SHIP TRANSFER - Way too expensive / Jumping for hours = WASTE of time

[askavir]

You are missing the criticism. You say its a good idea because it was a pain to exist in game with out it. My answer is that the reasons it was a pain to exist without are problems and are still problems and that this is essentially just serving to hide those problems from many people.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the concept of ship transfer, but when it obfuscates other problems to most peoples eyes then it becomes a hinderance to the game actually becoming balanced properly.

Its like if i were to stand around with a piece of paper and give everyone papercuts as they walked past me, and then started doing it near a medical supply room with free bandaids. "That supply room was always supposed to be stocked with bandaids!" people say.

That you feel like you need a massive fleet of ships to do all the stuff in the game is itself indication of a problem.

What are you talking about? Ship transfer has nothing to do with low or high jump ranges.

Ship transfer solved one problem: moving several ships around. It is not a bandaid for low jump ranges, it was implemented as a quality of life feature to address the problem of moving ships around without having to do it yourself. If FD wanted to "bandage" jump ranges, they would have increased jump ranges, surely it was much simpler to change some numbers than actually implementing ship transfer.

Before I had to take one by one, buy some Adder or Hauler, outfit it for travelling, go back to pick another ship, sell Adder/Hauler, etc etc. Repeat for every ship. Now I take the most expensive ship mysellf and on arrival request transfer of the others I want to bring. Much better.

Anyway, the game now actually has a way to increase your jump range, if you find it lacking.

 

[Erika]

You're supposed to have multiple ships, it's the reason why there are so many and they're all balanced for different things. As a rule larger ships are more capable of doing what it is that they're designed for be it combat, trading or exploration but are worse in other areas, usually in jump range.

There's a sci-fi justification for this too since it's more energy intensive to shift the spacetime curvature around more massive objects with the frameshift drive.

With large ships you can still get some fairly long jump ranges on them, but it involves stripping them down and specialising them around jump ranges.

This is fair because it means that smaller ships still have a use.

Point is that you were never supposed to have one ship and one ship only to do everything in the game and for things like trading the balance is that a larger cargo hold translates to a significantly decreased jump range. This allows the Hauler to still find some great usage as a rare trader while it's quickly surpassed in bulk trading by other ships.

Yet the best trade ships are multi-roles, and the loss of combat capability a combat fit multi-role suffers is trivial enough that people are happy to do most combat related things with them, which again gets us to where we are today, with most people in polls saying their primary ship is an aspx or anaconda - polls having questionable reliability is one thing, but i dont think anyone would claim that those results sound inaccurate.

 

[Some1else]

Ship transfer damages my immersion.

It does not take 44 minutes for my engineered combat ship with 20+ LY, good fuel scoop and extra fuel tanks for 4 consecutive jumps to reach my location. And there's no way that it can cost several millions, since I'm even getting the fuel free. And yet the game seems to think that it does.

If your ship has a fuel scoop, and extra fuel tanks, it's not a combat ship.

S1E

 

[Erika]

What are you talking about? Ship transfer has nothing to do with low or high jump ranges.

Its not exactly a difficult connection to make. Can you honestly say that if we did not have ship transfer there would not be more people complaining about jump ranges?

Ship transfer solved one problem: moving several ships around.

That may have been the only intended function, however

It is not a bandaid for low jump ranges,

It serves as one.

If FD wanted to "bandage" jump ranges, they would have increased jump ranges, surely it was much simpler to change some numbers than actually implementing ship transfer.

It would get too much backlash from people who are on one hand totaly against raising any jump ranges at all, but who would, i think, equally complain if i proposed lowering the jump ranges on the high end of what some ships can accomplish, a position i would suspect most people happily occupy

Before I had to take one by one, buy some Adder or Hauler, outfit it for travelling, go back to pick another ship, sell Adder/Hauler, etc etc. Repeat for every ship. Now I take the most expensive ship mysellf and on arrival request transfer of the others I want to bring. Much better.

Anyway, the game now actually has a way to increase your jump range, if you find it lacking.

