Could Frontier please demonstrate how to use the FSS enjoyably?

[IndigoWyrd]

Sure. It's not like I care about your personal preferences, so why would I wish to change them? I think the misunderstanding might be where you now said that "explaining in excruciating detail how and why this method is worse for you" (emphasis mine): however, I'm speaking of general usage scenarios, not my personal preferences. (Unless you actually meant "you" in the plural sense, in which case please disregard this. It can be hard to tell in English.) The point back then was that the FSS is better for some usage cases, especially the most common ones, but not universally better in every approach; it's worse than what we had in some others. You said you didn't see why on the latter part, so that's why I explained it.
Whether someone likes the FSS or not doesn't change anything in the fact that you get the same amount of credits and tags faster than what we had before, for example.
Well, at the end of it, would you still say that the FSS is universally better, for everyone?



A lot of us suggested that exact same thing since the very first feedback threads, yes. If FD went ahead with this, it would have been a small compromise that would have solved one issue, but not nearly all of them.

However, let me make an important distinction: I don't hate the new system, because hate is too strong a word to be used here. I dislike it. However, my reasons for disliking it go well beyond the reason expressed above. There are plenty of other issues with it, some of which I've recently mentioned. I do wish that Frontier fixed those, but well, here we are nearly nine months later, and they haven't touched them.

Actually, if you want to read some detailed feedback from plenty of people, I'd recommend reading through this thread. Or if it's just one post you'd read, then it should be Jackie Silver's:


It's all from eight months ago, but nothing much has changed since.

It is a plural “you”, and yes, I can see how extreme fringe cases might have a harder or at least longer time of things. However, I am very much a “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”

Can you cite any reason why they wouldn't. I am an avid explorer and have not gone near EDSM even though I know about it. I am sure there are many others out there too.

I think there are many players that have no idea that EDSM even exists, as there will be many players that are not on the forums, reddit or social media in general to know anything about it.

Whether they explore or not though, I don't know and either do you. EDSM active players are just a very small amount of the active population.

EDSM sounds too much like BDSM, and if that “E” is short for Electrocution...

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

It is a plural “you”, and yes, I can see how extreme fringe cases might have a harder or at least longer time of things. However, I am very much a “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”

I thought you were pro-choice?

And people think Pro Choice is a bad thing...

 

[IndigoWyrd]

I thought you were pro-choice?

I’m Pro-Getting Paid. Choice, No-Choice - I’m loyal to the money first.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Regardless of whether you personally like or dislike the FSS, the fact remains that people on the whole explore less. We don't know if it's due to less people exploring the same amount, the same amount of people exploring a considerably less amount, or less people exploring less, but things don't look good on this front

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: I don’t agree with your interpretation of that data.

If it takes longer to determine that a system is “worth exploring,” then naturally the number of submissions to EDSM will decrease. If players are spending more time on planetary exploration than they did before, then naturally the number of submissions to EDSM will decrease. If players are spending time investigating “stellar phenomenon,” then naturally the number of submissions to EDSM will decrease.

There is so much more to do while exploring these days, which isn’t tracked by EDSM, that your conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the data we have access to.

 

[marx]

If you would bother to go on a deep space exploration trip (I know it's hard for someone who dislikes the FSS)

Are you talking about me specifically now? I think you are, because you replied to me, but I'd like to make sure.
I mean, my exploration statistics both before and after the FSS are public (there was a thread just before Chapter Four, to revisit a year later and see how things changed), so it's easy to find out that I did bother to go on deep space exploration trips. In fact, since it seems you're trying to appeal to experience or something now, mind sharing your explorations stats with us? I'm curious, since you brought the topic up.

you will notice that on large plotted routes (10 KLY and more) many systems are already explored.

As I already mentioned, the data is new systems, bodies and stars, not those already discovered.

