Horizons Input please - POI spawns on planets

[Souvarine]

Hello community

I need your input please. I'm told that this topic has received attention on this forum already, so apologies to those who think it's put to bed. I can't see a similar thread in recent weeks so I thought I'd bring it up anew.

I'm exploring, currently about 26,000 light years from human space. I love exploring because of the sense of visiting places never before seen, of being a pioneer. In this trip I've landed on two planets. On the first, at 23,000 light years from Sol, I hopped in my SRV and sped off into the unknown. Within five minutes my wave scanner started pinging - and guided me to a crashed nav beacon.

23,000 light years is a totally different part of the galaxy to human space. There is no plausible reason for this to be there.

The second planet I visited was 25,000 light years from human space, in a system the System Map told me had never been discovered before. Again, within five minutes my wave scanner started pinging and guided me to... a crashed ship with two occupied escape pods and a canister of narcotics.

Poof, there goes the sense of being a pioneer, of boldly going where nobody has ever gone. It was like venturing deep into unexplored, virgin Amazonian rainforest and travelling for days without seeing another soul, only to stumble across a burnt out Vauxhall Nova.

There are over 400 billion systems in the galaxy, which means the number of landable planets will be into the trillions. There is absolutely no chance that you'd find human detritus within five minutes of landing on every planet you see on the other side of the galaxy.

I appreciate the list of development priorities is long, so what I'd like to do is gauge the community's feelings on this. Personally, the sense of what is means to be an explorer - venturing for weeks into the unknown and visiting systems never before visited - is ruined when you stumble across the space equivalent of a discarded fridge on every planet you see. I would like to see the spawn chance for anything of human origin drop to near zero as soon as you get beyond 1,000 light years from Sol.

If you agree that this should be changed, could you please comment below? What I'd like to do is see whether there is broad agreement on this, and if so, highlight this to the dev team.

Many thanks in advance!

Tom

 

[Blackcompany]

This needs fixed. Immediately. I am exploring near the Omega and Eagle nebulas now and I wont even land on planets for more than screen shots, as it chances completely wrecking my immersion in the game world.

The system is broken. Its a foundational mechanic for the entire second season of content and they released in a broken state. Its frankly unbelievable that this could or would happen. It needs fixed, along with the mission system. Forget multi crew and all that useless fluff; fix the core of the game first and then worry about tacked on, exciting-for-5-minutes mechanics like that.

 

[Pville_Piper]

Darn smugglers any how!

 

[Brandon31]

Yes I agree it needs changing. My expectation that it ever will is sadly not high - ED is taking a very "gamey" direction in my view, and this is merely another aspect of this fact.

 

[Tanith Low]

Not the first time this has been raised but it's worth re-iterating. As it stands Exploration is already one of the most under loved professions by FD and Horizons should have addressed this not made it worse.

Thing is it's not an especially challenging fix. In the RNG that rolls for a POI add a section that dramatically reduces the chance of finding man made POI's outside of the bubble. You already don't find installations (mining etc) so this is clearly something they have already got in code somewhere.

It would be nice to stil very VERY rarely find crashed explorers, or maybe even derelicts. Fully intact just run out of fuel. But at the moment every man and hos bloody monkey has been to every planet you land on. That's not right.

 

[avow555]

Couldn't agree more OP, this is really sloppy work by FD allowing this to happen with POI on planets so far out.
The whole POI and what can be found needs a serious look at anyway.

 

[Blackcompany]

-All bases, wrecks and downed pilots (aka, Major POI) should be persistent and publicly visible.

-Bases should never expire. Ever.

-Wreckage and downed pilots should expire as soon as they are cleaned up or after a set number of hours.

-Rocks (minor POI) should remain RNG

-ALL Major POI should be revealed by scanning the planet.

-Normal scan reveals the location of all major POI inside a 10km radius. No further information.

-Detailed Surface Scan reveals all major POI to within a 5km radius. Also reveals the type of each POI.

