Solution to carriers congesting community goal areas

[cmdr borschtl]

Currently i'm in LHS4031 where the burning station is. I am at wild dock and entering supercruise is not possible from this location. The sector is flooded with carriers. Is this what we have to deal with now on every community event? I'd strongly recommend to block carriers from parking directly in zones where these community events take place otherwise the playability suffers a great deal.

And while you're at it maybe increase maintenance and price of the carriers a bit for the simple reason of performance issues. thanks.

 

[Bottom Hat]

How does increasing prices improve performance? I don't get the correlation.

 

[Stealthie]

How does increasing prices improve performance? I don't get the correlation.

I assume the idea is that increased costs would reduce the amount of people who buy one... which seems a little, erm, "optimistic" to me.

Personally, I'd just suggest FDev, say, halve the amount of FCs that can park in a system and create FC "no fly zones" for whatever purposes the game requires (to make CGs or mining interesting, for example).

Given that the original reason for jumping in at stars, not allowing in-system jumps and not providing custom nav-buoys was, apparently (and quite reasonably), that "most of the game takes place while you're travelling to your destination in SC", I'd hope it's only a matter of time before it dawns on somebody at FDev that FC's are a gigantic own-goal in this regard.
And then, maybe, figure out a way to fix it.

 

[cmdr borschtl]

yeah, exactly. The idea behind raising the cost is to knock the players out who can barely afford it to get that number down. It might not be nice for those but as it is right now the gameing expereience of everyone suffers. Even if you play in solo your game gets screwed by these carriers.
Why do i need to have a lag in my game just because everyone and their dog has a carrier and thinks it is necessary to park them all in front of every community event?
Of course the idea won't be very popular. That was just a sidenote anyways. The main thing is to block access for carriers to zones where a community event is going on so they have to park one zone further out. That way the carriers get spread out a lot more into more zones and the zone where the main action takes place should then have better performance. I think that's pretty much a nobrainer to do that since there's really no downside to a no parking zone inside systems where events take place. It's an easy, clean and fast fix.

 

[varonica]

yeah, exactly. The idea behind raising the cost is to knock the players out who can barely afford it to get that number down. It might not be nice for those but as it is right now the gameing expereience of everyone suffers. Even if you play in solo your game gets screwed by these carriers.

No. I am way out exploring with my carrier, you raise the maint price sunstantially I will have to decommission because exploring doesn't bring in huge amounts of money, whereas players in the bubble have the opportunity to get much more, so what would happen is you would lose a lot of carriers that were presenting no issue at all, and end up keeping the carriers that are causing the problem.

 

[cmdr borschtl]

No. I am way out exploring with my carrier, you raise the maint price sunstantially I will have to decommission because exploring doesn't bring in huge amounts of money, whereas players in the bubble have the opportunity to get much more, so what would happen is you would lose a lot of carriers that were presenting no issue at all, and end up keeping the carriers that are causing the problem.

actually you might have a point there

 

[whothe]

After all the forum rage during FC beta about maintenance costs... increasing it now?? lol not likely.

I completely agree with the suggestion to lock FCs out of a CG system for the duration of the event though.

 

[Nadreck]

I don't understand why Carrier owners have to jump them into every system they're operating them in. I have two, and I tend to park them in nearby uninhabited systems unless there's a very good reason not to (short supercruise run when loading tritium from a station, for instance), and then I move them when I'm done.

I saw loads of them in Ngalinn and Mainani recently. People go there to gain Empire rank from missions at outposts, usually data-courier missions. You need one small ship for those, you don't have to bring your Carrier along!

 

[varonica]

I don't understand why Carrier owners have to jump them into every system they're operating them in.

I think the answer to that is "because they can" and this is a thing that has caused problems for game makers forever, it's also why stations and FC's are invulnerable. FDEV did think about making it possible to destroy stations, but then realised it wouldn't be long before every station was destroyed, the reasoning being players would do it "because they can" and not for any logical or story driven approach. This is, basically, why we can't have nice things!

 

[Old Duck]

I don't understand why Carrier owners have to jump them into every system they're operating them in. I have two, and I tend to park them in nearby uninhabited systems unless there's a very good reason not to (short supercruise run when loading tritium from a station, for instance), and then I move them when I'm done.

Why? People are [redacted]. Congesting a popular system with a fleet carrier is way worse than ganking IMO.

Personally I think Fleet Carriers should be forbidden from entering most populated systems. When I was in the Navy, we had to "park" many miles off shore in from civilian ports because of our nuclear reactor, taking ferries to and from the mainland. Fleet Carriers should be the same. I'm not sure what the criteria in ED would be, perhaps all high security systems should prevent privately owned megaships from entering their "airspace". At the very least, there should be a limit on how many fleet carriers should be able to enter a popular system (I'm taking about ten, not hundreds), just like air traffic control limits access to busy airspace.

Can you tell I've been playing a lot of flight simulator lately?

 

[Drelthar]

Why? People are [redacted]. Congesting a popular system with a fleet carrier is way worse than ganking IMO.

Personally I think Fleet Carriers should be forbidden from entering most populated systems.

Wouldn't it be better if Frontier Developments fixed whatever problem is causing the issue?
I feel like that's the solution.

