Why FSS Mode Must Go

[Ziggy Stardust]

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.

I'm way ahead of you. I stopped posting more than 2 weeks ago.

Started posting again the same day, but I said I would stop posting when I stopped playing the game, and I did.

 

[Tharrn]

I like it. It is easier to get an overview over the types of bodies in a system now as the spectrum identifies bodies while I previously more often than not for example had to guess if something is a water world or not. I am not the "looking for peculiar configurations" type though - guess for those it sucks.

I also like that I can easily find biological and geological features now. Beige patrol sucked.

 

[Rat Catcher]

I'm way ahead of you. I stopped posting more than 2 weeks ago.

Started posting again the same day, but I said I would stop posting when I stopped playing the game, and I did.

I know you stopped... I stopped reading your posts the minute you stopped too But then I started playing the game instead, but it wasn't as much fun! So, welcome back - keep making the smiles appear for me [yesnod]

 

[Rat Catcher]

I like it. It is easier to get an overview over the types of bodies in a system now as the spectrum identifies bodies while I previously more often than not for example had to guess if something is a water world or not. I am not the "looking for peculiar configurations" type though - guess for those it sucks.

I also like that I can easily find biological and geological features now. Beige patrol sucked.

There has been points made by Darkfyre on how much more can be 'interpreted' from the DSS even without resolving the bodies...

But for us more ordinairy folk the DSS has given a noticable QoL improvement (in terms of finding things) than previously. Others find the exact opposite, but that is to be expected as each of us is an individual

 

[Shinji Ikari]

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.

Actually, I'd be glad if they simply returned the old way with the FSS.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

It is sad. Please understand that a lot of us love exploration now. This is nice.

And that's why I have said we should simply have both and call it a day.

 

[Gut Rumble]

Can we see the poll numbers on the money vs worked for a living? No? OK then.

.
You can scan a system that is 400kly away in minutes and go onto the next system , old would take 30/40 mins to scan the same system . so of course the new way is only for money and not for doing the work lol , I pity people now

 

[Rat Catcher]

.
You can scan a system that is 400kly away in minutes and go onto the next system , old would take 30/40 mins to scan the same system . so of course the new way is only for money and not for doing the work lol , I pity people now

I guess that is why I'm finding so many systems where the secondary/tertiary stars remain unscanned because of distance, often even 'valuable' bodies in the main system because they might be 'too far away'.

Are you intimating that you have been a completionist in each system you scanned in 'the good old days'?

It is absolutely fine to not like the change, but it doesn't take away flying for indeterminate times, if that is what the player desires.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

It is absolutely fine to not like the change, but it doesn't take away flying for indeterminate times, if that is what the player desires.

It takes away my ability to plot a route around a system, minimizing my exposure to gravity wells without having already resolved all the information on the bodies I'm flying to.

Takes all the fun out of it.

 

[M3110w]

Hope you don't mind, I strongly disagree. For me it boils down to this: in the old system, detailed scans involved pointing your ship at a body, spending often minutes travelling to it (waiting), then more waiting for the scan to finish (again, waiting, doing nothing) once you actually got close enough to scan. That a core gameplay element involved literally waiting minutes for something to happen and that was literally the highest level gameplay possible? Yeah, I would not welcome a return to that old system. Whether the new system can be improved, yes, I imagine so. But, in my view, it's a definite improvement. On that subject, I do not think the orrery idea would be an improvement, frankly.

Frankly I never would have dreamed of doing something like DW2 if it were not for the vast improvements in exploration of 3.3.

Edit: upon consideration I recognize that I may have come across as callous. I'm sorry that you've lost a gameplay element you clearly enjoyed, even if I did not feel the same.

I just started 1,5 months before 3.3 release. I tried exploring before 3.3 but it was just … as this post states, flying 300k ls towards a planet, waiting… waiting… open a browser and watch a Video while waiting. Scan the planet just to turn the ship around to the next unexplored in the list … yeah 50k ls away… alt+tab to Video again while waiting…
Not much of a Gameplay.

Now I enjoy exploring.
Why?

