So, let's have a look at those, shall we?
There are needed Data items with download times as long as 90sec a piece. True, there are also many needed data items with needed download times as short as 5 sec, but that's not the ones that are an real issue.
Let's assume for just a moment that the average download needed for a crucial, read relevant vor engineering, data item is somewhere in the ballpark of 20sec.
A suit has 4 upgrade slots that need roughly 15 Data each.; Same for weapons.
We have 3 types of Suits. We have 2 Weapons per suit, 3 for the Dominator.
Now if someone wanted to upgrade all of their suits and all of their carried weapons with different loadouts on those, what would that mean?
[4slots x (3 + 2 + 2 + 3) x 15data] x 20sec = 12,000seconds
That's 200 minutes.
That's 3.333.... hours
Modding out our gear, not taking into account G-5-ing it, takes long enough as is with all the mat gathering and x-trading at bartenders and running missions and the likes. Forcing players to additionally spend over 3 hours of their gaming time with staring at a download bar while actively not playing the game, is nothing I'd call a reasonable designd decision.
I do get the fact that having a download thake some time to make it actually feel like a download comes from an immersion point of view, but given the level of data processing technology - hell we have real time sensor data conversion into sound in our suits, holographic displays, large scale data surveilance from the feds - the times should be cut down drastically.
Having a download finish in 2 seconds (across the board) would still give you the "feeling" that you downloaded something instead than just picking it up or pulling an USB stick, but it would cut the time players spend mandatorily staring at a wall - in other words wasting their time - to just 20minutes total in the above example.
TLDR: Cut the time needed for downloads down to 2sek across the board. Keep "download immersion", get rid of three hours of non-gameplay-time, spent staring at a dwonload bar. We have Windows update for that.
There are needed Data items with download times as long as 90sec a piece. True, there are also many needed data items with needed download times as short as 5 sec, but that's not the ones that are an real issue.
Let's assume for just a moment that the average download needed for a crucial, read relevant vor engineering, data item is somewhere in the ballpark of 20sec.
A suit has 4 upgrade slots that need roughly 15 Data each.; Same for weapons.
We have 3 types of Suits. We have 2 Weapons per suit, 3 for the Dominator.
Now if someone wanted to upgrade all of their suits and all of their carried weapons with different loadouts on those, what would that mean?
[4slots x (3 + 2 + 2 + 3) x 15data] x 20sec = 12,000seconds
That's 200 minutes.
That's 3.333.... hours
Modding out our gear, not taking into account G-5-ing it, takes long enough as is with all the mat gathering and x-trading at bartenders and running missions and the likes. Forcing players to additionally spend over 3 hours of their gaming time with staring at a download bar while actively not playing the game, is nothing I'd call a reasonable designd decision.
I do get the fact that having a download thake some time to make it actually feel like a download comes from an immersion point of view, but given the level of data processing technology - hell we have real time sensor data conversion into sound in our suits, holographic displays, large scale data surveilance from the feds - the times should be cut down drastically.
Having a download finish in 2 seconds (across the board) would still give you the "feeling" that you downloaded something instead than just picking it up or pulling an USB stick, but it would cut the time players spend mandatorily staring at a wall - in other words wasting their time - to just 20minutes total in the above example.
TLDR: Cut the time needed for downloads down to 2sek across the board. Keep "download immersion", get rid of three hours of non-gameplay-time, spent staring at a dwonload bar. We have Windows update for that.