The Galaxy - Is its size now considered to be a barrier to gameplay by the Developers?

[zimms]

Exactly. But know that FD talked about it being instant, people suddenly think that's the only way it should be and won't give it up anymore.

If tomorrow FD decides that new players should start with 1 billion credits and somebody mentions his/her concerns, the replies would be "But where's the fun in that. Don't you want fun?!", "You can simply not use the money", "Just suicide a thousand times to get back to 1k credits", "It doesn't affect you. Let me have fun".

And that would even be a way smaller problem than instant teleportation. At least it wouldn't compromise gameplay and lore too much.

 

[LuciusEsox]

Your over thinking it now .. Thats the issue.

Maybe because I know (to a point) how games are made and that I know this is all just data sitting on a database somewhere it doesn't affect me. But in the end it is just a game, if you look for the cracks in any game you will find them. You just happening to be looking harder now than before.

2.2 wont chnage my attitude towards the game, I know its all fake, I knew that from the start, you will get over it, you have to if you want to continue to enjoy playing it.

With respect, and there talks a techo... For me you are not right. Why would I want to play something if I am thinking of how it "really" runs.. Like thinking about humans as a collection of biological events..

Oh...

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

The lead designer recently said that it is better to not think about how things work.

I know. He's right. I have posted elsewhere that when FD resort to magic, then the best lore is no lore. If it is impossible to come up with a compelling story to explain it, don't even bother trying. Effectively, the +99 bag of holding we drag all those materials around in (i.e. magic) has just been enhanced to a plus infinity bag of holding, because it has an Anaconda, 2 asps, a viper and a mark iii in it as well. Not to mention several modified FSDs.

For those of us who try to play the game as if we were there, making in game decisions for in game reasons, this is hard to take. We might as well have an menu when we log in asking where we want to be and what ship we want to be in. Scratch that, a menu that asks us what we want to do today, and it automagically takes us to the best place to do that today. They might as well abandon the whole traveling infrastructure, and go back to a few PoIs in space.

 

[Leper Messiah]

Barely.

Strip an AspE down and engineer for a 50LY jump range and see how long it takes you to get anywhere.
Across the bubble takes under five minutes. The new mechanic enables every ship to effectively travel that fast, because the travel speed of your slowest, smallest jumping ship with a 2t fuel tank and no fuel scoop will equate to the travel speed of your fastest, furthest jumping ship. This is the new travelling paradigm.

The entire span of humanity's ambition can be crossed in under five minutes. That's really kind of pathetic and not at all awe inspiring. It used to take me five times longer to traverse some of the more expansive wilderness zones in Everquest. EQ will seem larger than the Bubble. Not cool.

Over 25,000 worlds in inhabited space, and we'll be passing like shadows through them; only interacting where we choose to.

Erm...if the size of the bubble/galaxy is so important then just DON'T take advantage of all the ways it can be smaller. Look at this scenario:

2 people doing a trip across America, one by car, one by air. The one in the car stops off where they want and see's all the sights but it takes months, the one travelling by air sees nothing but airports and it takes them hours. the one travelling by air then moans at the Air transport industry saying that it spoilt their "trip" across America and they saw nothing.

Don't fit the best jump drives, don't engineer them to be even better, Don't strip down that AspE, Don't use the ships transfer option. Players have the ability to make the game as hard as they want, players DON'T have the ability to make things easier, the devs have to do that.

Want it hard? Fine, then PLAY the game that way and don't complain how other people play the game.

 

[ndrwc]

For those of us who try to play the game as if we were there, making in game decisions for in game reasons, this is hard to take. We might as well have an menu when we log in asking where we want to be and what ship we want to be in. Scratch that, a menu that asks us what we want to do today, and it automagically takes us to the best place to do that today. They might as well abandon the whole traveling infrastructure, and go back to a few PoIs in space.

I think you just described Star Citizen

 

[LuciusEsox]

Erm...if the size of the bubble/galaxy is so important then just DON'T take advantage of all the ways it can be smaller. Look at this scenario:

2 people doing a trip across America, one by car, one by air. The one in the car stops off where they want and see's all the sights but it takes months, the one travelling by air sees nothing but airports and it takes them hours. the one travelling by air then moans at the Air transport industry saying that it spoilt their "trip" across America and they saw nothing.

Don't fit the best jump drives, don't engineer them to be even better, Don't strip down that AspE, Don't use the ships transfer option. Players have the ability to make the game as hard as they want, players DON'T have the ability to make things easier, the devs have to do that.

