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

[V'larr]

I'm not sure I'd qualify things a player imagines in game are really gameplay.

To be fair, it worked for Undertale....[rolleyes]

Like you, at first, I was against the idea entirely...but so long as it's kept *believable* within the context of the game that already exists so far, then it's fine, really. That word "instant" is what causes a mess.

 

[MajorHavoc]

Instant transfer of anything in Elite surely defeats it's entire ethos ? Please do not do this. Can we not wait until the crew/npc systems are completed before transfer is considered ? This idea is way too cheap for this great game ! I would rather have faster FSD travel than this as a solution. I understand that a lot of coding would be required to flesh out the ability to fly alongside npc crew and see them arriving with a ship being relocated to a home station but please do this first. Anyone else remember "Carrier Command" also from the 1980's where you could view in realtime the movements of your assets ? Networking/Multiplayer seems to have put a heavy burden on this version of Elite.

 

[master_xean]

Have some of you lose your sense?

The #1 design flaw in E so far has been the inability to quickly and easily transfer your ships and modules to where you want them to be. It's the single greatest criticism of the game.

Instant transfer of your ships and modules from one location to another is by far the biggest improvement they're making to the game since its release.

There is no sensible argument against it, no argument that actually makes any sense.

 

[Zesty Crab Legs]

The solution is simple. Instant Ship/Module transfer. Anyone who doesn't want it to be instant can set their own timer on their phone or some such.

Why do you care to dictate how other people play a single player game?

 

[Brian of Ardagh]

Have some of you lose your sense?

The #1 design flaw in E so far has been the inability to quickly and easily transfer your ships and modules to where you want them to be. It's the single greatest criticism of the game.

Instant transfer of your ships and modules from one location to another is by far the biggest improvement they're making to the game since its release.

There is no sensible argument against it, no argument that actually makes any sense.

Did you read through the 7681 posts prior to yours? Somewhere in there you will find plenty of sensible reasons, you may not agree with them but they are sensible to the people that made them.

Why does ship transfers need to be instant? Are you completely unable to play the game if a ship transfer took 5 minutes?

Finally, I think if we did a poll, the biggest single complaint would be that ED is a mile wide and an inch deep, that one seems to get said quite a bit. ED could use more content and more player activities. How will instant ship transfers add content or player activities? Sure, it will make it easier to get the ship you want to use closer to the activities you want to participate in but it doesn't add more activities. The people that think ED is only an inch deep will be saying the same thing even after ship transfers is implemented.

 

[cheesenbiscuits]

Let me tell you a bit of gameplay I did over the weekend... And then let's consider how "immediate" and "delayed" might affect it?


Heading back to a CG, I passed right through an Engineers system I'm current crafting with, and then on to the CG at LFT 133 to do a few runs on the Gold related CG. I would have like to have done a few bounty hunting runs in LFT 133 but I didn't have an appropriate ship there.

With Instant Ship Transportation

• Fly to LFT 133 and do some Gold runs.
• Call over my bounty hunting ship (instantly) and use it.

With Delayed Ship Transportation

• Consider if while flying though my Engineers system if its worth me stopping off at the engineer to call some of my other ships over there, so they're there next time I arrive?
• Fly to LFT 133 and call my bounty hunting ship over.
• Do some Gold runs.
• My bounty hunting ship has now arrived so use it.

Which gives "chompier" more considered and interesting(?) gameplay?

With instant tranfer you could still have done the "chompier" gameplay.

 

[master_xean]

Did you read through the 7681 posts prior to yours? Somewhere in there you will find plenty of sensible reasons, you may not agree with them but they are sensible to the people that made them.

Why does ship transfers need to be instant? Are you completely unable to play the game if a ship transfer took 5 minutes?

Finally, I think if we did a poll, the biggest single complaint would be that ED is a mile wide and an inch deep, that one seems to get said quite a bit. ED could use more content and more player activities. How will instant ship transfers add content or player activities? Sure, it will make it easier to get the ship you want to use closer to the activities you want to participate in but it doesn't add more activities. The people that think ED is only an inch deep will be saying the same thing even after ship transfers is implemented.

A 5 minute pointless time-waste is not reasonable.

I've read the writings of these people, its why I asked if they'd lost their sense.

 

[CaptainKremmen]

A 5 minute pointless time-waste is not reasonable.

I've read the writings of these people, its why I asked if they'd lost their sense.

I fail to see why it is "pointless" and "not reasonable" for something that is supposedly a machine for travelling places to take time to travel from one place to another.

 

[master_xean]

I fail to see why it is "pointless" and "not reasonable" for something that is supposedly a machine for travelling places to take time to travel from one place to another.

Because it is a pointless waste of time.

