Could Frontier please demonstrate how to use the FSS enjoyably?

[WolfgarVT]

After playing around wit the FSS last night and some more today as well as the fact that I am an industrial resource gathering MMO Loner type, I have come to the conclusion that you have to be of the mindset that you find in those who enjoy mining. Either in this game or any of the many other games that provide that flavor of activity.

I played 5 accounts on EvE Online for 7 years just eating entire asteroid belts and making ships, ammo and other consumables. Once I got the hang of the FSS I enjoyed using it... I dont think I would like the activity if I didn't have that Industrialist mindset though. I also did not mind the 8 mil + from scanning 12 systems in one run. Though mining makes money faster.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

First and foremost is the chevron system.

On the waveform spectrum tuner, it'll show you what types of bodies are within the range you're tuned into, whether they have rings, and when combined with the "signals" on the waveform themselves, it's possible (though not necessarily practical) to determine their size.

On the main screen, when combined with the range you're tuned into, it'll show what types of bodies are in your field of view, whether those bodies are moons, main bodies, or part of a binary or larger system.

When you combine the chevron system with the temperature and distance readings, it's also possible to deduce whether a body is terraformable or not.

If we're supposed to just "use it to scan the entire system without flying around," none of this information is necessary for that purpose. Why encode this information into the interface when it'll be revealed by resolving the body in the first place? Encoding this information, planning these interconnnected systems, programming in the rules, and testing them requires development resources. If we're supposed to just play the "minigame", why all the extra work on stuff that should be ignored if we're using it "properly?"

Furthermore, in the livestreams I've watched, especially the introductory livestream, the development team seemed quite proud of the fact that you can deduce the properties of a body before you resolved it. I spent a lot of time going over that livestream getting ready for the beta, rewatching the hints they provided, hypothesizing about what most of the things I was most interested would look like on the FSS, other uses for the FSS besides resolving bodies, and most of my hypothesis turned out to be correct.

I think the livestreams focused on the "minigame" not because that's the way we're supposed to play it, but because the "minigame" is the most easily understood by most viewers. But just because its the easiest to understand, doesn't mean its the only way its meant to be used. It's just that the livestreams are meant for those who'll be new to using the FSS.

I didn't fall into my current exploration workflow, FSS analysis -> discovery via parallax -> "minigame," right from the start. At first I was playing the "minigame" along with everyone else. But because I had paid attention to parts of the livestreams that others ignored, or outright dismissed as "fluff," I was soon in a position to skipping over completing the "minigame" in favor of flying there directly, once I had determined that there might have been something there worth flying to. It saved a little bit of time, and more importantly it was much more fun.

Interesting - maybe everyone else is using it 'wrong'
Still, I can't say it's great design if you can bypass the analysis part and simply 'randomly' slide the tuner and get the same result.

Either way, the fact that you're then NOT resolving the body through the FSS screen and flying off to look for it is clearly not 'as designed' otherwise the zoom-resolution functionality wouldn't exist.

So to me it appears that the FSS was designed with 'cherry-picking' in mind, where the cherries can be more than just ELWs - given that it's possible to identify other types of bodies prior to tuning.

It's a shame they decided to hide all that effort behind a far simpler mechanic in order to unnecessarily remove the need to fly to a planet in order to confirm the analysis done by the player. Without that shortcut the process would be much more engaging to me - but I suspect not to 99% of the rest of the playerbase. Hence we have what we have.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Well based on the livestreams, we're supposed to use it to scan the entire system without having to fly around.

I'm not sure what stuff you're talking about that isn't designed specifically to support that goal. Could you elucidate?

Use it how you want to. In the livestreams, that is how they use it. Its not how I use it though. That's what I like about it, you can use it in many different ways.

 

[Skip Rockbounder]

Presumably we're at the recycling arguments phase of the thread.

No, you should try reading a couple of the posts just above your one... interesting!

 

[Darkfyre99]

So once you've filtered to taste, you just open up the fss, dont do any panning, and tune for your blob. If its there remember the heading and go there and flash scan it?

