General Exploration SRV death penalties are oppressive

[Rakushael]

Probably a good idea to keep an eye on the screen when you're descending to a planet in that case, especially if it's high g.

Yup, super important to watch the super boring repetitive gameplay, including the 10 seconds of lag while leaving glide, so that your ship, with all its other safety features, doesn't play ostrich in the few moments you look away to deal with real life.

Understand that crashing into a planet has no warnings and is basically a guaranteed death if real world distractions occur... getting bumped by a pirate is, by comparison, much more likely to catch your attention with audio and visual cues. The pirate death happens gradually, and provides a chance for escape. The first warning you get upon planet smashing is your cockpit spinning with fire shooting out of the console right before you explode.

Some people have pets, kids, friends, family, or other responsibilities that interrupt. No reason but bad taste gatekeeping that FDev couldn't address the death imbalances and other problems as discussed; not sure why 'guess you should pay more attention' is considered a valid argument in a game where 90% of the gameplay is flying in a mostly straight line and waiting to get where you're going.

 

[varonica]

including the 10 seconds of lag while leaving glide

If you are having ten seconds of lag leaving glide that certainly needs looking at, but the point of it being a space ship flying game means that you need to fly your spaceship. Exiting glide is nearly instant on my PC, plenty of time to set my throttle and landing gear you know you can always just set your throttle to zero in glide so when you exit glide you will just stop in mid air/vacuum, giving yourself plenty of time to extend landing gear and land safely, and I mean you don't even need to land, it will do that for you, mind you that gets a bit to hand holdy for me. Maybe I should stick to RAID's in LOTRO where looking away for a few moments can get my entire party wiped! This is how the game plays, if you want a game that takes you from orbit to ground unassisted I believe Starfield will do that.

 

[aRJay]

Yup, super important to watch the super boring repetitive gameplay,

Yes anybody can pay attention to the exciting occasional stuff.

including the 10 seconds of lag while leaving glide,

That lag isn’t a universal constant feature.

so that your ship, with all its other safety features, doesn't play ostrich in the few moments you look away to deal with real life.

Understand that crashing into a planet has no warnings and is basically a guaranteed death if real world distractions occur...

There are warnings such as the word Collision displayed on your HUD but they aren’t the loud distracting sort that cover most of your field of view so you can’t see anything else.

getting bumped by a pirate is, by comparison, much more likely to catch your attention with audio and visual cues. The pirate death happens gradually, and provides a chance for escape. The first warning you get upon planet smashing is your cockpit spinning with fire shooting out of the console right before you explode.

The ship exploding on crashing also isn’t guaranteed it depends on build, pips, speed and gravity.

Some people have pets, kids, friends, family, or other responsibilities that interrupt. No reason but bad taste gatekeeping that FDev couldn't address the death imbalances and other problems as discussed; not sure why 'guess you should pay more attention' is considered a valid argument in a game where 90% of the gameplay is flying in a mostly straight line and waiting to get where you're going.

It is because most of the time you are doing that that you should pay more attention to the bits of the game where you do have more to do.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Yup, super important to watch the super boring repetitive gameplay, including the 10 seconds of lag while leaving glide, so that your ship, with all its other safety features, doesn't play ostrich in the few moments you look away to deal with real life.

Understand that crashing into a planet has no warnings and is basically a guaranteed death if real world distractions occur... getting bumped by a pirate is, by comparison, much more likely to catch your attention with audio and visual cues. The pirate death happens gradually, and provides a chance for escape. The first warning you get upon planet smashing is your cockpit spinning with fire shooting out of the console right before you explode.

Some people have pets, kids, friends, family, or other responsibilities that interrupt. No reason but bad taste gatekeeping that FDev couldn't address the death imbalances and other problems as discussed; not sure why 'guess you should pay more attention' is considered a valid argument in a game where 90% of the gameplay is flying in a mostly straight line and waiting to get where you're going.

Sounds like you're not enjoying the game. Maybe instead of asking the devs to change the game to suit how you want to play it, you might want to move on to something else you do enjoy.

 

[Lhorndra]

Does not have emergency stop or auto-throttle down when ending a glide, nose down.

Just like it has no emergency stop to avoid flying into other ships, or spaceports, or megaships. Because in Elite Dangerous, you fly space ships. That’s, like, the main selling point.

Looking away from the screen for a few seconds while grinding extremely boring, repetitive gameplay has cost me more than 2bil, to date.

I wouldn't call losing 2 bil. credits boring. Sarcasm aside, maybe play the game a little bit more while playing the game? How is a planetary landing extremely boring? During the glide, I usually look for interesting features of the landscape, plan a route for exobiology in my head, look at the gravity, the coordinates, and so on.

There really are many moments in the game when you can look away from the screen. Landing on a planet is not one of them.

Srsly FDev. Rebalance your death mechanic; this sucks.

