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

[Galactic Fork]

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.

It's not an afk timer. It's a literal button to replace gameplay. This isn't a comparison between getting your ship instantly and getting your ship with a timer. It's a comparison between having your ship sent to you and you going and getting your own ship yourself. You know, actually PLAYING the game. Actually flying your ship in your space flight simulator. I actually like space travel. And as has been pointed out now with Powerplay, having to keep track of your ship can have major impact. Your combat ships might be far away and you would have to rush and get it, or wait for it to arrive by transfer. Or you might have to go in a substandard ship. Proper planning is as important as ship layouts. With instant transfer, even that's gone.


Got a super powerful combat ship with a crappy jump range? Who cares? Just hop in your explorer vessel and jump 300 light years in 4 jumps then instantly transfer that ship.
Next the act of even those 4 jumps is going to be too much travel. We should just be able to instantly jump between stations.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

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.

Part of life is accepting some people like the things you don't and vice versa.

eg: Marmite.

 

[TobiasFuzz]

As i said in the "official" thread to this topic: The transfer times are ridiculous low. Make them much much longer, days or even weeks. These unbelievable short transfer times are comical and not fitting for a "sim" game.

 

[Screemonster]

It's not an afk timer. It's a literal button to replace gameplay. This isn't a comparison between getting your ship instantly and getting your ship with a timer. It's a comparison between having your ship sent to you and you going and getting your own ship yourself. You know, actually PLAYING the game. Actually flying your ship in your space flight simulator. I actually like space travel. And as has been pointed out now with Powerplay, having to keep track of your ship can have major impact. Your combat ships might be far away and you would have to rush and get it, or wait for it to arrive by transfer. Or you might have to go in a substandard ship. Proper planning is as important as ship layouts. With instant transfer, even that's gone.


Got a super powerful combat ship with a crappy jump range? Who cares? Just hop in your explorer vessel and jump 300 light years in 4 jumps then instantly transfer that ship.
Next the act of even those 4 jumps is going to be too much travel. We should just be able to instantly jump between stations.

If you want to waste your time doing a thing you don't want to do before allowing yourself to do the thing you actually want to do, go right ahead.

In the meantime, people who just want to get together and do something as simple as "hey let's hop on and wing up to shoot some pirates/bugs together" are utterly scuppered by arriving at the place they want to get to to fly together and then having to wait half an hour before they can actually play at which point the mood has passed.

Like, sure they can go take their taxi ships out and fight pirates in those, but largely people want to use their actual ships for these things.

If there's one thing that makes people quit this game more than any other factor among anyone I've known, it's how utterly inconvenient it is to accomplish the simplest of group activities and all these obstacles are largely at the behest of a pack of sneering gatekeepers rambling about the sanctity of watching a clock tick down.

This is a game.
The objective of a game is to have fun.

 

[Rubbernuke]

If you want to waste your time doing a thing you don't want to do before allowing yourself to do the thing you actually want to do, go right ahead.

In the meantime, people who just want to get together and do something as simple as "hey let's hop on and wing up to shoot some pirates/bugs together" are utterly scuppered by arriving at the place they want to get to to fly together and then having to wait half an hour before they can actually play at which point the mood has passed.

Like, sure they can go take their taxi ships out and fight pirates in those, but largely people want to use their actual ships for these things.

If there's one thing that makes people quit this game more than any other factor among anyone I've known, it's how utterly inconvenient it is to accomplish the simplest of group activities and all these obstacles are largely at the behest of a pack of sneering gatekeepers rambling about the sanctity of watching a clock tick down.

This is a game.
The objective of a game is to have fun.

With so much of the 'sim' part of the game undercooked or even forgotten I think the management side just needs to be as easy as possible, or at least have a expedited credits option. If the timer is reduced it might as well go, because otherwise its just spinning wheels for the sake of it.

When I was watching livestreams of PP2 being shown most of it was waiting for modules to be delivered / flying about to get modules / where have my modules gone staring at UI for the Mandalay- as in, it was like being stuck in a doctors waiting room with only a ten month old caravan magazine for company.

 

[Screemonster]

With so much of the 'sim' part of the game undercooked or even forgotten I think the management side just needs to be as easy as possible, or at least have a expedited credits option. If the timer is reduced it might as well go, because otherwise its just spinning wheels for the sake of it.

