[RESTARTED] X-TRA POLLS Round #12 | What are your LEAST FAVOURITE activities in the game? (vote multiple options!)

[BitByte]

It's little bit hard to decide which of tasks is the least favorite because they all have way or another important place in the game depending the age of playthrough.
At the begining (auro/personal) trading, (auto/personal) mining, exploring and missions (plots, public, hidden and guild) have place to open galaxy map, gain reputation and get credits. You need items to sell, craft and complete missions so lockboxes and looting is more or less must to do.
To make your empire more bigger and profitable you need bigger ships (and reduce piracy) so boarding comes to picture.
When game goes forward then designing and managing stations becomes more important. And maybe also salvaging.

Pirates and other enemies (Xenon and Kha'ak) are always pain in the galaxy so you cannot avoid fights. This also gain reputation, credits and loot to collect.

Empire gets bigger, resources are needed all around and so managing tradings and mining via map and finetuning your stations requires time to do.
When you have steady income from stations, decent reputation with factions (atleast most of them) and resources in personal inventory to satisfy possible modding / mission needs you don't need anymore do missions or open lockboxes so actively but can more choose what to do.
Terraforming is way to make new business and it puts to think what tasks you should do, plan way ahead while gather resources and maybe expand production in the galaxy for it. Even it requires huge amounts of resources I think it could be compared to previous X-game's hub mission (no personal experience from that).

Bucaneers satellite destroying ships are annoying because first 5-10mins from the load of the game you need concentrate to those (mostly via map). This part starts feel boring when need do everytime you reload the game (no matter if you managed destroy them before saving or not as them are autogenerated).

[vvvvvvvv]

Thank you! I really appreciate you doing that, because now surely they have no excuse.

The save is at the end of the thread you linked. viewtopic.php?p=5246742#p5246742

I wasted several hours trying to locate a black market station in ANT, ARG and HAT. No luck. Probably scanned in ballpark of 40 leaks.

It is taken at the time I got fed up, and "Katana Explorer" is parked somewhere next to last candidate I tried. There's unfinished megafactory at HQ, and some oddly staffed ship, but, eh, nothing unusual. I believe the save is subjected to the bug, because the only way I could find a black market was using a mod, and that mod "rerolled" black market locations. For example, the mod pointed me at... eh... I think it was station HUU-581, and t here was a black market. Without mod there was nothing. Because of the inordinate amount of time search took, I assume this is subject to the bug.

Anyway, have fun.

[LameFox]

Also wanted to write a bit about exploring, because I didn't vote on it as it lumps different things together.

I think the process of looking for things on asteroids is actually not awful. It's not exciting, but it's not demanding either so it's a good relaxed kind of activity. I think it could be improved though: for one thing, having your loot get nerfed because you found something is an awful mechanic. If you want to go that kind of route, it would be better to start out with worse loot and occasionally throw out a critical find than the other way around. Also, I think the whole thing should have been more scanner focused rather than, well, flying around shooting stuff to see what comes out. It doesn't sound like much, but thematically I think it would just feel less silly if I was flying to these asteroids, scanning the surface for things (crystals, spacefly eggs, lodestones, et cetera) and *then* removing them, ideally with a precise but gentle weapon like a beam laser. It would just give it a bit more of a serious identity as an activity rather than me taking any random fighter to blow bits off a rock and be like 'alright, good enough'. The latter is a much more arcade-like experience.

