News Chapter Four - Exploration Reveal

[WR3ND]

...

Random aside for comedic relief, but for some reason this video kind of reminds me of Michael Brookes – though only in the best possible ways, of course... [hehe]

Spoiler

[video=youtube_share;kzeeV_Dl9gw]https://youtu.be/kzeeV_Dl9gw[/video]

As you were. o7

 

[Ziljan]

Calculators make the calculation trivial and the brainpower redundant. Bots make the gameplay trivial and the player redundant.

You're not making much sense here and it seems to me that you're stretching back and forth here to display your fandom without interest in discussing the topic.

A minigame becomes at best trivial and at worst redundant - exactly at the point you described in your previous post.

That's my criticism of it and your previous post demonstrated that criticism perfectly.

Reductio ad absurdum is an attempt to show the logical conclusion of someone else's argument, not to actually take that side. The question you accidentally raised is: "would you rather have a game that is so trivial that a simple bot could replace you?" ... because that is exactly what the current 'gameplay' is.

The general hope is that the new mechanic would finally introduce gameplay that won't be trivial enough for simple bots. Including a selectable system map or body list in the nav panel for undiscovered bodies might make that possible again. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen.

Just to be clear, the point of de-trivializing the game isn't just to thwart cheaters. It's to involve the players brain in the exercise of discovery. If youre against the new mechanic because you think that thinking itself is "busy work" I am afraid we've reached the end of line for possible common ground? I sincerely hope not.

 

[wstephenson]

Would any other explorers appreciate a SC Power Orbit cruise control feature, that simply maintains a circular orbit around the current 'blue diamond' body at the current altitude, with the inclination defined as that given by the shortest slew to a 'nose forward' orbital heading? Roll control and throttle enabled, any other control input disengages the autopilot?

Would be nice for photography, looking at planetary surfaces and general basking.

 

[Tippis]

The question you accidentally raised is: "would you rather have a game that is so trivial that a simple bot could replace you?" ... because that is exactly what the current 'gameplay' is.

The general hope is that the new mechanic would finally introduce gameplay that won't be trivial enough for simple bots.

Unfortunately, it's the other way around.

The current gameplay is not that because it involves something the bot cannot do: subjective determination of “value” and relating that to an equally subjective determination of “effort”.

The proposed minigame, being wholly a matter of playing with a UI, is prime botting fodder — in fact, it is exactly this kind of UI minigame that is the most trivially botted: read the data that feeds the UI; adjust input accordingly; repeat until reward flag pops. A trivial, brainless, wholly programmatic procedure. Hell, the core problem they are trying to solve is solved in such a way that even the system-to-system travel could be largely automated.

There is no brain involvement in the new system, just rote following of instructions. By putting a barrier in the way of player making choices, and reducing the actual time investment needed after that barrier, the whole system is asking for cheats to be developed — something that the current system makes almost completely pointless. It trivialises the game; it encourages and simplifies cheating; it involves the player less; it engages with fewer groups of players; and it replaces thinking with busy work.

All that to not actually solve a problem (because it replaces the perceived issue with the exact same issue) and instead just promote cash farming.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Random aside for comedic relief, but for some reason this video kind of reminds me of Michael Brookes – though only in the best possible ways, of course... [hehe]


As you were. o7

I miss the old Brookester [sad]

 

[WR3ND]

I miss the old Brookester [sad]

Yeah, I wish I remembered where the source was and the specific context, but either way it was both funny and insightful seeing him talk about the game lore and why intimate human/thargoid relationships wouldn't work.

Spoiler

Physical contact would burn them.

...

Well, he's moved on to bigger and better things now at least...

Spoiler

 

[Marc_Hicks]

That is your opinion, and you're entitled to it, but for others, spending time detail scanning a mundane ball of rock or ice is not worth it. Not because it doesn't pay, it's a game, the credits are meaningless, but because there's no useful or interesting outcome for the game-play involved.

And it's nothing, nothing at all to do with credits, and if you don't believe that and simply cannot see how silly that comment is... Well, I have over 4.5 billion credits, more than I could ever need in the game. You really believe I care about credits?

But if I find something interesting to explore or examine up close, I don't grit my teeth, I simply head for it and scan it. Still, the new system will be better for both of us in that regard, as we won't have to fly to it at all, it'll be quicker, easier. It will also be more active, possibly more engaging (we'll have to see after the umpteenth time that you will do it on an exploration trip of any substance).

