The State of Exploration

For this post, I am ignoring content issues ("All systems are the same, there is nothing interesting to find") and focusing purely on two specific technical issues that plague explorers as of version 1.3.

Route planning in the galactic core (A roughly 3 thousand light year radius area surrounding Sgr A*) is essentially broken, causing any route longer than a few jumps to take ages to finish planning if it even finishes at all.

Selling data is a (in my opinion) needlessly tedious process. I think that any other CMDRs who have sold more than a few pages of data will agree. Pre-release, it was possible to sell all of ones data in a single transaction. This had the unfortunate side effect of overloading the servers. Prior to the implementation of the "sell all" and "sell page" options, explorers could only sell data one system at a time. At that time, I believe that the ability to sell an entire page of data was an acceptable compromise. That was almost six months ago. The intervening time has seen overhauls to missions, mining, criminal penalties, and more. Exploration has changed very little (although a 100% increase in revenue is a significant step in the right direction) and its most troublesome technical problems remain totally unaddressed.

From the fact that both route planning and selling cartographic data have both been severely deficient since the release of Elite: Dangerous, I infer that FD have put the improvement of exploration at a very low priority.

I do not expect either of these problems to be fixed any time soon. However, I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.

PS: Some say "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." Have we, as explorers, been too quiet while other players dominated the discussion about the future of the game? Do we need to whine louder to be heard? Ideally the answer would be no. Realistically, I think the answer might be yes.

PPS: Am I allowed to post the same thread to two different forums? I would love to generate discussion about this in the Elite Exploration section of the forum.
 
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I think Explorer Rage has been a "Thing" since v1.3. I'm stuck 1600ly out - want to get back for the CG but cant jump much without a disconnect so generally playing other stuff till this is fixed. Worrying that I cant see any acknowledgement from FD of the issues we're having.
 
Waiting several minutes to plot a few hundred ly when I'm 2700 lys from the core and then get disconnected on the very first jump! Twice! I've given up for tonight
 
I think Explorer Rage has been a "Thing" since v1.3. I'm stuck 1600ly out - want to get back for the CG but cant jump much without a disconnect so generally playing other stuff till this is fixed. Worrying that I cant see any acknowledgement from FD of the issues we're having.

Don't bother trying to get back tonight. The cartography webserver for the CG is broken/offline/overloaded/or just doesn't work (delete as applicable). 7 months in and we have the same issues we had over xmas; constant disconnects, spinning ship syndrome, commanders who can't log in, and a temperamental cartography webserver that is either painfully slow, or doesn't work.
 
Don't bother trying to get back tonight. The cartography webserver for the CG is broken/offline/overloaded/or just doesn't work (delete as applicable). 7 months in and we have the same issues we had over xmas; constant disconnects, spinning ship syndrome, commanders who can't log in, and a temperamental cartography webserver that is either painfully slow, or doesn't work.

Sadly, I think the only thing that is going to cause any of this stuff to be fixed or improved in the longer term is the Microsoft Certification process for the XBox.(Never thought I would hear myself looking forward to a PC game being ported to console before). I don't think ED would pass it at the moment in its current state, without significant fixes. Not sure if that process includes certifying FD's actual build/beta/release process and server back-end and support as well, but I hope it does.
 
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Content issues aside, even pre 1.3 the double/triple/quadruple honks, data corruption, planetary bodies discovered and then not appearing on the HUD/System Map and having to honk again, double scans and the Galaxy Map taking an age to be able to plot a route (not due to star density - I'm talking star to star) end up making your exploration journey about a third longer than it should be.

Then a third again flogging data. Then exploration CG's that aren't really exploration CG's.

Saying that though, planetary graphics and sounds are betterer.
 
For this post, I am ignoring content issues ("All systems are the same, there is nothing interesting to find") and focusing purely on technical issues that plague explorers as of version 1.3.

Route planning in the galactic core (A roughly 3 thousand light year radius area surrounding Sgr A*) is essentially broken, causing any route longer than a few jumps to take ages to finish planning if it even finishes at all.

Selling data is a (in my opinion) needlessly tedious process. I think that any other CMDRs who have sold more than a few pages of data will agree. Pre-release, it was possible to sell all of ones data in a single transaction. This had the unfortunate side effect of overloading the servers. Prior to the implementation of the "sell all" and "sell page" options, explorers could only sell data one system at a time. At that time, I believe that the ability to sell an entire page of data was an acceptable compromise. That was almost six months ago. The intervening time has seen overhauls to missions, mining, criminal penalties, and more. Exploration has changed very little (although a 100% increase in revenue is a significant step in the right direction) and its most troublesome technical problems remain totally unaddressed.

From the fact that both route planning and selling cartographic data have both been severely deficient since the release of Elite: Dangerous, I infer that FD have put the improvement of exploration at a very low priority.

I do not expect either of these problems to be fixed any time soon. However, I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.

PS: Some say "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." Have we, as explorers, been too quiet while other players dominated the discussion about the future of the game? Do we need to whine louder to be heard? Ideally the answer would be no. Realistically, I think the answer might be yes.

PPS: Am I allowed to post the same thread to two different forums? I would love to generate discussion about this in the Elite Exploration section of the forum.


Exploration is probably a taboo subject at FD. Rarely do devs appear in exploration-related threads and talk about the 'mechanics' of it. I think (and would hope) that they're as upset, embarrassed, and as unsatisfied with what exploration turned out to be compared to what they actually wanted (going off their dialogue and the passionate dev diaries we saw about exploration). They probably had to implement what they did against their own personal wishes. I'm sure it'll get some love eventually though. 1.4 could be an upgrade focusing on fleshing out each playstyle? We can live in hope ;)
 
Same problems tried to jump out of a system six times - transaction server problem so given up for tonight, probably traveled no more than 600 ly this weekend with all the problems :( Hope FD pull their finger out and get it sorted still 2k ly to civilization. Also had the cannot retrieve commander problem most of Saturday.
 
