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Elite: Dangerous 'billionaire' gamers are being 'antisocial', moan players
Action Group formed after swingbellies allowed to keep $$
A set of disgruntled owners of Elite: Dangerous have formed a Customer Action Group in order to pressure Frontier Developments over bugs, broken promises and a decision to allow players to retain unfairly acquired in-game gold.
Elite: Dangerous' woes started last year when it cancelled a promised offline mode, angering some users who'd funded the game after a Kickstarter campaign promising that experience. Then, on 1 January, the game crashed and upon restoration allowed some players to become in-game billionaires thanks to a credit refund glitch.
Frontier Developments has since decided that those who scored the loot can keep it, if they want to be excluded from the “Race to Elite” competition. In a support post, Frontier's Andrew Barlow writes that “We felt this was the fairest approach to the situation.”
But some of the players aren't happy with this arrangement, and have been in touch with The Reg to report billionaire player behaving antisocially in-game, safe in the knowledge that their bank balances can handle a few million credits of virtual fines. Others say the billionaire players are giving back their credit balances, but after doing so can retain assets they acquired with ill-gotten loot.
Frontier, meanwhile, says there are still players who cannot log in.
Elsewhere in the game's forums, players have fired up in a thread calling for the creation of a Customer Action Group.
Posts in that thread claim support requests have gone unanswered since December, that bugs aren't being fixed and that characters are sometimes being arbitrarily relocated to new worlds and/or having their assets stripped. It also appears that Frontier's online statements about response time to support calls – two days is promised – is not being upheld and that the company is aware of its tardiness.
Frontier Developments has promised an upgrade to version 1.04 this week to address some bugs. It looks like there are plenty more to squash. ®