Very limited quick travel (or if you will a galactic highway to Colonia)

[anderstn]

Hi

First of all I feel like traditional quick travel, as seen in most RPGs, in Elite would certainly break things horribly. As such what I'm about to suggest is in no way unlimited or entirely free form quick travel. If you want that make another thread.

First some backstory to explain why I think this feature is needed. I love exploring in this game and right now I'm making my way to Colonia. This journey has taken a lot of time as I don't have more than 5-7 hours of total playtime during a regular week. All of which is not dedicated to Elite. My guess is there are several players who are in a similar situation where their time is divided between the things they care about whether it is other games, movies, friends, family, work, etc. So far I'm a little over halfway there. With new patches to the game releasing content that is somewhat, or entirely, divided in it's focus between the Colonia and the good old bubble of human space constantly spending weeks to get back and forth to experience it is not really an option for me.

With that in mind I suggest creating a means for players who have already travelled to Colonia to book a fare back to the human bubble and vice versa. This transportation is only for your player character and should not be instantaneous. Also the route would be static so you might not choose where in the human, or Colonia, bubble you end up when you are booking the voyage. So if you wanted to upgrade an Asp explorer with all the engineer upgrades and station it in Colonia you still have to upgrade it and fly it there, but in my case I don't have to spend weeks making the journey back just to start working up my reputation with the engineers. A real world analogy to this would be the ships heading for America during the early days of exploring the continent. You only had a few destinations to chose from and you either had to buy fare for your horses and gear or have the money to buy these things when you arrived on the other side of the Atlantic.

The way I see it a system like this where Frontier defines the route, and the requirements to unlock it, is the best of both worlds in terms of making all the content they are producing accessible to all players without taking anything away from the gameplay experience for players who like to go at it themselves or seek out long trade routes, deep space exploration etc. It's also a nice foundation for lore and community goals with the route causing various pit stops to grow and appear organically along it's trail. Hence providing more gameplay possibilities for those who are travelling the distance on their own.

What do you think guys?

 

[MBaldelli]

There is a quicker method of getting to Colonia -- the Neutron Highway (AKA Hurt Highway). Anything quicker than this and you're going to be letting the genie out of the bottle for impatient players wanting quick travel on everything.

The fact is that the Milky Way is massive, and the Universe doubly so. You should be planning out whether or not you're wanting to make the journey with some consideration: be it with Hutton Orbital at .22 LY or Colonia at 20,000 LY.

I've noticed that many commanders are creating multiple accounts. One that can take advantage of the joys of Colonia, the other to happily fly around the Bubble. Perhaps you should consider this as well.

Or you can consider what I've been doing. Avoiding the stampede rush to Colonia by following my own path. After all, why do you have to march to the beat of everyone else's drums instead of your own?

 

[anderstn]

I am aware of the Neutron Highway, but it really does not change the immediate problem at hand. Frontier releases content that is specific to a certain area. As a casual player I would like to have access to this content even if I'm currently located in another play area without spending weeks bridging the distance. That does not mean I want to instant travel with my ship. I'm perfectly fine shipping just my old self as cargo and waiting one week in real life to arrive. These and other means of limiting this feature and preventing it from becoming what you fear it might create were outlined in my original post. Rather than just making a simple statement saying if they allow X then they must allow Y you could center your response around what was actually suggested. I made it perfectly clear that if you came here looking for a free form of quick travel go somewhere else or suggest it as another feature.

As for the Neutron highway I am aware of it, but it doesn't really solve the problem. It just replaces time with a considerable increase in risk while still being a pretty time consuming task for a casual player. So far I have tried doing almost everything in Elite aside from the engineers and none of it is about scale. Yes the scale is there and you notice it, but if you are trading you find one trade route and repeat it. Similarly if you are mining you don't travel 100ly for that one special asteroid instead you find a planet with a good ring system and a demand for ore in the system or close by and mine it. There are of course the community goals, rare trading and faction stuff as well, but these are again like a whole different meta-game within each aspect of the gameplay. Since all of these aspects require you to deliver some form of cargo or cartographer data to another station any system that just transports your character, and not your ship, won't impact the value of these activities.