Hmmm..... haven't tried that version. Can you prevent the fss from panning?

The navigation panel would be so much easier An unknown target is exactly the same thing!

Hmmmmmmmmmmm

Not quite. When I'm exploring, I'm looking for three things: discovery gameplay, interesting worlds to land on, and interesting systems to fly through... in that order.

Discovery gameplay for me means a) an active process; and b) I'm the one doing the discovering. That's why I don't enjoy automated systems that do the discovering for me, and why pre-explored systems are jump through territory for me. Neither generates that feeling of discovery that I seek, which is the difference between exploration being a dull interesting grind to me, or exploration invoking feelings of wonder, surprise... and occasionally disappointment when I misread the signs.

Interesting worlds to land on are tricky to clarify. Since there isn't a lot to exploration gameplay on the surface of planets, let alone a wide variety of things to discover outside the Human, Thargoid, and Guardian space, that pretty much means looking for visually striking worlds to land on. Furthermore, I would've preferred some "fly over the surface to map it" mechanism, which would reveal POIs when you got in a certain range while in orbital cruise. The probes are fine, but I think Frontier could've added some badly needed "living off the land" exploration gameplay by making them limited, and then providing an alternative method for finding POIs. Still, the current probe mechanics are a huge improvement over the pre-3.3 "throttle down outside of visual range and wait" mechanic.

Interesting systems to fly through are easy: they're the complex ones, with lots of gas giants, moons, and binary+ worlds. Mass creates terrain in Supercruise, and its terrain that makes systems interesting to fly through. They also require the least effort to identify: a large number of bodies + many signals at the gas giant end of the spectrum = a system worth sticking around for.

In my experience, systems have up to three bands of worlds, each with their own characteristics relevant to my exploration goals:

The first is what I refer to as "inner" system worlds: worlds with high metallic content that may be within a star's habitable zone. In my experience, these worlds have a :

• Very low chance of being interesting to land on.
• Moderate chance of being interesting to fly by
• Moderate chance of being valuable

Most of these worlds aren't even landable at all!!! These are the worlds I prefer to discover via parallax and flyby, while I'm on my way to the most interesting world within the most interesting band of the system, the "outer" system gas giants. I've found that gas giants have a:

• Moderate chance of having interesting moons to land on
• High chance of being interesting to fly through
• Low chance of having valuable moons

This is where FSS analysis comes in. The way the FSS is designed, I can tune into the middle of the very wide Gas Giant band, and learn about the gas giants in a system with, at most, a single pan, and no further tuning, and no zooming. Binary+ gas giants, gas giants with moons, and lone gas giants can be identified during this single pan, and I'll stop the pan the moment I see binary+ gas giants and just make my way out there.

If there are no gas giants in a system, and no life bearing worlds, I can still do a single pan of the system while tuning the scanner to just below the HMC band. This tunes out the icy world noise on the screen, letting me more easily identify if there are any binary+ HMCs in the system, because binary+ worlds are at least fun to fly by, and can be visually interesting if you can land on them.

The last band of worlds in a system are the Kuiper belt objects: generally small, tiny balls of ice. This is the least interesting band within a system, which is why I play the "minigame" to clean them up. These worlds have a:

• Low chance of being interesting to land on
• Low chance of being interesting to fly by
• No chance of being valuable

Now I'm sure you're saying to yourself, "But Darkfyre! I thought you don't care about credits! Why do you care if they're valuable or not?" And you're right, I don't. But there's a difference between not caring about credits, and not being willing to pick up something worth millions of credits when you're literally right there. Plus trying to find the right approach that is fast enough not to be captured by a world that isn't worth probing, while slow enough to get captured by it should it prove to be worth probing, without the aid of navigation data, is what can potentially make "inner" worlds so interesting to fly by.

This is also why I'd prefer having the information about a body I have targeted accessible in the cockpit. Having to slowly pan over to a world in the system map, in VR no less, is torture when I want to make a snap decision on whether to perform a capture maneuver or not. Life bearing worlds are easy to identify. Terraforming candidates or landable worlds with active geology... not so much.

