YES! Kill the "wait AND pay" ship and module time sink

Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.
Yes, the player community voted years ago and yes, the majority of THOSE players at THAT time did vote to add a time delay for transfers, but think about that logic... the people online for hours with nothing better to do with their lives wanted to add more wait time to a game, meanwhile those of us with families, jobs, lives didn't get a chance to vote because we were offline. NO MORE TIME WASTES. You're seeing how players hate it. SCO? Success. DSS? Success. Latest engineering? Success? High Grade Emission? SUCCESS!
 
There's already a feedback thread on this topic, you could have made your point there that you are more deserving of deciding on the game's direction because you have better things to do with your life than to play the video game.
 
But this thread has less rules about talking about other players feedback!

I'm very disappointed to see how many players are saying they want to keep the transfer times as they are without any real justification beyond an ambiguous "immersion" without really considering the effects on gameplay and how instant ship/module transfers could make potential future QoL features like loadouts (and many others) easier to implement eventually.
 
But this thread has less rules about talking about other players feedback!

I'm very disappointed to see how many players are saying they want to keep the transfer times as they are without any real justification beyond an ambiguous "immersion" without really considering the effects on gameplay and how instant ship/module transfers could make potential future QoL features like loadouts (and many others) easier to implement eventually.
Yeah, I mentioned it as part of my feedback in that thread but I'll elaborate here:

Any time you hear "immersion" or "realism" bust out as the justification for a game mechanic, what you are about to experience will be the most awful game mechanic ever devised by mankind. If the thing being discussed was "fun" or "engaging", then they'd use those words for it instead. It's like when a tabletop gamer says "it's what my character would do!" to justify something - 99% of the time you hear that phrase is to justify why they just had their character do something that derailed the game and ticked off the entire table. If the thing they did was actually fun and enjoyable for the other people playing with them, they wouldn't need to justify doing it.

The worst part is that in most games the "realism" they add isn't even realistic or is outright incongruous with other elements of the game's design - like throwing "survival mechanics" into games that give your character the metabolism of a hummingbird.

The real dirty secret is that without a time pressure, there's no advantage to imposing a time delay. If I'm sat on the pad in a starport, completely indestructable and in no immediate danger, making me wait five minutes for an in-system ship or module transfer from my carrier to the station, or even 30 minutes to bring it from across the bubble, adds nothing. There's nothing that can happen to me in those 5-30 minutes that makes a delay relevant.

By comparison, look at the timers relating to foot content like shutting down reactors and opening sample containers and downloading/uploading data - those exist because you actually are under a pressure: if you're being stealthy, then you have to consider that someone might walk in on you and interrupt you, you have to hide until the transfer is complete, and so on and so forth - but even then they can become tedious to the point where people complained about the time it takes to download things and the devs reduced it, because if you're in a settlement where you've disabled the alarms and already shot any potential witnesses (or there weren't any at the settlement to begin with) then all the delay does is force you to stand still and twiddle your thumbs for a solid minute. Even then most of these timers are annoyingly inconvenient and could easily be reduced or annulled without much complaint - the only reason shutting down a reactor can be justified to take three minutes is if you didn't disable the alarms first and now you have to fight off the entire settlement while it's counting down. Otherwise, you're just standing in an empty room waiting for the bar to fill. Pointless delay.
 
Yes, the player community voted years ago and yes, the majority of THOSE players at THAT time did vote to add a time delay for transfers, but think about that logic... the people online for hours with nothing better to do with their lives wanted to add more wait time to a game, meanwhile those of us with families, jobs, lives didn't get a chance to vote because we were offline. NO MORE TIME WASTES. You're seeing how players hate it. SCO? Success. DSS? Success. Latest engineering? Success? High Grade Emission? SUCCESS!
It is a long time ago that the vote was taken to reject FDevs proposed instant transfer but even so I am positive the vote was not carried out on line or even in the forums I seem to remember email being involved.

SCO fun and involving time saving secondary but nice.
DSS I am not sure it is any faster than the DSS it replaced when the FSS was introduced.
HGE while you definitely get more of what is there just sitting there with little to do actually feels slower even though it is not which reduces the fun so reduces the success.

But this thread has less rules about talking about other players feedback!

