Remove the traveling grind

[Berpol]

My only idea so far for reduced travel grind would be to sending your ship.
You can send yourself and your ship to another station. Costs and travel time would be the similar.

It could be fixed routes (Colonia Connection Highway, important solar systems like Achenar and Sol). During travel you would be inactive (log out and make tea).
As an alternative you can only reach stations you have already visited.

 

[Kenpachi85]

Elite: Passenger


You stowaway on a passenger liner.On discovery,you are put to work as a flight attendant.After successfully demonstrating emergency exits etc. a number of times you will be promoted to flight engineer,and you main responsibilty is stocking and maintaining a fully functional vending machine for the notoriously finnicky passengers(lots of synthesis fun here to keep those idle hands moving).
Finally you will be elevated to the rank of space plumber,and as you wallow in the fetid outpourings of your fellow passengers for the tenth time you might begin to think that life with a bit of grind wasn't perhaps quite so bad after all.

Lol and hope you don't get a bad beluga pilot that gets stuck in the slot forcing the station to murder everybody on board[haha]

 

[xondk]

I’ve suggested this many times, however the only response I got was from FDEV leaving FD.
So I guess it’s kind of a taboo?

If I use a certain word people goes balistic here, so I won’t, however the need to remove grind in the game is as needed as it was 4 years ago.

When you need to go somewhere you need to plan your route, that’s cool, the galaxy map is better than it ever was, after you pick a destination the grind begins, press (J) jump raise and repeat until you lose your sanity or reach your destination. Now the are pros and cons involved here, if we use the docking computer to dock it is an option for those who don’t want to dock manually, or if they just want to kick back and eat something while the ship is docking, some elite sessions are quite long you know!

I, and this is my personal opinion, simply got bored with this mechanic so I, and still do, set the game on pause. This was the intro, and you know where I’m going with this right

I would like to have a function, that removed the grind in traveling from star to star, I would like to keep the time, only remove the micro management from this traveling mechanic.

It will not make the game easier nor would it make the game less playable at the contrary it would make the game more enjoyable. It could be an NPC crewman/woman/bot or it could be a piece of equipment you need to buy.

No, it is not a taboo, to some it is a part of the game. Comparable to say, a rally race, it takes time to get from a to b, that is part of the progress. So making the whole thing significantly shorter would be detrimental to the whole.

Travelling happens in all games of one kind or another, personally I find games where you bounce around from action to action quite boring and repetitive, so yeah, people have different opinion on the topic, and for me, and I know others, it would not make the game more enjoyable.

 

[JustJon]

So 'jump gates' is actually a good idea.

1 gate at say sol - and then another at colonia

However in order to use a jump gate you must first take a quantum entangled particle manually from 1 gate to the other - then once that is done you can use it as needed.

Possibly the travel time is lengthened - e.g. it will take a 'day' but that is done while you are logged out (e.g. entering a jump gate automatically logs you out for 24 hours..)

As for lore - intergalactic hyperdrive http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Galactic_Hyperdrive - with some modifications.

Also building the gates could be a CG.

 

[Ca$hback]

I'm not competitive but for those that are this would water down the standards, something I'm against out of principal on almost everything. Despite being a logical fallacy, the slippery slope always seems to happen, so...not a fan. People always want more so scooping becomes automated, re-plotting becomes automated, interdictions don't happen 1000LY out of the bubble. People who don't like exploring set a course, binge watch a series and pat themselves on the back for all their hard work circumnavigating the galaxy, checking once after every episode to make sure their ship's alright. It allows for fake laurels. Doesn't matter much to me but I know a lot of explorers are proud of doing something that would kill you. Obviously the tedium keeps out those who aren't serious about traveling a BIG galaxy. No effort, no gain and it is effort or you wouldn't consider it a challenge, which you do or you wouldn't find it daunting.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Could care less about solo. Barely ever run into people in open myself.

so you DO CARE then?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

 

[londonx]

I think the auto pilot for long range travel could be more viable after space legs, the idea that you will walk around your ship to stretch your legs once auto-pilot is engaged, maybe to entertain passengers with a jester mini-game or working behind the bar or say checking on the temperature of the biowaste cargo etc.

