Ok....after getting into several SC discussions I though I'd throw an idea out.
So here is the problem as I see it:
1) space is big.
True.
2) players want to "feel" like space is big. Currently this takes the form of the game deliberately wasting the player's time when traveling from point a to point b.
It isn't the game that's wasting player's time. It is the
players wasting their time. Assuming you're only one jump away, it is
possible to go from undocking at one station, to docking at the majority of stations in the Bubble, in under four minutes in a Type-9... the most unresponsive ship in the game. 90% of likely bubble destinations are within 10k light seconds, and only 0.006% of systems have secondary stars greater than 700 kls out based on post 3.3 registered systems on EDSM.
Nearly all long Supercruise journeys are avoidable if you do your research before you hit "accept mission." The rest can be avoided by doing a little scouting near where you're operating, or hitting "abandon mission" if you consider a Supercruise trip excessively long. In addition, should you decide that a longer Supercruise trip is still "worth your time," you can use that time productively in the game. If you're out exploring, use that time to scout along your galactic route, searching for hidden gems a few hundred light years off your path. If you're in the Bubble, use that time to examine your local stellar neighborhood, or search for those opportunities for extreme profits that sites like EDDB inevitably miss.
Finally, active piloting can reduce travel times, sometimes considerably, vs the "Set it and Forget it" method you describe below.
3) when players complain that SC takes too long, it's not that it just takes too long, but that there's nothing to do. You're literally not playing the game and letting the computer idle for an arbitrary amount of time while a countdown clock decides when it's been impressed upon you enough how big space really is.
Speaking of the "Set it and Forget it" method, this is likely
why you consider travel times excessively long. This is literally the
worst way to travel in Supercruise. Large mass interferes with FSD efficiency, decreasing how much the FSD can bend space around it. This effectively reduces your top travel speed. By practicing active navigation and hands on piloting, you can plot optimal routes through a system, avoiding large mass and getting to your destination quicker. In addition, you can shave off even more time by practicing gravity braking, flying close to massive objects near your destination to slow your ship down faster than the "six second" rule. In fact, even overshooting and looping back is
faster than the "six second" rule.
When traveling to distant stars, you should always escape the arrival star and get captured by the destination star via the poles, where there
isn't all that mass to slow you down. Since most secondary stars are M-class stars, you can also shave off additional time by flying in an arc between the two stars, rather than directly, taking advantage of the smaller "mass shadow" and greater speeds farther from the arrival star to shorten the amount of time you spend being mass locked by the destination star. It's even possible to
overshoot the lowest mass M-class stars if you know what you're doing.
Let me make a suggestion - give us something to do in SC rather than just wasting our time to the point where people watch Netflix while "playing" the game.
1) remove the arbitrary 2001C speed limit. It's cute, 2001 was a great movie, but Elite Dangerous is a great game and could be better.
I have no problem with this, nor do I have a problem with the 2001c speed limit, given that you'll never reach that speed during normal play. You don't even reach this speed on the trip to Hutton Orbital,
the farthest destination in the game.
2) increase the max acceleration rate in SC....nothing crazy maybe 4x of what it is now. It's just a guess and probably will need some fine-tuning.
There is no such thing as a "max acceleration rate in SC." What you're mistaking for "acceleration" is a change in the mass lock effect as you get farther from local mass. Altering the mass lock effect can have counter-intuitive effects, due to how Supercruise
actually works. I've been playing this game since Alpha, and I still remember what happened the last time Frontier decreased mass lock in order to "increase" "speeds" for the "Set it and Forget It" crowd.
Those of us who were actively piloting at the time actually saw our Supercruise times
increase, because the optimal braking routes (aka "threading the needle") vanished, to the point where
overshooting, once the result of a failed braking maneuver, was now mandatory. This was because the "eye of the needle" had essentially moved
inside all but the gas giants within the game. A further reduction to mass lock will likely result in a situation where active piloting could be actually
less efficient than the "Set It and Forget It" method, which is the
opposite of what you claim you want.
3) this is the interesting part here - make us actually NAVIGATE in SC. There are gravity interactions between all the bodies, right? That's why they orbit each other. So...why not use those gravity interactions to create some kind of navigation mechanic where you have to fly through the various gravity interactions between bodies around you?
4) the faster you go, the more intense these gravity interactions become and the more skill is required to negotiate them and stay on course/not e-drop out of SC.
The irony of these two suggestions is that they are almost identical to the state of Supercruise during Alpha 4 and 5, before Frontier listened to the complaints of the "Set It and Forget It" crowd and nerfed mass lock. Three actually describes how Supercruise works, both now and back during the Alpha. Four sounds a lot like what I described as "threading the needle" above: trying to keep within a narrow region of space at high speeds, between disaster and overshooting. This gameplay still exists in certain circumstances: binary "super" HMC and Earthlike planets, gas giants, and a few other places where it's possible to extend the braking effects of mass lock by doing a flyby of another body before reaching your destination.
There's an easy way to get the gameplay you claim to want: get Frontier to increase mass lock a bit. This will
increase the travel times of the "Set It and Forget It" crowd, but it will make active piloting not only quicker, but much more fun as far as I'm concerned.
S
