the FSS, watching paint dry....

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Well they fixed the store bug instantly. It was hanging there for days in the forum and in the bug reports forum until someone pinged them there. Go figure.

I don't have a twitter account :)

Adding a missing item to the PS4 store is definitely within the realm of the support staff's responsibilities. Deep changes to gameplay are not.
 
Well they fixed the store bug instantly. It was hanging there for days in the forum and in the bug reports forum until someone pinged them there. Go figure.

I don't have a twitter account :)

And, this in itself explains why Frontier has comms problems.

People born in different generations. The older generation is the customer base, the Lord High Programmers are the younger generation.
 
And, this in itself explains why Frontier has comms problems.

People born in different generations. The older generation is the customer base, the Lord High Programmers are the younger generation.

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I can almost guarantee you no programmers were involved in fixing the missing item in the PS4 store. Someone from the social media staff saw the tweet, directed it to the support staff and they fixed it - probably via internal ticket.
 
The FSS mechanic has been purposely designed to make it tedious and time consuming. Strange that you ask, and seems silly to elaborate, but, to make it abundantly clear:

1. No blue blob visual persistence. Even decades old radar has some persistence.

I think that's more of an aesthetic preference, as opposed to a genuine flaw. That being said, pulsing lights can trigger epilepsy, so I think that effect should have an option to be turned off. That kind of thing, however, is a flaw in ED's overall visual part of this game's UI design: it isn't customizable at all, not even the colors, in an age where everyone knows color blind people exist.

2. The pan 360 degrees mechanic is completely unnecessary and purposely slow. (Has 3304 lost point and click?)

I use HOTAS, so I'm accustomed to having a speed limiter to my actions. Of course, playing in VR also means I can turn my head to see off the "screen" so the speed doesn't feel particularly limiting, especially given the wealth of information presented on the FSS screen.

I also fail to understand why panning should be completely unnecessary. Do you honestly expect Frontier to project the entire sky around you onto a single screen? What style map projection do you think they should they use, and why?

3. The key-in-lock (ring within ring line-up) is unnecessarily fiddly/tedious, and was made moreso after an update. (Apparently FDev thought it was too easy. The mind boggles. Is this exploration or tetris?).

This one I'll partially agree with, primarily because sometimes I just want to zoom in a little for better arrow separation, not resolve a body. There is a step zoom function to get around that limitation... which I just realized I haven't really played around with all that much. Here's hoping returns have finally died down at work so I can leave at a reasonable time, so I can spend some quality time in the game before I have to start making supper. After supper is going to be fairly busy again.

That having been said, that "key-in-lock" mechanic, which can be fiddly if your sole use of the FSS is to resolve bodies to generate a complete system map, does provide additional information when you use the FSS in other ways. The Waveform Tuner displays information over a fairly wide band, and the "target ring" provides information that can reveal if that particular gravity well is a single planet, a binary+ planet, or a planet with moons.

4. Doesn't tell you the direction of the ecliptic.

I guess this is another instance where my strategy to maximize finding eclipses has other advantages. If I don't immediately see the ecliptic, I know to look up or down. That being said, I've never liked "this way to your target" style indicators. When I see those, I feel like I'm being treated like an eight year old, with no sense of situational awareness.

I could go on. If the FSS had to be arcade (FDev's choice), it still could have been designed with usability in mind, in which case the UI would have been completely different. What we got was FDev's attempt at a mini-game. Unfortunately it also treats us like 8 year olds. There's no logical consistency within the game world. At least in other games, mini-games generally make sense and are internally consistent within their setting, like Skyrim's lock picking.

Yes, I can understand some players like the arcade-ish feel of the FSS mechanic and don't care about context, verisimilitude, or wasting time. But there are plenty who think otherwise, as evidenced by this and many other threads.

Again, this seems to be more a matter of personal preference than a genuinely flawed UI design. I would prefer a more customizable visual component of the UI in general, though. Options are always good, even if you don't use them. Frontier has gone above and beyond when it comes to the input part of the UI. I simply don't understand why they didn't do the same on the output portion of it.
 
I still want to explore by flying around the system. The minigame will never feel like exploration to me.

That's why I always liked the notion of an exploration buff/improvement being the introduction of a module of exploration drones.

You'd arrive in a system, look at the bodies in it (after the honk) and then if some take your fancy you'd jump into the orrery map and decide which you'd visit in person, and which you'd send your drone(s) off to explore.

