Instant ship transfer is ok, but Auto pilot is not.
- Thread starter lysan
- Start date
Optional yes... But in order to pilot your ship, you must be seated in the pilots seat in the cocpit... So the "autopilot" or NPC pilot must be capable enough to give you time to run back to the cocpit from wherever in your ship you were, when the emergency situation appeared... ;-)
If not capable enough, BOOOM ! :-D
K.
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Just make sure you've got some slaves on board with you at all times
OH MY GOD, thanks for this ! I forgot to mention the beatiful slave girl i own, always waiting for me in my luxury cabin of my FDL! :-D
o7 Karlos
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90% of the deaths I've experienced have been "one trade run too many" related, where I would try to squeeze in that extra return trip and fall asleep at the stick. Usually during the lulling repetitiveness of hyperspace. Now sometimes I'd click the throttle off like I'm supposed to in hyperspace, but other times I'd snap awake to a death screen. I think that is what auto pilot would be used for. This is a space sim, and we all like flying, but sometimes it would be oh so sweet to take your hand off the stick for a minute and not have things to disasterously wrong. And if you go make a cup of coffee (or even tea, if you're into that) and come back to find you're being interdicted or your shields are already down, that's a fair bit more exciting than "drop, speed, escape" because it's unexpected and adrenaline inducing.
I really don't expect an auto pilot feature though. It is clear that there is a vocal group that would verbally rip FD to shreds over it and those of us who want it have already had our say, we're not up in arms spewing hate, so we're not the ones FD thinks of when the feature comes to mind.
These plan are at least from their own minds, so yes they are aware of it. My point is that (watch Scott manleys's video) when you travel huge distances, it gets really boring, really quick. The Galaxy is very beautiful, and we should have the Autopilot so that we can actually spend some time study the system map in the systems we travel through. Just because we need to align the ship manually and press (J) doesn't make the game more fun, it just make it super repetitive.
I do not want to remove the traveling time, I just want to remove the task of pressing J time after time after time when nothing happens. It's the same when you fly a airplane or are in a sailing boat, you set a course and then activate the AutoPilot.
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You Sir, got it 100%
Gotta ask yourself this...why the heck should I give two seconds of thought on how another player reaches their destination, as long as it takes the same amount of time, and has the same risks that a person manually flying faces? Its kinda like getting into a racing game server, only to find that the host restricted all cars to manual transmission because he feels that is the only real way to race a car. They are forcing their preference on others though it doesn't affect the gameplay overall.
I say encourage the inclusion of a feature that will later enhance the experience when moving around in ones ship.
I say encourage the inclusion of a feature that will later enhance the experience when moving around in ones ship.
Did you (not) play Frontier Elite 2? Cos that had Autopilot and was still a very engaging game.
Absolutely, and it will not make the game easier, not at all. By what I understand some people like to force people to do repetitive tasks. It doesn't add to the challenge of the the game, and it doesn't take anything away from it.
Oh, heck - let's just be able to jump to any system anywhere at any time regardless of distance! Do away with the jump range limitation and make every known system immediately reachable. I mean, it's where the game is heading anyway...
It would be cool to have AUTOPILOT !!! With walking in shp and on planets available you could stand up and do other stuff while on long trips, there will also be multicrew so you could instruct your crew to do stuff with a menu, do you remember the game Shores of Hazeron ? I used to have crew at the various stations of my ship and I just walked around and chat while on long trips, I had private quarters on all of my ships where I would spend my time watching the stars and planets, I would really love Autopilot and NPC crews on my ships in ED, and Yes you could order the crew to attack a ship, at your own risk cause the crew would be pretty much like NPC ships so not so strong at all
From a pure logic perspective, you are right. However, each action in a game is contextual and depends on many factors. Instant fueling of your tanks in a hangar bay, for example. No one has ever complained about this in a year and a half, but instant ship transfers set off alarms. Context is key.
I don't want to see instant ship transfers. Game or not the context of that does not make sense within established game mechanics. Sometimes it makes sense to delay and that needs to be determined on a case by case basis.
Still a good time to bring it up, as it's (in my opinion) very much needed.
To be honest we already have an auto pilot for docking (which is way more challenging for some than just not crashing into a star). I don;t see why I can't autopilot to Hutton Orbital.
A thousand times this.
And I'll add supercrusing around systems to that too, it's just pointing at a dot on the direction indicator and then riding the throttle. It requires enough attention that in anything but the longest supercruise runs you can't do anything else or you'll miss your destination. But not actually engaging or interesting enough to be worth doing it for it's own sake. Don't get me wrong I do enjoy supercruise but let me leave the simple task of pointing and slowing down/dropping out to my computer/copilot so I can actually enjoy the sights, atmosphere. Or catch up on some reading, plotting my route, communicating with NPC's (well maybe oneday)... Anything but another press J, turn, press J, turn watch slow press J.
