.....and yet that is precisely the argument you & your fellow lovers of the current mechanic keep using to justify the need to retain the insta-reveal honk. If the value of the planets/stars means nothing to you, then merely knowing there are stellar bodies in the system should be sufficient for you. Why do you need to instantly know what kind of planets they are & precisely what they look like?
I just find it hilarious how much people can hate a mechanic that they have neither seen in action or tried out themselves......unless you are Commander Thrust of Bradford.
If I were you Marc, I'd have a look at my very first feedback post. You'll see it says we need to have a look at this in beta. I also haven't used the word hate, in fact the strongest words I can recall using about it are 'concern' and 'derpy'.
As to the rest, specifically this:
If the value of the planets/stars means nothing to you, then merely knowing there are stellar bodies in the system should be sufficient for you
I can't believe I'm actually doing this but I'll have one last try at it.
'Value' in this context is subjective.
The 'value' of the bodies in a system to me
in terms of credits is irrelevant. I see any credits gained from exploration as essentially a bonus. Even after the buffs there are numerous ways I can make credits 10x faster than I can exploring. It's not a motivator to me at all.
Whatever value I may attach to a particular body is measured purely by comparison to
what I am looking for and that may not even be the same thing on different trips. It
definitely won't be the same thing for different explorers. Many examples have already been given as to the kinds of things that explorers may focus on; close binary pairs, rapidly orbiting bodies, bodies in very close orbit to their parent star, high-G landable worlds (one of my own targets on any exploration trip) ringed earthlikes, whatever. I've seen a post where someone's interests include recording the hydrogen percentage of a particular class of gas giants.
Again, you should have a look at the exploration forum sometime to get a proper grasp of the variety of things that players are actually looking for on exploration trips. Explorers are a very broad church, which is the main reason that I find your insistence on trying to apply your 'real true explorer' definition to them somewhat at odds with the reality of the experience. Someone who sets off into the black with scanners on board aiming to find things is an explorer - it needs no further definition and attempting to create some kind of 'hierarchy' of explorers in that way adds nothing constructive whatsoever to a discussion of game mechanics.
But we digress. So no, simply knowing that a system contains stellar and/or planetary bodies is not in fact going to be enough for me, or for quite a few other explorers because if the bodies concerned happen to be six generic non-landable ice planets in orbits 200ls or more from the main star and with nothing about their orbital relationships that makes them in any way distinctive from the last 20 systems I saw like that (which in many areas of space will have been observed within my last 30 jumps...) then according to my own,
entirely subjective and
non credit-based assessment criteria the system will not be one that I have any interest in tarrying in.
(In case you didn't notice, that also means that every body in the system will not be tagged by me and therefore still available for tagging by another player, perhaps one like yourself for whom the thrill of discovering those bodies will provide all of the enjoyment you deem necessary.)
In the three years that I've played the game, the ADS functionality has ensured that I do not have to spend my game time discovering things about bodies in systems that I don't care about simply to be aware of their presence. That is the value of it - the ability to quickly gain an overview of whether a system meets enough of my own
wholly subjective and
non credit-based criteria to be worthy of more detailed analysis. The 'value' that you insist on fixating on is simply the amount of enjoyment I will be getting from that session of gameplay by meeting some of the objectives that I have set for myself. It's entirely personal and as a result of that, completely impossible to quantify by anyone other than me which is perhaps why you're having a hard time with it.
This is a computer game. There is
no amount of time spent performing unenjoyable or unfulfilling activities that it's reasonable to expect players to find acceptable in a computer game because the whole point of playing a computer game is to participate in an enjoyable leisure activity. It's not real life where a certain amount of taking the rough with the smooth is not only reasonable but usually inevitable.
I fully accept that your position is the opposite to mine in that you don't find the current mechanics engaging, although you may have noticed that I haven't felt the need to disparage your own preferred playstyle in my replies, or to assign a category of my own creation to you. That's
despite the amount of work you put into trying to make my reference to people wanting to spend their time in the game productively and an acknowledgement that
some people will
genuinely have relatively limited amounts of time to play games (honestly Marc it's true) into a suggestion that everybody who likes the new mechanics must be an unemployed basement dweller.
So, as mentioned last night Ziljan's suggestion of the original and new scanner sets being available as a discrete choice, with no mix and match possible but with the new surface drones added to the 'old' DSS so that all players enjoy that new functionality regardless of which set of gear they choose to use, seems to be a perfect solution to me.
Obviously we have no idea whether it's even possible to incorporate both old and new sets simultaneously in the game because I have no idea if the code base is sufficiently modular to allow that, but as a hypothetical scenario it would seem to provide everything that you want (the new system, in full with no compromises) and would also let players who are happy with the current functionality, or at least who consider the loss of aspects of it in the new system to not be sufficiently compensated for by the inclusion of other aspects of that new system, to retain the original functionality.
If you got what you want, which is a more involved exploration style using the new tools, I have to return to my question from last night. Why isn't that enough for you? Why was your first reaction to dismiss the whole idea of duplicate systems and then to immediately start dreaming up ways in which you think the current system could be restricted in such a model? In short, why would simply getting the new stuff that you want not be enough for you to be happy?
It seems to me that your potential happiness is rooted as much in the need to exert a sense of (entirely misplaced) moral superiority over other players as it is in what you actually experience whilst playing the game and I'll freely admit that I find that just as difficult to understand as you find the satisfaction some players may currently obtain from exploration.
I am genuinely through with this thread now because this is adding absolutely nothing of value to the discussion (which we aren't even supposed to be having here anyway) and certainly isn't giving FDev much in the way of feedback, plus I suspect the other few hundred poor souls still reading are sick of it. If you happen to post in any of the DD threads about this, or the exploration sub-forum ones I'll be happy to continue a conversation there.
