No more high-range FSD buffs, thanks!

[sollisb]

Not bothered reading any of the thread I guess.
No, its not salt or jealousy, its that large jump ranges make the galaxy flat and monotonous, almost "beigification"
Where once there was a difference between the arms and the gaps between, where once you had to keep an eye on the local star populations to stay out of brown dwarf zones, where once you were wise to consider your height from the orbital plane, now its all irrelevant uniformity.
Might as well be an even distribution of stars in 10 kly x 10kly x 10kly cube.
Just plot your destination and do the thing that everyone agrees is tedious of honk scoop till you have arrived.

Well, I'm pretty sure it hasn't changed. I don't ever remember a patch notes, saying anything about changes to the galaxy map as you claim.

For sure, FSD ranges have increased, and allowed players to jump further distances. And what's wrong with that?

Seriously, I'm a big boy, and what I'm reading from you is that you want players to play your way. You have some vexation that players are using the FSD range to bypass what they want to bypass, and it doesn't sit well with you. I don't understand why you beat yourself up about how other players play their game?

Can you explain that?

 

[Nazdakka]

Thought experiment: All ships have infinite jump range. You can jump anywhere you like in the galaxy in one hop.

Is this an improvement to the game or is there something inherently valuable in the galaxy's sense of scale?

 

[wstephenson]

Is this an improvement to the game or is there something inherently valuable in the galaxy's sense of scale?

I think the second clause of your sentence spoils the experiment by framing the question around the 'galaxy's sense of scale', rather than other qualities arising from the relationship of jump ranges and the distances between stars.

 

[Muetdhiver]

Thought experiment: All ships have infinite jump range. You can jump anywhere you like in the galaxy in one hop.

Is this an improvement to the game or is there something inherently valuable in the galaxy's sense of scale?

The problem with all this discution is that people are speaking of several different things, and conflating every single of them into one big mess.

• Scale. Which means time. Longer FSD range lowers the scale. I think the scale would be A-OK even 100 lyr FSD's.
• Difficulty, Risk and challenge. Quite some people here conflate something taking a long time with something difficult. It's not.
• Galaxy flatness - lack of terrain. Before long ranges FSD, the galaxy had some amount of terrain in the sparse regions between the arms. This is negated by the long range FSD. In effect, long range FSD flatten the galaxy.

Now, let's examine the issues :
1) The core loop of navigation is boring. scoop, aim, press J, repeat. Zero skill required here. Also, no danger, 'bangs' or nasty surprises beyond close contact binaries (very rare).

I think that this simple loop is good. It's boring, repetitive and snoozy. Exactly what you need to sucker punch someone with a nasty solar flare, a BH accretion disk or a 10^10 Tesla magnetar field.
Which is to say : add stellar dangers to exploration. Also, make jumping to systems a risky affair :

• unknown systems => high risk
• systems discovered by someone, but unknown to player => medium risk
• systems discovered by someone, and known to player => low risk
• systems with a (uncompromised) nav beacon => zero risks
• systems with a compromised nav beacon => high risk of ending with a FSD faceplant into an ambush.

How to introduce levels of risks ? Easy :

• Add stellar dangers. Most of them : closer to the star is worse.
• Introduce uncertainty in exit from hyperspace : the less information you have (see above), the more risk of a misscalculation leading you to exit really close to the object, or faceplanting it.
• Multiply uncertainty by jump distance : The longer the jump, the higher the uncertainty gets. 200 lyr Neutron boosted jump to an unknown neutron system ? Are you serious ? XD that what we need ^^
• Allow players to carry an nav beacon assembly bay, and lay down those to open routes. Make them craftable.

2) Time was used as an ersatz for actualy challenging/skill based navigation/exploration gameplay.

Well, if you make jumping into the unknown a risky affair, avoiding danger will take time and skill. With the above mechanics, high jump range would allow you to go : slow and low risk, or fast and furious (and pile on the risks).

3) The only notable features of the galaxy was provided by sparse regions now rather trivial to cross. IMO that is a bit lacking and there should be range-proof difficult features to navigate in the galaxy.

That's quite harder to fix. But : What if witchspace was not a uniform quiet sea, but had features such as calm ponds, rivers, maelstroms and raging storms ?

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

Thought experiment: All ships have infinite jump range. You can jump anywhere you like in the galaxy in one hop.

