TL;DR Removing the ADS or limiting its range would take away from existing gameplay and prevent explorers from managing their time effectively, which would make exploration less appealing as a profession. It is important to make the distinction between
scanning and
exploring:
scanning should be quick and easy to tell you what is, or is not, there;
exploration requires the effort to be most successful in finding out the details, in getting to (and returning from) new systems, in maintaining the ship and having some potential to deal with known and unknown challenges.
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When I first played this game in 1.0, I engaged in a mixture of activities and my exploration was done with a basic discovery scanner only for the first three weeks, after which I bought an intermediate discovery scanner for my Cobra Mk3 and it was another week or two before trading in my T6 got me the credits for an Advanced Discovery Scanner and a Detailed Surface Scanner. In those early days, exploration was harder and slower and often frustrating - at no time was it ever more fun than it was after getting the ADS. I never once wanted to go back to the days of using only the basic discovery scanner. The method of finding planets by parallax was required in every system visited - even if a system was just a single star, there was no way of knowing this without spending some time flying around in supercruise, repeatedly sounding the scanner to see if you found something. The system map was something I only used in inhabited systems - it was no use to me when exploring as I had to get so close to everything to reveal it with the discovery scanner that it was better to scan the new objects - even belt clusters - to avoid having to see *unexplored* on the contacts list and not knowing anything more about it. Back then, you could not select an object in the system map and have it targeted when you returned to the HUD. It was very easy to miss bodies with the basic discovery scanner and when I bought the intermediate scanner and later the ADS I often found that I had missed things. Many small icy planets simply cannot be seen visually until you are very close - sometimes just a few tens of light-seconds - and belt clusters are completely invisible. I made many long journeys out to distant secondary stars that I could tell were in the same system by their colour and very tiny movements - but I could not tell how far away they were or if they had planets. I had to make the journey to find out. It was very inefficient and I don't think I could go back to that way of operating. It was not exciting or fun, it was frustrating, which was why I chose to focus on trading for a while and did not undertake any kind of expedition - even out to the Pleiades - until I had both the ADS and a DSS.
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I am often puzzled that people think having an infinite range scanner 'takes away' from gameplay, when it adds so much. Here are some things that you get out of it that help to make the game more fun:
- Time management: you can tell immediately whether undertaking a more detailed examination of the system will be interesting or worthwhile.
- Completion: you can be certain when there are no other celestial bodies in the system. Without infinite range, you would never know that you had found all the celestial bodies.
- Excitement: what I most look forward to when jumping to a new system is a sense of facing the unknown, of not knowing what I might find and then having the ADS reveal the celestial bodies to tell me whether it is an interesting system with life-bearing worlds or spectacular ring systems or with planets or moons in close orbits. This excitement dies if you have to spend twenty minutes flying around the star honking the scanner to try and put the picture of the system together one planet and belt cluster at a time and looking for tiny movements amongst all the points of light to see if any shift against the background.
- Pacing: by giving players the ability to determine whether exploring the system will be fun or rewarding, it increases the pace of gameplay, allowing them to make an informed choice of when to move on to a new system as well as indicating where to go to find the interesting gameplay within a system.
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The main issue I see raised in relation to the ADS is one that says something like 'it makes exploring too easy'. What this viewpoint does not take into account, however, is the difference between
exploring and
scanning. The ADS makes
basic scanning quick and easy - which is a good thing, for the reasons I give above. It does not make
exploring easy. There are many challenges to
exploring, from outfitting a ship capable of making the journey, to the patience, perseverance and time management of spending the time in game to get where you want to go, to planning the journey to find out what your requirements will be. Even then, things can go wrong and some very good explorers have lost ships due to neutron star cones, repeated scrapes when landing on planets and even being attacked by hostile ships on the journey home. The ADS is a tool to help you find places of interest more quickly; it is not more fun to take an intermediate scanner and fly around systems looking for planets - that adds time and frustration at not knowing whether you have missed something interesting, no matter how much time you spend in a system (especially true for some systems with a single planet in a distant highly eccentric orbit). There is also a distinction between
exploring and
adventuring:
exploration has the purpose of discovery;
adventuring has the purpose of finding or doing something else, or looking for something specific. Exploration can certainly be an adventure and usually is on longer expeditions because you are not just discovering new objects and places of interest. Adventuring can have consequences based upon what you discover (or fail to) - look at the Formidine Rift: that was an adventure that many players became involved with that had some very profound consequences for the galaxy.
