Lol. Why not.
Pilot transfer
- Thread starter the source 0179
- Start date
Lol. Why not.
+Rep
I would like to see us able to choose which parked ship of ours we get to spawn into when we start the game.
If some are worried about immersion, it could be limited to how far our CMDR could have traveled via Passenger Liner while we were off line (using existing ship transfer times,) and charge us the going rate. Personally I don't see this limitation as needed because Elite is a game, but that's just me.
Not having this feature results in a lot of time wasted when trying to wing-up with friends. Not an issue in MC, but MC is only three players and only pays crew-members for combat ops.
That's why so many open world games like, Skyrim, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, The Division, Destiny 2, etc, etc, etc... all have similar features.
On the topic of transferring your ship and CMDR to a far away place, I do think that would be cool, but as others have said locking a player out of the game for 24 hours while their CMDR and Ship are transferred doesn't make sense.
Maybe there could be an "abort button" that would put you and your ship a the nearest station you've already passed based on the time elapsed?
I could pay that without issue, but that price is much higher than what I see in game right now. Much.
That makes no sense to me.
In the real world we don't have to sail our own boat or fly our own plane to visit the Caribbean. We just spent $$$ on a cruise or plane ticket.
No magic involved. No teleportation.
Oh, and obviously we can terminate our trip at ANY layover point to either stay there or book passage elsewhere.
That is reality. Not being able to do this in the game is an Unreal Limitation.
Or maybe the more conventional "Passenger Ship" concept which is already in the game lol.
So using your logic you also want Passenger missions and liners eliminated because they are unrealistic?
Oh, and any of us who have taken a bus, plane, or ship in real life are lazy?
Well, I've got some news: In real life MOST humans HAVE paid someone else to drive, fly, or sail on our behalf while we ride as passengers.
Yes, and while we're at it let's also make the real world Larger by eliminating planes, trains, buses, and cruise liners.
I'll never understand why some players want to force others to manually pilot their ship everywhere.
In real life it makes no sense for most people who love boating or sailing to buy their own ocean worthy vessel to cross the Pacific Ocean to visit the sites on the other side.
So why in a game (that's suppose to be a fun game and not a life simulator) should our in game avatars not have the ability to book passage on a liner like NPCs?
With (of course) an "abort" button like I mention above, and like we have in real life (i.e. you can always choose to get off at any stop along a real life trip when it's not a "non-stop" trip, and most long trips in real life and in Elite Dangerous aren't non-stop)
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Maybe the abort button could work. Sounds promising. But i think there would have to be a penalty to the abort. Like you still have to pay the full amount for the place you were going to.
It doesn't have to make sense; it's enough that there are people who would use it.
People who only get an hour a week to play but would like to play in Colonia (for example) but don't want to spend 12 weeks getting there.
I'd be much more apt to support "player" travel via passenger missions than I would "ship" insta-travel.
Wanna get somewhere, but don't want to pilot a ship? Open a contract, choose a destination- further the range, the more expensive the trip, and the longer the timer. Would need to be somewhere that has a station, of course.
If you're wanting to negate a timer and get there "instantly", then no.
The whole point of a space ship flying simulation game is to fly spaceships... so making instant-travel possible defeats the inherent purpose of the game to begin with.
Wanna get somewhere, but don't want to pilot a ship? Open a contract, choose a destination- further the range, the more expensive the trip, and the longer the timer. Would need to be somewhere that has a station, of course.
If you're wanting to negate a timer and get there "instantly", then no.
The whole point of a space ship flying simulation game is to fly spaceships... so making instant-travel possible defeats the inherent purpose of the game to begin with.
As a developer your view on that would change as soon as you see the hundreds of threads by people complaining about being locked out of the game.
To fill in between the lines for you here, I'm referring to how you can jump exponentially farther than you could before Engineers/synthesis/neutron boosting. Journeys that took weeks and months now take a matter of hours, possibly a day. Ergo, the galaxy has shrunk in terms of travel.
Additionally, go look up the EDSM heatmaps of late. 99% is statistically true but when you look at the physical map of the galaxy it's quite clear, the size of the galaxy is not the reason. (It's just the sheer quantity of stars in the galaxy.)
By your own logic I'm perfectly within my own rights to bluntly say "No" to what I see as a very poor idea that would be absolutely harmful to the game if it were implemented. Being blunt and direct isn't a bad thing...so long as nobody's taking things personally in a space meant for discussion.
Then maybe...just maybe...Colonia isn't for you?
It's a big galaxy out there and there's plenty room for you to play and do things in without having to undertake a journey halfway across said galaxy to a place that's renowned for being far away and taking a long time to get to.
