I'm asking as somebody who started playing ED when 3.6 came out: what was broken in 3.4 and never fixed in your eyes?
The Old vs the New and player age
- Thread starter Riktar
- Start date
i gotta admit, i don't like the path FD took with this... it makes everything dual purpose, and makes being a trader, salvager or whatever just an inferior combatant, rather than an "armed trader".
Combat ships have two goals:
- kill, and
- don't get killed
Non- combat ships also have two goals
- whatever the non combat objective is, and
- don't get killed
But non-com fits always take away from the ability to defend and kill. Every fitting on a combat ship is a necessary component for a non combat ship to defend itself. There are no non- dual- purpose modules which are effective for survival, but take away from the ability to destroy... there's lots of capacity for that kind of module too.
Modules like that are what's missing to truly create an "armed trader" type, instead of just an ineffective combat ship.
The no-fire zone exists in Elite Dangerous too, it doesn't necessarily have to be due to getting a fine, it could easily be due to the mission criteria of being covert.
This all sounds good, I just want to clarify that I really was giving an example off the top of my head, the possibilities are there, including all of the above.
It's difficult to say what is easy to implement, however, being that these missions would tie into already used modules and uses for them, it does on the surface look like it might be one of the less tricky things to implement. Though to take it further (or scope creep), if dialog trees and interaction with other NPCs via them became more general onfoot and in ships, missions like these could lead to some very interesting scenarios.
I honestly do not know. o7
So I'm reading that your original point was that it is a bad comparison because Windows does indeed differ vastly since 3.1 till Win 11 as Elite does? If so, I misunderstood as my view was that the original comparison was specifically referencing core basic functionality in regards to operation.
BTW; Agree about Win 2000, as an ex-Amiga user it was the first version of windows that was palatable to me, as was Win XP after it. Win 10 has been ok, Win 11 looks ok also, I have a mini PC box running it for my dedicated Serato host but I haven't switched on my main laptop yet, even if I keep getting 'invites' to do so..
Nonetheless, no missions currently do this, and "being covert" would be incredibly difficult, because detection of crime is system-wide. You'd have to luck-out that they immediately go to an anarchy system.
No-fire zone just determines whether or not you'll incur the stations wrath, iirc, not whether you get punished or not.
Mmmh. I suppose when I suggested we don't need "new things" i meant "new things that are standalone to existing things".... like... "base building" would be a whole new system. That's not going to solve anything,
We didn't need Odyssey, but that ship sailed, so we have it now. On-foot dialog, tier 2 & 3 NPCs, expansion of contact panel comms options beyond requesting docking, all things which could expand on extant systems, imo.
Some missions take you to places where that link fails, Haz-res also does it:
Thus triggering the mission fail.
That doesn't prevent crime detection, which I thought was the point being aimed at here (it's not exactly covert if your crime is detected). It just prevents a security response.
While I get the angle you're going for here... there's several challenges.
- You can't force an NPC to these locations, you'd have to follow them, perhaps for a very long time depending on what system you're in, and that makes balancing these missions a massive pain
- It'd be super-contrived for the NPC to jump out and fly to a random mission USS which happens to have no security response, but again, they don't prevent crime detection.
Yeah I think we've got different ideas of covert here. I'm taking it to mean that you don't receive a bounty/fine for the act (e.g like accessing megaship/surface installation data points with silent running enabled). That is, no crime is detected.
You will receive a fine or bounty whether or not you're in a no-fire zone or in an area where system security response doesn't happen, and that's not covert to me... that's the way smuggling/illegal passenger missions work; they need you to not be detected and receive a bounty/fine.... which is slightly different to Odyssey's definition (which is not trigger the base alarm).
3.4 was when SLFs started inducing serious issues (stuttering, rubberbanding, etc) with other peers. It's been a while since I've tested for these problems (I'm very confident 3.8 still has this problem, but I haven't checked for it in Odyssey in about ten updates), but Frontier implemented fixes that never addressed the underlying problem and reported the issue solved at least twice without actually fixing it. I ended up giving up on SLFs completely if there was any chance any other CMDRs would be encountered, which was a big deal for me as I had made use of them heavily from 2.2 through 3.4, including in PvP.
Yes - though the station NFZ is a bit weird anyway. Excluding the "strict NFZ" within the internals of a station docking cylinder, where firing weapons is a bounty offence even if you somehow manage to miss every target and the station itself with them...
... if you fire in the NFZ, you get a small fine. This doesn't stop you firing, doesn't get you shot at by the police or local authorities, etc.
... if you fire in the NFZ and hit a clean target with crime reporting enabled, you get a bounty. But this is also true of doing this action pretty much anywhere outside the NFZ too.
The more major rule difference in the NFZ is nothing to do with firing weapons, it's that ramming can count as reckless conduct (fine) or an assault/murder (bounty) in situations where it wouldn't otherwise.
Odyssey of course has the more internally coherent NFZ implementation; if you draw your weapon in a restricted area (i.e. anywhere there are guards to see you do it) then it's not illegal in terms of granting a bounty but they'll shoot you anyway.
That obviously can't work in space because there's a bunch of things like utility scanners, limpet controllers, etc. which are perfectly fine to use near a station but can't be used without also deploying all your weapons, whereas Odyssey does have the ability to draw and use a legal utility tool separately from your main armament.
It's not important whether "newcomers" acknoledge changes to the game. They play the game now and need not care about the past. it's nothing to them. Their interest is to enjoy a game.
"Old" players is a different story. Those that still enjoy and those that left for good. If I were to revisit ED I'd still have to combat the same crap I left for. There is little reason to return.
"Old" players is a different story. Those that still enjoy and those that left for good. If I were to revisit ED I'd still have to combat the same crap I left for. There is little reason to return.
Played since launch.....played original version in '84/85 on a C64 with tape deck.
Currently got something like 12k+ game hours in ED/EDO. For the first few years played something like 9+ hours every day.
Liked the Exploration & avoided pewpew throughout my playing time (as my sig shows).
Usually moaned on the forums as update after update was pewpew based with little to no love for Explorer's coming through.
Good value for money, that I can say, when Odyssey was due I pre-ordered knowing it would be mainly pewpew again.....& wasn't disappointed!
Basically picked my suits/weapons/upgrades & just trunddled my way to getting what I wanted/needed.......not used a weapon on foot for well over a year.
Still a goto game, but sadly now I only play for 1 to 2 hours a day Exploring & gathering Bioscans.....though after 500Lys (catching up to my jumped Carrier to offload the data collected), that'll do for the day & I move on to something else.
Shame, game needs some really good directions to go in, I'd like to see private base building, however I doubt that will ever be added to the game.
Got & played NMS, X4, Star Citizen (when free!) & watched Starfield Streamers......all these games miss something that Elite's got, that's why I still play ED after 9+ years & counting.
Currently got something like 12k+ game hours in ED/EDO. For the first few years played something like 9+ hours every day.
Liked the Exploration & avoided pewpew throughout my playing time (as my sig shows).
Usually moaned on the forums as update after update was pewpew based with little to no love for Explorer's coming through.
Good value for money, that I can say, when Odyssey was due I pre-ordered knowing it would be mainly pewpew again.....& wasn't disappointed!
Basically picked my suits/weapons/upgrades & just trunddled my way to getting what I wanted/needed.......not used a weapon on foot for well over a year.
Still a goto game, but sadly now I only play for 1 to 2 hours a day Exploring & gathering Bioscans.....though after 500Lys (catching up to my jumped Carrier to offload the data collected), that'll do for the day & I move on to something else.
Shame, game needs some really good directions to go in, I'd like to see private base building, however I doubt that will ever be added to the game.
Got & played NMS, X4, Star Citizen (when free!) & watched Starfield Streamers......all these games miss something that Elite's got, that's why I still play ED after 9+ years & counting.
It's worse than that!
I played Elite in 1985 on my Commodore 64. I was 34!
I'm now 72 and have 6 different Commanders!
(One is the Fleet Carrier guy, one is for FPS, another is stationed in Colonia, there is a young lady who runs illegal Passenger missions from Robigo, and the other two idiots like to hang out in Legacy for some odd reason...)
This is going to be a bit pedantic, but it wasn't the addition of the FSS: if it were just added alongside what was already there, then most everybody would have been fine. They just wouldn't have used it for anything except body scanning. I would expect that the only complaints we would have seen would be from a few people saying that the FSS's infinite range instant scanning is overpowered.
But the FSS wasn't an addition, but a replacement. It probably had to be done this way because Frontier themselves knew that if people weren't forced to use it, then after its novelty wore off, they'd go back to looking at the system map instead of the barcode.
Ironically enough, this would have been the better scenario for Odyssey. After all, it broke one of the core principles of the FSS, which was that one could look at the barcode, decide if there's anything of interest to them (which wasn't true at the start already, but this was the Frontier's intent as they said themselves) and jump out if there isn't. Except now, because if you are looking for thin atmosphere bodies, where the entirety(!) of the new exploration content of the expansion is, then this no longer applies. Oops. But then, exobiology wasn't well thought out enough to realise before the alpha that most players wouldn't welcome a reflex-based minigame for sampling plants.
It actually went beyond the FSS's in-game gameplay though. There was a massive increase in trolling on the exploration forums, well beyond what explorers had experienced before, and then the tone from higher up, through moderators all the way to Frontier (which was quite unexpected) became that if you didn't like the FSS, you weren't really welcome to discuss that after its launch. (Of course, before that, feedback on the revealed plans was at best met with "don't knock it until you've tried it".) So rather than the tone being "if you don't like the FSS, that's alright, we'll improve on it later", it was "if you don't like the FSS, the problem is with you, we are happy with it and there won't be any changes, stop discussing its negative aspects". Which was rather counter-productive after taking on a lot of feedback and not acting upon any of it. (I'm not talking about putting the ADS back here, but even minor changes which would have gone a long way on improving the FSS weren't implemented.)
Many people took the hint and left. Perhaps if the FSS was good, then more new people would have come than how many left - but it wasn't, and they didn't. Player retention when it came to exploration ended up worse.
That's apples to oranges, as the FSS is system-level body scanning, and the DSS is body-level surface scanning. If Frontier suddenly decided to rework, or even replace the FSS entirely, that still wouldn't touch how finding where stuff is on the surface works.
I wasnt around during the change, as an explorer i love the FSS as i scan pretty much every system i pass through (i dont do it for the credits).
The FSS shows me all i need to know about the planets and what maybe on them (im searching for Guardian sites etc), im genuinely interested in what the issue was with the FSS?
O7
AFAIK, guardian sites don't show up on the FSS scan, but they do if you point your ship at a planet containing one?
IIRC, once you get closer, but you can see them as a POI from far away on the cockpit HUD. I'm not 100% sure, but think this is how it works. It was a long time since I was hunting undiscovered guardian sites.
They show up in the nav panel about 1000ls out.
FSS should show a planet as having Guardian features in sys map, (or Thargoid features if you're at the Trapezium or Wregoe sites)
FSS should show a planet as having Guardian features in sys map, (or Thargoid features if you're at the Trapezium or Wregoe sites)
First off, the Guardian sites: they show up on the FSS scan, but not in the place you'd look. Rather, they are "hidden" (though still highlighted in yellow) in the optional "Locations" part of the text, and not the top right corner where Geological and Biological signals are listed.
The POIs themselves also appear if you are within 1,000 ls, or if you happen to point your ship at the body they are on.
Moving back to the FSS:
In a nutshell, the main issue was that it hid information that was previously immediately visible, behind a simple and monotonous minigame. (Which was designed as a time sink, and also to shower people with credits and tags.) If you were looking for interesting orbital configurations, or unusual surface features large enough to be visible from a distance, or green gas giants, or possibly other stuff I forgot, then once the FSS was added, you had to grind out the minigame to completion, just looking at the barcode wasn't enough. Only to find out that 99% (or worse) of the time, what you were looking for wasn't there.
To quote the developers (from a stream): "The key thing here, and in this bar, yes overall you're right, the [FSS graph] system is learnable, but what, what we're jokingly trying to kind of get across is that very quickly you can jump into a system, perform the pulse scan, look at that bar and say "there's nothing there that I want", there's no Earth-likes, there's no whatever you're looking for, and get back out again."
As you know, thin atmospheric bodies aren't visible on the bar either. So, if you want those, or any of what I mentioned above, it's grind time for you, and chances are you won't find what you're looking for, so it was mostly a waste of time.
You know, just this month, David Braben commented (on Twitter) on a GEC entry that I discovered: see here. Now, luckily I found that one before the FSS, because after it, I never would have noticed the place. After all, this was how it looked upon entering the system:
But after the FSS, you see this:
So yeah, I would have missed it, and so would have many others.
The POIs themselves also appear if you are within 1,000 ls, or if you happen to point your ship at the body they are on.
Moving back to the FSS:
I'll refrain from saying anything about the shortcomings of the interface and minigame itself, and just focus on what went away when it was forced on everyone.
In a nutshell, the main issue was that it hid information that was previously immediately visible, behind a simple and monotonous minigame. (Which was designed as a time sink, and also to shower people with credits and tags.) If you were looking for interesting orbital configurations, or unusual surface features large enough to be visible from a distance, or green gas giants, or possibly other stuff I forgot, then once the FSS was added, you had to grind out the minigame to completion, just looking at the barcode wasn't enough. Only to find out that 99% (or worse) of the time, what you were looking for wasn't there.
To quote the developers (from a stream): "The key thing here, and in this bar, yes overall you're right, the [FSS graph] system is learnable, but what, what we're jokingly trying to kind of get across is that very quickly you can jump into a system, perform the pulse scan, look at that bar and say "there's nothing there that I want", there's no Earth-likes, there's no whatever you're looking for, and get back out again."
As you know, thin atmospheric bodies aren't visible on the bar either. So, if you want those, or any of what I mentioned above, it's grind time for you, and chances are you won't find what you're looking for, so it was mostly a waste of time.
You know, just this month, David Braben commented (on Twitter) on a GEC entry that I discovered: see here. Now, luckily I found that one before the FSS, because after it, I never would have noticed the place. After all, this was how it looked upon entering the system:
But after the FSS, you see this:
So yeah, I would have missed it, and so would have many others.
So just to clear it up whilst i have some folks here more knowledgeable than me, if i F.S.S a previously undiscovered system (as most out here in Rykers are) and zoom in on a body to scan it (still in F.S.S), Guardian sites may appear in the 'Locations' section of the report but not under the 'Features' section at the top right?
Obviously i would have to DSS then body to find an actual location.
O7
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