You can scan a system that is 400kly away in minutes and go onto the next system , old would take 30/40 mins to scan the same system . so of course the new way is only for money and not for doing the work lol , I pity people now

No, not because of the Money. Just because I have the choice now. I start at entry Point and do the honk first. Switch into FSS and scan the bodies. Now i can decide, do I want to map all of those planets? "Yah, never has anyone seen those planets here. NICE!" And so, I still have to fly 30-60mins through the System and REALLY explore a planets Surface, not just a fast flyby waiting until the scanner did his Job. And more interesting: "Oh nice, geological sites on that planet. Let's see how they look on that planet." Landing and cruising around with my SRV (btw Lava spouts at night look AWESOME).

So, as someone who just started shortly before 3.3 and had absolutely no fun in exploring before:
I like it and it made me fly out of the bubble.

Edit: Removing the "you have to be in Supercruise" restriction would really be nice though

 

[Rat Catcher]

It takes away my ability to plot a route around a system, minimizing my exposure to gravity wells without having already resolved all the information on the bodies I'm flying to.

Takes all the fun out of it.

Oh, hello Drew

 

[Rat Catcher]

My only caveat: Eating, drinking and sleeping was yesterday.

They are all highly over-rated anyway [yesnod]

 

[SecretDragon]

The old way was awful and slow

 

[Darkfyre99]

It takes away my ability to plot a route around a system, minimizing my exposure to gravity wells without having already resolved all the information on the bodies I'm flying to.

Takes all the fun out of it.

And what, exactly, is it about the FSS that removes your ability to do just that?

It's not like the bodies of a system are invisible unless they're resolved. If you can see them, you can plot a route to them.

 

[Riverside]

And what, exactly, is it about the FSS that removes your ability to do just that?

It's not like the bodies of a system are invisible unless they're resolved. If you can see them, you can plot a route to them.

Fairly obviously they cannot be targeted. This isn't a complicated issue, the functionality of the ADS is well understood.

While manually detecting bodies against the skybox can be a fun challenge once in a while it's not something most would want to do in every system, and goes against the general design principle of 3.3 making things easier to find.

Personally I'm finding the FSS a dull & mindless activity system after system. It's turned me into a completionist as far as scanning is concerned which gets me loads of tags & money, neither of which particularly interest me. I'm still only mapping the same bodies I would previously have tagged.

I like the general benefits of being able to survey a system at a distance and locate the fixed POIs but the way the FSS works as a separate screen while stationary is a cludge and I'd much rather interpret an actual picture of the body than tune into a simple sprite on the wave tuner.

But others like it, it makes exploration & discovery accessible to a new section of the community. I wouldn't want to take that away from them but it sure does suck that apparently it had to come at the expense of well established existing features that would actually complement the new stuff.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Fairly obviously they cannot be targeted. This isn't a complicated issue, the functionality of the ADS is well understood.

Again, there's no requirement to make them targetable if you simply want to plot a route to them. Having them targetable simply makes that slightly easier to do.

While manually detecting bodies against the skybox can be a fun challenge once in a while it's not something most would want to do in every system, and goes against the general design principle of 3.3 making things easier to find.

Agreed. But there is also a middle ground between solely detecting things via parallax, and completely resolving a body using the FSS. The FSS provides a glowing blue blob that highlights where something is in the sky, which makes navigating to that region of space very easy to do.

Personally I'm finding the FSS a dull & mindless activity system after system. It's turned me into a completionist as far as scanning is concerned which gets me loads of tags & money, neither of which particularly interest me. I'm still only mapping the same bodies I would previously have tagged.

That's one of the things I like about the FSS, I don't have to use it in a "dull & mindless" way. As I've gotten better at analyzing the data that's presented on the FSS, Interesting Things(tm) have started to stand out like a sore thumb. IMO, using it a "dull & mindless" way is also slower than doing it in a fun and mindful way.

YMMV

I like the general benefits of being able to survey a system at a distance and locate the fixed POIs but the way the FSS works as a separate screen while stationary is a cludge and I'd much rather interpret an actual picture of the body than tune into a simple sprite on the wave tuner.

