Why FSS Mode Must Go

[mossfoot]

I explored a lot ever since the game was released, making Elite in a unengineered T6 transport. I liked exploration then.

I love exploration now.

It's not the same, sure. But honestly it feels more like what exploration should be.

Is it perfect? No, partly because since I'm in VR I not only have to get used to using my HOTAS to control the FSS but also the jump from cockpit view to FSS view. But compared to what we had it's a huge improvement.

Way back there was a debate over the infinite range ADS, and people wanting a return to "paralax shift" exploring that the ADS robbed them of. Heck, I even enjoyed that method of exploration. But that was only compared to what I felt was lost because of the ADS, namely getting all the systems at once and simply looking them over for something worthy to go to. That was it. The process was:

1) Honk
2) Check system map for interesting locations, all conveniently on one big splash page.

Now?

1) Honk
2) Note the readout for a distribution of planet types and possible anomolies. Right off the bat you're weighing whether this system is worth exploring further. Might just be a bunch of snowballs, after all.
3) While tracking down signals, take note of pattern distrbution and variation. You might notice clustering - lots of rocky planet signals here, oh, and there's a gas giant somewhere, I bet it's in the center of it all. A rocky world with the chevrons pointed out wide? Must have a ring around it. Narrow? No ring. All these things are going through your head even before you even zoom in and have your suspicions confirmed.
4) take not of anomolies that might be present on a planet geological or biological - tag it to explore later. None of that was possible before.
5) if the system is worth exploring further, start going to the planets and nuke.. er, I mean probe them from orbit.

I just can't see how the old system can in any way be seen as better.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

I just can't see how the old system can in any way be seen as better.

Subjectively, because 'better' is subjective, I preferred the old system because body discovery (the ADS) was decoupled from body evaluation (the DSS) and that required an intermediate step of 'fly around the system'.

With the new system body discovery and evaluation are performed prior to any flying around. To me, that doesn't feel like exploration, it feels like surveying.

So, from my perspective, the old system was better.

That's not to say it was perfect. Neither the ADS nor the FSS require me to do any thinking - they both provide too much information which removes the need for any thought. I'd prefer less information to allow decision-making gameplay to be present.

 

[krylite]

I like how the FSS introduced mechanics to take the place of the placeholder the previous ADS was. It was just incongruous with the tech lore of ED in how the ADS could instantly ascertain system detail in a honk presumably in a spherical field at infinite radial points scanning all vector points at once. The FSS brings it closer to the sci-fi reasoning of scanning that can be done in a direction but not all directions at once. That said, the FSS could use some semi-auto "shortcuts" to reduce the scanning time 25% to 50%, such as snap-in to the blobs while panning, and also proximity snap-in on the radial tuning. Imaging if the FSS scanning and tuning was completely automatic, it would still be watching the tuner and locator move by itself resolving the blobs within less than a minute for smaller systems and up to a few or more minutes when resolving systems with > 75 bodies. And also having to move the ship for the case where signals are blocked by the system star(s) by position.

 

[gumbie]

If they wanted to give people an infinite range surface scanner to make exploration more accessible then fine.
But why did they have to force me out of my cockpit into an ugly 2D HUD?
To make it look like they had actually done something other than just give people an infinite range surface scanner?

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

It was just incongruous with the tech lore of ED in how the ADS could instantly ascertain system detail in a honk presumably in a spherical field at infinite radial points scanning all vector points at once.

So automatically scanning the system and determining the location of all the bodies, but no details about their composition, in a few seconds is bad.

Imaging if the FSS scanning and tuning was completely automatic, it would still be watching the tuner and locator move by itself resolving the blobs within less than a minute for smaller systems

But automatically scanning the system and determining the location of all the bodies, PLUS the details about their composition, in a few seconds is good.

Honestly, you couldn't make it up.

 

[Glock_N_Load]

What does scanning the nav beacon buy you now?????

 

[Nepeta Uchiha]

Honestly this new system makes you much more money. So the FSS is basically the old detail surface scanner BUILT into the ship that doesn't require you to be within spitting distance of a body to scan. If you do that every system you get the same old payouts from before 3.3. Now if you go MAP the planets with the new detail surface scanner you make a metric ****ton more money. I'm making over 10 million on a lot of systems now where those same systems before 3.3 might net me 2 million. So the old HONK system can stay dead in the ditch.

 

[Aekero]

So I gave the fss a try...and I would have liked some sort of hybrid.
First off, it's not super intuitive, and even the little scrollable instructions aren't great.
Skimmed a YouTube vid and got the basics, and pretty quickly I was knocking systems out.. honestly it got boring fast. It can get super tedious (as exploration is) and there's some pretty silly stuff that can happen i.e. a planet being 9-10 "zooms" down. I appreciate not having to fly to every planet but the ads should still reveal bodies imo, then you can do further scanning with the fss.

Edit: to the guy above me, I did full scans of around 25 systems. Average probably about 15 bodies to scan per system. Had a couple codex entries, had a dozen or so first discoveries...took a chunk of time and I netted about 4 mil (which is terrible) are you saying that after you map with the fss you're flying to each planet still to use the dss? I only ask because this didn't seem like great money, I could easily make the same amount of money just jump honking for the same amount of time. (Not even sure if honking gives you money anymore, but in that case, just jumping)

 

[Scimiter]

My answer is simple, I like it.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I don't care about the payout, i've been exploring since launch when the payouts were terrible.

But anyone who thinks FD are going to get rid of the FSS after putting work into just to appease a minority is frankly speaking delusional.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Subjectively, because 'better' is subjective, I preferred the old system because body discovery (the ADS) was decoupled from body evaluation (the DSS) and that required an intermediate step of 'fly around the system'.

With the new system body discovery and evaluation are performed prior to any flying around. To me, that doesn't feel like exploration, it feels like surveying.

So, from my perspective, the old system was better.

That's not to say it was perfect. Neither the ADS nor the FSS require me to do any thinking - they both provide too much information which removes the need for any thought. I'd prefer less information to allow decision-making gameplay to be present.

De-coupling the DSS from the ADS does not give you more reasons to fly around a system unless you are interested in tags and money, and that hasn't changed in the new system as to get the first mapped you need to fly to the planet to map it and get more cash.

If atmospherics is the next expansion giving us more POI types the that will give us more reason to explore planets.

While I accept that the FSS may give us too much information such as the amount of POIs, and the percentage make up of materials (they should be reserved for the probes) there is just as much incentive now to fly around the system as there was before. In fact I would say that there was way more incentive with the fact that the FSS tells us there are some POI. If not for that I wouldn't have known in the old system as I wouldn't have been bothered to fly there. Even if there was something interesting on the planet, using the mk1 eyeball over the whole planet was not fun.

But I would like a few revisions, such as what I mentioned above and I would like the wave forma to appear in your HUD in analysis mode after a honk (gives a bit of meaning to the analysis mode too) without having to enter the FSS.

Saying that I would prefer search areas to the pinpoint locations we get at the moment. Having to use the mk1 eyeball (or maybe have a wave scanner type on your ship for large POI) but only in a specific area or use the wave scanner in your SRV would be better in my view. You get the pinpoint locations after a composition scan (giving more reason to use the comp scanner)

 

[Darkfyre99]

Subjectively, because 'better' is subjective, I preferred the old system because body discovery (the ADS) was decoupled from body evaluation (the DSS) and that required an intermediate step of 'fly around the system'.

With the new system body discovery and evaluation are performed prior to any flying around. To me, that doesn't feel like exploration, it feels like surveying.

Drew, this statement simply isn't true. There is a difference between having the option of evaluating a body prior to flying to it, and requiring you to do the same. To use your language, I've evaluated entire systems by flying past their bodies, using the FSS solely as an aid to navigation.

Most of the time, I won't do an entire system this way. I prefer not to waste my time flying to bodies that are of no interest to me, but sometimes it can be fun to do it, since it requires a different kind of flying altogether. At least with the FSS, I know I'm not wasting time trying to detect bodies via parallax that simply aren't there.

But mostly, I'll use the FSS until something interesting catches my attention enough to want to confirm it's there, "evaluate" it make sure I'm not wasting my time on a false positive, and then use the resulting Nav Panel icon as a navigation aid to go explore it.

So, from my perspective, the old system was better.

That's not to say it was perfect. Neither the ADS nor the FSS require me to do any thinking - they both provide too much information which removes the need for any thought. I'd prefer less information to allow decision-making gameplay to be present.

Again... that's simply not true. It is your choice, not that of the FSS, about how much information you can get from the FSS. As one poster earlier in this thread mentions, you can completely explore a system without entering the FSS once, just using the honk to confirm that there actually are bodies there to discover. You won't even know the what types of planets there are in a system until you do a flyby.

If you are playing the proverbial "mini-game" to obtain navigation data, it is your choice to do so, not that of the FSS. You are the one doing the panning, tuning, and zooming. All those activities are completely optional. Even the honk is, because you don't need it to resolve bodies via a flyby.

I, personally, prefer to restrict my information primarily to what's presented on the unzoomed FSS, requiring me to think about the information presented there to decide if a blue blob is interesting or not, only resolving a body to confirm what I suspect is already there. Even that is my choice to do so.

