fit the Standard Docking Computer. you're welcome. :D
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Really? It sure felt like a grind to me having to search through 10-20 USS hoping to get the right cargo, or the assassination target. Whenever you go into an USS there are 5 others close by, but when you come out of an empty one, or a wedding procession, or a guy trying to get you to deliver the cargo which you haven't found yet to somebody else, they have all magically disappeared and you need to look for the next USS for 2-3 minutes before rinsing and repeating.
Completing even the most basic of missions can take a few minutes or several hours without you doing anything different. And then there is no correlation between the time spent and the reward. You can chase after a high bounty and get destroyed by the guy and his armada, or you can try going for the scraps which could take hours for meagre reward. I guess what most people just end up doing is camping the nav beacons and trying to kill steal from the security forces or other NPCs battling it out. That was fun for a bit, but I got tired of it quickly.
It would also help a lot if the salvaged (wreck) cargo wasn't flagged as stolen. It shouldn't be illegal to be salvager IMO.
Then you have the other missions where they want you to deliver cargo x, so you fly to several stations that are suppose to be selling cargo x, but none of them have it, so you fly farther and farther out hoping to get it. Eventually you just give up, or you find it and return for a reward on which the prices have since updated and it's no longer profitable. That's if you can find one of these missions.
IMHO the biggest issue with the missions is that they are (and I can't believe I am going to say this) simply to random. If they give you a mission to go and get X, there should at least be enough X somewhere in the nearby vicinity. I've been made massive amounts of credits to kill a sitting duck in a low level ship, and I've been completely annihilated in seconds by a high levels ship with a measly bounty. Again lack of correlation between the challenge and the reward.
Yeah, I've heard best is to just point your arse at the star upon jumping into, that way they interdict into the star.
#AIlogic
I play a bit differently. Perhaps this might shed some light on why my time in Elite never feels like grinding:
1. I utilize third party apps to help with certain things. Like finding specific cargo, if I ever look for those.
2. I never play alone. There are enough players out there that coop is easy to get up and running. Or at least, I've never had problems with it.
3. If I do a mission where I have to look for something then there is an easy way to finish the missions without it taking a lot of time.
3.1. Keeping in mind that I play coop, wings always split up and go out looking for their own signals.
3.2. My way of finding the correct signals is by flying some distance away from the star and then slowing down as much as possible. Fly in a straight line and you will get signals every 10/20 seconds or so.
3.3. The fact that I am in coop comes to play again, with multiple times having to leave my signal to help out a wing that is in trouble. It adds so much to the fun factor in this game for me.
4. I rarely play just for the reward. I play to enjoy the game. Having hte best ship in the game is moot to me. But looking for unique missions is half the fun. Screw the monetary reward. To me the reward comes in sharing space with other players and just doing random things.
Granted, there are some things that are stupid grinds. Such as ranking up in factions. It makes logical sense, but not in a game style environment.
Very true. I find the docking computers useless. After some practice it becomes an art to swoop down and dock like a graceful swan. Only I'm flying an Asp, and it's farting. And I'm swearing and sweating and the fact that the landing gear hit the dock with a loud bang has nothing to do with my awesome docking skill-to-the-Zs.
Fair enough, but the problem I have with that is again that I am forced to play a recipe or forced to play in a specific manner. In a proper open world game that shouldn't be the case, there should be multiple ways of playing the game and having a good time doing them. Why is it necessary for me to exploit the game to get a proper experience?
In this short discussion the following things have already come to light:
1) Use third party apps to find cargo - even though this functionality is also available in game to an extent, but apparently it's not good enough or the third party apps wouldn't exist.
2) Exploit to avoid npc interdiction
3) Almost Exploit to find USS (you will get one, and then go in, it will take you 30 seconds to find out what's going on around you and to scan all the other ships for bounties, then you hop out. How long after hopping out is it before you see the next USS?) In my case it could take several minutes between USS and if I have a bad run I can easily get up to 10 dud USS which means that I've wasted almost an hour?
I think my biggest problem with Elite is that I simply expected more. I had such fond memories of the original one and I couldn't wait to back this one when it went to Kickstarter for funding, and I'm just not happy with the outcome.