Stuck recovery: Paving the way to... boredom with good intentions

DjVortex

DjVortex
I know that probably miles and miles of posts have already been written about this very subject in the past, but anyway, please allow me to express my views on it.

One of the phenomena that I find most interesting about the game is what the group of volunteers Fuel Rats do. It's an interesting group because not only is what they do completely voluntary pro bono publico work, but it's a kind of "meta gaming" in the sense that it's not any kind of official in-game game mode, or missions, or anything. It's completely player-organized and run, and they do it completely voluntarily just to help others with the only reward being a warm feeling.

Of course if that were the only thing, it would be an interesting but relatively minor curiosity. What makes it actually awesome is reading and sometimes even watching videos of the feats that they have achieved over the years, many of which go beyond just providing fuel to someone. For example in one video someone had managed to get their Anaconda completely stuck in the corridor of some space installation, and the rats did a lot of work to nudge the ship out of its predicament with their ships, little by little. In another video someone was stuck on the bottom of a deep hole on the surface of a planet and, once again, the rats helped the poor commander out of the predicament by nudging and lifting the ship with theirs. In one of the more amusing, unusual and interesting cases a commander had managed to launch to orbit with an SRV, and couldn't get back, so a fuel rat pushed the SRV back onto the surface.

And who can forget about the case of CMDR Persera, who tried to set a record on largest distance from Sol, by going to one of the farthest reachable systems in the galaxy and then supercruising for 48 hours in the direction opposite from Sol, only to find out that she miscalculated her fuel and was stranded extremely far from the primary star. The Fuel Rats launched a massive rescue mission, named "Operation Beyond The Void", which was so huge that it even got coverage in the main gaming press. It was an amazing collaboration of volunteers and took a significant time and effort, to rescue a fellow commander.

Reading about and even seeing on video those types of cases is just amazing.

And now, all of that's gone. Poof! In one fell swoop. Pretty much none of that will ever be done again, and we will rarely ever again get anything even remotely that exciting and interesting.

And why? Because fdev decided to add the "stuck recovery" option to the main menu of the game.

Just that one innocent feature, and all of the above is nullified. Well, at least in the sense that it will never happen again. That's because it doesn't make much sense anymore to spend tens of hours of supercruise time to reach a client when all you can do is to instruct them to select "stuck recovery" in the main menu and poof! they are magically teleported back to the primary star of the system, regardless of where they are. Stuck in the exclusion zone of a planet, very hard to reach? Just select "stuck recovery". Stuck on the surface of the planet, or in the corridors of some space installation? Poof! Magical teleportation to the primary star, and a quick refueling from a friendly rat. You're welcome.

That's nice and all, but gone are the days of daring rescues from unusual predicaments requiring ingenuity and huge amounts of effort, generating really interesting stories and videos. It's just... boring.

I'm not saying the feature should be removed. It's just... the biggest "meh" I have ever felt. Such a shame.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
Players have the choice...
pills-drugs.gif
 

DjVortex

DjVortex
ubermick said:
Pssst.

Nobody has to press the button. The players out there who participate in the community can still call on the Fuel Rats or the Hull Seals. Those who don't - who are likely in the majority - can press the button.
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I don't really understand. If you request a rescue from the rats, and they instruct you to go to the main menu and click that button, are you going to refuse? Would be highly strange.

I don't know what the rats' policy is if someone refuses to click that "stuck recovery" button, but regardless of what it is, it doesn't make much sense. You are trying to get rescued before your ship gets destroyed (and you possibly losing a huge amount of money). Why would you refuse to follow instructions?

My point is that now that the option is there, we will never again see those exciting unusual rescues. There's just no need because of the magic button that teleports you to the main star.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Sure, this happens a lot.

2.0 Horizons added the rocks to the surface of planets, and FSD synthesis. But back then, you couldn't scan a planet to see its material contents - you had to go and prospect it. So there was a substantial effort (high-end drop rates being somewhat lower then, too, it could take an hour to find a planet's last material) to find systems where all the materials for synthesis could be conveniently collected. On expeditions - remember, a lot of this was either pre-engineering or in the very early days of engineering, so basic jump ranges of 30 LY were pretty good for an exploration ship - people would team up to survey systems near the waypoints, so that those in slower ships would know which planets to search.

In those days the Rock Rats were an important part of any exploration expedition. Now all that remains of them is a commemorative station near Colonia, and the occasional note about "green systems" on EDSM.

Nowadays you can get all that information about which materials are where from your initial FSS sweep of the system, engineering has doubled jump ranges so there's much less routine need for FSD synthesis to hop over gaps, neutron boosts are considerably more effective than synthesis if you're somewhere that can use them, and of course at the high end a Fleet Carrier massively outranges a player ship anyway so you can always get over that way.