The fact that this is, IMO, much faster than "playing the minigame" and then looking at the system map is simply icing on the cake, because I would do it this way even if it wasn't, preferring fun over efficiency. Last night's session, I entered a system that had three potential terraforming candidates, roughly aligned along the same vector, two of which were obviously part of a binary. I didn't resolve a single one from a distance, deciding to resolve them via flyby, because up until that point, I'd hit a string of "dud" systems, where there wasn't anything interesting but stars or non-binary icy bodies. It might have been more efficient to resolve part of the more distant binary, to confirm I wasn't wasting my time flying out there, but at that point of my session, it wouldn't be more fun.

Because the FSS is an active system, how I use it is up to me. I can choose to use it in a way that maximizes the fun for me, I can choose to use it in a way that I find to be slower and less fun, aka the "minigame." Heck, I can even choose not to use it all, and go real old school and explore a system solely via parallax, which I found to be rather frustrating when used in the long term.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Drew, this statement simply isn't true. There is a difference between having the option of evaluating a body prior to flying to it, and requiring you to do the same. To use your language, I've evaluated entire systems by flying past their bodies, using the FSS solely as an aid to navigation.

Most of the time, I won't do an entire system this way. I prefer not to waste my time flying to bodies that are of no interest to me, but sometimes it can be fun to do it, since it requires a different kind of flying altogether. At least with the FSS, I know I'm not wasting time trying to detect bodies via parallax that simply aren't there.

But mostly, I'll use the FSS until something interesting catches my attention enough to want to confirm it's there, "evaluate" it make sure I'm not wasting my time on a false positive, and then use the resulting Nav Panel icon as a navigation aid to go explore it.



Again... that's simply not true. It is your choice, not that of the FSS, about how much information you can get from the FSS. As one poster earlier in this thread mentions, you can completely explore a system without entering the FSS once, just using the honk to confirm that there actually are bodies there to discover. You won't even know the what types of planets there are in a system until you do a flyby.

If you are playing the proverbial "mini-game" to obtain navigation data, it is your choice to do so, not that of the FSS. You are the one doing the panning, tuning, and zooming. All those activities are completely optional. Even the honk is, because you don't need it to resolve bodies via a flyby.

I, personally, prefer to restrict my information primarily to what's presented on the unzoomed FSS, requiring me to think about the information presented there to decide if a blue blob is interesting or not, only resolving a body to confirm what I suspect is already there. Even that is my choice to do so.

The fact that this is, IMO, much faster than "playing the minigame" and then looking at the system map is simply icing on the cake, because I would do it this way even if it wasn't, preferring fun over efficiency. Last night's session, I entered a system that had three potential terraforming candidates, roughly aligned along the same vector, two of which were obviously part of a binary. I didn't resolve a single one from a distance, deciding to resolve them via flyby, because up until that point, I'd hit a string of "dud" systems, where there wasn't anything interesting but stars or non-binary icy bodies. It might have been more efficient to resolve part of the more distant binary, to confirm I wasn't wasting my time flying out there, but at that point of my session, it wouldn't be more fun.

Because the FSS is an active system, how I use it is up to me. I can choose to use it in a way that maximizes the fun for me, I can choose to use it in a way that I find to be slower and less fun, aka the "minigame." Heck, I can even choose not to use it all, and go real old school and explore a system solely via parallax, which I found to be rather frustrating when used in the long term.

I get what you're saying Dark, but what you're doing is ignoring 90% of the FSS and only utilizing the information that you got from the ADS - or rather the information you'd get from a black-body ADS.

Crippling a new tool to replicate the gameplay which was readily available from the old tool meets the subjective definition of 'the old tool was better'.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

De-coupling the DSS from the ADS does not give you more reasons to fly around a system unless you are interested in tags and money, and that hasn't changed in the new system as to get the first mapped you need to fly to the planet to map it and get more cash.

If atmospherics is the next expansion giving us more POI types the that will give us more reason to explore planets.

While I accept that the FSS may give us too much information such as the amount of POIs, and the percentage make up of materials (they should be reserved for the probes) there is just as much incentive now to fly around the system as there was before. In fact I would say that there was way more incentive with the fact that the FSS tells us there are some POI. If not for that I wouldn't have known in the old system as I wouldn't have been bothered to fly there. Even if there was something interesting on the planet, using the mk1 eyeball over the whole planet was not fun.

But I would like a few revisions, such as what I mentioned above and I would like the wave forma to appear in your HUD in analysis mode after a honk (gives a bit of meaning to the analysis mode too) without having to enter the FSS.

Saying that I would prefer search areas to the pinpoint locations we get at the moment. Having to use the mk1 eyeball (or maybe have a wave scanner type on your ship for large POI) but only in a specific area or use the wave scanner in your SRV would be better in my view. You get the pinpoint locations after a composition scan (giving more reason to use the comp scanner)

Having no detailed planetary data gives ME a reason to fly to the planet. If I get that data from 500,000 Ls away then I don't feel like I've explored it. It's entirely subjective.

