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.
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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