Cut out all the time wasting

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

All these continual requests for faster, quicker, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie - a bit of searching and they would see the reasons why things are as they are and why their wheedling will be in vain.

*cough* FSS *cough*

 

[Dangerous_Dave]

Well, I didn't expect a positive response here, since there is obviously going to be a selection bias issue amongst the regs on these forums i.e. most of the regs are going to be long-term players of the game and therefore people who enjoy the mechanics as they currently are. But I would warn Frontier that this is not representative of the gaming community as a whole, and that you are definitely putting off/have put a lot of people off with this game mechanic.

 

[Para Handy]

*cough* FSS *cough*

Yes - you have been told many times the reason why the FSS was implemented and that F D appreciated that some people would get their nose out of joint but basically said "Parmesan" (or some other hard cheese).

You really don't need to moan about it in yet another thread.

 

[Captain Thea Kreutzer]

Why play games if you dont want to waste time :S

 

[VR CMDR Novindus]

I sympathise with the OP, but I don't agree with the framing of the problem.

As space is big, it's natural that it should feel that way in a game that attempts to simulate the entire galaxy.
What I think the real issue is, is that in attempting to create this feeling of vastness, mechanics have been implemented that either introduce repetitive actions in close sequence, such as Hyperspace Jump=>Honk=>Fuel Scoop=>Hyperspace Jump, or else long stretches of literally staring into space as you head to a planet hundreds of thousands of light years away in what feels like a crawling simulator, all while doing practically nothing. That's difficult to justify in a game, even one that's supposed to be to some degree a simulation. Yes, I know you can choose not to go to such distant planets, and most people tend to avoid them, but then what is the point of having them be so extremely inconvenient to reach? The goal cannot be to create content that you hope is utilised as little as possible.

I've made a fleshed-out suggestion previously about providing a limited ability to target bodies in a system through an alternate form of inter-system travel (slipstream) that has the trade-off of being measurably slower than hyperspace jumps (among other restrictions), and separately another suggestion about the ability to hire some colourful NPC crew to liven up your ship for those longer treks (which space legs would go hand-in-hand with). But I think more is needed in the realm of onboard activities, and by that I don't mean some little mini-games on your ship's computer, though having one or two wouldn't hurt.

I'm thinking more along the lines of a Galactic Directory (GalDir) that accomplishes some of what Inara and EDDB do, to a degree, and that allows you to make plans for your next mission/expedition/crime while your ship is moving on course.

Besides the usual stats of economy/government/allegiance/security/factions/state/services/available modules/etc, looking up a system, station, or body in GalDir would also give you a local summary of:
-What the system is known for (if anything) with any relevant lore included
-Recent events
-Community goals
-Powerplay balance
-Commanders with high influence there
-Highly wanted commanders who frequent the system
-The most common activities (e.g. mining, bounty hunting, etc)

Also, potentially other information that the game designers could tie into existing mechanics, or base new ones off.
For example, you might find special requests for materials, bounties, exploration data, or other types of data from a specific system or station by searching the directory.
So not a replacement for the local Mission Boards where factions advertise, but rather station or system-wide concerns.

Also, an in-game place to type in notes for your-eyes-only would be useful for planning, so if some time passes before you log back in, you can see what you were planning last time you played.

I'm sure a Galactic Directory can be leveraged for a good deal more than what I've mentioned here, and productively occupy a pilot or crew member's downtime on the ship, as well as inspire players to try more in the game, and even possibly provide a clearer overview of the impacts on the BGS in-game.

 

[rootsrat]

I made a suggestion that basically means systems have multiple nav beacons, and you can jump from one beacon to another, but only from normal space within a few km of a beacon.
Basically a "medium wake", charge time is moderate (faster than high wake, slower than low), low wake mass lock applies, uses more fuel than supercruising the same distance.

