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

[NW3]

Some of you need to keep in mind that sometimes a player only has an hour to play. Maybe only that one hour that week. For those people, the time tax that is travel is itself a barrier to them being able to enjoy the game with the time they have available.

Not everyone has 6 hours to play, guys.

In my last mission gathering series of runs, I timed myself for about 4 hours of play. My average experience? 70% of the time spent simply traveling to get to whatever I intended to do. Only 30% of my time was spent actually doing the tasks.

That's a problematic balance by any stretch. We're asking players to spend more of their time on the journey than on what they get to do at the destination in many situations. That leads to fatigue, frustration, etc.

It seems like a large portion of the gameplay in ED is travel. If you don't like flying your starship for extended stretches of time, I don't think you are going to enjoy this game very much.

FDev have always had problems with pricing and payouts and this is just another sign of that. I don't think they need to adjust the time at all. I think that's fine. But the prices are way too high to make ship transfer useful. FDev should really think about adjusting that. Otherwise I can see a lot of people overlooking this feature

I've used it a few times, when it made sense to do so. Personally, I'd like a cheaper, slower option. I'd be fine with an additional faster, more expensive option as well (even though I'd probably never use it).

Before we had ship transfer, you would just buy a temporary ship, for example: one dedicated for mining. Nothing is preventing you from doing that, when ship transfer doesn't make sense.

 

[Chris Simon]

You know... in certain other games empire building is a great way to implement money sinks... Fleet upkeep... Station upkeep.. Operation costs... [hehe] Just a thought.

Yup, having to pay a parking fee for every ship would actually be great.
Naturally some systems would be more expensive than others.
Also I'd like the ability to assign my pilots to ships I currently am not using and tell them where to transport them in advance, not after I got there.

edit after reading the OP: also, we should let this thread die, already. Fees are not changing.

 

[Ezren]

Indeed. To transfer my non-engineered cobra III from shinrata just over 80 ly is 34.6k credits, about the buy/sell loss. Presumably it would get more expensive with distance. (I assume would be the same cost the other way, where I could easily refit, in this special case.)
The engineered components and having to refit a new ship is obviously a factor. But something just does not seem 'right' in terms of the base incentive to use ship transfer, in this case. And as you say, I could do this in 4 ish jumps. So ship transfer is not the most attractive option, by design or otherwise. I do not know which.

And how much time would it take to get multiple ships in the same location? You could get your Cobra to Shinrata in 4-ish jumps, but you would also need to out to get it, which means either getting another ship to go out or bringing one of your other ships and leaving it elsewhere with the need to be retrieved at another time.

Seems that people approach this completely ignoring that facet - talking about how fast it would be one-way, instead of the round trip and means of getting out there in the first place.

But hey, if you don't want to, don't use it.

 

[Commander Biscuit]

Seconding the docking fee. I miss that. It was small and pointless but it was immersive.

 

[Ezren]

Seconding the docking fee. I miss that. It was small and pointless but it was immersive.

That's basically what the fuel cost is at this point.

 

[Lobstris]

Ship transfer should have more then just a time/money gate. Why can't we at least of a little cgi clip play of a massive freighter leave a station and a message saying your stufff is on the way. Then anaothet vid message play once the stuff arrives at destination.

Right now the way its implemented is just bare bones and sad. It's 2017 we need more in game content.

I'm all for seeing my ships being offloaded from a Lynx bulk carrier that's just arrived at the station - would prefer an in-game thing than a cgi cut scene though. Trouble is a certain segment of people would moan that the time taken for the cut scene was adding to the transfer time and eating into their credits/hour, or that they've seen the cut scene 1000 times and can't skip it.

 

[Don_Von_Hulio]

I dont mind the cost but the time it takes to move is almost equal to a Too and From trip manually.

 

[A D]

Love or hate ED, it is about realism. Real space is huge and if distance and time become irrelevant (or nearly so), then it is just another game.

I agree it can get tedious if you have to travel a long way, but don't think instant travel for players or ships is the answer. Maybe massive hyper space gates - big expensive machines that only the major powers can fund/operate and which permit long jumps between the most populated systems? The may in fact require permits, have tariffs or even be controlled/closed to stop incursions during times of conflict. As for rest of cold vacant space... well just got to fly the old fashioned way : )

 

[Lobstris]

I dont mind the cost but the time it takes to move is almost equal to a Too and From trip manually.

Factor in the loading and unloading of your ship from the freighter at either end, it should take a bit longer.

