And just like that, we've been moved into the trash can. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Thanks for the great discussion, guys.
The slow orbital cruise approach causes a host of problems.
- Thread starter DemiserofD
- Start date
What trash can?
The suggestions forum! The endless abyss from which ππ πππππ₯ πππͺ π€ππππ!
That's not quite fair...
I often see FDev support people reading this section. So they're well aware with what's being posted here.
However, while every suggestion maker in this section seem to think their ideas are mandatory for ED survival, not everyone else thinks the same, FDev even less so.
But that doeant mean they dont pick ideas from here if they think those ideas are feasible and could be implemented in the game.
Oh dear. I didn't notice as I usually open read threads from the notifications. Is it as much an echoing void as the bug reporting system?
I've never heard of a suggestion from this forum being even mentioned, let alone implemented. I keep punting things into the void, but mainly to get them out of my head at this point. Practically, it serves a similar purpose to a meme section; to keep them from clogging up other parts of the forum.
Its not landing on a planet that takes a long time. Its leaving that takes a long time!!! 
Especially when my next destination (supercruise or hyperspace jump) is on the other side of the planet.
Especially when my next destination (supercruise or hyperspace jump) is on the other side of the planet.
Maybe not acknowledged but too close to be a coincidence.
I take not much time landing on planets, if you fly well in seconds you will be in drop distance and if you angle the ship correctly you will be always at 4km from wherever you want to go, then is al about knowing how well your ship handles the gravity of the planed you're landing on and you will be touching land in less than 1 and a half minutes, i explore a ton and do lots of exobiology, is all about practice.
Also, turn off auto dock, it takes too much time.
Also, turn off auto dock, it takes too much time.
That's what I was going to say. The only people I have seen run out of time were ones using a docking computer that got confused.
I chose planets over orbital stations for the scenery and landscape.
What would be nice is a more "dangerous" approach where flight errors would result in some serious damage to the ship.
"Drop pods" ? Why not, as long as you have to spend a ship slot, just like auto-cruise and auto-landing.
Up to the player if they are pilots or mere users.
They are different games indeed, Elite offers it own experience.
It's surprising you mention spending time "teaching" new players how to play given how you despise every aspect if what makes Elite unique and enjoyable for the vast majority.
Or are you on a personal crusade to drive players away from Elite?
Apologies for the late reply, had to leave the other day and then forgot.
Ofc you're right, it's just a game, but what I meant with that is that games are also always learning experiences that transcend to other areas in life. Impulse control is quite a valuable one. It does not mean to diminish your experience, but the opposite, to be able to make better choices for maximising it.
I got Odyssey because I found it was time to move from free playing (via the offer from Epic at the time) to supporting its development, also to cut out the middleman (i.e. neither Epic nor Steam, only doing business with FD directly). As said I hope for more interesting content (to me, ymmv) getting built on the foundation laid now. Critics are always impatient; I claim to know a thing or two about software development and what it takes to create a product such as this.
Been thinking about your point of the biggest timesink being the leaving of a planet, much more than landing. As far as I've been playing, this never bothered me. (I do install the best possible thrusters always.) The reason is that it feels natural, it would be like that if we could do this in reality already and therefore I can enjoy the ride every time. A much smaller thing irks me on the other hand, because it's entirely artificial: SCA always drops you off slightly outside the 7.5 km radius of a station and you have to go the extra bit before you can ask landing permission. Why is it not set to 10 km, problem solved. Sure there are more skillful ways of travelling than the lazy default, but I've always found this just unnecessary from the very beginning. It's the little things...
The way I understood it OPs point is an alternative, that leads to interesting choices. The rebuyable SLF crew is not, but that is not a problem of the option per se, but the broken economy. Ship destruction also has become only a minor setback, even if you get nuked in your A-graded Cutter. The perma-death of SLF pilots never made any sense to begin with, nor do I think it enhanced the game in any way.
I disagree here. It made the SLF pilot precious and it created sort of a bond with them
Now they're just another size 3 turret. Do you care about a turret? i do not
There is no such thing as an alternative.
People will use the best / fastest method of doing things and the alternative will not be used at all
See the complains regarding:
- Scorp - people didnt necessarily wanted a different SRV with its own niche, they wanted a better Scarab
or
- the MLC - people are claiming they're useless because you can fit only one and they dont come in A-rated versions and the limpets they provide are the equivalent of same-class-one-size-lower. But they're really nice while they're not a replacement to the normal Limpets.
So unless the alternatives are not really niche (as the MLC or the Scorp are) people will use only the alternatives.
Pretty much if they enable micro-jumps for ships (pretty much like carriers can do) nobody will fly their ships in supercruise and Elite will be just another teleport game.
But since the bond is only due to the fear of permanently loosing it, you can hardly speak of a bond. It would be the same as loosing an engineered module, since the game does not provide enough depth.
FDev needs to create a purpose for both vehicles and find some way to balance them. Other than that, I can follow your reasoning here. It has been clear before, that most users don't know how a good game is designed.