 

[marx]

So what is the sample size of EDSM. How many active users are there?

Let's see then.
During DW2, 13,608 people signed up, 5,380 of them on EDSM. That's 39.53%, much more than enough.
At the end of DW2, 3,747 people finished, 2,628 of them on EDSM. That's 70.13%. If you finished DW2 and weren't on EDSM, you were in the minority. (Something to think about if you think your personal case outweighs the rest.)

Let's go with what we know from Frontier then. On 2018. March 2, they wrote that 112,863,791 systems were discovered. Going from the 2014. Nov. 22 Gamma (head-start) release date, that's an average of 94,367 systems added daily.
EDSM started logging systems on 2015. May 15, even then, it could log far less systems, as they had to be trilaterated until 2016. February 1, meaning that players added far less systems manually than they have been to. Now, on 2018. March 2 mentioned above, there were 20,853,341 systems added: 20,345 per day.
Extended to the present day, it would be 28,374 systems per day - but we don't have the current statistic from Frontier. Maybe somebody could ask them?
Also, to better put things into perspective, during DW2, the average on EDSM was 61.6k per day. (That also includes the time when numbers started dropping, as many finished it before the official deadline in the middle of June.)

But let's move back to 2018 then. So, what we do know is that EDSM had an average of 20,345 system uploaded per day, while the entire game across all platforms was 94,367. (Bear in mind that at this time, EDSM had no console support.)
So, if we're comparing systems, then EDSM represented 21.56% of the total. Plenty good. We can say that a player who doesn't upload to EDSM doesn't explore significantly slower nor faster than a player who does, so we can use the same speed for both groups, and then the ratio should remain the same.

That's a relative sample size, what about an absolute then?

To do that, we'll have to estimate how many systems per day a player would explore on average. Now, looking into the DW2 statistics that Qohen Leth posted and the EDSM data, we can estimate that. I went with a low estimate of only 2,628 DW2 players uploading their finds, but that could certainly be refined, by comparing daily statistics with how many people reached each waypoint, and so on. I'll probably do it sometime later.
But for now, the per-player average would be 10.12 systems a day, while also scanning 108.86 bodies, plus auto-scanning 18.42 stars. So let's go with 10.12 systems then.

Again, we can say that a player who doesn't upload to EDSM doesn't explore significantly slower nor faster than a player who does, so we can use the same speed for both groups. With that, we have a daily average of 9,325 explorers, rounded up. Out of them, 2,011 would be on EDSM. (Comparing these to the exploration CG contributor statistics, which probably don't really attract many explorers, and Steam player counts, which are only a part of the PC player count, both sound plausible.)

For a standard 95% confidence level then, with those population and sample sizes, the margin of error would be 1.93%. If you know statistics, that's plenty good.

 

[marx]

Oh, and please don't bring election statistics and whatnot into this. There are plenty of well-known complications, bias, sources of error and so on there. For example, people might change their minds in the booth, they might not be willing to admit in public that they are voting for parties with extreme views, politicians might try to buy votes en masse, there's a possibility of vote counting being manipulated, local weather on election day is a factor, and so on. It's an interesting topic, but none of those are relevant to uploading automatically generated logs to a third party site.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Let's see then.
During DW2, 13,608 people signed up, 5,380 of them on EDSM. That's 39.53%, much more than enough.
At the end of DW2, 3,747 people finished, 2,628 of them on EDSM. That's 70.13%. If you finished DW2 and weren't on EDSM, you were in the minority. (Something to think about if you think your personal case outweighs the rest.)

Let's go with what we know from Frontier then. On 2018. March 2, they wrote that 112,863,791 systems were discovered. Going from the 2014. Nov. 22 Gamma (head-start) release date, that's an average of 94,367 systems added daily.
EDSM started logging systems on 2015. May 15, even then, it could log far less systems, as they had to be trilaterated until 2016. February 1, meaning that players added far less systems manually than they have been to. Now, on 2018. March 2 mentioned above, there were 20,853,341 systems added: 20,345 per day.
Extended to the present day, it would be 28,374 systems per day - but we don't have the current statistic from Frontier. Maybe somebody could ask them?
Also, to better put things into perspective, during DW2, the average on EDSM was 61.6k per day. (That also includes the time when numbers started dropping, as many finished it before the official deadline in the middle of June.)

