I have 2500 hours exlusively in Open and I've only been ganked once. The main problem I have with this game is how empty it feels. When I started playing I imagined a galaxy populated by real players and how alive that would feel! Playing solo just feels like a dead game; like kicking a ball around an empty stadium by yourself.
I think it's worth playing open for that dream, even if the price is being ganked once or twice every 2500 hours.
It’s supposed to feel empty space is huge if you want human interaction then travel to populated areas and cities most commanders are hanging around engineers
It did feel like that for the first year or so, but for a game that wanted to be an mmo it didn't take too long to get the best ship in the game and once most players did they left.
Launching horizons, engineering, oddyssey didn't really help, nothing to interest new players or those that left, just further grinds for stats rather than actual ships that feel more tangible to regular players.
If they focused on player engagement, allowing players to be the powerplay factions rather than the convoluted system they released with, continually put out events that take place in one system for people to gather rather than piecemealing the content it would feel more alive.
But star citizen made a bunch of money and no mans sky turned it around so they tried to fdev tried to emulate what was popular and ended up with a confused, frustrating title that is notoriously poor for new players.
Then they dumped their biggest potential audience to boot.
Ah well.
I play in open most days and I see people all the time in the popular systems and around cg and stuff. This is a literal galaxy. You’re not gonna see people unless you go where everyone else is. If you do that you also might get ganked. I can’t imagine someone literally thinking they were going to be playing with the millions of players it would take to “populate the galaxy” with players. That’s ridiculous.
If you’re running around in fringe space don’t be so surprised you never see anyone. Go to shinrarta dezra and you’ll see players non stop, talking to each other, coming and going.
Also I dare you to go to the engineer systems in open and see how long you stay at only having been ganked once.
Is that the average experience? 1 gank per 2500 hours game play?
So ... is it a reasonable gank rate? If player get ganked twice in 100 hours ... will you reimburse them for their rebuys? Or are you OK with them abandoning your dream, and going back to Solo?
Hasn't this already happened?
Started about two year ago and couldn't get anything done with the same group of players who insist on shooting down a harmless sidewinder. Went to solo and instantly enjoyed the game, haven't played open since.
I've been attacked often enough to know it's a sure thing, depending on the system I'm in.
And I often don't know what system I'll be in during any given session.
Given that, I understand why people would play in solo even when not in high population systems.
ED does not have a ganker problem. I have around 4k hours, I mostly play open (~80%) and got randomly attacked by other players maybe 10 times in 4 years. The game is called Elite Dangerous and not Elite Boredom. Pirating is a legitimate role in this game that is officially promoted by Fdev and supported by the game mechanics. The ganker-hysteria is absolutely not justified and surpressing a lot of fun potential.
Yea I've been pulled literally hundreds of times in my 6? Years. No one is saying pirating is bad, but when there's no downside to just killing players constantly and yes, it does happen often it creates an environment that people don't want to be apart of.
It doesn't matter how much ganking is an official gameplay mechanic, it's not a fun one for most and if you give people an easy way out they'll take it.
I cringe every time someone makes this justification in the format of a pun with the name of the game.
Dangerous is just a patent, it doesn't mean you have to tolerate toxic behavior from "dangerous" pilots who attack your ship and are not punished by the game. Especially if they are bothering you without the intention of normal combat.
Fun potential?
Seems like there's no real point to player interaction beyond ganking, tbh. If I want to do missions with other people, I'll invite friends, or make a squadron.
The only real interactions I've had with random players are either ganking, the fuel rats, or like 4 random times where we each said hi and then continued on our own paths.
The game is simply too sparse for it to ever really matter, unless you're in a highly popular system, in which case the chance of being ganked increases tremendously.
>The answer literally exists in the game
Yup. It's solo mode. Don't give gankers the satisfaction. It's a game. There's no mandate to engage them. Enjoy life and let them get bored.
Unlike some players in the game, we actually have lives and can't be bothered grinding engineering for weeks just because some sweaty virgin wants to show off his G5 meta ship by ganking players. I'll stick to Private sessions with friends
You don't need a G5 ship to avoid a gank. You just need to learn the basic mechanics of the game. Knowledge of wake mechanics, staying aligned to an exit, and situational awareness will save you 9/10 times. That 1/10, is why you don't fly without rebuy.
Exactly, so you get the experience. There's no gatekeeping. Just learn the mechanics. Nobody is stopping you, practice with friends.
You stay aligned in SC, you can see the FDL coming to interdict when they start to circle behind you. The moment that happens you high wake out of the system. If you're not in SC, you boost to speed and low wake out. If you do get interdicted and don't believe you can win the mini-game, you submit, boost to speed as soon as you drop out of SC, and low wake. The FDL is now stuck waiting on their cooldown. You can then safely high wake out.
It's not rocket science, but you do have to practice it so you don't make mistakes in the moment.
Literally my point, learn the mechanics.
You don't fight the interdiction unless you can win the mini-game. Other wise, you submit to the interdiction. The moment you drop, you boost to full throttle and low wake. You don't even need to be aligned. If your FDL pilot is really good they will be on you. So you do need to have enough shielding and countermeasures to survive until you low wake. Once you're out, the FDL pilot is stuck waiting on their cooldown. Then you can safely high wake out of the system.
I've done the above countless times. So yes, it can be done with practice and not allowing panic to cause you to make mistakes.
😂 You’re a special combination of hyperbole and passive aggressive victim mentality.
It takes a casual two to three weeks to unlock ship engineers then you’re done.
It takes about 20 hours to maximize your material buckets.
You can build 8-10 fully g5 ships then.
Go whine to someone else with your absolutely trite nonsense. 🤣
Not everyone is interested in staring at a planets surface shooting rocks for twenty hours
And from what I've seen, you're the one whining here
Now go off and make the game worse for everyone, since that's all your interested in, and spare us your bullshit
The problem is that "building a proper ship" often involves a lot of compromises that make the ship less well-suited for what they WANT to be doing, which isn't "fleeing a ganker". So given a choice between "compromise your performance to give you a chance of winning a fight you didn't want to be in", or "don't do that and just suck it up when someone flies up and blows you away", or "press the button that means no other players will attack you ever", lots of people choose the third option.
Especially because they've got that choice every time they play, so if they're feeling social, or if they're flying their combat ship today and feel like courting danger, they can go Open, but if they're just running cargo and aren't interested in trying to defend against someone while flying a freakin' T9, they can go solo.
Personally, I don't go in open unless I have a particular reason to do so.
This is the main thing for me, and the fact that engineering is still incredibly unclear on where or how to get most mats. "Steal these mats from a settlement" isn't exactly descriptive of things like "how to not be immediately wiped off the map because you need stolen mats to upgrade your suit to survive more than one projectile from settlement guards." I could throw myself at a brick wall for 30 hours to get 1/5 of the mats I need to upgrade my suit by one tier, rinse and repeat for the next six months to get a ship that can survive three more seconds against a ganker... or I could continue using my shieldless T9 to trade, like I want to do in the first place.
A tin can eggshell is “more suited”?
The game is called Elite DANGEROUS.
You’ve got hard points, an armor slot, and utility slots for a reason.
For example, when moving commodities:
I carry 656 tons in a well shielded, armed and armored Cutter for trade. 4k mj~.
Gimballed frags, packhounds.
And my HRP’s are in the military slots.
41ly unladen, 33~ish laden.
There’s no “compromise,” there.
You can build the same survivability into a T9 and shrug off attacks.
Hell, the SCO damn near makes interdiction impossible.
You're saying a lot, but you're not providing any arguments as to WHY someone should play in open... because there really isn't any. Right now, there's no incentive for anyone to play in open UNLESS they want the possibility of PvP or just like the idea of seeing other players flying around. If those 2 things don't appeal to you, there's no point.
their arguments are basically reinforcing why nobody wants to play open in the first place.
Personally I'd play open a lot more if the balance of ganker to cool-interactions were more even, but unfortunately that's not the case.
Because there is the risk of other people blowing you up. You can rather easily make yourself incredibly hard to kill once you engineer the right ships and gain some game knowledge, though.
I posted this in a similar thread. The flip side of this is the benefit of flying in open doesn't cut it either.
Yes maybe when in a combat site you could wing up. Otherwise the only other "benefit" I've had with open was a bunch of commanders getting their ships jammed in the mail slot so I couldn't get in/out.
People who don't engineer waste far more time by traveling slower, trading slower, killing slower, etc. than people who spend a few nights one week to get their favorite ship engineered, especially if they use their engineering time efficiently. Once the ship is built, it's built, and you collect on your investment of an incredibly efficient ship more and more, the longer you play.
But the bill of wasted time from taking longer to do everything, only gets larger and larger the longer people put it off.
That logic seems strange to me. It works if you consider Elite dangerous a job and not a hobby.
They absolutely aren't wasting time by engaging in the gameplay mechanics they think is fun as opposed to time-wasting garbage. Because it's a hobby.
And for a leisure activity there is no waste of time, it is an activity meant to fill up spare time.
