FSS - my opinion

[Darkfyre99]

Erm, no offense, but you said you explore less than three hours a week, and that you aren't back from DW2 yet: are you sure that's more than the average?

None taken. While it was a bit tongue in cheek (thus the overblown emojis), based on what I saw before Steamcharts went behind a paywall, my typical weekly playtime is fairly average. Since all I do is explore these days, with the exception of the odd Buckyball Race, it’s safe to say I explore more than the average player.

That being said, I’m under no illusions that I’m not anywhere near the upper echelons of the exploration community. It’s hard to find an adequate block of time to play this game these days, too many real life demands on my time and/or attention. You probably spent more time exploring over the last year than the entirety of my time playing this game combined, and I’ve been playing since the Alpha!

Okay, but that doesn't matter. The point is that you can't tell from the barcode, same as you can't tell if there's a GGG, and so on. If you start panning and scanning stuff, you've invested a considerable amount of time already.

I hardly consider a quick five second pan a “considerable amount of time” personally. That being said, unusual orbital configurations and, to a lesser degree, size outliers* is one thing. Quickly detecting unusually colored planets is another. Which is why I have no issues with reintroducing an optional ADS module back into the game.

___
* I’ve found that size outliers do show up in the “barcode,” but most of the time the barcode is too noisy to pick them out at a glance. The one thing I would love is is an optional module that would let me separate the various types of signals from each other for better analysis.

 

[shreddog]

My opinion now?
I despise it.
I should have listened to the veteran explorers in here before praising it. (sorry I'm an idiot)

Damned right. It gets old! Tuning and zooming. Boy does it get old.. Scanning all those signals down, over and over and over and over,
.. AND OVER AND OVER! Every system. Trying to find something interesting. But usually(always, in my case ) nothing.
Then you come to those big systems with 50+ bodies, many clumped in a small cluster of signals 100k+ ls away, and you have to nest it all up... and, and you just I CANT DO IT ANYMORE! NO MORE!

Not only does it get old, but it becomes such a nuisance that you want to stop exploring.

Now, before I hate on it too much.. It is not a bad tool in itself, it's just that you rely on it too much.
I probably spend 80% of gametime looking at this one tool. And usually never find anything worthy of note.
So of course one get sick n tired of it.

If they could somehow combine it with the old ADS functionality it would be much more appreciated as a tool I think.


*Hmm , maybe I should go back to parallax now that I think of it. That won't help me find anything more, but at least I get to fly the ship instead of looking at one tool all the time.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

I've become numb to the inelegance of the whole thing. Projecting any form of action onto frontier developments is also self defeating.

I'll just say its a mark of craftsmanship how the fss wasn't implemented in the ship canopy, and similar to the current ui only used for adaptive zoom scenarios. Quite simply it was pen and paper design by people with only a very loose connection to the game experience that we all have.

Yeah i've certainly gotten used to it, but if i made it myself id be extremely embarrassed. Its a told what to do job even. I can't shake the feeling we all like the game better than the people who built it. Can never seem to go away that impression.. for some reason.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Michael Brookes, who wanted the ADS replaced with anything, and Adam Bourke-Waite, who was responsible for the version of the FSS that was released. Mr. Brookes no longer works on Elite, and Mr. Bourke-Waite has left Frontier entirely.

Really he left? That news didn't seem to make dangerous discussion, good trivia.

What i wonder is, in an indulgent fantasy if anyone had a choice on making an exploration tool for elite dangerous, noone in their right mind would choose the thing we got. That's the crux of the problem. You can only guess this weird mobile game was the faceless average of a dozen business requirements unrelated with each other.

 

[Jmanis]

Well, as you put it, it does feel like work.
My issue is that given the sheer size of the galaxy and the number of ordinary systems/objects vs. interesting stuff is very-very high. You have to invest a lot of time into scanning ordinary systems - at zero gameplay value.

Pre-FSS, constantly flying around planets for potentially days on end trying to mk1-eyeball a black cat in a dark room, when there might not even be a black cat, was infinitely worse, and infinitely more time consuming.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Pre-FSS, constantly flying around planets for potentially days on end trying to mk1-eyeball a black cat in a dark room, when there might not even be a black cat, was infinitely worse, and infinitely more time consuming.

