Hello commanders, hello Frontier,
I hope that this forum is actually being reviewed by ED development team.
I am quite new to ED, so far maybe around 100 hours, tried a little bit of everything, and I so far enjoy the game but I cannot help myself, I simply have a feeling, that there are just things in the game that makes it annoying to play. That being said, here is a list of my suggestions, what a newbie would do without "being used to the unchanging order of the universe as a veteran player".
1) Missions UI - direct location marker if the location is known: Right now, in order to navigate to your mission destination, you need to:
SUGGESTION: When you select the mission, on top of the galaxy map button, there will be a new TARGET button. This button will:
2) Map loading: Ok, so this is big. The map loading is really the pain. I know NO other game, where map loading would take so insane amount of time. We are talking like even 15secs the game crunching something, while you completely lose the ability to handle your ship, while also not being to escape the map (you are stuck with just grey overlay) if you hear some alarm in the background.
What is even more insane is, that the game is apparently loading the map from scratch every single time, so every repeated map opening is the same pain.
SUGGESTION: Obviously, the FSD jump is used as loading screen. Would that hurt so much to load the map as well? I would understand, that this is impossible for Galaxy map, as the game needs to load current data of trade routes, powers, whatever. But Sector map needs to be snappy. Open - Boom - it is there. Repeatadly, as often as I need. And not wait for sector map loading every time I want to check something in the map.
3) Docking denial reason: So when I was very early into the game, this was quite a frustration. I wanted to dock, I got denied but no reason provided. Big ship? Full landing pads? Reputation issues? Other reason? I had to GOOGLE the freaking reason I was denied. This is not a good user experience.
SUGGESTION: When the game can spam you over and over about the irrelevant things like "this Liner is the 1% of liners out there", it could tell you the reason of denial, when you hit the Request docking button.
4) Docking queue: This is one for the small stations out there in Open Play. When you get denied because somebody is on the platform, you should be put to the landing queue. Now, if you try to land, you just need to smash the Request docking button over and over again so you hit it immediately after the other pilot takes of. And you have to be lucky, that some other pilot won't be more lucky triggering the request docking right before you, even if you were there first and waiting like 10 minutes because that person on the landing pad was AFK. And that is quite big Request docking button spam.
SUGGESTION: Create a landing queue for each landing pad size. When you request docking, the system will put you to the queue and assign you the available landing pad as it is now, but if there is no landing pad available, it would put you the the holding state and assign you the landing pad as soon as some will be free. This is valid for AutoLand. For manual landers out there, there would be one more prompt with countdown to acknowledge the pad once it is available for you (say UI similar to supercruise disengage or leave station countdown, just hit the button to confirm you are still there. If you fail to acknowledge the landing pad, you are removed from the queue)
4) AFKing on landing pads: If the user blocks the landing pad for more than 3 minutes (which is usually fine to refuel, restock, repair, buy limpets, take missions and fly off), the user should be moved to the hangar, in the same fashion as if you go for outfitting. This should happen without the Docking services interface interruption, so if you just need more time, you can, only with the small downside of being pulled back from hangar before you fly off.
SUGGESTION: Players AFKing or spending more than X minutes on the landing pads (especially high traffic small stations) should be dropped down to the hangar without interrupting their station interface, so other players can use the landing pad. This feature can be enabled only in Open Play.
5) Better Fire group switcher: Of so you can have quite a number of firing groups, but you can switch between them only back and fort, cycling. On top of that, in certain travel modes, if you cycle the firing groups, the interface even does not bother to show you the firing group if none of the modules are relevant for that travel mode, making the cycling between the modes even more frustrating. Why I cannot see that I am trying to use group E? Why I have to guess how many times I need to smash the Next group button to get through F-H and back to B when half of the modes will not show up in super cruise? Why I cannot select my desired group more conveniently? (and yes, I know there is also cycle back button, but that does not provide that much of help if you are deep in the cycle)
SUGGESTION: Wheel selector could be in place to select your firing group directly, which will be useful for exploration and travel. Current cycling should be kept though as it can be more direct and useful for combat.
6) Passenger mission wanted status: It should be directly visible. I play Odyssey, but I have opened Horizons few times and I have no idea, why anyone decided to hide this information. In Odyssey, 2 extra unnecessary mouse clicks. Don't understand. If there is any issue with screen text/space, make it a simple icon somewhere. This one is just downgrade from previous version of the same game.
SUGGESTION: Passenger mission should have their wanted status visible DIRECTLY and not hidden under the icon.
7) Cargo retrieved message on your target hud: So this is situational. You are in place in Resource extraction zone. You have your cargo hatch open, and your little limpets are collecting all scrap you have blown a few seconds ago. So you want to just cycle through the ships in the system to scan for potential new target. So I am smashing bound [G] for next ship and I use the target ship holo for orientation, simply - green OK, for orange, I want to check the details. What annoys me is, if the limpet collects something, with will replace the target holo, interrupting me from the cycling of ships.
SUGGESTION: Cargo acquired should not replace target holo, but should be as a separate message.
8) Cargo transfer when changing the ship: So I use one ship as multipurpose for exploration, material gathering and so on. Then I have other single-purpose ship without any cargo hold. The annoyance, that I need to sell all limpets, and then re-buy everything after changing back is quite big. I have seen other topic here where some cargo hoarding was mentioned. Fine, agree, you should sell your valuables, but let us keep limpets.
SUGGESTION: Certain types of cargo is allowed to stay with the ship while you are changing it.
9) Crew pilot is not populated back when changing back to fighter-enabled ship. So for this, I always forget to set active pilot when changing the ships, there should be a little help around this.
SUGGESTION 1: The game remembers the last pilot setup you had for the ship, and if the ship has (still) the hangar equipped, it will automatically put your crew onboard when changing the ship.
SUGGESTION 2: At least there should be a message that you should review your crew setup when entering fighter-enabled ship, in the very same fashion, as the game does it fith Firing groups after changing something in the Outfitting for some reason, I have switched to a new ship and the message popped up. I don't know why I haven't seen it earlier ...
10) Search in your navigation panel. So you have just arrived to the system. You want to use the Navigation panel to set your target within the system. But even if you know the name of your destination, the Navigation list is a toilet paper long and your destination is like 2/3 down there. So you are scrolling, and scrolling and scrolling.....
SUGGESTION 1: There should be a search bar. You can navigate to it and hit space, which enables the writing mode. As you write, it would dynamically filter the list based on your input. Backspace would exit the writing mode. Near the search bar, clear/reset icon is present. Also, the whole thing resets upon navigation panel closure.
SUGGESTION 2: If the SUGGESTION 1 would be hard to implement due to the keybindings collisions, a line of alphabet letters + numbers could be present as one row, where upon selection the navigation list would filter only elements starting with the selected letter.
11) Clear target binding: So this is one I hit while programming the limpets. Of course I always accidentally program the limpet while having some scrap in the target as I am checking the distance. Currently, I use keybinding for Next system on route to reset the target, as I have no route plotted while flying in the Resource extracting zone. But that might not be the case when going to some Degraded signal emissions. Sometimes, I just want to clear all targets, period.
SUGGESTION: Create binding for Clear all targets.
12) Engage SuperCruise assist for target. Right now, even when you already have your target set within the system, you still need to painfully (suggestion 10) ) find it in navigation panel to activate it. It should be just one-button action.
SUGGESTION: Create SuperCruise assist activation for your in-system target as a keybinding.
13) When opening the details of a mission, the list of missions should remember its scrolling position and not make the mission you have just opened as the last one in the visible frame. This makes going through the missions very frustrating, especially when you go top-to-bottom, you scroll so the first mission is on top and then you will just click next and next, and instead, it will scroll down and make your opened mission as the last one, so you can not see any next mission and you have to scroll again. Very frustrating.
SUGGESTION: Do not touch/adjust the scroll position of mission list when you open any mission for details.
14) Mission filters. There is always quite a few missions. But I don't care about majority of them. I want to filter out the irrelevant ones. There should be a simple filter mechanism.
SUGGESTION: Filtering is introduced for mission dashboard. Filter includes:
Range limit (selectbox, values <10, <20, <50, <100, <500, <1000, >1000), filtered by target distance, for multi-target missions (sightseeing trips), total travel distance is counted)
Min paylout (selectbox, values: 10.000, 20.000, 50.000, 100.000, 500.000, 1.000.000, 2.000.000, 3.000.000, 5.000.000), filtered by the cash-only reward
Offers materials (checkbox)
Offers cargo (checkbox)
Offers influence (checkbox)
Offers reputation (checkbox)
Threat level (selectbox, values as per threat level)
Users are able to store up to 5 filters. There will be a simple interface with "slots" and a button, that is able to store the current filter to a slot you select. Near every slot is the button to purge that slot.
15) Reputation/influence reward bar preview: When selecting the reward, if you hover over High reputation or High influence reward the bars representing the current status should react on-hover of those selection, providing the change preview if you select that option.
SUGGESTION: Hovering/highlighting reward, that includes reputation/influence change, current faction bars on the reward selection screen should show the preview of change.
So that is for now commanders, I would be very happy to see some feedback, and even more happy to see some feedback from the development team.
See you out there!
