The Galaxy - Is its size now considered to be a barrier to gameplay by the Developers?

[Robert Maynard]

We will be given the ability to transfer any of our ships to our current dock in 2.2 - there will be no delay in this transfer as the Developers have done some testing and any delay at all was considered to be too much of an impediment to gameplay.

In the recent Gamescom streams a recurring theme was that of "lowering the barriers to gameplay".

It would appear that travelling back to the location of a stored ship to fetch it back to one's location takes too much time and is therefore a barrier to gameplay that is unacceptable in the eyes of the Developers (and a large number of players, of course).

In a game where we have been given, to the best of the abilities of the Developers, a 1:1 interpretation of the our galaxy - with hundreds of billions of stars it seems that the size of the galaxy itself would now appear to be a problem to solve in the eyes of the Developers.

It will be interesting to see what further concessions to convenience we are given in future releases that will facilitate the multi-player aspect of the game.

 

[YinYin]

It will be interesting to see what further concessions to convenience we are given in future releases that will facilitate the multi-player aspect of the game.

Quite honestly I think your one thread on that was enough.

And no, I don't think the size is an inconvenience.

Making players wait however is.

And since time cannot be simulated accurately due to the multi player nature (we have galaxy wide time, which is not physically correct), not making players wait on transfer actions in menus is absolutely okay.

You click and your ship is loaded up. You click and your ship is outfitted. You click and your ship/module is transferred. You click and you are logged into your friends ship (own commander location likely remaining unchanged).

It makes a whole lot of sense to do things that way. Actual travel (moving your own commander) still always takes time due to distances. Don't worry about that.

 

[ahwala]

Should they implement instantaneous ship transfer and continue down that road, I'm afraid the game will lose the very aspects which attracted me in the first place. It's also puzzeling, considering the last major update before 2.2, i.e. the RNGineers, introduced so many unnecessary timesinks and so much grind, that I can't believe them when they say "we don't need more timesinks". Engineers could have been so much better without adding 50+ micromaterials (I don't know how many there are, but way way too many) and the need to travel all over the place. And now instead of fixing that aspect, they want to implement instantaneous ship transfer? Sorry, the devs either don't know what they're doing, they don't care, they are lazy, or they are completely incompetent when it comes to reasonable and consistent gameplay-mechanics and -implementation. I'm inclined to think it's the latter.

 

[Siranui]

It's a strange choice.

I understand that not everyone enjoys hiking anywhere, but the instant-move-any-ship-from-anywhere-to-anywhere mechanic makes the Bubble 'smaller' and easier to travel than any other MMO game world I've played.... which is odd, because in all of those I played a bloke with a sword. Yet it took longer to get a teleport or ride a mythical beast across those relatively small worlds than it will to transport my several thousand ton spaceship 300LY across the entirety of human space!

And those games had magic as an excuse. :|

 

[Kicks]

In the recent Gamescom streams a recurring theme was that of "lowering the barriers to gameplay".

I wasn't aware there were any barriers to game-play...

 

[YinYin]

You still have to travel the distance at least once yourself and transferring other ships to not ferry them all back and forth personally will cost credits depending on ship value and distance.

Surely if you have the time and enjoy ferrying your fleet personally or lack the required money you will save the credits and do it manually.

I wasn't aware there were any barriers to game-play...

If you spot a conflict zone, but you are in your Type 9 ...

 

[Robert Maynard]

I wasn't aware there were any barriers to game-play...

You must have missed all of the threads where players air their opinions that having to spend a (potentially large) percentage of their available play-time merely getting to a specific location or travelling to meet up with friends for some Wing gameplay spoils their enjoyment of the game.

 

[StiTch]

In a game where we have been given, to the best of the abilities of the Developers, a 1:1 interpretation of the our galaxy - with hundreds of billions of stars it seems that the size of the galaxy itself would now appear to be a problem to solve in the eyes of the Developers.

Sums it all up. So much for having a sense of scale.

And on top of that so much for jump ranges being, you know, relevant.

