Could Frontier please demonstrate how to use the FSS enjoyably?
- Thread starter CMDR Karrde Sun
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This mini-game good.
Very good.
Very, very good.
Very good.
Very, very good.
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This is interesting. I'd agree that the likelihood is that a significant portion of the DW2 crowd just buckyballed back from BP. What we can't determine (since I don't believe that planetary scans were recorded in the journal at that time) is whether a similar drop off occurred with the original DW. It may just be an artifact of the way the DWs are structured - community on the way out, free-for-all on the way back, so to speak.
No doubt there's an element of bias in my assessment, but it certainly doesn't seem like the 3.3 changes have had a significant impact on the overall exploration activity - though I'd suspect it's had a more noticeable impact on WHO is exploring. Other opinions are equally valid
Bad bad bad
Good good good
Mini-game mini-game
This This
Very very very very very very
In the spirit of self-glossing, I did neutron it back from BP because I was keen to get involved with IDA. But I still explored on the way back too and found a tasty undiscovered neutron system with a pair of ELWs orbiting it. And it's MINE ALL MINE bwuahahahaha. Actually, I was surprised how many of the neutron systems I used were undiscovered (at least at the time I flew through them, I haven't gone and checked how many I got first dibs on reporting them in).
I've only just gotten to Beagle Point. Will start on the journey back at some point via the long way.
If Frontier truly designed the FSS to cherry pick valuable worlds, then they certainly spent a lot of development time on designing a system that lets you find things of little value as well. I’m glad they did, because that stuff is much more fun than cherry picking ELWs IMO.
I can only speak for myself, but I was having to neutron jump and cherry pick systems on the way out to Beagle Point, just to have a hope in making it there in time. Yes, I’d always stop for Earthlike Worlds, but I’d stop to explore my way any large system I’d come across.
On the way back, I’m stopping to explore every system I come across, and taking the time to test some hypothesis along the way. For example, I’d started to suspect that you could, indeed, detect non GGG outliers on the frequency spectrum if you knew what your looking for. Yesterday, I confirmed the presence of two “Super Icy Bodies” (my test group) among the systems I had explored. Next session I can play, I’ll try to replicate my results among HMC planets.
Of course, my detection method would be rather useless to those just want to search as many systems as quickly as possible to find them, but it does give me some more “interesting things” to keep an eye out for.
Well, the “mini-game” may be good, but the “analysis” game is utterly brilliant IMO.
A solution to this could be a message from the FSS after the honk that says that signals have been detected and what types of signals have been identified in the system (geo/biological/alien/guardian/else).
So you know that there is biological or alien activity in the system and you proceed to the scan to identify the body (bodies).
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That’s one of the things I’m hoping to test on the way back from DW2. I was (rightly) worried about making it there within the allotted time, so I didn’t spend as much time as I would’ve liked testing my known unknowns, let alone keeping an eye out for the unknown unknowns. Now that I can explore at my own pace, I’m hoping to expand my “Signs of Interesting Things” list considerably.
That would be a logical expansion, agreed.
I'm pretty sure you do get this information already because there will be more signal sources than there are planets. It's raw though and asteroid belts need weeding out from it so it does need fining up but if you see 10 planets, 11 signals and no asteroid belts, there's a POI out there. FSS 1.0 for sure.
A-yup. DW1 went from 2016. January to June, no such data from that time yet. However, I doubt it had as much an effect on activity: after all, DW1 had a much smaller number of participants.
Well, you can take a look at the top 100 explorers on EDSM, and see how much those who share their flight log heatmaps still explore, who stopped after the first FSS reveals back in August, and who after DW2 finished.
On overall activity, DW2 had a larger impact than the Chapter Four release, and nowadays it's back around the previous regular levels. We'll see if those who are new will explore as much as those who were driven off did.
Of course, Frontier likely doesn't care much about this. They have probably written off player retention overall until the big 2020 release. As I said before though, that's a risky move for a multiplayer game-as-a-service, where communities play a crucial role.
Yep, they have said so. For example, see the quote from the livestream in my earlier post. Or that it was to aid finding the Codex stuff with, which does necessitate heavier cherry-picking than just any one type of bodies. Except NSPs, of course.
