Of course fun is subjective. It's interesting that the entertainment you describe involves skill though. The issue I'm critiquing doesn't. I wonder if there's a connection
All games involve skill. Just because some games involve a bit less than others doesn't mean that skills of some kind aren't required. I don't recommend you play the elitist card with me.
Um, no, not really. My point was, when you change the rules, you change the game. In simple terms, it's not the same game anymore. People who play the game for what it is aren't going to be interested in it becoming something they didn't sign up for.
It doesn't matter if I think it's ironic. All that matters is the rules. It's ironic that a magic user in D&D is forced to stand still and chant incantations with no armour on, completely vulnerable, in order to cast spells to defeat his enemies. Doesn't mean the rule isn't there for a reason, reasons normally conducive to balance. Not just balance, though, but that's how things are in reality, too. The F/A-18 is a multirole fighter, which means it can do a range of ground attack missions as well as air-to-air. However, the mission it can do on any given sortie depends entirely on the weapons you mount to it. An F/A-18 loaded for SEAD is going to have a set of whopping great AGM-88 HARM missiles mounted to it, some incredibly heavy ordnance that weighs the plane down and makes it less maneuverable as a result, and while they still slap some Sidewinders on the wingtips for self defence, getting into a dogfight with that load is a bad idea. The plane is a great dogfighter, but not with that load, because you've sacrificed your dogfighting capacity in exchange for very capable anti-SAM surface attack capacity. Whether or not it's ironic that one of the best dogfighters on the planet has been reduced to all the moves of a whale to slug that ordnance is entirely beside the point.
But you already have solutions. You can decide to sacrifice a little bit of jump range for some weaponry. You can do engineering. The tools are already available to you. What you want is, quite simply, more. And my counterpoint would be you haven't qualified any such change in terms of game balance, only what you personally want. And I don't care what you personally want.
Ultimately the negative outcome of '20 jumps to reach a shop that may not have what you want in stock' still needs addressing, because it is awful gameplay. I'd go as far as to parrot the OP and say 'objectively' awful gameplay
I went to the local store today to buy broccoli for my pet cockatiel. She loves the stuff. And you know what? They were out of stock. How was I to know? Should I have called ahead? I ended up having to drive into town to get it instead. Not convenient, not even slightly. But that touch of reality adds immersion to Elite. If everything was easy to find on demand, as it pretty much is with EDDB (with the exception of it being crowdsourced and not perfectly up to date), then there'd be no discovery. The point of why it works now is you're meant to go out looking for these things, and record them and/or remember: "hey, that port always had the weapons I wanted, I'll go back there." That's how Elite has been since its very inception.
Nope I'm staying mate, because the game advertised itself to, and seeks to support, many playstyles, including my own. And I'll keep pitching win-win ideas that address poor gameplay experiences within the game for my playstyle, while also bearing other gameplay styles in mind. Even though many time-to-reward / explo players such as yourself never return the favour. Here's my latest
No, the game advertises, 'blaze your own trail'. It still has a set of rules within which you're supposed to adapt a playstyle. I'm sorry, but you don't change games to adapt to players. It's up to the player to adapt to the game. That's the point of a game to begin with. It presents a set of rules, lays out the challenge to which those rules apply, and you're meant to rise to that challenge within the rules, perhaps bending them where you can if you're capable of thinking outside the box.
And no, I don't believe time should be rewarded at all. Exploration is completely risk free as it is, and I'm of the opinion that it needs to be more dangerous. I'm an avid support of balancing reward with risk, not time. Time should have absolutely no bearing on reward. Most people think their time is valuable, and most people spend that 'valuable time' playing video games. The fact is, if you've got time to waste playing video games, then it's not valuable at all. Not even remotely.
If Elite is going to have wormholes, then they are going to be more realistic. First of all, they're going to be dangerously unstable, with mass limits and the potential to collapse whilst you're in transit. Let's make the game actually dangerous again? Cuz right now, there isn't a failstate in sight. Secondly, they're going to go somewhere random, and you'll have no idea where when you enter, only to make that discovery on the other side. Maybe they'd go to inhabited systems, maybe they wouldn't. Maybe, it'll collapse behind you, leaving you stranded in a system on the very fringes of the galaxy with nowhere to jump to. Maybe, just maybe, in order to balance the extreme risk, they'll occasionally go to small satellite galaxies near the Milky Way, and everything discovered there gets a 10x premium bonus for the extragalactic status. Then you'd have to find another wormhole, and hope it gets you home, so you can get paid. Now THAT'S exploration.
Maybe, just maybe, scientists will learn how to stabilise such wormholes allowing stargates to be built on them... but now you have EVE Online, and frankly, if I wanted to play EVE Online, I'd be playing EVE Online.
This is Elite. I'm playing Elite because it's Elite. I play it because it DOESN'T have fast travel. I play it because it feels like I'm an explorer in the galaxy, albeit one with next to none of the actual risk inherent to exploring one. I'd be okay with a few wormholes here and there that went somewhere random, but going specifically to nav beacons? Your request amounts to nothing more than 'pls gib ezmode travel!' And the answer is going to be no, FDEV will never do it, because they'll never do fast travel. It's never going to happen. This conversation has already happened, back in 2015, along with all the autopilot conversations, an d every time this and those come up on the forums, it's pretty much the same conversation again, except because FDEV are sick of having it, I guess they just don't bother anymore. But they've given their answers. Back in 2015. The answer is no. You will never have fast travel.
