It is sad. Please understand that a lot of us love exploration now. This is nice.
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Why FSS Mode Must Go
- Thread starter Commander William Diffin
- Start date
It is sad. Please understand that a lot of us love exploration now. This is nice.
I'm terribly addicted to the forums myself... I really need to scale back, as it's cutting into my productivity. Perhaps I should join a forum about forum addiction, LOL.
On the contrary.
The reason why I disliked the ADS was because it had two settings: famine or feast. Either you had so little information that you could spend entire play sessions searching for something that isn’t there, or you had so much information that it utterly ruined any sense of discovery, leaving behind only a grind for credits or “discovered by” tags, neither of which are important to me. This is what made it such a horrible tool for discovery gameplay.
Because of how the FSS gathers and presents information, a player has a wide variety of strategies for how to explore a system. The FSS can be used as a gravity well detector, a thermometer, or a range finder. It can be used as a navigation aide or not used at all. You can explore a system solely via parallax and performing a flyby, by analyzing the gravity wells to locate interesting things, by playing a “minigame,” or any combination in between. There are a couple strategies that I would love to try which require a moving ship... dang it.
I keep putting-off singing-up to one particular bulletin board about procrastination, although it seems there are not many posts on it.
I'm sure they'll get round to it. All in good time, you know.I keep putting-off singing-up to one particular bulletin board about procrastination, although it seems there are not many posts on it.
Nice try, but you just made up reasoning which I didn't say and completely ignored (or refused to comprehend or acknowledge) the point I made about the placeholder instant spherical field scan vs. an automatic search stepped process for a hypothetical auto tuner and panning more grounded scanner inline with the tech lore.
I said it could take less than a minute watching the tuner auto-seek for small systems which would likely not take just a few seconds but closer to several seconds up to a minute for smaller systems, with the zoom in/out close to requiring one second each in addition to the time it takes to tune . Similar to how a car digital radio auto seeks and snaps-to which of course is still not instantaneous. Plus adding the time from auto-panning which could be a CRT-like scanning process, which would take likely more than a minute or several minutes for systems with several bodies. The idea is to shorten the time it takes from the FSS for the extreme cases to a shorter but still substantial median range of the edge cases i.e. (30 seconds to 10 min) instead of (30 seconds to 30+ minutes) currently which is still substantially different from 5 seconds for every system of the ADS placeholder method.
You also mention determining composition which is a poor comparison point, because the old ADS honk gave overwhelming complete visual information which many previous explorers could easily and quickly decide to survey closer or move on with enough experience within seconds. Certainly not "no details about their composition". Whereas the FSS doesn't show newly FSS discovered system bodies and their composition in the system map until they are resolved (or within the ship's core module scanner range) which again the median range in my auto-scan idea would not take only a "few seconds" but reduce partially the extended time from extreme cases of a system with very numerous bodies.
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![[Diplomacy] Carnegie](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/123/123809.jpg?1553527149){kind=avatar}
So the ADS takes 5 seconds to perform an automated search for just the blue blobs.
The automated FSS takes longer because it has to tune-n-zoom as well.
Arguing that one is in line with the tech lore and one isn't is farcical.
Sounds like you don't get the fundamental difference. The ADS instantly gets the entire systems visual detail and distance with omniscence able to scan with increasingly infinite radial vectors. The FSS only recognizes that something is out there within a blob zone, and requires directional amplification after tuning and translation to resolve, implying a more limited and grounded sensor technology.
You may like to label my auto-tune idea as farcical where I think it's a reasonable idea to shorten the time for the extreme cases of system of large systems in the current FSS, but within the majority who like the FSS changes, I'd think many like it because it also approaches a more reasonable tech lore of the ED world than the old ADS.
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The fss is just another time sink put into the game , you play the blue blob game just to get to where the Honk gets you in one go , waste of time ,plus you have to fly closer to planets to surface scan them , more time sink added , Peoples names on Stars and other bodies are now pointless as no one reads them now , it's just quick scan and go , Fss is for people who want money , the old system people explored and worked for a living.
Can we see the poll numbers on the money vs worked for a living? No? OK then.
What do you mean by poll numbers? How many credits per hour you could earn before and now? Or do you mean player activity? The former can be estimated quite well, for the latter, what we have are EDSM and Steam statistics.
What is this 'worked for a living' ? I did that IRL until I retired, there is no need to do such a dirty deed in game as credits are given just for flying around being a layabout (or at least in my case).
My new (bubble based) CMDR makes millions just jumping around the bubble playing the scan game, after spending just a couple of hours running data that is
My new (bubble based) CMDR makes millions just jumping around the bubble playing the scan game, after spending just a couple of hours running data that is
Jon474
Banned
Um, Marx, I was asking for backup on the claim. Obviously there isn't any, unless we want to quantify the commanders "feelings".
Um, Marx, I was asking for backup on the claim. Obviously there isn't any, unless we want to quantify the commanders "feelings".
Even I misread that post Rooster
Although understanding the one you were responding to was even less easy reading.The new system can deliver more credits than previously (particularly on unexplored systems one completely maps) but the element of exploration is still there for the choosing, otherwise why do folk like me (it is about the only activity in the game I enjoy, immensely) bother doing it? Credits are virtually worthless as there is no game economy, materlials have a much higher 'value' in game and are less easy to accumulate than credits (and are needed more often...) but many mats are a by-product of exploration
Game money is only important when fleet-building and for re-buys (accidents happen!) once enough is made (whatever that figure is personally) the 'earning' of credits is secondary to gameplay itself.
Opinions here are my own, others may disagree vehemently if they are so inclined.
Games are time sinks. You enjoy them or you don't, they're still just ways to while away the hours until our inevitable demise, every click or key press taking us one second closer to death.
To say "I like this bit and therefore it is not a time sink" and "I don't like this bit so therefore it is just a time sink" is a ridiculous position that holds less water than a colander that is all one big hole. When you call the FSS a time sink that is exactly what you are doing.
If you no longer enjoy the game then I am sorry for your loss, I would be a bit bereft if it went in a direction that I no longer found enjoyable enough to play any more but the "time sink" criticism is just meaningless.
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I have put more consecutive hours into this game-over the last month-than I had over the previous 12 months......& I put almost all of that down to the new exploration mechanics.
@Ratkatcher, no harm no foul. Heck, sometimes I jump the gun on comments on comments. Then again I often leave out the /s tag and get a little obtuse.
All is good, the Galaxy doesn't have a new faction war
All is good, the Galaxy doesn't have a new faction war
The FSS could use some improvements, like some time saving extras such as snap-in on the tuning, or an option to auto-pan and search, when you can't find those last few blobs that are outside of the visible orbital lines, or showing blobs in the system map, or even on the orrery with combined FSS functions . But overall I think it's an improvement over the old placeholders of the ADS. It just didn't make lore sense to have the basic scanner at a certain range, and then an infinite system ranged scanner that would work instantaneously when powered so it was obviously a placeholder until FD could get around to expanding on the scanning mechanics. Perhaps a workable compromise (already suggested by someone back during the beta) would be to have the system map populated with the undefined blobs after the FSS honk so one could still navigate select them to fly to, and perhaps an option to FSS scan the targeted blob without limitation on supercruise speed.
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