When I was watching livestreams of PP2 being shown most of it was waiting for modules to be delivered / flying about to get modules / where have my modules gone staring at UI for the Mandalay- as in, it was like being stuck in a doctors waiting room with only a ten month old caravan magazine for company.

Yeah, like... the 3 day waiting time for colonia is a logistical concern. That's a timer that actually matters. That's something that had me building a combat ship out there with locally-sourced parts and engineers because my DBX didn't cut it for what I wanted to do and the rest of my fleet wasn't available.

Waiting fifteen minutes for a carrier jump (when the servers aren't busy)? That's not a "logistical concern", that's a "pointless delay". Anything that arrives during this play session might as well be instant, a delay that short doesn't actually add any tactical concerns. The BGS works on a 24 hour tick, powerplay works on a week, what the hell difference is 15 minutes going to make strategically?

It's like the dropboxes in settlements. What does a three minute twiddling-your-thumbs timer accomplish if the alarms are already off and the settlement population are... uh... no longer extant? It's not like anyone's going to walk in and stop you. The devs could easily make "alarms off" and "no humanoid contacts present" be modifiers on these times.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Yeah, like... the 3 day waiting time for colonia is a logistical concern. That's a timer that actually matters. That's something that had me building a combat ship out there with locally-sourced parts and engineers because my DBX didn't cut it for what I wanted to do and the rest of my fleet wasn't available.

Waiting fifteen minutes for a carrier jump (when the servers aren't busy)? That's not a "logistical concern", that's a "pointless delay". Anything that arrives during this play session might as well be instant, a delay that short doesn't actually add any tactical concerns. The BGS works on a 24 hour tick, powerplay works on a week, what the hell difference is 15 minutes going to make strategically?

It's like the dropboxes in settlements. What does a three minute twiddling-your-thumbs timer accomplish if the alarms are already off and the settlement population are... uh... no longer extant? It's not like anyone's going to walk in and stop you. The devs could easily make "alarms off" and "no humanoid contacts present" be modifiers on these times.

Its how I described it in the feedback thread: ED is a game of abstractions and time is relative- the example I stated was cargo loading being instant, but repairs, rearming, synthing etc are the same.

Your point about relevant delay is on point- what purpose is the delay? If its just to simulate spacial vastness well......why is that relevant now when players have been given neutron jumping, carrier data services that negate having to come back, SCO, ships that jump further and FCs that jump as soon as 15 minutes (ideally).

In short, ED is not an ironman sim. The fun is flying ships, not waiting for them to arrive.

 

[Screemonster]

Its how I described it in the feedback thread: ED is a game of abstractions and time is relative- the example I stated was cargo loading being instant, but repairs, rearming, synthing etc are the same.

Your point about relevant delay is on point- what purpose is the delay? If its just to simulate spacial vastness well......why is that relevant now when players have been given neutron jumping, carrier data services that negate having to come back, SCO, ships that jump further and FCs that jump as soon as 15 minutes (ideally).

In short, ED is not an ironman sim. The fun is flying ships, not waiting for them to arrive.

I did a fallout 4 survival mode run recently just to see what it was like. Removing fast travel was a big deal at the start, as was the reduced carrying cap. Then it soon devolved into just... running back and forth on routes I'd already cleared to drop off my stuff. I found it didn't actually add anything aside from a lot of walking. The food/water/sleep timers became irrelevant pretty quickly since I was spending so much time just hoofing it to settlements (where I always had access to a bed, water, and a cooking station) that I was never away from a settlement long enough for them to actually get a quarter of my AP bar down.

The biggest thing that survival difficulty added was turning every gunfight into instakill rocket tag, now that was fun.

Oh, and deleting my progress constantly because it turns off autosaving outside of sleep and lol, lmao, you expect fallout 4 to run without crashing?

 

[Galactic Fork]

If you want to waste your time doing a thing you don't want to do before allowing yourself to do the thing you actually want to do, go right ahead.

In the meantime, people who just want to get together and do something as simple as "hey let's hop on and wing up to shoot some pirates/bugs together" are utterly scuppered by arriving at the place they want to get to to fly together and then having to wait half an hour before they can actually play at which point the mood has passed.

Like, sure they can go take their taxi ships out and fight pirates in those, but largely people want to use their actual ships for these things.

If there's one thing that makes people quit this game more than any other factor among anyone I've known, it's how utterly inconvenient it is to accomplish the simplest of group activities and all these obstacles are largely at the behest of a pack of sneering gatekeepers rambling about the sanctity of watching a clock tick down.