All they had to do was let you do something else while you're waiting. If you can't find something do to with yourself while you wait then frankly why play this game?

 

[Siranui]

Actual travel (moving your own commander) still always takes time due to distances. Don't worry about that.

Barely.

Strip an AspE down and engineer for a 50LY jump range and see how long it takes you to get anywhere.
Across the bubble takes under five minutes. The new mechanic enables every ship to effectively travel that fast, because the travel speed of your slowest, smallest jumping ship with a 2t fuel tank and no fuel scoop will equate to the travel speed of your fastest, furthest jumping ship. This is the new travelling paradigm.

The entire span of humanity's ambition can be crossed in under five minutes. That's really kind of pathetic and not at all awe inspiring. It used to take me five times longer to traverse some of the more expansive wilderness zones in Everquest. EQ will seem larger than the Bubble. Not cool.

Over 25,000 worlds in inhabited space, and we'll be passing like shadows through them; only interacting where we choose to.

 

[Red Anders]

We will be given the ability to transfer any of our ships to our current dock in 2.2 - there will be no delay in this transfer as the Developers have done some testing and any delay at all was considered to be too much of an impediment to gameplay.

Considering that now (and since the game launched) we've had no way at all to speed that process up and yet now anything other than instantaneous is considered to be 'too long' I have to ask what on earth has changed with FD. Something clearly has, it's literally a paradigm shift. I noticed Obsidian Ant commented on that, something fundamental shifting in their thinking, the other day and to be honest I mentally dismissed the concept at the time but with the context added above, he was clearly right.

 

[Kicks]

You must have missed all of the threads where players air their opinions that having to spend a (potentially large) percentage of their available play-time merely getting to a specific location or travelling to meet up with friends for some Wing gameplay spoils their enjoyment of the game.

Yeah - I must have missed them.

Obviously each to their own but I've had to do the above on numerous occasions due to friends being in other places. Sometimes it's taken a bit of time to arrive - but honestly I've always done stuff on the way, or been chatting over skype/TS/Vent while en-route and so it never really bothered me.

 

[CMDR Pugwash]

Quite honestly I think your one thread on that was enough.

And no, I don't think the size is an inconvenience.

Making players wait however is.

Blimey!

Space = Time, Size = Wait, Wait = Size.

Ask Einstein, he wrote some stuff about it.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

We should now just skip the whole materials gathering part and just be able to buy them at any station.

Justification: Driving and flyng around pinging rocks is a bit boring. I need to get to my pew pew faster.
Lore: There are giant 3D printers at every station, to support that every station has enormous stocks of raw materials.

 

[Mephane]

If you spot a conflict zone, but you are in your Type 9 ...

And then you travel around to fetch it. That act in an of itself is gameplay. As the saying goes, the journey is the destination - in a game that is literally about controlling any kind of vehicle, moving that vehicle about is central (and sometimes the only) gameplay.

 

[Joe Akeem]

In a near future on your left hand panel:

Jump out of hyperspace --> select station -->presented with two drop down menu options: Supercruise or Instant (1000cr)

In a near future on your right hand panel --> deploy collector limpet--> presented with two drop down menu options: Normal or Instant (1000cr)

Why stop there, Sandro? The sky's the limit. *slow applaude*

 

[Siranui]

All they had to do was let you do something else while you're waiting. If you can't find something do to with yourself while you wait then frankly why play this game?

Quite. And I view that 'something else' time as a good thing.

It allows you to get a feel for where you are going and orientate yourself. If you're going to a CG, the odds are that you've probably never been there before. With instant transfer, people jump in in the Asp or other maxxed-FSD taxi of choice, summon their ship though the magic ritual or whatever, then dive straight into the CG, barely knowing where they might be, and caring little for the place.

Conversely, make someone wait a while and it gives them time to poke around the place, see what the system is like, see who is in charge, check the local markets, look at the new station textures and anything pretty nearby, maybe recce a couple of nearby systems, start kissing up to a faction and doing a mission or two.... y'know: Playing the game in a manner that really interacts with the locality. But apparently that's not as good gameplay as instant teleportation magic.