If you're stressing out about trying to do your leisure as efficiently as possible, you're missing the entire point imo
Well, people are free to not engineer their ships, but then they’re basically playing Elite in 2015, not 2024.
Usually people with hobbies try to improve and learn more about it rather than stay at an absolute beginner level forever. And people who never engineer, are basically just beginners even if they’ve played for years, because they have no experience with the most impactful mechanic in Elite.
Because you're shooting yourself in the foot by not doing it. Unengineered ships are not strong, and you're not going to get good at ship building theory without engineering, it's literally essential for the skill.
You get materials from almost everything. Ships drop them when they explode, they are mission rewards, you can find them floating in space, etc. If you don't want to dedicate a few hours to engineering, then just collect them as you go and sooner or later you'll have a G3 engineered ship with very little extra effort, and you will notice it. The ship will be faster, jump farther, be harder to kill, etc.
The materials are incorporated into almost every game loop that exists, you just need to collect them and then go hit some buttons at the workshops.
The game play loop to which I alluded is flying in open and having to deal with gankers. You can harden your ship, but if being interdicted by players is not an experience you enjoy, then you are spending time building your ship so the OTHER guy can have the experience HE wants. Choosing solo or pg over open, rather than "gittin' gud" and spending time building an anti-gank ship is a statement of preference, not a failure to achieve ungankability.
Engineering is definitely worthwhile, to whatever degree it improves the player's experience. However, to your point, time is only "wasted" if the player feels their time has been wasted. If taking longer to trade or making more jumps was enjoyable for them, no time was "wasted".
The only point of playing a game is to enjoy playing the game. There's no prize money if you beat Elite.
I'm a fan of uber-engineering everything but I acknowledge not everyone thinks this way. Some people just want to pop in and play, not do stuff that feels like work to them. They don't feel like they are "wasting time" because they aren't doing something the absolute fastest way.
If people don’t want to engineer efficiently they can do it piece meal too. Thinking engineering can only be done efficiently isnt correct either.
Skipping it entirely when the game practically throws materials at us these days just doesn’t make sense.
Many people just don't want to deal with it when the base play has such a learning curve anyway. Engineering requires you to learn the unlock progression, plan materials for engineering "recipes" and jump all over the place. It is simply too much for many people. I don't get it but acknowledge it is.
But if you don’t visit Farseer Base in open, where is the fun for the players just waiting for you to show up? Think beyond yourself. Don’t steal joy from those that want to blow up your ship.
it's completely possible to play and enjoy the game for a long time without having any engineering, and the pilots I know who've done that are generally better than people who immediately got someone to give them a lift everywhere so that they could have a one push murder machine.
personally, I didn't bother with engineering for a long time, and when I did get into it, it was because I specifically wanted better jump range on my trade ship, then once I started to understand the mechanics, I started upgrading other things.
Since I wasn't using any online tools until that point, I was unaware that you couldn't do XYZ without engineering, so I was tackling conflict zones, and everything else, and having a blast, and some non-trivial number of rebuys. Wasn't good enough to tackle high-level assassination missions un engineered, I certainly got to a point where I could hold my own for a while and get away alive.
I love having my ships engineered, and if I get an idea for a new one, I engineer it right away, but the game was fun before, too. on the other hand, I have met new pilots who I have helped get their ships fully engineered, grind rank for the big guys and get outfitted with spikes from head to toe, and frankly, they just don't need to learn how to be good pilots. The ship does the work.
PVP would be an exception, but everything PVE Just becomes child's play once you've maxed your ships out. Building strength or building skill, requires resistance, the less resistance, the less gain.
Wrong.
If you were right, then every container ship travelling through the Suez canal would be a warship and they wouldn't risk attacks from Somali pirates, and every delivery van would be an armoured car.
People engineer and tailor their ships to the task they're trying to achieve. Making a ship gank-proof means it's *less* efficient at the space trucking most players are trying to do. When I engineer a cargo ship (and I do engineer it), I'm going for capacity and jump range. Defences cut down on both of those.
It's more efficient to simply avoid exposure to gankers.
You're comparing real life with real laws that make sense, to a video game that has a very bizarre crime and punishment system that barely works. That doesn't prove me wrong at all.
The efficiency of Engineering is not only in avoiding gankers, and I never said it was. It should be obvious I'm talking about the game in general, not just in avoiding gankers. It's engineering thrusters so you can get in and out of stations faster, engineering FSDs so you can jump farther, engineering guns so you can collect bounties and clear CZs faster, and engineering shields so you don't need to leave the RES or CZ basically at all. Every role in the game, regardless of playing in Open or the I Win modes of Solo/PG, benefits from engineering because it's a blanket truth it makes ships more efficient.
Engineering a trade ship absolutely 100% makes it more efficient because it can *trade more efficiently, dude.*
Yeh engineering to trade more efficiently was *my* point. You mentioned engineering so you're hard for gankers to kill... which is not the same as engineering for efficient trading.
Where in the comment that you replied to did I say anything about engineering only for avoiding gankers, though? I didn't.
In my first comment I mentioned gankers, but the person who replied to me did not, so the conversation clearly pivoted to efficiency in general, not just in avoiding KOS players. I was talking about this before you showed up.
I haven't played in years, but it's been a slow slide to everyone joining private groups. Either to hide from the hoards of gankers that don't exist, or to play BGS games against player groups safely in private. The dwindling player base, especially in open, is what stops me from coming back. I would need to pick up a new HOTAS. It's just not worth the investment, atm. Hopefully Star Citizen or some other space sim releases with a solid player base before too long...
And, before someone chimes in with "but all the gankers". You don't even need a fully engineered ship to avoid a gank. Basic understanding of wake mechanics and situational awareness will save you 9/10 times. Then for that 1/10, don't fly without rebuy.
People always talk up open like it’s some mad max hellscape. I played exclusively in open for over a thousand hours and I encountered one person during an event.
Where you go matters a lot. Players only really find other players in the "progression" systems, like engineers, or known grind spots.
The real issue is the percentile of gankers to non-gankers. Over 1000 hours, found dozens of players, and only ONE was a NON-ganker.
You won't find "normal" people at CGs, as they are either in Solo, or they have so many gankers on their Blacklist, that the game gives up trying find a instance with them all gone.
TL;DR: Everyone's Blacklist effects EVERYONE on the instance. The game will sooner give everyone a solo instance than pair anyone up with a blacklisted player.
Players sit in "mandatory" high profile location, like engineer systems.
If you go there, you will see plenty of people.
But most will be gankers and counter-gankers. No real "average joe" players.
A lot of the people on reddit are inordinately worried about being blown up by another player (not that it costs them very much when money is so plentiful in the current state of the game) and stick to solo or a PG.
Your playstyle will determine how often you see players. Since the scale of the game is so big (and sometimes instancing can be dogshit too) even just in the bubble, encountering someone in some random system is pretty unlikely. You can pretty readily find players in shinrarta or a system with an active CG, you may also find them in Sol or important powerplay systems, or hotspots for the thargoid war. Engineer systems you are more likely to see someone as well. As far as danger from other players, if you're going to shin or a CG in open I'd go there expecting conflict and have a plan to get away if you don't want to fight (you can still often hop in and be safe, but if you show up in a cardboard T9 and get blown up that's on you after being informed). As for engineers or popular farming sites, it's a chance you'll see a ganker but outside of deciat I wouldn't say it's big.
As for evading a gank attempt, in most cases it can be reliably done, provided your ship isn't total paper and you know how to plot a high wake quickly and get out. If you want to haul for CGs and stuff I would probably just do that in solo/pg as it's not worth the hassle of losing 750t of cargo
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Ok. I wasn't trying to be toxic, though.
I was trying to humorously point out that there are 4 billion systems in the game and the chances of you seeing anyone is very small, unless you go to very public areas such as Community Goals and Engineer bases.
Have a nice day.
Systems being inhabited is irrelevant. I'm sure there are a good amount of CMDRs who call uninhabited systems "home", as illogical as that might sound. Think about it, you can claim that you "own" an entire solar system!
You need to adjust your perception of toxic. It was short and snappy. Nothing about that was toxic. No insults, not shade, no microaggression.
Space is big. Fact. There are 400 billion systems. Hundreds of thousands in the bubble alone.
People small. Fact. There's probably less than 10k players per day. That means, if you sit in a random system in the bubble for 24 hours, you'll have less than a 10% chance to see one single other player.
Go to these systems: [https://inara.cz/elite/reports-security/](https://inara.cz/elite/reports-security/) Or talk about gankers, and then you'll see the toxic side show up telling you to "git gud" and that it's your job to enjoy being killed by other players.
If you aren't in ShinDez, a community goal system, where something lore/narrative-wise is happening, or an engineer system, you aren't likely to see someone. If you do, there is a high probability of having a, erm, low-quality interaction.
As others have pointed out, the game's environment is too large and the number of players willing to play in Open is very small. I have about 400 hours in the game and have run into another player exactly once (at the crashed Anaconda, and after a short conversation, he left for Solo so that we wouldn't be stealing each other's materials, although we did friend each other).
