News Chapter Four - Exploration Reveal

It's NOT a change.

It's the same thing with a layer of faux complexity.

It's not an exploration update.

And it'll be compromised by the forum anyway. It's the absolute bare minimum to tick the box. It's a minigame to make the little spheres light up.

What the hell happened to the ED team over this last year? The expo was full of promise.
 
Sorry, but everybody asked for a) easier way to discover things on bodies b) more meaningful mechanics of discovering and exploring system.

Both are covered more or less by new system.
Both of them are covered by replacing the DSS with a probing system. That leaves the change to the ADS, which does almost the exact opposite. Curiously enough, no-one is really complaining about the former, whereas the many issues with the latter have been expounded upon in great detail.
 
Both of them are covered by replacing the DSS with a probing system. That leaves the change to the ADS, which does almost the exact opposite. Curiously enough, no-one is really complaining about the former, whereas the many issues with the latter have been expounded upon in great detail.

Emmm no. Problems are mostly coming from people getting used to "hit and run" exploration, not really valid complains per se.
 
Both of them are covered by replacing the DSS with a probing system. That leaves the change to the ADS, which does almost the exact opposite. Curiously enough, no-one is really complaining about the former, whereas the many issues with the latter have been expounded upon in great detail.

So how would we get DSS scans if the DSS is changed to probes only. Are you suggesting that the ADS and the DSS gets bundled into one item so you can get "discovered by" on every single thing in the planet and all the in-depth surface details and all the POI's on every planet with a five second honk?

I don't think I can actually believe what I am reading in these posts. Talking about making a magic god mode mechanic even more powerful. Everyone will just Jump and honk and that is it. In one fell swoop it would make exploration from being bad to utterly appalling and to be honest completely destroying the game for me.
 
A key piece of info missing from the debate:

The new probes are likely to add significant amount of time to the exploration per system. The new scanner removes travel time and hence is made of pure scanning time. This seems to be designed to SAVE time precisely because they need to make room in the time budget for PROBES.

Hence, if you want probes and you want the slow old travel + scanning system, you are asking the devs to massively increase the time it takes to explore a single system.
 
Emmm no. Problems are mostly coming from people getting used to "hit and run" exploration, not really valid complains per se.

Lmao no. You have zero indication of the former, and you have to have skipped the entire thread to have missed the numerous entirely valid and cogent reasons why the new UI will cause problems.

So how would we get DSS scans if the DSS is changed to probes only.
They're already bundling the DSS functionality into the ADS. That doesn't seem to have been cause for complaints from anyone. Rather, the problem is that the honk is needlessly turned into pointless busywork, and the DSS scan is not particularly changing anything. The DSS part is being made faster, which some people seem to enjoy, but it does not actually fulfill those two points: it has no effect whatsoever on discovering thigns on bodies, and it offers no (and definitely not more) meaningful mechanics as far as discovery and exploration goes. It's just the same old stuff; some made slower, some made faster, only now it's being done in a disconnected -fiddling UI layer.

I don't remember anything remotely as silly as your suggestion being brought up before, so you can probably calm down there (although, now that you've introduced the idea, I'm sure the people who are advocating faster planet scanning will latch onto it).

Talking about making a magic god mode mechanic even more powerful.
Yes, that is indeed one of the problems with the suggestion in the OP. Hence why it's being critiqued: it does exactly two things — reduce player choice and agency and increase credit accumulation speed. Hardly a change worthy of being called an exploration update.
 
Last edited:
A key piece of info missing from the debate:

The new probes are likely to add significant amount of time to the exploration per system. The new scanner removes travel time and hence is made of pure scanning time. This seems to be designed to SAVE time precisely because they need to make room in the time budget for PROBES.

Hence, if you want probes and you want the slow old travel + scanning system, you are asking the devs to massively increase the time it takes to explore a single system.

Clearly we need a screenshots per hour discussion.

How about a probes launched per hour discussion?
 
A key piece of info missing from the debate:

The new probes are likely to add significant amount of time to the exploration per system. The new scanner removes travel time and hence is made of pure scanning time. This seems to be designed to SAVE time precisely because they need to make room in the time budget for PROBES.

Hence, if you want probes and you want the slow old travel + scanning system, you are asking the devs to massively increase the time it takes to explore a single system.

I don't plan on doing the world surface mapping much at all. I see it more as an additional option rather than an exploration requirement. So good on Frontier for that.

With a hybrid system you'd presumable still have to fly out to worlds close enough to "discover" them and/or use the new map mechanics, likewise if you want to launch probes.

If some people just want to use the new ADS map mechanics to tag worlds without flying around a system, no sweat of my back. There are plenty of systems to go around.
 
Last edited:
Can this whizzy new system be extended to SC travel? I'd really like to see energy efficient ships be essentially stealthy in SC, and that scanners + scanning enhancing utility modules are needed to hunt for them.

It would be fantastic; if you ping scanners or probes, you become visible, but if you remain passive and have a low thermal output (perhaps speed, ship size as well) you become very hard to spot.

You could also have the reverse, with hunters powered down and big ships (with their larger sized arrays) sweeping for them. It would make ship size and scanner size matter a lot more.
 
Lmao no. You have zero indication of the former, and you have to have skipped the entire thread to have missed the numerous entirely valid and cogent reasons why the new UI will cause problems.

The 'former' you refer to is the same argument put forward by Obsidian Ant in his video today, and is the reason I find myself taking issue with him on this topic (a rare thing).

This topic is wider than the issue of 'time taken' and extends into areas such as persistence and agency.

This is the first topic I've jumped into on the forums in a long time because I had the impression that there was going to be a hell of a lot more to it than a scanner ui.

I can tell you what will happen though and why we're all wasting our time - there'll be a compromised version of the new scanner ligh up the dots minigame rolled out to keep the forum happy. It'll be a shallow shiny thing and it'll become second nature and redundant after 5-15 times using it.
 
I can tell you what will happen though and why we're all wasting our time - there'll be a compromised version of the new scanner line up the dots minigame rolled out to keep the forum happy. It'll be a shallow shiny thing and it'll become second nature and redundant after 5-15 times using it.

My greatest fear is that you're absolutely right.
 
How about a probes launched per hour discussion?

There's no point to this proposal from FDev beyond creating a minigame and rewarding credits.

None of the data generated feeds back into the game or out to other players. Probes per hour or screenshots per hour will therefore be an inevitable discussion coming out of it.

You can see this a mile off.
 
My greatest fear is that you're absolutely right.

Might be another good reason for a hybrid system, actually. People could still take the "slow and easy" way – I'd prefer the wording "scenic route," but maybe that's just me – or the "new and engaging" way, aye?
 
Last edited:
This is the first topic I've jumped into on the forums in a long time because I had the impression that there was going to be a hell of a lot more to it than a scanner ui.

Its funny because any time a new UI is added that disconnects a player from their immersion cockpit, people on this forum wet the bed.
 
Back
Top Bottom