And some of those improvements were made. Not all though, as I suspect that the others probably required more work to include. Hopefully they will look at it in the future and think about adding those suggestions at some point.
The ADS
- Thread starter Demsit
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@Stephen Benedetti - I don't suppose you would be inclined to contribute some Developer knowledge, once again (as it has been posted previously), to this recurrent theme? I do appreciate you are very busy, but this topic is beginning to go sour, again 
True, I just don't believe that anything would stop people from complaining. Before the FSS, general consensus was (at least from my perspective) that the ADS needs a complete overhaul, only after it was changed the people who liked it voiced their opinion. Maybe a few people said that the ADS is fine in the past but they've been quickly hit with the fanboy bat. So when FDEV would integrate some of the suggestions I believe someone else wouldn't like it for reasons nobody thought about yet. I guess my point is that, despite the sometimes reasonable criticism, we should accept that we'll probably never get our subjective perfect implementation. And only after we made peace with everything that is wrong we should come up with suggestions how to improve it. Being snarky and hostile so far didn't help anyone. That's just my opinion though.
Personally I like to unlock (what I call discover) what is in the system. It gives me a sense of actual discovery. But I do completely agree with you regarding what there is to find. All we have are some geological and biological POIs. There needs to be more. Give me reasons to have a look at this seemingly unremarkable ball of ice.
The honk never went.
Maybe it would already help if some of the 'lesser' bodies would resolve automatically?I like this post.
You correctly identify the issue with regard to the FSS (keeping in mind the obvious disclaimer it's your personal opinion which I happen to share, for other players the mileage may vary and all that jazz). For the ADS however, you're less specific. "It's stupid"
I think this might be the cause of you judging both systems in itself. Just the ADS, or just the FSS. Combine them and the issues you (we) have with the FSS, and you may even say the issue with the ADS is/are lessened. Not resolved, because your 2 would still be an issue.
Scanning systems with 45 bodies is a chore.Even worse if you just jumped from another system with a significant amount of bodies, "here we go again!". In the old system I looked forward to new systems, and the number of bodies couldn't be high enough. In the FSS I dread new systems. A big problem here (again, I will keep hammering on this, for me, this is my personal experience with the mechanism, reasonable people may disagree since game experiences are subjective) is we have no indication besides the inadequate FSS spectrum to get an idea what kind of system it is. If we were to have a general picture of a system, without any details per planet as you used to get in the way the old ADS worked, you could decide this system of 45 bodies was not worth your time, while another system with 45 bodies could be interesting enough to spend your time on.
The ADS is stupid. I agree in as much as the ADS being the end-all, without any follow-up is stupid. But having the ADS (system map) which you could use to base a decision on, is this system worth investigating, simply as a starting point, is not stupid. In fact, it makes perfect sense because it reveals the largest scale we're investigating: the system. It's a perfectly reasonable step 1. What kind of system are we in. Followed by the steps: what kind of planets are in this system and finally, what can we find on the surface of these planets.
The FSS doesn't bother with the: "what kind of system are we in" question, it goes straight to the planets question. And for clarity, when I say: what kind of system, I don't mean: one that has an ELW in it. In effect the FSS has flattened the exploration experience.
edit, edit, edit: for me!
By the way, I just visited your very flat country!
Just something to think about. Most systems with 40 odd bodies have gas giants with multiple moons. You don't need to use the FSS on them. I regularly just do the gas giant and fly out to the gas giant to see whats there. I don't always use the FSS for everything. It breaks up the gameplay and it becomes less of a chore.I like this post.
You correctly identify the issue with regard to the FSS (keeping in mind the obvious disclaimer it's your personal opinion which I happen to share, for other players the mileage may vary and all that jazz). For the ADS however, you're less specific. "It's stupid"
I think this might be the cause of you judging both systems in itself. Just the ADS, or just the FSS. Combine them and the issues you (we) have with the FSS, and you may even say the issue with the ADS is/are lessened. Not resolved, because your 2 would still be an issue.
Scanning systems with 45 bodies is a chore.Even worse if you just jumped from another system with a significant amount of bodies, "here we go again!". In the old system I looked forward to new systems, and the number of bodies couldn't be high enough. In the FSS I dread new systems. A big problem here (again, I will keep hammering on this, for me, this is my personal experience with the mechanism, reasonable people may disagree since game experiences are subjective) is we have no indication besides the inadequate FSS spectrum to get an idea what kind of system it is. If we were to have a general picture of a system, without any details per planet as you used to get in the way the old ADS worked, you could decide this system of 45 bodies was not worth your time, while another system with 45 bodies could be interesting enough to spend your time on.
The ADS is stupid. I agree in as much as the ADS being the end-all, without any follow-up is stupid. But having the ADS (system map) which you could use to base a decision on, is this system worth investigating, simply as a starting point, is not stupid. In fact, it makes perfect sense because it reveals the largest scale we're investigating: the system. It's a perfectly reasonable step 1. What kind of system are we in. Followed by the steps: what kind of planets are in this system and finally, what can we find on the surface of these planets.