 

[bladerunner900]

I would love to be able to hitch-hike across the galaxy. Sell everything and just go. Perhaps when we have legs. In the meantime, perhaps booking passage could be made possible with a suitable delay, with the price of a Sidewinder at your destination perhaps. Just a thought.

 

[PigKiller]

“The journey, Not the destination matters...”
― T.S. Eliot

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
― Tennessee Williams

"You can't get there from here."
-Old Yankee saying

 

[JudeSaint]

I am aware of the Neutron Highway, but it really does not change the immediate problem at hand. Frontier releases content that is specific to a certain area. As a casual player I would like to have access to this content even if I'm currently located in another play area without spending weeks bridging the distance. That does not mean I want to instant travel with my ship. I'm perfectly fine shipping just my old self as cargo and waiting one week in real life to arrive. These and other means of limiting this feature and preventing it from becoming what you fear it might create were outlined in my original post. Rather than just making a simple statement saying if they allow X then they must allow Y you could center your response around what was actually suggested. I made it perfectly clear that if you came here looking for a free form of quick travel go somewhere else or suggest it as another feature.

As for the Neutron highway I am aware of it, but it doesn't really solve the problem. It just replaces time with a considerable increase in risk while still being a pretty time consuming task for a casual player. So far I have tried doing almost everything in Elite aside from the engineers and none of it is about scale. Yes the scale is there and you notice it, but if you are trading you find one trade route and repeat it. Similarly if you are mining you don't travel 100ly for that one special asteroid instead you find a planet with a good ring system and a demand for ore in the system or close by and mine it. There are of course the community goals, rare trading and faction stuff as well, but these are again like a whole different meta-game within each aspect of the gameplay. Since all of these aspects require you to deliver some form of cargo or cartographer data to another station any system that just transports your character, and not your ship, won't impact the value of these activities.

First off i just want to state that i am in NO way trying to crap on you or anything. Now that that is out of the way .... I highlighted a portion of your post .... THIS is the problem in my opinion. Just because you can't get to something quickly it should be changed? Because you are a "casual" player it should be changed? Weeks getting to colonia? I just spend less than two days going 14000 LY and i scanned down at minimum 50% of the systems i visited. the latter half of the first 7000 was Neutron stars ... and the first portion of the trip home were neutron stars. To be fair if i had just jumped (not even with the neutron stars) and not worried about scanning id wager i would have cut my time in half only taking a day or so (few hours) to do it.

Again im not trying to crap on you in any way but so often i see the "im a casual gamer and i cant do this so please fix it" post and it just annoys me to no end. Modern MMO's are ruined by the casual gamer because if someone else who puts in the time and effort to do something DOES it ... and you cant because you cant put in the time and the effort ... than its given to you (you being the causal gamer) making all that work that others put into it meaningless.

I am a father to two newborn twins(two months early and spent 45 days in the NICU) and i can find time during my week to make these long trips. I also meet on Monday nights with a gaming group. spend Saturdays doing chores Sundays at church and work an 8-5. Did i mention i play 2-3 other games? My point is that it IS possible to do your colonia trip if you really wanted to. If your soul purpose is to get to clonina id bet you could do it in a couple days MAX if you hit the neutron highway. If you want to stop and explore on the way than that is a different story

Appologies if i seem offensive. The whole "im a casual gamer and i think i should get this" thing always kind of rubs me the wrong way.

 

[Tadeus72]

Well, there are a lot of exploration targets for casual players. Most nebulas 5-7kly from the bubble have asteroid stations in them now and there are explorer passenger missions to those nebulas. There are also a lot of undiscovered systems there. All cool exploration content that you can do while having less time. Also, maybe in the future the mega-ships or carriers will go part of this way. Right now a lot of exploration players are traveling with the Gnosis that is going out deeper into the void with every week. It seems much more interesting then a mechanic that wouldn't allow you to play for a week because your CMDR is traveling to Colonia.