As I said the idea of ship transfer in and of itself is fine, but it lets other issues get covered up.
Its not about actual jump range, its about the difference between jump ranges as a balancing mechanism not corresponding sufficiently to the kinds of things that its supposed to offset. I would be just as happy if aspx/conda could only make around ~35ly max. Its about balance between ships not about me wanting to go somewhere. You can see there is inbalance because some ships are hardly used. This tends to correspond to jump ranges. (dropship and gunship being under-used for example) What this means is that what ever these ships are supposed to be gaining from having their range limited, is not actually enough in-game to make them be seen as useful enough to increase their popularity.

This is the first issue then: jump range is more important than FD weighs it in their balance considerations - because you can now transfer ships people do not complain so much since there are mechanisms to simply transport your low range ships. This results in what we seem to have now, people spending most of their time in a few hulls and neglecting others.

Now i criticize using jump range so heavily as a balance at all because, especially with ship transfers, doing something like buffing low range ships in ways other than jump range would just result in low range super ships, but since transport is an option it doesnt matter. This could potentially spiral out of control.

This gives us a second issue: jump range can be bypassed, yet jump range is still being used as a balance consideration.

As you can see its sort of backed into a corner, with these things conflicting with each other, thus my opinion that jump range as a balance factor is a bad idea overall to start with.

 

[NW3]

FD indicated that the planned cost would be even higher for instant transfer. They lowered the cost when they added time to do the transfer. Then, when players complained, they halved the cost.

I've used transfer a few times now and the time (~21 min) and cost seemed reasonable. It's only expensive to transfer expensive ships and the time required is fine. Do missions or something (or even exit the game) while the transfer is happening.

I would like to see improvements to regular FSD travel. The current jump, scoop, jump cycle can get tedious after a few hundred jumps. Inside the bubble is OK, it's only long distant travel that needs to be more fun.

 

[Dracaya Tzentchel]

Yet the best trade ships are multi-roles, and the loss of combat capability a combat fit multi-role suffers is trivial enough that people are happy to do most combat related things with them, which again gets us to where we are today, with most people in polls saying their primary ship is an aspx or anaconda - polls having questionable reliability is one thing, but i dont think anyone would claim that those results sound inaccurate.

Well the Asp X is a ship that almost anybody can buy with a relatively short amount of time playing and the Anaconda was for the longest time the largest ship in the game and is still the largest ship in the game that doesn't require a superpower rank to buy, so that inflates the statistics a bit.

The Type 9 is a better trader ship for bulk than the Anaconda is, and it's also nearly half the price just for the chassis. The main advantage that the multi-role ships have is that you can refit them to suit your needs even if they aren't the best at anything. ED is such right now that you don't really need a super heavy combat optimised ship unless it's for PvP and so the Anaconda is completely fine for it.

 

[Titan1978]

This was DEMANDED by commanders OP! I was in beta when they nuked INSTANT transfer and DEMANDED exorbitant costs in ship transfer. By far the only community that DEMANDS grind than requesting to LOWER it.

 

[Erika]

The Type 9 is a better trader ship for bulk than the Anaconda is, and it's also nearly half the price just for the chassis.

Thing is hauling is one of the easier ways to raise faction rep quickly, and so i would expect a dedicated space trucker to have the easiest time getting that cutter. I know my reputation increases faster when i have a large cargohold to work with.

The main advantage that the multi-role ships have is that you can refit them to suit your needs even if they aren't the best at anything.

The problem here is your need to do other things never really shuts off. If you want to do combat, you need some cargo space if only to accept the missions that give some rewards, you need range to get to the target system which can sometimes be out of the way, you may even need specific tools to isolate the target (i know that combat grinding tends to avoid more elaborate mission types in favor of stacking things, but we have the missions so im going to operate under the assumption that you are meant to be doing them do them). Which is another issue, when you compare a combat specialists ability to combat over a multi-role, compared to a multi-roles ability to do everything else but combat, you should be coming to an even trade off, a combat should be giving up a certain % of its efficacy at doing non combat things, and gaining that exact amount back in combat capability, however...

ED is such right now that you don't really need a super heavy combat optimised ship unless it's for PvP and so the Anaconda is completely fine for it.