The FSS doesn't bother with the: "what kind of system are we in" question, it goes straight to the planets question. And for clarity, when I say: what kind of system, I don't mean: one that has an ELW in it. In effect the FSS has flattened the exploration experience.
edit, edit, edit: for me!
Anything done regularly will feel like a chore if you don't mix it up a bit including the old ADS method, but the old ADS method had less flexibility.
I disagree. The general consensus (that I was also part of) was that exploration as a whole needed a lot more gameplay and content, as there was nothing to do while exploring a system but whatever gameplay we imagined in our heads.
I never even imagined not even in my most pessimistic estimate that the exploration update could boil down to replacing the honk with a more manual honk.
It's not flat! We have speedbumps.
That's why I said 'from my perspective'. I don't believe I've ever seen someone stating 'the ADS is awesome, please keep it in game when you are overhauling exploration'. The majority of posts I remember were something along the lines of 'the ADS is a placeholder and honk - scoop needs to be replaced ASAP'.
Yeah over the months been getting that impression that there has been interesting baggage when it comes to the ads specifically. I never knew about that though. I had no idea, tried the beta quite excited for exploration changes.. and infront of me had 2 conditions, the prior game completely invalidated, and the replacement a really braindead panning and clicking exercise that is as far as gameplay goes such a dramatic downgrade from every other system in the sandbox.
That was too much. We as humans generally work in good faith, and even when there's a challenge, look for a successful path, or landing on your feet. I would have been happy to be disappointed in the fss and would have left it aside, not complained about it, and kept on going. But that didn't happen. Frontier built us only a lose / lose situation. The only demographic this serves is people do disliked the prior system or never used it.
What's absolutely screwed is its the most trivial thing to just let people have choice, but.. its really hard to believe the feature ended up as it is. It doesn't even invalidate in game science lore..... there are heads stuck somewhere really dark on this.
Even if the militant baggage carrying ads haters out of principle were to be accommodated, they could have made the fss actually good...
Most gameplay is pretty braindead. Thats not the point of it though.
Built you a lose lose situation you mean.
Not necessarily. I don't know the ins and outs of the code base of ED and I hazard a guess that you don't either.
Militant, I think you need to look in the mirror for that. You are one of the most aggressive people on here.
In hindsight I have a really sour feeling how the whole FSS implementation was handled.
It has become quite clear that FDEV have no interest in doing any adaptation to the exploration changes of 3.4 at all.
First, they invited a select crew of community "leaders" to demonstrated the FSS in order to get their opinion and feedback on the FSS.
From what I heard (I was not part of that), some small adjustments, improves and fixed were made to the FSS.
After that it went into a open beta test IIRC. During the beta, while the idea of the FSS generally received positive feedback, the players made a lot of suggestions for improvements, mainly criticizing the 2D nature of the FSS, the need to slow down before using the FSS, but also very small changes like adaptions to the graphics and animations, blop pulsating and rain effect etc, because they felt uncomfortable while using the FSS.
FDEV have ignored any suggested improvements to the FSS. They even haven't fixed all the bugs in the FSS to date (it's going to be a year soon).
This shows me that FDEV is currently completely unwilling to make any changes to the exploration update or FSS implemetnation.
Discussion is utterly pointless at this point.
It has become quite clear that FDEV have no interest in doing any adaptation to the exploration changes of 3.4 at all.
First, they invited a select crew of community "leaders" to demonstrated the FSS in order to get their opinion and feedback on the FSS.
From what I heard (I was not part of that), some small adjustments, improves and fixed were made to the FSS.
After that it went into a open beta test IIRC. During the beta, while the idea of the FSS generally received positive feedback, the players made a lot of suggestions for improvements, mainly criticizing the 2D nature of the FSS, the need to slow down before using the FSS, but also very small changes like adaptions to the graphics and animations, blop pulsating and rain effect etc, because they felt uncomfortable while using the FSS.
FDEV have ignored any suggested improvements to the FSS. They even haven't fixed all the bugs in the FSS to date (it's going to be a year soon).
This shows me that FDEV is currently completely unwilling to make any changes to the exploration update or FSS implemetnation.
Discussion is utterly pointless at this point.
Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
Given that it took 5 years to get any updates to Exploration at all, are you surprised?
See, there the difference in playstyle becomes apparent.
The thing that would interest me about gas giants with multiple moons for instance is moons orbiting moons. Knowing a gas giant has 6 moons is of no value to me. So I would still need to FSS them to see whether I'd want to fly to them. For a long time I was looking for very close binaries or moons with their own moon.
When you're interested in system configuration, you do need to FSS the lot, and it will indeed need to be done regularly without an option to mix it up. That's my issue. That is what the system map provided me with during long journeys. Opportunities to mix things up. And again, the ADS has no flexibility, because it wasn't a gameplay loop. The ADS provides information. That's it. What I do with that information is the start of my gameplay loop. Without that information, I have no gameplay loop.
Discussion is all that many folks have left... Sometimes the discussions about the game are better than the game itself.
Now if only we earned Arx instead of likes
Lets not forget the abandoned Forum Feedback round other features that were introduced did get.
That never slowed us down!
Ahhhh fleet carriers went quiet so we came here again....
and 36 pages of it no less!
Beats talking about Arx...
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