Moving a bit off the track then...
You might want to go off the beaten track if you're still finding that. If what you do is plot a route from frequented system A to frequented system B, then of course you'll travel through lots of visited systems. Same origin and destination as many others, with roughly the same jump range: of course the plotter will route you across many already visited ones.
Meanwhile, you can find plenty of unexplored systems at even 600-700 ly from Sol, but only in some directions, and mostly only mass code B and below. You won't see those if you switch of class M stars and below in your route filter. But with a usual 50 ly exploration build (achievable for most ships), that's a bit over a dozen jumps out.

There are, however, some notable exceptions. Areas of interest where the star density is very low have been thoroughly explored by now, so if you're travelling there, you won't find many new things. This mostly involves the extreme edge (lots of Allitnil tags there) and nebulae in sparse areas.
On the other hand, a couple of days back, I found ten or so entirely unvisited systems in the sector of a real nebula, which has an asteroid base present. That I didn't expect.

The only place where "numbers are down because people are finding less and less new stuff" only works with the Codex, as I noted before. With exploration CG numbers, with EDSM data, and so on, it doesn't really.


@ Max Factor: Let's see. You wrote that "EDSM active players are just a very small amount of the active population." I asked "Is that so? Please prove this. What data can you offer us that would prove your claim that they are a very small amount of the active population, how much?" I shared with you the data on how much of the total EDSM uploaders have contributed, as well as the DW2 statistics, so there's my proof. You said that you don't have any, yet you claim that only in spite of the data that we do have, only a very small amount of the active population are "EDSM active".
I think we're done here then - well past done, probably. Anyone can check for themselves which one of us is right.

 

[sandkid]

I am amazed this thread is approaching 100 pages...

Still, my own two credits (again...) on Elite's most important topic: exploration.

A great video from 2014 has been circulating from when the developers spoke of their aspirations for Elite. They knew how distant many of these aspirations were (atmospheric landings, space legs, capital ships) but what's striking is how many spoke specifically to exploration - particularly Braben himself - and its importance to Elite as an experience and simulator.

A lot of time is spent discussing walking on planetary surfaces or within the ships, experiencing natural phenomena such as nebulae and geysers, and fully immersing yourself in the vastness of the galaxy. While the last bit is often over-romanticized, the other two are fairly straightforward. No Man's Sky gets picked on for over-reliance on procedural generation. 'Everything is new and so it is also old.' Yet there's no doubt that NMS presents compelling landscapes and environments worthy of exploration. It might help to remember exploration is not an action so much as a desire: to see something for the sake of curiosity and little else.

Elite produces some incredible screenshots and explorers (real explorers) regularly commend the game for producing astounding environments from as close to Sol all the way to Beagle Point and everywhere in between. Yet exploring as a desire makes it less a gameplay mechanic and more an experience - and most gamers don't pick up a flight simulator looking for screenshots. NMS has a dedicated community, but its foundation lies more in artists and dreamers than competitors and gamers. Elite is an excellent game and the best space flight simulator on the market, bar none.

But it's not a very good exploring game. The FSS is an attempt to 'gamify' the desire to explore, and it works to some extent. There's not really much in the way of skill - one can quickly tell whether the object they are seeking is there or not without actually zooming in - but it's not as simple as NMS where the planets all orbit within unrealistic ranges and are easily identified for what they are. Then again, such a simple approach convinces players to land and see what is planetside. Comparisons between NMS and Elite quickly stretch thin because NMS isn't a space-flight game - it's a planetary explorer game that uses space as a medium for travel. Elite is nearly the polar opposite: it is a space flight game that happens to use planetary surfaces as a medium for gathering certain materials (if you want to).

I have said many times that what Exploration in Elite lacks isn't so much gameplay mechanics as it does experiences. If you've seen one geyser, you've seen them all. The Biological signals help, but they quickly run out, too. Asking developers to produce an infinite catalogue of creatures quickly replicates the NMS problem: It's all new and so it is old. Instead, Elite needs more interactive experiences in Exploration. The very best example of this is the place most folks don't consider an exploration activity anymore: aliens.