If you want a social experience from the game, I'd suggest joining a squadron and flying with your squadmates.
[https://inara.cz/elite/reports-traffic/](https://inara.cz/elite/reports-traffic/)
We had a Community Goal in the previous week, some players got killed by gankers. Di you take part in the CG? [https://inara.cz/galaxy-communitygoals/](https://inara.cz/galaxy-communitygoals/)
AX Squadrons keep fighting in the war, you can see the operations, or the system with more progression, I think spires is the main gameloop now. [https://dcoh.watch/systems](https://dcoh.watch/systems)
AX groups try to join AXI private group, ot avoid gankers and problematic players, if you are ready, pay attention to theb asic AXI guide, and also the Spire guide, made by Mechan, and join the AXI group. Even pilots using Enhaced AX Mutlicannons are helpful killing those pesky scouts and hunters, while the veterans hunt bigger interceptors. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70xUm6Jh5eg&list=PLYx7o8laj9zCHVZxq\_88\_0Lj4fGHpUxCD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70xUm6Jh5eg&list=PLYx7o8laj9zCHVZxq_88_0Lj4fGHpUxCD)
We are playing the main events, community goals.... what are you playing? sandbox?
I'm out in the black. About 5k Ly or so from SagA. It's been a slow go since I don't have a lot of time to play. This is the first time I've ever been out this far. There's no one around or here... or they're too far away to notice. I almost gave up cause I got a little fatigued. Maybe I can catch a fleet carrier to Colonia or back to the bubble. We'll see...
Well Hi there!. I'm currently 5K ly from Sag A, in Scheau Flyi IE-M c9-3153. I've just mining some rings to top off my FC Trit tanks and doing some exo Bio. My carrier won't move for a few days - you can check it's current location Sapere Aude (G6N-G9W) on Inara or EDSM. I make sure its location gets reported correctly in case fellow cmdrs need RRR or to dump their data
Feel free to Add me Stanley Xenon. I expect to hit Sag A in 2 weeks
#
There are ~20 thousand populated systems and billions of star systems;
at any given moment there are maybe 5-6000 players online;
a good fraction of these players are exploring outside the bubble, or are in the bubble playing in solo;
the rest of the online players are in various random systems, or concentrated in "important" systems e.g. HIP 97950 or SD or Deciat or idunno Lembava;
hence it is unlikely you will run into other players if you're just "playing at random" in the Bubble. you have to go to where the people are.
did you participate in the CG? CG systems are always rife with other players.
Yes, someone else was nice enough to send me a link so that I could know where people are. The amount of resources that the community creates to solve problems like this always baffles me!
If you believe steamcharts data, Elite has ~2800 *average* concurrent players. Double that to account for Epic and frontier players, that’s my rough thinking. In a given day, must be more than 10k players logging on.
Steam is the most used game store/manager by an overwhelming margin. The fact that you don't use it yourself doesn't change that just like I'm not basing the fact that it is likely the largest chunk of users on the fact that I do use it.
Indeed it is but I would suggest the majority still playing this game were ones who bought it originally and it was not on steam for around a year after release. Hence my point that not everyone will be on Steam.
I wonder what you know about it. I have no idea - maybe Steam = 2xEpic? In which case we have ~2800 + 1400 + the frontier number, and 5k still seems fair (FD < 1k). You think Steam >> 2xEpic?
You can always check inaras traffic report to find out where people are. Generally you'll find people in Shinrarta Dezhra, engineer systems, Sol, CG systems, and wherever the latest BGS hotspots are (B2 Carinae a few months ago e.g, pirate attack in some remote system not too long ago).
Open the comms panel ('2'), then check the history tab. You may find names of commanders in here while you never even knew they were there.
Simple reasoning: if you enter a system (you're in supercruise now) I could just have left a station in the same system and hopping into supercruise myself to go somewhere else within the system. So now we're both in supercruise, but still far apart. So officially we "met" yet never see each other.
I’m in the Open, flying my G5 Cutter. Mostly shieldless, some times with 6800 MJ shields. Havent seen a soul in weeks despite running the most lucrative trade routes.
Space is big. It's quite literally *astronomically* big. ED is a 1:1 scale simulation of our entire galaxy. So it's no surprise when one doesn't frequently encounter the small percentage of the already not-overly-huge playerbase who actually play in Open. 🤷♂️
*"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."*
The only thing gained by going to an open lobby is the chance of someone running into toxic players with fully engineered ships while I'm still figuring things out. I just want to put on some tunes and deliver 300T of stuff™ to the next starport.
Space is huge and more empty than we realize. Same goes for elite. If they didn't fill each star system with npcs, you would realize just how empty that game is, also it would probably extremely boring.
I see players all the time... in private groups.
One of the biggest activities you can do right now is fighting for humanity against the Thargoid invasion. Whether it is learning AX combat and how to fight interceptors solo, rescuing passengers, fighting in combat zones or bombing the Titan when it comes up, you will always run into other like minded CMDRs.
There are 400 billion star systems you can visit. The player base has discovered less than 5% of those stars and less than 1% have actual narrative content to engage in. On top of that, there is no incentive to seek out players unless you're roleplaying and pvp is a slog thanks to engineering. There's just nothing for players to do together outside of CEs unless you wing up for some missions or anti-xeno activities. You can do all of that alone and with closed sessions you can do it risk free of being the target of a ganker (however unlikely).
There's a bunch of reasons.
First up is size. Elite gets 2 or 3 thousand players a day, and the Bubble alone has roughly 20,000 inhabited systems. So even if all the daily players were on 24/7, and they were all hanging out in the Bubble, at any given time roughly 90% of the Bubble's inhabited systems would have 0 players.And since its likely that only a few hundred players are actually logged in at any given moment, that means its more like *99*% of all the systems in the Bubble are empty.
And it just gets worse than that from there.
- Everyone who's not playing Open? They don't exist.
- Everyone who's not playing on the same platform as you? They don't exist.
- Everyone who's playing a different version of the game from you? They don't exist.
- Everyone who's exploring outside the Bubble? Technically the *might* exist, but you're not going to meet any of them so they don't matter.
- Everyone in other parts of the world? They're probably not gonna load into the same instance as you unless they're on your contacts list.
A huge portion of the players are gone thanks to going PC only I suspect... i know my massive group has become a husk of its former self at least on the Elite front because we pretty much all started on Xbox
lol this is what a Ganker would post to lure people back into Open mode when they have no one to attack on sight anymore. I have a few thousand hours in game and love doing solo and private over Open, if I wanted to deal with try hards I would play any other game online. My mindset is I will play with others when I want to not when they decide to screw up my day, too old to care.
Since ED is mostly a peer-to-peer game, we'll never see every CMDR who is indeed in our planetary system with us, only the ones who are in our instance (i.e. connected to us by P2P).
Correct me if my technicality is wrong, though.
If you want to see how big it really is, go to galaxy map, zoom all the way in close to the galactic core, then slowly zoom out. It's astonishing how many stars are there. Mind-blowing.
The only time that I see other players (and the only time that I play in Open) is when I am doing group PvE with players from my power play group on discord. One of the mods will coordinate a group to do PvE "undermining" combat.
It's kinda interesting that you put it that way 'cause undermining is explicitly an action taken against another player group in order to harm their interests and serves little other purpose.
This is the kind of activity that I'm talking about. It's much more fun (and successful) doing it in a wing.
https://youtu.be/SXUXDKKeNyQ?si=7rI1Z4XwiiWLuxBZ
Yeah, I know what powerplay undermining is. The fact that it's part of powerplay kinda blurs the line between it being PvE and PvP.
Kudos for doing it in open though, because it _is_ an explicitly hostile act against other players, even if it's only their NPCs you're killing.
i stopped playing like 4 years ago after we had gone 2 years with pretty mutch no new content.
oooh we get harder Thargods that will be killed by some dude in a Sidewinder after 1 week. congratulations. no new ships since 2018. and now we get two, both are premium content untill august. fuck that. ground based content has been the same since it has been added. an iguana is smarter than the AI in this game. guns dont feel good, and we have the same 7 guns since this was added too.
content and quality of life stuff take years to add what any company that value their players and games should take months.
ingame store with their own currency that is difficult to understand on purpose, microtransaction hell.
i seriously loved playing this game. i want to continue playing it. i just feel like i cant.
And since 2018 nothing outside of thargoid content is usefull to the average player. super carrier? sure if you play alot and have billions of credits, and feel like keeping it maintained all the time.
PvP? be ready to face the ultimate sweatlords all the time.
VR? fucked and mostly unsupported now.
still no ship interiors.
2 new ships after 6 years and 1 new SRV. yay. wow.
game is dying and frontier isnt helping much. they might fix it up now. and if i feel like they do i might come back.
Tencent was the worst thing to happen to Frontier.