I was about to ask if you might be from the USA, but a quick look at your profile showed that my suspicion was correct, and you are.
This was why the thought came to me:
Also some "extended editions" of this floating around, with the British curve saying "it's fine" over the whole range, and so on.
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I fell out of the Top 100 visited systems list (I'm only about a hundred below) when I stopped playing between August and April. I'm still at 90 in the first reported list.
If I remember correctly, that means I've fallen about 30 places in each list. The people at the top of those lists will most probably have been involved in DW2, so if I start climbing back up the rankings we could infer that they're no longer active.
Actually, I don't think it was designed just for cherry picking valuable objects which it is very good at - and that's fine, that's one type of exploration that a lot of players probably do to tick off the exploration box. I think it was most definitely designed to alert players to things on planets from a distance, meaning that players would only need to do the SC bit (which FD know lots of players dislike) for a reason, because there's something there to find.
The problem is, as you point out, that players will still have to scan a lot of potential haystacks to find the odd needles.
I continually argue that IMO it's poor gameplay to have to open lots of doors when there's nothing behind most of them, but the scale of the galaxy means that is inevitable. I'm sure FD hoped that they had made the FSS painless and quick enough to make scanning systems seem like a no brainer and then players would find whatever was there. However, it doesn't negate that you get a lot of false returns for every positive, and your statistics suggest that either players aren't motivated to look for POI's, or that they don't enjoy the scanning process enough to fully scan every system.
This has been my argument for an optional ADS module, to allow players that want it to be able to see that there's something in a system they want to explore (for the things the FSS doesn't reveal), not have to explore it in the hope that it will be what they are interested in. Perhaps FD will have to introduce a module, or FSS upgrade that alerts players to a generic 'POI's present in system' alert.
I think at least part of the problem here is that POIs (including the NSPs) are completely passive - there's nothing to do with them once you've scanned them. After the first geological site on a planet with silicate vapor geysers there's no reason to map another one, unless you happen to have moved to a different sector and you actually care about the codex. For biologicals scanning most systems is pointless, since unless you're in a nebula or an O, B, A system then you're unlikely to find anything anyway.
Yes, interaction with what's there is a bit lacking.
I look for geological POI's in the bubble when I need materials for engineering, not randomly if / when I'm exploring, and since the others are seemingly for sightseeing purposes I don't look for them. Found a bunch of NSP's on my last exploration ships, scanned the floaty things... And that was that.
A good point. It's also why the ADS worked when the focus was on the generated galaxy, but wouldn't have if the focus were on POIs, and neither really does the FSS. For those rare POIs, it would be much better if you were alerted to their presence in the system automatically, so you'd know there is reward to be had for your gameplay, but you'd have to play with a more involved scanning mechanic to find and identify them.
I've said it before, but because of considerations like this, and the fact that until the "new era", we're getting QoL improvements for new players, I wouldn't be surprised if Frontier eventually made body scans automatic the same way stars are now, and reworked the FSS and the DSS into a more advanced suite, so that identifying and locating the POIs weren't as trivial as it is now. I don't expect this as the most likely scenario to happen, but on the off chance it did, I wouldn't be surprised.
Putting in simple message notifications after a honk about POIs present in the system would be good, but the problem there is that it might take a while (especially with many landable planets present) to generate that.
But again, this all would only make sense if Frontier decided to focus on the hand-crafted stuff now. At launch and at Horizons, that wasn't the case. Maybe in Chapter Four, it was, but as you've also noted in your next post, the actual quality of the stuff added is basic and lacking in gameplay. Biological and geological POIs are basically small static loot fields for materials, and the NSPs are just as basic as well. Guardian structures (not the original ruins) and Thargoid structures are better and of much higher quality, but they don't exist outside the vicinity of the bubble. At the end of the day, when it comes to exploration, the procedurally generated galaxy of Elite is overall much better than its hand-crafted assets.
Ditto.Please don't give me nightmares
Something like that would have me Buckyballing it Back to the Bubble as fast as I could. About the only thing that would prevent me from Suiciding back the Explorer's Anchorage is that I'm using Mossfoot's Pilot's Ejection rules, and at about 65 kly away from Sol, the odds are not in my favor.
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