No, tourism was what we had in pre-3.3, where you literally could only find these interesting things if a tourist beacon had been placed there beforehand.
Boy am I loving exploration!
- Thread starter Marc_Hicks
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No, tourism was what we had in pre-3.3, where you literally could only find these interesting things if a tourist beacon had been placed there beforehand.
Precisely, I went out looking for a q-type anomaly, I found a lovely pre-legrange cloud & those metal spike things instead. Then I went searching for some Legrange Clouds & stumbled across some biologicals & geologicals that I didn't even know were out there. The Codex merely acts as a stimulus to push me further & further from home. Some may use it differently, though, & that is the beauty of the mechanic.
That said, I look forward to them peppering the Codex with rumoured phenomena over the next year or so.
How do you think the sites for the tourist beacons were found?
I was aware of your working alone and not using tools to explore from - the suggestion was not to investigate those systems but to compare your own findings with them as that would still leave determination of the usefulness of the data as your own decision. If the suggestion has offended you, my apologies.
Some were manually added by FD, others were the result of people flying in a straight line over a planet for dozens of hours with the graphics turned down to spot the pixels easier. Been there done that during the barnacle era. Oh the fun we had! :/
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Yeah I think in fairness you've given a good example there of it working for you, like I've said I'm pleased with the tools as well.
My experience was.... Great new explorer tools, finally a chance to progress the Guardian lore by exploring the relevant area's only to find everything already discovered and a permit locked region of interest. That was off the back of the Guardian site ruins a year ago being bugged and not doing anything so you spent hrs trying to search and figure out things only to discover it was unsolvable.... and that's the point if things are not there to be found then what is the point cos the Codex will reveal all.
If the Codex bought you to sector xyz to see some discovery and then you went off with some clues with the explorer tools and discovered "something of interest" then that works all is good.
I spent Q2 of 2016 hunting for barnacles, never found a single one. I spent about a week on Merope 5a I think it was, teamed up with Gypsy12 hunting for 'something', Gypsy has/had an awesome level of tinfoilhattery and it was enormous fun chasing him over the horizon to distant hills shaped in some way that was 'obviously' a clue. Huge fun, never found any persistent POIs of course, some other team found a barnacle & I left them to it, I eventually found a barnacle in another system but it had already been depleted, but I ticked the personal box. From October'16 to March '18 I flew a fully armed & armoured 19ly multi-role Corvette on a grand tour of the galaxy, looking for anything I could find, I located maybe a dozen fumerole sites, never more than one on a single planet. I found what is now called a guardian site way out towards Sag A* but wasn't equipped to do anything with it (no cargo space at the time).
It was fun, but it wasn't for everyone. It was probably intended to be a team surveying effort but I did it alone & independent of others apart from the Merope thing because I didn't know what was there to be found. Now I do & all it feels like is surveying and visiting what feel like tourist beacons without the beacon.
But I can do box ticking, so that's what I'm doing
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Planetside exploration - what you are describing here - was always in a relatively good state, thanks to the Wave Scanner, which always shows at least some faint signals and because of the varying terrain on planets, IMHO. The Wave Scanner is really an example of a good game mechanic for exploration, I think.
But spaceborne exploratin was never that interesting, but rather as Ian described it. Honk => System Map => Flying 100k LS to a water world in a straight line while doing nothing in the meanwhile was the most barebones and boring interpretation of exploration ever. (There is a reason why every Elite Dangerous Youtube video focusing on exploration using the old system skips e.g. cuts those long traveling parts to far away planets.)
To you. You are expressing a subjective opinion.
The wave scanner has an apparent depth that experience has taught me is a red herring or so obscure in it's subtlety that it is of no practical benefit for me to pursue. I have followed up those leads, it did not help me to find anything.
Now it may be that every faint noise & signal does have meaning, perhaps like the UA sound waveform that if examined by an audio expert in a very particular way reveals an even more intractable puzzle.
But if there is I'm not the one who's going to find it, and I am not going to go looking for patterns in random noise simply because it isn't homogeneous.
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And yet I managed to enjoy it. It's a shame FDev decided to replace the flying part with sitting next to the planet chasing blobs, rather than making the flying part meaningful.
I don't know, I prefer sitting in one place and operating a scanner for a limited time and then decide whether to fly to a far away planet to further scan it, based on the results of the FSS.
I couldn't imagine any way to make the straight flying for what sometimes felt like hours just to scan the planet even more void of anything to do and monotonous than it already was.
Disclaimer: I did reach Elite rank in Exploration with the old system a year or so ago, but I didn't enjoy it very much. Guess it would have been much more engaging with the new system for me!
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If you had quoted my entire post, you'd have seen the big "IMHO" in the previous sentence:
Do I need to put that at the end of every phrase, now?
Pah! I started playing in June '18 and had made Elite Exploration by September
For me it was doing the first Ram Tah mission that unlocked it, but I had been 'touring' quite a lot before than! Most of mine was in a 36Ly Krait / 40Ly DBXI really want to get to the Rift just to see what attracts folk there, but this new-fangled system keeps dragging me toward the core (edges) because there is so much to find there - a bit short of NSP's & Bio - but you can't have it all ways
Sitting in one place doesn't feel like exploration to me. I'd put up with it if the FSS didn't perform the detailed scan too - just too much information from looking at a map.
The probing mechanic suffers from the same problem - too much information (for me) from sitting still and not enough from moving around.
SC in most systems didn't involve flying in straight lines, it's all about avoiding gravity wells, maximizing speed and distance traveled. There's a whole realm of gameplay available just from SC which requires active use of my brain.
I actually agree with this. There is too much information from the FSS. More should be given to the probes.
Agreed. It should provide search areas and only way to get a pinpoint area.is after it's been found and scanned.
That is how I fly to.
Saying that with the above it still doesn't stop me from flying around the system unless there are no landable planets, but that will change at some point and then there could be reasons to go to most planets and probe them.
Are you kidding? I have visited well over 10000 systems and have explored quite a few of them, but those where planets or other stellar bodies were per coincidence even just remotely colinear so that their gravity wells had any impact on the straight line flight path required to fly to the body I could easily count on two hands.
Thats cause a very large % of systems you jump into (from my observations only) you arrive with the planets all neatly lined up. Like the system only started to move when you jump in. I figured it to be a bug.
It isn't simply about bodies being colinear.
The star's gravity well has an impact on your speed pretty much everywhere in the system - until you get out to the 2001c speed limit point.
If there are two bodies on side side of the star and two on the other, it may be quicker to visit both bodies on the same side, even if they are bodies 1 and 4. Alternatively, it may be faster to swing by the star in a wide arc to maintain speed rather than heading directly past it.
Even simply aiming off to one side of a body (the side the next body is on) will make a difference. Sure, it might be negligible, but that doesn't mean it's pointless to do it.
All these calculations require me to use my brain, which the FSS doesn't.
For the record, I'm at 30,000 systems visited, with 500,000 level 3 scans.
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Also, I forgot this:
If there are two gas giants in a system , consider doing the one without moons first, so you don't have to climb out of the gravity well after scanning the moons and can just jump to the next system.
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So how is flying out to Probe a distant planet in SC and getting extra credits for it, different than the old system of flying out to a planet to DSS it and getting extra credits for it?
Your previously enjoyed gameplay is still there - it's just now step 3 instead of step 2.