Want it hard? Fine, then PLAY the game that way and don't complain how other people play the game.

How others can play the game effects EVERYONE which is why people complain..

 

[Weps]

Want it hard? Fine, then PLAY the game that way and don't complain how other people play the game.

Perfectly fine if you're playing Solo. But what about cooperative or competitive play. This was supposed to be a multiplayer game after all.

From your example, 2 people are doing a trip across America, but not just for the sake of doing a trip. They need to meet at the destination. In this case, meeting (cooperative play) is the end goal. The person talking the plane looks at the guy talking the car and says: "Am I supposed to wait months in an airport just so you can see some pretty mountains? Get your butt over here!"

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

How about a Compromise.

I don't think anyone likes the 3D printing thing, its just wrong. I am all against instant transfer, but I see some people want it, how about this:

Story and Lore, the basics:
A scientist has discovered a way to teleport stuff using quantum entanglement and witch space, maybe they are not sure how it works properly, you can get some good story ideas from this.

It doesn't work on organic material very well, so putting someone through the process will likely kill them. Well it did with all the test subjects/slaves.
You can only get this service at Hi-Tech systems as they are the only ones with the tech and the knowledge and money to put it into place.
It is also very expensive, so cargo running is still by far the cheapest way to move goods.

The reasons for the high price, is that it will make people think about what they want to do. Something is kicking off near, I can jump to the nearest Hi-Tech system and transfer my ship which has to be at another Hi-Tech system or do I not pay that price and go get the ship myself.

It stops breaking the mission system, give the players options and allows them to think what the best option is for them, stops players having a swiss army knife of ships in their pocket as most times. Ships will still need their jump drives etc.
But their are limitations to the system.

It will give players options instead of the automatic go to button, which everyone will use. Options are good, both have their good and bad points, one takes time, the other a lot of credits.

 

[Angus]

Not really - it's down to the facilities they have and the ship manufacturers - it's not a machine that spits out ships - more like a larger process.

Besides in this case the convenience of the feature means that a little look away is required, in the same way that we don't make you wait for cargo to be unloaded.

Michael

Lifting your shopping out of your car is one thing, matter transferring the your car instantaneously to another country is something else. This isn't a "little look away" Michael, its selling off a part of Elite's credibility for the price of a quick fix.

I honestly believe FD need to look at this again and find a workable compromise.

 

[MarcusKross]

Ohh i am so gonna tackle these questions by myself.

What is the real reason for this ? I mean why do it at all ? instantly that is.

Bottomline it is the easiest imaginable way to implement the feature. Other types of ship transport systems even the players came up with ( even the simplest ones ) need some sort of extra coding/calculations. Why spend time with work when you can count the money you earned from your players who are suffering from ADD?

Admittedly I don't frequent these boards as much as I used to but I was aware that people have wanted ship transfer for a long time, so was there a large lobby of players who influenced the instant decision ?

For this one i have no idea, ship transfer was a cool idea which was supposed to enrich the game see where we sit with it today.

What does in FD's terms "making the game more accessible mean ?"

Catering for people with ADD.

Is, as the OP said the size of the galaxy now creating problems and are those problems player base size decreasing and you think it is accessibility which is the issue ?

I don't know if the player base size decreasing since i don't have the statistics but i don't think the accessibility is the issue. People lose interest varies person to person. ADD guy loses it in 5 minutes because there are no question marks on top of stations or an arrow guiding them to where they should be. Guys like me have thousands of hours of playtime under their belt been here since alpha or beta or release, buying the vision of David Braben and trusting the devs to deliver on it.

It will just make the grind faster and give the people the illusion they are doing things quicker, for a while, until they become used to it that is, then what ?

The Grind™.. but you are right yes. Taxi meta will be the new navigation standard then who knows? I am expecting space dragons since we have magic now.

Meh win button ?

You arrived at the next system claim 100 000 000 million button SooN™.

How about for once trying to use some ... and I think <a swear word> would be entirely appropriate at that point in the sentence ... imagination when trying to improve peoples playing experience.

You kiss your mother with that mouth?

Design and implement around the easiest concept, dip it into a barrel of handwavium and there you go.

Make it easier for em to get more.. more I say. do more, have more.... ! Who is running the show there HSBC.. ?

No. An axe<man> and a cowboy if you can believe.

is DB real or a Hologram ?

I am fairly certain he is real and also a great person.