I certainly agree that the FSS could use some improvements, starting with letting us use it while throttled up. There's also no reason not to have the option to present certain information from the FSS while using the analysis HUD in the cockpits of our ships.

OTOH, the way I use the FSS is much more involved than either "tun[ing] into a simple sprite" or interpreting a visual representation of the body in question... especially when targeting said body in question gave you a second, much simpler sprite that removed any potential ambiguity of the first.

But others like it, it makes exploration & discovery accessible to a new section of the community. I wouldn't want to take that away from them but it sure does suck that apparently it had to come at the expense of well established existing features that would actually complement the new stuff.

I have no issue with an optional module that would restore some of those "well established existing features," but I have a very hard time seeing how that would "complement" the new stuff, when they are the very antithesis of the new stuff. The new stuff adds discovery gameplay to the game. The old stuff negated discovery gameplay almost completely. That was the problem with it in the first place!

 

[space voyager]

Of course we can go back to parallaxing, I'm all in for it (and I was crying a river when back in the days the ADS made it totally superfluous). But even I must admit that by now, after 5 years, I'd probably would have enough from that. That said, I think the FSS is a golden middleground between parallaxing and ADS: The FSS is the compromise!

Also, it has an inbuilt compromise for all bubble related gameplay in that all bodies in an already explored system are immediately visible, not even a honk required. It's this function that helps us learn to get a feel for the signatures and how 'interesting' a system might be, based on potential and probabilities.

Point is, assuming you are no completionist, how many systems would you actually have been detail scanned with the former system? Maybe one in ten or twenty perhaps? This is not different with the FSS now and once learned to read the signatures you want to do a full scan in such a system. It's not that the FSS is suddenly forcing us to become a completionist in every next system.

But if you are a completionist and would have detail scanned every system before, the FSS is accelerating your journeys at a factor of 10 to 100, depending of the complexity and size of orbits.

The FSS is a win win mechanic that only requires one 'return service' from us: that we make up our mind about what we actually want. When on an extended exploration trip you can actually fine tune 'your mind' to control the pace of your trip and thus can speed it up tremendously - if you want.

The only exception were the FSS actually might appear like a brakeshoe is when all you are interested in is the local map itself. But then I can't help people who won't mind to cripple down the whole exploration to some nice image watching...

He he he, parallaxing would be an interesting thing to have IF there was something g interesting and unique to be found on every darn planet. I tried it and the time spent to find anything is nuts. Aaaaand you'll never be able to find it all, especially distant secondary stars that act more or less as the background stars...

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Oh, hello Drew

*waves*

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

And what, exactly, is it about the FSS that removes your ability to do just that?

It's not like the bodies of a system are invisible unless they're resolved. If you can see them, you can plot a route to them.

Being able to see, from the Nav Panel, the relative positions of all the bodies in a system unlocked gameplay in supercruise - optimizing my path through a system, avoiding gravity wells, flying curves and doglegs because as well all agree, straight lines are boring.

Not being able to construct that overview without simultaneously obtaining the information on a body removes the gameplay that I enjoyed. I just want to be able to map a system and THEN explore it.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Being able to see, from the Nav Panel, the relative positions of all the bodies in a system unlocked gameplay in supercruise - optimizing my path through a system, avoiding gravity wells, flying curves and doglegs because as well all agree, straight lines are boring.

You get that info after the FSS, so you still have that gameplay.

Not being able to construct that overview without simultaneously obtaining the information on a body removes the gameplay that I enjoyed. I just want to be able to map a system and THEN explore it.

You can still do that. The FSS does not stop you from exploring a system. What is the difference by flying to a planet to get some useless information (which it is as you can't actually do anything with it) and just flying to a planet to explore/look at it. I am still struggling to see what the issue is. Do you really need a reason like tags and money (as that is what the information gave you in the old way) to fly to a planet to explore/look at it. If so, then that gameplay is still there.

Use the FSS to make up the system map, fly to whatever planet you want to tag and get cash, probe it and get tags and cash and whatever information it gives you, such as info on the rings and info on the planets POI's. Same gameplay, but slightly different results.