But let's move back to 2018 then. So, what we do know is that EDSM had an average of 20,345 system uploaded per day, while the entire game across all platforms was 94,367. (Bear in mind that at this time, EDSM had no console support.)
So, if we're comparing systems, then EDSM represented 21.56% of the total. Plenty good. We can say that a player who doesn't upload to EDSM doesn't explore significantly slower nor faster than a player who does, so we can use the same speed for both groups, and then the ratio should remain the same.

That's a relative sample size, what about an absolute then?

To do that, we'll have to estimate how many systems per day a player would explore on average. Now, looking into the DW2 statistics that Qohen Leth posted and the EDSM data, we can estimate that. I went with a low estimate of only 2,628 DW2 players uploading their finds, but that could certainly be refined, by comparing daily statistics with how many people reached each waypoint, and so on. I'll probably do it sometime later.
But for now, the per-player average would be 10.12 systems a day, while also scanning 108.86 bodies, plus auto-scanning 18.42 stars. So let's go with 10.12 systems then.

Again, we can say that a player who doesn't upload to EDSM doesn't explore significantly slower nor faster than a player who does, so we can use the same speed for both groups. With that, we have a daily average of 9,325 explorers, rounded up. Out of them, 2,011 would be on EDSM. (Comparing these to the exploration CG contributor statistics, which probably don't really attract many explorers, and Steam player counts, which are only a part of the PC player count, both sound plausible.)

For a standard 95% confidence level then, with those population and sample sizes, the margin of error would be 1.93%. If you know statistics, that's plenty good.

That is only based on people signed up to DW2. Again it's meaningless unless you think that every explorer signed up to DW2 which is doubtful.

I know you are trying your best, but you don't have the information to make a judgement call that I would call reliable. Sorry.

Also there are other variables such as a new explorers will have to go much further out to find virgin system then what was happening when the game started. That's the thing the amount of explorers may not have changed, but the rate of new discoveries may have. Difficult to know. A lot of new explorer I would guess would go to the usual tourist spots first, which wouldn't show up.

All you can say for certain is that the amount of new systems being found is on the decline. Which I don't dispute.

Now the reasons for that, it's difficult to tell. I would hazard a guess that there just isn't enough stuff to find. We desperately need things like atmospheric planets and new activities to do on planet surfaces.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Oh, and please don't bring election statistics and whatnot into this. There are plenty of well-known complications, bias, sources of error and so on there. For example, people might change their minds in the booth, they might not be willing to admit in public that they are voting for parties with extreme views, politicians might try to buy votes en masse, there's a possibility of vote counting being manipulated, local weather on election day is a factor, and so on. It's an interesting topic, but none of those are relevant to uploading automatically generated logs to a third party site.

I'm not the one that bought it up.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Not quite. When I'm exploring, I'm looking for three things: discovery gameplay, interesting worlds to land on, and interesting systems to fly through... in that order.

Discovery gameplay for me means a) an active process; and b) I'm the one doing the discovering. That's why I don't enjoy automated systems that do the discovering for me, and why pre-explored systems are jump through territory for me. Neither generates that feeling of discovery that I seek, which is the difference between exploration being a dull interesting grind to me, or exploration invoking feelings of wonder, surprise... and occasionally disappointment when I misread the signs.

Interesting worlds to land on are tricky to clarify. Since there isn't a lot to exploration gameplay on the surface of planets, let alone a wide variety of things to discover outside the Human, Thargoid, and Guardian space, that pretty much means looking for visually striking worlds to land on. Furthermore, I would've preferred some "fly over the surface to map it" mechanism, which would reveal POIs when you got in a certain range while in orbital cruise. The probes are fine, but I think Frontier could've added some badly needed "living off the land" exploration gameplay by making them limited, and then providing an alternative method for finding POIs. Still, the current probe mechanics are a huge improvement over the pre-3.3 "throttle down outside of visual range and wait" mechanic.