 

[anderstn]

Again im not trying to crap on you in any way but so often i see the "im a casual gamer and i cant do this so please fix it" post and it just annoys me to no end. Modern MMO's are ruined by the casual gamer because if someone else who puts in the time and effort to do something DOES it ... and you cant because you cant put in the time and the effort ... than its given to you (you being the causal gamer) making all that work that others put into it meaningless.

I am a father to two newborn twins(two months early and spent 45 days in the NICU) and i can find time during my week to make these long trips. I also meet on Monday nights with a gaming group. spend Saturdays doing chores Sundays at church and work an 8-5. Did i mention i play 2-3 other games? My point is that it IS possible to do your colonia trip if you really wanted to.

We will just have to agree to disagree here. I don't feel like my current trip to Colonia, where I am purposely exploring anything interesting along the way and avoiding Neutron stars for this exact reason, would be somehow diminished by the fact that the journey back could be done without spending 10+ hours constantly jumping. I guess I just find it weird that people would want to make parts of the game inaccessible or less interesting to others simply because they consider it an achievement to have the time for it. Like I have said earlier if the mechanic allowed you to take missions without putting in the work that would be a very different suggestion and not at all something I would support.

Well, there are a lot of exploration targets for casual players. Most nebulas 5-7kly from the bubble have asteroid stations in them now and there are explorer passenger missions to those nebulas. There are also a lot of undiscovered systems there. All cool exploration content that you can do while having less time. Also, maybe in the future the mega-ships or carriers will go part of this way. Right now a lot of exploration players are traveling with the Gnosis that is going out deeper into the void with every week. It seems much more interesting then a mechanic that wouldn't allow you to play for a week because your CMDR is traveling to Colonia.

Well yes I'm not specifically heading to Colonia because it's an exploration target. It's more because it's the first new are of human habitation and expansion. The thing is I would also like to dabble with the engineers content and right now that means grinding my way back home via the Neutron highway, which is dull as hell, or exploring in which case the time consumed is vast and a repetition of the tasks I just spent hours on. Generally speaking, with respect to exploration, I don't feel like the distance you travel impacts the value of the activity. You can go a few hundred light years outside inhabited space and find lots of interesting stuff so it's not really a contest of who has gotten further or found the most amazing system. With that in mind I don't see why somebody arguing that you should have to jump grind your way between every system you have visited before if all your interested in at the time is getting to your destination in any way impacts the value or purpose of exploring. That said if you could just jump from any system to any other system it would obviusly break the game and the immersion hence my suggestion of a single pre-defined route you hvae to unlock first.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Any "easy" route to Colonia, will instantly deprive it of the one thing that makes it unique.

It's distance from the bubble.

If you're not willing to fly there, don't fly there.

I'm a casual gamer, and I personally don't see the need to be in Colonia at the moment, so I won't go.

Moving to Colonia needs to be a proper conscious decision and careful thought, not just something you do on a whim.

Sorry to disagree.
In general, I'm all for tweaking supercruise to make trips more interesting and/or faster. But I'm generally against easy options to jump long distances.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[MBaldelli]

Any "easy" route to Colonia, will instantly deprive it of the one thing that makes it unique.

It's distance from the bubble.

If you're not willing to fly there, don't fly there.

I'm a casual gamer, and I personally don't see the need to be in Colonia at the moment, so I won't go.

Moving to Colonia needs to be a proper conscious decision and careful thought, not just something you do on a whim.

Sorry to disagree.
In general, I'm all for tweaking supercruise to make trips more interesting and/or faster. But I'm generally against easy options to jump long distances.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

I find myself in complete agreement to this sentiment and you worded it far better than I did when I first addressed this thread. This game has the biggest sandbox. Far, far bigger than WoW ever did. I like the fact that we have the ability to speed up our travels just a bit using Neutron Stars as a method of extending our jump ability; and while it seems more than coincidental that there is such a string of them from the Bubble to Colonia, I'm willing to take the slow road if only for the experience alone.