As far as lockboxes go... I don't like that at all. The lock-shooting thing might have been alright in small doses, as part of something like what I described above. Like, maybe you'd be out there looking for [asteroid stuff] and occasionally ping someone's hidden loot crate. It's absolutely not good enough to be something I fly around doing for its own sake, though, which is what it ends up being because there's not much else to find. The process is still not exciting, like with crystals, but the added effort starts to push it across the boundary from relaxing into tedium, and the rewards don't really feel like much (perhaps because this game has struggled to make almost anything but high-tier upgrade parts feel valuable). It's also so extremely limited in terms of what's out there that to call it "exploring" feels ridiculous. I normally love exploring in games, but this is not that. I was more excited finding useless things like "The Aqueduct" or some of the weird but functionless asteroids in the game than I've ever been for a box. It doesn't really feel like I'm going out and finding anything, more like very transparently generating additional boxes. It's shallow and artificial, kind of like how when I first ran into the encounters mechanism all those years ago, it felt so weird and fake that I made a thread in here trying to figure out what was going on.

Data vaults aren't much better. The idea of finding something like that out there and repairing it to extract something isn't awful, but the execution being to laser some red lights green feels very shallow and fake, and I rarely bother with them.

[adeine]

Trading personally

One of the fun activities in earlier X games, this is underdeveloped to the point where some things don't even work properly (e.g. exchanging cargo with drones). Without trading extensions/software upgrades and with menus and trade interfaces as barren as they are, it's like chewing cardboard in comparison.


Mining personally
Salvaging personally

Similarly underdeveloped and uninteresting.


Hacking stations

No gameplay at all.


Exploring the universe for treasure (e.g.: lockboxes, crystal hunting)

Lockboxes are worthless and crystal hunting is incredibly tedious. It doesn't feel like you can find/discover anything interesting in the universe other than perhaps data vaults (which is a one-time experience). I do enjoy exploring/mapping sectors, so this is specifically about the 'treasure' aspect.

[mr.WHO]

Trading/Mining/Salvaging Personally — Timelines missions remined me how boring it is and why I stayed away from those in open world.

Terraforming - it simply too tedious and time consuming for reward (only some Terraforming missions, that change the universe are worthy to bother - like Antigone or SCA one).

[Socratatus]

Voted.

I don't really see a reason to explain anything. It don't get heard. AI still can't pick up Lockboxes in 1st person mode. So I just vote.

[Good Wizard]

I think this polling effort is worth a vote, so I voted.

But I did use the last 'unspecified' option, so:

Actually I like all the things mentioned in the list, more or less, even the least favorite (at this moment) - mining myself.

That does not mean, I will do these things often, but I do not hate them. I would not want to be forced to do any of the things in the list, but depending on the my mood while playing, I will do some of these things. They are all valuable and enjoyable, if not forced! This is the key: In a Sandbox game you can do as you like, depending on your time and mood.

What I really do not like is scanning. The mechanism is sort of a mini game, and does not work very well, it is a grind, time consuming and compared to the time you need the results are not valuable enough. I understand, that station scanning cannot be done by NPCs, since they are unable to navigate the stations geometry (IS), OOS it could be done. Even worse is scanning of ships. This should be possible for NPC pilots. If an action requires you to hit Pause, for it to work reasonable, then something is wrong, IMHO.

[donmelon]

Doing the Timelines timetrial frustrating and tedious missions is for me the least favourite activity in X4.

[ballti]

Troling NPC in war whit proper setup on personal shipyards production for loot and salvage and not for fun

[G315t]

Hi.

I voted for this 3 things:


Salvaging Personally.

While I like that we have the options to salvage it doesn't offer much gameplay. ‘Fly to wreck, collect wreck, fly extremely slowly to processor’ That's pretty much it.

Personally I would also think it would be better if we didn't turn the wracks in the processor into hull parts, but instead into refined metals. Because that's much more realistic and also doesn't devalue the production chain as much as it is now.


Hacking Stations

Of course, I think it's great that you're giving us the option to intervene in the production processes, stockpiling or defence capabilities of a station in this way. But the fact is that I hardly ever need that. Unfortunately, it's also not exciting because you don't have to sneak into the technical or security department or look for a distraction or access options, you can just walk in there, press a button and that's it.

I think I've had a station eject goods into space 3 or 4 times. Otherwise, I only used hacking when it was part of a quest.

