way out to the goddamn Witch Head.

Thank you very much sir! That's the issue, there are just these silly short cuts to things that are unrelated to the achievements, you could become elite at combat by simply pew pewing the easiest ships in the game over and over again. It should be difficult to gain elite in anything, but not grindy.

Thank you very much sir! I think they've allowed a few things short circuit ranking, the big problem is tying profit to ranking, this is also an issue with combat ranking. The result is that someone who makes more profit doing something progresses faster in rank than someone who works hard at it. So you end up with people ranking elite in 12-24 hours if they find a profitable milk run or an area stacked with high bounty outlaws. I love the game, but it shouldn't work that way.

Thank you very much sir! You're absolutely correct about the choice. However, I don't think it's a choice that should exist. The issue is the linking of profit to systems like exploration and combat. It would be much more interesting if you had to discover new worlds and chart systems unheard of in the bubble. Even if you don't circumvent (read cheat) it like I did, doing a long trip and bringing back data that presumably others have previously supplied is a little like being told you're the first by the town bike. I love the game, let's be honest, it's the only non-ponzi space sim out there, but I feel they could make it a whole lot more interesting by changing the economic model (a player economy with interesting pitfalls in more repressive systems and indeed other interesting pitfalls in systems that are completely laissez faire. The big first step for me would be to unlink the economy from the ranking system with the exception of trade. Of course yes, the tourist beacon, thank you.

Thank you very much good sir! I really enjoyed exploration until I found what I suspect (I could be wrong here) is that all endeavours are linked to a price rather than skill or experience. So, because bus driving pays great money it's more rewarding to exploration than exploration, I suspect the same may apply to combat, it's an easy fix, which is why it pisses me off so much.

@@Laobi I wholeheartedly share you concern, sir.

Thank you very much my friend! I'm a sucker for space, and I love this game, but it's almost like the devs have only heard about how the world works from a friend of a friend's auntie, who was told by her garden gnome. P.S. That email is on the way, I miss the days of carrier pigeons, when you had to finish a letter before the feathery little git became too weak from hunger.

Thank you very much good sir! I guess that's the overarching point of what I'm trying to say, it rewards mindless grind as much and sometimes more than the actual pursuit of a goal or task, and it wouldn't take very much to change it. The economy is coming, I think towards the end of the series as it feeds into everything else, and not in the way an economy should.

Thank you very much sir! Pass on my regards, oh and the news that he's achieved 'Elite Explorer'.

Thank you very much good sir! It's almost as if they're trying to see how much they can not give people what they want. The annoying part is, what most people want is quite easy to provide.

Thank you very much good sir! Very true!

Thank you very much sir! I remember those days well, I had it on the Commodore 64, ah those vector graphics and trying to figure out if something was the hole or the wall of the station.

@@Laobi love the sense of humour lol. I used to play on the Acorn Electron many years ago and waited what seemed like an eternity for a console elite game. I now have a few thousand hours on ps4 and can’t even bring myself to load the game any more. After a while it’s a soul destroying life sapping game with little reward and Odyssey seems even worse and have no plans to buy it when FDev finally get around to fixing it even to even consider releasing it on console. I like the ED videos on RU-vid and frankly they are the only thing about the game that remain remotely interesting. I look forward to more of your videos coming out. I need something about this game to make me laugh again

what's the point of this comment?

Thank you very much good sir! That's the point, you can explore the galaxy, spend hours plotting routes, planning and learning something about how exploration, get bugger all for it, as exploration and wanderlust are often the opposite of profitable. Or you can drive the Bridlington-Pocklington return around 20-30 times receive the same accolade and become quite wealthy.

Thank you very much good sir! Great to hear from you. 1: I love this game, but it's true I am very frustrated not to have found a space bar where one can watch a middle age lady repeatedly shoot a terrified budgerigar from her love tunnel. 2. I suppose that's the bonus of space, they just walk right into it, the universe gets lighter and there are more free tables at the Budgie Bar! Enjoy the land of not quite smiles, cheers from the land of morose alcoholics.

Thank you very much good sir! Well the 'innocence' part was maybe hyperbole.

Thank you very much sir! I'm half way through another episode, videos are taking too long at the moment.

Thank you very much sir! I tried it many moons ago, for me the economics of it don't suit.

Thank you very much sir! That's what irks me, it shouldn't reward rote repetition, it should reward effort.

@@Laobi I understand, that it ranks you by the money, you generated from selling data. and if you didn't found some high value planets, profits are not that great.

Thank you very much good sir! I passed through it once on the way somewhere almost 2 decades ago, all I remember is I was hungry and in need of coffee and the cafe I chose salted the fuck out of everything and made their coffee from some weird brown liquid in a jar. Thus I remembered the name.

Thank you very much sir! Exactly, driving a bus should give you three things, shiny pants, a sore arse, and money, nothing else.

Thank you very much sir!

Thank you very much good sir! I play it sometimes in Veeeeeeeeee Orrrrre, but I make videos in pancake as I hate the distortions I see on many VR recorded videos. I don't mind so much exploration being pretty unrewarding, it's the adventure side of it, how about this (spoiler alert): You're the first to discover something, you just get a little more than the cost of your fuel, you discover a resource rich system, you get 1% of the extracted resources for a year. I love the game, but I hate the inability of Fdev to actually think about how things may work.

Previously unexplored systems give you a bonus to rank (Because rank is based on money gained from exploration), but every system and planet you haven't scanned adds to your exploration rank.

It's done by the credits gained for exploration data, honking discovered stuff gives you money, just not much.

Thank you very much sir! You get the rank from selling your data, which makes it more of a transaction than anything else. Additionally the money you make from an endeavour seems to be incrementally tied to the XP you gain from it.

@@Laobi Yeah, I remember now. It's been a while since I did it! Keep up the awesome videos. I always love your work!

Thank you very much sir! I was almost sucked into Eve a couple of times, then I did some research, having a hatred of spreadsheets I decided to give it a miss.

@@Laobi Once I found a good bunch of mates to play with it was a great. I ended giving it up after a friend in the states passed away...

Thank you very much sir! I enjoyed the progress they were making in ED and Horizons, it was incremental, it wasn't promising everything at once and felt achievable. They've created a great sandbox, but seem very shy about allowing emergent gameplay take the reins. I think CR has spent too much time and money, doing what narcos call 'getting high on his own supply', I forsee a lot more money bing burnt before the hardcore fans finally turn.

Thank you very much sir! That's for a future episode. I play Odyssey, but have been off for a while working and doing hardware upgrades etc., I think their problem is it seems like they settled for a 'that will do!', then just copy pasted across the galaxy rather than taking a more slow and steady approach. As much as I'm annoyed at Braben, I'm just glad he hasn't gone all Chris Roberts.

That would be Hilarious..

@@TheWatson83 It is Hilarious... even without Laobi

In a nutshell... which comes first? SC: Sq42 or DCS: _FAT AMY_ being out of Early Access?

Thank you very much sir! I did one about 6 years ago, but I was a lot more charitable then than I would be now. I also had flu when I recorded it. I may revisit. Incidentally I got my sign off from an interesting mail I received in reaction to that video, it was 100s of pages of copy pasta 'go fuck yourself', I loved it.

@@Laobi yeah they are a bit sensitive, it's fun to poke the bear.

Thank you sir! If I can do it you could sit your cat in front of the PC for 22 hours and on your return he'll be elite in exploration.

Thank you good sir! What mouse clicks? _I never watched my own videos, no idea why anyone else does_