Interesting systems to fly through are easy: they're the complex ones, with lots of gas giants, moons, and binary+ worlds. Mass creates terrain in Supercruise, and its terrain that makes systems interesting to fly through. They also require the least effort to identify: a large number of bodies + many signals at the gas giant end of the spectrum = a system worth sticking around for.

In my experience, systems have up to three bands of worlds, each with their own characteristics relevant to my exploration goals:

The first is what I refer to as "inner" system worlds: worlds with high metallic content that may be within a star's habitable zone. In my experience, these worlds have a :

• Very low chance of being interesting to land on.
• Moderate chance of being interesting to fly by
• Moderate chance of being valuable

Most of these worlds aren't even landable at all!!! These are the worlds I prefer to discover via parallax and flyby, while I'm on my way to the most interesting world within the most interesting band of the system, the "outer" system gas giants. I've found that gas giants have a:

• Moderate chance of having interesting moons to land on
• High chance of being interesting to fly through
• Low chance of having valuable moons

This is where FSS analysis comes in. The way the FSS is designed, I can tune into the middle of the very wide Gas Giant band, and learn about the gas giants in a system with, at most, a single pan, and no further tuning, and no zooming. Binary+ gas giants, gas giants with moons, and lone gas giants can be identified during this single pan, and I'll stop the pan the moment I see binary+ gas giants and just make my way out there.

If there are no gas giants in a system, and no life bearing worlds, I can still do a single pan of the system while tuning the scanner to just below the HMC band. This tunes out the icy world noise on the screen, letting me more easily identify if there are any binary+ HMCs in the system, because binary+ worlds are at least fun to fly by, and can be visually interesting if you can land on them.

The last band of worlds in a system are the Kuiper belt objects: generally small, tiny balls of ice. This is the least interesting band within a system, which is why I play the "minigame" to clean them up. These worlds have a:

• Low chance of being interesting to land on
• Low chance of being interesting to fly by
• No chance of being valuable

Now I'm sure you're saying to yourself, "But Darkfyre! I thought you don't care about credits! Why do you care if they're valuable or not?" And you're right, I don't. But there's a difference between not caring about credits, and not being willing to pick up something worth millions of credits when you're literally right there. Plus trying to find the right approach that is fast enough not to be captured by a world that isn't worth probing, while slow enough to get captured by it should it prove to be worth probing, without the aid of navigation data, is what can potentially make "inner" worlds so interesting to fly by.

This is also why I'd prefer having the information about a body I have targeted accessible in the cockpit. Having to slowly pan over to a world in the system map, in VR no less, is torture when I want to make a snap decision on whether to perform a capture maneuver or not. Life bearing worlds are easy to identify. Terraforming candidates or landable worlds with active geology... not so much.

Okay, just tried it with a fresh system, almost worked. Im more of a stripminer (for tags, and know max factor is just fibbing every time he talks about them) so am inclined to just go for anything.

Main problem is you can't determine at all whether the body you're going towards has any bodies closer in the system. You end up going all over the place. Yeah i know the fss god mode is perfect for the misses like this. Also in practice the 360 field of view is too much to pan around with your ship like that in a coherent manner.. probably more importantly, it feels really stupid when you do it. The only way it could work is if the blobs were permanently on your screen (yay analysis mode). For bodies around a distant star too its not that straight forward because you have get closer to the next star and start again.

Flying without a target though is kinda fun. You can target the body you were just at to get some idea of distance, and working out supercruise without auto brakes is good stuff.

The alternate method of fss spoiling gas giants, flying there to get the moons, then god moding the leftovers still might be an inch ahead. There's a really cheap equation of only flying to gas giants for a pretty view + less trips + less mistakes from not having the orrey is nice.

Also for your method, how you find points of interest without god moding them? Do you map everything you find? I've only come across one system since the patch that was fully discovered and mapped by someone. Real respect there, though that's above my pay grade. My name on it once is enough, i don't really need to show off.