Other

My least favourite activity is crew leveling and the hoops we have to jump through to get decent pilots.
Sure, there are seminars we can get from guild missions. But after the 20th or 30th mission, I just don't want to do them anymore. You can only repair so many satellites, teach a newbie to mine, or deliver so many delicious meals before it gets boring.

Sure, you can level up your crew with terraforming (but at this point in the game, you've got stations, and you don't need level 3+ star pilots for your trading and mining operations. I consider Auto Trader and Auto Miner to be an early and mid-game solution before you build up your station economy).

Why can't my trading ship pilot just level up to a level 3 or 4 pilot by doing his job, trading in his trading ship? Why do I have to put him in a warship and let him fight for hours near a Xenon gate just because I want to turn him into another autotrader or autominer?
It would be nice if I could hire a level 1 pilot, put him in a courier, let him level up to 2 star, then put him in an M trader to distribute goods until he reaches level 3 and I can put him in an autotrader. But this progression is not possible because they will not reach level 3 doing this job.

[PersonyPerson]

I chose Boarding and Hacking.

There's just no incentive to board other ships when it's much easier to get the funds to buy another or find the pre-existing abandoned ships. The only place it would be useful is if you purposefully decided to be at war with everyone or are doing a full pirate playthrough. That's a personal thing for me though. It would be much more inviting to use if for say it was available to use on Stations. Having a whole ship class (like the TM from X3) dedicated to just shifting marines around. The mechanics themselves are decent enough, but its utility just isn't there. Another thing that sets it back is that the AI doesn't do boarding. It would be much more engaging if for say instead of pirates blowing up every single one of your freighters on sight, that on occasion, they'd attempt to board one. The player could attempt to rescue the boarded freighter by destroying the harassing ships or even launch a counter-boarding party.

However, Hacking as a whole is not good. I think should be revamped. It's just not realistic to dock at a station and openly walk into engineering or the security office and nobody in the station bats an eyelid into what you're doing. It's far too easy once you've gathered the materials or just buy the 3 decryption devices en masse from pirate stations. If there was no scope creep limitations, the ideal scenario would be to have the engineering/security rooms redesigned, set as restricted areas and made much larger, with security camera's (like the ones in the "Bomb Disposal Amateur" Timelines mission) watching over the room and over the consoles, moving left to right and back again with hiding spots in the room. If you get caught, then you get put into the station's brig for an extended period of time. Perhaps let off with a warning for first time offenders as so noobs don't just wonder in there unknowingly and get punished for curiosity. Make hacking feel like a dangerous activity to do with actual consequences for detection. If the player has +20 or +25 relations with the station's owner, then the player can be allowed into the restricted areas and not have to partake in any stealth shenanigans, but may still get punished if caught hacking a console on camera.

I forgot to vote for "Lockboxes", but I found them to be near useless, with the exception of ones given as rewards through plots. I'm more likely to get what I need in them from other sources. Crystal hunting is also frustrating. It's not the fact that they're rare that bothers me, it's that they're non-existent in DLC sectors and are only present in base game sectors, at least from my experience.

Just a few thoughts/ideas.

[LameFox]

Salvaging Personally.

While I like that we have the options to salvage it doesn't offer much gameplay. ‘Fly to wreck, collect wreck, fly extremely slowly to processor’ That's pretty much it.

This was really quite sad to me. Salvaging had the potential to be its own type of gameplay, offering more interactivity and reward than things like mining. Instead it's just a mining and refining reskin. I get that they can't put something very fancy in this game since the AI need to do it too but this felt less like salvaging than combat loot in X3 did... at least then I'd occasionally get equipment.