As a casual player as well, I rather enjoy the distances as I'm not having to deal with being an adrenaline junkie during my deep space runs outside the bubble. It gives me time to catch up on snippets and articles, chat with friends in, even RP a bit of my journal entries on Inara. Anything faster than that is definitely immersion breaking.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Any "easy" route to Colonia, will instantly deprive it of the one thing that makes it unique.

It's distance from the bubble.

This is an unfortunate effect of the game as it stands:

1) Colonia needs a barrier between it and the Sol bubble so that it's an actual decision to move between them. If you want "Colonia but without the barrier", the Pleiades have similar levels of growth and interesting bits, plus aliens and more CGs.

2) The only current way to implement this barrier is to make it take a lot of uninteresting-in-itself time to move between them (2 hours with skilled use of neutron highways and a fully optimised ship; much longer for most people)

Making the journey more interesting is probably the right answer, but that won't be easy or quick to implement.

(Due to possibly unintended consequences of the implementation, as long as you're willing to either leave ships in Colonia or pay a premium to have them transferred back, you can use a suicidewinder to immediately return to the bubble *from* Colonia. But you can't get out there that way.)

 

[Ian Doncaster]

and while it seems more than coincidental that there is such a string of them from the Bubble to Colonia,

Not a coincidence at all - the same would be true of almost any two points a similar distance from the galactic core. You don't need a very high density of neutron stars to chain them together into a highway for long-range ships - one per 100 LY cube is easily sufficient, and most of the galaxy [1] has at least that until you get way out onto the fringes.

The string between the Bubble and Colonia is much better mapped in tools such as Spansh because it's a popular route, so many more people have gone that way and found them, that's all.

[1] With an exception for those sectors due North, East, South or West from the bubble, which have few if any neutron stars.

 

[Alexandr]

This is about to imagine. If such a thing (quick travels) will be implemented the game become very different. It will not be "Elite Dangerous", it will not be a cosmic game. Someone can say - such a thing will destroy the game.

 

[Bartizan]

One of the few pragmatic areas I agree with the devs on is the scale of the game being integral to it's realism. Colonia should feel far away, because it is. I have made the trip a couple of times and hope to try out the NS highway eventually. The investment in time to reach a far off colony instills a sense of "I better make use of the time I am spending here since I committed so much to reaching it" mentality. If the goal is not "miss out" on something happening, then the importance of the scale of the game is lost on that player. There was a time when a jaunt to Maia was a commitment to some and now its like going to the corner store for milk. The distance to Maia didn't shorten, we have no secret Stargate getting us there. Reasonable changes to the game like engineers and the importance of going has melting the Light years away. Colonia could be the same thing some day with greater importance of going there and more reasonable tech innovations.

I would be saddened if the scale of the game was ignored for the convenience of a few less patient players.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[MBaldelli]

Not a coincidence at all - the same would be true of almost any two points a similar distance from the galactic core. You don't need a very high density of neutron stars to chain them together into a highway for long-range ships - one per 100 LY cube is easily sufficient, and most of the galaxy [1] has at least that until you get way out onto the fringes.

And

[1] With an exception for those sectors due North, East, South or West from the bubble, which have few if any neutron stars.

You even notice that something's going on with your exception/notation here. Don't worry -- I'm not damning the game or the devs for its creation. I understand that it's a game and that it can be set up that way for "convenience". It's just... for lack of a better word, setting my teeth on edge because of it.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

You even notice that something's going on with your exception/notation here.

Right, but Colonia could be literally anywhere *except* on the cardinal axes with Sol (or way out on the galactic fringes), and there would be a direct neutron highway there. Even if it *was* on a cardinal axis, as Sag A* is, you could get a neutron highway by travelling just 1000 LY to the side first, for barely any extra travel time.