For the completely unknown flying, the hud radar populated without anything else would be pretty handy.

In summary, the feeling might be that parallax / visual hacks to avoid the fss are just that one degree off sane given all the fss does. The experience is a bit of mess with inefficiences that wouldn't be there if the system was designed to do it all over the place. A few more though, sure

There may have been a bug in beta where the orbital plane once honked was displayed outside the fss.. this would dramatically improve that experience too.

Also it makes absolutely no sense why the ship hud isn't populated after a honk. Its even got pulses like its pretending to be one.

 

[Riverside]

I'm not the one that bought it up.

You are not the only contributor to the thread Max, Marx is pre-empting a likely response, which could come from anyone.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

You are not the only contributor to the thread Max, Marx is pre-empting a likely response, which could come from anyone.

I never said I was the only contributer. I just thought it was a continuation of his reply to me. Not sure it needs a snarky reply from you though.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Okay, just tried it with a fresh system, almost worked. Im more of a stripminer (for tags, and know max factor is just fibbing every time he talks about them) so am inclined to just go for anything.

Main problem is you can't determine at all whether the body you're going towards has any bodies closer in the system. You end up going all over the place. Yeah i know the fss god mode is perfect for the misses like this. Also in practice the 360 field of view is too much to pan around with your ship like that in a coherent manner.. probably more importantly, it feels really stupid when you do it. The only way it could work is if the blobs were permanently on your screen. For bodies around a distant star too its not that straight forward because you have get closer to the next star and start again.

I'm not quite sure what your question is, but if I'm reading you correctly, "going all over the place" is half the reason why I use parallax to discover the inner planets of a system, if any. Seeing an unidentified light moving against the background stars and realizing that's a world never gets old IMO, and quite frankly approaching a world from its dark side or towards its terminator requires slightly different piloting than approaching from the sun. Plus it also varies how a planet might look as I fly by.

I find it to be fun. YMMV

Flying without a target though is kinda fun. You can target the body you were just at to get some idea of distance, and working out supercruise without auto brakes is good stuff.

That's why I do it.

The alternate method of fss spoiling gas giants, flying there to get the moons, then god moding the leftovers still might be an inch ahead. There's a really cheap equation of only flying to gas giants for a pretty view + less trips + less mistakes from not having the orrey is nice.

Not to mention that flying at speed near gas giants, especially if they have fantastic ring systems, is a lot of fun.

Also for your method, how you find points of interest without god moding them? Do you map everything you find? I've only come across one system since the patch that was fully discovered and mapped by someone. Real respect there, though that's above my pay grade. My name on it once is enough, i don't really need to show off.

This is where my frustrations with the artificial throttle restrictions on the FSS, and/or being forced to use the system map, really kicks in. The former would work best if I could stay throttled up, even at partial throttle, while the latter is just torturous to use IMO, especially if you want information fast. Either way, I'm pretty much looking at the part of the panel that lists vulcanism and atmospheres. Biological signs have been pretty sparse unless I'm deliberately going out of my way to search for them.

pauses

I'll have to double check when I get an opportunity to play later in the day, but IIRC, the other reason why I don't use the FSS just to get body information is that I'm pretty sure you can't get information about a body if you're too close to it. Maybe if I don't wait for it to autoresolve when I get close...

 

[marx]

That is only based on people signed up to DW2. Again it's meaningless unless you think that every explorer signed up to DW2 which is doubtful.

Of course, you seem to be forgetting the part that I repeatedly mentioned, namely that a whopping 76% of the stars and bodies uploaded to EDSM during DW2 came from DW2 players. By the same method as before, we can say that if you weren't on DW2 during that time, you were in the minority.

I know you are trying your best, but you don't have the information to make a judgement call that I would call reliable. Sorry.

Thank you. I know you're also trying your best. Oh, and no apology necessary: I don't find your opinion important (then again, I don't place much value in anyone's opinions, including mine), I wrote and posted the above chiefly for the benefit of others.

Also there are other variables such as a new explorers will have to go much further out to find virgin system then what was happening when the game started.

