Choose My Adventure: Fighting for friends in Elite Dangerous

Combat in Elite Dangerous is hard, but finding friends was just a bit harder. At least, it was in the way that I had set myself up to do it. The votes suggested that I find a wing to fly along with, but my ignorance won out in that joining a wing isn’t something that one just… does. Not directly in-game, anyway.

Before I tried to find anyone to ride along with, however, I felt that getting my combat chops first would be a smarter decision. With that in mind, I selected what seemed to be the most reasonable combat mission on offer at my level of reputation and expertise and took a ride into the danger zone. I may or may not have had the appropriate Kenny Loggins song playing at the time.

The crucible of Elite Dangerous combat was an unkind one, I found. In spite of plenty of very good advice from readers on how to approach combat, including waiting until NPCs engaged my chosen target, I was still getting popped with alarming frequency. There must be something about pulse lasers, honestly. It’s like they’re aggro flashlights.

My stubbornness egged me on, however, and I kept running headlong into the same mission, attempting to take out any one single target at all. I got sort of close and even deactivated the enemy’s shields on a few occasions. Still, I either didn’t have the right weapons on board to finish the job or I just got surrounded as I got turned into chunky salsa several times.

After my third or fourth defeat, and in the face of mounting rebuy costs, I called it quits and decided to seek the aid of others.

My search for comrades started in-game, filing through the social panel and then through the Squadrons list. Social was relegated to the Multi-Crew feature, so I focused my attention on finding Squadrons to join and wings to fly along with.

The wealth of options was heartening here. It certainly seemed like there were more than a few people who were willing and eager to Take in new pilots. Even when I pared down the filters to my chosen forms of play, there still looked to be a whole lot of Squadrons out there. Once I found a one that seemed to be a fit, I sent out a request to join.

It was left unanswered.

The radio silence of the Squadrons tab led me to outside websites and methods of finding wings, including a rather appropriately named Looking for Wing website. Even so, its use felt a little weird and I didn’t really feel a connection to the community that I felt like I would get from meeting someone directly in-game. Turns out, though, it wasn’t exactly the fault of the tools so much as a fault of the server.

Most of the lack of contact was, funnily enough, a result of what seemed like the insular nature of the Mobius PvE server than anything else. Even going off the voting rails in Mobius to find ships via Multi-Crew went unanswered. The moment I hit Open Play, however, that all changed.

A whim fueled by the thirst for human contact led me to engage in Open Play and seek a ship for Bounty Hunting via Multi-Crew. It’s here that I met a friendly German fellow by the name of MrMachtet and his sleek ship the Kriegskreuzer. MrMachtet was friendly, welcoming, and extremely skilled.

We headed out on several bounty hunts, taking off to a location and blowing up criminal target after criminal target. I hopped into the deployable fighter for a few rounds of combat and had an immediate good time. Even though I was pretty sure MrMachtet was the one landing the killing blows, I still felt like I was actually contributing.

After a short while, I was invited to his Squadron and told to look forward to additional missions of the same sort, including actions in wings. So while I didn’t exactly go about my goal the planned way, I met my needs in what’s definitely been the happiest accident I’ve had in Elite Dangerous yet. It also turned out to be a lucrative meeting: Our joint endeavor raked in over 700k credits and brought me to a seven-figure bankroll.

So technically, I did not join a wing to find people to fly with. However, I did find people and combat in Elite Dangerous to enjoy, and ultimately my experience is absolutely richer as a result. I look forward to more flight time with my new Squadron and will very likely be reporting in next week with any wing actions I take.

Until then, however, I think it’s just about time to close the chapter on Elite Dangerous for CMA’s purposes and lay track to head to the next game. Here are the destinations I’m thinking of going to next:

• ARK: Survival Evolved – My connection to this game is a bit tenuous at best, and my interest in survival sandboxes even more threadbare. Still, I’ve found no shortage of lovely people to be with in MJ and her group, and so it would probably be best that I try to give this one more effort in order to be of actual use to them.
• The Elder Scrolls Online – With Elsweyr on the horizon, ESO’s stock is most certainly rising, and so a closer look at this game seems like it’d certainly be appropriate.
• Sea of Thieves – Another personal curiosity much like Project Gorgon. I had taken a peek at this game in its opening stages and found it wanting, but there’s been more than enough time for things to pad out that a return trip probably won’t be unwelcome.

That’s where we stand in terms of our next destination. So, where to?

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Once again, this poll will wrap up this coming Friday, January 25th at 1:00 p.m. EST. In the meantime, I’ll definitely be busying myself with more co-op adventures in Elite Dangerous with my new in-game friends and will hopefully report in with some actual wing-related shenanigans. I’ll also, of course, summarize my time in the game’s galaxy and size up where it sits astride my time in Star Citizen. Until then, here’s hoping I can actually shoot things more effectively.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.