[Novvak]

I voted:

Trading personally
Mining personally

These activities are not bad in themselves, the issue I'm having is the limitation of the Autopilot:
- The guidance marker overwrites the currently selected mission, forcing you to switch between menus every time you want to fly somewhere.
- Autopilot only accepts one destination (player can't queue commands) and does not dock to stations.
- Given how many steps there are to a profitable trade or mining operation, it's just more convenient to get up from the pilot's seat, instruct AI pilot what to do step by step and just let him fly.


Salvaging personally

I rather like salvaging as a mechanic in the game, but flying a Manticore pulling a scrap cube just is not fun. The handling is so bad as if I was piloting a large building. I've done it once for the achievement and never attempted it again.
Sidenote - ToA is out for many years now, and we still can't assign Teutas as station subordinates - it was possible before as a workaround, but in 7.1 it's completely impossible.


Exploring the universe to discover new sectors
Exploring the universe to uncover the space stations

On a first playthrough, I was excited by the universe and discovering it. In subsequent playthroughts it was just the case of practicality - more stations discovered = better trades in theory. There is nothing wrong with that, the issue is that there are no tools to assist the player.
- The biggest problem is the fact that for the exploring to be efficient, either the player has to do it manually in sector (with the addition of scanning mode).
- The Explore command is an absolute waste of time - even when I ordered my exceptionally moded Experimental Shuttle, that was travelling 17km/s in Travel mode, to explore using the implemented algorithm, it needed 20 minutes and the sector was badly mapped anyway. You will inevitably end up setting HUNDREDS of manual "fly here" commands to reveal the sectors quicker. The pattern can't be "saved" in any way, shape or form, so the player effectively spends a lot of time clicking on the map to gain anything from having scout ships.
- There are no automated ways of placing sats,adv. sats and mining probes. When you are mapping most of the universe using several ships placing objects in long queues in your 3rd, 4th playthrough, it really becomes a tedious chore.
- AI pilot and Autopilot behave differently when sent to a gate.
The autopilot will just stop right before it, while AI pilot can be tasked with "explore" command which results with him flying through. It's not a major difference, but another point against the autopilot.
- The scanning utility of the player ship just is not fun.
For starters, it disallows using different ship modes, slowing player down a lot.
The pings do not show the exact direction of where the object is and require a lot of readjustment in your course along the way, while executing multiple scans. They also disappear quite quickly. It would be awesome if pings appeared briefly as coloured question marks on ships gravidar, so that we can adjust the direction of travel properly.
- The scan moves at 10km/s (I think), so when you have a ship that travels faster, you actually outrun your "ears". You would think that having a VERY FAST ship would benefit exploring, but the speed is actually hindering you due to the way scanning works. As far as I know, there is no way of manually capping your travel drive speed, so the game "rewards" your time farming exc. mods with making an uninteresting mechanic even worse.
- The implementation of Erlking data vaults is so wrong... not only you have no quest to gain blueprints, so the players have no clue ingame that they are supposed to look for the vaults and have to stumble upon a thred somewhere online to know that, but the random placement of the vaults makes everything even worse. Not only you are expected to fly for hours looking for them, but to make matters worse, they do not stay on your map unless they are in the range of a satelite. When the players are writing their own scripts to parse savegame XML just to find the vaults, you know that something is not OK.


Exploring the universe for treasure (e.g.: lockboxes, crystal hunting)

I never found crystal mining engaging - it's nice that the mechanic exists, but the time and effort required to gain anything from doing it is just not worth it in my eyes. The crystals are barely visible, even when I'm using a mod to make them more discernible in the distance.

Lockboxes on the other hand, are just plain tedium. Shooting the locks each time, while the container rotates and you have to constantly adjust your course or wait for the spin is just so boring, I quit doing it the third time I've discovered a lockbox. The reward is also not worth the time and effort. It's way better to install a mod that instantly opens them so that you do not have to engage with this mechanic at all, or send an AI pilot.
Overall exploring feels pointless - there is nothing exciting to find, both from the perspective of player's character own gain or player's satisfaction when playing a game.