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

I wrote this somewhere else, but since it kind of answers your question, let me just copy it here:

In fact, everyone who ever asked for ship transport specifically requested that it should not be instant. Here are just a few examples:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/231632-Ship-Towing-Transport-Service

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/281865-Ship-transport

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/103669-Having-ships-transported-to-new-locations

If you search the forums for "Ship transport" you will find that universally everyone who ever mentioned the time aspect of the mechanic, requested the it to not be instant but take some time to complete.

Agreed.

However, I do not imagine that anyone who asked for ship transfer (and I'm sure I agreed with the request, even if I did not open a thread on it) thought through all the implications. Some of the implications we are worrying about (the long range taxi, micro FSD combat ships, possible loss of ship diversity, and so on) become issues even if there is realistically timed transfer. They are just an inevitability.

So as soon as FD started to think about the design of ship transfer, they must have gone through all those issues. Good designers (I'm one of those in a business area, not games) do that. You have to think through the ramifications. So what do you do? You could limit the use of ship transfer to the fleet consolidation use cases that caused various people to ask for it by putting in artificial caps and limits and making it very slow so the only practical use was to consolidate a fleet. Or you could make it universal and accept the game changing implications of doing so. And if you are doing that, then I agree with those that say a small delay is (literally) a waste of time. So I can understand how they got to instant magic. But the magic and the game changing stuff is far too big a price to pay from where I sit. FD disagree. Or, rather, FD almost certainly went through this debate internally (but with fewer people, and face-to-face so it did not take so long), and the consensus that emerged was for instant. Michael has already told us that Sandro initially favoured timed. Was he convinced to change his mind, or just outvoted? It doesn't matter. We are where we are.

Or they could just do it instantly because it is so cheap and easy, and damn the consequences. If it has not already happened, they will soon have spent longer explaining and justifying the feature than it took to code it.

 

[tarragon]

I am fairly certain he is real and also a great person.

He just no longer cares about making a game he'd play. Instant transfer comes, obviously from Brookes and making game accessible to more players, and Braben doesn't care. He talks about physics, but he is no longer involved in the game deeply. Producers and other execs with no soul took over.

 

[Niamhy]

"loss of ship diversity"... everyone flies the same 5 ships anyway (possibly with the same 5 loadouts), what diversity exactly?

 

[LuciusEsox]

Ohh i am so gonna tackle these questions by myself.



Bottomline it is the easiest imaginable way to implement the feature. Other types of ship transport systems even the players came up with ( even the simplest ones ) need some sort of extra coding/calculations. Why spend time with work when you can count the money you earned from your players who are suffering from ADD?



For this one i have no idea, ship transfer was a cool idea which was supposed to enrich the game see where we sit with it today.



Catering for people with ADD.



I don't know if the player base size decreasing since i don't have the statistics but i don't think the accessibility is the issue. People lose interest varies person to person. ADD guy loses it in 5 minutes because there are no question marks on top of stations or an arrow guiding them to where they should be. Guys like me have thousands of hours of playtime under their belt been here since alpha or beta or release, buying the vision of David Braben and trusting the devs to deliver on it.



The Grind™.. but you are right yes. Taxi meta will be the new navigation standard then who knows? I am expecting space dragons since we have magic now.



You arrived at the next system claim 100 000 000 million button SooN™.




You kiss your mother with that mouth?

Design and implement around the easiest concept, dip it into a barrel of handwavium and there you go.



No. An axe<man> and a cowboy if you can believe.




I am fairly certain he is real and also a great person.

Lol... yes I apologise for the expletive reference....... :x

 

[Kitster]

It's my dream to be able to write an official novel for the ED universe, so I need to be able to rationalize game mechanics (and adjust them as needed) to work in the fiction.

Thats a really laudable ambition mate and all power to you. The problem is, once you've rationalised everything, written and published your novel FD can still subsequently change the ED universe is ways the break your story. A little consistency or at least plausibility within the existing framework is a good thing. Both for past and future novelists. Instant 3D printing of anything including huge complicated ships has a seismic effect on the Elite universe narrative.

Don't get me wrong, 3D printing in SiFi is great and very plausible judging by todays real life advances in Additive Manufacturing (thank you for that Deadspin) but where it has been successfully used in stories its implications have usually been well thought out and the consequences integrated into the fabric of the fictional universe. It's poor form just start explaining stuff away by saying yeah, well... 3D printing and then pasting over the cracks it causes by, well, err 'licenses'.