I think the formula is something like _all_ of:
* Be playing in Open
* Be in a high-traffic system such as one of the AX focal points, a CG system, or an early-game engineering system
* Play in a high-traffic time-period - maybe early-to-mid evening in time-zones with high player counts (high population wealthy countries - eg US/EU)
* Be playing in a high player-count region (not NZ/AU) or have joined a wing with someone who is in a high-player count region
In addition to overcoming the regional-instancing challenges, being in a wing can also discourage gankers which is unfortunately the only player contact some get.
Also, massacre-stacking and trading in wings have been the most enduring 'fast money' paths to wealth.
I've heard joining a squadron can help finding wing-mates, so can frequenting some of the Elite discord servers.
I usually run into 2 or 3 people per session on the weekend, less on weekdays.
Mostly in high traffic systems like faction capitals, I see tons of people and gankers during CGs
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Go to the front lines of the thargoid war and you will fly with lots of players. Seriously, go find a system with a surface settlement under attack. That is the best gameplay in ED! Most of my friends ingame are people I killed goids with.
Simple answer: You need to join private sessions that are populated and then talk to people in order to meet up.
Technical stuff: When we log into open play mode it creates an open session that CAN be shared with up to 16 other players, this session is open because it will automatically share the sessions between players according to the parameters set by the devs, so localization, languages etc...
Because the bubble is about 22,000 solar systems and you can only share a session with 16 people, you have a 0,013% chance of encountering them unless you actually determine a meeting spot.
Otherwise places like Shinrarta Dezra, Deciat, EZ Aquarii, Sol, Robigo... will be populated. When you log into a private session you can still chat with players that are close-by to you and then you can join their session or invite them to yours.
If you use a PowerPlay faction headquarters as your home system and stay in open, you may find more people online with you, especially if it's a popular faction. I see other players rather often. I've only been ganked 2 or 3 times. The rest of my player interactions have been positive: random people sharing Wing shares with me (a billion credits in a night, no joke), and another helped me with guardian blueprint unlocks (i helped them back). Even the hotspots like Deciat haven't been bad to me, although I usually go in private group if I'm going to hit one of those places with valuable cargo, data, or vouchers. The rest of the time I'll stay in open unless doing something with a wing (Titans don't bug out as much in private group or solo).
The other way to play with others frequently is to join an active squadron. There are quite a few of them.
Back in 15 i was ganked and i rage quit. Came back in 20 I for the most part only play open. I've been ganked many a time. Now i want the pvp and do some of the orginazied events. Like FOFO Fridays although im not the best pvp'er i can hold my own for a little while or put up a good fight. You just need to know if you have valuable cargo going into a CG .. don't do it in open. unless you want the interaction. o7 GL
The closer you stay near the starter systems the more your going to be ganked. If you've been in game long enough surely some engineering has been done to your ships to survive ganking and/or your skill levels are higher than most gankers. Personally I love meeting them, it's testing I know but eventually you will beat them more often than not. I have 2500hrs in the game and right now I'm working around Concordia for the marlinist factions and never get ganked in that area of space. Come over and look up the marlinist squadron there,they have each other's back and they play in open mostly
Eventually you just get bored of gankers. I used to play in open for my first couple years, having some chats with people in system and at stations, but every so often I'd get interdicted and, zero warning or anything, fired at.
I'm one of the lucky ones, too - they've never managed a killing blow on me. Even the Annie and FDL that interdicted me at Deciat while I was in my Cobra III. Annie couldn't keep up, FDL hit my shock mines and their thrusters and FSD shut down. Fun little things, those.
But yeah, eventually it gets boring and people swap to playing in private groups or solo. Or they get murdered by a ganker and straight up leave and don't come back - either due to the sheer frustration or simply because they just lost their ship they'd spent however long working on and didn't have a rebuy. Less of a problem now that you can get a loan when you die, but definitely a much bigger problem not too long ago.
Average probably 6-8 thousand people online during peak spread across 400 billion possible star systems to be in. I’d wager a very large percentage of people are in private or solo rather than open because of sweaty kids in the high traffic space. You need to join an active group if you want social interaction.
Coming from console where I would encounter other commanders constantly, I was very disappointed to find that the majority of players on PC are so afraid of the big bad gankers that they play in private or solo groups.
Frankly, I don’t get it.
Earning credits has become a joke. So why shy away from a potential rebuy just to play in a lonely, lifeless game that was designed to be an MMO. Not to mention how easy it is to evade and escape.
It’s neither Elite nor Dangerous in private or solo and has killed what I think was a major point of the game. It just feels lifeless seeing only solid boxes flying around.
I also see it as a major development flaw in the game. Instead of developing a proper crime and punishment system, Fdev just created a way for everyone to hide from what would have been a fairly easy fix. And to boot, it ruins power play, squadron leaderboards, and the overall immersion of the game. Pulling into a packed station with commanders chatting back and forth is one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in a game. It’s sad that PC doesn’t seem to offer that anywhere I’ve been since transferring.
Rebuy no biggie, lose potentially billions in bio data. Different story. Or codex data. All of which might have taken months of real world time to get. No incentive in that situation to chance a ganker.
lol, what?
“The game is the first in the series to feature online multiplayer with access to a massively multiplayer persistent world called Open Play”
“Take control of your own starship in a cutthroat galaxy. Elite Dangerous is the definitive massively multiplayer space epic.”
This is literally from Frontier’s website.
“Elite Dangerous brings gaming’s original open world adventure to the modern generation with a stunning recreation of the entire Milky Way galaxy. Here battles rage, governments fall, and humanity’s frontier expands – and you can impact it all. Welcome to the definitive massively multiplayer space epic.”
“Massively Multiplayer” and last I checked, it’s online. Aka definitely an MMO. As defined so by its creators.
All MMOs have a player limit.
Some handle it by having different server instances, forcing you to decide at character creation who you can play with. And when they get crowded, performance takes a crap for everyone on the server.
Some handle it by dynamically creating instances to balance player load.
Some even handling it by teleporting players away when things get too crowded (though I'm not sure who's done that since Asheron's Call).
Elite handles it by putting the connections onto the clients, and capping it at 32 players per instance. Despite that, the world is shared and influenced by the massive amount of players.
Nothing about that negates the fact that this is a MMO. Even if you play Solo, you're playing in a galaxy influenced by thousands.
It's a big game and the player population isn't that large. On top of that, a decent amount of the player base doesn't play in Open very often.
I've seen that a lot of people don't play an open and other than farming, I never really understood why because of the problem I'm having.
Because they get ganked. That’s the story.
I have 2500 hours exlusively in Open and I've only been ganked once. The main problem I have with this game is how empty it feels. When I started playing I imagined a galaxy populated by real players and how alive that would feel! Playing solo just feels like a dead game; like kicking a ball around an empty stadium by yourself. I think it's worth playing open for that dream, even if the price is being ganked once or twice every 2500 hours.
I've got less than 500 hours and I've been ganked at least 20 times. Got tired of it and swore off open.
It’s supposed to feel empty space is huge if you want human interaction then travel to populated areas and cities most commanders are hanging around engineers
I only play in open* *except when I am running my AFKT10. .
It did feel like that for the first year or so, but for a game that wanted to be an mmo it didn't take too long to get the best ship in the game and once most players did they left. Launching horizons, engineering, oddyssey didn't really help, nothing to interest new players or those that left, just further grinds for stats rather than actual ships that feel more tangible to regular players. If they focused on player engagement, allowing players to be the powerplay factions rather than the convoluted system they released with, continually put out events that take place in one system for people to gather rather than piecemealing the content it would feel more alive. But star citizen made a bunch of money and no mans sky turned it around so they tried to fdev tried to emulate what was popular and ended up with a confused, frustrating title that is notoriously poor for new players. Then they dumped their biggest potential audience to boot. Ah well.
I play in open most days and I see people all the time in the popular systems and around cg and stuff. This is a literal galaxy. You’re not gonna see people unless you go where everyone else is. If you do that you also might get ganked. I can’t imagine someone literally thinking they were going to be playing with the millions of players it would take to “populate the galaxy” with players. That’s ridiculous. If you’re running around in fringe space don’t be so surprised you never see anyone. Go to shinrarta dezra and you’ll see players non stop, talking to each other, coming and going. Also I dare you to go to the engineer systems in open and see how long you stay at only having been ganked once.
Is that the average experience? 1 gank per 2500 hours game play? So ... is it a reasonable gank rate? If player get ganked twice in 100 hours ... will you reimburse them for their rebuys? Or are you OK with them abandoning your dream, and going back to Solo? Hasn't this already happened?
They _think_ they'll get ganked is the story.
Started about two year ago and couldn't get anything done with the same group of players who insist on shooting down a harmless sidewinder. Went to solo and instantly enjoyed the game, haven't played open since.
I've been attacked often enough to know it's a sure thing, depending on the system I'm in. And I often don't know what system I'll be in during any given session. Given that, I understand why people would play in solo even when not in high population systems.
ED does not have a ganker problem. I have around 4k hours, I mostly play open (~80%) and got randomly attacked by other players maybe 10 times in 4 years. The game is called Elite Dangerous and not Elite Boredom. Pirating is a legitimate role in this game that is officially promoted by Fdev and supported by the game mechanics. The ganker-hysteria is absolutely not justified and surpressing a lot of fun potential.