But if I ask you if you'd rather material contents were like exobiology: you could see how many from FSS, what major types from mapping, but had to land and survey to find out exactly what was there ... and you'd need to do that to explore large parts of the galaxy because your base jump range would be in the 20-35 LY range ... would you say "yes" to get the Rock Rats back?

And if so, would you also say yes to NPCs routinely targeting and attacking explorers returning to inhabited space - as was the case on release and gradually watered down into nothing by the 2.2 release - so that player escort groups could come back too? Obviously this one would also need some significant downgrading of Fleet Carriers.
 

DjVortex

DjVortex
While all those things might have indeed watered down and even completely destroyed many forms of meta-gaming, at least they kind of make sense from an in-universe lore perspective. After all, technology marches on, and new scanners and tools are being developed all the time. Even in the real world we can now travel in 1 hour what took literally weeks a long time ago.

However, the "stuck recovery" button is not an in-game feature, it's an outside feature that's not part of the gameplay itself, and on top of that it does something that's not really feasible in the in-universe lore, ie. just magically teleport your ship from 500000 Ls away to the main star in an instant, using zero energy, which is just physically impossible. (After all, if such a "technology" had been developed in-universe, why not use it to make this kind of completely free instant travel all the time? Why spend an hour and a half to traverse to Hutton Orbital when you could just teleport there instantaneously, using zero fuel?)

(Yes, I know that if you commit a crime and get caught you get teleported instantaneously to the closest prison system, no matter how far it is, even if it's half galaxy away. I do not like that feature either, as it breaks immersion and willing suspension of disbelief. I wouldn't lose any sleep if that was removed from the game, or the delay made significantly longer.)

But anyway, my main point is that it just destroys one of the coolest "meta-features" of sorts from the game: The spectacular unusual rescues. Such a cool thing, poof, gone. Never again to be seen. Meh.
 

Hellrider

H
Ian Doncaster said:
But if I ask you if you'd rather material contents were like exobiology: you could see how many from FSS, what major types from mapping, but had to land and survey to find out exactly what was there ... and you'd need to do that to explore large parts of the galaxy because your base jump range would be in the 20-35 LY range ... would you say "yes" to get the Rock Rats back?

And if so, would you also say yes to NPCs routinely targeting and attacking explorers returning to inhabited space - as was the case on release and gradually watered down into nothing by the 2.2 release - so that player escort groups could come back too? Obviously this one would also need some significant downgrading of Fleet Carriers.
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1 yes
2 yes*

*because 90% of my exploships could survive this encounter, because I'm not maniac of mac possible range :p
 

The Reverend

The Reverend
These kinds of "QoL" features are one of the reasons why Elite earned the tagline of being a mile wide but only an inch deep. Frontier add things like this with no thought to existing community driven initiatives that were born out of the lack of such features being implemented in the first place. The Fuel Rats, and the Rock Rats, as Ian Doncaster mentioned above, were created to fulfil roles that the game mechanics themselves failed to provide for. Player dedication lead to emergent gameplay. Which is fantastic to see. But sadly the decision-makers at Frontier obviously have little understanding of, nor care about, community created initiatives in this game these days. Instead of working with the fuel rats or the now defunct rock rats in finding ways to implement their roles into the game itself as some sort of official profession, or mission based system, they take the easiest route possible and make it into a shallow gimmick. And that inch deep gameplay the game is associated with, gets ever shallower.
 

Vernier

Vernier
DjVortex said:
fdev decided to add the "stuck recovery" option to the main menu of the game.
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Where is this magic button? Last weekend my SRV was stuck in a deep crevice (while looking for Concha). I spent an hour trying unsuccessfully to manoeuver my way out. I wish I knew about this button. Finally, I gave up and used the old "Log into Horizons" trick.
O7
V
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
The Reverend said:
These kinds of "QoL" features are one of the reasons why Elite earned the tagline of being a mile wide but only an inch deep
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The interesting thing about these examples (and some others too) is basically the question: "should you need to get help from other players to achieve your goals?" Hence the regular player demands to steamroller the rest of the "depth" out too, complaints about "needing" to use 3rd-party tools to get trade or outfitting or engineering information, etc.

And in a lot of cases you end up with the depth exhibited as one of the Powerplay Problems: iffy as Powerplay's mechanics are, they have created a complex strategic layer which few people (I'm not one of them!) understand the implications of fully, requiring detailed planning to maintain and expand a Power. If you're not one of the people who understands all of that, though, it basically simplifies to "see this person? go and shoot and haul where they tell you to."

Back in the Colonia Bridge CGs I was the person making those recommendations because of the way various economic factors normally in the background had combined - depth! - to put together an interesting supply optimisation puzzle. As a result of people taking those recommendations and taking the time to set up suitable BGS states, we got about 3-4 times the cargo delivered that we might have. But for the majority of players involved, their experience was sitting on a landing pad for 20 minutes slowly loading cargo on board, and the fact that if we hadn't optimised things they would have been sitting on the same pad for most of an hour was little consolation.

