As far as I'm aware it will always put smaller ships on larger pads if there's one free and the smaller ones are all full. I notice it more often at small planetary ports, when I'm in a medium ship and the two medium pads are in use I get directed to a large pad instead. But I have had it happen occasionally as a small ship bumped up to a medium pad at an orbital outpost.
This is what I mean about FDev being "spiteful"...
- Thread starter Stealthie
- Start date
This is another one of those little things that make this game a chore rather than fun. I do not know why FDev is so feverishly making everything as complicated as possible instead of an actual good experience. Wonder why i should play this game actually..
Turning in a load of exploration data, one page at a time with waiting between each.
Collecting raw materials from geological sites... yeah i made a video about that.
Collecting and handing in Bulk missions with a slider one item at a time instead of just a deliver button.
Traveling is the same minigame over and over again.
Interdictions on a cargo mission is the same mini game over and over again.
The menu for the storage? Holy hell.. abysmal interface.
Seeing your engineering status.. abysmal interface again.
the list goes on and on..
Turning in a load of exploration data, one page at a time with waiting between each.
Collecting raw materials from geological sites... yeah i made a video about that.
Collecting and handing in Bulk missions with a slider one item at a time instead of just a deliver button.
Traveling is the same minigame over and over again.
Interdictions on a cargo mission is the same mini game over and over again.
The menu for the storage? Holy hell.. abysmal interface.
Seeing your engineering status.. abysmal interface again.
the list goes on and on..
You might be right.
Technically, the sysmap is wrong, but I guess it's not a big deal.
Speaking as somebody who's done a bit of programming, I'm surprised a developer would make a mistake like that, though.
Anybody who's done anything with flow-charts should know you don't draw lines through things unless you intend to link them.
Really, the sysmap should show my FC somewhere between the star and planet 1 but I guess they didn't want to move the planets around in the sysmap so all the FCs orbiting the star are just tacked onto the outside of the furthest planet from the star.
As a rule, I always use a ship to scout ahead and then jump my FC to my intended destination so it's always ended-up exactly where I intend it to be, so I've never had cause to look at where it's displayed when I jump to a system and orbit the star.
+EDIT+
Quoted wrong post. D'oh!
Last edited:
The problem with trying to diagnose oddities like this one is that you never know how much of ED is actually simulating the same mechanics with which players interact, and how much is just smoke / mirrors / RNG designed to produce the same end result. When everything's working it doesn't matter, but when something breaks...
I guess the immersive disconnect is the same in either case so in many ways it doesn't really matter, but for me ED's sheer scope and scale makes it unusually sensitive to these effects.
In many games you can almost instinctively reconcile slight bugginess into the fiction, convincing yourself that the odd behaviour is character- or situation-based even when you know intellectually that it's a coding quirk. But because of ED's setting, this veneer of "realism" is vast but very thin, analogous to the "mile wide, inch deep" criticism often levelled -- unfairly in my opinion -- on the gameplay. It has to convince you constantly that everything you see from the galactic background to orbiting space stations to the rocks on a dusty moon are somehow real, and it generally does such a good job of this that the things it's not so great at -- simulating humans and human behaviour -- are still relatively easy to mentally fold into the overall fantasy.
But it doesn't take much to punch through that veneer, and when something "impossible" happens -- like, say, NPC ships appearing to request docking permission from 15km out -- very quickly you find yourself like Neo seeing Matrix code for the first time. You know something's wrong, and you know the reason is in there somewhere, but you don't have enough information to know what it might be.
None of which helps unpick this, of course. I just fancied a ramble on a Sunday morning. Time for some bacon.
I guess the immersive disconnect is the same in either case so in many ways it doesn't really matter, but for me ED's sheer scope and scale makes it unusually sensitive to these effects.
In many games you can almost instinctively reconcile slight bugginess into the fiction, convincing yourself that the odd behaviour is character- or situation-based even when you know intellectually that it's a coding quirk. But because of ED's setting, this veneer of "realism" is vast but very thin, analogous to the "mile wide, inch deep" criticism often levelled -- unfairly in my opinion -- on the gameplay. It has to convince you constantly that everything you see from the galactic background to orbiting space stations to the rocks on a dusty moon are somehow real, and it generally does such a good job of this that the things it's not so great at -- simulating humans and human behaviour -- are still relatively easy to mentally fold into the overall fantasy.
But it doesn't take much to punch through that veneer, and when something "impossible" happens -- like, say, NPC ships appearing to request docking permission from 15km out -- very quickly you find yourself like Neo seeing Matrix code for the first time. You know something's wrong, and you know the reason is in there somewhere, but you don't have enough information to know what it might be.
None of which helps unpick this, of course. I just fancied a ramble on a Sunday morning. Time for some bacon.
I thought you were going to say "crime and punishment actually got released".
Carebear missions give you a bounty. Really?