When a drone got to a body it would notify you and begin to scan it (think probes now) and you could decide to view its camera to get a good sense of what it looks like etc. You could get then send the drone off to the next body etc.

Once you're finishing up in the system, you use your orrery map to decide the best rendezvous point between you and your drone(s), before then leaving the system.


In short, some micromanagement of the drones while you do other things (ie: while super cruising to an object to explore in person). An actual use for the orrery map. And if you have drones, faster detailed surface scanning (probing) etc... (And a multi-crew member could have controlled these drones too)

This would have at least kept things simple, while moving them forwards, instead of contriving something that's trying to imply it's technical and complex when in fact the new mechanics (to me at least) don't feel very engaging, involved or enjoyable TBH; Lining up circles in a stand alone mini-game, while needlessly cemented in place around the arrival star.
 
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The first part I totally agree with. The highlighted part I disagree with very strongly.

Instead of an arcade mini-game, FDev could (and should) have designed it as a strategy game. I've been saying this for months. In fact it would be more than just a strategy mini-game. It would be a long term strategy meta-game and a system by system mini strategy game, a bit like a puzzle to work out efficient ways to reveal the system content.

It's my failing for not being able to easily and quickly describe how this might work. It's very clear in my mind, but would take many hours on the forum. You could read my brief descriptions in many previous posts, all about starting the system discovery process with unknown or uncertain information, then using your discovery resources to uncover it using strategy, tailored for and by the explorer.

FDev actually have a very good strategy game in their BGS (ymmv - not everyone's cup of tea). It would have been so nice to see another strategy based game design for exploration, and with so much more verisimilitude.

I have to agree that what you describe would be awesome, and actually would be more to my liking than the FSS. If they added something like that as an optional module, I'd install it, especially if "discovery resources" were limited. It would be something I could save for larger, more complex systems.

I was kind of on the fence when it came to the "infinite probe" debate. Nobody seemed to want a truly limited number of probes, which would make the decision to map a planet or not meaningful, and most of the "compromises" were so huge in my opinion that they might as well make them infinite.

What you describe also isn't a completely automated process, which is what the ADS was when it came to system exploration. It requires player input to get information about a system, which was missing pre 3.3.
 
Excellent analogy. If the FSS was designed in a sane universe, it would look like a hammer and it would drive in nails. Instead, we've been given a screwdriver, also to drive in nails, because... game. ;)

Personally, the FSS feels more like this to me:


People keep using it as a hammer though, out of the perception that bodies are nails... because game. ;)
 
Has anyone brought up EvEs scanning system yet?
Does this look... better? Because it really isn't and I say that as someone who likes many of the mechanics in EvE. The only reason it is engaging is because of the fact that you need to watch out for enemy ships approaching like a hawk while doing it.
 
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Nobody seemed to want a truly limited number of probes, which would make the decision to map a planet or not meaningful, and most of the "compromises" were so huge in my opinion that they might as well make them infinite.
I did!

But I wanted the generation of more probes to be simple and meaningful. Thus rather than requiring you to drive around surfaces for materials, I suggestion the notion of you have to keep an eye out of metalic rings around planets while exploring. If you spotted one, and your probes were getting low (in ammo) you could go to it, and deploy your fuel scoop which would top up your "probe ammo" quickly (eg: ten a second)...

Thus keeping your "probe ammo" topped up would be a small tactical consideration. ie: You're flying to a body to probe it, but in the orrery map you notice theres a metalic ringed system enroute, so do you stop there on the way?

It also - most importantly - then means efficient probe use is its own reward, instead of using a Nintendo Bonus Score mechanic for using less infinite probes <-- This is as daft, contrived and comical as it sounds surely!
 
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As far as gamified mechanics go, the FSS is certainly a step up from point-and-honk.
The problem is that anyone who really cares about exploration isn't necessarily interested in shallow gamified mechanics in the first place. It'd be much more interesting if exploration involved a modicum of actual science.

Like what? How would it work? Which buttons would I be pressing and why?
 
I did!

But I wanted the generation of more probes to be simple and meaningful. Thus rather than requiring you to drive around surfaces for materials, I suggestion the notion of you have to keep an eye out of metalic rings around planets while exploring. If you spotted one, and your probes were getting low (in ammo) you could go to it, and deploy your fuel scoop which would top up your "probe ammo" quickly (eg: ten a second)...