It could auto-end at the plotted refuel star point for refuelling or other dangerous events. I would insist this added convenience is balanced out with random dangerous events such as solar storms taking ship modules out requiring space walking to fix external damage. Or say passengers going crazy after x jumps and becoming violent and unruly, requiring sedation (aka Jurassic world) or better entertainment. Or the ship picking up an SOS signal from an unmapped planet strangely abundant with full yielding corn fields and other edible fruit.

So yeah repost sometime after the end of 2020.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Yes many, many discussions.
I was still young then .

I still hope that we will eventually get a good solid NPC crew mechanic.
So much could be done with this to add depth to the experience, but also to add QoL improvements (like the auto jump mechanic), or even increase profits (f.e. by hiring a mining supervisor, or a science officer).
Flying an Anaconda, T9/T10, Cutter, or even a Python etc on you own should simply not be possible. This has been a thorn in my side since the very start.

totally.... the biggest ship (from the "old world") we should be allowed to fly solo should be the cobra - maybe some of the newer ships which did not exist back when the lore was written could also be single cmdr.

I know Michael Brooke's book did break this a bit, but the book made it quite clear his conda was hugely modified to allow him to pilot it solo, and was not an off the shelf ship. I always thought ED launching without crew was an MVP thing which would have been fleshed out during the 1st year of the games existence...... Joke is on me ( / us) it seems

 

[phong]

totally.... the biggest ship (from the "old world") we should be allowed to fly solo should be the cobra - maybe some of the newer ships which did not exist back when the lore was written could also be single cmdr.

I know Michael Brooke's book did break this a bit, but the book made it quite clear his conda was hugely modified to allow him to pilot it solo, and was not an off the shelf ship. I always thought ED launching without crew was an MVP thing which would have been fleshed out during the 1st year of the games existence...... Joke is on me ( / us) it seems

There's quite a bit of potential in the AI multicrew concept,so maybe that's what they're working on.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

[*]Maybe if we removed the single-jump restriction and allow ships to jump their total range in a single "leap". The witch-space tunnel would last longer and the FSD cool-down would also be longer (minutes, not seconds). This could always be done with some Guardian tech "Frame-shift modulator". Yes, you go further faster, but while the "FSD modulator" cools, you could do a bit of exploring.

The witchspace tunnel is just a loading screen, so that lasts as little time as your computer can manage already. No sense in stringing it out longer than that - but a longer cooldown at the destination could be used to balance.

The tricky thing is ... what's the total range of a ship? With economic routing an Anaconda full of fuel tanks can go from Sol to Sag A* without refuelling once (and Sol->Beagle is theoretically possible without refuelling, though no-one has managed it yet). If you don't require an explicit route to be set (and the game can't plot economic routing that far in reasonable time anyway), then by making a series of 1LY jumps an engineered Anaconda could probably make it to Sag A* without even having to fit extra tanks.

Requiring all the fuel to be used at once would make the calculation simpler - an Anaconda can jump 70ish LY on 8t of fuel, and can carry 500t of fuel if all the internals are used for it, which should allow a single jump of about 300 LY if you could use it all at once ... interestingly, that's about the same distance as the same Anaconda can already get with neutron boosts *without* needing to fill all its internals with fuel tanks.

...and at that point we're at the usual question: if you can get between any two systems in the bubble with a single jump, why bother having multiple systems in the first place? Why not just keep jump ranges as they are, but shrink the bubble to be about 30LY across?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

You can send yourself and your ship to another station. Costs and travel time would be the similar.

While the current long-range travel mechanisms are pretty unsatisfactory, I think "press this button and you can't usefully log in for the next 61 hours while you and your ship are moved to Colonia" would be considerably worse.