Is this an improvement to the game or is there something inherently valuable in the galaxy's sense of scale?

Depends how the new exploration game mechanics and the Codex work. Right now it's just 'people want to have fun' vs 'people want lots of load screens to destination to make the galaxy feel big'

It's obvious you can't really have 1 jump to anywhere, because it ruins lots of game mechanics for combat, trading and the point of different fsd classes.

It would probably help players that can't stand lots of repetitive jumps to visit the Thargoids, Guardains and other interesting events.

 

[Vorxian]

Then all planes should have a max range of 250km. As there would be no fun in seeing friends and family in Hong Kong on just a 12 hour flight. We'd expect it to take at least 10 days otherwise there would be no sense of the scale of Earth.

Come on folks, at the end of the day, technology evolves, and the world is a better place for it feeling 'smaller'.

It's not like any time soon we'll have the whole galaxy explored..... Until there's actual content, it's all the same anyway... other than the distance from the bubble. But distance isn't 'content'.

Ho hum.

 

[JonathanBurnage]

The problem with all this discution is that people are speaking of several different things, and conflating every single of them into one big mess.

• Scale. Which means time. Longer FSD range lowers the scale. I think the scale would be A-OK even 100 lyr FSD's.
• Difficulty, Risk and challenge. Quite some people here conflate something taking a long time with something difficult. It's not.
• Galaxy flatness - lack of terrain. Before long ranges FSD, the galaxy had some amount of terrain in the sparse regions between the arms. This is negated by the long range FSD. In effect, long range FSD flatten the galaxy.

Now, let's examine the issues :
1) The core loop of navigation is boring. scoop, aim, press J, repeat. Zero skill required here. Also, no danger, 'bangs' or nasty surprises beyond close contact binaries (very rare).

I think that this simple loop is good. It's boring, repetitive and snoozy. Exactly what you need to sucker punch someone with a nasty solar flare, a BH accretion disk or a 10^10 Tesla magnetar field.
Which is to say : add stellar dangers to exploration. Also, make jumping to systems a risky affair :

• unknown systems => high risk
• systems discovered by someone, but unknown to player => medium risk
• systems discovered by someone, and known to player => low risk
• systems with a (uncompromised) nav beacon => zero risks
• systems with a compromised nav beacon => high risk of ending with a FSD faceplant into an ambush.

How to introduce levels of risks ? Easy :

• Add stellar dangers. Most of them : closer to the star is worse.
• Introduce uncertainty in exit from hyperspace : the less information you have (see above), the more risk of a misscalculation leading you to exit really close to the object, or faceplanting it.
• Multiply uncertainty by jump distance : The longer the jump, the higher the uncertainty gets. 200 lyr Neutron boosted jump to an unknown neutron system ? Are you serious ? XD that what we need ^^
• Allow players to carry an nav beacon assembly bay, and lay down those to open routes. Make them craftable.

2) Time was used as an ersatz for actualy challenging/skill based navigation/exploration gameplay.

Well, if you make jumping into the unknown a risky affair, avoiding danger will take time and skill. With the above mechanics, high jump range would allow you to go : slow and low risk, or fast and furious (and pile on the risks).

3) The only notable features of the galaxy was provided by sparse regions now rather trivial to cross. IMO that is a bit lacking and there should be range-proof difficult features to navigate in the galaxy.

That's quite harder to fix. But : What if witchspace was not a uniform quiet sea, but had features such as calm ponds, rivers, maelstroms and raging storms ?

+1. Some great ideas here. The problem as I see it is that the small proportion of unreachable systems cannot be made reachable without increasing jump ranges to the extent that the galaxy would become truly tiny. If the frontiers of the galaxy have all been reached, then we have to make what is within those frontiers more dangerous somehow.

Here’s a starter for ten, building on the Thargoid hyperdiction. If jumping beyond your normal range, there’s a chance (which increases the further you go) that you get the ‘hyperspace conduit unstable’ warning. You then have to manually keep your ship on course, perhaps a little like the interdiction mini game, in order to reach your destination. It could be made more difficult as the distance travelled increases. Fail and you get unceremoniously dumped in your system of origin; you lose the fuel for the jump (and the boost) and take damage. This would combine really well with the double neutron supercharge if FDev could be persuaded to restore it, because even after you supercharged again you wouldn’t be guaranteed a safe return.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Come on folks, at the end of the day, technology evolves, and the world is a better place for it feeling 'smaller'.

