Server Dev Peteris: "while delay for FC is unfortunate, it's for benefit of the feature... make it as good and fun as possible"

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
LumberTubs said:
I find it hard to imagine that the fleet carriers will provide any more gameplay than what exists already.
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For me, probably they won't do a lot useful - I rarely leave the Colonia region, and I have one ship that I use for everything, so I'm really not the target audience for them :) But I think there's a lot of bits that will come out of them.

I think the convenience of being able to move lots of ships at once instantly within the bubble will be fairly popular. 500LY is basically anywhere-to-anywhere within the bubble, and puts the Pleiades in reach of most of it as well. You can do most of it already with FSDs and ship transfers, but being able to fuel up the carrier well in advance, and then just jump straight into the action when the time comes, is probably a better balance for keeping the gameplay feeling active.

I'd expect a network of deep space ones to gradually form for exploration repairs - the stations mostly stop once about 7k from the bubble, except on the line to Colonia, so there's a lot of the galaxy where this would be useful.

The extended per-jump range is going to - perhaps slowly - break some previous exploration records, and maybe give rise to some new types of expeditions, even though they'll probably be much slower per-hour than even a mid-range ship in much of the galaxy.

People could use them to set up "taxi" services to distant places (bubble-Colonia, for example) - in a reasonably balanced way.

Once the concept of player-driven shuttle services and deep space networks is set up - and actually working in practice, balance issues worked out over a few releases, etc. - rather than just a "theoretically this could happen" - that then allows the possibility for Frontier to add more deep space content in a future release which is either outright dangerous or just requires ships specialised for something other than exploration, without it being really hard work to get the required ships out there in the first place. That won't be there on release, but could be added later.
 

enonymous

E
JetsonRING said:
Does anyone think that if/when fleet carriers do arrive they will work perfectly, provide feature rich, fun gameplay with few to no bugs? Eh?
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I think they'll have some minor graphical issues that people will whine about. Bad paint jobs, glitched animation, etc. Nothing of consequence. The core gameplay will probably have some major issue you can work around and would be fixed within a week. Most of the complaints will be around design decisions. Why can't I blow up his carrier? Why can these people camp around my carrier? It's too easy to jump 500 Ly. You're making the galaxy too small! It takes too long to gather material to jump. This is a grind.

Some will love it and consider it "fun gameplay". Others won't find them useful. I just hope FDev is willing to further add mechanics so everyone will find them a valued game mechanic. Actually ask players before some wannabes start roleplaying as "leaders of the community".
 

Maolagin

M
CMDR Jayce MacLeod said:
I give the dev's credit and they have a herculean effort ahead of them, but I think the whole "bugs have destroyed the game and is unplayable" cries from the community has been blown way out of proportion, and exaggerated to no end.
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Indeed, my first reaction on seeing the announcement was to get angry at the folks who seem to spend all day posting threads about bugs, and at FDev for caving in to them. So I took a deep breath and stayed out of those threads yesterday.

And now I think FDev is making the right call. Not because of the bugs as such - I still say that the "bugginess of Elite" issue is overstated. But FDev are adults, they are quite capable of looking at their own data and deciding how many players are bring negatively impacted by bugs. More importantly, recent releases really do give the impression that they have some serious process issues to work out. They seem unable to properly test the game as it is actually delivered to the users, since they have released with very obvious visual bugs that they didn't seem to know about until users reported them. They have a real problem with "fix X here, break Y over there", which could be a sign of fragile internals, or flawed change management that doesn't allow introducing isolated fixes (my guess is both). Those are the kinds of issues they need to address if they intend to deliver a quality product at all from a codebase of this size and complexity. And if they do address them, then fixing the user-visible bugs will become orders of magnitude easier.
 

Drelthar

Drelthar
Fleet carriers seem to be FD's way of putting instant ship transfer (with a cost) as originally designed, into the game, without annoying all the people who voted to add a timer to a system they designed to not have a timer.

There's a couple bits and bobs added on and some graphics but that's pretty much what it seems to be.
 

Fosdyke

Fosdyke
For me equipement, ressources and NPC crew management will make fleet carriers great. Considering the work they made in Planet Zoo about the staff management.
 
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[VR] M4st0d0n

[VR] M4st0d0n
Rubbernuke said:
Lets hope FD act on the beta stage feedback and actually fix as many bugs and issues as they can now they have the time, and make robust features that last.

Only then can the pause be justified- and that, moving forward we never have regressions in bugs or updates that were of Septembers quality.
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What feedback? What beta? This game is released and the test server should have its section in the issue tracker. No more, no less.

Not sure the open letter crowd should delude itself by thinking they will be grand pioneers and enlightened design influenzas. Test monkeys should know their place.
 
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