2.2's Instant Ship and Module Transport - Yay or Nay?

[TomR]

Except that Jaques doesn't use the 'modern' FSD, but the older tried and tested hyper drive engines from FFE and FE which take days to transit between system s

So what? They can't send your ship on a carrier with the same tech? You need a lore reason for every little thing the game does?

 

[CMDR Robyn Highart]

No one force you to use a feature you dislike.

You are defending "your vision" of the game.

Things are bit different.

Can we close the thread already? I think all the logical points have been made by now. People are just posting the same weak arguments without reading the hundred posts where they're destroyed.

 

[CaptainKremmen]

Why would anyone think it should take time to transfer the ship? A 10% hull on a federal corvette takes a fraction of a second to fix when in reality it should take several months. Where is the outcry on that?

I've seen that covered about fifty times so far. Even mentioned it myself.

How would you assess that question, and what answer would you come up with?

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

I think it's highly likely FD's decision had very little to do with "wanting to improve gameplay", and instead had a lot more to do with "being able to deliver ship transfer with minimal dev effort".

I really don't think that 'highly likely' is strong enough. We know what they really wanted to do from the DDF. I would be astonished if development effort is not the main driver here.

 

[Angus]

This totally nails it.

The time it takes to get somewhere in Elite Dangerous is part of the game. As others have commented, there is still plenty to do while waiting for your ship to arrive (it's what we're all doing at the moment!). So, I'm totally in favour of having the ability to have your ship moved, but there should definitely be a constraint based on distance

Agreed. I can't believe Michael Brookes is in favour of the instantaneous idea. I think his take would be, "Space is big - deal with it." Definitely some delay is required in my view, or you effectively wear all your ships on a key ring.


Or risk being asked, "Are you pleased to see me, or is that in an Anaconda in your pocket?"

Dear mods, I did not name the ships!

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

So what? They can't send your ship on a carrier with the same tech? You need a lore reason for every little thing the game does?

i think the issue here (and this imo is the devs fault ) You are clearly happy playing Sandro's vision of the game.

I bought David Braben's vision of the game, and whilst if pressed on the matter they would both probably swear they are singing from the same hymm sheet, if you listen to them speak, they clearly are not imo.

 

[Khelder]

As other people are saying, presenting the info is the easy bit, it's the "Writing the scheduler" and "Ensuring that everything works ON TIME" that's the really horrible bit. Especially when you're talking about say, 300,000 non-concurrent users with possibly an average of 3-4 ships and let's say they want to warp 1 or 2 of those a week. That's the kind of CPU butchering nightmare that nobody wants to walk into. Realtime management and scheduling of an ongoing queue of approx 50,000 database queries constantly shifting around and being bounced and forth to the transaction database AND player saves? THAT SOUNDS LIKE FUN TO ME!

Sorry. But that's really over-complicating it. I mean really, really, over-complicating.

Hitting the TRANSFER button would:

• Send request to servers (I want to transfer ship A to station B)
• Quick sanity check takes place (does ship A exist? does player own ship A? is player at B? etc)
• Quick calculation takes place to calculate travel distance (you could forget routing here - keep it simple - point to point would be a sufficient). Ship A data updated with: transit to B, arrival time C.

Every query on shipyard screen (which we're doing anyway - no additional load):

• Send query for player ship information (pass along that we're at station B, but that should already be known)
• Quick test (are any of the ships in transit to station B? If so, is current time greater than arrival time? If so, clear transit state and update location)
• Query now returns some additional data.
• Present to player accordingly.

Done

Adding notifications (infrastructure):

• Implement a notification queue: player, time, message.
• Messaging app on a server has sole purpose of iterating through that queue and delivering when required.
• Messaging app finds a message with appropriate time - push to player client.

Addint notifications (transfer):

• When player requests transfer and sanity checks are complete, add delivery message to queue.

Really, there are AWS technologies that FD could likely use off the shelf for some of this stuff. I use Azure, but I'm certain AWS has comparable.

 

[Robert Maynard]

As other people are saying, presenting the info is the easy bit, it's the "Writing the scheduler" and "Ensuring that everything works ON TIME" that's the really horrible bit. Especially when you're talking about say, 300,000 non-concurrent users with possibly an average of 3-4 ships and let's say they want to warp 1 or 2 of those a week. That's the kind of CPU butchering nightmare that nobody wants to walk into. Realtime management and scheduling of an ongoing queue of approx 50,000 database queries constantly shifting around and being bounced and forth to the transaction database AND player saves? THAT SOUNDS LIKE FUN TO ME!

It doesn't take very many players to account for 50,000 ship relocations a week - and that's just playing the game - jumping between systems, moving around systems - location is periodically stored even when in one system (as can be seen by the location when joining the game after a connection drop).

 

[Eymerich]

Can we close the thread already? I think all the logical points have been made by now. People are just posting the same weak arguments without reading the hundred posts where they're destroyed.

good idea. Who is against the new feature didn't show a reason good enough to bring me on the other side.

 

[WeirdWizard]

3000 posts in 36 hours must be a record, i would love to be a fly on the wall a frontier on Monday morning.

Not even close, you should of seen the storm that erupted when they pulled offline mode at the 11th hour. Didn't help then either.

 

[Slopey]

So does the fact that I was able to take a combat fit Anaconda to Jacques bother you at all? Because I'm definitely not an "under equipped" explorer facing off impossible odds...