Besides, personally...it's not all it's cracked up to be anyway. The novelty for me when I went was the involvement with Jaques and feeling responsible when I participated in the CG that fueled it for the (mis)jump that started it all. (A part of me is still annoyed that he didn't simply make it to Beagle Point instead....)
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That's even WORSE than having Pokemon-style instant ship transfer, because you can simply set up instant-teleportation hops anywhere you please. Just, no.
This is disingenuous. If you have any communication with said friends, you can agree to meet up at a location ahead of time. (And most of the time spent getting there would probably be spent watching timers which I've talked about in my time thread). Not having teleportation magic isn't the problem here.
Skyrim: single player RPG. One that's highly enhanced by never touching fast travel, in my experience, but whatever.
Guild Wars 2, ESO, Division, Destiny: all fantasy MMORPGs with varying levels of realism that are far below that of Elite's. Distance has no real bearing in these games.
Elite is a different type of game from all of those. It's not a simulator, but it's not Mass Effect either. It sits in a gray area in between. Distance matters in Elite. Travelling is the core pillar from which all other areas of the game branch out from, because you are a space ship commander in Elite in a 1:1 scale representation of our Milky Way Galaxy. All those other games, you are a magician, a warrior, a thief, or gunmonger taking part in dungeon crawling and occasional 'open' world wandering where scale is paid the mildest of attention at best.
Suffice it to say they make poor comparisons, and really there aren't many games at all that compare well with Elite.
A. The real world isn't a game.
B. Most of us in the real world are indeed *not* boat captains or plane pilots.
C. In Elite, *all you are* is the boat captain/plane pilot.
D. Elite Dangerous is not a cruise liner, nor does it come with in-flight entertainment, stewardesses, complemantary peanuts, or window seating. (Multicrew experiences may vary.)
Nah, that's just called entitlement.
You seem to be missing a major point of what a game is. That is, the point of the game - really, any game - is that *you're supposed to be PLAYING it*. Not *paying* to get around it. (Something that's a bit of a stickler for all the microtransaction-laced games that are out there...looking at you, Warframe....)
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Exactly. It would be no time at all before new players would step in wondering why on earth it exists like this, saying that it should either be instant or not exist at all.
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I've always dreamt to be able to "book passage" aboard another player's ship with multicrew. Having my commander physically aboard his ship and disembarking at any station. Disembarking would require a "dummy ship" to disembark into, maybe modeled as a bar or an airport lounge, watching ships docking and undocking. After which I could buy a ship or call one of my own in. Since my commander would have to be online to disembark, there would be no exploit. And I could at any time eject and return to the station where I embarked using the current death screen mechanic.
Ahh.. the dreams. Instead we got holograms.
Ahh.. the dreams. Instead we got holograms.
Maybe so - but to be honest, it's really not about how I feel. If there's a feature in the game that helps retain customers and doesn't negatively impact other players in any substantial, or really measurable, way it should be there (if it's viable), even if it doesn't make sense to me, even if I don't like it.
I wouldn't completely lock players out.. I can think of several activities one could implement to keep some players entertained for the journey; and I'd give players the option to abort the journey if they so choose. It would return the player back to their departing system, with a % of their transfer fee paid back to them.
A feature like this won't please everyone, but that's fine because not everything we put into our products is meant for everyone. A feature like Pilot Transfer is not Ship Transfer; it's a feature specifically implemented to help players with limited game time get around the galaxy, allowing them to experience the content they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Off the top of my head, one way to handle this would be to make it an Opt-In feature; the player would have to Opt-In to use it from their accounts page; and the only condition is that their average play-time over a certain period (eg: 3 months) has to be less than a certain amount per week. Granted it's not very practical, but it's an option nonetheless.
Anyway, it's something that would need a lot of discussion and round-tabling before design even begun; and luckily, that's not our problem - that would be Frontiers, if they decided the proposal had merit.
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I play mostly as an explorer so I understand both sides of this argument and it's a great debate we're having here. I think most would agree that insta-travel of any kind would be a bad idea and should be ruled out. I personally don't see a problem with a pilot transfer feature as long as the cost and time were realistically in line with what we already have eg:
1. It's very profitable to do taxi missions to Colonia, so CMDRs should expect to pay a lot for pilot transfer
2. It takes about 5 days to get a ship delivered to Colonia, so that's about how long it takes for a pilot transfer to happen
That just leaves us with the argument that "but you're forcing people to not play the game for X days and that's terrible design!"