-Make rescuing downed pilots a standing, "always on" job at every large (non-outpost) station not controlled by a pirate/crime faction. Just dock, choose "Rescue Service" from Station Services and turn in all rescue pods you have collected for a reward per pod. This could even up Rescue Services as an in game role playing opportunity.


As it exists now, planetary exploration is far too dependent on RNG for its foundation. This is capable of ruining immersion as well as wasting a player's time. Two very common results of the activity, as a matter of fact.

Also of import: The SRV is not terrible exciting. To date the two most exciting endeavors involving the vehicle are Tag and Base Jumping - neither of which have anything to do with its intended role in the Universe. Very telling fact, that. Forcing players to continually drive about looking for interesting things and finding only rocks, will sour them on the experience.

Revealing Major POI from space will still require use of the SRV. You still need to scan down the exact location using your SRV scanner. Scanning just reveals the Major POI in a rough area and maybe offers some idea of what to expect, in order to allow players a CHOICE about whether the SRV time is worthwhile.

 

[Gedemon]

Hello community

I need your input please. I'm told that this topic has received attention on this forum already, so apologies to those who think it's put to bed. I can't see a similar thread in recent weeks so I thought I'd bring it up anew.

I'm exploring, currently about 26,000 light years from human space. I love exploring because of the sense of visiting places never before seen, of being a pioneer. In this trip I've landed on two planets. On the first, at 23,000 light years from Sol, I hopped in my SRV and sped off into the unknown. Within five minutes my wave scanner started pinging - and guided me to a crashed nav beacon.

23,000 light years is a totally different part of the galaxy to human space. There is no plausible reason for this to be there.

The second planet I visited was 25,000 light years from human space, in a system the System Map told me had never been discovered before. Again, within five minutes my wave scanner started pinging and guided me to... a crashed ship with two occupied escape pods and a canister of narcotics.

Poof, there goes the sense of being a pioneer, of boldly going where nobody has ever gone. It was like venturing deep into unexplored, virgin Amazonian rainforest and travelling for days without seeing another soul, only to stumble across a burnt out Vauxhall Nova.

There are over 400 billion systems in the galaxy, which means the number of landable planets will be into the trillions. There is absolutely no chance that you'd find human detritus within five minutes of landing on every planet you see on the other side of the galaxy.

I appreciate the list of development priorities is long, so what I'd like to do is gauge the community's feelings on this. Personally, the sense of what is means to be an explorer - venturing for weeks into the unknown and visiting systems never before visited - is ruined when you stumble across the space equivalent of a discarded fridge on every planet you see. I would like to see the spawn chance for anything of human origin drop to near zero as soon as you get beyond 1,000 light years from Sol.

If you agree that this should be changed, could you please comment below? What I'd like to do is see whether there is broad agreement on this, and if so, highlight this to the dev team.

Many thanks in advance!

Tom

We've told them this was not good since day one of the beta.

And they've noted that, up to a point, with every patch they've reduced the frequency of some types of POI with distance, but for some unknown reasons they've decided that there must be POIs on every planet in the galaxy...

And not just one, ho noooo, hundreds of POIs per planet !

I can usually see 2 or 3 at once at max sensor range (at 20,000 LY from the bubble), and if you had a bit of spare time, you could collect more tea than what have been traded by the British Empire in it's whole history on any small icy planet orbiting a red dwarf on the other side of the galaxy... uncontrolled RNG...

 

[Blackcompany]

We've told them this was not good since day one of the beta.

And they've noted that, up to a point, with every patch they've reduced the frequency of some types of POI with distance, but for some unknown reasons they've decided that there must be POIs on every planet in the galaxy...

And not just one, ho noooo, hundreds of POIs per planet !

I can usually see 2 or 3 at once at max sensor range (at 20,000 LY from the bubble), and if you had a bit of spare time, you could collect more tea than what have been traded by the British Empire in it's whole history on any small icy planet orbiting a red dwarf on the other side of the galaxy... uncontrolled RNG...

It came to me how this happened: A bunch of engineers sat down, plugged in numbers and tested. The numbers look good. The tests worked. They added the feature into the game.

