Just watched the live stream seems Instant transfer is here to stay.
FD want to turn ED into Skyrim with fast travel mechanics.
It makes me sad
Just on that, you may recall that Frontier had 'fast travel mechanics' via use of the time acceleration feature, so it's not as if it's entirely without precedent. Even back then there was clearly an attempt to balance the focus of the game between elements that have a semblance of realism and ones which encourage play.
It's no kind of gamebreaker to me whatever they decide to do and that takes in every option from no ship transfers at all (I've played the game so far without them) up to fully instantaneous transfer.
My own preference (just in terms of how it would feel most 'realistic' within the game) would be for some form of delay and I actually like this concept the most out of the ones I've seen suggested:
My suggestion/preference: do it via the new NPC crew lounge as an order to collect the ship. (They would travel to it by passenger liner).
Time taken could be optionally compressed, perhaps proportionally to the rank of the NPC crew eg. Harmless = real time/cheapest; Elite = eg 20% of real time & most expensive
It still takes the jump range of the ship you're transferring as a factor because that's what calculates the base time, but allows players to influence that and does so by applying one of the new mechanics to be introduced in 2.2 anyway.
<Sandro hat on> Is it gamey? Yeah. But it's a game. <Sandro hat off>
It's gamey in the sense that we all know no matter how good a pilot you are you can't make your jump range 5x as long but I cannot stress this enough - this is not a sim. It's a space trading and combat game which has considerably more elements of realism than many entries in the genre have, but that does
not make it a sim. The developers have been abundantly clear that they are not tring to make a pure sim because for a start there simply isn't the market for such a game to sustain the levels of ongoing development that people want.
(Don't anybody pipe up with
'You're wrong, I'd play it' here - I'm sure
you would but even if every single player who has posted in this thread said it, that's not enough people to fund the ongoing development of a 5 man indie game, let alone this game.)
I can't see any way at all that FD are just going to drop ship transfer no matter how much people say it trashes their immersion (nor do I think they should if they want to include it in what is after all their game) so the issue is balancing it.
I'd much prefer a balancing mechanic that doesn't simply involve paying out vast sums of money because that doesn't actually balance anything at all, what it does is lock the newer players and those whose play style is not based around acquiring vast wealth out of the content; particularly important here because the playerswho are likely to benefit the most from ship tansfers are those who don't have vast wealth and ships strewn all over the bubble just three jumps away in a Hauler taxi to begin with.