I've witnessed and took part a lot of autopilot discussions, and I had seen a lot of, let's say, half-thought arguments against its implementation. In this post, I'll try to categorize and debunk most of those.
I will point out some statements as follows:
1.
Autopilot for this game is already available as an external software in many variations.
2.
Most of activities in this game involves traveling between star systems to various, sometimes quite excessive degrees, especially with the introduction of engineering.Presence of capability of limiting yourself to activities in one star system does not make this point invalid.
3.
Amount of activities in this game which have massive amounts of jumps between star systems as a meaningful and delightful part of the experience is limited. (namely exploration and exploration missions).
4.
Combat currently is the most engaging and fleshed-out part of the game. Not travel between two systems.
5.
By human nature, any process tends to get boring with excessive repetition.
This is true even for sex, let alone pressing the same button after circling some star.
Specifically about "Not wanting to play the game".
Let's take GTA. It has taxi since VC or SA, don't quite remember.
Is driving in GTA integral to gameplay?
. Not even talking that it is way more engaging than circling star and pressing J.
Yet GTA has a taxi service in it. Cause you might not want to drive in GTA all the time despite it being a core feature.
And same goes for ED. And ED not having an autopilot is just dumb. It's unwise. I don't even quite understand why I have to explain this.
6.
Time and energy which people can spend on playing this game varies, and in some cases may be insufficient to progress meaningfully, mainly because of jumping involved.
7.
Autopilot implementation may vary in functionality and limitations.
Please consider this.
For example, how autopilot which won't turn on with cargo on board can be abused for trading or PP.
On exploration, its a matter of improving exploration gameplay mostly. And they had already taken steps against honking. Which, because of botting, affected all, as usual. Instead of targeting botters only.
8.
Controlling effectiveness and consequences of external software effect on gameplay and BGS is much harder than controlling those parameters of an in-game function.
Let's imagine what would be if autopilot function would be legitimately present in-game instead of it being illegally added externally.
a) Trading.
By point 1, people can already bot trade if they really want. Firstly, with autopilot being implemented in-game full-on trade automation can simply be made unavailable.
Even if in-game limited autopilot be supplemented with externally-provided functionality to enable full auto trade, obstacles which make full-auto trading unprofitable or straight up impossible can be placed, i.e. increased pirate activity, malfunctions, slow docking/undocking, even captcha on 3rd and further trade per hour; and they will touch
only people which do use autopilot as in-game core functionality is in use and its usage obviously is registered. Detecting botting at the moment is almost impossible.
b) Powerplay/BGS
Same as above, actually. Adding to that, the effect of botting on those aspects of the game can be made to be automatically counteracted to roll back a large part of it, either blatantly or by usage of NPCs. The situation will actually improve, I belive (or why are easiest to bot their way through powerplay factions are most influential?).
9.
Any function can be implemented as an optional for gameplay.
Anyone which have some daoistic view on traveling can opt to not use the autopilot. I remember trying to get out from LHS 3447 without jumping despite knowing how to, and was set on not using jumps at all as this, as I've thought, will make my gameplay experience better. Unfortunately, ships do not move faster than 2001 ls/s.
10.
Lack of content in the game is obvious as it is, and unavailability of an autopilot doesn't make the situation better.
11.
Autopilot function not being available in this game is unnatural, especially when it's already present in-game by lore (unmanned ship takeoff from planets) and technically (NPC movements), as well as it is long being present in today's technology IRL.
Imagine how GTA would be successful if it didn't have bowling, arcade machines, etc. Hell, GTA5 even have a stock market. Who cares if many do not use this stuff more than once. It helps immersion, even more, it creates immersion.
If this game looks realistically, its hard for the imagination to make you belive that there are more happening than you see. All of it would have sort of worked if the player was presented as part of the military, with limited activity specter and with limitations created by some military statute, which are quite often stupid and go overboard. But its not the case in this game. So not having things which are supposed to be here but are not present kills immersion pretty fast, in two weeks in my case. Imagine all that realistic party in FFXV lining up in a row and attacking in turns. That just doesn't work. With all those limitations, this game looks like NES Super Mario with realistic graphics.
I may update this post in case I've missed something.
Please read the whole post, or better yet, think before replying.
By the way, reasonable ship transfer costs and transfers along with a pilot and no cargo would be a sufficient fix, but there are other pluses to autopilot's implementation as well.