Ideas such as varying the loot (its all Tea), spacing out the POI across the planets, making them visible from space, adjusting frequency or basing spawns on locations inside or outside the bubble...never even occurred to them. Engineers plugged in numbers, they worked and it was called a feature.

Which resulted in what we have now: Perhaps the least compelling implementation of an Exploration mechanic ever seen in video gaming. Because none of the people who worked on it was an actual game designer.

 

[Rardain]

I am definitely with you on this OP. For those of you that have seen my exploration thread you will know I am off exploring for a whole year so I am not due to head back into habitable space till December and this kind of problem is irritating to say the least. Unfortunately I also came across SRV wreckage and cargo canisters and a downed Nav beacon back in January. I make it a point not to investigate any signals at the top of the SRV scanner now.

The fact that every planet I land on is pretty much the same with only a difference in the severity of the terrain is another problem - there needs to be a greater range of 'anomalies' occurring on planetoids to make them interesting, not to mention a change of colouration - off-white and grey is very dull!

 

[Pville_Piper]

It came to me how this happened: A bunch of engineers sat down, plugged in numbers and tested. The numbers look good. The tests worked. They added the feature into the game.

You keep saying that they are engineers. I don't know if that is true, I have never looked into their background, but it does make sense. In the nearly 30 years I have spent a technician and controls designer travelling the North America installing/servicing/upgrading automated equipment I've found that a very large potion of engineers are reasonably removed from the end user and have no clue as to how the end user uses the systems on a day to day basis and will fight tooth and nail to prevent you from trying to make the system more user friendly. It wasn't designed to do that... They should do it this way... are common themes. So they make all these rules to do things that you have to remember instead of focusing on how the average operator will approach things and work from that perspective. Hmmmmnnn.... Does this sound familiar?
No game is ever perfect... Not everyones opinion is correct or correct for the game. but the OP's point is very valid... One of the big reasons that many people bought this game was to explore and find interesting things, be the first to find a planet or a feature on that planet "to go where no man has gone before".... So much for that...

 

[Fendalton]

I believe it's currently the way it is, because they don't have a way to stop them spawning on planets.

If they somehow confirmed POI spawn to certain nebula around the Human Space, this would work. But hey, 400,000,000,000 stars, that's a lot of Admin work (Unless you Deny all and Allow certain areas of space)

 

[Souvarine]

Blackcompany, I think your suggestions are really good. We should definitely be able to clock major points of interest from low orbit at least, and the rescue mechanic is a really good idea. Right now my only options for what to do with these escape pods is to abandon them or sell them into slavery!

I'm now on a rocky planet 2,700 light years directly above the core, as far above the galaxy as I can get. It's an undiscovered system. What have I just stumbled across? A canister of tea and a canister of battle weapons.

It's telling that several people on this thread no longer even investigate the top band POIs because of this.

What's the best way to lobby FD to change this with the 2.1 update?

 

[DCLXVI your God]

I have also stopped to check out POI's altogether, unless I stumble across one while out driving.
Last one i bothered to look at was coffee and personal weapons; in the California Nebula.
And I find it just weird and even worse, that we can't see all things from the ship.

But then again; it is 3300 and we would not be the first to try to explore the Galaxy.
So that there is stuff lying around maybe just ain't that strange, even far off?

 

[Deleted member 38366]

I still hope that the spawns get reworked in V2.1...

Seeing this stuff everywhere (even where only max. Range Asp/Anaconda Explorers can travel using Lvl3 FSD Boosts) completely killed Planetary Exploration for me.

Nothing beats landing on an untagged Planet in an untagged System that required a 75LY jump - only to find tons of Installations cooking Tea, Mining, unlimited amounts of Cargo, countless crashsites etc...
I really hate that.

Ironically, we now have exactly the same issues with POI that we had with NPC spawns or USS back in V1.0...
Location awareness, location awareness, location awareness.... I can only repeat it so often before I get numb to it.

For the time being, I entirely ignore anything that looks like a POI. Be it in the Ship or in the SRV.