If you want to wait five minutes, just wait five minutes.

You don't need some kind of special permission to wait.

 

[V'larr]

The #1 design flaw in E so far has been the inability to quickly and easily transfer your ships and modules to where you want them to be. It's the single greatest criticism of the game.

Completely disagree. That's not a flaw, that's believable game design. "Oh look, travelling across mind-boggling amounts of space takes time and effort! And it's been shaved down to a reasonable yet believable & playable amount!"

And you see that as a flaw, do you? [rolleyes]

Instant transfer of your ships and modules from one location to another is by far the biggest improvement they're making to the game since its release.

"Have you lost your senses?"

With instant tranfer you could still have done the "chompier" gameplay.

You totally missed the point of the quote you posted. I suggest reading it again, slowly, and if that doesn't work, I will spell it out for you:

Option 1: Handwavium instant finger-snap impulsive instant gratification.

Option 2: Interesting decision-making and emergent gameplay. (Isn't using cliches accurately fun?)

A 5 minute pointless time-waste is not reasonable.
I've read the writings of these people, its why I asked if they'd lost their sense.

1. It's not pointless, it's believable. And it's only a waste of time if you insist on doing absolutely nothing while your ship is being transferred. You'd have complete freedom to do whatever you wish during that time, both ingame and without. Frankly speaking it takes you more time to supercruise to the average station. So please don't exaggerate about how "unreasonable" it is.

2. If you can't be bothered to be reasonable and understanding, why do you expect to receive such treatment in return? [noob]

 

[master_xean]

Ya the game has too many time sinks already, v'larr, I agree.

Its why i'm having so much trouble wrapping my head around the opposition to what will literally be the single biggest improvement of the game to date.

Like I told that other one, if you want to wait for things, just wait for them!

You don't need special permission from the game to wait.

 

[cheesenbiscuits]

Completely disagree. That's not a flaw, that's believable game design. "Oh look, travelling across mind-boggling amounts of space takes time and effort! And it's been shaved down to a reasonable yet believable & playable amount!"

And you see that as a flaw, do you? [rolleyes]



"Have you lost your senses?"



You totally missed the point of the quote you posted. I suggest reading it again, slowly, and if that doesn't work, I will spell it out for you:

Option 1: Handwavium instant finger-snap impulsive instant gratification.

Option 2: Interesting decision-making and emergent gameplay. (Isn't using cliches accurately fun?)



1. It's not pointless, it's believable. And it's only a waste of time if you insist on doing absolutely nothing while your ship is being transferred. You'd have complete freedom to do whatever you wish during that time, both ingame and without. Frankly speaking it takes you more time to supercruise to the average station. So please don't exaggerate about how "unreasonable" it is.

2. If you can't be bothered to be reasonable and understanding, why do you expect to receive such treatment in return? [noob]

So when you get your way what will you do whilst you're waiting?

 

[Brian of Ardagh]

Ya the game has too many time sinks already, v'larr, I agree.

Its why i'm having so much trouble wrapping my head around the opposition to what will literally be the single biggest improvement of the game to date.

Like I told that other one, if you want to wait for things, just wait for them!

You don't need special permission from the game to wait.

Since there is no ship transfer today, I would travel to where a ship is if I need it. In that case I would also look to see if there are missions that will take me in that direction. I would also look to fill my cargo holds with goods so I can make money on the trip.

If ship transfers are implemented with a delay I would still need to travel to where I plan to have my ship delivered to. So I would do the same activities along the trip. Once I arrived I would start the ship transfer. If it tells me that the ship will be delivered in 15 minutes, since it's a bit far away, I would take local missions or again do a trade loop or two. Once it arrived I'd pick it up and do what ever I had planned with it.

If instant ship transfers are implemented I would still need to travel to where I plan to have my ship delivered to. So I would do the same activities along the trip. Once I arrived I would start the ship transfer. In this case though my ship would magically be transported to or replicated at the shipyard, in perfect detail. In this case I wouldn't do those other activities and I would just do something else with the magic ship. In this case I would do less activities in game, not more.

In reality if instant ship transfers are implemented I will ignore them. I'll just act like they don't exist. They may get exploited or abused by other players but that won't bother me too much. At least I'll be saving the credits and not buying a hokey and unexplainable mechanism in the game that would be considered a cheat if a 3rd party added a mod to the game.

 

[Brian of Ardagh]

So when you get your way what will you do whilst you're waiting?

This is the argument that always boggles my mind. I have never waited in game. The only things that come close are waiting for the mission board to open and a trip to Hutton Orbital.

The mission board delay can be fixed. During the trip to Hutton I have gotten up to go to the galley or the ship's laundry, one time I did overshoot my mark and had to circle back.