Guardian Ruins and Thargoid Sites are the only real exploration activities in Elite - they are not necessary to playing Elite but any normal player greeted with such a sight for the first time would undoubtedly want to get a closer look. This is exploration. The desire to see for the sake of curiosity. Of course one you've seen it, that desire will fade. Some people can view the Grand Canyon in the United States hundreds of times and still come back - most see it once, get a shirt and postcard, and move on. Elite does not need procedurally generated experiences or creatures. It needs handcrafted experiences, assets that take great amounts of time and effort to produce.

Time and effort FDev doesn't seem keen on investing in.

Because it will all go stale, eventually. Even a vast and vivid world like World of Warcraft became old for the majority of the playerbase in just a few years! Frontier is no Blizzard, and Elite is no Azeroth. But the point still stands. Exploration in Elite doesn't benefit (or lessen) because of features like the FSS. It just doesn't go anywhere. What's more, exploration doesn't have to be in the black - it can be in the bubble just as easily, and for many new players it is for a short time. But tourist beacons aren't experiences - they're short stories - and once you've seen the few types of stations and planetary docks, you've seen them all. It is a sad state of affairs that I was more blown away by the asteroid base I encountered on my way to a nearby Nebula than sixty or so systems I stopped in along the way combined.

Only because it was a new experience. It was still just a plain ol' station dock. The magic quickly wore off - a truly unique sight found almost exclusively in the black and it turns out to just be another station with the same services as any other station.

Exploration requires the most expensive segments of gaming: new assets. That's why so many games don't pull it off too well. NMS isn't an explorer game - not really after a few hours - it's a crafting game. Real exploration gameplay requires a multitude of new experiences. You do more exploring in a combat RPG like God of War than you do in most 'exploration' games, if you think on the real meaning of exploring. You see new sights, new stories, new experiences.

This is why exploration is the easiest gameplay idea to get hyped about...and the absolute hardest to deliver on. Those developers are genuinely excited to deliver an exploration experience, back in 2014. The FSS is solid proof that they've realized how hard delivering that vision is. It is easier to gamify exploration than actual deliver it. This doesn't make them lazy or evil or liars - it just reaffirms what exploration actually is and is not.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: I don’t agree with your interpretation of that data.

If it takes longer to determine that a system is “worth exploring,” then naturally the number of submissions to EDSM will decrease. If players are spending more time on planetary exploration than they did before, then naturally the number of submissions to EDSM will decrease. If players are spending time investigating “stellar phenomenon,” then naturally the number of submissions to EDSM will decrease.

There is so much more to do while exploring these days, which isn’t tracked by EDSM, that your conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the data we have access to.

I'd argue otherwise, the FSS is an excellent when it comes to scanning, before 3.3 you had to travel to a body to scan it, the FSS makes it much easier to scan as you can just sit and play around on analysis mode unveiling all objects, this would increase the number of submissions to EDSM but that's not what we see.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

As I already mentioned, the data is new systems, bodies and stars, not those already discovered.

So the reduction in new system reporting rate could be down to:

1. Less exploration happening
2. Explorers are returning to systems they've already visited in order to map them
3. Most of the galaxy is already mapped, so there's nothing new to find
4. Nothing, it's just random
5. Explorers came back to the Bubble after DW2 and the subsequent IIs have been so exciting that they haven't left again

Obviously option 3 is rubbish.
I'm sure options 2 and 5 account for some of the change*, but in either case they'd be trickling back to exploration trips over the last 6 months, which I don't believe is reflected in the stats.
Option 4 is possible, but to accept it we'd also need to accept that the spikes correlating to FSS release and DW2 were also random.
That pretty much leaves option 1.

*Sidenote
It will be interesting to see what happens when Fleet Carriers are introduced - will explorers head home to grab an FC, or will they stay out in the black. I figure it depends on what the actually implementation is.

 

[marx]

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: I don’t agree with your interpretation of that data.

If it takes longer to determine that a system is “worth exploring,” then naturally the number of submissions to EDSM will decrease. If players are spending more time on planetary exploration than they did before, then naturally the number of submissions to EDSM will decrease. If players are spending time investigating “stellar phenomenon,” then naturally the number of submissions to EDSM will decrease.

