It is super simple, really. If you want to scan a thing, you point the scanner at the thing and hit the scan button. That is all there is to it. It boggles the mind when you think about it: mining got way more complex, and all the miners are happily mining. Combat pilots have all kinds of binds for ECM, chaff, heat sinks, SCB etc etc. "Yay!", they say, and learn how to play.
And then you have the explorers bumbling around in total frustration at literally every single thing.
Yeah I'd hazard a wild guess that's because the sole reference we have is a couple of streams which happened whilst I was at work, meaning I get to fast scan through hour-long youtube videos which are 95% Ed and co prattling on about unrelated things just to try to catch the moment where they say 'and now we use the thingy in whatsit mode to err no wait that's... oh yes, there we go' all without any kind of reference whatsoever to what keys they're pressing, or indeed to what what keys they bound the controls that we can't see in the keybinding screen which they never show us. It's hardly instructive.
Or alternately, wade through endless forum threads which invariably involve people, all of whom who are genuinely trying to help, providing information which is directly in contradiction to information which other people who are genuinely trying to help posted three posts earlier.
That's without even getting into the fact that exploration in general has basically been crapped on for me in this update with the FSS (and let's not get into a round of whether that's right or wrong and whether I'm a true explorer, a traveler or whatever, it's a subjective thing and that's my opinion of it)
As I said the other day, I was parked up about 10K outside the bubble on update day and so far I haven't even felt motivated to log in because unless I want to spend most of my game time farting around playing match the dots in an interface rather than flying a ship, I'm only ever going to see a system map again in the bubble or other previously explored systems. The prospect of spending the bulk of my time ing around twiddling knobs and pointlessly switching between display modes whose sole function seems to be to prevent you from being able to use some controls in each of them, only to end up with about six fully mapped systems full of tedious snowballs for an hour of gameplay leaves me incredulous to be honest, it seems the vast majority of players have a very different concept of what comprises satisfying gameplay than I do.
I feel duty bound to point out that we're still very much in the 'novelty' phase of this and a lot of the positive feedback I see is from people who are saying 'wow I never went exploring before this update but...' whilst I've seen comments from people who have previously done significant amounts of exploring since the game went live who are now pretty much where I am with it. It's a fantastic change for those players who would habitually scan everything in every system they visited, sadly I was never one of those. I'll be very surprised if the enthusiasm for it is as high in a couple of months though.
For those focused on the micro aspects such as scanning a single planet to find POIs etc, yeah it's clearly an improvement. I'm still seeing nothing that required the other changes to support that though, frankly they could have added all the planetary probing etc without needing to also add all this other pointless b.s. That's really all I wanted from an exploration update; some more stuff to find and some way to make finding stuff on planets possible without turning your graphics settings down and flying over one for hours. It's about as typical an FDev move as I can imagine that we got that, but made the process of getting to a point where you were ready to do it about 10x as convoluted in the process.
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