 

[StiTch]

Barely.

Strip an AspE down and engineer for a 50LY jump range and see how long it takes you to get anywhere.
Across the bubble takes under five minutes. The new mechanic enables every ship to effectively travel that fast, because the travel speed of your slowest, smallest jumping ship with a 2t fuel tank and no fuel scoop will equate to the travel speed of your fastest, furthest jumping ship. This is the new travelling paradigm.

The entire span of humanity's ambition can be crossed in under five minutes. That's really kind of pathetic and not at all awe inspiring. It used to take me five times longer to traverse some of the more expansive wilderness zones in Everquest. EQ will seem larger than the Bubble. Not cool.

Over 25,000 worlds in inhabited space, and we'll be passing like shadows through them; only interacting where we choose to.

Exactly. Jump range irrelevant. No sense of scale, no sense of sacrifice in outfitting. Just fit yourself with the lightest FSD you can on any combat ships.

+1 rep for seeing the obvious and the EQ reference. Getting across the zones was okay...provided you weren't making it through some of the more awkward dungeons on a corpse run with no SoW.

 

[CMDR Pugwash]

You must have missed all of the threads where players air their opinions that having to spend a (potentially large) percentage of their available play-time merely getting to a specific location or travelling to meet up with friends for some Wing gameplay spoils their enjoyment of the game.

Oh, so that's the issue they're trying to address! And the sock puppet slug thought this was an easy way to solve it, I get it.

Shame they didn't think it through.

 

[Mephane]

Considering that now (and since the game launched) we've had no way at all to speed that process up and yet now anything other than instantaneous is considered to be 'too long' I have to ask what on earth has changed with FD. Something clearly has, it's literally a paradigm shift. I noticed Obsidian Ant commented on that, something fundamental shifting in their thinking, the other day and to be honest I mentally dismissed the concept at the time but with the context added above, he was clearly right.

I agree, but I saw the paradigm shift start with 2.1, with the engineers, when we got that fateful combination of power creep, skinner box and RNG.

 

[YinYin]

Barely.

Strip an AspE down and engineer for a 50LY jump range and see how long it takes you to get anywhere.
Across the bubble takes under five minutes. The new mechanic enables every ship to effectively travel that fast, because the travel speed of your slowest, smallest jumping ship with a 2t fuel tank and no fuel scoop will equate to the travel speed of your fastest, furthest jumping ship. This is the new travelling paradigm.

If you chose to travel that way instead of your beloved lower jump range ship, then surely you want to skip on ship ferrying time too? Or would you just be envious of others now travelling across the bubble that way?

I know I'm going to enjoy it, but it will only be about 30 ly in my combat engineered DBS. Not going to fly a fat vulnerable tin can to get 50 ly.

The entire span of humanity's ambition can be crossed in under five minutes.

I'm afraid we just enlarged our entire span to 22k ly.

And density inside the bubble is what makes it feel large to me. Not the fact that some traditionalist bucky ball racer still takes a long time to cross it in an unmodified ship.

That's really kind of pathetic and not at all awe inspiring.

Awe inspiring to me is that some racers now are capable of crossing this enormously huge bubble in that time. Fortunate enough here to not have my sense of scale damaged by ship transportation. Sorry it does that to others.

And then you travel around to fetch it. That act in an of itself is gameplay. As the saying goes, the journey is the destination - in a game that is literally about controlling any kind of vehicle, moving that vehicle about is central (and sometimes the only) gameplay.

The desired game play in that moment is entering the conflict zone in your Vulture. Not crossing the entire bubble to fetch it - and maybe getting to enter the conflict zone two days later, when it or your desire to partake might already be gone (assuming limited play time per day).

Space = Time, Size = Wait, Wait = Size.

Ask Einstein, he wrote some stuff about it.

I think this covers it:

And since time cannot be simulated accurately due to the multi player nature (we have galaxy wide time, which is not physically correct), not making players wait on transfer actions in menus is absolutely okay.

You still have to travel the distance at least once yourself