Which means either you should need a more sturdy combat ship (people complained) or said combat ships should not be penalized as much at other things (people complain)

Traditionally in elite multi-roles were ships that could do everything kind of ok concurrently, that was the whole idea behind the combat trader. Instead we have ships that can be fit to do specific things as good as you practically need them to do, while retaining some degree of flexibility even in reasonable fits for those dedicated tasks, and then ships that on paper are better at those tasks, but their enhanced prowess not actually needed or particularly impactfull, which have to sacrifice for that needless advantage.

The balance option is then to make those edges actually payoff to have, or to reduce the penalties.

 

[Dracaya Tzentchel]

Thing is hauling is one of the easier ways to raise faction rep quickly, and so i would expect a dedicated space trucker to have the easiest time getting that cutter. I know my reputation increases faster when i have a large cargohold to work with.

It's true that you can get rep faster with trading missions, however you're comparing entirely different magnitudes of ship together and calling them equivalent. The Cutter is almost three times more expensive just to buy the hull than the T9 is, and that's before you even start to fit the Cutter with anything, the price gap only increases from there.

The gap in performance between the Type 9 and the Imperial Cutter is almost equivalent to the gap between the Type 7 and the Type 9 and I don't think anybody would argue that they're equivalent 'tiers' of ship.

 

[Erika]

It's true that you can get rep faster with trading missions, however you're comparing entirely different magnitudes of ship together and calling them equivalent. The Cutter is almost three times more expensive just to buy the hull than the T9 is, and that's before you even start to fit the Cutter with anything, the price gap only increases from there.

The gap in performance between the Type 9 and the Imperial Cutter is almost equivalent to the gap between the Type 7 and the Type 9 and I don't think anybody would argue that they're equivalent 'tiers' of ship.

Price is a small overall component to the actual effort to optimally create a ship however. With things like faction grinds, engineer grinds, and the increased income potential now - credits are sort of being phased out as a concern (which i think is a good thing given some credit imbalance issues in the past), and 'currencies' are replacing them.

The result is that things like pad size, ease of use, and more obscure things like how difficult it is to land on a planet, its heat management when doing a series of jumps and scooping, all become more important considerations than the base cost because said cost is trivial as a representation of effort compared to, say, the effort required to get the materials to get extremely good rolls on all your mods. So i dont think cost is a viable balancing consideration at the current state the game is in. Some people complain about that, though as i said i think phasing credits out and replacing them with other things is for the best anyway - but whichever you agree with it doesnt change that cost is less of a consideration now than in the past.

Now when it comes to cargo hauling, which some of those considerations dont really apply to, you can still look at the simple ship progression path people pick to see if things are ok. How many people manage to skip the t9 comfortably even if pursuing a cargo-hauling game style start to finish with the goal of obtaining a cutter? I see many people say they just stick with a cargo python because of medium pad size

 

[z33r0x]

Yeah too expensive, or at least there should be a cap how expensive it could be. To transfer my Anaconda home, cost me 575 Million Credits, and would take 61 hours. I don't mind the 61 hours, but darn it, 575 Million, thats more than a new ship cost

 

[z33r0x]

I'd personally prefer if it was all just one jump, at least as much as fuel allows. I don't mind if the witchspace sequence is just as long timewise especially once spacelegs* are a thing.

But the whole "star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J, star, press J" thing to get somewhere far in the bubble in a combat ship... THAT IS NOT GOOD GAMEPLAY. It is a ton of loading scenes that demand a mindless prompt from the player to get to the next one over and over again. A wall blocking the actual gameplay. The spaceflight may be unrealistic and arcadey but at least it's fun flying around, hell, at least supercruise has some variety... not so the jumps! Once you've seen each kind of star a bunch of times the novelty really wears off.

Just give me a long witchspace sequence from where I am to my destination so I don't need to be there to sit through all the load screens.

*Though unless Frontier really fixes their approach I won't be giving them any money or indeed opening the game again. Their loss of customers I guess, everyone I know has stopped actually playing and purchasing too.

Lol all my friends left as well, and one guy actually gave away his alpha backer account... and that new owner of the account, he left as well, and wanted to give the account back, and the original owner of that account said, nah im good, keep it, I mean, how sick is that? .. I so agree with you, one jump, and how far, is based on Frameshift Drive and fuel, it still would take a long time to get to for an example... From the bubble to Colonia, would still take a lot of time and work, but it will be less painful. But filling each slot with fuel tanks would be a nice way to get there easier.