The probing which pinpoints the black cats does more to alleviate that problem.

And I continue to get the feeling that players don't actually have an issue with the way the FSS works, rather with the frequency they have to use it. If I could make an informed decision when to use the FSS, and when I could bypass a system, without using the FSS, I'd have few issues with it either. The current system doesn't put the cart before the horse, it puts the horse in the cart.

 

[Darkfyre99]

The probing which pinpoints the black cats does more to alleviate that problem.

And I continue to get the feeling that players don't actually have an issue with the way the FSS works, rather with the frequency they have to use it. If I could make an informed decision when to use the FSS, and when I could bypass a system, without using the FSS, I'd have few issues with it either. The current system doesn't put the cart before the horse, it puts the horse in the cart.

That kind of decision depends upon what you’re looking for. Personally, I’m looking for interesting worlds to land on, primarily binary+ worlds, and I quickly found out that that kind of thing can be quickly identified with a quick five second pan of the system. It’s how I kept pace with Distant Worlds 2 on the way out.

The issue some have is that they’re only looking for the kinds of things that cannot be quickly identified in the FSS (unusually colored worlds and GGGs) and/or easily identified in the FSS (size outliers). The former definitely needs an optional ADS like module. The latter would benefit from being able to divide the WSA into individual types of signals.

 

[Riverside]

Pre-FSS, constantly flying around planets for potentially days on end trying to mk1-eyeball a black cat in a dark room, when there might not even be a black cat, was infinitely worse, and infinitely more time consuming.

The new system is no better, it's just a different slice of initial data. There are billions of systems to discover, imo by removing the old functionality it has vastly reduced the actual challenge of discovery once in a system (ie the fun bit) but increased the time spent on dull systems (for any player's definitions of dull & interesting).

I spent a huge amount of time looking for stuff on planets before 3.3, and drove tens of thousands of miles in the SRV, shooting rocks & looking for unusual signals on the wave scanner. Now I barely use the SRV at all, and rarely fly over the beautiful terrain for more than a few minutes at a time because there is no longer any purpose to doing it. If there is anything to find that's not already pin-pointed by mapping a planet how many players would still look with the new system?

 

[Jmanis]

And I continue to get the feeling that players don't actually have an issue with the way the FSS works, rather with the frequency they have to use it. If I could make an informed decision when to use the FSS, and when I could bypass a system, without using the FSS, I'd have few issues with it either. The current system doesn't put the cart before the horse, it puts the horse in the cart.

Do you not use the bar at the bottom of the screen? If we're talking exclusively about assessing celestial bodies in a system, that's what I do... if there's no blips corresponding to the type of body I'm after, I leave.

In part, I put this problem entirely down to the uselessness of the codex; the interface you were meant to be able to look at, assess and analyse and make sane decisions about where to have a very likely chance of finding things. But it's useless; you can find hundreds of systems matching requirements for a particular type of thing, and you might find it on your thousandth attempt

The new system is no better, it's just a different slice of initial data. There are billions of systems to discover, imo by removing the old functionality it has vastly reduced the actual challenge of discovery once in a system (ie the fun bit) but increased the time spent on dull systems (for any player's definitions of dull & interesting).

I'm confused by this... the majority of complaints I hear about reflect Ziggy's, that the FSS "makes things harder", but here you're saying the challenge of discovery is now "vastly reduced". Not that I understood what the "challenge" was pre-FSS anyway (enter, honk, leave if nothing of interest, or point at celestial objects of interest for a few seconds then leave)... but your opinion isn't unheard of either, and that's why I can't put any stock in complaints about the FSS; as a collective body there's a want for polar, mutually exclusive systems, which is unachievable.

I spent a huge amount of time looking for stuff on planets before 3.3, and drove tens of thousands of miles in the SRV, shooting rocks & looking for unusual signals on the wave scanner. Now I barely use the SRV at all, and rarely fly over the beautiful terrain for more than a few minutes at a time because there is no longer any purpose to doing it. If there is anything to find that's not already pin-pointed by mapping a planet how many players would still look with the new system?

You couldn't look with the old system anyway; remember... the game trains you to look for things where the blue-discs are on your scanners. If you strictly applied that logic we'd never have found:

• Barnacles
• Thargoid Sites
• Guardian Ruins
• Any Biological/Geological sites.

Quoting yourself before, there are billions of systems (400 billion, right?). Being generous, there's probably just millions of things to discover in the galaxy. which, a couple million against 400 billion systems, that's still a 1-in-a-million chance of finding something. I get chance in game mechanics, but with those odds to find something which gives me a complementary pat on the back for... I've got much better things to do with my time.

IMO, all this is no problem with the "pinpointing" system, and everything to do with the lack of any worthwhile, meaningful activities to do on planets. I'm not going to try and change your views on "flying over beautiful terrain", personally if I want "beautiful terrain" I've got plenty here on my doorstep, but even I go "Oh, that looks cool, let's check that out" a planet surface.

Noting that does happen, and I've been known to do some canyon-running, "SRV base-jumping" and the like despite the ability to pin-point locations of interest; that's because I see these on my descent to those pinpoints. It's always started with me going "Let's try and find some bio sites", and as I descend closer I see landscape that "looks cool". The key part being; I knew something was there, so I went and took a closer look.

Under the old system, it was a non-starter for me; I tried finding things in areas like the Pleiades, which were filled with barnacles, Thargoid structures and the like. I used all the information available to me, and, nothing, and yet for all the hours I spent, I'd barely scratched the surface exploring a single planet... Then the FSS came out and i checked back to those planets and sure enough; nothing on them at all, despite "matching" all the right criteria people had highlighted for finding these things.

Another thing that gets me doing this? Missions. Since these dynamically generate points to go to on a planet, you're always going somewhere new, and here and there there's always some new terrain or a blip on scanner to go check out before or after you finish your mission. One of the coolest things in the game right now is when you're roaming past a planet, and there's actually a surface signal on your scanner, which turns out to be a comms beacon linking you to a mission in another system. And that's what's lacking in Exploration right now; any sort of dynamic reason to check out planet surfaces. That's not the FSS or probing system's fault, that's exploration as a whole.

tl;dr FSS and Probes didn't take the challenge out of exploration, it just highlighted how little there is to do in this part of the game.

Pretty scenery is nice, but scenery should stick to what it's good at; being the backdrop to which other activities are undertaken, not be the core content itself.

 

[Mengy]

I felt the FSS was okay at first. I knew it slowed down exploration but I also felt it made it more interesting, and at least it allowed for a greater chance to actually find something out there.

However, after thousands of scans with it, I've now become very numb to the new mechanic. It is designed to emphasize the wrong aspects of exploration in my opinion. In fact the FSS is largely why I haven't played the game in many months now.

The old ADS may have been an instant God Honk but at least it quickly allowed us to make informed decisions followed by immediate actions. Plus it required us to actually fly our ships to the planets to get scans on them. Back then that felt like a time waster, but at least we were flying around and piloting our ships.

Now, with the FSS you MUST do the entire FSS dance in order to make any informed decisions, all of the information is hidden behind the minigame and it must be done in order to see if a system holds any interest or not. This is what greatly slows down the new exploration routine. Decisions and actions can't be made until the FSS is completed. Over and over again. And over, and over, ad nauseum.

It's a very tiresome, laborious, and un-rewarding mechanic in my opinion.



I wish the exploration routine today was something halfway between the old ADS and the current FSS. For example, I wish the honk provided the system layout with black body planets, that way we could tell immediately if a system had an interesting layout or not BEFORE the FSS was ever entered. I wish we were allowed the choice of whether or not to use the FSS instead of being forced to use it in every system just to tell if we actually want to explore said system.

Alas, I don't expect anything to change or improve on this matter. I think what we have now is what we will have for the foreseeable future, it's a done deal.

 

[Jmanis]

Now, with the FSS you MUST do the entire FSS dance in order to make any informed decisions, all of the information is hidden behind the minigame and it must be done in order to see if a system holds any interest or not.

I've heard this said a few times now and I'm curious... what information aren't you getting from the FSS which is pertinent to functional[1] aspects of the game?

