WARNING: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME - The company has a track record of broken Kickstarter promises and recently scammed customers with a $100.000 tournament that never happened.

CyberChaosCrew alerted the gaming press for this event http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-07-11-frontier-cans-its-own-usd100-000-elite-dangerous-tournament

Apparently this $100.000 CQC Tournament that Frontier Developments announced November last year on their website @ https://www.elitedangerous.com/en/arena/ and on their official forums @ https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/199427-The-100-000-CQC-tournament-%E2%80%93-Everything-you-need-to-know when launching the Xbox One Elite Dangerous client and CQC Arena game was a failed effort to entice customers into acquiring these games, the event failed to meet its expectations and the company went on a long communication blackout when the PC customers saw the qualification heats and finals deadline expire. Only when facing mediatic pressure by gaming media outlets did they finally announce that the tournament had been "postponed to a future date".

Some players like myself invested many hours of training and CQC account ranking/feature unlocking to be able to participate, time that could have been spent on something productive and lucrative, had we not been scammed into believing the tournament would really happen.

I have reported this incident to Action Fraud - UK's National Fraud and Cyber Crime Reporting Center http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/ I submitted all the information available at this facebook post https://www.facebook.com/Cyb3rCh40sCr3w/posts/1045289945553894 Action Fraud forwarded my report to the NFIB - National Fraud Investigation Bureau, they investigated the incident and concluded that they "would require further information that made my report more suitable" - "Your report will be retained and will be assessed against new reports received. If the NFIB receive further information that makes your report more suitable, the NFIB will inform you of any further action taken. Your report will also help to inform prevention messages and awareness campaigns, you can find more information about these and the Action Fraud Alert service on the Action Fraud website."

UK authorities will not prosecute Frontier Developments for its EliteDangerous $100.000 tournament fraud unless they receive multiple reports from more people that were scammed and damaged by it.

If like myself you would like to see them forced to comply with trading law and realize the tournament they advertised as incentive for customers to buy their product (which they claim they will "at a future date") or face compensatory and/or punitive damages for not doing so, you should also report the incident to Action Fraud @ http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/report_fraud, to the National Trading Standards eCrime Team @ http://www.tradingstandardsecrime.org.uk/ and to Citizens Advice @ https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/

The reporting process at Action Fraud is pretty straight forward and if you need additinal information or evidence to include in your report you can get some at the facebook post I linked above.

Don't let them sweep the tournament under the carpet and get away with scamming us. Together we can bring them to justice.


If you'd like to read about other instances where Frontier Developments scammed its customers, a full collection of broken promises is available at the followings links for your reading pleasure:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/223142-Broken-Promises-A-Collection
https://www.change.org/p/frontier-development-fulfill-your-promises-complete-localisation
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/11/20/elite-dangerous-refunds/
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/182757-Beta-Backer-Perk-One-of-5-new-ships-when





The godfather of space trading and combat simulators and a pioneer in 3D computer graphics and procedural generation. The first Elite game launched in 1984 served as role model for EVE Online aswell as other games like Wing Commander and Freelancer.

Besides the satisfaction of knowing they once more kicked big publishers in the nuts with another epic crowdfunded project (just like Star Citizen), Elite Dangerous' Kickstarter early backers got handsomely rewarded with lifetime expansion passes in a program that closed in 2013 with over 40.000 backers donating over £2 million to fund the development of the game. Resorting to traditional funding and publishing methods was out of the equation from the start since Frontier Developments never had the interest of jeopardizing its own vision and development plans in exchange for a couple millions.

The game looks gorgeous and gives players the freedom to roam/resource gather/trade/pirate/fight in more than 100 billion procedurally generated star systems (including our own) with moving celestials, real 1:1 scale and physics, atmospheric entry and planet landing/exploration. Virtual Reality HMD's are supported and multi-crewed flight aswell as character creation and gameplay are coming down the line in the current Horizons expansion season.

The game has no monthly fees but Frontier Developments does charge for the expansion passes, which in my opinion, along with the cosmetic and merchandise goods, make for a healthy business model that creates a good relationship between the company and the players, ensuring both are happy with the income and product delivered. The company also promotes a strong mercenary feel to the game with yearly competitive events awarding real money prizes (£10.000 Race to Elite Competition in 2015, $100.000 CQC Championship in 2016) and keeps players engaged with regular community goal updates.

One of the things that sparked my interest for Elite when I heard about it was the procedurally generated universe. Check out this link http://pcg.wikidot.com/pcg-games:elite if you'd like to see how Elite uses the Fibonacci sequence for procedural content generation. Fibonacci was an italian mathematician in the 13th century who discovered a way to generate apparently random numbers using a simple formula. It is a powerful mathematical tool that explains how some patterns in nature work, and Elite developers initially used it in their 80's game to cope with limited memory problems while trying to create entire galaxies to play in on a BBC Micro with only 18KB of memory.

To play a game using this content creation technique is surely an experience worth having. Reminds me of the 1998 "Pi - Faith in Chaos" movie about a paranoid mathematician who does computational research on Pi, trying to find patterns in it and in nature. He gets a moment of clarity when associating the Fibonacci sequence with the golden ratio, and one of his assumptions is that everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers, since we are made of spirals (DNA) while living in a giant spiral (Milky Way).

In Elite Dangerous players choose how much they interact with others, from completely offline play to something approaching an MMO. The extensively procedurally generated universe is vast both in scope and detail, allowing players to fly down into a unique cloudscape for every planet of every size in a universe containing hundreds of billions of stars. Unlike previous games in the series, procedural generation of economic and political aspects of the universe are based largely on player input, so for example a concerted campaign by players against a star system could destabilise the local government, turning it from a stable system into an anarchic one.