But even if the ship transfer had a small delay I can't fathom why any players would just sit there in the shipyard waiting for it, doing nothing else. It's almost like these players that want instant ship transfers really don't like ED, besides the one activity they like to do. I'm going to assume that is mostly going into CZs to blow up ships.

Don't get me wrong, that's a lot of fun. I just don't think that's the only thing worth doing in the game. I doubt there are lots of players that need their type-9 now or else the galaxy will fall apart.

 

[master_xean]

Is anyone talking about making this ship transfer feature compulsory?

 

[MONTItheRed]

Where do you draw the line on convenience though?

It's no strawman to suggest that we get rid of supercruise for convenience sake. There are plenty of people that would like to get rid of that inconvenient and boring mechanism.

Supercruise is an important element in finding USS, transit time to distant stations (FOR THE MUG!), piracy/anti-piracy, bounty hunting, and system defense.

Some people would like an autopilot so they don't have to sit and be bored making 20 jumps to go from one side of the bubble to another. Should we implement that for convenience sake?

Makes sense to me. Modern aircraft can basically fly themselves from takeoff break release to landing touchdown.

How about the upcoming multi-crew addition? It's been speculated that players will simply be able to all appear on a friend's ship, instant pilot teleportation. Is that too much convenience?

No, because that would enhance the time that players have to engage in actual gameplay. The simple solution for this would be that once you leave the multi-crew ship, you are returned to wherever your ship was docked before you joined the multi-crew thing.

Eventually we may just use the galaxy as a pretty backdrop for all the gameplay. If we do it won't be Elite Dangerous any more, just a series of mini-games.

It IS a series of minigames. Launching, takeoff, mailslot exit, jump to supercruise, supercruise navigation, hyperspace jumps, dropping into an instance, mailslot entrance, approach, landing, scanning stellar bodies. all of these are in essence miniature games, each has a set of rules, benefits for success, penalties for failure, learning curves.

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No, because you have to make the same trip twice to do it manually. Ship transfer is 1-way.

In the example I gave, you have to travel to your destination, then call your ship. If the called ship moved at real time, it would take longer than just flying there yourself. The trip is twice, once in whatever ship you use to get there, and twice to get the called ship there.

But that's not true.

The quality of life convenience would be 100% intact with a believable transit delay. You'd still be able to move your ships around like never before, wherever and whenever you need them. It just wouldn't be instantaneous magical nonsense!

With ship transfer you can't move ships around whenever and wherever you want. You can only call ships to where you are, assuming where you are has a shipyard. You can't direct ships to places you aren't or to places without shipyards. That's a fundamental premise of the ship transfer.

And in the case of moving ships to Jaques...there's no question it would be faster with this feature than to do it yourself.

I personally hope that the ship transfer isn't available to Jacques to preserve the element of a remote colony. However, I can see the justification of having the transfer to Jacques since it can take just 24 hours to get to Jacques.

 

[Heavenly-Hammer]

Instant transfer of anything in Elite surely defeats it's entire ethos ?

lol. half of the core features you interact with in the game every day are instantaneous. that's just an objective fact. a fact that some here seem to forget.

take off these damn blinders and see the game for what it actually is.

also, thread is getting weird. like some people seem to think if they volume post their opinion, it's going to change the implementation all by itself. it really won't. no need to attempt to drown out everyone else because they don't agree with you.

 

[MONTItheRed]

Ship Transfer - cost based on FSD module and jump range

TLDR: make ship transfer cost scale based on FSD module and jump range

There has been lots of discussion regarding ship transfer (instant vs real time vs accelerated time) on Reddit, Facebook, the frontier forums, and Lave Radio.

A common criticism of instant transfer is that it removes the concern of FSD modules from ship balance, usually around combat ships (which tend to have short jump ranges and short total range).

One way to address this issue would be to scale the transfer cost based on FSD module and jump range. The normalization could be at the largest FSD for that ship, with a class C FSD. FSD that provides greater jump range provide discounts. FSD with shorter jump range incur additional cost.

This would give incentives to have the best FSD and engineer modded FSD.

I'm for instant transfer because I think it meets the intent of the feature and against any type of time delay because it defeats the intent of the feature. I've posted with math on other locations so I won't go into that here.

- https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/285979-delay-ship-transfer-doesn-t-make-sense-with-math

- https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/50txfc/delayed_ship_transfer_makes_no_sense/

What I'm not concerned about

- immersion: there are plenty of things that others have brought up about that can break immersion. Immersion is a personal issue.

- ship balance: exploration and trade ships will still want good FSD and jump range because these directly impact their role. FSD doesn't affect a combat ship's role beyond being able to escape or pursue easily.