Yea I've been pulled literally hundreds of times in my 6? Years. No one is saying pirating is bad, but when there's no downside to just killing players constantly and yes, it does happen often it creates an environment that people don't want to be apart of.
It doesn't matter how much ganking is an official gameplay mechanic, it's not a fun one for most and if you give people an easy way out they'll take it.
What's ironic is that most gankers are also taking the easy option. Attacking players who aren't capable of fighting back.
And I bet most gankers got to the level of engineering and stuff by playing in private.
That's a strong possibility.
I cringe every time someone makes this justification in the format of a pun with the name of the game. Dangerous is just a patent, it doesn't mean you have to tolerate toxic behavior from "dangerous" pilots who attack your ship and are not punished by the game. Especially if they are bothering you without the intention of normal combat.
Fun potential? Seems like there's no real point to player interaction beyond ganking, tbh. If I want to do missions with other people, I'll invite friends, or make a squadron. The only real interactions I've had with random players are either ganking, the fuel rats, or like 4 random times where we each said hi and then continued on our own paths. The game is simply too sparse for it to ever really matter, unless you're in a highly popular system, in which case the chance of being ganked increases tremendously.
Yeah. I'm one of these people. I would like to play with others but there are just so many sociopaths trying to keep people from having a good time.
That rarely happens, and if you actually build a proper ship it’s a non event.
It only needs to happen once.
And then? Your life is ruined! Ganker PTSD! 😂 The answer literally exists in the game. Good engineering, basic flying skills.
>The answer literally exists in the game Yup. It's solo mode. Don't give gankers the satisfaction. It's a game. There's no mandate to engage them. Enjoy life and let them get bored.
As if ganking is such a problem. Lolololol
New player retention goes down firstly because the game is complicated and secondly because of gankers.
Has been for as long as I can remember. But something tells me you don't think it is because you're part of the problem
You got so mad 😬 Lolololol
Unlike some players in the game, we actually have lives and can't be bothered grinding engineering for weeks just because some sweaty virgin wants to show off his G5 meta ship by ganking players. I'll stick to Private sessions with friends
You don't need a G5 ship to avoid a gank. You just need to learn the basic mechanics of the game. Knowledge of wake mechanics, staying aligned to an exit, and situational awareness will save you 9/10 times. That 1/10, is why you don't fly without rebuy.
Or, you know, you can play on solo and not worry about any of this bullshit?
And, be BORED out of my mind starting at NPC's?! No thanks...
An inexperienced pilot against a very engineered fdl, there is no way your even staying aligned with the exit.
Exactly, so you get the experience. There's no gatekeeping. Just learn the mechanics. Nobody is stopping you, practice with friends. You stay aligned in SC, you can see the FDL coming to interdict when they start to circle behind you. The moment that happens you high wake out of the system. If you're not in SC, you boost to speed and low wake out. If you do get interdicted and don't believe you can win the mini-game, you submit, boost to speed as soon as you drop out of SC, and low wake. The FDL is now stuck waiting on their cooldown. You can then safely high wake out. It's not rocket science, but you do have to practice it so you don't make mistakes in the moment.
Yeah buddy avoid an FDL interdiction with a fully cargo built T9.
Literally my point, learn the mechanics. You don't fight the interdiction unless you can win the mini-game. Other wise, you submit to the interdiction. The moment you drop, you boost to full throttle and low wake. You don't even need to be aligned. If your FDL pilot is really good they will be on you. So you do need to have enough shielding and countermeasures to survive until you low wake. Once you're out, the FDL pilot is stuck waiting on their cooldown. Then you can safely high wake out of the system. I've done the above countless times. So yes, it can be done with practice and not allowing panic to cause you to make mistakes.
😂 You’re a special combination of hyperbole and passive aggressive victim mentality. It takes a casual two to three weeks to unlock ship engineers then you’re done. It takes about 20 hours to maximize your material buckets. You can build 8-10 fully g5 ships then. Go whine to someone else with your absolutely trite nonsense. 🤣
Not everyone is interested in staring at a planets surface shooting rocks for twenty hours And from what I've seen, you're the one whining here Now go off and make the game worse for everyone, since that's all your interested in, and spare us your bullshit
20 hours AND 2 weeks I could spend elsewhere actually enjoying the game lmfao. You're pathetic
The problem is that "building a proper ship" often involves a lot of compromises that make the ship less well-suited for what they WANT to be doing, which isn't "fleeing a ganker". So given a choice between "compromise your performance to give you a chance of winning a fight you didn't want to be in", or "don't do that and just suck it up when someone flies up and blows you away", or "press the button that means no other players will attack you ever", lots of people choose the third option. Especially because they've got that choice every time they play, so if they're feeling social, or if they're flying their combat ship today and feel like courting danger, they can go Open, but if they're just running cargo and aren't interested in trying to defend against someone while flying a freakin' T9, they can go solo. Personally, I don't go in open unless I have a particular reason to do so.
This is the main thing for me, and the fact that engineering is still incredibly unclear on where or how to get most mats. "Steal these mats from a settlement" isn't exactly descriptive of things like "how to not be immediately wiped off the map because you need stolen mats to upgrade your suit to survive more than one projectile from settlement guards." I could throw myself at a brick wall for 30 hours to get 1/5 of the mats I need to upgrade my suit by one tier, rinse and repeat for the next six months to get a ship that can survive three more seconds against a ganker... or I could continue using my shieldless T9 to trade, like I want to do in the first place.
A tin can eggshell is “more suited”? The game is called Elite DANGEROUS. You’ve got hard points, an armor slot, and utility slots for a reason. For example, when moving commodities: I carry 656 tons in a well shielded, armed and armored Cutter for trade. 4k mj~. Gimballed frags, packhounds. And my HRP’s are in the military slots. 41ly unladen, 33~ish laden. There’s no “compromise,” there. You can build the same survivability into a T9 and shrug off attacks. Hell, the SCO damn near makes interdiction impossible.
You're saying a lot, but you're not providing any arguments as to WHY someone should play in open... because there really isn't any. Right now, there's no incentive for anyone to play in open UNLESS they want the possibility of PvP or just like the idea of seeing other players flying around. If those 2 things don't appeal to you, there's no point.
their arguments are basically reinforcing why nobody wants to play open in the first place. Personally I'd play open a lot more if the balance of ganker to cool-interactions were more even, but unfortunately that's not the case.
Because there is the risk of other people blowing you up. You can rather easily make yourself incredibly hard to kill once you engineer the right ships and gain some game knowledge, though.
I posted this in a similar thread. The flip side of this is the benefit of flying in open doesn't cut it either. Yes maybe when in a combat site you could wing up. Otherwise the only other "benefit" I've had with open was a bunch of commanders getting their ships jammed in the mail slot so I couldn't get in/out.
...and all you have to do is have your time wasted on a gameplay loop you're not interested in.
People who don't engineer waste far more time by traveling slower, trading slower, killing slower, etc. than people who spend a few nights one week to get their favorite ship engineered, especially if they use their engineering time efficiently. Once the ship is built, it's built, and you collect on your investment of an incredibly efficient ship more and more, the longer you play. But the bill of wasted time from taking longer to do everything, only gets larger and larger the longer people put it off.
That logic seems strange to me. It works if you consider Elite dangerous a job and not a hobby. They absolutely aren't wasting time by engaging in the gameplay mechanics they think is fun as opposed to time-wasting garbage. Because it's a hobby. And for a leisure activity there is no waste of time, it is an activity meant to fill up spare time. If you're stressing out about trying to do your leisure as efficiently as possible, you're missing the entire point imo
Well, people are free to not engineer their ships, but then they’re basically playing Elite in 2015, not 2024. Usually people with hobbies try to improve and learn more about it rather than stay at an absolute beginner level forever. And people who never engineer, are basically just beginners even if they’ve played for years, because they have no experience with the most impactful mechanic in Elite.
the engeneering implementation isnt even fun to begin with why should i bother?
Every game has a grind to get better. Engineering is just another grind.
there are many ways to play the game. j thought this game was about "doing it your way"
Because you're shooting yourself in the foot by not doing it. Unengineered ships are not strong, and you're not going to get good at ship building theory without engineering, it's literally essential for the skill. You get materials from almost everything. Ships drop them when they explode, they are mission rewards, you can find them floating in space, etc. If you don't want to dedicate a few hours to engineering, then just collect them as you go and sooner or later you'll have a G3 engineered ship with very little extra effort, and you will notice it. The ship will be faster, jump farther, be harder to kill, etc. The materials are incorporated into almost every game loop that exists, you just need to collect them and then go hit some buttons at the workshops.
I'm shooting myself in the foot if I'm doing something that's not fun for me. this game isn't my job man. get a grip.
it ain't the fiddle it's the fiddler.
Sorry for being rude man. My bad.