A few days ago, I did a little experiment on that. Going to the ESE, distance from Sol to first undiscovered system: 600 ly. Granted, that was just one system, and I didn't go in multiple directions to measure where the closest one was. It's still more than what you offered though.
Granted, that was a mass code B, class M dwarf star. The low-hanging fruit is of course gone next to the bubble, but undiscovered systems are undiscovered systems regardless of what they contain.

Oh, and about the distance. Bear in mind that at the start, jump ranges were frequently around 25 ly. These days, they are over double that. It's the number of jumps that are more relevant, not the total distance. You could even say that Frontier keep increasing jump ranges to compensate for having to travel farther.

All you can say for certain is that the amount of new systems being found is on the decline. Which I don't dispute.

I can also say for certain that the amount of bodies players scan per system is also on the decline, and the amount of ELWs and AWs they scan per system is also on the decline. If you've read my posts, you know this.
"On the decline" is also putting it mildly. When there were drops down to half or even a third, that's not a "natural", gradual decline.

Lastly:

I'm not the one that bought it up.

Yes, which was why I wasn't replying to you there.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Regarding the distance to reach an unexplored system:

I'm exploring by constellation, which means I'm returning to the Bubble pretty much once a month. To the 'east' of Sol you'll start finding unexplored systems around 500 LY out, and by 1,000 LY a tagged system is unusual. This is a relatively lightly traveled direction, so I'd expect a much higher distance in the northern through western arcs due to Sag A, Colonia and the Formidine Rift.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Okay, just tried it with a fresh system, almost worked. Im more of a stripminer (for tags, and know max factor is just fibbing every time he talks about them) so am inclined to just go for anything.

Main problem is you can't determine at all whether the body you're going towards has any bodies closer in the system. You end up going all over the place. Yeah i know the fss god mode is perfect for the misses like this. Also in practice the 360 field of view is too much to pan around with your ship like that in a coherent manner.. probably more importantly, it feels really stupid when you do it. The only way it could work is if the blobs were permanently on your screen (yay analysis mode). For bodies around a distant star too its not that straight forward because you have get closer to the next star and start again.

Flying without a target though is kinda fun. You can target the body you were just at to get some idea of distance, and working out supercruise without auto brakes is good stuff.

The alternate method of fss spoiling gas giants, flying there to get the moons, then god moding the leftovers still might be an inch ahead. There's a really cheap equation of only flying to gas giants for a pretty view + less trips + less mistakes from not having the orrey is nice.

Also for your method, how you find points of interest without god moding them? Do you map everything you find? I've only come across one system since the patch that was fully discovered and mapped by someone. Real respect there, though that's above my pay grade. My name on it once is enough, i don't really need to show off.

For the completely unknown flying, the hud radar populated without anything else would be pretty handy.

In summary, the feeling might be that parallax / visual hacks to avoid the fss are just that one degree off sane given all the fss does. The experience is a bit of mess with inefficiences that wouldn't be there if the system was designed to do it all over the place. A few more though, sure

There may have been a bug in beta where the orbital plane once honked was displayed outside the fss.. this would dramatically improve that experience too.

Also it makes absolutely no sense why the ship hud isn't populated after a honk. Its even got pulses like its pretending to be one.

Inner system bodies are really easy to find by parallax once you're 1,000 Ls out, so I tend to leave them to last. I generally leave those to last, since they're the easiest to find and you aren't going to lose track of them - though I will do a flyby if I haven't already identified the orbital plane from other bodes (using the FSS to determine the orbital plane is cheating). I spiral outwards, always heading towards what I think is the outermost body (that I've spotted). When I'm sure there's nothing else out there (or I've hit icy bodies if I'm not fully scanning) then I'll head back towards the star and fill in the gaps - this is really easy with orbital lines turned on, because the search area for a body is clearly delineated by the orbits of other stars.

I only use the FSS for the spectrum, since I hate the panning mechanism and the 'random' rotation of the view means that it's not effective for ensuring full coverage anyway.