To the op though, yeah i was at an outpost recently in the bubble and the one pad was busy.. maybe its just a quirk in the ai they haven't checked in a while. It used to happen much more in the past.. oh wait i only used medium ships alot more in the past. Who knows.
Carebear missions give you a bounty. Really?
To the op though, yeah i was at an outpost recently in the bubble and the one pad was busy.. maybe its just a quirk in the ai they haven't checked in a while. It used to happen much more in the past.. oh wait i only used medium ships alot more in the past. Who knows.
It surely doesn't help that there are so many NPC's hanging around Rackham's Point. At other outposts, you might have to race against one or two to get within 7.5km and request docking. At Rackham's Point, there can easily be half a dozen or more. Surely that's something Frontier could look at?
Is that the same in Solo or Private Group, i.e. where the NPCs are spawning at the same time as you? It's not unusual for stations in Open where other players are already in the instance and NPC's have already spawned before you arrive.
This is in Solo. Perhaps they've introduced an algorithm that measures all player activity at "busy" stations and scales up NPC activity in Solo for "realism"?
If so, they've overdone it. Especially when a Python with A-rated G5DD engineered thrusters isn't fast enough to get ahead of the rush. It looks suspiciously as if the NPC's are dropping in at the normal distance, whereas the extra installations force players to drop much further out than usual.
I would agree but I don't think fdev put that much into it. Its prolly a callous consequence of subpar frontier rigamoro!There are rare moments where this happens. I mean... we have a background simulation working, we got npc's doing theyr jobs to feed the npc kids and help the npc grandparents to survive in the npc nursing homes. So don't act like an npc-KarenWaiting times can happen.
That would explain it.
That IS definitely happening.
If you race to reach the pad at Rackham's Peak, while you're waiting you can the "Zzaappp" of other ships arriving nearby... and not the 15-20km out that we have to drop in.
That isn't the cause of the issue with pad-blocking, though.
From 15km out, if you're in the correct orientation, you can see that the medium pad is lit up as soon as you arrive.
If you rush to get to the station, you'll arrive, sit there for 30 seconds and then a T6 (or Keelback or AspS) will sedately trundle along and land.
Point being, the ship that lands must be the ship that requested docking (causing the pad to light up) so it's either requested docking from >7.5km distant or we have to assume the ship started off <7.5km away, requested docking and then just kind of hung around for the time it takes you to travel from 15km out to the station plus the 30 seconds you have to wait for it to actually start docking.
The questions are why does this ALWAYS happen, rather than being randomised, and How do NPCs manage to request docking from so far away?
I've now delivered 30,000t of booze to Rackham's, 292t at a time (I really must be nuts!) so that's 103 arrivals and the scenario has been precisely the same every time. Zero variation.
+EDIT+
Also, nice FC BTW.
Particularly like the chick doing ATC.
She sounds cute.
Of course not silly... They stowed away on all of the player FC'sThe question should be: how in the hell NPC ships can get there? Do they have FCs too?
Damn cheaters,working as intended!Of course not silly... They stowed away on all of the player FC's
Speaking of cheaters, I have encountered some wild NPC showing an unnatural bevaviour at the landing pad that I can not explain to myself: (3 mins)
Maybe they are just trolling...
Maybe they are just trolling...
Somebody was probably super happy that somebody else came up with a script within reasonable time that seems to do what was intended in the first couple of checks.
Happens all the time in IT. Much more likely than genuine malice ; )
Making the player wait is the dirt-cheapest gameplay possible. Waiting while someone says "4... 3... 2... 1... " or for a 15 second hyperspace animation to play, or for a pad to become available.
The second-cheapest is to make players do the thing over and over again because they lost the RNG roll.
The metric for FDev isn't fun. It's logged-in hours per development cost. As long as you keep logging in, they'll keep making you wait longer and longer and doing things over and over.
The only way to do something about that is to stop logging in.
<bored to death uni lecurer voice>
... is the classic implementation of IF-THEN simplistic mechanic. In this example IF the player enters the instance, THEN said instance spawns NPC ship to make said instance live. Normally this wouldn't be a problem unless player decides to visit certain place numerous times in short period of time. In that case above simplistic mechanic activates each time giving the very same result. Which in the end gives the player exactly the same encounter. At first it may behave as designed but after several iterations it becomes simply boring, unimaginative, repetitive, and expectable. That is why, when programming, you need to implement variety to your code. This you may see on the next slide...
... is the classic implementation of IF-THEN simplistic mechanic. In this example IF the player enters the instance, THEN said instance spawns NPC ship to make said instance live. Normally this wouldn't be a problem unless player decides to visit certain place numerous times in short period of time. In that case above simplistic mechanic activates each time giving the very same result. Which in the end gives the player exactly the same encounter. At first it may behave as designed but after several iterations it becomes simply boring, unimaginative, repetitive, and expectable. That is why, when programming, you need to implement variety to your code. This you may see on the next slide...