The lack of neutron stars *and other high mass stars not used for fast travel* on the cardinal axes is generally believed to be a bug - an adjustment intended to suppress procedural generation of those stars in the immediate region around Sol that ended up affecting (far) more sectors than it was supposed to. So you get - on the axes - systems with a 'G' or 'H' masscode but only a tiny M-class or T-Tauri at the centre, that would normally contain a Wolf-Rayet, or a supergiant, or an O-class, or a giant black hole.

I'm really not sure what you think is going on here, or how it fits with the timeline around the stellar forge (pre-release), Colonia (2.1, and based on player action), and neutron boosts (2.2, and apparently a bug-that-became-a-feature that they're as useful as they are)...

 

[MBaldelli]

I'm really not sure what you think is going on here, or how it fits with the timeline around the stellar forge (pre-release), Colonia (2.1, and based on player action), and neutron boosts (2.2, and apparently a bug-that-became-a-feature that they're as useful as they are)...

Oh wait... you're thinking the premise I'm using to bring this up against the quick-travel option that the OP is suggesting is based on a potential bug or issue with the game's sandbox? No, quite the opposite. I'm approaching that the Neutron Highway is more the proof that it was definitely planned perhaps even years in advance of the Stellar Forge and Colonia Initiative/Push. It is also possible to work that code into the existing sandbox because how much of the Milky Way Sandbox has been discovered and looked into during Pre-Release? Post-Release? Currently?

Especially with the distance bug (that became a feature) that the devs have kept in the game. Because if you look at the distances between the Neutron Stars -- even with the distance pre-bug -- this was set up as a means of speeding up the process from the Bubble to Colonia. With the bug turned feature for FSD boosting, it significantly pushes up the timeframe for being able to get from The Bubble to Colonia.

I've worked on projects that span the course of weeks, months and years when it comes to implementing aspects for a final product (even if it's a database) to being able to do things expected from other users long before it's actually used by the end-users. Gaming isn't really all that different than those projects -- especially when you consider that the gaming industry does often work on introducing things into the code long before implementation.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I'm approaching that the Neutron Highway is more the proof that it was definitely planned perhaps even years in advance of the Stellar Forge and Colonia Initiative/Push. It is also possible to work that code into the existing sandbox because how much of the Milky Way Sandbox has been discovered and looked into during Pre-Release? Post-Release? Currently?

Especially with the distance bug (that became a feature) that the devs have kept in the game. Because if you look at the distances between the Neutron Stars -- even with the distance pre-bug -- this was set up as a means of speeding up the process from the Bubble to Colonia. With the bug turned feature for FSD boosting, it significantly pushes up the timeframe for being able to get from The Bubble to Colonia.

I'm really not convinced by that

1) The DDF proposals on exploration (before public Alpha release, but not that much before) suggested a much slower pace for it with significant distances requiring major cooperative efforts to chart and cross. Obviously that didn't happen, but it sets a floor on when any plans involving convenient fast travel could have started.

2) EDSM has been tracking system positions and names since September 2015, and that was a replacement for an earlier tool dating back further. The nature of the stellar forge mass cubes and the way the procedural names are generated means that it would be difficult to sneak any significant number of new systems in post-release without causing noticeable anomalies. There is no evidence of any change to which systems exist since the release of Gamma 1. (There have been some post-Gamma changes to the non-procedural sectors which have led to system renames, which are detectable via EDSM data). Additionally, Frontier have indicated that they aren't able to add entirely new systems to the game, though changing the contents of an existing one is possible.

3) Jaques Station ended up in the system now known as Colonia as a result of a large number of player-led actions and coincidences.
- it was originally jumping to Beagle Point, a system made famous by CMDR Erimus but not in itself particularly special except for its player-led historical value
- it was jumping there as a result of a CG proposed by the Fuel Rats (a player group founded in 1.3 which took off well beyond its founders expectations)
- it ended up where it did as a result of players UA-bombing the station shortly before the jump
- it ended up being a thing players want to visit (you never hear of anyone complaining how long it takes to get to the Crab Pulsar base, for instance) mainly because players went out there and adopted it. It could easily have ended up as just a distant and largely abandoned anomaly ... something you go see if you happen to be passing nearby on an exploration trip.

