Okay, so I installed the newest 6MB update.

Before I start, let me say this: When will developers learn not to push a Main Branch update on a Friday? You push the update on a Thursday and see what kind of bugs crop up in the wider audience. THEN work your ass off to make a hotfix by Friday. (A lot of devs shut down over the weekend,)

ANYWAY...

I play without the Galaxy client. Try launching it from the GOG update installer. I wait several minutes. Open the task manager and NMS isn't running. Okay. I try to launch it from the shortcut. Where did my desktop shortcut go??? Fine. I'll launch it from the directory.

It starts! YAY! I'm used to the stuttery Star Field intro by now, but this isn't cool. Where I was getting 50fps with a slowdown to 20, now I get 20fps with a slowdown to 2.

Game begins. I was getting a reasonable 30-60fps before the update. Now I'm getting 30 fps and frequently less. Planetary pop-in is as bad as ever. The only time I get 60fps is in space.

Try going to a planetary terminal to sell your goods. They updated the text showing you distance traveled, etc. Did you notice there what an incomplete sentence in a different font that basically makes the first line gibberish? (Okay, now I'm nit-picking)

Another thing I've noticed, when reporting your discoveries for credits. Steam users report you cant hold 'E', slide the mouse and upload multiple items. This isn't the case in 1.09 GOG. Do we have a different version? What gives.

Before anyone tries to crawl all over me and call me a hater. Know this. I waited patiently. I didn't badmouth the game. I never called Sean a liar. I knew nothing about this game until a week before release. I'm an older gamer and I thought, "Hey the kids are being impatient, I'll just wait until the bugs are patched and content appears."

30+ days in, no dice. I wish I had refunded this when I had the chance. This game needs to be pulled from the GOG store until such time HG can get it together.

TL;DR: I'm an idiot.

If anything positive comes out of this, it'll be that I won't purchase a game developed by HG. And I won't purchase a so-called "AAA" title from GOG again. Lesson learned.

Yep, so 1.09 is a downgrade. Don't even know what it supposedly "fixes." It is very unstable now. It has a tendency to "crash to desktop" now, which it never did before. Frame rates are lower. Let Steam have their patch back.

Look on the bright side. At least I saved the older clients if I want to play again. Which at this point, I don't. :/

Beside the worse framerate, I'm not noticing anything new.
Maybe the planets (approaching and entering) seem to do less color swapping
(bad LODs previously?) but other than that, I'm not seeing anything new.
Others claim to see new ships and sharper graphics, but by looking at the examples for those,
I've seen those ships and my graphics isn't sharper or less anti-aliased.
With no patch notes, this is very amateurish. Even indie devs, heck, even modders leave patch notes.

Actually, it's become very common to not have meaningful patch-notes at all. What we usually get is nothing, a notice saying "general fixes", or some mash-up by a community person whose technical expertise in programming languages extends to knowing "java" is a kind of coffee.

Microsoft, for example, haven't had specific notifications about what they've changed in any of their updates for well over a year. And they're doing that for several reasons:

1) the fixes to serious security holes are typically deployed in the main branch after they have been made semi-public in the nightly bui... eh.. I mean, the "once in a while"-builds. And it turns out that a large amount of users don't install the fixes right after they are made public. Meaning that MS was essentially publicising the security holes in every windows-user's computer at every patch-update.

2) PR. Admitting that you are fixing serious problems with a program is bad PR. Even if you write artful notes like "Improved rendering quality", rather than say: "Rearranged idiotic layering that caused artefacts on all setups", it's still suggestive that certain things should have been sorted out.

3) Internet outrage. Over at reddit, multiple people completely independent of each other flew into a rage when they read that the last NMS build changed some threading issues. "Waaa, didn't they have multithreading before this! HAHAHA IDIOT DEVELOPER!". Multithreading is an intel-convention, it doesn't mean anything, even though tech-sites talk it up and 3rd party middle-ware producers use general threading optimisation on the assembly level to speed up repeated tasks via for example intel's "hyperthreading" tech (read: faster cache on the processors, allowing reuse of reduced atomic instructions in cisc-based cpus. Also can reduce overhead during frequent context shifts if the code is uniform enough, like when very repetitive tasks are compiled with specific compiler options). But this kind of stuff is dominating feedback on public channels pretty much always.

4) "It's a downgrade" - complaining. If you mention tech or specifics, someone will take this phrase and start complaining as if they know everything there is to know about "volumetric shadows", or "anti-aliasing on transparent layers", or "collision detection intervals", or "world update vs. rendering context redraw rate". Mentioning anything like this is a red flag for people to start inventing issues they have, that they then send to support.

EA had a thing with this that, thanks to their support-department's total incompetence, led one of their community managers to label throughput and ping-filters in Battlefield 3's server software "a bug". I'm not even exaggerating, they got feedback that the game kicked people who were lagging to a server by more than, some 350ms, or had packet loss up in 80%. And they had this function, or the limits on those servers removed. Which they bragged about on the blog by saying they had now removed "a bug" that "prevented" people from playing the game.

5) Structured feedback is not the point here. As with all Sony releases, and all major publisher releases, they are not considering the game as a product they are selling you. They are considering NMS a part of a customer service package that Sony owns.

In that sense, the point is not that the product is actualy made well, the point is that you as a customer feel valued and catered for.

In other words, if it turns out that most customers are technical analphabets who rage a lot on the internet while acting like 12-year old kids with brain-damage and no parents. Then the product Sony sells has to be adjusted in order to be sold. The aftermarket service of that customer-service product may for example consist of flatly lying to you about promises for ice-cream for dessert if you just sit still for the rest of dinner, etc.

I`m sorry, but I gave up and went to Elite horizons. I tried so hard to like NMS, but the more I played the more it dawned on me what a conn this was.

Elite is Far, far better. Game actually treats you like an adult, you can free fly (you can even fly into the sun if you don`t watch out and it looks beautiful as you burn up!!!) and the landing and take off routine is so much more immersive with the base comms telling you this and that (you need permission etc). Bases are all very varied too. Heck i was even attacked by pirates and while trying to figure out my controls, Police dived in and killed the Pirate for me. That NEVER happens in NMS, as I said in another thread NMS cops are only there to kill you. Bs.

You can even land on some planets, although you won`t get all the animals and plants, it`s mostly barren planets with a base on it.

Negatives of Elite? I don`t like having to be online 24\7 to play even in Solo mode, but since most people are online mad that won`t bother most of you. It`s also a `quieter` game which I don`t mind at all. You might fly for hours with little happening then suddenly be involved in a furball.

Far better than NMS and actually feels like a AAA game.

It`s `realism` may not suit some, but It suits me to the ground. I should have spent my £40 on this, not NMS. I can`t even get a refund now. Ah well, lesson learned.

Did you check out the area's near each star, I forget what they are called, it's an area near the star with ships hanging out coming and going. I earned my first few ships there bounty hunting. Scan ships to see if they are wanted and what the bounty is and shoot them down.
I remember parking in the wrong spot at first and being killed for that, until someone pointed out there are numbered landing pads and you can't just pick one.
You got the base game and the expansion so you should be good until the next expansion. I just have the base game so I would totally out matched, gun, shields, everything. Frontier lied about still being able to play with just the base game. Sure you can play, if you don't mined being shot down all the time. I watched a video the other day, if i don't buy the expansion at the full price of the game, I would be at a severe disadvantage. If it wasn't for that I would probably be still playing.
Good luck, if they haven't nerfed it, get a Vulture if you like shooting down wanted people/NPCs. It's really good, fairly cheap ship. Not much cargo space, none the way I outfitted it.
Have Fun

Ok, but I just wanted to see official words on what the patch does.
For example Facebook says for its FB app, that the patch "fixes general bugs". I won't argue.
But when it says "fixes general bugs and adds the ability to _xyz____ and changes the interface to __zwx____ , then I'm either intrigued or suspicious and I'm looking for opinions.
So, what I'm looking for is whether or not there is anything regarding the game-play, or don't bother to look for visible or somehow noticeable improvements while playing.

But again, what we would get is a community manager making up something that sounds pleasing to fans.

What we won't get, presumably because Sony are dicks, is Sean continuing to write his own patch-notes. With these specific references that a certain type of fan(that hopefully is kept away from any sharp objects in the safety of their homes) will rage over until reddit boils over in shit, which then causes headlines on polygon, kotaku and IGN. That read stuff like "FAN IS ANGRY - THIS CAUSES BAD PRESS FOR GAME! WHICH CAUSES MORE BAD PRESS! BAD PR HANDLING DEVELOPER BAD! YOSHIDA AGREES, WHICH MAKES IT OFFICIAL!".