In 3 years the range of the FSD has been increased by 50% through engineering. Added to that are the incidental Jumponium (max 100%) and neutron star (300%) boosts.

So technology in that regard has advanced at an unprecedented level in Elite dangerous. If you are determined to bring real life situations into it, you would have to conclude that the rate at which the FSD range has increased is way beyond expectations and needs to be nerfed.

 

[PiggyPiggyPig]

I think people keep missing the point. We're not mourning the loss of exploration and risk. Exploration will forever remain unaffected by FSD jump ranges.
In the sense that the OP laid out, those who voyage are driven by the expedition in navigation. Finding a way through.

 

[WR3ND]

In 3 years the range of the FSD has been increased by 50% through engineering. Added to that are the incidental Jumponium (max 100%) and neutron star (300%) boosts.

So technology in that regard has advanced at an unprecedented level in Elite dangerous. If you are determined to bring real life situations into it, you would have to conclude that the rate at which the FSD range has increased is way beyond expectations and needs to be nerfed.

It's a rabbit hole of a poor analogy anyway. Sometimes it's called for to just say no, regardless of jump range.

 

[WR3ND]

I think people keep missing the point. We're not mourning the loss of exploration and risk. Exploration will forever remain unaffected by FSD jump ranges.
In the sense that the OP laid out, those who voyage are driven by the expedition in navigation. Finding a way through.

Path finding is hugely affected by jump range. Not sure what you're talking about.

Basically, it isn't really a thing anymore, except for very niche scenarios. This hasn't always been the case.

These days I can plot a course all the way to the Skull and Crossbones Nebula in my combat loaded Vulture using nothing but scoop-able stars. Back in 3301, I didn't even know it existed. I remember being called a fool for using a Vulture and told I could never make it out to the Rosette Nebula... Pfft.

The Crab Nebula turned out to be much more of a worthy challenge. → https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/271103-Navigating-the-Crab-Nebula-Labyrinth

Even something basic like navigating through and along the brown dwarfs near the plane of the galaxy isn't really a thing anymore.

 

[Mengy]

Thought experiment: All ships have infinite jump range. You can jump anywhere you like in the galaxy in one hop.

Is this an improvement to the game or is there something inherently valuable in the galaxy's sense of scale?

I believe there is a value to the galaxy’s sense of scale. Or rather there would be if there were more interesting things to discover in it.

It’s analogous to Skyrim’s fast travel vs foot travel debate. You can use fast travel to get all the way across the map in an instant, BUT by doing so you miss out on the best parts of the game: the random interesting crazy stuff that happens while traveling across the map. The meat of Skyrim is not the main story points or the quests but rather the unpredictable out of the blue scenarios which pop up anywhere and everywhere when you least expect it.

That’s what Elite is missing in it’s procedural galaxy: a variety of things you can come across which makes the world unpredictable and interesting. Traveling across deep space would be much more fun and tolerable if it wasn’t all jump and honking ad nauseum. I break it up by looking for interesting looking planets and driving the SRV just for fun (before 2.2 anyway). What if while fuel scooping you sometimes had to dodge solar flares or corona ejections? What if some systems were bathed in strong radiation which slowly damaged your systems over time? What if you could come across stars surrounded by fast moving dense matter fields which were very dangerous to jump into? There are tons of ways to make traveling across the galaxy much more interesting, things to add which would break up the jump and honk monotony and actually give commanders events requiring decision making and responses.

In an interesting galaxy there is value to a sense of scale. In a boring galaxy scale is just a time barrier to traveling. IMHO of course.

 

[Sapyx]

I have said it before in other threads and I'll say it again here: I believe that alien-tech-derived stardrives (Thargoid, Guardian or Someone Else, it doesn't matter) that let you jump 600 LY at a time will be in the game within a couple of years. You might have to actually have an alien ship to fly them, or you might be able to install them in any ship. Or maybe only in large ships, or only in small ships. But I believe the 600 LY jump drive is inevitable.

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

Thargoids have totally ruined exploration. By reverse engineering their drive technology, we can now jump to systems in seconds instead of days or weeks. The Pilot Federation needs to lockout all FSD systems, to prevent them working. We then need to go back to hyperdrives were in could take over a week to jump to another system. If you jump today, then sometime next week you can keep playing once jump is complete. It could take months maybe years to get to Maia from Sol.