This is a game.
The objective of a game is to have fun.

Or you could just fly to the ship you want to use and then fly it to meet up with your friends? No count down timer. All space flight.
Maybe a better idea would be for fdev to make an arcade mode where you can just pick a ship you own and choose "pirate scenario b" and bam, you and your wing are in a space fight. Once you finish, you go back to the menu and choose another scenario.
Heck since CQC is basically dead, they can alter that to be an arcade coop/pvp mode.

 

[Rubbernuke]

The other aspect to it all is what comes next- colonization- and FD thinking how transfer times fit with that. A few weeks to FedEx your PP to the edge of the galaxy?

 

[Rubbernuke]

I mean, if you really wanted to make something of it, why not bring Powerplay into things?

For example- players get instant transfers between power systems they control, or greatly reduced times (due to Powers having enhanced logistics)?

 

[CMDR Daiyus]

If you want to waste your time doing a thing you don't want to do before allowing yourself to do the thing you actually want to do, go right ahead.

In the meantime, people who just want to get together and do something as simple as "hey let's hop on and wing up to shoot some pirates/bugs together" are utterly scuppered by arriving at the place they want to get to to fly together and then having to wait half an hour before they can actually play at which point the mood has passed.

Like, sure they can go take their taxi ships out and fight pirates in those, but largely people want to use their actual ships for these things.

If there's one thing that makes people quit this game more than any other factor among anyone I've known, it's how utterly inconvenient it is to accomplish the simplest of group activities and all these obstacles are largely at the behest of a pack of sneering gatekeepers rambling about the sanctity of watching a clock tick down.

This is a game.
The objective of a game is to have fun.

I've never experienced the game that way. Not saying others don't get frustrated, but any time any of these "issues" come up, I've always found ways to create emergent gameplay to work with it, rather than against it. Some of the best moments I've had in this game (and this applies to life generally I guess) is when things AREN'T going exactly to plan.

I'm quite often away from the areas my friends base themselves in as they don't like exploring, but I enjoy the odd jaunt. If I'm out in the black my mates field fighters so I can telepresence in. I build my ships with travel in mind, so if I do have to take a combat ship somewhere, it's capable of it, even if I have to refuel a few times en route. If I really need a different ship somewhere using the transfer window I just get stuck into whatever else I can do, either with the current ship or via Apex until the new ship arrives.

I guess I have a slightly different approach to many players, which is going to happen with a diverse player base, but instant transfers would diminish my enjoyment of the game, not improve it. The memories, experiences, and lessons learned due to waiting for ships have helped me enjoy more of the game, and appreciate the Elite galaxy in ways I wouldn't have considered otherwise.

 

[Jmanis]

Meanwhile, actual meaningful activities in the game languish while irrelevant stuff like this gets all the effort. GG prioritization. I'm sure glad they worked out all the activity balancing before PP2 went live....

Who cares that all these "wait times" are being eliminated when the outcome is to achieve the same things that could've been basically achieved where you were previously, bugs and all.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

The best comparison to this type of "logistics" might come from car games. I can't think of an open world racing game that forces you to drive to the place a car is stored to switch to it. More sandbox games like GTA and some of its clones do it with garage storage, but that doesn't add much to the game overall except the QoL of being able to store a vehicle at all.

There are games that do force you to do this - spintires/mudrunner (maybe Euro Truck too? been too long since I last played that) and open world survival crafting games that have mounts/vehicles. Mastering just getting around there is the goal there and being able to switch or even recover vehicles anywhere without doing extra work would skip the core gameplay for these (less so for the survival crafting games).

Elite is more like a racing game and would need extra features to be more like the games that have meaningful vehicle logistics. Since you can't switch ships out in the black travel can still be as challenging as Elite lets it be and requiring you to find a station with a shipyard in friendly-ish inhabited space is already enough and transfer times can't add challenge or gameplay/decisionmaking to that.

The place where Elite pulls off this logistics gameplay is carriers actually with refueling and moving/storing cargo and all the options and opportunities it offers, this is of course vastly different from how ships work. It's possible to imagine a game where ships work more like FCs in Elite and in that world jump/transfer times could be made to matter, but you'd still be left with the problem of "what do I do while waiting for the transfers".

 

[Ian Doncaster]

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

This is where I think it needs to be a "pick one and stick to it" approach.