There is so much more to do while exploring these days, which isn’t tracked by EDSM, that your conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the data we have access to.

Excellent, finally a better reasoned point has been made. However, you're forgetting one relevant part here, and I believe I mentioned this to you the last time too: the number of scans that people do in systems is also decreasing. Half of what it was at the beginning of Chapter Four, and less than half of the DW2 peaks. So it's not just that players are visiting less systems, but also that they are scanning less bodies in those systems.

In fact, a curious ratio might mean that they are even looking at the FSS bar less. You see, the monthly new ELW / new systems ratio used to move around the 0.5-0.56% range before the FSS, and 0.65-0.7% after it... until DW2 ended, at which point it crashed to 0.31% in two months. In June, it recovered to 0.43%, then in July, back down to 0.38%.
Why would players not be scanning ELWs? Likely because they are in too much of a rush to look at the FSS bar. That would in turn be because they are chain-boosting neutron stars. At least, that's the most likely explanation I can come up with why people would scan less ELWs than before.

Back to your point: Why would players spend more time on planetary exploration now though? The DSS pinpoints all locations, you no longer have to fly around eyeballing stuff. If anything, it would be significantly less time spent planetside.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Guardian Ruins and Thargoid Sites are the only real exploration activities in Elite - they are not necessary to playing Elite but any normal player greeted with such a sight for the first time would undoubtedly want to get a closer look. This is exploration.

drinks

Never seen a Thargoid site, and only found one Guardian ruin, but over got over 1.1M LY traveled.
I guess I'm not an explorer.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

In fact, a curious ratio might mean that they are even looking at the FSS bar less. You see, the monthly new ELW / new systems ratio used to move around the 0.5-0.56% range before the FSS, and 0.65-0.7% after it... until DW2 ended, at which point it crashed to 0.31% in two months. In June, it recovered to 0.43%, then in July, back down to 0.38%.
Why would players not be scanning ELWs? Likely because they are in too much of a rush to look at the FSS bar. That would in turn be because they are chain-boosting neutron stars. At least, that's the most likely explanation I can come up with why people would scan less ELWs than before.

Possible alternative explanations:

From a quick scan of the FSS it's easy to mistake an ELW for a Rocky Ice World (I think it's that one) since they're very close on the spectrum. WWs and AWs are much more obvious, so it would be possible to check the metrics of those to confirm whether people are simply missing ELWs.

Those people who are scanning systems are more likely to scan the entire system, rather than cherry-pick the ELWs since the FSS shifts the ratio of time spent scanning a whole system to time spent cherrypicking ELWs significantly towards 'scan everything' in comparison to the ADS.

Back to your point: Why would players spend more time on planetary exploration now though? The DSS pinpoints all locations, you no longer have to fly around eyeballing stuff. If anything, it would be significantly less time spent planetside.

Players who used to look for volcanic/biological sites prior to 3.3 will be spending much less time doing so.
However, most players didn't bother to look for them (because it took forever). Those players will now be spending much MORE time doing planetary exploration.

Now this is where it gets tricky:
Most of the time spent post-3.3 on planetary exploration comes from flying to the planet - mapping itself is quick and the results are immediate - which pre-3.3 had to be done in order to even find out if there was volcanism. So is the overall time spent on a planetary exploration now (scanning + flying + mapping + landing) significantly greater than the old way? And are people flying to more or less bodies than they were before?
Told you it was tricky.

 

[marx]

I'd argue otherwise, the FSS is an excellent when it comes to scanning, before 3.3 you had to travel to a body to scan it, the FSS makes it much easier to scan as you can just sit and play around on analysis mode unveiling all objects, this would increase the number of submissions to EDSM but that's not what we see.

Correction: the number of bodies submitted to EDSM did increase with the FSS, that should be no surprise. However, after the time it peaked during DW2, that has gone below what it used to be. It's not comparable to what it was before Chapter Four though, since it takes much less time to scan a body now.
However, number of systems visited is still comparable.