Then this game is not for you in the long term, I think.

Point is, ship AI is totally available and a reasonable feature for keeping you/your ship in one piece.

When I do exobiology, I tend to fly really, really low and fast above the surface, sometimes I do shenanigans like flying upside down. And yes, sometimes I do crash into the planet. But I would be really annoyed if some AI would intervene and automatically slow down or lift up my ship. How’s an AI supposed to know how you want to fly your ship?

Outside of that, completely unreasonable that Thargoid bounties, engineering components, engineered modules, and on-foot storage are retained post-death, but exploration credits and exobiology research are utterly lost.

Yes, that’s fairly inconsistent.

Yup, super important to watch the super boring repetitive gameplay

I don’t understand why you play a game that you’ve described as super/extremely boring more than once.

The first warning you get upon planet smashing is your cockpit spinning with fire shooting out of the console right before you explode.

No, the first warning is that a whole planet appears in front of you. The second warning is that this planet is getting really big in your front window.

in a game where 90% of the gameplay is flying in a mostly straight line and waiting to get where you're going.

In your gameplay. Please don’t assume that this applies to everyone.

 

[varonica]

No, the first warning is that a whole planet appears in front of you. The second warning is that this planet is getting really big in your front window.

Maybe it just wants to be his friend!

 

[Technodubber]

..or you could learn that you should repair your SRV when it drops to a point you get worried it. 2% seems low - I usually look at repairing at around 25%. Others will have different limits. Same with refueling it - some will leave it until the tank is dry, but is it worth the risk?

A low tank for an SRV isn't too bad especially when you get 100% refueled when synthesising new fuel, I guess you just have to pay attention to not be AFK when it happens.
Also there is no reason that, while exploring with an SRV, it's hull should be any less than 30% unless you're incapable of not driving like a mad man, or are just God awful at driving, all you need to do is re-enter the ship and the hull gets repaired.

 

[madmongoose]

In my opinion Exploration as a loop is a survival game. When you plan meticulously and act carefully, 99% of the time it will be safe. However, there will be 1% dangerous panic or the unexpected and if you panic and don't handle it right, you're dead. Likewise, if you don't plan and/or start to take risks, danger goes up significantly.

Doing combat you are facing down death constantly and it will be over quickly one way or another. Going exploring is an endurance race of avoiding and/or recovering from mistakes with the penalty for failure getting increasingly large over time.

Learning what not to do in combat is relatively quick and the costs are straightforward. Learning what not to do with exploration becomes a larger and larger cost the longer you're out there. Imo that's perfectly fine it does suck to lose several billion but now you know to be more paranoid and cash in more often.

 

[Brrokk]

In my opinion Exploration as a loop is a survival game. When you plan meticulously and act carefully, 99% of the time it will be safe. However, there will be 1% dangerous panic or the unexpected and if you panic and don't handle it right, you're dead. Likewise, if you don't plan and/or start to take risks, danger goes up significantly.

Doing combat you are facing down death constantly and it will be over quickly one way or another. Going exploring is an endurance race of avoiding and/or recovering from mistakes with the penalty for failure getting increasingly large over time.

Learning what not to do in combat is relatively quick and the costs are straightforward. Learning what not to do with exploration becomes a larger and larger cost the longer you're out there. Imo that's perfectly fine it does suck to lose several billion but now you know to be more paranoid and cash in more often.

Yes, the fun bit of it is thinking, "Shall I head back to base now or hold out for even more first discoveries?"

People (I guess they're usually non-explorers) who suggest making exploration more dangerous haven't understood this. Any routine danger in exploration would inevitably kill every explorer in time, making the whole activity into a pointless "nip out, scan a few things and run back to station" workaround.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Also, there’s no need for an emergency stop, you can kill the throttle during the glide and when it comes out it will level off and sit a few km from the surface.

Might depend on whether you're flying an Anaconda with unengineered 5D thrusters and a 1D distro towards a 6g planet.

 

[varonica]

People (I guess they're usually non-explorers) who suggest making exploration more dangerous haven't understood this. Any routine danger in exploration would inevitably kill every explorer in time, making the whole activity into a pointless "nip out, scan a few things and run back to station" workaround.

No that's wrong, all the dangers out there are indeed routine dangers, that's what makes them so easy to avoid, you know what's coming, you know how you need to set up your ship and be prepared, they are easy to handle once you know them. It has been suggested every now and then that "exceptional dangers" be put in place, like every now and then suddenly find your self flying through an accretion disk with no warning, suddenly intercepted and attacked by powerful aliens at random times, dangers you can't be prepared for because they are random and unpredictable.

This is why we now have hyperspace de-throttle on emerging from a hyperspace jump, because players simply couldn't understand that exiting hyperspace leaves you pointed at the star on full throttle and you needed to be there to take control of the ship, I mean why do a hyperspace jump if you weren't ready to avoid the star at the end?