I'd be very happy for travel times in general to be a lot longer than they are now - go back to the Elite I (or even as a compromise a bit of FE2) style of travel
- you can only carry enough fuel for 1 or 2 jumps
- you don't arrive in a system conveniently next to a fuel scooping site
- supercruise attacks by pirates are common
- jump ranges are a fixed and low number (10 LY, say) regardless of ship or FSD

Obviously that has a whole bunch of knock-on effects on game design: positioning the engineers as the single source of blueprint A all over the bubble so that it's several hours of game time to get between them every single time really wouldn't work - they'd need to be more common, there'd need to be more emphasis on keeping the same ship but making it capable of doing more things at once, the bubble itself would probably need to be much smaller. It'd be a completely different game.


That's not the direction Frontier have gone in with Elite Dangerous, and fair enough - it's all about having hyper-specialised ships carrying single-purpose modules, hopping from end to end of the bubble like a demented flea to get your engineering done, things happening at your destination rather than on the journey, etc.

Fleet Carriers make moving a squad and its entire assets from any point in the bubble to any other point in the bubble possible in just 15 minutes for less than the cost of transferring a single one of their ships. I don't think it's a coincidence that their introduction led to most of the loudest complaints about ship/module transfer times going away entirely ... and apparently now substituted for "FCs are taking too long to jump".

Yeah, like... the 3 day waiting time for colonia is a logistical concern. That's a timer that actually matters. That's something that had me building a combat ship out there with locally-sourced parts and engineers because my DBX didn't cut it for what I wanted to do and the rest of my fleet wasn't available.

And with the modern engineering balance, material availability, etc. when I returned from the Colonia to the bubble recently ... I could have afforded to transfer some ships, but it was cheaper and quicker just to build some new ones. And now I still have my fleet over there too, so that's all good.


People suggest having "personal fleet carriers" or "mini fleet carriers" occasionally for people who don't want the entire functionality, but just want something to store their own stuff. Obviously that runs into the problems of "it's still a dockable asset so it's not actually any less troublesome than a full-size carrier".

So... how about a slight variant: the invisible Fleet Carrier:
- Like the fleets of millions of invisible megaships currently parked across the bubble waiting to transfer our ships and modules on demand, it can't be seen, not even by its owner, and certainly can't be docked with.
- so therefore none of the other services a real FC has can be included
- it costs less than a normal FC, though I'd still be happy to pay 2 billion + the same 5M/week upkeep as a regular FC for one, if not more
- ownership is mutually exclusive with a regular one
- it can move at the same rate as a regular FC (but since it doesn't have to exist as an actual station, this is mainly just to avoid real FC owners feeling bad - it hopefully wouldn't actually put anywhere near as much load on the servers)
- cost of the move is the same as the galactic average Tritium cost to move a fully-loaded FC the same distance (you can't actually deliver Tritium to it, since it's not there, so this substitutes and is probably slightly more expensive in most cases)
- if your invisible FC is present in a system, you can access any ship or module assigned to it instantly from any regular shipyard/outfitter in the system, and any ships or modules at the stations in the system get transferred to your invisible FC automatically

Gives basically the same advantages as a real Fleet Carrier for people who were just using them as a personal garage to avoid having to care about ship and module transfer, but hopefully a lot lighter on the servers, system maps, etc. etc.

 

[babelfisch]

As I said in the feedback thread, keep transfers for ships but store modules in an inventory that we can access in every port with outfitting. Similar to our on foot gear.

I know it's unrealistic, but so is a large portion of the game. Storage of engineering materials is also unrealistic. Just like remote engineering. Or the fact that we can't store a 2t module in our 128t cargo rack. There are many unrealistic things in the game. The most important question is: does delayed module transfer make the game more enjoyable? Or does instant access to your modules make the game more enjoyable?
Back in the day I voted for delayed transfers but I realised that it didn't add anything to the game. In my opinion it doesn't make the game any more immersive either.

I remember a few hundred threads with people complaining they gained a bounty for shooting a criminal before the scan finished. And we all (including me) told them about trigger discipline and that it's realistic that way and that is supposed to happen. At some point FDEV finally changed it. And what can I say? The game is better that way. And I don't see anyone complaining that they don't get a bounty for shooting before the scan finished. Maybe it's not realistic that we shoot people before seeing their ID, but it made the game better and that's what we should care about in my opinion.

 

[Ozric]

Sorry but this thread isn't necessary at all.