It doesn't alter the fact to me that I'd much prefer to be a little targeted and goal oriented in my game-play, and not just scan something because it's there. I'd like to scan something because it's interesting.

No, it really isn't just an opinion. To an explorer, surely a planet is a planet.......something that is inherently very exciting to find? So why this arbitrary value assigned to one planet type over another? It'd be like Mawson saying "no point trying to explore Antarctica, 'cause its just a load of ice".

 

[Tippis]

No, it really isn't just an opinion. To an explorer, surely a planet is a planet.......something that is inherently very exciting to find?

Not really, no.
Nothing is “inherently exciting”, and especially not something that is a dime a dozen (at which point it's even debatable if it qualifies as a “find”).

It'd be like Mawson saying "no point trying to explore Antarctica, 'cause its just a load of ice.

No, it would be like Mawson saying “no point trying to explore my front lawn, 'cause it's the same lawn I see forty times a day — let's instead go to Antarctica, which has never been seen (or as near as makes no difference).”

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

As Dr. Livingston once said: "A tree! I have discovered a tree. Lets investigate it. It's similar to the last tree. This is great! Look! Another tree. Holy smokes, I must check that one out! Oh my! There's another one! I'm going to be here for ages exploring the hell out of this forest, at this rate I'm never going to make Africa this century

Oh my giddy aunt! Is that a rock? It is a rock!"

 

[WR3ND]

Also, many of us have already been to Antarctica...

Spoiler

...

No, it really isn't just an opinion. To an explorer, surely a planet is a planet.......something that is inherently very exciting to find? So why this arbitrary value assigned to one planet type over another? It'd be like Mawson saying "no point trying to explore Antarctica, 'cause its just a load of ice".

For me it's the variety and relative uniqueness of a system and the worlds in it that tends to pique my interests.

 

[Ziljan]

Would any other explorers appreciate a SC Power Orbit cruise control feature, that simply maintains a circular orbit around the current 'blue diamond' body at the current altitude, with the inclination defined as that given by the shortest slew to a 'nose forward' orbital heading? Roll control and throttle enabled, any other control input disengages the autopilot?

Would be nice for photography, looking at planetary surfaces and general basking.

It's unfortunate from the game's design that we can't do this ourselves since SC's minimum speed of 30 Mm/s is generally speaking way too fast for a tangential orbit for most bodies common bodies. And also generally speaking, normal space unboosted speed limit is much too low for bodies much above 1/2,000 the mass of the earth. So yes, a feature that autocorrects the pitch angle in orbital cruise to maintain a circular path around the body would be most welcome by me.

The proposed minigame, being wholly a matter of playing with a UI, is prime botting fodder — in fact, it is exactly this kind of UI minigame that is the most trivially botted

It really depends on:

1) How the discovery process works. As I said above, any ability to select undiscovered objects will mean that you can automate that portion of the discovery. However if discovery relies on locating gravitational sources, then good luck to those botters.
2) How complex the signal sources are. If they are noisy enough to constitute a captcha, then bots will be doubly thwarted and human brains will finally get some small amount of exercise while exploring.

I can't get the Metallic Metoerite signal correct all the time....almost but not every time. The SRV scanner is pretty crappy & wastes time when trying to locate 1 type of rock when all you see is interference from all the other objects that the SRV is scanning.

How are players going to identify planets, from the ADS signals, in a system of 1 Star & 5 Planets?....probably easy.

But what about 1 Star system with 20 planets? or a 2, 3, or 4 Star system with 60, 70, 80 Planets? all distorting the readings on the scanner.....that's what I want to test out in Beta.

The new mechanic has one clear advantage here. The wave scanner has horizontal lines in a vertically compressed readout, which makes it hard to tell how high or low lines are. The new energy signal is broader, allowing for more physical space for differentiation between individual signals. But you're right, we'll need to see it in action to get some idea of how easy or hard it will be. I am hoping it will too hard for bots, and still easy enough to tell the general taxonomic classification of a system at a glance. If so, I am looking forward to the names people come up for certain system types. We're bound to get a whole new zoology of explorer jargon

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

It's unfortunate from the game's design that we can't do this ourselves since SC's minimum speed of 30 Mm/s is generally speaking way too fast for a tangential orbit for most bodies common bodies. And also generally speaking, normal space unboosted speed limit is much too low for bodies much above 1/2,000 the mass of the earth. So yes, a feature that autocorrects the pitch angle to maintain a circular path around the body would be most welcome by me.