Routine dangers are not and never have been a problem, exiting glide and smashing into a planet, I mean that's something you might do once, even a couple of times, there are ways around it to make it safer, like setting throttle to zero on exiting the glide, but this is a routine danger that you should be prepared for, not one that should be removed.

 

[Brrokk]

No that's wrong, all the dangers out there are indeed routine dangers, that's what makes them so easy to avoid, you know what's coming, you know how you need to set up your ship and be prepared, they are easy to handle once you know them. It has been suggested every now and then that "exceptional dangers" be put in place, like every now and then suddenly find your self flying through an accretion disk with no warning, suddenly intercepted and attacked by powerful aliens at random times, dangers you can't be prepared for because they are random and unpredictable.

This is why we now have hyperspace de-throttle on emerging from a hyperspace jump, because players simply couldn't understand that exiting hyperspace leaves you pointed at the star on full throttle and you needed to be there to take control of the ship, I mean why do a hyperspace jump if you weren't ready to avoid the star at the end?

Routine dangers are not and never have been a problem, exiting glide and smashing into a planet, I mean that's something you might do once, even a couple of times, there are ways around it to make it safer, like setting throttle to zero on exiting the glide, but this is a routine danger that you should be prepared for, not one that should be removed.

OK, poor choice of word by me. By "routine" I meant constantly present danger which you can't avoid. Like that accretion disc, but not like crashing into a planet, which you can avoid by taking care.

 

[varonica]

OK, poor choice of word by me. By "routine" I meant constantly present danger which you can't avoid. Like that accretion disc, but not like crashing into a planet, which you can avoid by taking care.

Ok fair enough, I interpret routine as to dangers that are always there but can be accounted for, like if you are camping, don't drink the river water untreated, and not routine as a danger that you can't predict and are difficult to avoid, like wildfires, meteor strikes etc, you can't prepare for them, you can maybe run but if you stay there you will die....so dangers that would be extremely likely to kill explorers and can't really be mitigated unless you know about them in advance, make those routine danger and yes exploring would become difficult.

 

[Rakushael]

Aight, so, I'm mostly hearing 'boo-hoo, cry more' from most of this forum community, regarding crashing into a planet. Kay, distasteful, but kinda fair. More constructive feedback might have been 'increase your max shield/reduce your max thruster speed' to prevent crashing being a 1-hit KO, instead of the wannabe gatekeeping... And most folks are skipping all other relevant points, in favour of blaming the OP, myself, and anyone who's ever been in a similar situation. 'Geht gud newb' isn't relevant to a conversation about improving immersion and balancing. We want more people to want to play this game. We don't want Broken.Shenanigans that cause players to shut the game down and walk away.

Rebalancing death consequences should be a constructive conversation. Though I'm sure that topic exists elsewhere, that is essentially the point of the OP whose thread I've apparently hijacked. Pre-Odyssey, SRV deaths were basically safe, yet here we are with SRV and on-foot deaths costing all of your gathered bio data... while you have a data-hoarding ship that should store it all in a black box. The requisite of having to avoid anything remotely risky while exploring and how that makes exploration particularly boring was the OP's point. Look closely at a geyser on foot? Get glitch-flung into space, then splat when you land, even though driving your SRV through the same geyser would be perfectly safe.
Crash avoidance AI is basically already cannon; every NPC ship has near-psychic levels of automatic collision evasion, regardless of pilot rank. Would be sensible to have an optional flight assist module for this, and add an optional 'deaccelerate after glide complete' to planetary landing modules. But alright, we can skip the 'makes the game too easy' options if they offend you.

Returning to your own crash site to retrieve data should sit well with most players. Who hasn't flown their exploration racer along a planets surface at 700+ m/s, just to have the landscape loading lag, and re-shape a mountain crag as you fly between two peaks, ending your journey through no fault of your own? Certainly more lore-friendly than scanning the Jameson crashsite 100 times in a row for data acquisition, or raiding Dav's Hope in a similar manner, for components that are cumulatively 50x larger than either your ship's cargo space, or the modules you'll be engineering with them... Keeps the death risk, while balancing it somewhat. Turns a bad experience and a reason to exit the game into a very good reason to keep playing and retrieve what you've lost.

Picking a spot to land takes about five seconds. Aim for the blue biology scan you're most interested in, point the ship at it, and wait, wait, wait for the glide-drop lag to finish, when you get there. Yes, zeroing your throttle mid glide is great, but you can AFK well before you get to glide, and having the game require your undivided attention for nothing more than to press a zero throttle keybind in 30 seconds isn't all that thrilling. We do enough of that sort of thing in Supercruise. And if you push zero throttle during a glide-drop lag and look away, well, whoops... too bad, you're dead. Because I guess control input errors are semi-common on interstellar starships 1000+ years in the future, though in-flight entertainment and basic safety features are not...