 

[Ozram]

Seems to be working as intended. I use it regularly and am quite happy with it. Keeps small ships relevant and manages to not "shrink" the galaxy.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Their reasoning is obvious, they want to use jump range as a balancing factor. The issue is they have not done it very well.

Game developers are not the ideal people to judge game design. Just like artists are not the ideal art critics, cheffs are not the ideal food tasters, etc. People who make something think in terms of implementation, not in terms of what actually is. They will be impressed by novelty or things that most people will not even notice, not the real experience as a layman will have it. Part of our responsibility as consumers is to be critical and act as a reference to what the creations real manifestation in actual reality is, because its the only way they are going to know.

That is plain nonsense. You make it sound as if it's the artist's job to please an audience. You are confusing artist with entertainer. Regardless, fine: you would like different jump range values. That's just a personal opinion. The idea that you find your opinion somehow important, more important than that of the devs, is also just an opinion. It's dressed-up as art philosophy, and you'll find that your 'reference to what the creations real manifestation in actual reality is' will have as much impact on ED as the average critic has on whatever field is being critiqued: none whatsoever.

 

[Dracaya Tzentchel]

You're not supposed to be able to instantly zip from one end of the bubble to the other without any commitment, that's a deliberate design decision by FDev.

And if you could I guarantee you that if FDev caved to the demands of all the people making endless complaint threads there would be endless complaint threads about the changes, probably by the very same people, because these people are pretty much impossible to please. It's the equivalent of going to SCS Software and complaining that their truck simulator games have too much driving on highways and require too many delivery missions.

 

[Erika]

That is plain nonsense. You make it sound as if it's the artist's job to please an audience.

Depends on how you look at it. You can pretty easily correlate an artists success based on how good they are at producing things people who are not artists appreciate.
Im a musician. Since becoming one my interests in music have changed over the decades to the point that every day people really dont appreciate the kinds of music i now do, nor would i have in the beginning, and the little things that just blow me away are missed entirely. I could take the perspective that "all the normal people are just stupid!" but i instead accept that my preferences are skewed by my experiences in creating. Some music may be composed for musicians to appreciate, but most is for every day people, just as most games should be made for people who are not game developers to play.

That's just a personal opinion.

An opinion with arguments and reasoning behind it which i present. This is a good deal better than some hand waving "the devs must know what they are doing even if its a total mystery to us all".

I have shown basic issues with the current situation, such as a very obvious one of the problem with both using range as a balancing factor and implementing a way to bypass travel for slower ships altogether.

I bring up ship usage, admittedly we do not have hard statistics but is anyone going to challenge the assertion that some ships get exponentially more play time than others? I would say that constitutes a problem and then go on to propose that one of the reasons these ships get used less is their jump range is significantly shorter and that the trade off for that has obviously not be adequately compensated. That seems like a straightforward and reasonable thing to propose. People are free to disagree that its a problem at all that some ships are hardly used, in which case there is no real way to argue, thats just a disagreement. However someone accepting the idea that ships aught to see a reasonable level of use would then have to either agree with my broad statement or counter-argue that the lower jump range actually has nothing to do with these ships decreased popularity.

Of course you cant just listen to random forum complaints, thats why you have to see if someone is actually arguing or just complaining. A complaint would be something like "i dont like X because its not fun because i dont want to do it" and then a bunch of hyperbole thrown in and mentions of things like 'fun' or 'i paid good money' or 'choices' when choices means the choice to do things exactly like they want damn the consequences. An argument would explain why something is flawed or just raise concern over a certain mechanism not in relation to how it affects a specific player but the game overall. Ive said before that lowering the upper end of jump ranges would have the same effect as raising the lower end, it makes no difference to me, my only concern is that the disparity causes some ships to be used significantly less than others because range is obviously more important a consideration in general gameplay than FD accounts for. The only reason i would advocate raising minimum range is simply because i foresee nerfing some ships range would cause massive forum complaints.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

OP - no. really?

You took an Anaconda and for some reason wanted to call in a Corvette? Why for gods sake man? Why? The Anconda is perfectly good for combat or trade or whatever. Call in the corvette if you want to waste some money, but just get down to business in the Anaconda... unless you, for no reason i can fathom, are wasting an Anaconda jumping around the bubble by stripping it down.