Supercruise minimum speed is 30 kilometres per second.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

Would any other explorers appreciate a SC Power Orbit cruise control feature, that simply maintains a circular orbit around the current 'blue diamond' body at the current altitude, with the inclination defined as that given by the shortest slew to a 'nose forward' orbital heading? Roll control and throttle enabled, any other control input disengages the autopilot?

Would be nice for photography, looking at planetary surfaces and general basking.

Yes, I like that. In fact that mode would have been great for an exploration suggestion I posted here in 2016...

Rather than removing things from Exploration, I prefer making suggestions which adds value and reward to the act of exploration.

I say that you can add to exploration by having a map of potential Points Of Interest superimposed onto the 3D terrain map of a detailed scanned planet.

Here's how I see that could work...

1) You jump into a system, and perform the usual discovery of system bodies with your Advanced Discovery Scanner.

2) You review discovered system bodies you are interested in exploring - this is by way of the 3D terrain map which contains nothing more than the terrain at this point in time. (For landable planets). This has an advantage for non-explorer types looking for interesting planets to canyon race on, for example. (A quality of life improvement for everyone, not just explorers).

3) In order to perform a Detailed Surface Scan, you will need to get close to the planet, and go into Orbital Cruise, and do a complete orbit of a body whilst doing the Detailed Scan.

4) After the scan is complete, the 3D terrain map now has superimposed upon it a 3D Points Of Interest Map. This PoI Map might list things such as ;

a) Surface features like Geysers to explore
b) Areas on the planet with extra amounts of materials to go look for and pick up or mine
c) Generalised marked out areas with potential Unknown Things to explore (e.g. this area appears to have anomalous transmissions/features)

And many more scenarios.

So that's the idea - a Detailed Surface Scan can only be done by doing one complete circuit of a body during Orbital Cruise.

I think this would improve the actual Exploration side of the game for a number of reasons...

1) There is at least some skill needed in order to maintain an Orbital Cruise around a body.

2) The word "Detailed" to me suggests that a scan should be "up close and personal" (i.e. via Orbital Cruise)

3) IMO this mechanic would be A) Engaging, and B) Rewarding.

Regards.

In fact come to think of it, the reveal in the OP of this thread is remarkably similar - apart from the horrendous ADS/System map thing.

 

[Ziljan]

30km is still too fast for orbit for most planets, but could work for something the size of Jupiter. I am not sure whether gas giants have gravity modeled yet but you definitely can't use orbital cruise around them... yet. Worth investigating once we get gas giant atmospheres

 

[Tippis]

It really depends on:

1) How the discovery process works. As I said above, any ability to select undiscovered objects will mean that you can automate that portion of the discovery. However if discovery relies on locating gravitational sources, then good luck to those botters.
2) How complex the signal sources are. If they are noisy enough to constitute a captcha, then bots will be doubly thwarted and human brains will finally get some small amount of exercise while exploring.

No, it depends on how the UI works. From what they've described, it's absolutely trivial. The only real question is how much of the exploration data is sent in one chunk to the client and how much is revealed in pieces in response to trigger events, because a discovery bot might not even need to care about the UI layer at all.

Nothing of what they've presented so far requires any kind of thought. Just looking at the description will reveal this if you think about it for more than a couple of seconds:

You are able to tune the focus of your sensors to a particular point on the scale, making emissions from objects at this range much clearer, at the cost of filtering out signals returned from bodies not emitting at this range.

As you move the view around, you are aiming your discovery scanner sensors. To aid you, the discovery scanner view also features a repeating sweep of gravitational disturbance detected in the system. You can use this sweep to narrow your search for stellar bodies, as well as start your search around the star's orbital plane, which is revealed by the initial system scan.

Emissions that come close enough to your view’s focus are represented by signature patterns around a central reticule.

[…]

As you locate and identify stellar bodies their emissions are filtered out

1. Pick a scale segment.
2. Sweep scan area.
3. When patterns show up, follow those to the target.
4. Repeat until resolved.
5. Repeat until all remaining signals are resolved.