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The issue that I think Sandro and many others want to address is engagement in the gameplay processes. Simply pointing your ship at a body and waiting maybe 30 seconds until a scan has completed is one main area that is repeatedly highlighted as lacking in engagement. This requires addressing and enhancing, I should say
'building upon', the detailed scanner, not the advanced discovery scanner. The ADS needs to be reasonably quick to perform its function, as it rapidly becomes a source of frustration if you are waiting to find out if you can have fun in a location - this should be a problem that is removed from the DSS, not added to the ADS. One solution to this is to add capabilities or specialisations to the detailed surface scanner.
It is important to add to existing gameplay, not to take away what is there. For example, the DSS could have variants that specialise in highlighting the locations of different types of planetary features:
- Biological: reveals whether life exists on the surface of a world (or within the atmosphere) and provides an indication of where to go to find it, rather than having to eyeball it from almost point-blank range.
- Mineral: reveals the varying concentrations of different materials on the planet. Looking for polonium? Then head for this big crater here; Looking for zinc; that canyon over there has the best deposits.
- Geological: reveals locations with active volcanism, enabling the player to find geysers and magma vents quickly.
- Technological: reveals not only the location of bases but any ruins, wreck sites or abandoned settlements.
- Energetic: a repeatable scan that tells the player if there are currently active power signatures of any kind on the surface. This would pick up active settlements and ships in flight but might also give faint readings for locations that have recently seen activity, such as if a ship has recently landed and/or taken off, or a battle has taken place. It could be useful for tracking down a ship or surface vehicle, for both bounty hunters and pirates.
The advantage of these specialisations would be that they allow the player to find locations for interesting gameplay quickly. This is important for pacing of gameplay and to avoid frustrating activities, like collecting groups of players to eyeball large planets in the hope of finding something that might not even be there.
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As to the gameplay, and by implication the addition of an element of skill, involved in these new scanning processes it must be reasonably quick but also engaging, so as not to become frustrating or repetitive when done for the hundredth, or even one thousandth time. The best existing example of this kind of gameplay I have yet seen is a 'phase-matching' mini-game that has been used in Star Trek Online for mining dilithium (I've no idea if it's still in that game - I've not played it once since ED came out!). Another good example was from an old 8-bit game called Quazatron that involved configuring the pathway to an electrical circuit - under time pressure. There are probably many other examples of potentially engaging activities from the 8-bit era, as games then had to be simple and engaging and yet also be addictive enough to compete against many other games built upon the same design principles.
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I think it might be an opportunity, especially with the introduction of new scanner types, to be able to introduce the concept of repeatable scans. This would be essential to having exploration missions and location-specific exploration community goals, as it would allow anyone to travel to a system or region and make scans that provide data that can be returned, regardless of whether they have visited and scanned an area before. If you had, e.g., a CG to establish the flight paths of Thargoid ships within a system, then players could go to that system and scan the planets and moons with Energetic-type scanners, revealing hotspots of activity that might be time-dependent. You could have local factions giving out missions to hunt down a ship thought to be in a location at a certain time and the player needs the right kind of scanner to find it quickly before it can finish repairs, attack a settlement or escape. Perhaps a settlement is building weapons illegally and the player needs to make a scan to find where they are being stored, before they are shipped out.
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I am glad that exploration is being looked at but I would strongly urge the design team at Frontier to build upon what is there and not to take away any existing capabilities. I would still like to be able to go exploring in the same way with the same equipment that I have today in 3.x (or whatever the designation of things will be post-2.4). What I would hope for is that building upon exploration would give me additional options in what to do and also in what my objectives might be: it could allow for specialised roles within exploration. Some players might want to go searching for signs of life in deep space and take the equipment they need to do that role well, whilst others might be more interested in archaeology; others might want to look for signs of Thargoid activity or another active civilisation and some might want to find valuable resources for mining. Even a fully-kitted Anaconda would not be able to do all of these, perhaps two - most small-medium ships would probably only be able to do one (unless there are specialised module slots for scanners, to help make some ships like the DBS able to do a little specialised work). Eventually (I believe, though no idea if 3.x or not) there will be atmospheric planets from gas giants to Mars and Titan-like bodies, all with different and interesting features to find. I hope that finding them will be exciting and engaging and that there will be fun things to do when landing on them or flying through their atmospheres. I don't want to be spending time just looking for planets by parallax whilst not knowing if there are even any planets in the system - so please keep the ADS as it is and build upon the other aspects of gameplay. When you have done this, then compared to what all the different types of scan can tell you, the results the ADS gives you will seem so small and insignificant that I suspect very few people will think it overpowered.
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