Managing multiple stations

This is a tough one, as for my playstyle, I consider having and managing station as the core mechanic of the game. I generally like this A LOT and engage with it in every single playthrough. Sadly there are some problems, which I will outline below.
- The UI is NOT your friend when you try to manage several stations at once. Not only the logistic overview makes some decisions for you, but also doesn't allow you to have full control over settings, e.g. mandatory buy order on intermediate wares. If you forget to set buy order to 1 object on a station that produces it, the station manager will burn your money buying stuff they are supposed to sell at some point. There could be a button somewhere in your station that could apply setting to all wares, e.g. "only buy from my faction" or maybe "set all sell prices to average price"; just to help you speed up the initial setup, limit the amount of ommissions and mistakes you as a human tend to do.
The player property menu does not have even simple QoL features like "collapse all", drowning you with information and forcing you to scroll a lot. This is one area of the game that would really benefit from Egosoft's attention, but was not touched in years.
- It always brings me joy watching my empire grow, all the ships moving, doing their jobs. But once in a while, instead of just glancing at the big picture, I inspect what the individual ships are doing. When I see a Heron E assigned to my power plant selling ECs, and discover that it carries 400 cells half way across the galaxy, I ask myself "what the **** am I doing with my life, spending finite time I have on this planet, setting everything up perfectly in this game I'm supposed to have fun with, when the AI decides to do stuff like this?". Then I press F5 followed by ALT+F4 and take a long break from X4.


Doing story missions

Some story missions are actually quite fun, but overall they give a strong feeling of being written by different people, for different people. What I mean by this is the complete lack of cohesive approach in mission design, rewards and expectations.
- Some missions are essentially tutorials (dangerously many missions are like this), others will shower you with rewards for almost no effort, and then there are those which are set up like "bring me one billion credits and then we'll talk".
- There are also missions with (imo) grave design flaws - forced sections of spacesuit activities or ships you can't put a pilot in, because of reasons, making them just junk polluting your property view.
- he dialog and voice acting in missions are quite bad most of the time.
- Missions do result in the change of the universe (factions going to war with one another), but they do not result in the change of the universe towards the player. I understand that in the sandbox like this it would be very hard to implement given the almost impossible number of scenarios, but even when you are responsible for ending the Paranid civil war, you will always remain Boso's associate, Terran recruit or hatikvah's errand boy. No matter what you do, the universe does not acknowledge your existence, you are always a noname to everyone around you, even when you have a fleet capable of evaporating every faction in the game.
- On the n-th playthrough, story missions just feel like a chore to get through, not something you can't wait doing.


Crafting

I have a feeling this mechanic was implemented just for the sake of being able to say that your game has a crafting mechanic.
- There is nothing interesting about it and worse of all, I never know when I can safely sell something that sits in my inventory, as I may need it for a mission at some point.
- It detracts more from the game than it adds, the amount of objects to keep track of is vast and I can't really tell the difference between one or the other, as the item names are just gibberish to me.
- Another really confusing thing is SETA - in X4 it has to be made manually by the player, despite being one of the most ubiquitous ship systems in X3, available to buy on every shipyard. It is worth millions of credits, but nobody wants to buy it from you when you have more than one (but they will happily buy individual components, so by making another SETA you are shooting yourself in the foot). Then the game shows you a middle finger again - despite being in a personal equipment of the player, it's actually a ship mode that you can only use in the pilot's seat. So I'm not able to speed up time while on a station, on a ship using my two healthy legs, and most importantly, not on a ship while travel drive is engaged. X4's SETA is a massive step backwards compared to X3's SETA.
- Ship mods should be available to craft by the player, not just story rewards and ship kill drops.