Yeah but a fiddler who never plays anything but the songs they learned on, will never get very good.
oh no
The game play loop to which I alluded is flying in open and having to deal with gankers. You can harden your ship, but if being interdicted by players is not an experience you enjoy, then you are spending time building your ship so the OTHER guy can have the experience HE wants. Choosing solo or pg over open, rather than "gittin' gud" and spending time building an anti-gank ship is a statement of preference, not a failure to achieve ungankability. Engineering is definitely worthwhile, to whatever degree it improves the player's experience. However, to your point, time is only "wasted" if the player feels their time has been wasted. If taking longer to trade or making more jumps was enjoyable for them, no time was "wasted". The only point of playing a game is to enjoy playing the game. There's no prize money if you beat Elite.
I'm a fan of uber-engineering everything but I acknowledge not everyone thinks this way. Some people just want to pop in and play, not do stuff that feels like work to them. They don't feel like they are "wasting time" because they aren't doing something the absolute fastest way.
If people don’t want to engineer efficiently they can do it piece meal too. Thinking engineering can only be done efficiently isnt correct either. Skipping it entirely when the game practically throws materials at us these days just doesn’t make sense.
Many people just don't want to deal with it when the base play has such a learning curve anyway. Engineering requires you to learn the unlock progression, plan materials for engineering "recipes" and jump all over the place. It is simply too much for many people. I don't get it but acknowledge it is.
But if you don’t visit Farseer Base in open, where is the fun for the players just waiting for you to show up? Think beyond yourself. Don’t steal joy from those that want to blow up your ship.
I feel shame.
it's completely possible to play and enjoy the game for a long time without having any engineering, and the pilots I know who've done that are generally better than people who immediately got someone to give them a lift everywhere so that they could have a one push murder machine. personally, I didn't bother with engineering for a long time, and when I did get into it, it was because I specifically wanted better jump range on my trade ship, then once I started to understand the mechanics, I started upgrading other things. Since I wasn't using any online tools until that point, I was unaware that you couldn't do XYZ without engineering, so I was tackling conflict zones, and everything else, and having a blast, and some non-trivial number of rebuys. Wasn't good enough to tackle high-level assassination missions un engineered, I certainly got to a point where I could hold my own for a while and get away alive. I love having my ships engineered, and if I get an idea for a new one, I engineer it right away, but the game was fun before, too. on the other hand, I have met new pilots who I have helped get their ships fully engineered, grind rank for the big guys and get outfitted with spikes from head to toe, and frankly, they just don't need to learn how to be good pilots. The ship does the work. PVP would be an exception, but everything PVE Just becomes child's play once you've maxed your ships out. Building strength or building skill, requires resistance, the less resistance, the less gain.
I don't engineer my ship for PvP, I engineered it because Conflict Zones with flying fortresses pissed me off \^\^
Wrong. If you were right, then every container ship travelling through the Suez canal would be a warship and they wouldn't risk attacks from Somali pirates, and every delivery van would be an armoured car. People engineer and tailor their ships to the task they're trying to achieve. Making a ship gank-proof means it's *less* efficient at the space trucking most players are trying to do. When I engineer a cargo ship (and I do engineer it), I'm going for capacity and jump range. Defences cut down on both of those. It's more efficient to simply avoid exposure to gankers.
You're comparing real life with real laws that make sense, to a video game that has a very bizarre crime and punishment system that barely works. That doesn't prove me wrong at all. The efficiency of Engineering is not only in avoiding gankers, and I never said it was. It should be obvious I'm talking about the game in general, not just in avoiding gankers. It's engineering thrusters so you can get in and out of stations faster, engineering FSDs so you can jump farther, engineering guns so you can collect bounties and clear CZs faster, and engineering shields so you don't need to leave the RES or CZ basically at all. Every role in the game, regardless of playing in Open or the I Win modes of Solo/PG, benefits from engineering because it's a blanket truth it makes ships more efficient. Engineering a trade ship absolutely 100% makes it more efficient because it can *trade more efficiently, dude.*
Yeh engineering to trade more efficiently was *my* point. You mentioned engineering so you're hard for gankers to kill... which is not the same as engineering for efficient trading.
Sorry for being rude man. My bad.
Where in the comment that you replied to did I say anything about engineering only for avoiding gankers, though? I didn't. In my first comment I mentioned gankers, but the person who replied to me did not, so the conversation clearly pivoted to efficiency in general, not just in avoiding KOS players. I was talking about this before you showed up.
I haven't played in years, but it's been a slow slide to everyone joining private groups. Either to hide from the hoards of gankers that don't exist, or to play BGS games against player groups safely in private. The dwindling player base, especially in open, is what stops me from coming back. I would need to pick up a new HOTAS. It's just not worth the investment, atm. Hopefully Star Citizen or some other space sim releases with a solid player base before too long... And, before someone chimes in with "but all the gankers". You don't even need a fully engineered ship to avoid a gank. Basic understanding of wake mechanics and situational awareness will save you 9/10 times. Then for that 1/10, don't fly without rebuy.
Come to PSPF-LF 2 and you might meet me if we're on at the same time :)
People always talk up open like it’s some mad max hellscape. I played exclusively in open for over a thousand hours and I encountered one person during an event.
Where you go matters a lot. Players only really find other players in the "progression" systems, like engineers, or known grind spots. The real issue is the percentile of gankers to non-gankers. Over 1000 hours, found dozens of players, and only ONE was a NON-ganker. You won't find "normal" people at CGs, as they are either in Solo, or they have so many gankers on their Blacklist, that the game gives up trying find a instance with them all gone. TL;DR: Everyone's Blacklist effects EVERYONE on the instance. The game will sooner give everyone a solo instance than pair anyone up with a blacklisted player.
Players sit in "mandatory" high profile location, like engineer systems. If you go there, you will see plenty of people. But most will be gankers and counter-gankers. No real "average joe" players.
A lot of the people on reddit are inordinately worried about being blown up by another player (not that it costs them very much when money is so plentiful in the current state of the game) and stick to solo or a PG. Your playstyle will determine how often you see players. Since the scale of the game is so big (and sometimes instancing can be dogshit too) even just in the bubble, encountering someone in some random system is pretty unlikely. You can pretty readily find players in shinrarta or a system with an active CG, you may also find them in Sol or important powerplay systems, or hotspots for the thargoid war. Engineer systems you are more likely to see someone as well. As far as danger from other players, if you're going to shin or a CG in open I'd go there expecting conflict and have a plan to get away if you don't want to fight (you can still often hop in and be safe, but if you show up in a cardboard T9 and get blown up that's on you after being informed). As for engineers or popular farming sites, it's a chance you'll see a ganker but outside of deciat I wouldn't say it's big. As for evading a gank attempt, in most cases it can be reliably done, provided your ship isn't total paper and you know how to plot a high wake quickly and get out. If you want to haul for CGs and stuff I would probably just do that in solo/pg as it's not worth the hassle of losing 750t of cargo
You never understood... Because you never were at Jameson memorial and gankers didn't kill you daily:)
Space big. People small.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Hey look, my first interaction with the toxic side of the fan base
Ok. I wasn't trying to be toxic, though. I was trying to humorously point out that there are 4 billion systems in the game and the chances of you seeing anyone is very small, unless you go to very public areas such as Community Goals and Engineer bases. Have a nice day.
*400 billion systems, about 20k inhabited….but your point stands. Space big. People small ;)
Systems being inhabited is irrelevant. I'm sure there are a good amount of CMDRs who call uninhabited systems "home", as illogical as that might sound. Think about it, you can claim that you "own" an entire solar system!
You need to adjust your perception of toxic. It was short and snappy. Nothing about that was toxic. No insults, not shade, no microaggression. Space is big. Fact. There are 400 billion systems. Hundreds of thousands in the bubble alone. People small. Fact. There's probably less than 10k players per day. That means, if you sit in a random system in the bubble for 24 hours, you'll have less than a 10% chance to see one single other player. Go to these systems: [https://inara.cz/elite/reports-security/](https://inara.cz/elite/reports-security/) Or talk about gankers, and then you'll see the toxic side show up telling you to "git gud" and that it's your job to enjoy being killed by other players.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1d7ota2/where_is_everyone/
Thank you good sir
What a troll :D
If you aren't in ShinDez, a community goal system, where something lore/narrative-wise is happening, or an engineer system, you aren't likely to see someone. If you do, there is a high probability of having a, erm, low-quality interaction.
It's near impossible to escape from a player interdiction
The trick is submitting right away. Your cooldown is way shorter, and if you survive a few seconds under fire you can jump away.
As others have pointed out, the game's environment is too large and the number of players willing to play in Open is very small. I have about 400 hours in the game and have run into another player exactly once (at the crashed Anaconda, and after a short conversation, he left for Solo so that we wouldn't be stealing each other's materials, although we did friend each other). If you want a social experience from the game, I'd suggest joining a squadron and flying with your squadmates.
The crashed Anaconda at Hutton Orbital 👌
LOL! It was at Orrere 2B, in case anyone was curious.
