***POLL NOW CLOSED*** IMPORTANT, OFFICIAL SHIP TRANSFER POLL

[m0rl0ck]

100 minutes for 300 LY. I'm trying to think of a ship that would take one hour and forty minutes to cover 300ly.

If we assume ~60 seconds per jump, then that is then roughly 140 jumps taken, equivalent, to cover that same 300 LY in the same time.

Or a bit over 2 LY. Per jump. Average. Because the game other wise tries to make each jump the same. So I'm going to assume exactly the same concept for ship travel.

Those ship transport vessels have lousy mileage.

It will be faster to fly virtually everything manually. Plausibly I can walk faster. I didn't think it was actually possible to make it slower than even efficient plotting to get to a destination.

Heaven help anyone foolish to lock in a 900 LY journey. Your ship will now be unavailable for closing on 5 hours or something. Crikey.

Don't send to Jaques. Your ship will be gone for over a year.

I was mistaken to think some logic could appear in the debate. Congratulations, team. Well done. Quite litterally one extreme, to the other.

Yeah i think the poll was weighted to bias instant. 100 minutes seems excessive.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

From a 'lore' perspective, I would say the discussion is moot. IMHO, there's no sensible way to justify insta-anything, whether it's repairs, paintjobs, outfitting, escapepods or transportation. You have to conjure up increasingly contrived ways to deal with player conveniences and it all becomes contradictory.

I won't be waving any magic wands at ships in Elite Dangerous: Premonition, or trying to justify these game decisions in lore - I've already made that clear (scroll down to 'Issue 4')> http://www.drewwagar.com/progress-report/premonition-the-challenge-ahead/

So my advice is to forget the lore on this one! This is 100% gameplay and whether or not it, overall, has positive or negative (or indeed unintended) consequences.

Cheers,

Drew.

Actually I have head-cannon for the paintjobs...

Paint on a ship - or "paint" - is actually a coating of nano machines on your ship.

When you purchase a paintjob, you are purchasing a program which when loaded, tells these nano machines to configure themselves in such a way that the ship's colours are changed according to the program.

The rigours of supercruise causes wear and tear, which degrades the nanomachines and hence you get degradation of your ship's "paint", which is why you can repair your paintjob at a station.

PAINT : Programmable Adjustable Intelligent Nanomachine Technology

 

[Paramemetic]

You don't instant telepport wheen you die; your remlok'd memories are booted into a new body.

...at least, that's my understanding?

No sir, according to lore you are ejected in an escape pod and taken to the station where you last docked. They simply remove the waiting because it's not fun.



Edit: The game you're thinking of is Eve Online.



Edit 2: If I can 3D print a body to put someone's memories in, why can't I 3D print an SRV?

 

[GG7]

I only have 50 active hours played so take my comment with huge amounts of salt but I'd prefer if the game would aim to be more realistic and we wouldn't have stuff like ship teleportation.

At the very least I think transferring ships should take much longer than minutes. Maybe the time and cost of transferring a ship should depend on its jumping range and value.

Or maybe it should be implemented in a way that players could transfer ships for other players for money (with insurance).

The idea is that the ship is loaded into a larger transport ship and moved. Your ship isn't literally flown to your new location by a hired pilot, so jump range of the transferred ship isn't relevant.

Since Sandy mentioned "Transport Ship" in his comments, I think they should plan to physically add these to the game, so we can at least see them operating around the galaxy. Would give the new feature more realism for sure, even if you can't literally watch your own transfer complete in-game.

 

[Nevada]

OPTION 2: Yes there should be a delay of 5 minutes minimum, 100 minutes to cross the human bubble, edge to edge.

This.

 

[TomR]

Jump speed is a loading screen, it's length directly related to your CPU and more importantly your ram speed. People with DDR2 600mhz have 60+ second loading screens, people with DDR4 3400mhz have 10 sec loading screens. It's not a gameplay choice, it's a limitation of the player's computer. In 4 or 5 years, jumps will be near instantaneous to people with good computers.

By the year 3000 computers will be fast enough for instant ship transfers.

 

[SafteyBot]

Incidentally, I believe his point is that the game is already losing players like a ushima nursing home, and that speeding it up by advertising a feature and then making using the feature actively discourage playing the game is not going to help with player retention or engagement.

This is way better put, and better speaks to what I meant than my explanation.

 

[ROSS-128]

I voted instant for two simple reasons: arbitrary realtime delays flat-out screw over people who have limited time to play, and good gameplay trumps realism.

College students, parents, cops, soldiers, anyone working more than one job: if you're lucky, you've got an hour or two of free time to play, and that's probably not even every day. Say you went bounty hunting last time, but tonight you're on call and can't go fighting in a RES--you just want to hop into Solo and do a few leisurely trade runs, and the nearest ship with any jump range or cargo space is halfway across the bubble. Sorry, you don't get to play today--either spend what little time you have jumping 10 LY at a time to fetch the ship and maybe you'll get to play next time, or waste 50 minutes of your limited free time just sitting there waiting for the transfer. This sort of pointless, frustrating, tedious waste of real-life time is *exactly the kind of problem that ship transfer is supposed to eliminate*.

Moreover, as a general rule game mechanics that force you to just sit there and wait doing nothing aren't gameplay, they are *anti*-gameplay that should be avoided at all costs if there is any other option. Elite has too many of those already, and they are among the aspects of the game that draw the most hate as it is.

Realism is great, but FDev already KNOWS that gameplay takes precedence over that. It's reflected in countless "gamey" areas of Elite's mechanics: instant "FTL" communications and news, realtime remote visualization, cockpits with glass we can see out of, the fact that we can see anything at all when we're in supercruise, not getting crushed in our seats on a 9G planet, the total inability to transfer credits between players or remotely claim a CG reward while mission NPCs can pay you instantly from light-years away... not to mention the fundamentally unscientific gaminess of the entire Engineers expansion, what with the silly concept of "micro-resources" (really? I have to go scavenging on a planet to find a trace amount of nickel or iron, and can't just buy it for half a credit?) or crafting commodities that are "ubiquitous" yet for some reason can't be purchased anywhere in the galaxy, "data" that's somehow impossible to copy in any way, and "engineers" who keep no records of their experiments and can't replicate their own work even once.

Yet out of an entire universe of examples where gameplay trumps realism, some folks are picking *this* as their hill to die on, because muh immershun.

How about this: if your sense of immersion requires a delay before your ship is transferred, *waste your own time sitting there for however long you think is appropriate*. But don't force everyone else to waste *their* time for the sake of *your* immersion.

If we run with that argument, we should also entirely eliminate supercruise and teleport the player too. What if I only have five minutes to play, but I want to do a trade CG that is 600LY away? Clearly nothing should get in the way of that, so I should be able to teleport my commander directly to the station and then do all my trading via teleportation. It works when we die, so why don't we just teleport the *commander* all the time?

Then Elite: Dangerous can be a truly menu-driven game, with no need to ever leave the station.

 

[The Wallet Inspector]

By the year 3000 computers will be fast enough for instant ship transfers.

And there will be no need for pilots.

 

[Aeos]

Once you initiate a ship transfer what happens if you decide you don't want it to be en route anymore? Is it possible to cancel the transfer? I'm going to guess for simplicity the answer is no but just curious.

 

[Jack Schitt]

I haven't read all 14 (full size) pages for reasons of sanity, but I wanted to add my thanks to Sandro for reconsidering the stance on this one. It was, and remains, one of the most polarising topics for the community.

As for which way I'll vote, it's testament to the quality of the debate (well, some of the debate) that I've gone from being a hardcore "delayer" to actually having to take time to weigh up the pros and cons. Some of the arguments for instant transfer have made a lot of sense, even the ones that betray an agenda that's at odds with my personal play style. But we're all in this together and it's only fair that FD tries its best to benefit as many players as possible with new features.

Before this poll was announced I'd more or less resigned myself to the idea of instant transport, and had even started outfitting a DBX as a long range sprinter. So the idea of voting for instant, as long as it was treated purely as a game feature and no attempt was made to shoehorn it into the lore, did seriously cross my mind.

But at the end of the day, despite some really strong arguments, I have to go with my initial instinct. A feature that is believable within the fiction, even if we never get to see the mythical bulk carriers, is easier for my imagination to cope with than one that is purely "gamey" or requires too great a suspension of disbelief if it's integrated into official lore. (The words "3D printed" still make me shudder). So I'm going to vote for delayed transfer as I did in the unofficial poll. The lore of Elite is at least as important to me as the gameplay (it's partly what's kept me thinking about this universe for the last three decades even when I'm not playing) and I have to respect that even if it means abandoning the admittedly very convenient idea of instant ship availability.

Thanks again to Sandro for opening this poll up officially, and to everyone on both sides of the argument who made it such an interesting (if occasionally frustrating) debate.

Now off to the polling booth...

 

[m0rl0ck]

I'm not saying that everyone is going to leave the game while they wait, but I am sure that plenty of players will start to "work" the way this new feature works and start making their requests at the end of their current session so that when they come back later, the ship is already at the new location.

That was my point, and that ultimately, players are going to adapt their gameplay around the time delay, and in many cases make the delay a moot point.

Yeah i think thats the way id do it. While finishing my bounty hunting / mission running in system x arrange to meet my trader in system y when i wanted to do some trading.

 

[kofeyh]

Honestly, if people are sitting around waiting for their ships to transfer .. that just shows a complete lack of focus, planning or even imagination to do something else whilst the timer runs. That's not meant to be insulting, it's just how I see it.

For me personally, I'd go.. "right, I want to do the CG, it'll take about 30 minutes to get my ship, so in the meantime, I'll do some missions for this power."

Can I ask what you'll do for the circa 6-7 weeks it'll take a ship to come to you at Jaques, if you ever go out there.

Or would you not bother? How many people, do you think, will be contacting Frontier to get their ships unstuck from transport when they realise that a ship might disappear for a few days. Or weeks. Or possibly a couple months?

Just asking.

 

[MONTItheRed]

All the work that Michael put into justifying instant transfer now seems lost.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...to-be-a-barrier-to-gameplay-by-the-Developers

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/member.php/2-Michael-Brookes

 

[m0rl0ck]

Since Sandy mentioned "Transport Ship" in his comments, I think they should plan to physically add these to the game, so we can at least see them operating around the galaxy. Would give the new feature more realism for sure, even if you can't literally watch your own transfer complete in-game.

That would be cool.

 

[MachineR]

The idea is that the ship is loaded into a larger transport ship and moved. Your ship isn't literally flown to your new location by a hired pilot, so jump range of the transferred ship isn't relevant.

Since Sandy mentioned "Transport Ship" in his comments, I think they should plan to physically add these to the game, so we can at least see them operating around the galaxy. Would give the new feature more realism for sure, even if you can't literally watch your own transfer complete in-game.

I voted the second option just because i want to see this big ships in game, maybe using the same technology to jump of the capital class ships, or just bigger FSDs, that would be so cool..

 

[jarsqui]

Hi, Sandro

* 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.

This list is not correct. The word 'instant' only applies to the first point. If you're gonna have ship transfer in this game, ppl are gonna use it.

* SHIP TRANSFER will lessen the need to have decent frame shift drives in ships other than one, “main” explorer type vessel.
* SHIP TRANSFER will remove any potential game play from deciding when/if transfer should be initiated.
* SHIP TRANSFER undermines the scale of the galaxy.

I fixed it for you, and as you can see these things can not be fixed by adding a waiting time. There is enough waiting around in the game and this brings nothing to the table (except lore-wise).
Instant transfer, please.

 

[Monk]

I'd imagine the main reason for an 'official' poll was to get pure results, without the possibility of multiple fake forum accounts.
Also, the former community poll was simply too ambiguous to be really useful.

Agreed. I've nothing against having a more serious poll. Though, can we dispense with the debating in this thread? It's like having campaigners harass you on your way to vote...fortunately, I don't have to threaten to get out my tape measure here

 

[Paramemetic]

Jump speed is a loading screen, it's length directly related to your CPU and more importantly your ram speed. People with DDR2 600mhz have 60+ second loading screens, people with DDR4 3400mhz have 10 sec loading screens. It's not a gameplay choice, it's a limitation of the player's computer. In 4 or 5 years, jumps will be near instantaneous to people with good computers.

Yes obviously, what I'm saying is that the NPC flying my ship should not have that loading screen so you can't really include it in the time it takes for the NPC to jump my ship to me IMO. Seems dumb to make it take a full minute to jump between systems when the only reason it takes a player that long is their computer.

I mean it's almost like it's actually a video game and I'm not actually flying a spaceship in real life, and . . . and if it's a video game, it's almost as if it could be instant without taking anything away from it.

 

[kofeyh]

Yeah i think the poll was weighted to bias instant. 100 minutes seems excessive.

Poll will have one outcome. Just like the recent EU vote. People are voting and then second guessing decisions.

I'm just going to look forward to the "frontier why is my ship stuck in transit still?" threads when people realise they might have made a terrible mistake, transporting ships.