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Honestly, I think this would make the game more boring, not less. The constant threat of interdiction already makes it so you have to always be paying attention to the game. Without an auto-pilot, you also have to make course corrections and such as you go, so you actually have something to do. If you were sitting with an auto-pilot handling that for you, then you would literally have nothing else to do but stare at the screen or shrink the window and do something else on the side while you wait.
Sure, you could just not use the auto-pilot, but gamers often don't know what gamers want. That sounds rather pretentious, but it remains a true fact most of the time in the game design field. Games, by nature, have to have limitations to overcome. When those are repetitive, people naturally want a solution to "fix" it, but at the same time, that fix impacts other things about how the game is perceived. Many would use auto-pilot and then get bored with the game since it doesn't provide a variety of things to do and doesn't encourage you to wander a bit. Seeing something fly by that peaks your interest to go check out as a detour or whatever.
Another concern would be exploration. An auto-pilot feature would remove most of the actual gameplay of exploration. There aren't NPCs out there interdicting, so it would just be a matter of setting autopilot to fly someplace and alt tabing back periodically. I believe this may also be the reason they don't give us calculated arrival times rather than the constantly shifting "time at current speed".
While I like the idea of a basic auto-pilot, I'm not sure it would actually benefit the game overall and might actually, counter-intuitively, make the game more boring rather than less.
Sure, you could just not use the auto-pilot, but gamers often don't know what gamers want. That sounds rather pretentious, but it remains a true fact most of the time in the game design field. Games, by nature, have to have limitations to overcome. When those are repetitive, people naturally want a solution to "fix" it, but at the same time, that fix impacts other things about how the game is perceived. Many would use auto-pilot and then get bored with the game since it doesn't provide a variety of things to do and doesn't encourage you to wander a bit. Seeing something fly by that peaks your interest to go check out as a detour or whatever.
Another concern would be exploration. An auto-pilot feature would remove most of the actual gameplay of exploration. There aren't NPCs out there interdicting, so it would just be a matter of setting autopilot to fly someplace and alt tabing back periodically. I believe this may also be the reason they don't give us calculated arrival times rather than the constantly shifting "time at current speed".
While I like the idea of a basic auto-pilot, I'm not sure it would actually benefit the game overall and might actually, counter-intuitively, make the game more boring rather than less.
Sure, when(if) spacelegs come along, then it's a whole different story. Many, many things could/should change at that time. But until then I vote no.
Hmm...ok, that's a start.
Like I said earlier, I'm not really taking a side either way on this. For me, adding autopilot neither adds or detracts from my experience.
My only stance is that I'd like to see other interactive elements added and improved before adding autopilot as I feel AP doesn't have a strong enough ROI.
How does that example equate to the discussion at hand? It doesn't. Do you feel this threatened when someone engages a autodocking computer? It's no different. I love docking manually. I enjoy flying through that slot every time, even now. Never at anytime that i've played this game, have I wondered about how another player is landing his ship in a base, or had thoughts of "hey you aren't playing right if you aren't manually flying your ship to your landing pad."
Arguments like that, are like watching some conservative right wing religious nut stating well if you are going to legalize gay marriage, you might as well allow people to marry a dog, or legalize bestiality.
If your gameplay basicly consist in pointing at a dot for 10min, then it's the epitome of poor gameplay. Yet, as you so aptly pointed out, this makes up most of what exploration is in ED.
That is kind of pointing to the cracks in a poorly designed piece and saying : "see, it's all good, this broken piece has cracks. As it should, nothing wrong here".
Let's be real for a minute and speak about stuff like netflix exploration, because I'm pretty sure I'm not alone doing it. In effect we have a gameplay offering such a low level of engagement
that you can engage in an other activity till something interesting happends. Such as locating an interesting system or planet and scan it fully / land on it. At the moment exploration is
90% filler (scoop, align, press J, keep ETA > 6s) and 10% interesting stuff (search galmap, scan system, take screenshots, explore planets and rings).
You can get somewhere like 60%/40% if you count stuff like building planteray nebulas DB and searching for super-giant stars engaging gameplay (I do, but that's me).
So, yeah I'd like to have an autopilot so I can alt-tab and work on a DB, or open the galmap and being notified when I reach the planet I want to land on. And if I need to cross 1K ly in a hurry,
I would enjoy to have the ability to search the galmap for interesting systems and POI for 20min while the ship gets there.
*No offense, but I kind of feel you're post is sarcastic, but I'm not sure about it
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I don't see the connection between Auto-pilot, and ship transfer. One has to do with control of your ship, the other has to do with control of inventory. The conflation is based on trying to shame FD into making a change they don;t seem willing to make. I'm with FD. To get your ships to another station, you actually have to be there.
There are threats to your ship when jumping between systems. The Pilot of the craft aught to be there to face them. Go ahead and do some logic-gymnastics to try and compare the two, I don;t mind. But, I don;t expect to be convinced.
There are threats to your ship when jumping between systems. The Pilot of the craft aught to be there to face them. Go ahead and do some logic-gymnastics to try and compare the two, I don;t mind. But, I don;t expect to be convinced.
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