OK, so how about putting some content into that "in transit" mode? You make a demand of the Captain to go get some "Consumer Electronics", and then get access to:
1. CQC. Make the whole thing a mini-game that you can play while being transported.
2. Expand the "Training" missions into mini-games where people can learn new aspects of the game without having to buy the ships and gear. Maybe mining or rescue mini-games where you could get a sense of how the limpets work, or SRV racing mini-games so you can try out your driving skills without risk of getting killed. Formation flying mini-games over VR-like canyons, etc.
3. A "VR shipyard" simulators of ships you don't yet own, so you can fly them around a bit to get an idea of the flight characteristics and the cockpit and hardpoint layouts, etc. (I personally would love to be able to do this for the bigger ships before I drop a billion credits on a setup only to realize I hate flying the thing).
4. Target practice with various weapons and engineering levels to assess effectiveness and damage against a range of different target packages.
5. Hell, you could probably embed the entire original Elite game in there as an emulated mini-game...
Obviously nothing in this virtual environment is permanent and accrues no grind benefits, but you could probably put enough there to keep people interested for a couple of days.
I played Watchdogs a few years ago and they a handful of VR minigames that I ended up spending more time on than the rest of the story line, so I think this kind of content can work.
1. It's very profitable to do taxi missions to Colonia, so CMDRs should expect to pay a lot for pilot transfer
2. It takes about 5 days to get a ship delivered to Colonia, so that's about how long it takes for a pilot transfer to happen
That just leaves us with the argument that "but you're forcing people to not play the game for X days and that's terrible design!"
OK, so how about putting some content into that "in transit" mode? You make a demand of the Captain to go get some "Consumer Electronics", and then get access to:
1. CQC. Make the whole thing a mini-game that you can play while being transported.
2. Expand the "Training" missions into mini-games where people can learn new aspects of the game without having to buy the ships and gear. Maybe mining or rescue mini-games where you could get a sense of how the limpets work, or SRV racing mini-games so you can try out your driving skills without risk of getting killed. Formation flying mini-games over VR-like canyons, etc.
3. A "VR shipyard" simulators of ships you don't yet own, so you can fly them around a bit to get an idea of the flight characteristics and the cockpit and hardpoint layouts, etc. (I personally would love to be able to do this for the bigger ships before I drop a billion credits on a setup only to realize I hate flying the thing).
4. Target practice with various weapons and engineering levels to assess effectiveness and damage against a range of different target packages.
5. Hell, you could probably embed the entire original Elite game in there as an emulated mini-game...
Obviously nothing in this virtual environment is permanent and accrues no grind benefits, but you could probably put enough there to keep people interested for a couple of days.
I played Watchdogs a few years ago and they a handful of VR minigames that I ended up spending more time on than the rest of the story line, so I think this kind of content can work.
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This could be pretty cool. But would take quite alot of setting up on FDs side of things.
Keep the ideas coming
I said earlier in this thread that it would be fine if we could walk around and do stuff. Talk to passengers etc. But that's a completely different suggestion than what OP posted. If there would be a game inside the game that allows us to solve murder on the orient express, great! But that's a huge amount of work, very low priority and overall very unlikely to happen. Locking out players for one week with no ability to play the game on the other hand is not going to happen for the reasons I stated above, and if you are really a game developer I don't think we need to argue about this any further.
Apart from basic game design of course.
I said earlier in this thread that it would be fine if we could walk around and do stuff. Talk to passengers etc. But that's a completely different suggestion than what OP posted. If there would be a game inside the game that allows us to solve murder on the orient express, great! But that's a huge amount of work, very low priority and overall very unlikely to happen. Locking out players for one week with no ability to play the game on the other hand is not going to happen for the reasons I stated above, and if you are really a game developer I don't think we need to argue about this any further.
Apart from basic game design of course.
Frontier have said that at some stage they may look into the possibility of what some people call space legs. But to what i remember it was more to do about walking around your own ship or a multi crew ship. If they implemented full space legs as in you could walk in your ship, other cmdrs ships, stations, outposts, settlements, and planets it wouldn't really be a space pilot sim anymore it would be closer to an open world game/galaxy. I'm guessing full space legs would never come in due to frontier would have to be 3 or 4 times the size and become a AAA game and studio. And the costs and memory loads would be extreme.
Why dont you have a think about anyway to try to work this into the game that doesn't include insta travel or space legs? There seems to be some people interested but not know how to implement it.
Also just pointing out you are the one arguing the most in this thread. Everyone else is happily discussing or putting their thoughts and or ideas across then leaving. You seem to want to just argue and shut the thread down. If Im wrong I'm sorry it just comes across that way.
