Advanced discovery scanner makes exploring skill less and only a race

I have a great time getting out and looking at stars. I think exploring is a wonderful part of the game. However I feel that the Advanced Discovery Scanner, in that it finds everything with a few seconds takes a great deal of skill (and chance of loss) out of the activity and makes it simply a race which people hurry through as many systems as possible barely looking at them . This, to me, seem to be the exact opposite of exploring.
There will be some situations where you need to go quickly through systems (heading out to unknown space and coming back for example), but going through systems as quickly as possible should not be the end goal of exploration. The meat of it, the main part should be finding stars and planets.
To that end, I think the advanced scanner should be replaced by a series of scanner with increasing range (say, 2,000 ls, 5,000 l/s and 10,000 ls), and the final one should give a direction of where something massive is beyond that, but not a mark on the system map until you get within range.
Explorers should use techniques like using parallax method and where a binary star should be based on the orbital lines to find planets and stars.
This leads to a more rewarding experience.

Arriving at a system, holding down a button for a few seconds and having everything laid out for you, quickly picking the valuable ones and jetting to the next system, is not what I see as exploring. It is somewhat the equivalent of going back and forth between two planets 20 times for trade.

I know a number of people have their strategy planned around the ADS and it makes it much easier, but that ease is a main objection of mine.
We wouldn't allow a bomb that destroyed every ship in scanner range after dumping their cargo and thus required you to only fly around and scoop up the cargo (and get bounties ). That would be considered very broken.
We don't have AIs that do dozens of trading runs while you are logged out. That would be broken as well.
Every activity needs to have risk as well as reward. In combat, your ship might get destroyed, in trading, you might take a chance and have a bad deal. In exploring, currently an ADS will guarentee that you will never miss a planet or star. It's the 'smart bomb' of exploring and as such I think it takes away from the activity to where people,
since they have no risk of loss, just go through systems as fast as they can without looking at them.

Remove the Advanced Discovery Scanner, replace it with a set of scanners with progressively bigger but never systemwide range. Leave a chance for something bigger to be lurking just outside of range , where no one has yet looked. That's exploring.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom