Ok, here's some of the problems:
- players not knowing there's things out there to find
- players thinking all there is to exploration is jumping and scanning
- players not knowing how to go about finding things
- the sheer difficulty in finding things which means:
- some will never be stumbled over by chance
- some will never be found by someone on their own, even if they know they're out there, and even if they know how to look
- knowledge of them depending on out-of-game sources
- how this all negatively impacts on people's knowledge of & involvement in the many story threads criss-crossing the game
In terms of what's out there to find (and it's currently found) I covered quite a bit of the surface stuff in
this post
There's also the 'Tubeworms' which I mentioned somewhere - known of since the 2.2 Trailer, but not yet discovered (or at least not yet discovered and reported through any of the normal channels).
Then in the space there's all the usual stuff like CZz, RES's etc, but there's also UCB's, Listening Posts, other Beacons, Gen Ships, Installations, Capital Ships (working and wrecked), Probes, and so on. some of which people will stumble across quite easily but others which they won't, and probably never would without an out-of-game source of info.
The new FSS mechanic, will make these things a lot more obvious to people and allow them to discover them (in conjunction with other mechanics). This will open these things up to a lot of people. Some people might actually have no interest in them, which is up to them, but as it stands, a lot of the time people would not even know the things are there so wouldn't even have a choice as to whether it interests them.
Here's how it will do that:
Things in space - these will show in the new interface in the Filtered Signal Bar - you'll get used to the signals for the usual bodies quite quickly, and then at some point you're going to jump into a system, fire up the FSS and see a signal on there that you've never seen before. Some people are going to at some point see signals that no one (outside of FD) has seen before.
Things on planets - these will be indicated when you scan planets in with the FSS. At this point you'll know somethings there and can choose whether to go and investigate further. As part of the scanning bodies/systems people are going to be finding that there are things on the planets that they would never have known were there in the current system, and may never have known even existed.
Ok, so that covers the problems and how the new FSS mechanic helps fix them.
So why would retaining the current honk mechanism alongside the new FSS mechanic be detrimental to the fixing of the problems?
Well a key reason is that is a lot of people are creatures of habit. Some would just continue with the existing mechanic. Some would try the new mechanic but
unless they find something unusual and interesting in the first couple of uses they will just go 'well that's pointless, it's just a longer way of getting the same thing' and will go back to using the existing mechanism. All the problems above are going to remain, or at least be less well addressed for all those people. Now as forumites who watched the livestream, read the summary, participate in the discussions, etc. it might seem like I'm how much that would happen because we all know the reasons to use the FSS, but thing is that there also all the people who don't participate in the forums, don't watch the streams, etc. and just play the game and won't know as well as we do why they should use the FSS, and they need to be taken into account.
Long explanation, but there we go.
(I feel I'd better just clarify that I'm not claiming to know FD's thoughts on all this, but I do know all the problems I talked about exist, and how the new mechanics are going help to help fix them, whether that's by FD's intent or not.)