I hope that this forum is actually being reviewed by ED development team.
I am quite new to ED, so far maybe around 100 hours, tried a little bit of everything, and I so far enjoy the game but I cannot help myself, I simply have a feeling, that there are just things in the game that makes it annoying to play. That being said, here is a list of my suggestions, what a newbie would do without "being used to the unchanging order of the universe as a veteran player".
1) Missions UI - direct location marker if the location is known: Right now, in order to navigate to your mission destination, you need to:
- open navigation tab and go to Transactions and select the mission.
- Hit the map marker and wait until the map loads
- Open the sector map and wait until the maps load
- Select your destination.
SUGGESTION: When you select the mission, on top of the galaxy map button, there will be a new TARGET button. This button will:
- set the System destination if the system has not yet been discovered by the player, plotting the fastest route.
- set the exact station/place destination if the system has already been visited by the player, plotting the fastest route.
2) Map loading: Ok, so this is big. The map loading is really the pain. I know NO other game, where map loading would take so insane amount of time. We are talking like even 15secs the game crunching something, while you completely lose the ability to handle your ship, while also not being to escape the map (you are stuck with just grey overlay) if you hear some alarm in the background.
What is even more insane is, that the game is apparently loading the map from scratch every single time, so every repeated map opening is the same pain.
SUGGESTION: Obviously, the FSD jump is used as loading screen. Would that hurt so much to load the map as well? I would understand, that this is impossible for Galaxy map, as the game needs to load current data of trade routes, powers, whatever. But Sector map needs to be snappy. Open - Boom - it is there. Repeatadly, as often as I need. And not wait for sector map loading every time I want to check something in the map.
3) Docking denial reason: So when I was very early into the game, this was quite a frustration. I wanted to dock, I got denied but no reason provided. Big ship? Full landing pads? Reputation issues? Other reason? I had to GOOGLE the freaking reason I was denied. This is not a good user experience.
SUGGESTION: When the game can spam you over and over about the irrelevant things like "this Liner is the 1% of liners out there", it could tell you the reason of denial, when you hit the Request docking button.
4) Docking queue: This is one for the small stations out there in Open Play. When you get denied because somebody is on the platform, you should be put to the landing queue. Now, if you try to land, you just need to smash the Request docking button over and over again so you hit it immediately after the other pilot takes of. And you have to be lucky, that some other pilot won't be more lucky triggering the request docking right before you, even if you were there first and waiting like 10 minutes because that person on the landing pad was AFK. And that is quite big Request docking button spam.
SUGGESTION: Create a landing queue for each landing pad size. When you request docking, the system will put you to the queue and assign you the available landing pad as it is now, but if there is no landing pad available, it would put you the the holding state and assign you the landing pad as soon as some will be free. This is valid for AutoLand. For manual landers out there, there would be one more prompt with countdown to acknowledge the pad once it is available for you (say UI similar to supercruise disengage or leave station countdown, just hit the button to confirm you are still there. If you fail to acknowledge the landing pad, you are removed from the queue)
4) AFKing on landing pads: If the user blocks the landing pad for more than 3 minutes (which is usually fine to refuel, restock, repair, buy limpets, take missions and fly off), the user should be moved to the hangar, in the same fashion as if you go for outfitting. This should happen without the Docking services interface interruption, so if you just need more time, you can, only with the small downside of being pulled back from hangar before you fly off.
SUGGESTION: Players AFKing or spending more than X minutes on the landing pads (especially high traffic small stations) should be dropped down to the hangar without interrupting their station interface, so other players can use the landing pad. This feature can be enabled only in Open Play.
5) Better Fire group switcher: Of so you can have quite a number of firing groups, but you can switch between them only back and fort, cycling. On top of that, in certain travel modes, if you cycle the firing groups, the interface even does not bother to show you the firing group if none of the modules are relevant for that travel mode, making the cycling between the modes even more frustrating. Why I cannot see that I am trying to use group E? Why I have to guess how many times I need to smash the Next group button to get through F-H and back to B when half of the modes will not show up in super cruise? Why I cannot select my desired group more conveniently? (and yes, I know there is also cycle back button, but that does not provide that much of help if you are deep in the cycle)
SUGGESTION: Wheel selector could be in place to select your firing group directly, which will be useful for exploration and travel. Current cycling should be kept though as it can be more direct and useful for combat.
6) Passenger mission wanted status: It should be directly visible. I play Odyssey, but I have opened Horizons few times and I have no idea, why anyone decided to hide this information. In Odyssey, 2 extra unnecessary mouse clicks. Don't understand. If there is any issue with screen text/space, make it a simple icon somewhere. This one is just downgrade from previous version of the same game.