Nav beacons can be mostly placed procedurally, but FD can make it so Hutton Orbital and whatnot are safe.
(Using the lore that Hutton truckers kept stealing the nav beacon, so governments have given up placing them. Lol)

Then you have a choice of
Jump in -> supercruise* (for however long) -> destination
-Or-
Jump in -> short SC to Nav* -> drop in -> charge for medium wake* -> jump -> charge for supercruise* -> supercruise* -> destination.

* = Risk of attack.

So supercruise only has a risk of attack during the beginning and end as you slow down. So it's safer, but takes longer.
My suggestion has way more risks, but does cut your trip down significantly.

Really good idea imo. Compromised nav beacons could be at risk of misjump.

New mechanics - hack the navbeacon and disable it temporarily (pirates ambush type of thing).

But also - make fuel expensive again, so the "uses more fuel than supercruising the same distance" actually matters.

 

[Azmuth Divarchchron]

1. If you are clumsily trying to land on the landing pad. Learn to pilot your ship better because it takes 10-20 seconds to manually dock after dropping out of supercruise for both small and large stations. Regardless of the ship you are flying.

2. The ship's Nav AI requires the tachyon signature of a star to get a system lock.
As planets do not generate tachyons it is impossible for it to preform a hyperspace jump to a planet. Once it is in a system the Nav AI's uses tachyon pulses scan and keep track of system objects by remembering wavelength data from scans on astronomical bodies.

3. The FSD's speed is only partially affected by the Ship's AI. The mass of local astronomical objects affect the preformance of the FSD due to quantum friction between gravity and the FSD itself. The FSD has to work harder to warp space that is already warped by gravity which cause quantum friction. The same as an airplane overcoming wind resistance. The ship has to account for quantum friction near astronomical bodies because it affects how much the FSD can accelerate or decelerate within a certain time and a certian distance from an astronomical body, hence the "slow down" warning messages as it is trying to alert you that FSD efficiency will drop near the planet and it will not be able to accelerate or decelerate as quickly as it would in deep space.
The FSD warping space is also why you drop to sub-light speeds if it fails, because your ship's internal kenetic momentum is no more than a few hundred meters per second, The FSD "Shifts" the quantum density of your ship relative to the rest of the universe so it can travel at faster than light speeds, because normal matter is incapable of traveling faster than light otherwise. The physics of the FSD are far from skewed.

4. The FSD's supercruise mode takes you tens to thousands of light seconds in distance between planets and is capable of getting you to most places within a star system in less than 5 minutes.
Which is more than you can say your car does for you. Especially considering it would take you more than a year to cross the solar system going at speeds of 300m/s

5. Pirates in the game are easily avoidable, use a heatsink or chaff launcher if they pull you and plan a hyperspace destination to get away instantly.
Otherwise you can avoid being interdicted by taking a curved route to you destination instead of a straight one, then the pirate cannot interdict you as it will fly past you when you turn to face your destination by taking a curved path. Then you can just keep making loops till you are close enough to drop. Or you can learn to evade interdictions.

The FSD is fine the way it is now

 

[Sysmon]

I've seen many people complaining that they seem to spend half their time slowly cruising across a solar system to reach a port, and then clumsily trying to land their ship on a landing pad like they've done a hundred times before. The usual response to this is "well it's a space trading sim - space is big and empty so you should expect to spend a lot of your time not doing very much".

I'd like to put it to the community that this is a completely bogus response. This game is not remotely realistic either on the issues of space travel or of trading. It completely laughs in the face of physics, the myriad risks and challenges involved in space travel, is frequently inconsistent with its own skewed physics concepts, not to mention the extremely superficial treatment of trading, which more or less entirely glosses over the bureaucracy and other red tape that is actually involved with trading.

But that's ok. It's ok because what Elite Dangerous is, no matter how much anyone would like to pretend about it, is a game. Considering this, it seems very unjustifiable to insert gameplay mechanics that have players spending half their time doing nothing. It is just a waste of the player's valuable playing time.