So obviously it's better to just shut up. I too would prefer it if HG had a closed loop of some sort they could test things in, and where they could treat people like adults. Or that they just didn't give a shit about reddit in the first place. But that ship has sailed long ago thanks to how Sony's publisher wing basically lives on Gaf and Reddit. And I don't think HG even has the opportunity with the current agreement they have with Sony, to actually make any significant changes to the game anyway.

In other words, all we're going to see until Sony's support-agreement expires is invisible engine tweaks.

Not that this stops reddit from making things up about what the patches change or patch out. But hey! Sony knows best, right? It's not like they've single-handedly ended HG's chance at making it as an indie-studio, or gutted - again - perhaps the most interesting engine and rendering system ever created on a computer. Because Sony knows best!

No. I'm saying Sony is ruining their business over trusting their insipid community and q&a folks to produce genuinely useful feedback. If they want to make a game for flat-earthers with three second attention spans and who has sea-lion flippers for hands - then that would be perfectly fine if that was their choice as a publisher.

But what they're doing is, consistently, to allow their community and q&a department to wash internet forum comments from any amount of sources, before or after launch, etc., as more organised and representative focus-group testing. And they're doing this to such a high extent because they genuinely believe that if they can placate internet noise, and give in to all the demands of Gaf and reddit, then the games will sell amazingly. Even if they had to ruin the game for literally every other player who bought the game. But that one internet guy was happy, so it's fine. Etc.

I also know for a fact that certain people in that community group deliberately abused their access to insert personal quirks and changes. On some of the productions it was heavy changes to the game. Complete bullshit was just pushed upstream several times in that mix of possible and plausible feedback. And that certain specific beta-testers have gotten in their personal settings-tweaks put into the final release of the game. Which you sort of don't care about, but this was in a competitive online game. If it turned out that all of the Sony marketers' kids worked in beta and q&a, I wouldn't be very surprised. The amount of insipidly spoiled children in that mass, and the total fascination with how group-think makes anything sellable, regardless of actual product quality, etc., is so high that it would make a professional advertisement salesman blush. It's not even remotely close to the level of restraint a tobacco-salesman has.

Point is this: Sony's ecosystem trusts the early feedback to the point where producers will think that a space-exploration game with training wheels on the ships and planets arranged to make the game as much like a corridor shooter as technically possible -- is something "people want". Rather than that this was a concern from a forum-racer's widely publicized fear of losing their ship out of sheer stupidity. If you just talk to one person in that part of the ecosystem in Sony, I promise you, your skin will start crawling even if you couldn't care less about what they're producing. If they produced milk-cartons, like the former Sony boss in the EU region did, you would still grimace if you talked to these people. No. What happens is that Sony's publishing deals always start out with an infinite leeway for the developers. Towards release, however, a series of "critical concerns highlighted by our user-groups" start emerging, "that may negatively impact sales", and therefore is a concern for Sony's publishing effort. And that's how these idiot-complaints taken from internet forums by lazy community managers inventing their own low-cost focus groups, become inserted at the last minute.

These guys are the most unpleasant shit-heads I have ever met. You might think that I'm blowing up over something that doesn't matter here. You know, it's just a game. And sure, the games were perhaps good and they were sellable before Sony started whacking on the edges two months before launch. Sure, Sony could have been selling five times the amount of discs, the developers would have been making new games. And sure, it happens 10 times in a row, and scuttles the ps3 and buries the cell and asynchronous memory architectures for another year. And sure, Sony loses money on this to a scale that probably is going to end Playstation as a brand. And sure, a bunch of developers who had survived since the 90's ended over Sony's shit.

And whatever, it doesn't affect me in a significant way, so why should I care? Right?

But just try to accept as reality that Sony is often paying for very expensive productions to go on for years. They offer to pay for publication costs, for doing support-testing and consistency checking, etc. And inside that process, people like Musterbuster (he's on twitter - grand lord of the playstation community loyalty effort) sits and insert their personally approved of "fixes" and "concerns" - that then become critical depending on how much internet outrage three people in a forum can scrounge up at the right moment.

So no, I don't have a grudge against Sony. I have a grudge against the shits who work in q&a.

Well, If i take a step back from the big picture, NMS was aimed to be accessible from age 12 and up?

Why I'm saying this:
1. Inability to crash the ship into the planet. It seems like NMS did feature a different landing procedure, just seeing the pointer around landing spots just for a flash before landing, suggests, that we aren't supposed to be hovering at 200 meters (that's what in the global file) above ground before beginning the landing procedure.