Researching new technologies (e.g.: Teleportation, various station module hacks, various ship mods)

Research does not feel like research, it's just a set of story missions plus a shopping list. Not much here to engage the player.
- It's the only thing in the game that requires Nvidium, the material nobody in the universe except the player ever cares about.
- I'm surprised it's even on this list, as you can't really decide not to do it, as at least teleportation feels absolutely necessary for me, and modding ships gives powerful advantage.
Side note: I think that early game teleportation should be available to the player from the start, not as a gameplay choice, but as a softlock prevention. I was falling through the Boron ships geometry so often in my games, that without teleportation I would have to reload previous saves (yes, I know you can teleport to the elevator of the ship - this is where the geometry was broken).
- On the topic of ship mods - paint mods should not be as limited as they are, players should be able to mass produce them and apply to each ship in their empire. It's paint, not nanomachines.
- The randomness of modding results is just another middle finger aimed at the player, rewarding hours of farming with a sub-optimal result. Luckily there are mods to fix that.


Well, that's quite a long post - I doubt the feedback will be appreciated or acted upon by the company, but it's Sunday, my coffee is good and I felt like practicing a bit of English.
I would comment on some other things I didn't vote on, but it's quite a mouthful already.

[Duncaroos]

There could be a button somewhere in your station that could apply setting to all wares, e.g. "only buy from my faction" or maybe "set all sell prices to average price"; just to help you speed up the initial setup, limit the amount of ommissions and mistakes you as a human tend to do.

You can set the default behavior for stations to only buy from your faction using trade blacklists in Global Orders menu. It is the first thing I always do when creating a new save.

[birdtable]

Nothing wrong with the activities if they had been considerably better implemented ... The poll should ask what are the worst implemented tasks because according to Egosoft they are all working has planned . Mind you no one at Egosoft has ever played the game other than to test certain individual trials/tests/tasks. Let us hope that come X5 someone with very large testicles can have some gaming input.... You can tell I am frustrated after about 12 - 18 months I have forgotten how to transfer wares to Bosa for research . Jeeeesz what a pain...plus I am on the wrong type of ship to make a delivery to Oberth

[ranOutOfNames]

Everything that is simple and repetitive, like always doing the same missions (shooting mines gets boring after a few times), micromanaging miners, deploying laser towers.

[Tharrg]

I chose manual mining, but that was only because Timelines were not an option.

[ragnos21]

I chose piracy. Piracy is a fun activity in the game. But now there is something wrong with it. Reputation drops even in neutral sectors, without witnesses and stations nearby. And a shot down distress beacon does not solve anything.

[BitByte]

I chose piracy. Piracy is a fun activity in the game. But now there is something wrong with it. Reputation drops even in neutral sectors, without witnesses and stations nearby. And a shot down distress beacon does not solve anything.

Can you open little bit about this? Friendly faction ship in neutral sector and you're sure it's not part of fleet before you attack? As if ship is part of fleet it will make whole fleet hostile and they can give alert to local authority.
Keep in mind that you get temporary reputation loss against that specific ship but if in neutral sector and not near the stations / police it should not cause any escalation.
Atleast for me it works sameway as before (7.10hf1 without mods).

[ragnos21]

I chose piracy. Piracy is a fun activity in the game. But now there is something wrong with it. Reputation drops even in neutral sectors, without witnesses and stations nearby. And a shot down distress beacon does not solve anything.

Can you open little bit about this? Friendly faction ship in neutral sector and you're sure it's not part of fleet before you attack? As if ship is part of fleet it will make whole fleet hostile and they can give alert to local authority.
Keep in mind that you get temporary reputation loss against that specific ship but if in neutral sector and not near the stations / police it should not cause any escalation.
Atleast for me it works sameway as before (7.10hf1 without mods).

Ship M is a trader. It is not part of a fleet. I attack it, in a neutral sector, to rob it. It does not drop cargo, I destroy it. There is a loss of reputation with the ship's faction. There are no witnesses, no stations nearby, the emergency beacon is destroyed. The same thing happens with assassination missions. After the destruction of the ship, there is a loss of reputation, even when it is alone and there are no witnesses.