It's fine as a transfer delay if you're not in your ship at the time, but it would just be silly otherwise. What happens if you do log in, you see the inside of a shipping container? I can't think of many games which actively aim to have players not play them for days at a time...

Conversely, within the bubble, transfer times are short enough that it might as well just be implemented as "choose the system you log in at" if you haven't logged in for the last hour or two.

 

[O'Roarke]

So I guess it’s kind of a taboo?

Well - it's a sliding scale, or snowball effect, thing.

If one implements your wish, then before you know it, just landing your ship is a "grind" too -- and people will demand Docking Computers become standard...
...and before you know it people are writing "liberate tute me ex inferis" on walls and windows with hemoglobin rich fluids.

We just can't have that happening, so you'll just have to do the "press J to jump" grind.

 

[Berpol]

While the current long-range travel mechanisms are pretty unsatisfactory, I think "press this button and you can't usefully log in for the next 61 hours while you and your ship are moved to Colonia" would be considerably worse

I didn't say it was a good idea.
The docking computer is enough auto piloting.

 

[Lestat]

The word Autopilot is maybe not the right word, it should more be a function incorporated in the route planning phase, where you can set more parameters in your route. To those who ask who far would I go, wel, as far as I can would be the answer.

Ok the Better word would be lazy pilot right? Please note Lazy Pilot Also known as Autopilot caters to groups of people who use BOTS AND MACROS that can ruin the game for us all.

As I see it now, you are just doing a repetitive mechanic and it gets boring, to the question what would I do if I didn’t need to micro manage the jumps? Well it could be many things, but really this it not important, what is important is why keep this function when it’s easy to make something that would make some players happy not to do a task that is so repeatedly in the game.

If you don't like jumping to a system to system work on your FSD so you have 70+ jump range and work on Neutron highway. So you jump less. Note people have been able to get a Long range in a short amount of time.

Check your map, program when to fuel and lean back and relax until you get to your A) fuel point B) destination.
I could spend a lot of time checking the galaxy map, and I could do that while I’m going to my POI.

Or play ANOTHER GAME and use the sound to tell you if there a problem. Ya, we can see this as a bad idea. I could see players using Multiple Elite Dangerous games as dual box or play another game while Elite Dangerous is running in the background.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

That’s ok, some people also injoy counting roundabouts, I just like to get the feeling I’m in an actual spaceship, just as I like to use the function in flight simulation, simulating real airplanes

ED ships =! airplanes, if you want that kind of autopilot go and play an airplane simulator.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

That was actually in the design phase from the beginning, FD just dropped it for some reason.

Could you cite that?

 

[Shinji Ikari]

As per the OP's avatar - more than one jump at a time could make your head explode.

I can see that some people find travelling many jumps a bit of a bore, to which I respond: "Why are you travelling so many jumps at a time?"

If you are exploring - go explore.

If you are running Colonia - use the NS Jumps.

If you are in the bubble - "What's your beef?"

So really, seriously, what is the purpose of this suggestion? What is the big issue in these days of Engineering, NS boosts and Guardian Modules?

The kids these days don't know how ol' travelling was, crossing the galaxy took weeks, nowadays it takes less than 8 hours.

 

[Lestat]

The kids these days don't know how ol' travelling was, crossing the galaxy took weeks, nowadays it takes less than 8 hours.

More like Months. Now it only takes 5 hours from Sol to Beagle point.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

More like Months. Now it only takes 5 hours from Sol to Beagle point.

It could be made in a week (but you'd have to be very resiliant to do so), nontheless, travel has come a long way and it's the fastest it has ever been.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I wouldn't mind an autopilot, IF, it could somehow be done without the creating hordes of bots doing BGS work 24/7. Lol

If this was a single player game, then yes please. Elites of old, I-War and many others had an autopilot, and they never felt like they do anything away from the game.