An old honk gave a bunch of unknown bodies which could be visually recognised[2]. An FSS honk only gives a bunch of unknown bodies and a visual representation of their types too (on the blip bar). About the only thing it doesnt represent is the formation of those bodies, but that's not a functional aspect of the game.

[1] i.e has any functional purpose in the game; doesnt affect credit rewards, or change anything you need to do.

[2] I'd argue that they shouldn't have displayed their type after just a honk in the old system; they should've just been generic bodies until more information was found.

 

[Riverside]

Do you not use the bar at the bottom of the screen? If we're talking exclusively about assessing celestial bodies in a system, that's what I do... if there's no blips corresponding to the type of body I'm after, I leave.

In part, I put this problem entirely down to the uselessness of the codex; the interface you were meant to be able to look at, assess and analyse and make sane decisions about where to have a very likely chance of finding things. But it's useless; you can find hundreds of systems matching requirements for a particular type of thing, and you might find it on your thousandth attempt


I'm confused by this... the majority of complaints I hear about reflect Ziggy's, that the FSS "makes things harder", but here you're saying the challenge of discovery is now "vastly reduced". Not that I understood what the "challenge" was pre-FSS anyway (enter, honk, leave if nothing of interest, or point at celestial objects of interest for a few seconds then leave)... but your opinion isn't unheard of either, and that's why I can't put any stock in complaints about the FSS; as a collective body there's a want for polar, mutually exclusive systems, which is unachievable.


You couldn't look with the old system anyway; remember... the game trains you to look for things where the blue-discs are on your scanners. If you strictly applied that logic we'd never have found:

• Barnacles
• Thargoid Sites
• Guardian Ruins
• Any Biological/Geological sites.

Quoting yourself before, there are billions of systems (400 billion, right?). Being generous, there's probably just millions of things to discover in the galaxy. which, a couple million against 400 billion systems, that's still a 1-in-a-million chance of finding something. I get chance in game mechanics, but with those odds to find something which gives me a complementary pat on the back for... I've got much better things to do with my time.

IMO, all this is no problem with the "pinpointing" system, and everything to do with the lack of any worthwhile, meaningful activities to do on planets. I'm not going to try and change your views on "flying over beautiful terrain", personally if I want "beautiful terrain" I've got plenty here on my doorstep, but even I go "Oh, that looks cool, let's check that out" a planet surface.

Noting that does happen, and I've been known to do some canyon-running, "SRV base-jumping" and the like despite the ability to pin-point locations of interest; that's because I see these on my descent to those pinpoints. It's always started with me going "Let's try and find some bio sites", and as I descend closer I see landscape that "looks cool". The key part being; I knew something was there, so I went and took a closer look.

Under the old system, it was a non-starter for me; I tried finding things in areas like the Pleiades, which were filled with barnacles, Thargoid structures and the like. I used all the information available to me, and, nothing, and yet for all the hours I spent, I'd barely scratched the surface exploring a single planet... Then the FSS came out and i checked back to those planets and sure enough; nothing on them at all, despite "matching" all the right criteria people had highlighted for finding these things.

Another thing that gets me doing this? Missions. Since these dynamically generate points to go to on a planet, you're always going somewhere new, and here and there there's always some new terrain or a blip on scanner to go check out before or after you finish your mission. One of the coolest things in the game right now is when you're roaming past a planet, and there's actually a surface signal on your scanner, which turns out to be a comms beacon linking you to a mission in another system. And that's what's lacking in Exploration right now; any sort of dynamic reason to check out planet surfaces. That's not the FSS or probing system's fault, that's exploration as a whole.

tl;dr FSS and Probes didn't take the challenge out of exploration, it just highlighted how little there is to do in this part of the game.

Pretty scenery is nice, but scenery should stick to what it's good at; being the backdrop to which other activities are undertaken, not be the core content itself.

TL;DR we basically agree. Before it was too hard really, now it is too easy.

I am not confused about my position Jmanis, and the solution is obvious as already stated.

 

[iain666]

I've heard this said a few times now and I'm curious... what information aren't you getting from the FSS which is pertinent to functional[1] aspects of the game?

[1] i.e has any functional purpose in the game; doesnt affect credit rewards, or change anything you need to do.