Ship transfers are cheap unless you are moving the big ships long distances.... but if that's how you play it, then its your choice.

My advice, get the Conda fitted properly and you can stop worrying about other things.

 

[Dbrn47]

I think it's just fine. It's not a bag of holding to drag around a whole fleet of ships in your virtual pocket.
Time and cost are factors for descision making. Your play style or what you want to do are always choice.

I have a hot rod Viper modded for nothing but speed and maneuvering, with just a D rated drive that's ultra light weight. I use transfer to move this ship to systems I want to fly in. It's not costly and I run missions while waiting. It's fine.

So you're saying that you use the feature in a way that people were scared of you using it if it were instant instead? I guess as long as there's a delay it's all good. [haha]

I'm sticking with just a couple ships, a multipurpose and a traveler, instead of having many for different purposes. Just less fuss and wait when I'm in a multipurpose ship that can handle pretty much anything I run into while I'm running around.

I've always had an issue with the amount of tedious travel in this game but that's unrelated to ship transfer really.. it's just that the game world isn't that interesting (anymore), it's too empty, too realistic, too procedurally generated (all the interesting things happen in mini instances). Travel wouldn't be so bad if the scenery changes were more than just different colored orbs. Hell, you can't even get to many nebulae, only to a star close to them so you can only see it from a distance.. Then the nebulae you can enter... well, it doesn't even feel like you are in them... Neutron/White Dwarf Jets and Thargoid Scout interdictions are a couple of the coolest things I've seen since this game released. It's not that I'd want those specific examples to be everywhere, but if we don't want to make travel faster or instant, then the game world needs to be more interesting to travel. Danger, wonder, excitement, beauty are things that get lost after your Nth consecutive loading screen and pop in to X colored orb. People love how big our galaxy is, but I think that sometimes, for a game, it can be too big for its own good.

 

[Dbrn47]

That is plain nonsense. You make it sound as if it's the artist's job to please an audience. You are confusing artist with entertainer.

Is it no longer the job of game developers to develop a fun game? I guess they don't have to create an entertaining experience, but their career might be cut short if they don't. Their entire company might implode under the weight of zero money coming in. I think it's a balance of creating art and pleasing the audience. You can see that Sandro battles with this constantly, David and/vs Sandros vision for the game vs the bi-polar audience's wishes for the experience.

 

[Tarman]

So you're saying that you use the feature in a way that people were scared of you using it if it were instant instead? I guess as long as there's a delay it's all good. [haha]

I'm sticking with just a couple ships, a multipurpose and a traveler, instead of having many for different purposes. Just less fuss and wait when I'm in a multipurpose ship that can handle pretty much anything I run into while I'm running around.

I've always had an issue with the amount of tedious travel in this game but that's unrelated to ship transfer really.. it's just that the game world isn't that interesting (anymore), it's too empty, too realistic, too procedurally generated (all the interesting things happen in mini instances). Travel wouldn't be so bad if the scenery changes were more than just different colored orbs. Hell, you can't even get to many nebulae, only to a star close to them so you can only see it from a distance.. Then the nebulae you can enter... well, it doesn't even feel like you are in them... Neutron/White Dwarf Jets and Thargoid Scout interdictions are a couple of the coolest things I've seen since this game released. It's not that I'd want those specific examples to be everywhere, but if we don't want to make travel faster or instant, then the game world needs to be more interesting to travel. Danger, wonder, excitement, beauty are things that get lost after your Nth consecutive loading screen and pop in to X colored orb. People love how big our galaxy is, but I think that sometimes, for a game, it can be too big for its own good.

The size is a core underpinning of the game design; it's built around travel, so ofc travel features heavily. It mystifies me when people crank about travel in a game where the playfield is a scale model of the Milky Way. Yes, there are plenty of blanks and placeholders, but that's also related more to the build plan than the design itself. They made the galaxy first and are layering on top of that. People who get bored travelling should understand that they're playing a WIP (don't even start about quality of WIP, that's a whole other 50 threads; here it's a statement of fact). I don't want fundamental changes to travel that will be mitigated by future gameplay additions. Get more stuff, but don't break the frame that the stuff needs to be attached to.