 

[Old Duck]

I've been away from this thread for awhile, TL;DR, so forgive me if this has been asked. Are you "bring back the ADS" folks looking for never discovered "cool finds", or does it not matter? I know a few of you have declared that you don't care about first discovery tags.

The reason I ask is because my beachcombing approach to exploration often takes me to systems that have already been discovered but not mapped. In these systems I rarely even bother with the FSS. I just pull up the system map (which is populated thanks to someone else) and see if there are any planets worthy of my time to fly to and map out. Now I personally am a bit of a "go where no CMDR has gone before" kinda guy, so if a system is both discovered and mapped, then I tend to move on unless something really catches my eye.

The one negative of foregoing the FSS is that you'll miss things like stellar phenomena. Unless I'm wrong, SP doesn't show up on the system map, does it?

 

[marx]

I have to admit, Darkfyre99's post about how he makes the FSS more enjoyable for himself is more on-thread than statistics are. Those are some interesting insights there, but there's a catch: you're basically deviating from the typical usage scenario it was designed for. In other words, you have to bend the tools you are given quite well in order to still have fun with it. Let's not forget that you're not someone who explores a lot (say, 10+ hours a week), and you've already reached this stage. Plus you also have to rely on the new auto-scanner somewhat... but at least it's there as an alternative. (There is a good reason for it, mind you: without a proximity scan, you could land at a POI and have the game not know it's there.)

Oh, there is one part I'd like to specifically comment on:

They also require the least effort to identify: a large number of bodies + many signals at the gas giant end of the spectrum = a system worth sticking around for.

Note that plenty of the most interesting, or certainly the rare, systems that the Stellar Forge has produced would fail these criteria.

The one negative of foregoing the FSS is that you'll miss things like stellar phenomena. Unless I'm wrong, SP doesn't show up on the system map, does it?

POIs don't show up on the system map in general: not only NSPs, but also Guardian beacons and so on. However, they do show up on the Contacts tab, and NSPs specifically appear to do so at possibly any distance. (Guardian sites show up within 1,000 ls, unless you point your ship directly at their planet.) Personally, the farthest NSP I've seen show up was around 350k ls away, so their range is at least that.

It is because of this that the FSS is actually worse for finding NSPs than simply looking at the contacts. On the FSS barcode, you might miss that there's a blip in a part where you usually don't look at anyway. On the contacts, they stand out much better - unless you're in an already-explored system, of course.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

I've been away from this thread for awhile, TL;DR, so forgive me if this has been asked. Are you "bring back the ADS" folks looking for never discovered "cool finds", or does it not matter? I know a few of you have declared that you don't care about first discovery tags.

The reason I ask is because my beachcombing approach to exploration often takes me to systems that have already been discovered but not mapped. In these systems I rarely even bother with the FSS. I just pull up the system map (which is populated thanks to someone else) and see if there are any planets worthy of my time to fly to and map out. Now I personally am a bit of a "go where no CMDR has gone before" kinda guy, so if a system is both discovered and mapped, then I tend to move on unless something really catches my eye.

The one negative of foregoing the FSS is that you'll miss things like stellar phenomena. Unless I'm wrong, SP doesn't show up on the system map, does it?

Now that I've adapted to exploring by not using the FSS, I'm personally okay with not bringing back the ADS. I just don't think there was a good reason to remove it in the first place. I think more choices are better.

Note:
I've heard a lot of arguments as to what other people consider a good idea, and none of them have convinced me. Please don't waste valuable internet space explaining them to me again.

 

[Old Duck]

POIs don't show up on the system map in general: not only NSPs, but also Guardian beacons and so on. However, they do show up on the Contacts tab, and NSPs specifically appear to do so at possibly any distance. (Guardian sites show up within 1,000 ls, unless you point your ship directly at their planet.) Personally, the farthest NSP I've seen show up was around 350k ls away, so their range is at least that.

It is because of this that the FSS is actually worse for finding NSPs than simply looking at the contacts. On the FSS barcode, you might miss that there's a blip in a part where you usually don't look at anyway. On the contacts, they stand out much better - unless you're in an already-explored system, of course.

This is just after a simple honk, no FSS at all?