 

[Burlsol]

Current system is fine and vastly better than the old way of having to keep buying haulers to use as shuttles:
Switch from cargo ship to the shuttle, jump 14 times across the bubble to your combat ship, switch to combat ship, then suffer with the ~10ly jump range to go to the other corner of the bubble where there is a CG for combat. 2 hours of nothing but jumping later and down the 500k for the cost of the shuttle, you're finally able to do some fighting.

Compared to now, where you can just have your asp moved where you are while you do some quick missions to cover the cost, hop in your asp, cross the bubble in 6 jumps directly to where you want to go, start your combat ship transferring, run a few more quick missions, and be golden.

 

[Aereon Theed]

Love or hate ED, it is about realism. Real space is huge and if distance and time become irrelevant (or nearly so), then it is just another game.

I agree it can get tedious if you have to travel a long way, but don't think instant travel for players or ships is the answer. Maybe massive hyper space gates - big expensive machines that only the major powers can fund/operate and which permit long jumps between the most populated systems? The may in fact require permits, have tariffs or even be controlled/closed to stop incursions during times of conflict. As for rest of cold vacant space... well just got to fly the old fashioned way : )

I am quietly hoping they open up other galaxies and us hyper gates to get travel back and forth between them.

 

[Lobstris]

I am quietly hoping they open up other galaxies and us hyper gates to get travel back and forth between them.

Based on the pattern on the barnacles, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the Large Magellanic Cloud would be the first destination.

 

[Dbrn47]

I am quietly hoping they open up other galaxies and us hyper gates to get travel back and forth between them.

I love all the high sci-fi stuff. I'd be completely fine with this and even jump gates going to other populated space, say from the bubble to Colonia (hides).

 

[Ignition]

I am quietly hoping they open up other galaxies and us hyper gates to get travel back and forth between them.

This would be amazing, imagine the other galaxy with aliens invades our galaxy and then something bigger than powerplay could happen. Small colonies of aliens start to get bigger and bigger through time and get constantly moving. Then human bigger fleets venture to the other galaxy to fight back.

But this would never happen and atm the state of the game don't need it. It has bigger issues like no gameplay complexities.

 

[Aereon Theed]

This would be amazing, imagine the other galaxy with aliens invades our galaxy and then something bigger than powerplay could happen. Small colonies of aliens start to get bigger and bigger through time and get constantly moving. Then human bigger fleets venture to the other galaxy to fight back.

But this would never happen and atm the state of the game don't need it. It has bigger issues like no gameplay complexities.

I was like yes! YES we see eye to eye... then you went and smashed my dreams (lol). Lets hope Elite Dangerous has as large of an arch as EVE and then maybe in five years we will see this sort of addition to the game.

 

[NW3]

I dont mind the cost but the time it takes to move is almost equal to a Too and From trip manually.

While I do understand your point, I respectfully disagree.

The time should be about the same, imo. I'm hoping that one day we will have missions to move NPC ships. At that point, the cost and time would be about right. I'd certainly want a decent fee and the time required should be reasonable for me to fly the ship to the destination.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

I dont mind the cost but the time it takes to move is almost equal to a Too and From trip manually.

This is by design. It was balanced so as never to be more efficient than actually doing it yourself. Truth is i think FD will cave on the cost and reduce them, however i do not see them backtracking on the time

- - - Updated - - -

Factor in the loading and unloading of your ship from the freighter at either end, it should take a bit longer.

I would love live loading times and what not, obviousky accelerated but just a "nod" to realism... We need stuff to do whikst waiting however. I have thoughts on that but for another thread

 

[stooger]

I used it couple of times and it worked great. Time and costs are ok imo. One thing I'd want is the ability to send ships anywhere we want remotely. But still I'm happy with ship transfer as is. Some physical/graphical representation of them going somewhere would be great but it's not that important. But looking at harmless npc crashing my conda into beluga in mail slot... yeah that could be pretty exciting thing to watch ;D

 

[Dbrn47]

I used it couple of times and it worked great. Time and costs are ok imo. One thing I'd want is the ability to send ships anywhere we want remotely. But still I'm happy with ship transfer as is. Some physical/graphical representation of them going somewhere would be great but it's not that important. But looking at harmless npc crashing my conda into beluga in mail slot... yeah that could be pretty exciting thing to watch ;D

Especially if you get to watch your Anaconda get blown up by the station for it and you completely lose the ship because of it. Immersion levels off the scale man. Can we put it in tomorrow?

 

[careBear1]

But hey, if you don't want to, don't use it.

How unsurprisingly childish. I was talking about the balance of relative incentives. Take your point about two ways, not one though.