CQC and Fighting Thargoids aren't boring. NPC combat, full system scanning, and mining are at least somewhat engaging. Slowly getting closer to the 1000th crater-covered dustball of the week, so your flight computer doesn't emergency drop you for going 1% over entry speed or being at slightly too steep of an approach angle for one millisecond is... not my definition of an exciting time. But for whatever reason, that's where the credits are. And it can be relaxing and somewhat enjoyable, if you're not needing to watch the screen through 100% of each loop, every time, to avoid countless hours of lost progress.

In before someone tells this humble peasant that his in-game money problems could be solved by exploring with a second account and a fleet carrier.

 

[varonica]

And most folks are skipping all other relevant points, in favour of blaming the OP, myself, and anyone who's ever been in a similar situation.

You crashed into a planet while piloting your spaceship, who is it you want to blame again?

 

[Brrokk]

Aight, so, I'm mostly hearing 'boo-hoo, cry more' from most of this forum community, regarding crashing into a planet. Kay, distasteful, but kinda fair. More constructive feedback might have been 'increase your max shield/reduce your max thruster speed' to prevent crashing being a 1-hit KO, instead of the wannabe gatekeeping... And most folks are skipping all other relevant points, in favour of blaming the OP, myself, and anyone who's ever been in a similar situation. '...

TBH that's not at all how this thread reads to me. Advice has been offered. Keeping an eye on things while approaching a planet isn't unreasonable advice. No-one used any playground words like "boo hoo".

Exploration is slightly dangerous. That's actually how most of us like it. It's been said that it's the only true "iron-man" play in the game.

 

[Frankymole]

'Geht gud newb' isn't relevant to a conversation about improving immersion and balancing. We want more people to want to play this game. We don't want Broken.Shenanigans that cause players to shut the game down and walk away.

Rebalancing death consequences should be a constructive conversation.

I agree. Most deaths in-game are far too lenient. You can get destroyed multiple times in a surface conflict zone, on foot, and you just respawn a few seconds away in a drop-ship with zero consequences (unless for some reason you have exobiology data that wasn't handed in... something I admit I have done. Recently). There's not even the cost of a ship rebuy, you get all your weapons that are worth millions of credits and days' worth of time in upgrading, free, gratis and for nothing....

Ship rebuy cost (on all ships) should also increase every time you write one off, to reflect your increasing insurance premiums for klutziness... until eventually they reach or exceed the raw ship + unmodified modules' cost.

 

[Frankymole]

CQC and Fighting Thargoids aren't boring. NPC combat, full system scanning, and mining are at least somewhat engaging. Slowly getting closer to the 1000th crater-covered dustball of the week, so your flight computer doesn't emergency drop you for going 1% over entry speed or being at slightly too steep of an approach angle for one millisecond is... not my definition of an exciting time. But for whatever reason, that's where the credits are.

No, you can make more Goiding.

 

[Rakushael]

No, you can make more Goiding.

The fact that Goids are potentially obscenely profitable does not invalidate that exobiology is properly good money... How approachable is Goiding, vs how approachable is exobio? Goiding is a big learning curve and ship kitting and frustration and attention and skill. Personally, there's a firm limit to how many hours a week I can deal with Thargoids for, and I'm not going to pretend like I'm particularly good at soloing them. Whereas Exobiology, for 6 hours a day, while binge-watching Netflix? Easy. Until you die to something stupid or just by being dumb, and lose it all.

 

[Rakushael]

I agree. Most deaths in-game are far too lenient. You can get destroyed multiple times in a surface conflict zone, on foot, and you just respawn a few seconds away in a drop-ship with zero consequences (unless for some reason you have exobiology data that wasn't handed in... something I admit I have done. Recently). There's not even the cost of a ship rebuy, you get all your weapons that are worth millions of credits and days' worth of time in upgrading, free, gratis and for nothing....

Ship rebuy cost (on all ships) should also increase every time you write one off, to reflect your increasing insurance premiums for klutziness... until eventually they reach or exceed the raw ship + unmodified modules' cost.

I'd totally be down for the idea of increased costs elsewhere (though I doubt it would be a popular implementation), but I would still like to see the data losses of exploration data mitigated somehow, as the priority here.

Unless absolutely everything in-game was revamped to some kind of 'hard core' game design, exploration data is too much of an outlier. Materials would have to become cargo, become tradeable, and be lost on death if not stored at a station/fleet carrier. Engineered modules would need to cost exponentially more to 'rebuy', and preferably only available at engineers outfitting, after unlocked. Ship paintjobs/customizations would reset to stock on your rebought ship, and re-applying the same would cost credits, as well.

But none of that really addresses the problems of 'glitchy game and inconsistent flight assist options make deaths suck'. So I think we'll shelve it, for now.