There is only one thing you ever "need" to do while exploring - scoop some fuel if you've not got enough to jump to the next system. Credit rewards quickly become irrelevant to the explorer, if that's what you primarily do and aren't having to worry about rebuys often or at all then the credits just keep mounting up. It's all about what you're looking for.

If you are looking for interesting orbital configurations or unusual planet textures then those things are not available from the FSS until you have resolved all, or most, of the signals where as previously the ADS would have immediately revealed these things.

Are these things "functional" by your definition? Not really. Are they the things some people are looking for? Most definitely.

I'm happy enough with the FSS, although it could be better, but there are some things like odd system configurations that don't show up from an FSS honk and did show up from an ADS honk, and there are some players who are mostly looking for those things.

 

[Sysmon]

There are systems enough in this game to contain 400 billion stars. Please show me a method to scan all these that would not after a while become a bit repetitious.

My only "grind" with the FSS is having to enter it is as a separate screen every time I need to use it. But that goes for pretty much any activity in the cockpit that is not actual flying: Especially in VR, the change to flatland is a bit jarring, and I don't know why I can't have it on a secondary screen within the cockpit while still trying to fly my ship. That being said, doing this kind of analysis should really only be possible at low relative velocities between the ship and the objects in focus - so either going very slow (or at a very sharp angle) or being quite a distance from the object to be scanned.

The FSS has room for improvement, but it is a grand step up from the inanity of the previous solution.

S

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

I'm confused by this... the majority of complaints I hear about reflect Ziggy's, that the FSS "makes things harder", but here you're saying the challenge of discovery is now "vastly reduced". Not that I understood what the "challenge" was pre-FSS anyway (enter, honk, leave if nothing of interest, or point at celestial objects of interest for a few seconds then leave)... but your opinion isn't unheard of either, and that's why I can't put any stock in complaints about the FSS; as a collective body there's a want for polar, mutually exclusive systems, which is unachievable.

Make the old ads functionality optional, keeping the fss as it is for the reward claiming (tags and credits). Whether there's an outfitting cost doesn't matter its the solution that counts. With this setup, after the honk you can fly there as it was, sit and spin your way to billions if that your taste, or move on as usual. Or any combination of the above in any order. Elegant.

To the people that are really sore about the system map game that's now happening, tangibly buff the rewards for not using the ads. Max Factor at least knows the value of rewards so this should make sense to some.

The other option is to improve the fss to make it non offensive. Put it in the ship first, and fix the mouse panning. If you want to imagine, think about how the "next target" button for ships works, and there easily really attractive ways a similar idea could be used with blobs in ship or even with the current interface. There are so many ways in between everyone could have been made happy that wouldn't end up as a mandatory god mod button.. with all prior methods disabled. Except paralleling course.

Wow, imagine the exploration ships, actually being op for exploration.. clipper, beluga, type-9/10, asp ex.

 

[Jmanis]

There is only one thing you ever "need" to do while exploring - scoop some fuel if you've not got enough to jump to the next system. Credit rewards quickly become irrelevant to the explorer, if that's what you primarily do and aren't having to worry about rebuys often or at all then the credits just keep mounting up. It's all about what you're looking for.

If you are looking for interesting orbital configurations or unusual planet textures then those things are not available from the FSS until you have resolved all, or most, of the signals where as previously the ADS would have immediately revealed these things.

Are these things "functional" by your definition? Not really. Are they the things some people are looking for? Most definitely.

I'm happy enough with the FSS, although it could be better, but there are some things like odd system configurations that don't show up from an FSS honk and did show up from an ADS honk, and there are some players who are mostly looking for those things.

Credit rewards were just an example. Ultimately, there's nothing functional about the exploration mechanics as they currently stand, except anything to do with the FSS.

I would concede you don't get orbital configurations from the FSS where you did from the old system, but interesting orbital configurations? I assume you mean close, high eccentricity or other interesting aspects which you need the body's tab data... this is not obtained under the old system by a just a disco honk... you would need to fly-to and scan each body to obtain that information, where FSS you can just do it on-entry and then analyse the system map afterwards, no flying half an Ls just to go "these two bodies are close to each other, or not". The only information the old DSS gave was what orbited what, not how, which I think is actually the thing people care about. And on obtaining the how, FSS is a superior option.