I'm very disappointed to see how many players are saying they want to keep the transfer times as they are without any real justification beyond an ambiguous "immersion" without really considering the effects on gameplay and how instant ship/module transfers could make potential future QoL features like loadouts (and many others) easier to implement eventually.
I find how many advocate instant transfers disappointing and wonder if they consider how shallow the game will become when so little forethought or planning will be required

Someone suggested the times could be based on how long it would take to move the ships and modules using an FC nicking the time to Colonia down to under 15 hours whic would be great except the minimum transfer time for something would go up three times which probably not go down so well.

My suggestion for ships was they transfer as if flown in their current configuration with an option to use the current system for ships unable to complete the journey.
 
Yea, why not make anything in this game "instant"?
And add buttons for "i win" like get 1bn credits, get 10000 merits, fill the carrier with 10000t of your chosen commodity and so on.

No thank you.
There's a difference between "instant gratification" and "not finding AFK timers to be engaging gameplay" and being a condescending snob about it won't change that.

Obtaining credits, merits and materials all require you to do things. Waiting out a timer requires the opposite of that.
 
The real dirty secret is that without a time pressure, there's no advantage to imposing a time delay. If I'm sat on the pad in a starport, completely indestructable and in no immediate danger, making me wait five minutes for an in-system ship or module transfer from my carrier to the station, or even 30 minutes to bring it from across the bubble, adds nothing. There's nothing that can happen to me in those 5-30 minutes that makes a delay relevant.
But this game wants to pretend to be a territory control game. If you want territory control to matter you have make the actual space matter. If your squad has all its assets on one end of your territory then you aren't defending the other end of the territory. If an attack occurs on one end of your space and you have to wait a day to move your ships over before you can even start defending, it matters. Now you have to consider spreading your members and assets around your territory to maintain control. Now you have interesting considerations to maintain your territory. Can Bob and his crew hold that side all on his own? No, apparently he's got a life and kids and a job, he's not reliable. 😏

Or you can just instantly teleport everywhere and do anything, in that case, why even have territory at all? If everything is a singularity we should just all be in one super system and not even travel. Territory is meaningless. 🤷‍♂️

I'm all for this game stopping pretending to be a territory control game btw, that's not the game I KS'd. ;)
 
There's a difference between "instant gratification" and "not finding AFK timers to be engaging gameplay" and being a condescending snob about it won't change that.

Obtaining credits, merits and materials all require you to do things. Waiting out a timer requires the opposite of that.
Yes, but apart from ages and ages ago waiting in an empty system waiting for a bounty to decay into a fine and a bit later waiting out a notoriety point I don’t recall ever having nothing I couldn’t do while waiting for a transfer to finish.
It might not be what I was expecting to do when I logged in but there has always been something.

Ship transfers tended back in the early days to be something I planned to happen after I finished for the day, modules were usually more ad hoc but would just change the order I did things.
 
Yes, the player community voted years ago and yes, the majority of THOSE players at THAT time did vote to add a time delay for transfers, but think about that logic... the people online for hours with nothing better to do with their lives wanted to add more wait time to a game, meanwhile those of us with families, jobs, lives didn't get a chance to vote because we were offline. NO MORE TIME WASTES. You're seeing how players hate it. SCO? Success. DSS? Success. Latest engineering? Success? High Grade Emission? SUCCESS!
Gamers these days just want a short cut for everything.

O7
 
Yea, why not make anything in this game "instant"?
And add buttons for "i win" like get 1bn credits, get 10000 merits, fill the carrier with 10000t of your chosen commodity and so on.
I touched on this in the main thread, but the why of it comes down to decisions - what would you do differently if transfers were instant and would that be more interesting than what you do now.

As for the other "I win" buttons, there's plenty of flight sim games that don't have an persistent economy part tied to them that work ok - there will always be some other limitation anyway, either how well you can design your ship, how well you can fly it or what activities are available for you to do. In Elite things like not having credits or ranks are roadblocks to actual activities you might want to do and overcoming them requires making more actual decisions about how you want to achieve those things.

For transferring ships/modules the decision space is just too small and barely interacts with other systems in the game. To top it off there's a mostly optimal solution (just use a FC) that's unfortunately becoming less so because it's too much for modern computers to handle that stuff server side apparently.
 