Very little thinking (and absolutely nothing resembling analysis) is needed in any of this, and even less thinking is required to see how little thinking is needed. Add in the range filtering that wasn't even described in that first post, and it becomes even more simplistic to run through those steps, simply because of how Stellar Forge works.

 

[WR3ND]

30km is still too fast for orbit for most planets, but could work for something the size of Jupiter. I am not sure whether gas giants have gravity modeled yet but you definitely can't use orbital cruise around them... yet. Worth investigating once we get gas giant atmospheres

Yeah, though I wasn't sure that they were asking for gravitational orbits or just holding altitude in supercruise with some kind of autopilot.

I do think being able to drop to gravitational orbit as it were would be kind of cool too, given the current altitude, speed, and trajectory. Hmm...

Not much use for gameplay that I can think of off the top of my head, but still kind of cool for some of us space geeks.

 

[Ziljan]

Yeah, though I wasn't sure that they were asking for gravitational orbits or just holding altitude.

I know And I agree it would be a welcome feature. Was responding to someone else (not Wstephenson) on the OC velocity. I was lamenting the fact that the opportunities for manual orbit are so rare. Afaik, tests to acheive orbit in OC have all failed. Not sure if it's because they were going too fast though. Afaik the g rating does show up in the OC interface so maybe it does come into play if the planet is dense enough? The easiest place to test would be Achenar 3 which has an a low altitude orbit velocity of ~32 km/s.

I haven't also haven't tested whether the orbital acceleration boost that happens when perfectly aligned with the horizon still applies when you have throttle to zero.

 

[WR3ND]

I know And I agree it would be a welcome feature. Was responding to someone else (not Wstephenson) on the OC velocity. I was lamenting the fact that the opportunities for manual orbit are so rare. Afaik, tests to acheive orbit in OC have all failed. Not sure if it's because they were going too fast though. Afaik the g rating does show up in the OC interface so maybe it does come into play if the planet is dense enough? The easiest place to test would be Achenar 3 which has an a low altitude orbit velocity of ~32 km/s.

I haven't also haven't tested whether the orbital acceleration boost that happens when perfectly aligned with the horizon still applies when you have throttle to zero.

Supercruise is kind of its own beast anyway, so I'm not sure how it would apply to normal physics, nor if it even really should. There be dragons, as they say.

But yeah, fleshing out orbital mechanics would be kind of cool, especially if they added in some gameplay with satellites or something.

I suppose the issue then would be relative speeds and the speed limits imposed by the game. [blah]

 

[Cobra1984]

Reductio ad absurdum is an attempt to show the logical conclusion of someone else's argument, not to actually take that side. The question you accidentally raised is: "would you rather have a game that is so trivial that a simple bot could replace you?" ... because that is exactly what the current 'gameplay' is.

The general hope is that the new mechanic would finally introduce gameplay that won't be trivial enough for simple bots. Including a selectable system map or body list in the nav panel for undiscovered bodies might make that possible again. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen.

Just to be clear, the point of de-trivializing the game isn't just to thwart cheaters. It's to involve the players brain in the exercise of discovery. If youre against the new mechanic because you think that thinking itself is "busy work" I am afraid we've reached the end of line for possible common ground? I sincerely hope not.

I didn't raise that question, I quoted your post which demonstrated my criticism, and I called out your attempt at twisting yourself out of it.

You haven't read or understood my disappointment at Frontier proposing a minigame scanner mechanic in place of meaningful gameplay mechanics as relates to exploration.

There are third party apps bringing more to the game than this proposed scanning mechanic will.

This was the one update I was looking forward to, and there's been more thought put into forum posts quite frankly than two screenshots and a rough minigame spec from Frontier.

You have your logic all backwards and inconsistent. I pointed out the common ground and you tried to twist out of it to maintain your fandom. I see a few others doing the same and I even saw criticism dismissed as 'salt' which is poor.

 

[Cobra1984]

subjective determination of “value” and relating that to an equally subjective determination of “effort”.

Exactly right. Nail on head.

You cannot design a scanning mechanic which knows how much effort/time should be required because the value of each discovery is completely subjective - BECAUSE there is no gameplay value defined anywhere as a property of any of the discoveries. They are transient spawned items.

Frontier's answer here will be multiple rounds of balancing.

The real answer is to give discoveries real, tangible, persistent gameplay value - and there are many ideas along those lines from posters.

But Frontier should know this, a game designer will know this, in particular mmo designers.