SUGGESTION: Passenger mission should have their wanted status visible DIRECTLY and not hidden under the icon.
7) Cargo retrieved message on your target hud: So this is situational. You are in place in Resource extraction zone. You have your cargo hatch open, and your little limpets are collecting all scrap you have blown a few seconds ago. So you want to just cycle through the ships in the system to scan for potential new target. So I am smashing bound [G] for next ship and I use the target ship holo for orientation, simply - green OK, for orange, I want to check the details. What annoys me is, if the limpet collects something, with will replace the target holo, interrupting me from the cycling of ships.
SUGGESTION: Cargo acquired should not replace target holo, but should be as a separate message.
8) Cargo transfer when changing the ship: So I use one ship as multipurpose for exploration, material gathering and so on. Then I have other single-purpose ship without any cargo hold. The annoyance, that I need to sell all limpets, and then re-buy everything after changing back is quite big. I have seen other topic here where some cargo hoarding was mentioned. Fine, agree, you should sell your valuables, but let us keep limpets.
SUGGESTION: Certain types of cargo is allowed to stay with the ship while you are changing it.
9) Crew pilot is not populated back when changing back to fighter-enabled ship. So for this, I always forget to set active pilot when changing the ships, there should be a little help around this.
SUGGESTION 1: The game remembers the last pilot setup you had for the ship, and if the ship has (still) the hangar equipped, it will automatically put your crew onboard when changing the ship.
10) Search in your navigation panel. So you have just arrived to the system. You want to use the Navigation panel to set your target within the system. But even if you know the name of your destination, the Navigation list is a toilet paper long and your destination is like 2/3 down there. So you are scrolling, and scrolling and scrolling.....
SUGGESTION 1: There should be a search bar. You can navigate to it and hit space, which enables the writing mode. As you write, it would dynamically filter the list based on your input. Backspace would exit the writing mode. Near the search bar, clear/reset icon is present. Also, the whole thing resets upon navigation panel closure.
SUGGESTION 2: If the SUGGESTION 1 would be hard to implement due to the keybindings collisions, a line of alphabet letters + numbers could be present as one row, where upon selection the navigation list would filter only elements starting with the selected letter.
11) Clear target binding: So this is one I hit while programming the limpets. Of course I always accidentally program the limpet while having some scrap in the target as I am checking the distance. Currently, I use keybinding for Next system on route to reset the target, as I have no route plotted while flying in the Resource extracting zone. But that might not be the case when going to some Degraded signal emissions. Sometimes, I just want to clear all targets, period.
SUGGESTION: Create binding for Clear all targets.
12) Engage SuperCruise assist for target. Right now, even when you already have your target set within the system, you still need to painfully (suggestion 10) ) find it in navigation panel to activate it. It should be just one-button action.
SUGGESTION: Create SuperCruise assist activation for your in-system target as a keybinding.
13) When opening the details of a mission, the list of missions should remember its scrolling position and not make the mission you have just opened as the last one in the visible frame. This makes going through the missions very frustrating, especially when you go top-to-bottom, you scroll so the first mission is on top and then you will just click next and next, and instead, it will scroll down and make your opened mission as the last one, so you can not see any next mission and you have to scroll again. Very frustrating.
SUGGESTION: Do not touch/adjust the scroll position of mission list when you open any mission for details.
14) Mission filters. There is always quite a few missions. But I don't care about majority of them. I want to filter out the irrelevant ones. There should be a simple filter mechanism.
SUGGESTION: Filtering is introduced for mission dashboard. Filter includes:
Range limit (selectbox, values <10, <20, <50, <100, <500, <1000, >1000), filtered by target distance, for multi-target missions (sightseeing trips), total travel distance is counted)
Min paylout (selectbox, values: 10.000, 20.000, 50.000, 100.000, 500.000, 1.000.000, 2.000.000, 3.000.000, 5.000.000), filtered by the cash-only reward
Offers materials (checkbox)
Offers cargo (checkbox)
Offers influence (checkbox)
Offers reputation (checkbox)
Threat level (selectbox, values as per threat level)
Users are able to store up to 5 filters. There will be a simple interface with "slots" and a button, that is able to store the current filter to a slot you select. Near every slot is the button to purge that slot.
15) Reputation/influence reward bar preview: When selecting the reward, if you hover over High reputation or High influence reward the bars representing the current status should react on-hover of those selection, providing the change preview if you select that option.
SUGGESTION: Hovering/highlighting reward, that includes reputation/influence change, current faction bars on the reward selection screen should show the preview of change.
So that is for now commanders, I would be very happy to see some feedback, and even more happy to see some feedback from the development team.
See you out there!
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