You keep using this argument, and as you're already aware, nobody has an issue with you flying a combat Condie out to Jacqs.

What people have an issue with is you flying a FSD maxed Asp out to Jacqs in record time, then summoning a Combat Condie. Or you summoning a Vulture and FDL and Cutter instantly, after you got there in your Combat Condie.

Please stop repeating the same thing over and over again and ignoring the answer, no?

 

[CMDR Robyn Highart]

good idea. Who is against the new feature didn't show a reason good enough to bring me on the other side.

You didn't read any of it. But be that way..

 

[kofeyh]

So what? They can't send your ship on a carrier with the same tech? You need a lore reason for every little thing the game does?

Actually someone suggested that. It didn't go down well. Frankly what frontier are currently offering, is what they want to offer. Same with variable jump ranges, same with stations that aren't all identical and same with virtually all mechanics.

Yes, there are limitations as to what they can do. But of all things to decide "this far, and no further" for the whole performance concerns of frontiers servers (which I am sure they appreciate) it's teleporting ships.

This ignores that most of what we have now is a function of desired outcomes, more so than just a function of limitations. Yes, I don't doubt there is a laundry list of things Frontier want to do but the tech may not facilitate. But they've managed to get this far?

We wouldn't have half the mechanics we do, if it was just a bit computational heavy or a bit of a challenge.

 

[Lendri]

One: Jaques has shown that matter can be thrown through hyperspace over huge distances given enough resources. Why shouldn't it be possible to do that to a ship, paying for the necessary fuel that is then used to feed an Inanimate Matter Accelerator to transport an object that has an infinitessimal fraction of the mass of a station? There is no real argument against that IMAO at this point in Elite history.

Two: You can die at Beagle Point and instantly respawn in the safety of a core system. Maybe that should take into account the time it would take a measly little escape pod to bridge that distance? Would a few weeks be a good amount of time for that?

Three: When you detonate your souped-up Clipper with all the best engineer modules that time an money could buy, you can instantly buy it back for a fraction of its value. Would you feel better if that process cost a lot on top of the travel time from point Two?

I get this argument. But the respawn/buyback thing is balanced by the fact that you have died, losing money, failing your missions, losing exploration data, losing journey progress, not to mention the plain humiliation of being killed. So there is a penalty for these things, which mitigates the realism-breaking aspect of respawning. As for jumping/FTL travel, that's a legit part of the game universe without which there wouldn't be a game. It's part of what you buy into and a pretty standard scifi trope.

Instant ship teleportation, as proposed by Frontier, doesn't compensate for itself in the same way, and raises the odd question of why a civilization that can teleport giant spaceships needs me to take 6t of poo from Sothis to Hecate for 2mil credits

 

[CaptainKremmen]

I'd be crying about now, if I had human tear ducts.
Thankfully I don't.

Won't surprise me if some of the PvP folk start running around with fleets with varying types of loadouts so if they die, they just pick another, more effective build against what just killed them.

All people really wanted was a way to move their ships to where they wanted to...as they relocatearoud the Universe.
To allow them to do so instantly is just a really bad idea which will be exploited. It also makes a mockery of any sense of time and jump mechanics.
It should take time to deliver a ship.

You've cottoned on too, eh.

So has Paramemetic, I'm sure.


Yes, the signature use of this mechanic in PvP won't be to get a ship somewhere fast. It will be to have a full set of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock offensive/counter combination ships "on call", anywhere, any time.

Expect anything but the most casual of PvP to boil down to this.


If you're not prepping your full spread of ship build combos now, you're being left behind!

 

[warbaby2]

i think the issue here (and this imo is the devs fault ) You are clearly happy playing Sandro's vision of the game.

I bought David Braben's vision of the game, and whilst if pressed on the matter they would both probably swear they are singing from the same hymm sheet, if you listen to them speak, they clearly are not imo.

Not at all, and listeing to the off site/pre recorded interviews with DB back to back to the staghe presentatiom did more then just sting a little, to be honest...

 

[Goose4291]

So what? They can't send your ship on a carrier with the same tech? You need a lore reason for every little thing the game does?

If you sent a ship on a carrier with that same tech, it'!d take days to arrive (rather than being instantaneous).

To be honest I like the idea of a living breathing universe with rules and constants that we as players have to adapt our playstyles to that doesn't magically change to suit making the experience more convenient for those involved. But I think that comes from Frontier's attempts to cater to every gamer type they can, with their marketing, hype and reaction to community handwringing events like this to support it.

 

[Trueno33]

That isn't true. You could "rent" a ship while the repairs are done to your other ship. You could still play the game. Realism!

That's not a bad idea, actually [sarcasm]

 

[Theodrid]

good idea. Who is against the new feature didn't show a reason good enough to bring me on the other side.

How on earth could you have missed the posts with good reasons for being against instant ship transfer?, oh that's right, selective viewing. Come on, the potential effects on powerplay, community goals, gold rush elements, Jaques and many more have been well presented. Ship transfer with a decent delay is still a quality of life improvement on what we have now, instant transfer, could potentially at least, have a real adverse effect on many elements. This absolutely reeks of instant gratification, and sorry, just because I have 2 flies in my soup, (instant travel upon death, instant repair etc), does not mean that I want 20 more in it with a lazily implemented and ill conceived mechanic such as insta-tranfer.

 

[Eymerich]

You didn't read any of it. But be that way..

Only because i disagree with you?

Btw: I have read if not all, mostly of it.