Let me put the decrease in bodies in perspective. The peak was in 12,879,021 new bodies uploaded in 2019 February. Now in 2019 July, less than a third of those have been uploaded: 4,168,826.

Meanwhile, with systems, the Return and Beyond Chapter One saw 1.2-1.4 million new systems per month. (2017 Oct - 2018 March.) That jumped up to 2 million in 2019 January, held almost exactly that for three months until 2019 April, then 1.89 million in May, 1.28 million in June, 1.11 million in July. Unfortunately, all the gains from DW2 and the earlier update are gone, and we're back below where we were.

 

[marx]

From a quick scan of the FSS it's easy to mistake an ELW for a Rocky Ice World (I think it's that one) since they're very close on the spectrum. WWs and AWs are much more obvious, so it would be possible to check the metrics of those to confirm whether people are simply missing ELWs.

Good thinking. I actually checked the numbers of AWs too, just didn't publish that anywhere yet. It follows the same pattern, but it dropped from 1.2% to 0.71%... but not in lockstep with the drop in ELWs, rather, two months later.

Didn't look at WW numbers yet though, as there's many more of those, so compiling the data would take more time - and I did ELWs and AWs for other analysis anyway. I didn't think about positions on the FSS bar, mind.

 

[Sunyavadin]

It will be interesting to see what happens when Fleet Carriers are introduced - will explorers head home to grab an FC, or will they stay out in the black. I figure it depends on what the actually implementation is.

I expect a potential spike as exploration focused squadrons get their carriers and begin moving them out to places where they can serve as waystations, then a similar dropoff as the novelty wears off from that too.

 

[Northpin]

Maybe the number is decreasing because you guys already discovered all the cool stuff already?
I mean the edge of the galaxy, the cool nebulas and the likes.
Everyone seems to be attracted to circle the galaxy on the outer edge, but i don't think anyone will be interested to spend a year exploring a random and anonymous patch of stars in a 100ly cube near the center of the galaxy...

 

[Shinji Ikari]

Correction: the number of bodies submitted to EDSM did increase with the FSS, that should be no surprise. However, after the time it peaked during DW2, that has gone below what it used to be. It's not comparable to what it was before Chapter Four though, since it takes much less time to scan a body now.
However, number of systems visited is still comparable.

Perhaps people just do what I did briefly after the FSS released, you just don't use it until you reach a POI or a destination, or they cherry-pick more than before though I have my doubts on that given other stats you mentioned, particularly on ELWs.

Meanwhile, with systems, the Return and Beyond Chapter One saw 1.2-1.4 million new systems per month. (2017 Oct - 2018 March.) That jumped up to 2 million in 2019 January, held almost exactly that for three months until 2019 April, then 1.89 million in May, 1.28 million in June, 1.11 million in July. Unfortunately, all the gains from DW2 and the earlier update are gone, and we're back below where we were.

It'd be interesting to see if the decrease was comparable to pre 3.3 levels, a decay in activity is somewhat expected between long periods of updates*.

*Relevant updates, minor bug fixes hardly attract more players.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Good thinking. I actually checked the numbers of AWs too, just didn't publish that anywhere yet. It follows the same pattern, but it dropped from 1.2% to 0.71%... but not in lockstep with the drop in ELWs, rather, two months later.

Didn't look at WW numbers yet though, as there's many more of those, so compiling the data would take more time - and I did ELWs and AWs for other analysis anyway.

Being 2 months out of sync is odd. I really want to see the WW numbers

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Moving on from opinions and people disrespecting and covertly insulting the developers by saying they couldn't do better than the FSS, let's take a look at some data.

First, the volunteer moderator above and some others have overstated travel times by saying they are "spending an hour or more flying to planets". See, the thing is, we have plenty of data to refute that claim. Incredibly few of the procedurally generated bodies are over a distance of 700k ls: on EDSM, it's only 1,672 bodies out of 113,924,466. So what's the highest travel time then, for that extremely rare scenario? See here: 15m 50s.
Or I can tell you the median distance for ELWs and AWs: around 1,100 and 1,600 ls respectively. Barely over one minute of flight in supercruise. You haven't spent hours in supercruise, only a couple of minutes at best.