4) The Neutron boost as originally planned by FDev would not have been especially useful as a means of long-distance travel. The original 50% boost is inferior to and doesn't stack with what was already available from FSD Injection, and with the delays caused by setting up the boost and having to do more refuelling and repairs, would probably end up slower than normal travel except in special cases.

5) Frontier do not generally give the impression of having a decade-long roadmap set out in advance beyond some very broad outlines ... and if they ever did, the delays in the Horizons season (and the insertion of Beyond) have presumably caused the original to be thrown out and replaced by something more pragmatic anyway.

The times and the actors involved don't add up to it all having been pre-planned this way.

---

I can believe that Frontier decided in 2.2 to go with keeping the NS bug partly to make it easier to get to Colonia, because it was taking off so much at that stage, and to make the CEI community goals they had planned easier for players. I can't believe that they'd pre-planned the neutron star distribution way back in pre-release for just this eventuality, however ... if they were paying that much attention to what the stellar forge was generating far from Sol, we wouldn't have the blue cubes, or the axial mass suppression ... and probably wouldn't actually have the neutron fields either, given what causes them...

(I can also believe that Frontier eventually intend there to be human coreward settlements and took the opportunity to put Jaques there as an early start on the first one, but I think we're talking about a "several years earlier" start in that case)

 

[MBaldelli]

I can believe that Frontier decided in 2.2 to go with keeping the NS bug partly to make it easier to get to Colonia, because it was taking off so much at that stage, and to make the CEI community goals they had planned easier for players. I can't believe that they'd pre-planned the neutron star distribution way back in pre-release for just this eventuality, however ... if they were paying that much attention to what the stellar forge was generating far from Sol, we wouldn't have the blue cubes, or the axial mass suppression ... and probably wouldn't actually have the neutron fields either, given what causes them...

(I can also believe that Frontier eventually intend there to be human coreward settlements and took the opportunity to put Jaques there as an early start on the first one, but I think we're talking about a "several years earlier" start in that case)

I'll agree to disagree at this point. When it comes to human nature I always take the approach from the following quote:

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

 

[Bartizan]

Oh wait... you're thinking the premise I'm using to bring this up against the quick-travel option that the OP is suggesting is based on a potential bug or issue with the game's sandbox? No, quite the opposite. I'm approaching that the Neutron Highway is more the proof that it was definitely planned perhaps even years in advance of the Stellar Forge and Colonia Initiative/Push. It is also possible to work that code into the existing sandbox because how much of the Milky Way Sandbox has been discovered and looked into during Pre-Release? Post-Release? Currently?

Especially with the distance bug (that became a feature) that the devs have kept in the game. Because if you look at the distances between the Neutron Stars -- even with the distance pre-bug -- this was set up as a means of speeding up the process from the Bubble to Colonia. With the bug turned feature for FSD boosting, it significantly pushes up the timeframe for being able to get from The Bubble to Colonia.

I've worked on projects that span the course of weeks, months and years when it comes to implementing aspects for a final product (even if it's a database) to being able to do things expected from other users long before it's actually used by the end-users. Gaming isn't really all that different than those projects -- especially when you consider that the gaming industry does often work on introducing things into the code long before implementation.

I don't believe for a second the NS highway was pre-determined. I think in classic cryptic fashion FD saw NS/WD boosting as a solution to quicker travel to unspecified areas that the players can piece together on their own. The actual highways that have been charted are organic. I have personally charted hundreds of first discovery NS and WD briar patches and if I felt so inclined could piece together a highway from one arbitrary point to another arbitrary point. I feel pretty comfortable the highways might have been a possible outcome discussed, but designed? nah, don't buy it.