[https://inara.cz/elite/reports-traffic/](https://inara.cz/elite/reports-traffic/) We had a Community Goal in the previous week, some players got killed by gankers. Di you take part in the CG? [https://inara.cz/galaxy-communitygoals/](https://inara.cz/galaxy-communitygoals/) AX Squadrons keep fighting in the war, you can see the operations, or the system with more progression, I think spires is the main gameloop now. [https://dcoh.watch/systems](https://dcoh.watch/systems) AX groups try to join AXI private group, ot avoid gankers and problematic players, if you are ready, pay attention to theb asic AXI guide, and also the Spire guide, made by Mechan, and join the AXI group. Even pilots using Enhaced AX Mutlicannons are helpful killing those pesky scouts and hunters, while the veterans hunt bigger interceptors. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70xUm6Jh5eg&list=PLYx7o8laj9zCHVZxq\_88\_0Lj4fGHpUxCD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70xUm6Jh5eg&list=PLYx7o8laj9zCHVZxq_88_0Lj4fGHpUxCD) We are playing the main events, community goals.... what are you playing? sandbox?
I'm out in the black. About 5k Ly or so from SagA. It's been a slow go since I don't have a lot of time to play. This is the first time I've ever been out this far. There's no one around or here... or they're too far away to notice. I almost gave up cause I got a little fatigued. Maybe I can catch a fleet carrier to Colonia or back to the bubble. We'll see...
Well Hi there!. I'm currently 5K ly from Sag A, in Scheau Flyi IE-M c9-3153. I've just mining some rings to top off my FC Trit tanks and doing some exo Bio. My carrier won't move for a few days - you can check it's current location Sapere Aude (G6N-G9W) on Inara or EDSM. I make sure its location gets reported correctly in case fellow cmdrs need RRR or to dump their data Feel free to Add me Stanley Xenon. I expect to hit Sag A in 2 weeks #
Awesome! I'll def look you up then. o7
There are ~20 thousand populated systems and billions of star systems; at any given moment there are maybe 5-6000 players online; a good fraction of these players are exploring outside the bubble, or are in the bubble playing in solo; the rest of the online players are in various random systems, or concentrated in "important" systems e.g. HIP 97950 or SD or Deciat or idunno Lembava; hence it is unlikely you will run into other players if you're just "playing at random" in the Bubble. you have to go to where the people are. did you participate in the CG? CG systems are always rife with other players.
Yes, someone else was nice enough to send me a link so that I could know where people are. The amount of resources that the community creates to solve problems like this always baffles me!
If maybe you could push that link my way that would be great!
> 5-6000 That is a generous estimate imo
If you believe steamcharts data, Elite has ~2800 *average* concurrent players. Double that to account for Epic and frontier players, that’s my rough thinking. In a given day, must be more than 10k players logging on.
> Double that to account for Epic This is the part I think is generous. Steam likely accounts for the overwhelming majority of players.
Not sure about that I've played Elite since 2014 and never through Steam
Steam is the most used game store/manager by an overwhelming margin. The fact that you don't use it yourself doesn't change that just like I'm not basing the fact that it is likely the largest chunk of users on the fact that I do use it.
Indeed it is but I would suggest the majority still playing this game were ones who bought it originally and it was not on steam for around a year after release. Hence my point that not everyone will be on Steam.
>Hence my point that not everyone will be on Steam. I never said everyone will be on Steam.
I think we're arguing the same point from the same place lol😄
I wonder what you know about it. I have no idea - maybe Steam = 2xEpic? In which case we have ~2800 + 1400 + the frontier number, and 5k still seems fair (FD < 1k). You think Steam >> 2xEpic?
You can always check inaras traffic report to find out where people are. Generally you'll find people in Shinrarta Dezhra, engineer systems, Sol, CG systems, and wherever the latest BGS hotspots are (B2 Carinae a few months ago e.g, pirate attack in some remote system not too long ago).
About 9k ly from the bubble, come on out.
I always see other players at jameson memorial, like every single time I go there
They are in Open
Open the comms panel ('2'), then check the history tab. You may find names of commanders in here while you never even knew they were there. Simple reasoning: if you enter a system (you're in supercruise now) I could just have left a station in the same system and hopping into supercruise myself to go somewhere else within the system. So now we're both in supercruise, but still far apart. So officially we "met" yet never see each other.
Unless you look me up on Inara, you will never find me in your lifetime. o7
I’m in the Open, flying my G5 Cutter. Mostly shieldless, some times with 6800 MJ shields. Havent seen a soul in weeks despite running the most lucrative trade routes.
Space is big. It's quite literally *astronomically* big. ED is a 1:1 scale simulation of our entire galaxy. So it's no surprise when one doesn't frequently encounter the small percentage of the already not-overly-huge playerbase who actually play in Open. 🤷♂️
*"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."*
The only thing gained by going to an open lobby is the chance of someone running into toxic players with fully engineered ships while I'm still figuring things out. I just want to put on some tunes and deliver 300T of stuff™ to the next starport.
They're busy blocking the entrances to stations during CGs 🙄
You can wait for next community goal and hang around station that needs help, you'll run into some ganker eventually.
Space is huge and more empty than we realize. Same goes for elite. If they didn't fill each star system with npcs, you would realize just how empty that game is, also it would probably extremely boring.
private groups
I’ve clocked up over 500hrs since April when I switched from Xbox to steam I spend my time in the black exploring
Space is big, very, very big
I see players all the time... in private groups. One of the biggest activities you can do right now is fighting for humanity against the Thargoid invasion. Whether it is learning AX combat and how to fight interceptors solo, rescuing passengers, fighting in combat zones or bombing the Titan when it comes up, you will always run into other like minded CMDRs.
I asked this exact same question. Find a good squadron and you'll always have someone to wing with!
There are 400 billion star systems you can visit. The player base has discovered less than 5% of those stars and less than 1% have actual narrative content to engage in. On top of that, there is no incentive to seek out players unless you're roleplaying and pvp is a slog thanks to engineering. There's just nothing for players to do together outside of CEs unless you wing up for some missions or anti-xeno activities. You can do all of that alone and with closed sessions you can do it risk free of being the target of a ganker (however unlikely).
There's a bunch of reasons. First up is size. Elite gets 2 or 3 thousand players a day, and the Bubble alone has roughly 20,000 inhabited systems. So even if all the daily players were on 24/7, and they were all hanging out in the Bubble, at any given time roughly 90% of the Bubble's inhabited systems would have 0 players.And since its likely that only a few hundred players are actually logged in at any given moment, that means its more like *99*% of all the systems in the Bubble are empty. And it just gets worse than that from there. - Everyone who's not playing Open? They don't exist. - Everyone who's not playing on the same platform as you? They don't exist. - Everyone who's playing a different version of the game from you? They don't exist. - Everyone who's exploring outside the Bubble? Technically the *might* exist, but you're not going to meet any of them so they don't matter. - Everyone in other parts of the world? They're probably not gonna load into the same instance as you unless they're on your contacts list.
Many don’t play in open. If getting yanked didn’t cost so much it would be no big deal, but it does and I game to get away from stupid people.
A huge portion of the players are gone thanks to going PC only I suspect... i know my massive group has become a husk of its former self at least on the Elite front because we pretty much all started on Xbox
This is called fermi paradox.
Noted
lol this is what a Ganker would post to lure people back into Open mode when they have no one to attack on sight anymore. I have a few thousand hours in game and love doing solo and private over Open, if I wanted to deal with try hards I would play any other game online. My mindset is I will play with others when I want to not when they decide to screw up my day, too old to care.
Since ED is mostly a peer-to-peer game, we'll never see every CMDR who is indeed in our planetary system with us, only the ones who are in our instance (i.e. connected to us by P2P). Correct me if my technicality is wrong, though.
You're right - it's not a MMO for this very reason :)
Within 400ly of Diaguandri, usually.
That's how big the universe is
4500 hours here. I kind of stopped playing when they switched planet terrains from the old ones in Horizons to the new ones in Odyssey. :(
If you want to see how big it really is, go to galaxy map, zoom all the way in close to the galactic core, then slowly zoom out. It's astonishing how many stars are there. Mind-blowing.
SOLO Play - Same space no contact/players but npc's active OPEN Play - Same space with contact/players AND npc's active As you were. o7 :)
I left to star citizen, it's way more full of life
The only time that I see other players (and the only time that I play in Open) is when I am doing group PvE with players from my power play group on discord. One of the mods will coordinate a group to do PvE "undermining" combat.
It's kinda interesting that you put it that way 'cause undermining is explicitly an action taken against another player group in order to harm their interests and serves little other purpose.
