“I actually felt amused by the whole situation,” one told me on Discord. Some commanders actually took their entrapment pretty well. Their only gameplay options? Mine Void Opals and sell them back to the carrier that brought them in for roughly one sixth of their fair market price or self destruct. Once docked on board with their custom-built mining rigs, recruits were ferried 800 light-years from the heart of the Milky Way and left to rot. But they also helped to isolate these new players even more. After a buggy first few months, they quickly became the preferred way to travel long distances thanks to their 500 light-year jump range - nearly five times further than any other ship in the game. As a consequence, they were unable to travel to another star system without the help of a Fleet Carrier.Įlite: Dangerous players are getting stranded while traveling with the new Fleet Carriersįleet Carriers are relatively new to Elite, and were added to the game just last year. Once in the PG, players were instructed to outfit a new starship in a particular way that limited its range to less than two light-years. Travel in Elite is accomplished by folding space and “jumping” between star systems, using a neighboring star cluster as a kind of beacon. Contributing to that isolation was the fact that this all happened on Xbox One, which has a markedly smaller player population than the PC version of the game. Playing in a PG is a good way to make sure you can meet up with your friends and allies, but it also cuts you off from ever seeing anyone else. Behind the scenes, they were exploiting in-game systems to isolate these new commanders from everyone else in the game.įirst, they required new recruits to join a private instance of Elite called a Player Group (PG). They said they were looking for recruits, and offered to give these players money to buy a better ship, but also training in how to farm Void Opals and a free ride to a good spot to find them. The perpetrators hung out around star systems heavily populated by new players, many of them brought into the game by a free giveaway on the Epic Games Store in November. Looking into the details of the scheme, it was actually quite clever.Ī Fleet Carrier in Elite Dangerous. Polygon spoke with four commanders who had been trapped this way. At least a dozen - likely more - had already been trapped, press-ganged into working for low wages in a star system they had little hope of ever escaping. “I praised her for doing the right thing, reinforced the message with my boy (who truth be told would have jumped straight in the van),” Jason says.Īs it turns out, many older players jumped in the van before him. There would have been no way back other than to self-destruct his new starship and effectively begin Elite’s grind all over again. Making matters worse, Jason’s son would have been trapped in that mining system, stranded more than 800 light-years from the populous center of the in-game galaxy. Other players would then export those commodities to another system, profiting from his work. If his older sister hadn’t intervened, Jason’s son would have been forced to sell off those Void Opals for far less than their fair market value. The offer sounded too good to be true, and the girl’s “stranger danger” instincts kicked in. The goal was to work together in order to farm Void Opals, one of the rarest and most expensive commodities in the game. Once the money changed hands, a group of players would help them build a new starship, fly them to a mining claim, and help them break apart asteroids. They were encouraged to fly to a fleet carrier - a mobile, player-owned base - and exchange some simple goods for a large amount of in-game currency. Jason’s kids had received a rather lucrative proposition. The offer sounded too good to be true, and the girl’s “stranger danger” instincts kicked in Last month, a group of players worked to create a deep-space gulag, an in-game space prison designed to quietly trap new players and exploit their labor. That little episode set the bar pretty high, but recently a group of players vaulted over it like a team of heavily-armed Olympic gymnasts. Like when a group of players farmed a bunch of rare items, then hauled them 22,000 light-years away in order to harass a terminal cancer patient. Unlike other professions in Elite, being a dirtbag takes hard work, creativity, and the willingness to be the kind of asshole that thinks outside the box. But, for a dedicated few, the real draw is making other people miserable. For others it’s the combat, where you can test your mettle against other players or alien enemies that could easily snap your ship in two. For many players, the allure of Elite Dangerous is the freedom to explore the Milky Way galaxy, to see stars and planets that no other player has ever seen before.
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