Hello Commanders!
We’ve had a big response from you folk about 2.2 regarding ship transfer, so first things first, thanks for all of the feedback! It’s always extremely useful, and helps us make more informed decisions.
It can also sometimes kick start or reignite discussions, by effectively bringing new evidence into circulation, allowing us to re-examine issues with a broader perspective.
We’re very happy and excited to be bringing ship transfer into Elite: Dangerous, as we feel that it offers dramatic improvements to game play, by allowing Commanders more freedom to have the right tools (ships) at the right place.
However, there’s clearly a lot of folk that are not so happy about our choice of implementation: specifically the concept that your ships can be summoned to your current starport instantly. Whilst most folk seem to be on board with the idea of transporting ships to your location, the time transfer takes has raised some concerns.
Clearly, the benefit of instant transfer is that, assuming you have the credit funds, you always have the appropriate ship to hand at all times. I will summarise for reference the main concerns that have been raised about having instant ship transfer:
* Instant transfer is likely to have a less plausible/desirable explanation for how the feature works in game lore.
* Instant transfer will lessen the need to have decent frame shift drives in ships other than one, “main” explorer type vessel.
* Instant ship transfer will remove any potential game play from deciding when/if transfer should be initiated.
* Instant ship transfer undermines the scale of the galaxy.
These are interesting arguments that have got us talking about this feature in the office once more.
After much debate, we are coming around to the idea of having a delivery time for transferred ships. It also follows, that if we have delivery times for ship transfer, we should have them for module transfer as well, as both actions use the same concept. But before we go ahead with this, we want to take a final reading, as it were.
So we’re going to run a simple, official poll. I know that there’s already been one, which has had lots of responses; think of this as a final safety alert.
As with all polls, it would take a significant majority of a large voting base for us to take the results as anything more than interesting anecdotal evidence, so I’d like to stress that if you have a strong opinion on this issue, please vote, and tell your Elite playing buddies to vote as well.
We’ll run the poll until Monday next week.
*Unless there is a significant, majority vote against ship transfer delivery times, along with a high turnout*, we will likely be moving towards implementing plausible delays into ship and module transfer, though such a change may affect when the features comes online.
I’ve tried to make the poll as straightforward as possible, with just two options, please take a moment to read through them before you vote. Basically, it comes down to instant travel versus delivery times. We’re not very interested in having minor delays just for the sake of appearances – if there’s to be a delay, it should try to be roughly appropriate to a bulk freighter’s ability: reasonably slow compared to an explorer type vessel, but able to reach any destination – eventually.
Note there will always be a credit cost component to ship transfer, though it will likely be lower if there is also a delivery time component.
Also note that the delivery times used in the poll (5m minutes and 100 minutes) do not preclude further travel outside the human bubble, say to Jaques, with an appropriate increase in time.
Thank you for your participation!
The poll itself can be reached at this URL:
https://www.elitedangerous.com/en/shiptransfer-vote/
for your convenience, the options in the poll are are shown below:
POLL: Should transferring ships and modules to your location take time?
OPTION 1: No, the transfer should be instant.
OPTION 2: Yes there should be a delay of 5 minutes minimum, 100 minutes to cross the human bubble, edge to edge.