With that said, I'd like to propose a couple of simple fixes: The frame shift drive is clearly a very accurate piece of equipment, since is it reliably able to deliver the player to a position just a short distance from the system star (something that could result in catastrophe if slightly miscalculated). So why not let us select a location within the solar system to frame shift to (a planet or a space station). When you frame shift, you pop out 500-1000 light seconds from the place you're trying to go, and then have half a minute to a minute of cruising to get there, instead of the usual 3-10 minutes we currently have. 30-60s is plenty of time to be interdicted by pirates and get all those gameplay mechanics going. If you don't select anywhere within the system, you will just frame shift to the star as before.

Then for that repetitive docking [and this may be something that already exists in the game or a mod for all I know], it would be nice if you could buy an automatic pilot system that just lands your ship in about 30 seconds without you having to do it for the umpteenth time.

I don't think you would lose anything from the game with these adjustments, but you would stop wasting huge amounts of player's time and make the game much more accessible.

You may think that this post is an unfounded rant of epic proportions, but please reflect that I wrote all of this, proofread it and reconsidered my arguments, checked my spelling and so on, all while my ship was slowly cruising into a space port.

I think we should ask FD to have us drop out of supercruise at least 2 ls from stations then, just like when we drop out of hyperspace near the stars. Then we can use the docking computer to autopilot the remainder of the trip. Pirates everywhere will thank them!

S

 

[varonica]

You can dismiss it if you like, but it is highly likely that a great many people have been put off this game because of this one issue alone. That may not be a problem to you, but it should be a problem to Frontier, since their game has been less successful/profitable as a result. As per the above, I don't see a good reason to keep it this way. It is an arbitrary gameplay mechanic that has a very negative effect on the gameplay.

Let's put this in perspective. People buy a paritcular game because they like that game, they like how it works, they enjoy playing it. Now I have played a lot of games, some paid, some free,and some I didn't like particular mechanics or ways it did things, if I didn't like it I didn't come on to a forum to demand changes. For instance before buying and playing ED I looked at Eve Online, SC and NMS, and the reason I purchased ED was because of the galactic simulation and the opportunity to explore other solar system in a realistic way. Not liking a game or a particular mechanic is always going to be an issue in any game, but demanding it be changed or removed entirely due to the fact it may put a few players off is nonsensical because where do you stop?

We have demands for auto-pilot, mini-jumps, auto-throttle, wormholes/star gates, it gets to a point where the game is no longer the same game most players invested time and money in, the game that most players want and the game most players will continue to play. Changing the game to attract a "few" players while at the same time destroying the game for the existing player base would be madness indeed. If it's that big a problem for you then simply stop playing, I have done so for quite a few games, it's alright to not like a game, it's not alright to demand a game be changed to suit yourself regardless of what the existing player base thinks.

 

[Para Handy]

Let's put this in perspective. People buy a paritcular game because they like that game, they like how it works, they enjoy playing it. Now I have played a lot of games, some paid, some free,and some I didn't like particular mechanics or ways it did things, if I didn't like it I didn't come on to a forum to demand changes. For instance before buying and playing ED I looked at Eve Online, SC and NMS, and the reason I purchased ED was because of the galactic simulation and the opportunity to explore other solar system in a realistic way. Not liking a game or a particular mechanic is always going to be an issue in any game, but demanding it be changed or removed entirely due to the fact it may put a few players off is nonsensical because where do you stop?

We have demands for auto-pilot, mini-jumps, auto-throttle, wormholes/star gates, it gets to a point where the game is no longer the same game most players invested time and money in, the game that most players want and the game most players will continue to play. Changing the game to attract a "few" players while at the same time destroying the game for the existing player base would be madness indeed. If it's that big a problem for you then simply stop playing, I have done so for quite a few games, it's alright to not like a game, it's not alright to demand a game be changed to suit yourself regardless of what the existing player base thinks.

Quite correct.