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

[Fluffy Whiskers]

I mentioned this about 30 pages ago, but I am afraid it got lost in the flood of this thread, so I will quickly mention it again.

Why not have both? The instant transfer can be for the rich and impatient, and for those who are too cheap to pay through the nose for instant transfer, can get the delayed transfer for a much more reasonable price.

That way everybody will be happy, and we will have a money sink for the filthy rich.

 

[kofeyh]

Are you taking multiple ship transfers to one location simultaneously into account?

Assuming we can do this, of course. heh

Yes I am. The range is 2-3 LY average for transport. What do most of your ships have? What's the lowest?

In every practicable sense, it's much faster to use a taxi to collect a ship. Or even 2-3 because that's still faster.

So unless one has 25 ships? I think one is mostly just going to keep doing what one does now, because it's never ever going to be faster to transport anything anywhere.

 

[fantasmic]

you are free to not use the feature, but why enforce that choice onto others?

if we are to have the feature, i would prefer it to be instant, to help those with limited time to play, getting the most from their limited time online.

If nothing else, I would prefer that only those who have some intention to USE the feature be the ones to vote on it.

It shouldn't be about speed racing anyway. That's what playing the game is for, not transferring ships, if that's your thing.

Say I have 25 ships spread out around the bubble and I'm out at Jaques Station and want that to be my new home base of operations. This is a huge time saver and convenience, if that is the "problem" you're trying to solve. Having whatever ship you want nearly anywhere whenever you want it takes away from legitimate gameplay too much in my opinion.

I don't know if you've noticed, but many on the delay side of this feature are adamant that jaques should be an off-limits target.

 

[Ghost in the Net]

With the implementation of passenger missions, doesn't it make more sense to have the option of transporting the pilot to the ship rather than doing things the other way around? I have far less of an issue with transporting a person across the galaxy in a passenger liner than I do with transporting a ship; especially if that ship doesn't have the jump capacity to make the trip in the first place.

 

[Troy_McClure]

It has to be instant because game-time is limited for most of us! Can you imagine killing time for even 15 mins, for some bizarre, expedient suspension of disbelief? The cost also has to be prohibitive to avoid the use of it, willy-nilly (I got to use 'willy-nilly' in a sentence..woohoo!)

I am willing to make a massive U-turn though, if we can have Heat magazine on Galnet - like some intergalactic dentist's waiting room! Then 20 mins is fine..reading about Kim Kardashian & her super talented husband *cough*..ooh celebrities are just better than normal people! Make it happen FD!

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

So applying that logic to instant transfer whilst you want a delay, why not set an arbitrary time of your own and set an alarm for yourself before you collect your transported ship. Then everyone can have what they want and we can all go dance together in the land of Lavian Brandy? Not having a delay is only a problem if you let it be one for yourself

That's is if instant transfer doesn't effect other people. It will do.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Another person using 25 as the magic number. Does everyone have 25 ships?

I did an example with 2

Ok, so I take me trusty T-6 to Jack, I'm there in 12 hours. Never in a hurry.
Decide I want my mega jump range Conda over as well. Takes 128 hours.
I'll explore around Jack for 5 days.
Come back, Conda is waiting for me.

Now:
Ok, so I take me trusty T-6 to Jack, I'm there in 12 hours. Never in a hurry.
Decide I want my mega jump range Conda over as well.
I have to fly my trusty T-6 back to the Bubble, pick up my Conda and fly that back to Jack.
But then I don't have my trusty T-6 anymore. So that's not the same result.

Nope, I take me trusty T-6 to Jack, I'm there in 12 hours. Never in a hurry.
The I buy another T-6 without the FSD upgrade and have to fly that back to the bubble. Takes me longer than 12 hours. 15?
Sell it, fly the mega jump range Conda back to Jack, about 10 hours.

Now the kicker is: flying to the bubble and back takes me 25 hours. If I'm averaging 2-3 hours a day playing time that's 10 days.

And I haven't done my 5 days of relaxed exploring.

This only goes wonky if I want that Conda now! But shouldn't I have anticipated that?

Seems this only goes astray in unforeseen circumstances, and ... well I think it's ok if we don't have the tool we want at our disposal when circumstances go unforeseen. What fun are unforeseen circumstances if they got no consequences?

 

[Niewitch]

I just cant vote. I dont like magic tricks. Ship should fly there by NPC, not spawn, time or no time. Cant decide. Maybe this feature should develop first entirely, so module and ship freighters exits in first place and add then this feature as it should be.

 

[Wolvie]

Hi Frontier,

Thanks for listening to the community and giving us the ability to make an impact on this change, I love that you guys care about what we think. I have voted for the time delay on delivery, and love the idea of seeing bulk freighters in a later patch, plus the idea of being able to pick a destination to send ships to would be a fantastic addition but I understand that this would also be for a patch some time after 2.2.

 

[Tin Actual]

Why instant transfer is a bad thing:

Exploiting. As an example, let's use the most recent CG's

Delivering gold--Now you don't have to fly your massive short jumping type-9 3-5 jumps back to the station that has gold for sale. Get your hauler with max jump range, run to the supply station and insta-transfer your ship to you. Load up the type-9, jump to the station, sell your stuff, insta-deliver your hauler and fly back fast. Rinse/repeat. Reduces your jumps by 50%. Total exploit.

Jaques Station--haul your rear out there carrying 700 tons of cargo, scream back home a ship that goes 3x faster, same as above. After you get tired of that, have your combat anaconda delivered to you in seconds (even though it took 12 hours of play time to get there with 50 LY jump range). Murder all of the explorers in your insta-delivered death machine.