[h1]November 2016 Update[/h1] WARNING: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME - The company has a track record of broken Kickstarter promises and recently scammed customers with a $100.000 tournament that never happened. CyberChaosCrew alerted the gaming press for this event http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-07-11-frontier-cans-its-own-usd100-000-elite-dangerous-tournament Apparently this $100.000 CQC Tournament that Frontier Developments announced November last year on their website @ https://www.elitedangerous.com/en/arena/ and on their official forums @ https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/199427-The-100-000-CQC-tournament-%E2%80%93-Everything-you-need-to-know when launching the Xbox One Elite Dangerous client and CQC Arena game was a failed effort to entice customers into acquiring these games, the event failed to meet its expectations and the company went on a long communication blackout when the PC customers saw the qualification heats and finals deadline expire. Only when facing mediatic pressure by gaming media outlets did they finally announce that the tournament had been "postponed to a future date". Some players like myself invested many hours of training and CQC account ranking/feature unlocking to be able to participate, time that could have been spent on something productive and lucrative, had we not been scammed into believing the tournament would really happen. I have reported this incident to Action Fraud - UK's National Fraud and Cyber Crime Reporting Center http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/ I submitted all the information available at this facebook post https://www.facebook.com/Cyb3rCh40sCr3w/posts/1045289945553894 Action Fraud forwarded my report to the NFIB - National Fraud Investigation Bureau, they investigated the incident and concluded that they "would require further information that made my report more suitable" - "Your report will be retained and will be assessed against new reports received. If the NFIB receive further information that makes your report more suitable, the NFIB will inform you of any further action taken. Your report will also help to inform prevention messages and awareness campaigns, you can find more information about these and the Action Fraud Alert service on the Action Fraud website." UK authorities will not prosecute Frontier Developments for its EliteDangerous $100.000 tournament fraud unless they receive multiple reports from more people that were scammed and damaged by it. If like myself you would like to see them forced to comply with trading law and realize the tournament they advertised as incentive for customers to buy their product (which they claim they will "at a future date") or face compensatory and/or punitive damages for not doing so, you should also report the incident to Action Fraud @ http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/report_fraud, to the National Trading Standards eCrime Team @ http://www.tradingstandardsecrime.org.uk/ and to Citizens Advice @ https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/ The reporting process at Action Fraud is pretty straight forward and if you need additinal information or evidence to include in your report you can get some at the facebook post I linked above. Don't let them sweep the tournament under the carpet and get away with scamming us. Together we can bring them to justice. If you'd like to read about other instances where Frontier Developments scammed its customers, a full collection of broken promises is available at the followings links for your reading pleasure: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/223142-Broken-Promises-A-Collection https://www.change.org/p/frontier-development-fulfill-your-promises-complete-localisation https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/11/20/elite-dangerous-refunds/ https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/182757-Beta-Backer-Perk-One-of-5-new-ships-when [h1]Original Review[/h1] The godfather of space trading and combat simulators and a pioneer in 3D computer graphics and procedural generation. The first Elite game launched in 1984 served as role model for EVE Online aswell as other games like Wing Commander and Freelancer. Besides the satisfaction of knowing they once more kicked big publishers in the nuts with another epic crowdfunded project (just like Star Citizen), Elite Dangerous' Kickstarter early backers got handsomely rewarded with lifetime expansion passes in a program that closed in 2013 with over 40.000 backers donating over £2 million to fund the development of the game. Resorting to traditional funding and publishing methods was out of the equation from the start since Frontier Developments never had the interest of jeopardizing its own vision and development plans in exchange for a couple millions. The game looks gorgeous and gives players the freedom to roam/resource gather/trade/pirate/fight in more than 100 billion procedurally generated star systems (including our own) with moving celestials, real 1:1 scale and physics, atmospheric entry and planet landing/exploration. Virtual Reality HMD's are supported and multi-crewed flight aswell as character creation and gameplay are coming down the line in the current Horizons expansion season. The game has no monthly fees but Frontier Developments does charge for the expansion passes, which in my opinion, along with the cosmetic and merchandise goods, make for a healthy business model that creates a good relationship between the company and the players, ensuring both are happy with the income and product delivered. The company also promotes a strong mercenary feel to the game with yearly competitive events awarding real money prizes (£10.000 Race to Elite Competition in 2015, $100.000 CQC Championship in 2016) and keeps players engaged with regular community goal updates. One of the things that sparked my interest for Elite when I heard about it was the procedurally generated universe. Check out this link http://pcg.wikidot.com/pcg-games:elite if you'd like to see how Elite uses the Fibonacci sequence for procedural content generation. Fibonacci was an italian mathematician in the 13th century who discovered a way to generate apparently random numbers using a simple formula. It is a powerful mathematical tool that explains how some patterns in nature work, and Elite developers initially used it in their 80's game to cope with limited memory problems while trying to create entire galaxies to play in on a BBC Micro with only 18KB of memory. To play a game using this content creation technique is surely an experience worth having. Reminds me of the 1998 "Pi - Faith in Chaos" movie about a paranoid mathematician who does computational research on Pi, trying to find patterns in it and in nature. He gets a moment of clarity when associating the Fibonacci sequence with the golden ratio, and one of his assumptions is that everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers, since we are made of spirals (DNA) while living in a giant spiral (Milky Way). In Elite Dangerous players choose how much they interact with others, from completely offline play to something approaching an MMO. The extensively procedurally generated universe is vast both in scope and detail, allowing players to fly down into a unique cloudscape for every planet of every size in a universe containing hundreds of billions of stars. Unlike previous games in the series, procedural generation of economic and political aspects of the universe are based largely on player input, so for example a concerted campaign by players against a star system could destabilise the local government, turning it from a stable system into an anarchic one.