2. Nearly every crucial element/isotope is available on every single planet. If you can't find something like Zinc, it's surely available at the galactic trading interface, which you can find by just walking around for a few minutes. There is no way to be stuck on a planet. (Bugs/glitches are a different story, doesn't count)>

3. As soon as leaving space, the entire space is a meteor field. If you can't shoot at them, you can crash into them without any damage and refuel your pulse drive. It's impossible to run out of fuel

4. There are no real deaths in this game. If you get blown up by pirates (possibly the only way to die in this game), the game restarts from your last save point and just go find your black atlas coffin and recover all the stuff you had.

5. There is no way to get lost after hyperdriving to the next system. You exit the hyperspace right between the space station and a planet.

6. There is no way to burn up in the atmosphere, from entering at the wrong angle

7. You can just hop into your space ship or dig a hole/find a cave to avoid dying from extreme environments. The whole point of extreme environments has little role.

8. There aren't much of threatening alien-animals. Find something close to a T-rex, and it will have butterfly wings and it will be a herbivorous "grazing" animal. Tiny crabs or cat looking things may attack you with minimal damage caused. Trying not to scare the 12 year olds?

The whole game is pretty much providing you everything on a silver plate and makes you walk on the red carpet.

It's the Teletubbies of the PC games, even though it may not be aimed to be one, but this may the result of the Q/A team's "suggestions" , I'm guessing?

Is a good guess. But your explanation is too consistent to describe the actual process except as a recontextualized retelling that could fit with some of the facts, so to speak. ;) Or, there are lots of elements in the game that are pretty scary and clearly not written for kids. Monolith: choose to die/resist. Then you're rewarded if you accept your fate. Technically, large predators with stalking ai can hunt you fairly early on at any of the red planets. Pirates are a real threat if you get higher value ships, even if your weapons are just not strong enough to attack, etc.

What's really going on is just random concerns from various sources and reasoning being rewritten into simple lines that are easy to interpret.

Say you get feedback like this: wow, i got blasted by a pirate squad on the first system, and had no way to defend myself. The shots, before I ran out of cannon power, miss a lot. And it takes too long to escape, or I'm not given a good indication of when it should be time to escape (pretend that this is a reenactment of something that was intelligible on beforehand).

Then you have a lot of different ways to go with that. You could say, well, that should teach you to run away when you have a pea-shooter under the wings and a hand-held laser-pointer instead of a blaster-beam. That you should struggle a fair bit before being able to run away, that this is supposed to be nail-biting in the sense that this segment is supposed to feel like a defeat, whether you just take damage to the shield, or if you barely escape with one tick left on the critical hits. In the same way, if you're dumb enough to fly into a battle without any other ship on your side, then expect to get pummeled to a smear very quickly. The same if you waste your shots - we've tested this, after all, and know that if you have a pocketful of thamium, you should need to basically hold the fire-button down for 3 minutes straight before running out of shots.

But maybe, you could reason, these mechanics could be mode more clear (when to run, where to run, and maybe add some indication of when the inhibitor field breaks, etc). And that certain tweaks could be done to the AI to not have every ship on an opposing faction start to hunt the player ship as if it is the only one in the universe with dangerous weapons on, etc.

And you could say, well, perhaps what's really the issue here is that we're introducing the players to something unfamiliar, and that we might want to look at some way to make the "you have a weak and tiny ship, and you need to be careful for now" impression stronger. Maybe there are a range of visual tricks to do that, perhaps there are some narrative ones.

Or perhaps the player is just venting after getting pummeled when biting over too much, which they were actually completely aware of, but instead just decided to complain about it. Let's just take a look at it, it's our job after all, and it's not fun if the game is genuinely unfair or an actual escape is not technically possible within the rules of the game as they emerge in, say, a random situation that might occur. This needs some more testing.

---

Or, you could go this route: "I see, the player got shot and couldn't defend themselves. That means the enemies are too strong, the guns are too weak, and the rechargable cannon is too complicated. And here are other people who also got shot and are complaining - this is clearly a problem. And it will automatically no longer be a problem once guns are stronger, have more autoaim, and the cannons can be masturbated non-stop for as long as it takes to destroy the ships. Because that's what three guys on the internet are saying.

Meanwhile, we don't see any way to fix battles with more ships than just the player, this is very confusing and frustrates people (by which I mean the same guy who discharged his cannon prematurely). Etc.