Nerf the FSD.

 

[WR3ND]

Thargoids have totally ruined exploration. By reverse engineering their drive technology, we can now jump to systems in seconds instead of days or weeks. The Pilot Federation needs to lockout all FSD systems, to prevent them working. We then need to go back to hyperdrives were in could take over a week to jump to another system. If you jump today, then sometime next week you can keep playing once jump is complete. It could take months maybe years to get to Maia from Sol.

Nerf the FSD.

No one is suggesting this that I'm aware of, so I don't really get your point.

Being able to supercruise between systems would be kind of nice though...

Spoiler

For better or worse, the FSD is something that effectively can't be nerfed in the game.

 

[Brrokk]

I don't really have a "side" in this thread, but I would comment that the galaxy is vast; completely beyond imagination. Attempts to get its scale depend on adopting some yardstick. With a jump time of about a minute, that yardstick could be 20ly per minute or 50ly per minute. In either case it's an exercise of the imagination to try to "get" the size of the galaxy while using it. None of us will succeed but some might be more impressed than others.

A more physically accurate way would be to simply forbid any travel faster than 1c. That would really show us the distances between stars, but gameplay would be impossible.

A favourite calculation of mine is as follows. Suppose I shrink the entire solar system out to Pluto down to the size of a grain of sand 1mm in diameter. Light then travels about a yard per year. The nearest star is about 4 yards away. How big is the galaxy? It would fit nicely into the English Channel between the Isle of Wight and Cherbourg! On the same scale I'd put the Andromeda galaxy in the Mediterranean off the toe of Italy.

 

[WR3ND]

I think the second clause of your sentence spoils the experiment by framing the question around the 'galaxy's sense of scale', rather than other qualities arising from the relationship of jump ranges and the distances between stars.

↑ This. A sense of scale is just one factor to consider, though very much a relevant one, in my opinion.

Unfortunately, path finding has taken a big hit in the game.

Earlier on it might have been better to keep jump range variation between ships smaller than what it is.

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

No one is suggesting this that I'm aware of, so I don't really get your point.

Being able to supercruise between systems would be kind of nice though...

Spoiler

https://i.imgur.com/zlHJQjN.png

For better or worse, the FSD is something that effectively can't be nerfed in the game.

It's about the balance of the feeling of galaxy scale vs fun. No one would want to wait a week to jump to another system, that would be boring. Jumping across the whole galaxy in one jump would be boring. Some people feel the same way when going to Calonia doing 100's of repetitive jumps. No one is right or wrong, it's a balancing act. As some else mentioned, those jumps would not be so bad if the galaxy was interesting, but the travel and exploration game mechanics are practically non-existent.

 

[Winterwalker]

Being able to supercruise between systems would be kind of nice though..

Always happy to add my +1 to that.

The hyperspace jump record thread was a great follow so, even though I'm generally quite traditional in how I hope ED to be, FSD is actually one (maybe the only one) area where god rolls will be a loss when the Beyond update drops imo. I don't have any problem with extreme FSD distances because when it comes to exploring, it's obvious you're leapfrogging dozens of systems that aren't explored. I also like the like the idea of experiment FSD builds that run so hot, even managing to survive a single jump becomes a full time occupation. ps. I don't support "single bound" or stargate type jumps but really anything up to 100/150 Ly doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

 

[CMDR ANCALAGON]

Just to weight in on the repeated assertions that exploration is about navigation, or finding a way through: perhaps it is for some, but navigation is rarely a cornerstone of my exploration experience or objectives. For me, its seeking the rare and wonderful, and planting a "discovered by" flag. Its all about "firsts" most of the time.

"Finding a way" only comes into play if that potential first is on the edges of the rim, or high above/below the plane. Of course, this is where jump range comes in to some extent. The other time jump range figures into my exploration objectives is my current scenario.

Yesterday I found an amazing deep purple and blue undiscovered planetary nebuela within 2,500ly of occupied space. I've been on an expedition for a few weeks to find such locals, and given the proximity of this one to civilization, I'll be hauling Asp (Anaconda actually) to the nearest starport before someone beats me to it. I plotted the course before bed, and it will only take 17 jumps to get there. Had this been on my first expedition eight months ago, it would have taken me 62 jumps.