Thus keeping your "probe ammo" toped up would be a small tactical consideration. ie: You're flying to a body to probe it, but in the orrery map you notice theres a metalic ringed system enroute, so do you stop there on the way?

That's a good compromise. Having limited probe ammo would turn into a complete annoyance, but being able to scoop up ammo is a very good idea.
 
Like what? How would it work? Which buttons would I be pressing and why?

Well, the FSS already takes ideas from real-life spectroscopy so I'm sure there are way to add to this. You could also do something with triangulation of signals and planets in a system instead of just honking.
As I see it there are only really two ways: Make it fast and simple or make it hard, complicated but rewarding. As it stands, scanning is fast(er) and more rewarding but still incredibly simplified once you figure out the FSS.
If we're going by real-life methods of exploration you'd probably not lift a finger beyond launching some probes to each planet in the system at all. Heck, the ED universe is so advanced there really is no need to have human explorers at all.
 
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If you tell a lie often enough the simple minded start to beleive. If enough people accept the lie it becomes truth. They use this kind of tactics on gullable software developers aswell.

So who told you that the FSS is bad.....? [big grin]

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:x
 
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100 pages is just the same 3 guys bumping the thread. There are maybe 6 real pages at best, and more than half of those are positive FSS feedback.

Hey just in case, over in the ps4 forum a few of us were lamenting the gold type-9 ship skin not being available on the store.

Someone suggested interacting with frontier on twitter because they're very proactive there, and they got a response with the item added.

Just in case 106 pages hasn't triggered frontier to notice yet.. apparently twitter is the way to go.

You need to take a drink from the fountain of reality. Fixing a bug that is costing Frontier money (the inability to buy a cosmetic) is entirely different than rolling back a change that Frontier invested months in developing, a change that many of us like. And as Ziljan points, the same 10 people (give or take) saying the same thing over and over again do not make a majority.

If tweeting worked to get our way, then my very serious bugs on PS4 would have been fixed a year ago. Fixing bugs is way less controversial than changing a fundamental game mechanic that a large part of the community actually enjoys.

And as for thread size, research the history of the "beige plague", and you'll find class O threads that make this look like a small class M star in comparison.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go tweet about how much I LOVE the new exploration tools :p
 
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Good grief. So a content creator on youtube complains about the FSS because it slows down his way of making real world cash (finding places so he can do some "filming" to sell as content on his channel) and scores of "players" yell and scream with the same problem and arguments.

I guess either a lot of you are "content creators" in secret or you're REALLY invested in your training wheels, or it's a result of 90% of the posters not actually playing the game but coming on here to complain and troll.

The latter is rather indicated by the abandonment of the earlier "complaint" that "I can't find things in FSS that I could in ADS, this mode just slows me down!!!" to "The FSS shows far more stuff IT is the 'godmode' LOLOLOLO!", plus the general ignoring of ANY pst or suggestion on what could be done, since "the only acceptable answer" is "Give back the ADS!" with nothing about how to do it without ruining the FSS's use. No pretense at getting what you're "missing" into the FSS as it is, improving it. Just "I WANT MY ADS!!!".

Plus the high count of posters during christmas.

So, yeah, fairly convinced that 90% of the posters complaining don't play elite, they just play the forums.
 
Good grief. So a content creator on youtube complains about the FSS because it slows down his way of making real world cash (finding places so he can do some "filming" to sell as content on his channel) and scores of "players" yell and scream with the same problem and arguments.

I guess either a lot of you are "content creators" in secret or you're REALLY invested in your training wheels, or it's a result of 90% of the posters not actually playing the game but coming on here to complain and troll.

The latter is rather indicated by the abandonment of the earlier "complaint" that "I can't find things in FSS that I could in ADS, this mode just slows me down!!!" to "The FSS shows far more stuff IT is the 'godmode' LOLOLOLO!", plus the general ignoring of ANY pst or suggestion on what could be done, since "the only acceptable answer" is "Give back the ADS!" with nothing about how to do it without ruining the FSS's use. No pretense at getting what you're "missing" into the FSS as it is, improving it. Just "I WANT MY ADS!!!".

Plus the high count of posters during christmas.

So, yeah, fairly convinced that 90% of the posters complaining don't play elite, they just play the forums.

Wow!
So much fail in one single post.
 
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