You are completely wrong about space legs:
http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Space_Legs
Also what's wrong about arguing in a forum that is called dangerous discussion? Posting a reply and leaving (which is what you suggest I should do) doesn't sound a like a good discussion to me. Also I am not trying to shut the thread down. I am posting replies and keep it on the front page and on topic by this. To me this sounds like you are trying to silence any criticism to your idea, if I am wrong I am also sorry
To fill in between the lines for you here, I'm referring to how you can jump exponentially farther than you could before Engineers/synthesis/neutron boosting. Journeys that took weeks and months now take a matter of hours, possibly a day. Ergo, the galaxy has shrunk in terms of travel.
Additionally, go look up the EDSM heatmaps of late. 99% is statistically true but when you look at the physical map of the galaxy it's quite clear, the size of the galaxy is not the reason. (It's just the sheer quantity of stars in the galaxy.)
By your own logic I'm perfectly within my own rights to bluntly say "No" to what I see as a very poor idea that would be absolutely harmful to the game if it were implemented. Being blunt and direct isn't a bad thing...so long as nobody's taking things personally in a space meant for discussion.
Then maybe...just maybe...Colonia isn't for you?
It's a big galaxy out there and there's plenty room for you to play and do things in without having to undertake a journey halfway across said galaxy to a place that's renowned for being far away and taking a long time to get to.
Besides, personally...it's not all it's cracked up to be anyway. The novelty for me when I went was the involvement with Jaques and feeling responsible when I participated in the CG that fueled it for the (mis)jump that started it all. (A part of me is still annoyed that he didn't simply make it to Beagle Point instead....)
__
That's even WORSE than having Pokemon-style instant ship transfer, because you can simply set up instant-teleportation hops anywhere you please. Just, no.
This is disingenuous. If you have any communication with said friends, you can agree to meet up at a location ahead of time. (And most of the time spent getting there would probably be spent watching timers which I've talked about in my time thread). Not having teleportation magic isn't the problem here.
Skyrim: single player RPG. One that's highly enhanced by never touching fast travel, in my experience, but whatever.
Guild Wars 2, ESO, Division, Destiny: all fantasy MMORPGs with varying levels of realism that are far below that of Elite's. Distance has no real bearing in these games.
Elite is a different type of game from all of those. It's not a simulator, but it's not Mass Effect either. It sits in a gray area in between. Distance matters in Elite. Travelling is the core pillar from which all other areas of the game branch out from, because you are a space ship commander in Elite in a 1:1 scale representation of our Milky Way Galaxy. All those other games, you are a magician, a warrior, a thief, or gunmonger taking part in dungeon crawling and occasional 'open' world wandering where scale is paid the mildest of attention at best.
Suffice it to say they make poor comparisons, and really there aren't many games at all that compare well with Elite.
A. The real world isn't a game.
B. Most of us in the real world are indeed *not* boat captains or plane pilots.
C. In Elite, *all you are* is the boat captain/plane pilot.
D. Elite Dangerous is not a cruise liner, nor does it come with in-flight entertainment, stewardesses, complemantary peanuts, or window seating. (Multicrew experiences may vary.)
Nah, that's just called entitlement.
You seem to be missing a major point of what a game is. That is, the point of the game - really, any game - is that *you're supposed to be PLAYING it*. Not *paying* to get around it. (Something that's a bit of a stickler for all the microtransaction-laced games that are out there...looking at you, Warframe....)
__
Exactly. It would be no time at all before new players would step in wondering why on earth it exists like this, saying that it should either be instant or not exist at all.
+1 rep for a very educated post
To add my own 2 cents, I have to admit I'm not 100% against pilot transfer, with some caveats:
- First and foremost, it would need appropriate time and financial cost to keep the sense of scale
- Space Legs. If you're going to be unable tp pilot for hours or days, we'd need to be able to walk around aboard the ship we're on
- I wouldn't be opposed to locking transfer only to places you've been
- The destination station would need to have a shipyard
Some journies, such as the one to Colonia, are special and I don't think should be skipped by players. But after time, players have done a lot of travelling and it seems fair to add QoL features around this. Perhaps buying passage on a ship is only possible after travelling a certain amount on light years yourself?
There also seems to be a lot of interest in ferrying other pilots - which I think should be encouraged.
But there are many serious potential pitfalls with pilot transfer which would need careful consideration. It's not a feature you want to do wrong.
Passenger liners are going to be a lot faster than heavy-lift ships. I can get 2.5k LY/hr out of my barely engineered 'Conda, so that's the ballpark figure. Colonia in nine hours.
We can argue about this as much as we like (that's what the forum is for[yesnod]) but whether or not passenger transfer to Colonia happens will depend on what matters more to FDev: strict fidelity to the original travel concept, or getting more players to invest time and assets in Colonia - which is what pilot transfer would allow.
OP, I think I have the right game for you:
http://progressquest.com/info.php
http://progressquest.com/info.php