---

And that's basically how you get these changes inserted that doesn't make any sense, that are disconnected from any other tweaks, and really fixes nothing with the actual dogfights. The real problem was that you don't get a good indication of which ships will attack, and what ships will start to assist you on a run. That you can't spot how making a longer turn towards the other side of the battlefield would allow you to single out one or two fighters, and then engage them. Or you just didn't gauge your firepower well enough and should now be punished for that mistake, but allowed to turn tail and run away - which then may not have been obvious is actually possible. The problem with the AI in that sense is that it is too categorical - groups should not be as eager to shoot a weak ship, and perhaps there could be a way to make the frequency of the pirate attacks slightly less annoying given the pacing of the rest of the game, so it doesn't feel predictable. Perhaps some slight work on the ship-battle AI also would allow you to fly with other ships and take down larger targets, so there is some progress and a sense of accomplishment here.

All of that could be a way to solve the initial problem with how someone feel very strongly that they are shot to bits unfairly.

But instead something more specific and easily implementable is chosen in existing routines. I.e., the way to solve all outstanding issues now that there is two months to release need to be on tweaks to existing functions. And that means increasing the cannon damage, making the lock-on absurdly strong, disabling the rechargable main cannon (I mean, why not remove both the recharge options here? That would obviously make sense, right, if you thought that was a gamestopper. It's easily explained by that the guy who spam the fire-button just didn't manage to discharge the beam in the same way, so it never became an "issue". Similar with the hazards - hazards become a mere annoyance after the first shield you get. So that things are too easy is not a concern, while it's actually completely possible to get to a red system and fry in a 90 degree firestorm - but no one ever did that, so this unbalance here never comes up). And making sure that the pirate level is also very low at the beginning. Blow random, or bad luck, this is going to be planned by encounter sizes scaled to specific absolute limits. And once it's predictable and not dynamic any longer, and it's balanced to an absolute standard, we just have to remove all dynamic direction elements in the game as well. Because that's the only way to balance a game!

Etc., etc. And "these people have jobs?", like one guy said in the M.A.G. beta, when reacting to some of the reasoning behind the changes made to that game. It's just disjointed comments off hand or off the internet that someone shapes into a specific direction. It may not have been a problem, it might not have been describing the actual issues, and it might actually cause new problems that anyone with eyes are going to see right away.

But that's not a concern, as long as "issues" are sorted out. And if those issues happen to align with what a very unintelligent person believes marketing wants, at this very nanosecond, then all the better of course.

Again, as always, I know I'm a bit salty about this stuff. But.. it's so pointless. See, I also thought exactly like you do here. I pushed these people on why in the name of f. they were trying to make Halo out of a tactical strategic shooter, for example. Who in their right mind would possibly think that a shooter with a scorched post world war 2 dresden should be about a single hero master chief saving the world? It's not going to be that game no matter what - this is a squad-shooter through and through, with a team trying to get out of hell! This is the vision the designers clearly had, so why are you trying to make Halo!

You know, I bliew up like that. And they honestly hadn't thought about that. At all. They had just taken random concerns, mostly disjointed and unconnected of each other. And I had put together pieces that confirmed my suspicions. But in reality, they were just gathering random stuff on the internet. *shrug*

And the game bombed like a rock. In spite of up to several people on the internet having their "issues" taken care of, as explained.

This is why Elite/Horizons is such a relief.

Took up 3 jobs where I had to go to a certain system. I had the wrong kind of engine so couldn`t get to the system because i didn`t plan it properly. Tried hopping to planet by planet, almost ran out of fuel so hopped to a nearby station to refuel.
Had 4 hours left to complete the jobs, decided to take a rest by sleeping overnight. Next day, started the game and got `mission failed` for EVERYTHING, because i didn`t realise the game plays in real time even in solo mode. lol.

Took a new job to deliver wine. Made sure I could actually reach the system. The job had a note in red saying, `Failure to compete this job could result in a fine.`

In trepidation I travelled through 3 systems dodging pirates and finally got to the space port that was on a planet. As I crested the atmosphere and neared the base...

`Incoming ship, you must request permission before you can land. We have a speed limitation here. Keep to them.` (paraphrasing).

Came in to land, `Commander, your gears are not extended!`

Oops!

Landed. Docked. `Welcome commander.`

Got my paltrey 13000 credits.

A good day`s work! :)