Similarly in the Thargoid War recently, it's possible to make the weekly situation "better" by carefully selecting target systems that constrain the Thargoids' moves. But a consequence of that has been the widely disliked lack of Invasions and the fun scenarios they had. Lots of complaints about the fun having been optimised out - which, sure, some different system design could have avoided by not tying lots of that fun to a single system state ... but equally a less deep system like the original Thargoid skirmishes after 2.4 couldn't be pushed into that sort of failure state in the first place.

The problem isn't that the game lacks depth, it's that the manifestations of that depth are not necessarily experienced as fun compared with what a simpler system could reliably produce, and from a pilots-eye perspective a lot of them look basically random anyway. See also the great Palladium shortage, the effect of (finally) bugfixing supply and demand for core gems, whatever the outfitting system is doing behind the scenes, Tritium efficiency, etc.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
Ian Doncaster said:
Back in the Colonia Bridge CGs I was the person making those recommendations because of the way various economic factors normally in the background had combined - depth! - to put together an interesting supply optimisation puzzle. As a result of people taking those recommendations and taking the time to set up suitable BGS states, we got about 3-4 times the cargo delivered that we might have. But for the majority of players involved, their experience was sitting on a landing pad for 20 minutes slowly loading cargo on board, and the fact that if we hadn't optimised things they would have been sitting on the same pad for most of an hour was little consolation.
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Your observations and suggestions during that CG were invaluable, particularly once supplies in Colonia had dried up big-time!
The last few loads I collected were solely gained by taking heed of your advice, keeping me in the top 10!
 

DjVortex

DjVortex
Jack Winter said:
FWIW, even if it's less than in the past, the fuel rats still seem to have work: https://grafana.fuelrats.com/d/H-iTUTPmz/public-statistics?refresh=1h&orgname=2&orgId=2
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Sure, there are still plenty of daily cases. It's just that the vast majority of them are just routine fuel transferring and that's about it. Rarely, if ever, do they need to do those awesome unusual rescues anymore, because they can just instruct the client to click on the "stuck recovery" button. (I of course don't blame them for doing that. The most important goal is to save the client. If the feature is there, and it saves the client, it should be used. It's just... boring. That's all.)
 

Jack Winter

Jack Winter
DjVortex said:
Sure, there are still plenty of daily cases. It's just that the vast majority of them are just routine fuel transferring and that's about it. Rarely, if ever, do they need to do those awesome unusual rescues anymore, because they can just instruct the client to click on the "stuck recovery" button. (I of course don't blame them for doing that. The most important goal is to save the client. If the feature is there, and it saves the client, it should be used. It's just... boring. That's all.)
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Yes, I see your point! I didn't know that stuck recovery placed you closer to the main star. I've only used the feature once to dislodge my srv when it seemed like nothing else would work. Not sure what the solution would be, though I'm pretty sure there would be teeth gnashing from some quarters if this feature was modified causing more people to have to call the fuel rats or splode their ships.

In certain ways I think that the meta gaming that arises is probably one of the most interesting features of the game. Do the fuel rats actually tell people to use the stuck recovery option instead of going out to rescue them?
 

aRJay

aRJay
O.P. have a look at this thread,

Help, I need Ship Rats!

*UPDATE* Rescue has been sucessful, I am saved and arrived back in the Bubble on the 14.07.3302! So, I just started going out exploring and about 1000Ly out, found a nice looking planet to drive about a bit and having fun. Good times! Then I recall my Ship and it was weird, my view was blocked...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
the only actual organisation involved was the forum, using a shortcut is down to the player. Just because an easy way out option exists doesn’t mean we have to use it.
 

Codger

Codger
As I recall, the reason this feature was created was to solve all those issues that we used to fix by switching to Horizons (back before the Legacy/Live split).

Once Live was introduced, switching to Horizons no longer fixed those problems (being stuck on a planet was just one of them).

So they added Stuck Recovery which helps in some cases, but doesn't fix other stuff (like not being able to pay a fine or bounty, and having to log in and out or travel elsewhere).

Anyway, it certainly wasn't put in there to prevent the Fuel Rats from doing their thing.
 

DjVortex

DjVortex
Jack Winter said:
In certain ways I think that the meta gaming that arises is probably one of the most interesting features of the game. Do the fuel rats actually tell people to use the stuck recovery option instead of going out to rescue them?
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It is my understanding that they still prefer to do rescues the "old-fashioned" way, but resort to that in cases where reaching the client becomes too risky (eg. the client is on emergency oxygen and deep into a star's exclusion zone) or way too time-consuming (eg. would need to supercruise for an hour to get to the client). I don't think they resort to it in slightly simpler cases, such has having to supercruise for 30 minutes to get to the client.

If any fuel rat is reading this, please correct any mistakes I may have made.
 
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