 

[Mitore]

Lesson learned here: don't do drugs and hyperspace, makes you do crazy things!

 

[Al-pocalypse]

Aye, I can see finding human detritus everywhere spoiling the immersion.

However, I don't agree with zero encounters either. I think it would be interesting if they were very rare (ie. 1/10 000) once you are something like 1000ly from Sol or more. That way, when you do find something it does have significance, it could well be that you've stumbled across another explorer who has crashed or the secret base of a smuggling racket.

 

[telperion]

It came to me how this happened: A bunch of engineers sat down, plugged in numbers and tested. The numbers look good. The tests worked. They added the feature into the game.

Ideas such as varying the loot (its all Tea), spacing out the POI across the planets, making them visible from space, adjusting frequency or basing spawns on locations inside or outside the bubble...never even occurred to them. Engineers plugged in numbers, they worked and it was called a feature.

Which resulted in what we have now: Perhaps the least compelling implementation of an Exploration mechanic ever seen in video gaming. Because none of the people who worked on it was an actual game designer.

Interesting assertion. It does seem like this behaviour is about right for most of their releases.

If they do employ game designers they should either be replaced or listened to, depending on the reason for an almost entire lack of game design in most added features.

It's impossible to state the reasons for the lack of thought put into these features. It could be that the developers don't listen to the game designers or the game designers aren't any good or there aren't any game designers or they get most of the way through the design process and then just go "fudge it, can't be bothered with the rest" or they have too tight a development path and not enough developers so never actually finish anything. Due to the fact that Frontier have a policy of not communicating these things to the community we'll never know but always wonder.

 

[Muetdhiver]

At the moment POI a very much placeholders. I have many issues with them :
They are boring, they are not telling a story and not worth investigating in term of payout.

Boring & Not telling a story : what we got now is a bunch of scap metal with a tea canister and some escape pod.

• Much cooler A : a crashed T7 in a canyon, half buried in regolite, marked with laser impacts, which are also visible in the canyon walls. The canyon wall is dented and there is fragements of pirate viper further along in the canyon. The T7 hold contains 80 tons of indium and 20 tons of gold.
• Much cooler B : 20K lyr from Sol, an ASP explorer trapped in an ice crevice. There are multiple SRV tracks near it. The ASP has been used as shelter for a long time. Following the SRV tracks and half buried cables for 300m leads to the ASP radiation leaking reactor buried in the Ice for shielding. Investigating the ASP leads to a data exploration package worth 850K, materials for 4x FSD boost lvl 2 and one AFM refill. It also provides coordinates of a few nearby earth like worlds. Mission to bring his pod for 2M credits and a massive (and I mean massive) rep boost with the federation (like one fourth/third of a rank).
• Much cooler C : 1100 lyr from sol, in a nebula, wrecked Imperial Research anaconda. Seems to have been properly cut in half. Invesitgation leads to partial coordinates of a point on a nearby planet, science package triggering a mission for 2M and a lot of imperial rep, several UA's and some meta-alloys.
• Much cooler D : derelict smuggler Imp. courrier, with a police eagle crashed nearby. The courrier's hold contains 12 tons of wolf fesh and 8 tons of onion heads. triggers long range smuggling mission for these for a very nice payout. The police escape pod can be returned for a small reward and a nice rep boost with the local minor faction.

This leads to : in order to have worthy payouts, one would need a way to loot crashed ships cargo holds in a practical way.
(collecting scattered cargo with SRV is fine, but a T9 could contain 400-500 tons of stuff). I think something akin to being able to
interact with the cargo hatches using the data link to unlock them and then having the ability to call in the ship. The ship could then
hover, open its bay and lower a cable crane. Menu to transfer cargo opens, like when below it with the SRV.
Done, transfering 50 tons of loot made pratical.

 

[Henri]

what I perceive as an issue is that every planet has every POI.
I have experienced finding exactly the same wreck with 2 escape pods and 1 cargo spot on more than 10 consecutive planets I've visited.
Now I no longer bother landing while exploring simply because it is too...ugh!
Also the materials distribution...planet hoovering