I'd rather they didn't bother trying to justify it at all.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I know. He's right. I have posted elsewhere that when FD resort to magic, then the best lore is no lore. If it is impossible to come up with a compelling story to explain it, don't even bother trying

As much as it pains me to agree with you on something I have to agree with you on this one.

I can handwave away the instant transfer in my own way (by ignoring the fact that its instant... i just imagine my CMDR has nipped to the local space bar or whatever until the ship arrives). The 3D printing idea has so many holes its not fully, and just opens up more lore questions elsewhere.

 

[orfeboy]

I would rather no transfer over insta transfer

Its removing a vital part of the game world for me, fhe travel time, the different range of ships, the fact a fighter cannot move thru the systems as fast as a asp.

If it comes in, youll see people buy a disposable long range hauler, jump 300ly, thow the ship away, magically summons the fleet to you.

So that fdl with a low jump range.. who cares about that anymore. In fact fit it with the worse fsd you can. It can be insta called anywhere.

In fact except for you one long range ship, asp or anaconda, why bother with any good fsds on other ships.

The game play is going to be worse, with people essentially subverting the scale dynamic of the universe

This is pretty much exactly what I have been saying.

Add to that: Outfitting in all the stations that FD has gone to the trouble of making diverse is now meaningless. Allplayers will do is fly around and use the best outfitters calling ships when needed. Places like IX and Shinrarta Dezra will become the place everyone just asps over to and calls all their ships to to upgrade them. This is what I mean when I say that FD are cheapening the richness of their own game.

We already have a RNG galaxy. The diversity of the galaxy is limited enough by the fact it is not hand crafted. Whatever richness is actually there is being reduced further. When you look at what we stand to gain from this feature vs what we stand to lose, is it really worth it?

I completely agree, I would rather have no ship transfer than have instant transfer as FD have described it. It either needs to have a timer placed upon it, made silly expensive to transport ships in order to discourage its frequent use, or else put some other way of controlling it in place.

FD will shoot themselves in the foot with this one. You see, when they originally designed this game the idea was that you only had one ship in your posession at any one time. The BGS was designed to have frequent movement within the galaxy pushing its buttons to make it move. Then, they introduced the idea of owning more than one ship and what that did was encourage players to stay in one place. That is where their ships are and so they would never stray far. This instant transfer is an attempt to break that cycle. But in doing that they are going to break other areas of the game.

 

[Michael Brookes]

So I've just caught up with the thread. Thanks for everyone's input, as I've said before we do keep it in mind. There will be further discussions on the feature, although I do still feel that adding a time delay weakens the feature more than it solves any problems. One issue does resonate, and that's how far the jump can be, so we'll look into that. We still reserve the right to disagree with you

I see that people don't get that printing thing, which is a shame as it is used quite a bit anyway - for example food cartridges. We can review and change if needed, to be honest the feature is what is important in this instance. Yes, I appreciate the difference in scale, and as I mentioned before we're not talking about a single machine that just spits out a ship, it combines more economical processes as well.

The cost of the feature is also a balance, one that we'll refine through beta. Obviously we need to keep it accessible.

Michael

 

[MarcusKross]

He just no longer cares about making a game he'd play. Instant transfer comes, obviously from Brookes and making game accessible to more players, and Braben doesn't care. He talks about physics, but he is no longer involved in the game deeply. Producers and other execs with no soul took over.

Personally i cannot say that for sure.. at least for now. DB is the CEO of Frontier, guy has a company to run and honestly i would not expect from him to keep an eye on day to day operations of his devs. One thing i am fairly certain tho is he did not have floonetwork magical teleport in mind when he thought about space travel in Elite.

 

[Comrade Error]

So I've just caught up with the thread. Thanks for everyone's input, as I've said before we do keep it in mind. There will be further discussions on the feature, although I do still feel that adding a time delay weakens the feature more than it solves any problems. One issue does resonate, and that's how far the jump can be, so we'll look into that. We still reserve the right to disagree with you

I see that people don't get that printing thing, which is a shame as it is used quite a bit anyway - for example food cartridges. We can review and change if needed, to be honest the feature is what is important in this instance. Yes, I appreciate the difference in scale, and as I mentioned before we're not talking about a single machine that just spits out a ship, it combines more economical processes as well.

The cost of the feature is also a balance, one that we'll refine through beta. Obviously we need to keep it accessible.

Michael

Guys I got it! If you don't like what the devs have to say just mention piracy, it's basicly holy water against them, they will not come NEAR it. Believe me. [big grin]