Hello Commanders!
OK, for clarity, let's look at what dive slaving is: players giving up control of their ship to someone else in a group, whether this be for a hyperspace jump, or travelling in super cruise.
The benefits it could achieve would be:
* Everyone leaving a system at more or less the same time during a hyperspace jump/super cruise transition.
* One person controling the direction of multiple ships in super cruise.
Looking back, the "everyone following a leader" mechanic has gone very cold for us. Observing the way super cruise actually works (as opposed to a paper theory design) it seems clear to me that it would be extremely challenging to accomplish, whilst the gains are (in my opinion) questionable. I'm simply not a fan of having an "auto follow" function, especially in super cruise.
Synchronised jumping to super cruise is also now a bit weird. In practice, it would likely lead to either:
A) ships overheating as they waitied for other vessels to spool up
B) a borderline cheat escape mechanic (if we prevented or limited FSD inhibition to wings)
The ability to match-make is more or less completely separate, so should work equally well with drive slaving or without. Basically, we should be able to force wing members to get into the same sessions during transitions.
So right now we'll be looking at feedback and options that
A) let wingmen easily see where they are in relation to each other, in system, in super cruise, or mixed
B) let them see as much as possible what each of them are currently doing
C) tweak values to make it even easier to perform transitions that wingmen are making (for example, relaxing distance when dropping at locations)
I hope that makes things a little clearer.
It would be, in my opinion, with hindsight and with the game as it stands, the wrong call to go down the drive slave route.