Gotta stop you right here. Not Everyone uses EDSM. I don’t. I use very little outside the game. Coriolis.io if I want to share a ship build here. EDDB.io if I can’t remember where a specific station was. That’s it.

So yeah, nobody has ever spent flying hours in a system to unexplored planets. In fact, if Frontier wanted to shave off time spent from exploration, the biggest offender there, and the biggest complaint about exploration from new players, would be to cut down all the unnecessary time spent with JJJJJJJ and doing nothing except looking at the witchspace loading screen. Starting from the bubble, you have to spend at least half an hour doing nothing but jumping if you want to find any undiscovered systems that aren't class M or below. And why else do you think so many complain about Palin's 5,000 ly requirement? Because they don't enjoy all that time spent jumping, and also don't enjoy the FSS enough to offset that.

So yeah, plenty of us have. Just look at the folks who tracked down the Voyager probes before the FSS, the Cannon folks who tracked down Guardian Ruins, the list is as long as your argument is full of holes.

As for opinion polls and whatnot: we actually have better than that already. There is in-game data on how much people are exploring (CG numbers, squadron leaderboards and Codex activity, although the latter naturally slows down over time as more things are found), and even more detailed data on EDSM, which we know is statistically hugely representative of the whole. What do these all show? That people are exploring less and less, while player numbers are fairly stable. (Granted, we only have Steam Charts on the latter, but I don't see why other platforms would be dropping significantly while Steam holds its place. I might be wrong about this, of course. However, based on DW2's stats, PC users account for 80% anyway.)

Not everyone participated in DW2. I didn’t go. I left before they started and am barely 25% complete. I also have not sold any of the data gathered from thousands of system in the past 36 weeks, and I know for a fact I am not alone. There are pkenty if others out there right now with unsold data skewing the in-game data.
As for Steam Charts, they’re not worth wiping with. Plenty of players are non-Steam, some us us block Steam analytics.

Regardless of whether you personally like or dislike the FSS, the fact remains that people on the whole explore less. We don't know if it's due to less people exploring the same amount, the same amount of people exploring a considerably less amount, or less people exploring less, but things don't look good on this front. The Chapter Four launch brought in a big spike in exploration alongside a big spike in player numbers, and DW2's launch has brought in an even larger one while there wasn't a large increase in player numbers, and now after the largest drop in exploration after DW2 reached Beagle Point, we're back below the pre-FSS highs (of the Return and Beyond Chapter One), and it's still decreasing.
So yeah, that there is a problem... or is it really? I mean, for us, perhaps it is, but as far as we know, Frontier doesn't really mind player activity and numbers decreasing before the late 2020 expansion. And if player numbers aren't decreasing and only exploration is, I'm fairly sure they mind that even less.

Us who? And also keep DW2 in mind, as many of the participants make up a large portion of the Exploration community, and if they’re recently back from a long trek, it’s also very possible they actually want to do something else for a change. Then factor in those of us still “out there”, those of us who don’t use EDSM, and those of us just hoarding our data, and you’ll probably find some very different figures.

Also, before some people say they don't care about less people exploring because they personally explore more and/or there's more undiscovered stuff for them: bear in mind that Frontier have outright stated before that the less players use a feature, the less likely they are to work on it. And I think everybody here would like it if they worked more on exploration.

Oh, and let’s not forget about all those who have forgone all other activities in favor of mining void opals.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Gotta stop you right here. Not Everyone uses EDSM.

Not everyone is asked their opinion by Gallup, but they have a large enough sample size that they can predict voting patterns within reasonable tolerances. EDSM is a large sample size.

 

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

I’ve done more exploring since FSS. This is mainly due to the fact of POI’s. Previously I had no idea how people were finding these things (I’m a bit slow), since the FSS, this is much easier. I use no third party stuff to log any of it.

I appreciate this is one man’s take and someone out there has stopped exploring since FSS, thus cancelling my experience out in ‘the great count up’.