 

[Cmdr Nemo LXXI]

yeah, exactly. The idea behind raising the cost is to knock the players out who can barely afford it to get that number down. It might not be nice for those but as it is right now the gameing expereience of everyone suffers. Even if you play in solo your game gets screwed by these carriers.
Why do i need to have a lag in my game just because everyone and their dog has a carrier and thinks it is necessary to park them all in front of every community event?
Of course the idea won't be very popular. That was just a sidenote anyways. The main thing is to block access for carriers to zones where a community event is going on so they have to park one zone further out. That way the carriers get spread out a lot more into more zones and the zone where the main action takes place should then have better performance. I think that's pretty much a nobrainer to do that since there's really no downside to a no parking zone inside systems where events take place. It's an easy, clean and fast fix.

I had business in Leesti the other day and when I arrived there were 95 unsold FC's parked at all the various planets, moons and stations. The game crashed and I wasn't able to get back in until the next days tick. Which I did, and was able to leave Leesti, I shall not be going back there again.
WIth some 4 billions systems to choose from, why does Frontier park all the unsold FC's in the bubble. They do effect or cause lag.

 

[Drelthar]

yeah, exactly. The idea behind raising the cost is to knock the players out who can barely afford it to get that number down. It might not be nice for those but as it is right now the gameing expereience of everyone suffers. Even if you play in solo your game gets screwed by these carriers.
Why do i need to have a lag in my game just because everyone and their dog has a carrier and thinks it is necessary to park them all in front of every community event?
Of course the idea won't be very popular. That was just a sidenote anyways. The main thing is to block access for carriers to zones where a community event is going on so they have to park one zone further out. That way the carriers get spread out a lot more into more zones and the zone where the main action takes place should then have better performance. I think that's pretty much a nobrainer to do that since there's really no downside to a no parking zone inside systems where events take place. It's an easy, clean and fast fix.

So, because Frontier can't resolve what is essentially a bug (they even said in some patch notes they had tried to fix it) - they should change the balance and game design to try to punish player/remove players achievements?

I disagree- I think they should fix the actual problem, not patch over it with sticky back plastic and bits of coat hanger wire.

(For context, it wouldn't effect me, I have plenty of stored credits in my fleet carrier - which by the way, isn't in the community goal system.)

 

[Sylow]

No. I am way out exploring with my carrier, you raise the maint price sunstantially I will have to decommission because exploring doesn't bring in huge amounts of money, whereas players in the bubble have the opportunity to get much more, so what would happen is you would lose a lot of carriers that were presenting no issue at all, and end up keeping the carriers that are causing the problem.

Very much this. Those who are no issue at all would run into problems, while others would just do even more grinding or would ask the forum for more donations.

 

[askavir]

Wouldn't it be better if Frontier Developments fixed whatever problem is causing the issue?
I feel like that's the solution.

This ^^^.

We had and have systems with dozens of thousands of players in them (pretty much any gold-rush system at any given time), so I'm pretty sure it will be possible to fix whatever issues might be caused by a few dozen carriers.

 

[Zieman]

We had and have systems with dozens of thousands of players in them (pretty much any gold-rush system at any given time), so I'm pretty sure it will be possible to fix whatever issues might be caused by a few dozen carriers.

Those amounts of players are distributed in thousands of separate instances, while the carriers are in every single instance. I think therein lies the problem.
Just make CG systems permit locked for the duration of the CG. At least until FC problem gets solved.

 

[Old Duck]

Wouldn't it be better if Frontier Developments fixed whatever problem is causing the issue?
I feel like that's the solution.

Define "this issue". If Frontier fixes the terribly crowded system map and navigation panel and HUD (though I have a mod for that) in systems full of fleet carriers, by adding the ability to hide all fleet carriers except our own, then sure, I could live with that.

 

[askavir]

Define "this issue". If Frontier fixes the terribly crowded system map and navigation panel and HUD (though I have a mod for that) in systems full of fleet carriers, by adding the ability to hide all fleet carriers except our own, then sure, I could live with that.

If the problem is just map / nav panel clutter, certainly making a filter would be simpler and much more player-friendly than outright blocking FCs from the bubble. IMO that filter could even be set to "on" by default.

 

[Drelthar]

Define "this issue". If Frontier fixes the terribly crowded system map and navigation panel and HUD (though I have a mod for that) in systems full of fleet carriers, by adding the ability to hide all fleet carriers except our own, then sure, I could live with that.

The issue according to the OP, is some kind of network related thing, potentially, which can cause people to be unable to shift from normal space to super cruise, due to a large number of carriers being present in the system.

The UI/UX issue is entirely different, and while I agree with you it needs to be resolved in a satisfactory way - the actual game function destroying issue (rather than a valid, but only UI related issue) is something which requires fixing for the game to function, rather than for it to be nicer to play.

 

[Bottom Hat]

yeah, exactly. The idea behind raising the cost is to knock the players out who can barely afford it to get that number down. It might not be nice for those but as it is right now the gameing expereience of everyone suffers. Even if you play in solo your game gets screwed by these carriers.
Why do i need to have a lag in my game just because everyone and their dog has a carrier and thinks it is necessary to park them all in front of every community event?
Of course the idea won't be very popular. That was just a sidenote anyways. The main thing is to block access for carriers to zones where a community event is going on so they have to park one zone further out. That way the carriers get spread out a lot more into more zones and the zone where the main action takes place should then have better performance. I think that's pretty much a nobrainer to do that since there's really no downside to a no parking zone inside systems where events take place. It's an easy, clean and fast fix.

To be fair though, I was only taking the pish, to stir up the popcorn entertainment.