Just headed out again to let PP settle down and within 1000ly of Sol I was getting disconnected every 15 jumps and getting worse. I played for 3 hours in the populated area before hand to play with the new mechanics and didn't get booted once. Also given up for the night.
 
I'm sure it'll get some love eventually though. 1.4 could be an upgrade focusing on fleshing out each playstyle? We can live in hope ;)

I want to disagree with one thing here.

I am not satisfied with living in hope. I am not satisfied with waiting for some 1.X that might never arrive. I am not satisfied with filing bug reports and getting a "We will investigate." Not anymore.

At the very least, I want somebody at Frontier to say "We are working on it," or even just "We hear you."

I admit that I am pretty powerless when it comes to development of ED, but I can do something. Even if that something is just making a couple of forum threads once in a while.
 
Infact, they bait new players like me with 400 billion stars and then I buy the game and see this. A joke...

Yup. Exploration was what interested me and made this game stand out from all the rest. Combat, trading, mining seems to have nothing particularly new to it. But exploration is remarkable or at least has the potential to be. Yet it is the thing FD chose to effectively ignore. Figures, knowing my luck.

Well, since I am heading back towards Sol with many millions worth of data, I think I'll just park outside the outer rings of wherever the heck I am and go play something else for a while. I'm not having nearly as many issues as many other explorers are reporting, but I don't want to take any chances.
 
Yup. Exploration was what interested me and made this game stand out from all the rest. Combat, trading, mining seems to have nothing particularly new to it. But exploration is remarkable or at least has the potential to be. Yet it is the thing FD chose to effectively ignore. Figures, knowing my luck.

Well, since I am heading back towards Sol with many millions worth of data, I think I'll just park outside the outer rings of wherever the heck I am and go play something else for a while. I'm not having nearly as many issues as many other explorers are reporting, but I don't want to take any chances.

Exactly like me. I am googeling potentional alternative games atm (is star citizen worth to try?). PM me for alternatives of ED... thx
 
exploration was tedious at best before 1.3 .. and I actually liked it.
pre-1.3, I was able to get home from a 10kly trip in two nights without a ton of time . Granted, I wasn't really doing more than honking, but I was able to do it.
After 1.3 .. forget it. I got about 500 light years out, with a 37 ly jump range, and gave up. Disconnects, honking now ten times worse than it was. I love exploring, but the core is going to wait a long time while they put these issues to rest.
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The problem is, what else is there? combat is terrible, it would be nice if there were some challenging npes, but your choices are grind out on absurdly easy elite npes or duke it out with combat pilots that have been doing combat as long as we've been exploring. and trading... whatever.
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hey, at least there's powerplay. I heard that was fun an immersive.

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Exactly like me. I am googeling potentional alternative games atm (is star citizen worth to try?). PM me for alternatives of ED... thx

Star citizen promises to be everything ed ... promised it would be.
Graphics are amazing, ships are amazing, you can walk around your own hangar, walk through your own ship. It's *supposed* to be a truly open universe.

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The problem is that it's still in beta (alpha?) you can play some of the simulators, "back" the game and get some ships to walk around in your hangar... but currently its really not a game, just more bits and pieces that people can try out.
 
Exploration is probably a taboo subject at FD. Rarely do devs appear in exploration-related threads and talk about the 'mechanics' of it. I think (and would hope) that they're as upset, embarrassed, and as unsatisfied with what exploration turned out to be compared to what they actually wanted (going off their dialogue and the passionate dev diaries we saw about exploration). They probably had to implement what they did against their own personal wishes. I'm sure it'll get some love eventually though. 1.4 could be an upgrade focusing on fleshing out each playstyle? We can live in hope ;)

I honestly think the very fact they're so quiet about it is for that very reason, they have something big planned and don't want to start getting people nosing in that direction early (flooding them with "include this!" requests, which they already get, but it would be ten fold if it was public knowledge that exploration was the next thing they'd give attention to.) Not to mention the backlash of people saying "Hey, fix all this crap here first before you get your head in the stars" and saying that ED is doomed all over again.

Seriously, when it comes to talking about the future, I can't help but think of War Games.

[video=youtube;uOoXwxqeVzg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoXwxqeVzg[/video]
 
Yeah I'm missing my exploring journey. I logged in once after the update to see if I could get in and got commander data not found (or something along those lines). Second time lucky I got in, but I just don't want to take the risk of exploring while the myriad of issues that have appeared since 1.3 are still prevalent in the game.
 
I honestly think the very fact they're so quiet about it is for that very reason, they have something big planned and don't want to start getting people nosing in that direction early (flooding them with "include this!" requests, which they already get, but it would be ten fold if it was public knowledge that exploration was the next thing they'd give attention to.) Not to mention the backlash of people saying "Hey, fix all this crap here first before you get your head in the stars" and saying that ED is doomed all over again.

Seriously, when it comes to talking about the future, I can't help but think of War Games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoXwxqeVzg

I sure hope you are right. I want so badly to buy a DBE and equip it for combat while exploring. I've already seen a stealth fighter sort of build for it. That would be cool against the insectoid invasion or whatever is coming our way out of the deep dark.
 
so how is it that some of us are not having any issues at all... been doing both honk and slurp and proper stuff for days now, both before and after 1.3 and not getting dodgy honks and not had a dropout for nearly 2 days. just uploaded 200 sets for the CG this evening and they were pretty rapid. just a bit puzzled and wanting to counterbalance the negative vibe in this thread...
 
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