Soothis/Ceos runs just got a lot faster too. Then again, ship delivery should remain limited to the bubble only.

A wait time of 4 minutes to undock/supercruise & dock + 1 minute/jump based on your current FSD sounds totally reasonable. Allowing to deliver your ships to a destination in advance feels like a good compromise.

What would be very entertaining would be to see these ships moving through the universe and possible to interdict & destroy. Destruction of a ship in transit would add a few minutes to the transfer and could also add options for insured (expensive) vs. uninsured transport (cheap).

 

[wulfson]

Thanks Sandro and team for bringing this poll up. I hope that instantists will loose Even non-instant travel is a great asset, because you can spare a lot of time by calling more than one ship to your current location and move your shipyard to your new base of operations relatively quickly. While the ships are in transfer, you still have the option to do something with your current ship, so it does not damage gameplay in any way, contrary to weapon reload/repair/death. And I hope that non-instant travel using bulk carriers can bring even some future extended gameplay, like being able to own a bulk carrier and haul ships around the galaxy or protect/attack the bulk carriers.

 

[CMDR Zhon Daeli]

Yes I am. The range is 2-3 LY average for transport. What do most of your ships have? What's the lowest?

30 unladen... give or take.
... but then I only have one ship .. LOL

I wasn't trying to prove a point, was just wondering if you took it into account. because I think transferring 4 ships to one location would be faster than having to race back and forth 4 times. Or 25 ships and back/forth 25 times. ( ignore crossed out )

 

[WR3ND]

Another person using 25 as the magic number. Does everyone have 25 ships? I only have 12 for one commander, 4 for the second and 3 for the third. Clearly I can solve my problems by having enough ships to make the mechanic scale.

You are pretty screwed if you have like 4-5 ships though, hey?

I just pulled the figure out of my rear end to make a point – likely what others have done as well – that seemed reasonable.

Personally, I'm not always the most efficient player as I prefer being more of an immersion player than a meta player.

This would be a huge time saver for me either way as moving ships around manually is very low on my priorities list of things to do. Sure, I can race back from Jaques, etc., but I'm an explorer, so it takes me weeks, if not months. I'll be much more incentivized to get more ships too. You could say that would be the case with instant ship transfers too, of course, though I personally find the concept to be too game breaking, both given the current game and ship balancing dynamics, and for immersion and continuity reasons.

To put it simply (as best as I can), instant ship transfers seems like cheating to me and kind of spoils the game.

 

[Arubeto]

In general, the ability to fly back and pick up a ship has a few issues: that you are doing the journey twice (even if the first journey is in a faster ship) and that you are forced to leave a ship at the pick up location. In addition, your time is completely filled by the logistics task. The ability to have ships delivered, even at non-optimal jump rates, is arguably better.

So much this! I haven't been eloquent enough to put it in similarly understandable words, but this is exactly what people complaining about additional time sinks have to consider:

you don't have any ship transfer right now, so adding time-consuming ship transfer is not a new time-sink, but quite the opposite: it *saves* you a lot of time you'd have to spend making the transfer yourself right now!

Secondly, just because we currently don't have bulk freighters in the game does not mean that we won't have things like this in the future (regardless of whether we have timed or instant ship deliveries) or even that they don't exist in the lore already (I believe the concept of mega freighters has always existed in Elite lore in some way).

And although we may finesse the final times to be a little faster or slower, the concept is that these freighters are built to be able to get everywhere, with minimal crew, but not amazingly quickly.

I feel that having plausible, time-consuming ship transfers is the only way to still retain the option to later add those bulk freighters, since instant transfer would effectively remove this opportunity to somehow add those freighters at a later stage in any sensible way at all. Do you agree with this, Sandro?

 

[fantasmic]

Another person using 25 as the magic number. Does everyone have 25 ships?

I have 60 something if that makes you feel better....

 

[Colonel Kenney]

If you cut that wait time in half I'd be ok with it. Most of us only have 1-2 hours to play and it would be an entire game day to wait for transfers.

 

[mossfoot]

I just cant vote. I dont like magic tricks. Ship should fly there by NPC not spawn, time or no time. Cant decide. Maybe this feature should develop first entirely so module and ship freighters exits fist to do that in real game.

Yet NPCs spawn in systems all the time and we accept that.

Don't get me wrong, I'd LIKE it if NPCs were persistent in some fashion, being given routines and patterns as they fly trade routes or hunt for people to rob, but right now it doesn't happen.

So if we can accept that, why not spawning our ships after the requisite time? It still feels like that it took the time to get there, and for all intents and purposes, did.

 

[Marak]

Instant ship transfer would be too much like playing Pokemon...

"Thermal Multicannon Vulture - I choose you"!!!!

*poof*

 

[Zesty Crab Legs]

double post

 

[Rupoe]

I love this idea the best! Copy/paste of WhatGravitas wrote:

"I feel like a lot could be solved by making the transfers remote. Then, if you're in system A and want to participate in some bounty hunting in B, you could order your Vulture from C to B, while making your way from A to B in your cargo ship.Upon arrival, your Vulture is probably already ready, so it's effectively instant in most cases but keeps the immersion.

Would add some game play, too, because you could take some cargo from A to B to sell at a profit, so it's encouraging planning and multiple concurrent activities."

There's still a delay, people don't have to complain about waiting and it's still much, much faster then the current method.