 

[Old Duck]

Drew, when you finally give up on this cause, please take up one of my own causes for me - terrible shadows on PS4, pirates ambushing explorers outside the Bubble, the broken engineered NPCs with bad AI, analysis mode, etc. I thought I was a dog with a bone, but you really put me to shame, LOL. That's not an insult!

 

[marx]

So the FSS is basically the old detail surface scanner BUILT into the ship that doesn't require you to be within spitting distance of a body to scan. If you do that every system you get the same old payouts from before 3.3. Now if you go MAP the planets with the new detail surface scanner you make a metric ****ton more money. I'm making over 10 million on a lot of systems now where those same systems before 3.3 might net me 2 million. So the old HONK system can stay dead in the ditch.

Even if you "only" FSS all the planets, you make many more credits per hour than under the old system. The amount per body is the same, yes, but you no longer need to fly to planets, meaning it takes far less time to earn the earlier amount.

However. All this applies to undiscovered bodies. Already-discovered and already-mapped bodies both will give you much less credits now.

Edit: to the guy above me, I did full scans of around 25 systems. Average probably about 15 bodies to scan per system. Had a couple codex entries, had a dozen or so first discoveries...took a chunk of time and I netted about 4 mil (which is terrible) are you saying that after you map with the fss you're flying to each planet still to use the dss? I only ask because this didn't seem like great money, I could easily make the same amount of money just jump honking for the same amount of time. (Not even sure if honking gives you money anymore, but in that case, just jumping)

Honking gives you money, yes, even more than it did before.
Also, that was only four million because you had only a dozen or so first discoveries. A single WWTC or ELW mapped will give you 3.25-3.75 million, provided it's a fresh, untagged one.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Having no detailed planetary data gives ME a reason to fly to the planet. If I get that data from 500,000 Ls away then I don't feel like I've explored it. It's entirely subjective.

And what do you do with that data? For a lot of planets all it is, is travelling. You can't explore them because you can't land on them. So the only reason to fly to them is get useless information (because you can't do anything with it), tags and cash.

The ones you can land on, well there are plenty of reasons to fly to those even with the old way without a DSS, so you could explore the planet yourself. The FSS does not replace exploration, it's gameplay that opens the door for exploration. Also you still keep ignoring that atmospheric planet could very likely be the next update which would give even more reasons to fly to planets.

I can't see travelling to a planet and letting a passive scanner get some pointless information for you as exploration (you can do this while the planet is just a dot in the sky, you don't even need to get close) because it isn't. It is just travelling. Space is the same everywhere. An Earthlike or any other atmospheric planet is pointless to go there unless you want tags or money (and that hasn't changed). The only planets that you can actually explore are the landables and that hasn't changed no matter how much information you get from the FSS.

Explore means this: travel through (an unfamiliar area) in order to learn about it.

When you travel through space, you are not exploring it, as space is the same in every other part of the galaxy. You can't land on atmospherics so you can't learn anything about them apart from the basics the FSS/old ADS/DSS gives you. You can probe them and they will come up with POI's but you can't land on them to explore these POI's or travel around it mountain formations etc.

The only planets you can actually explore are landable non-atmospheric planets, and that hasn't changed.

If it's strange orbits and other such phenomonen, that gameplay hasn't changed either. You do your FSS scanning (doesn't take long), look at the system map/orrery and fly over there to have a look.

To me it looks like you are looking for issues when there really isn't any. Even the minor changes I want are not real issues. They don't need to be added even if I would prefer it.

Look if you think getting useless information about a planet is fun, then so be it. I am happy to give atmospheric planets a miss until I can land on them and properly explore them.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Drew, when you finally give up on this cause, please take up one of my own causes for me - terrible shadows on PS4, pirates ambushing explorers outside the Bubble, the broken engineered NPCs with bad AI, analysis mode, etc. I thought I was a dog with a bone, but you really put me to shame, LOL. That's not an insult!

Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it - I mean, I got StigIan to understand my point of view!

I can't help you with the PS4 issue (I can't fly on consoles to save my life) but the auto-spawning pirates (for explorers and miners) issue I can get behind

 

[Rat Catcher]

Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it - I mean, I got StigIan to understand my point of view!

I can't help you with the PS4 issue (I can't fly on consoles to save my life) but the auto-spawning pirates (for explorers and miners) issue I can get behind

Thanks for making me smile - your last (my bold) bit even I'd ask the same

 

[Jon474]

Drew, when you finally give up on this cause...

I find this attitude sad.

However, I’ve given up on the cause. I’ve given up on the game.

In time, I’ll give up reading the posts on this forum...but since I’ve been here for over five years that is quite difficult to do.

It’s a shame.

Jon