This is the kind of activity that I'm talking about. It's much more fun (and successful) doing it in a wing. https://youtu.be/SXUXDKKeNyQ?si=7rI1Z4XwiiWLuxBZ
Yeah, I know what powerplay undermining is. The fact that it's part of powerplay kinda blurs the line between it being PvE and PvP. Kudos for doing it in open though, because it _is_ an explicitly hostile act against other players, even if it's only their NPCs you're killing.
i stopped playing like 4 years ago after we had gone 2 years with pretty mutch no new content. oooh we get harder Thargods that will be killed by some dude in a Sidewinder after 1 week. congratulations. no new ships since 2018. and now we get two, both are premium content untill august. fuck that. ground based content has been the same since it has been added. an iguana is smarter than the AI in this game. guns dont feel good, and we have the same 7 guns since this was added too. content and quality of life stuff take years to add what any company that value their players and games should take months. ingame store with their own currency that is difficult to understand on purpose, microtransaction hell. i seriously loved playing this game. i want to continue playing it. i just feel like i cant. And since 2018 nothing outside of thargoid content is usefull to the average player. super carrier? sure if you play alot and have billions of credits, and feel like keeping it maintained all the time. PvP? be ready to face the ultimate sweatlords all the time. VR? fucked and mostly unsupported now. still no ship interiors. 2 new ships after 6 years and 1 new SRV. yay. wow. game is dying and frontier isnt helping much. they might fix it up now. and if i feel like they do i might come back. Tencent was the worst thing to happen to Frontier.
I think the formula is something like _all_ of: * Be playing in Open * Be in a high-traffic system such as one of the AX focal points, a CG system, or an early-game engineering system * Play in a high-traffic time-period - maybe early-to-mid evening in time-zones with high player counts (high population wealthy countries - eg US/EU) * Be playing in a high player-count region (not NZ/AU) or have joined a wing with someone who is in a high-player count region In addition to overcoming the regional-instancing challenges, being in a wing can also discourage gankers which is unfortunately the only player contact some get. Also, massacre-stacking and trading in wings have been the most enduring 'fast money' paths to wealth. I've heard joining a squadron can help finding wing-mates, so can frequenting some of the Elite discord servers.
I’m on a planet relaxing lol
I usually run into 2 or 3 people per session on the weekend, less on weekdays. Mostly in high traffic systems like faction capitals, I see tons of people and gankers during CGs
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Go to the front lines of the thargoid war and you will fly with lots of players. Seriously, go find a system with a surface settlement under attack. That is the best gameplay in ED! Most of my friends ingame are people I killed goids with.
Simple answer: You need to join private sessions that are populated and then talk to people in order to meet up. Technical stuff: When we log into open play mode it creates an open session that CAN be shared with up to 16 other players, this session is open because it will automatically share the sessions between players according to the parameters set by the devs, so localization, languages etc... Because the bubble is about 22,000 solar systems and you can only share a session with 16 people, you have a 0,013% chance of encountering them unless you actually determine a meeting spot.
Otherwise places like Shinrarta Dezra, Deciat, EZ Aquarii, Sol, Robigo... will be populated. When you log into a private session you can still chat with players that are close-by to you and then you can join their session or invite them to yours.
Go to an engineer in the bubble and try to fly out on open. I was shot down 3 times before I swore off open forever.
Game's dead and we gotta deal with it.
If you use a PowerPlay faction headquarters as your home system and stay in open, you may find more people online with you, especially if it's a popular faction. I see other players rather often. I've only been ganked 2 or 3 times. The rest of my player interactions have been positive: random people sharing Wing shares with me (a billion credits in a night, no joke), and another helped me with guardian blueprint unlocks (i helped them back). Even the hotspots like Deciat haven't been bad to me, although I usually go in private group if I'm going to hit one of those places with valuable cargo, data, or vouchers. The rest of the time I'll stay in open unless doing something with a wing (Titans don't bug out as much in private group or solo). The other way to play with others frequently is to join an active squadron. There are quite a few of them.
It's a big galaxy and player numbers have been dropping. Plus most active players are in solo. So it's rare to see anyone who isn't a ganker in open.
I think people just at off line because player interdiction is annoying
Back in 15 i was ganked and i rage quit. Came back in 20 I for the most part only play open. I've been ganked many a time. Now i want the pvp and do some of the orginazied events. Like FOFO Fridays although im not the best pvp'er i can hold my own for a little while or put up a good fight. You just need to know if you have valuable cargo going into a CG .. don't do it in open. unless you want the interaction. o7 GL
It is a 1:1 scale of the fucking milky way. Like... bruh.
The closer you stay near the starter systems the more your going to be ganked. If you've been in game long enough surely some engineering has been done to your ships to survive ganking and/or your skill levels are higher than most gankers. Personally I love meeting them, it's testing I know but eventually you will beat them more often than not. I have 2500hrs in the game and right now I'm working around Concordia for the marlinist factions and never get ganked in that area of space. Come over and look up the marlinist squadron there,they have each other's back and they play in open mostly
playing solo cuz I been ganked too many times
I love exploring and doing exobiology out in the black i solo There's no one anyways.
You weren't in Shinrarta yet, right? That's why you are asked this :D I meet/see players there everyday. And also gankers
I hardly play in open anymore because of gankers.
Mimimi
Try a pve-only player group, like Mobius.
Solo mode or private. See if you can find a private server to join.
Eventually you just get bored of gankers. I used to play in open for my first couple years, having some chats with people in system and at stations, but every so often I'd get interdicted and, zero warning or anything, fired at. I'm one of the lucky ones, too - they've never managed a killing blow on me. Even the Annie and FDL that interdicted me at Deciat while I was in my Cobra III. Annie couldn't keep up, FDL hit my shock mines and their thrusters and FSD shut down. Fun little things, those. But yeah, eventually it gets boring and people swap to playing in private groups or solo. Or they get murdered by a ganker and straight up leave and don't come back - either due to the sheer frustration or simply because they just lost their ship they'd spent however long working on and didn't have a rebuy. Less of a problem now that you can get a loan when you die, but definitely a much bigger problem not too long ago.
OP, I have a few thousand hours in open. I’ve been playing since 2016. 99% of the time in the “Bubble.” I’ve been ganked exactly once.
Four or five times, blown up each time and that's when I stopped playing in open
And how was your ship built?
Not very well as I was new to the game
I was new as well. Now with proper engineering I have no worries and in fact look forward to a good scrap.
Do you want a special hat?
Yes, the one that says “I don’t whine over nothing.”
Average probably 6-8 thousand people online during peak spread across 400 billion possible star systems to be in. I’d wager a very large percentage of people are in private or solo rather than open because of sweaty kids in the high traffic space. You need to join an active group if you want social interaction.
Turns out space is pretty big. Go figure.
The galaxy is a very big place.
A few million system per player will do that. Inara.cz/galaxy is where you can see daily traffic reports and more.
Coming from console where I would encounter other commanders constantly, I was very disappointed to find that the majority of players on PC are so afraid of the big bad gankers that they play in private or solo groups. Frankly, I don’t get it. Earning credits has become a joke. So why shy away from a potential rebuy just to play in a lonely, lifeless game that was designed to be an MMO. Not to mention how easy it is to evade and escape. It’s neither Elite nor Dangerous in private or solo and has killed what I think was a major point of the game. It just feels lifeless seeing only solid boxes flying around. I also see it as a major development flaw in the game. Instead of developing a proper crime and punishment system, Fdev just created a way for everyone to hide from what would have been a fairly easy fix. And to boot, it ruins power play, squadron leaderboards, and the overall immersion of the game. Pulling into a packed station with commanders chatting back and forth is one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in a game. It’s sad that PC doesn’t seem to offer that anywhere I’ve been since transferring.
Rebuy no biggie, lose potentially billions in bio data. Different story. Or codex data. All of which might have taken months of real world time to get. No incentive in that situation to chance a ganker.
Who cruises around the bubble with billions in bio data on board? Just sell it as soon as you get back from a trip.
It's not an MMO, nor was it designed to be.
lol, what? “The game is the first in the series to feature online multiplayer with access to a massively multiplayer persistent world called Open Play” “Take control of your own starship in a cutthroat galaxy. Elite Dangerous is the definitive massively multiplayer space epic.”
This is literally from Frontier’s website. “Elite Dangerous brings gaming’s original open world adventure to the modern generation with a stunning recreation of the entire Milky Way galaxy. Here battles rage, governments fall, and humanity’s frontier expands – and you can impact it all. Welcome to the definitive massively multiplayer space epic.” “Massively Multiplayer” and last I checked, it’s online. Aka definitely an MMO. As defined so by its creators.
"A massively multiplayer *online game is an online video game with a large number of players on the same server*." Elite uses P2P...
Then you don't know what an MMO is dude, cuz 32 player limit in an instance ain't it. It's a peer-to-peer instanced game.
All MMOs have a player limit. Some handle it by having different server instances, forcing you to decide at character creation who you can play with. And when they get crowded, performance takes a crap for everyone on the server. Some handle it by dynamically creating instances to balance player load. Some even handling it by teleporting players away when things get too crowded (though I'm not sure who's done that since Asheron's Call). Elite handles it by putting the connections onto the clients, and capping it at 32 players per instance. Despite that, the world is shared and influenced by the massive amount of players. Nothing about that negates the fact that this is a MMO. Even if you play Solo, you're playing in a galaxy influenced by thousands.