Everything quicker ?? Is it really better ?
I know people want stuff quicker but I wonder where it will end up ?
I am an old time player and see that other things are needing work to be done before ship transfer .
But dbear in mind the last time we had Fdev asking for thoughts over a year passed and we still didn't get a response from the OP and nothing actually happened .
 
It is a long time ago that the vote was taken to reject FDevs proposed instant transfer but even so I am positive the vote was not carried out on line or even in the forums I seem to remember email being involved.

SCO fun and involving time saving secondary but nice.
DSS I am not sure it is any faster than the DSS it replaced when the FSS was introduced.
HGE while you definitely get more of what is there just sitting there with little to do actually feels slower even though it is not which reduces the fun so reduces the success.


I find how many advocate instant transfers disappointing and wonder if they consider how shallow the game will become when so little forethought or planning will be required

Someone suggested the times could be based on how long it would take to move the ships and modules using an FC nicking the time to Colonia down to under 15 hours whic would be great except the minimum transfer time for something would go up three times which probably not go down so well.

My suggestion for ships was they transfer as if flown in their current configuration with an option to use the current system for ships unable to complete the journey.
You wanna hear how my "logistics" planning is working in the current version of game?

Let's say I want to transfer ship and it takes 1 hour to finish transfer. Since I have nothing to do because of ahh my "logistics" moment, I decided to take a shower, and then go shopping. I return back home with snacks and beer and.. did I forgot something? Anyway, I guess I'll play Elite the next day. And in the meantime I think it's about time to read yet another FDev annual report on how much money they lost this year because of ahh "logistics" moment that exist in their game. Oh wait.. is that.. Frontier Development shares are on the bottom again.. what could possibly be the reasoning behind that I wonder.. Why else do you think they're now selling prebuilt ships?

It can't possibly be for the fact that their game doesn't respect player's time and IS NOT FUN TO PLAY, right? Right?

It's been 8 years of suffering. Will you ever learn? Do you understand why FDev are questioning it now? They actually figured this out! Took them long enough..
 
Last edited:
Everything quicker ?? Is it really better ?
I know people want stuff quicker but I wonder where it will end up ?
I am an old time player and see that other things are needing work to be done before ship transfer .
But dbear in mind the last time we had Fdev asking for thoughts over a year passed and we still didn't get a response from the OP and nothing actually happened .

It's the modern way with phone games, the problem with that way I have found is you get a lot of short term players who quickly move on once they have done everything, they come in play all the easy stuff for a month or two, suddenly declare they have finished the game and they are gone. The question is do FDEV want a lot of turnover of short term players just paying the initial purchase price or long term players who will invest in cosmetics and ship kits etc through the ARX shop. I am sure FDEV have the numbers and can work it out for themselves.
 
Let's say I want to transfer ship and it takes 1 hour to finish transfer. Since I have nothing to do because of ahh my "logistics" moment,

Hop in one of the my other ships, do a few missions, scan some megaships maybe, do a delivery or two, maybe kill some pirates, take some missions to settlements and take the Apex travel to do some deliveries and get some foot engineer materials and etc. If you think because you have ordered a ship transfer you then have nothing to do must mean we aren't playing the same game, because nothing in the game requires you to sit around waiting while your ship transfers!
 
Hop in one of the my other ships, do a few missions, scan some megaships maybe, do a delivery or two, maybe kill some pirates, take some missions to settlements and take the Apex travel to do some deliveries and get some foot engineer materials and etc. If you think because you have ordered a ship transfer you then have nothing to do must mean we aren't playing the same game, because nothing in the game requires you to sit around waiting while your ship transfers!
It's been 8 years of suffering. Will you ever learn? Even FDev figured out that something is wrong. Yet you are still in denial phase.
 
It's been 8 years of suffering. Will you ever learn? Even FDev figured out that something is wrong. Yet you are still in denial phase.

What, I'm not allowed to use one of my other ships to have fun and do missions while waiting? I am not allowed to take foot missions to ground stations while waiting? Where is the suffering exactly? It seems to me you are creating your own suffering by purposely denying yourself fun.....that's ok of course if that's the way you like to live life, but don't try and push your self-imposed suffering on other people, they just don't feel the same way.
 
Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom