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

[Ziggy Stardust]

The bottom line is, this is a hard choice, with valid opinions on both side of the fence, for us as developers as much as you the Commanders. I can assure you that neither side can claim to have objectively the "correct" viewpoint.

Key point here. When discussing personal preference everyone is right when they state it. It's all subjective.

 

[Eera]

About transfer time :

Please make an average...

Take on ship per category, and stopwatch the time it take from point A to point B on 100 ly distance. Make an average of the results per category ship and timer, and you may apply the ship transfer time. It will be more near the player reality.

And by the god, no RNGtransfer please !

 

[Cmdr. Zack Ryder]

I think I'd kind of like to see a version of insta-transfer that would (assuming that the 3D printing kind of explanation is in play):
A. Cost a fair whack
B. Not take engineer-modified modules (forcing you to make a choice - Leave it where it is or abandon those modules to the recycler)
C. Only be able to transfer to a shipyard that can sell that ship in the 1st place.

In fairness these caveats are mainly so that I can make peace with the explanation of the 3D printing lore reasoning for it while also putting a couple other hopefully not deal-breaking for the most part disadvantages to it to hopefully stem the tide of people teleporting souped-up 'vettes & Vultures everywhere.

Just my $0.02...

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I say FDEV should decide, it's your baby, and a fine one at that. (brexit anyone?)

They will decide, they just want to know what active player base thinks before they cast the dice.

 

[Nat]

Your not locked out of the game whilst waiting on a transfer. You still have the ship your flying to play in.

I think you missed the point I was making, I never mentioned being locked out of the game in that way!

 

[Bacalao]

The kind of people who spent 5 days solid to get to ONE station in the middle of nowhere, should not care so much. You think the casual babysitters who play 6 minutes a day and need their instant gratification are going out there? If they wanted to get out there with a specific ship, they should have taken that ship. Otherwise they are just exploiting a "feature" that makes putting FSD's in battleships obsolete..

Yes, absolutely, it just happens over a longer period of time. Very nice, derisive tone you've got there. Are you spreading contempt around everywhere or are you specifically targeting this thread because a Dev is likely watching?

 

[Monk]

No more posts about the "other" game please - they are off topic, and it has its very own threadnaught elsewhere.

Sorry...couldn't resist...no more, I promise

Spoiler

http://i.imgur.com/sPrAN2n.gifv

 

[Sandro Sammarco]

Hello Commander SWABteam!

We are talking about the ability to have a ship stored at a distant location transported to your current location. The same for stored modules.

At no point are you (the Commander) able to fast travel - you must always manually fly a ship.

 

[Niewitch]

NPC should fly it in destination in shortest fastest route, and in real game, so it could be interdicted even. Maybe transfer cost same like coming pilot hiring, more talented pilot delivering you ship, more less to get in trouble.

 

[Paramemetic]

No. Instant Ship Transfer bad. Instant Respawn and replacement of unique engineer mods barely tolerable and only because no one was given the choice.

Indeed, perhaps it would be best if nobody was given a choice about instant ship transfer as well, so that we can all suffer from the same decisions that led to being able to replace your ship if you die.

Just restart your save if you die and you want to be immersed.

Edit: or uninstall if you don't believe in rebirth/reincarnation.

 

[BigZiggyHD]

Is this seriously an issue still? Why are we still griping about this, just let it be instant. There's a minority griping about time, but what about people that don't voice themselves because they don't know or whatever. Just let it be nice Gameplay. And let this thing die like it should have weeks ago...

We'll see who the true minority is in this situation. Please don't mistake the vocal majority as the actual majority. Roughly 75,000 CMDRs registered on reddit and I would bet less here. With millions of copies sold I doubt any of us here have an accurate representation of the actual majority. I've very glad Frontier did this through the official site so they can cross check if the cmdrs voting actually own a game copy because I suspect there was a large amount of spam accounts voting in the unofficial poll.

 

[Noshtzy]

I honestly could have it either way, but what I WANT to see is an actual in-game docking, just like recalling a ship on a planet surface. You make your request transfer, and the ship drops near the station and auto-docks. Instant, two hours, or 30 seconds, it doesn't really matter. I just want it to feel like something's actually happening in-game. Even more fun can be had when players try to mess with auto-docking player ships, but just like using a docking computer, you do not rack up fines for speeding while auto-docking.

Even more fun, though perhaps unnecessary, would be your ship auto-departing from the remote station you called it from. You can't see what's going on there, but other players could.

The time it takes for your ship to launch, exit the station, escape masslock, perform one (very long range) jump to wake directly into the target station's neighborhood, auto-dock and land could be considered enough "delay" for both sides to be happy.

 

[Vermill]

I wanna game be more realistic. Please remove instant spawning after death, and instant pilot teleporting to the middle of the bubble from center of space. And ship after destruction should have timer for next use and not have upgrades. And please remove solo and private group. Thank you

 

[Backelaer]

Instant ship transfers... why stop there... I mean why not make my ship jump 5000ly.. jumping so short puts a delay on my arrival and is annoying ... why not remove refueling and rearming... it all so much of a hassle.. why not remove any delay in docking the ship... you fly inside the station ... and BOOM instantly docked.... wait when i arrive in the system.. BOOM instantly docked at the station i wanted to go too..

Not a fan of the instant ship transfer

That's the 'slippery slope' fallacy. And that's never a good argument to use in any discussion.

That being said, I'm not a fan of instant ship transfer either. Almost entirely because of the last point Sandy talked about: it would seriously decrease our -or at least my- perception of the size of the bubble.
My homebase is around Kamadhenu. I'm an ALD supporter from the start. Now I also got involved with the Rift and the Children of Raxxla. (we'll have to see how much longer I can keep being an Empire supporter depending on how the Rift story is going to play out but that's a different story ) Anyway, that system is on the other side of the bubble. I like having to actually plan my gaming session a little if I decide to spend some time there.

If there is one single thing I absolutely love about this game, it's how it so brilliantly conveys the scale of the galaxy (and thereby, the scale of civilized space). That feeling of travelling significant distances to get where you want to be really adds to the gameplay, and makes you think about what you exactly are going to do there. It makes you set goals, to make the travel a worthwile investment of time. Take that away, and you can just go fool around and do random stuff wherever you want, whenever you want. It would make the game a lot less menaingful to me.

Another thing: I had to do quite a bit of trading / smuggling to be able to buy an a-specced FdL that I can park on the other side of the bubble for doing missions around the Children of Raxxla system. With instant ship transfer I can immediately sell that FdL and cash in quite a bit of credits. You probably see where I'm going with this.
It would make credits even less valuable in the E: D universe. I guess it's pretty clear what I'm going to vote

 

[kofeyh]

The kind of people who spent 5 days solid to get to ONE station in the middle of nowhere, should not care so much. You think the casual babysitters who play 6 minutes a day and need their instant gratification are going out there? If they wanted to get out there with a specific ship, they should have taken that ship. Otherwise they are just exploiting a "feature" that makes putting FSD's in battleships obsolete..

Suggest you think carefully about your response. A large number of people who have been to Jaques aren't explorers and have barely ever stepped outside of the bubble.

5 days. Before any sent ship arrives. That's 5 days after you have arrived. Having covered twenty two thousand light years, which itself might be a week or two's worth of play sessions.

I'm not sure who you are angry at. But asking people to wait 5 days on top of potentially 1-2 weeks of existing effort, sounds just a tad punitative.

 

[SafteyBot]

The kind of people who spent 5 days solid to get to ONE station in the middle of nowhere, should not care so much. You think the casual babysitters who play 6 minutes a day and need their instant gratification are going out there? If they wanted to get out there with a specific ship, they should have taken that ship. Otherwise they are just exploiting a "feature" that makes putting FSD's in battleships obsolete..

Been to Jaques, came back to get another ship. While floating around the bubble, I would love instant ship transfer so I can get my cargo hauler out to a pile of trading missions I found while in my vulture.

I'd like to not wait 20 minutes to do these trading missions. Pay fee, fine. Wait? May as well go get the trader myself.

Not super sure why I'd want to wait.

 

[charognard]

Hello Commander SWABteam!

We are talking about the ability to have a ship stored at a distant location transported to your current location. The same for stored modules.

At no point are you (the Commander) able to fast travel - you must always manually fly a ship.

You are talking about populate the universe with long range fsd taxi and no mounted fsd warships aviable at any moment, this is what will happen

 

[IAM GROOT]

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.

Assuming for lore purposes that the ship transfers are carried out by AI/robot mechanisms then I would be in favour of real time transfers, ie not the time it would take a player to fly one from point a to point b but an AI travelling from system to system non stop and the ships FSD limitations should be taken into account, an FDL/ Vulturewould take much longer than a Cobra. This would make pirates currently in say, Jaques bubble think twice about making the journey in Asps then quickly to transferring all their combat ships in an unrealistic time frame, also the cost should be high to do a 20000 lys trip in a FDL with a low jump range.
I would also throw in the chance of ship damage on long trips

 

[GJ51]

Instant ship transfers... why stop there... I mean why not make my ship jump 5000ly.. jumping so short puts a delay on my arrival and is annoying ... why not remove refueling and rearming... it all so much of a hassle.. why not remove any delay in docking the ship... you fly inside the station ... and BOOM instantly docked.... wait when i arrive in the system.. BOOM instantly docked at the station i wanted to go too..

Not a fan of the instant ship transfer

Why not just tell everyone they won the game.

Award Quadruple Elite, 3 of every ship fully A rated, and 100 Bil worth of credits.

Let's just get it over with - it's obvious that's what everyone wants...

 

[Fliposide]

Regarding the instant ship transfer function I think the best way would be to have 2 options.

1. Your ship is instantly "recreated" from the available components at that station, i.e. Your ship is not transferred instantly just the mechanics at that station create a close to spec as possible to your ship, instantly.

2. A delayed transfer of a 20 mins or so.

This could add an interesting gameplay dynamic if the player can't wait for a delayed "realistic" transfer should they go with a slightly less spec'd ship and a credit refund for the missing components?

Cheers