I have not followed this discussion in detail, but the general idea should be to give every asset some relevance.
So you are saying it is not possible for a game to create meaningful choices for players?
No, it's also a matter of looks and accent
But since there is no chance to lose them, it doesnt mean too much now.
Here a bit of a story from like 3+ years ago
Anaconda, hardened explorer build (1700 shields, 1700 hull, armed to the teeth), on the return leg from Explorer's Anchorage CG (Bubble, Explorer's Anchorage, Colonia, some 3k-5k away from the bubble).
I was enjoying the scenery right outside an asteroid base along the Colonia Highway - read as: i was just left the asteroid base and i was trying to position the ship in front of the asteroid's mail slot for some nice screenshots. I somehow drifted in the mailslot loitering zone, being in camera mode no messages reached me, so a brief but very vivid fireworks ensued followed by me starring at the rebuy screen.
I wasn't really fazed by this. Rebuy was not a problem and i just sold all the exploration data before leaving the asteroid base.
Then it hit me: My. ELITE. SLF. CREW. GONE.
There was this heat wave running down my spine and the feeling that i lost something really precious and sort of irreplaceable
along with this (finding a SLF crew was a laborious thing)
I was enjoying the scenery right outside an asteroid base along the Colonia Highway - read as: i was just left the asteroid base and i was trying to position the ship in front of the asteroid's mail slot for some nice screenshots. I somehow drifted in the mailslot loitering zone, being in camera mode no messages reached me, so a brief but very vivid fireworks ensued followed by me starring at the rebuy screen.
I wasn't really fazed by this. Rebuy was not a problem and i just sold all the exploration data before leaving the asteroid base.
Then it hit me: My. ELITE. SLF. CREW. GONE.
There was this heat wave running down my spine and the feeling that i lost something really precious and sort of irreplaceable
along with this (finding a SLF crew was a laborious thing)
Oh, but there is (see the Scorp and the MLC i mentioned above).
But people will still slam FDev for those meaningful choices, sometimes in really aggressive ways
However, it didnt seem to me that OP offered really meaningful choices, just some teleport options that will superseed anything else that came before them.
And then we have the FDL. Is there any meaninful choice when it comes about high skilled pvp combat?
Nope.
For what it's worth, I timed a run of a Covert Heist mission last night, from departing station through to arrival via Apex.
7 minutes to get to the destination (46.7 Ls from jump-in)
6 minutes to do the mission (3minutes was just waiting for the sample containment to open... I didn't particularly want to risk triggering an alarm by faffing about doing other things)
5 minutes to return to the base. [1]
Even if we write-off the three minutes of waiting for the sample containment to open as "active time"... that's 66% of one activity simply waiting. That's fairly significant, so I'd argue there's a case for cutting that down through some sort of mechanic which is achieved possibly through some interactive mechanism in supercruise.
But I don't think the absence of a proposed alternative is necessarily a reason to say it shouldn't be done. IIRC there's been a lot of people that want supercruise to be a more interactive experience.
[1] I'm interested to re-time what this one looks like when it's going from one base activity to another.
Last edited:
or to be completely removed from the game (micro-jumps galore or other various teleport methods)
On the contrary, i'm of the opinion that supercruise is what gives Elite dimension (and the orbital cruise - glide - normal space seamless transition is a part of it) and it's a big part of the decision making process when deciding what to do in Elite.
But I can understand the arguments for teleport/microjumps
Fwiw, it's the same thing with the fade-to-black transition when disembarking [*], but my immersion is not affected at all by fade-to-black since i still consider Elite to be a space game with on-foot aspect a purely optional part and that transition does not diminish in any way the vastness of space we get to deal with in Elite.
On the same note, i would have preferred to be able to supercruise between systems, but i can understand and accept why we cannot.
*[i like it the way we have it now and i would hate to have to spend time navigating hallways on my ship before being able to disembark, but apparently there are people that wouldnt mind to spend an extra minute (or more) while disembarking on foot]
I would agree, except that it's not actually a very considered part of the game.
It took a long time for, say, mission rewards to actually factor in distance into their reward calculations... and even then it's not the primary determinant where in many cases it should be (e.g Cargo Delivery runs). For any effective and "good" game design, you need to ask "so what?" about everything.
Satisfactory did this quite recently with clipping changes.
It used to be that all buildings/things hard "Hard clipping"... you couldn't place buildings/things over the top of each other. But that created issues because the geometry for clipping had to be basic for compute efficiency, and so you had things like this where the whole open area above the main structure but between the stovepipes was unusable. Meanwhile you had other situations where things were clipping where it didn't look like they should.
Eventually, some people found an "exploit" (i guess) where you could build foundations into the hard-clip zone, because foundations didn't have clipping for <reasons>. Once you had the foundation in there, structres would snap onto the foundation and not calculate the clipping of the hard-clip zone.
CSS investigated and essentially it was found to be a pretty major bug in their code which had to be resolved. Of course, this annoyed a lot of people when they removed this "exploit"... so then they did something really cool... they basically went "Why do we care about people clipping structures?". Obviously there's some good reasons to have clipping... but when it gets in the way of the game experience (which is, building a cool-looking and effective factory design) that's a bad thing.