I would argue orbital configurations aren't functional though; they don't increase credit rewards, they don't change how/if surface features are present[1], they don't make flying through supercruise any different, they don't make firing probes any different. All interactions with bodies with "interesting" orbital configurations are identical to any other.

It's worth noting at this point, one of the first Barnacle Forests was found Pre-FSS not because of mark 1 eyeballing, but because of a bug making all surface POIs visible... this one in particular was on a body over 300k Ls away and was otherwise going to be ignored, until it showed up as a point.

[1] Except for Crystalline Shards only, as far as I know. But again, that's not information old DSS honking would provide.

 

[iain666]

I assume you mean close, high eccentricity or other interesting aspects which you need the body's tab data... this is not obtained under the old system by a just a disco honk... you would need to fly-to and scan each body to obtain that information

Nope, you could see many things from the old honk - multiple planets with a common barycentre, close orbits could be inferred (SMA was available from the ADS honk), trojan planets could be discerned. High eccentricity often required a scan - although it could often be inferred for an out of position planet - but nothing else in your list did.

I would argue orbital configurations aren't functional though; they don't increase credit rewards, they don't change how/if surface features are present

I wouldn't argue with you - indeed I explicitly said "Are these things "functional" by your definition? Not really. Are they the things some people are looking for? Most definitely."

Although, as a point of information, the orbital parameters of moons do indeed change how/if surface features are present as tidally induced vulcanism is a thing that is modelled by the stellar forge.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Now, with the FSS you MUST do the entire FSS dance in order to make any informed decisions, all of the information is hidden behind the minigame and it must be done in order to see if a system holds any interest or not. This is what greatly slows down the new exploration routine. Decisions and actions can't be made until the FSS is completed. Over and over again. And over, and over, ad nauseum.

If you're only looking for the proverbial rare unicorns, true.

But there is a lot of information displayed on the FSS screen that can be assessed quickly with some practice, without having to play the "minigame." Binary+ worlds, eclipse candidates, worlds in tight orbits, potential geological and biological sites, and many other "interesting" things can be quickly found if you know how to look for them. I can get a good feel on whether or not a system is going to be what I consider interesting after, at most, a five second sweep of the FSS, no "minigame" required.

The only thing it can't do is tell you if there's a GGG or other unusally colored planet in the system, and the FSA is generally too noisy to quickly identify size outliers.

 

[Darkfyre99]

I wish the exploration routine today was something halfway between the old ADS and the current FSS. For example, I wish the honk provided the system layout with black body planets, that way we could tell immediately if a system had an interesting layout or not BEFORE the FSS was ever entered. I wish we were allowed the choice of whether or not to use the FSS instead of being forced to use it in every system just to tell if we actually want to explore said system.

Oh, god no.

Personally, I consider half the fun of visiting a new system is figuring out its orbital heirarchies. I'd have no problem if it was an optional module, but what you're describing is far too close to the bad old days of the ADS for my comfort.

edit:

If you are looking for interesting orbital configurations or unusual planet textures then those things are not available from the FSS until you have resolved all, or most, of the signals where as previously the ADS would have immediately revealed these things.

For unusual planet textures, that is true.

Interesting orbital heirarchies, OTOH, I've found can quickly identified in the FSS, needing only a quick pan, and maybe resolving a body or two for trinary+ worlds, to eliminate the difference between a rare alignment, and co-orbiting bodies.

 

[Faded Glory]

Personally, I consider half the fun of visiting a new system is figuring out its orbital heirarchies. I'd have no problem if it was an optional module, but what you're describing is far too close to the bad old days of the ADS for my comfort.

Yes an optional module that simply provides a different view of a system would be a total winner.

I have to agree with Mengy that after (for me) a very short time of using the FSS I was bored with it. I found it to be repetitive and dull. I did two short (extremely lucrative) exploration trips and have only used the FSS two or three times since.

Sadly I doubt FD will change things though. Certainly the FSS makes basic exploration (gaining the rank) much easier and quicker, and it along with the DSS allow players to find stuff on planets, which is a very good thing. And maybe that's what they want for / from exploration. But for this player, the FSS added no depth, and no compelling gameplay, hence why I haven't explored since.