EDIT: Additionally, changing from a max size A FSD to a 2E FSD has MINIMAL affect on combat ships' max speed, boost speed, shields, and power availability.

 

[Brian of Ardagh]

lol. half of the core features you interact with in the game every day are instantaneous. that's just an objective fact. a fact that some here seem to forget.

take off these damn blinders and see the game for what it actually is.

also, thread is getting weird. like some people seem to think if they volume post their opinion, it's going to change the implementation all by itself. it really won't. no need to attempt to drown out everyone else because they don't agree with you.

If it were up to me, and thank the IPU that it isn't, all the features that are instantaneous would be filled with content, actual activities you could do, although they would be optional. I want fuller immersion and reality, not less. I don't want a full on space travel simulator, if we had that it would take weeks just to land on the moon. KSP is a good program for that. No, I want a good space-based science-fiction game with extremely tight rules and consistency. I want the lore and history to be well documented so that every addition to the game sticks to the rules laid out in the game's bible.

Thankfully, I'm sure Mr. Hammer you will appreciate, this will probably be my last real post on the subject. I've spent most of my time on the forums vs. playing due to Bell's palsy. I was able to get in today without any significant trouble so I plan on playing more and posting less. Still not 100% but close enough. I look forward to the long slow climb up from my SideWinder and less than 100,000 credits to get back to a Cobra Mk III. Maybe someday I'll have more than 1 ship but I hope to never feel the need to use the instant transfer mechanism.

 

[V'larr]

So many replies...lengthy post ahead!

Ya the game has too many time sinks already, v'larr, I agree.
Its why i'm having so much trouble wrapping my head around the opposition to what will literally be the single biggest improvement of the game to date.

See, I agree there's a lot of time sinks and the grind could be reduced. But *instant* ship transportation isn't the way to do it. (Faster supercruise acceleration/deceleration would be the biggest time saver we could possibly get....)

So when you get your way what will you do whilst you're waiting?

I could do a mission, I could collect a couple bounties, I could carry out other plans thanks to planning my ship transfer ahead of time, or I could do the same things I do when supercruising, waiting for the autodocker to complete, waiting for hyperspace to complete, waiting to get close enough/slow enough to drop into normal space, etc.

The possibilities are endless. The 5-15 minute transfer time is not.

Supercruise is an important element in finding USS, transit time to distant stations (FOR THE MUG!), piracy/anti-piracy, bounty hunting, and system defense.

I don't think the Hutton Mug is worth keeping supercruise speed limits. Sorry, Hutton Truckers, what you and every other person who makes the Hutton run is special but...I'm really tired of ignoring binary star systems that have 1 star and all the other stuff is out 100,000ls+ away.

I honestly don't get why all these people who demand instant ship transfer aren't arguing for faster supercruise times instead. My brain trembles!

With ship transfer you can't move ships around whenever and wherever you want. You can only call ships to where you are, assuming where you are has a shipyard.

See, I don't think this should necessarily be the case. I think players *ought* to be able to transfer ships wherever and whenever they please, if it indeed becomes a feature - the limiting factors ought to be having a shipyard, as you mentioned; a REASONABLE cost; and a BELIEVABLE period of time. (the caps are so the Devs don't miss it in this wall of text [ugh])

I personally hope that the ship transfer isn't available to Jacques to preserve the element of a remote colony. However, I can see the justification of having the transfer to Jacques since it can take just 24 hours to get to Jacques.

I think that's the primary reason why we're even getting this feature to begin with...to ease the process of moving to entirely different areas of the galaxy to start new bits of human civilization. (If we can start settling our own bases or building our own outposts...!)

lol. half of the core features you interact with in the game every day are instantaneous. that's just an objective fact. a fact that some here seem to forget.

Something you seem to forget is that's not true. That's subjective bias, not objective fact, and I've been repeating myself over and over how things either aren't actually instant, or have nothing to do with space travel and only refer to station services.

also, thread is getting weird. like some people seem to think if they volume post their opinion, it's going to change the implementation all by itself. it really won't. no need to attempt to drown out everyone else because they don't agree with you.

Do I need to feed you your own medicine here, or will this rhetorical hint suffice?

Ship Transfer - cost based on FSD module and jump range
TLDR: make ship transfer cost scale based on FSD module and jump range

I'm hesitant about making the transfer's barrier-to-entry rely upon cost.

I want this feature to be available to ALL CMDRs, not just those with a lot of credits to throw at things.

And I also don't want the cost being an excuse to make the transfer instant. It really does not need to be instant. 5-15 minutes to get your ship moved across vast distances will not hurt or kill anybody or impede the usefulness of this feature.