So they categorised things with having Hard and Soft clipping (and complex clipping, but i won't go into that)... in short... two hard-clipping structures can't clip... and a new hard-clipping structure can't be clipped into a soft-clipping structure, but soft-clipping can be clipped through anything.
This can lead you to make some pretty cursed things... but it means that functionality doesn't get in the way of what the core game experience is. And as a result, the overall game experience is vastly improved by removing a game rule/condition in a situation where it's not relevant to the experience.
Watch this part of this video to get a better idea.
Eventually, some people found an "exploit" (i guess) where you could build foundations into the hard-clip zone, because foundations didn't have clipping for <reasons>. Once you had the foundation in there, structres would snap onto the foundation and not calculate the clipping of the hard-clip zone.
CSS investigated and essentially it was found to be a pretty major bug in their code which had to be resolved. Of course, this annoyed a lot of people when they removed this "exploit"... so then they did something really cool... they basically went "Why do we care about people clipping structures?". Obviously there's some good reasons to have clipping... but when it gets in the way of the game experience (which is, building a cool-looking and effective factory design) that's a bad thing.
So they categorised things with having Hard and Soft clipping (and complex clipping, but i won't go into that)... in short... two hard-clipping structures can't clip... and a new hard-clipping structure can't be clipped into a soft-clipping structure, but soft-clipping can be clipped through anything.
This can lead you to make some pretty cursed things... but it means that functionality doesn't get in the way of what the core game experience is. And as a result, the overall game experience is vastly improved by removing a game rule/condition in a situation where it's not relevant to the experience.
Watch this part of this video to get a better idea.
I get the concept of distance adding to the "vastness" of Elite. I argue that matters a lot for exploration, but it virtually doesn't matter at all nowadays for operations within the populated areas of the game (being the Bubble, Colonia, Witch Head, Pleiades and to a degree, California nebula. Lone, isolated stations are less of a consideration).
Firstly, Ship Transfers and FCs mean logistics within populated areas is pretty trivialised to the point of not mattering. Long-range travel fits within the bubble are virtually non-existent, except where someone just wants to deliberately write themselves off.
Second, mission balance with respect to distances is, frankly, incredibly botched. Of missions which do recognise it, the delta in reward is, I'd argue, not sufficient enough... and there are plenty of missions which don't recognise it, but should (at least, to some extent). Then there's the fact that scaling only applies to credits, and not to influence/rep/material rewards. It's a complete dog's breakfast.
You say specifically that distance is a big part of the decision making process, which is the bit I disagree with for some aspects of the game.
If you're exploring the Pleiades and find a Thargoid signature 300,000Ls away... do you ignore it knowing it's probably another Barnacle, or do you invest that time, on the off chance it's a rarer barnacle forest?
If you're exploring in the middle of nowhere, in mostly untagged space, and spot a bio signal on a very distant planet 500kLs away... do you spend that time to potentially find a new discovery, or just something you've seen before?
I'd argue these are very meaningful, "big parts" of the decision making process... for exploration.
But for activities within the bubble, especially missions, where your goal is at least one of credits, influence, rep, materials, commodities, or just the outright experience... when your decision point is:
- Do something a couple minutes away; or
- Have virtually the same experience, half an hour away.
...while yes, you're right, it's still a big part of that decision, the context of that decision is very different, especially when you're essentially at the whim of a random number generator, and if all your options look like the second, well, I'm more inclined to simply log off and play something else... and I might come back at a later day to see if I've been graced by the RNG gods this time.
And that's without even going near activities with more freeform choice like simply doing trading... do I go to this system where the port is 1,000Ls away, or do I go to this other system where an identical port is 300kLs away. It's no longer a decision, it's just a formula with a static result at the end.
Contrast against a meaningful decision around waiting and time... I need manufacturing instructions... do I wait for the faction I'm supporting to offer such a mission? Or do I take one from an opposing faction knowing I'll need to work extra to counter that effect. That's a meaningful use of time.
Of course, there's definitely ways around this... mechanics which make supercruise more interactive... for example (though not a suggestion) trade lanes in Freelancer... or EDs very own White Dwarf/Neutron supercharging... or Military Drives in FE2/FFE which gave vastly superior mobility and speed getting to and from places, but you could never leave jump range of a colonised station meaning it's the remit entirely of operations in populated space.
Alternately, if you don't want to change that... make distances more meaningful with the extant effects. Make buy prices at stations 300kLs away 10 times that of a 1kLs counterpart... make a mission to that distant station have 10 times the influence effect.... then you actually ask meaningful "So what?" questions... do I take that single mission 300kLs away... or am I going to get better bang for buck doing missions closer to home?
There's a huge range of options here. But ultimately, the key outcome needs to be getting people doing the activity they want to do faster or more meaningful, and for in-bubble activities, distance and time is not meaningful and is just an obstruction to the core activity right now.