I'm all for tolerating opinions, but I never thought autopilot would be more engaging unless we had legs or something else to do while we wait. (In-game of course)
Why does my 34th century spaceship have no autopilot OR how do you accept the hyperjump grind?
- Thread starter sc_neo
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I'm all for tolerating opinions, but I never thought autopilot would be more engaging unless we had legs or something else to do while we wait. (In-game of course)
I agree with THIS completely. There really does need to be more interaction added to flying a spaceship. Trust me, I get it, as do most.
Q4 is supposed to be adding more to exploration... whether it does or not remains to be seen.
Really? I need to spell this out? People want the mindless, challenge-free, risk-free, skilless demand of pressing one button for thousands upon thousands of times, to be automated. What is left is literally everything else. And for those who find pressing one button for thousands upon thousands of time is an engaging activity: you can still do it if that is the kind of stuff you're into.
Ditto ^^^
the irony is if those that want full manual, all the time still want that, I fully support their choice and more power to them. The problem is the reverse isn’t true - the nanny police just can’t allow even an -optional- toggle / feature / whatever implementation because they care more about how you play than how they play
basically, your misery is their game content.
Hmm... I highly doubt that. IRL, the astronauts aren't just ballast on ships. They used to be, yes, back in the Gemini days and Chris Hadfield had alot to say about that. IRL, you don't just set Auto Go There on vehicles. The navies of the world don't have auto docking. Ever seen a plane refuel in the air? They don't let the auto pilot do that. Yes, they are working on it, but AAR isn't something most pilots I have read about trust. (hmmm.... much like auto docking. I still have nightmares about the time my Python tried to enter the station from the opposite side of where the mail slot was while I was getting coffee...)
And while it may not be the most fun part of the game... it's part of the whole experience. You don't get to cherry pick your way through life. Every once in a while you gotta deal with the stone in the cherry.
True. But the thing is that the mechanic is so terrible that for many people not playing at all is preferable to what we currently have. Many people would love to explore this or that region, but dont feel like pressing one button for thousands of times. Adding actual gameplay to this journey would be golden, but right now that seems far beyond the abilities of FD. So as a band-aid people ask for the ability to not have to press that button at all, without gaining any advantage over people who find great enjoyment in pressing that button.
Yes, You need to spell it out, because other than your strawman "risk/reward" hyperbole/trope (or rather "tripe") you've simply failed to provide any actual evidence other than opinionated snark as a response.
This core of this game is about flying spaceships.
If you don't like to fly spaceships- I recommend a game that you can simply "point and click" and engage "autopilot" wherever you wish. It's called EVE Online.
Nobody here dislikes 'flying there ship'. We just think the 'flying the ship' part is not the same as 'pressing that one button thousands of times'. We feel the actual flying the ship part is everything you do when you aint doing that. And as people say, it is fine if you like pressing that button. Have at it, press it as often as you want. But your viciously fundamentalist view that everyone should just press that button thousands of times because you find it such an awesome thing to do is something not everyone agrees with.
So please take your 'if you dont like pressing 'J' thousands of time you hate flying ships so play EvE' crap elsewhere.
I love a meaningful, well-balanced and reasoned response about the nature of explorers. It so adds to the quality of a thread
And in case you don't understand my highlights in bold .... it is sarcasm.
Not entirely. As some literally said, they take pride in 'enduring the hardship of space travel' and 'being tough enough to face space madness and come out in one piece'. If you make the soul-crushingly stupid activity of pressing a single button thousands of times with zero gameplay or challenge of any kind involved optional, you remove the hardship. To them, its like installing an elevator to the top of Mount Everest: they dont like the climbing itself, but they like having climbed the mountain.
The problem of course is that to the overwhelming majority of people games shouldn't be a thing you endure but enjoy. A second problem is that noone at FD every walked up a hill, never mind climbed a mountain. Like with many facets of the game, they have no idea what it is like to play it the way they designed it.
I love a meaningful, well-balanced and reasoned response about the nature of explorers. It so adds to the quality of a thread
And in case you don't understand my highlights in bold .... it is sarcasm.
Exactly. People seem to think we waste HOURS of our lives hitting that little "J" button, when in reality that takes only seconds of our time in between actual exploration.
The real issue is getting beyond the "honk/scan" mechanics into something a bit more meaningful and with more depth... not "witchspace".
How exactly does adding a simple "click to fly from here to there" button add to your so-called "risk/reward" gameplay mentality?
Yeah, it doesn't.
While I am all up for more interaction, it never is just pressing one button. You need to navigate around the star, fuel scoop, do a discovery scan (I do this in all system that I haven't been to myself), check the system map, I normally do this stuff when fuel scooping, scan any planets that I want to, then continue on my way.
For me it has never been press one button as there is by default more stuff that you have to do before jumping again. I am also hoping the new exploration mechanics will spice things up.
All of the above is part of exploration and piloting your ship. I am not against more stuff to do regarding your ship, but adding an autopilot just seems like cheating without any risk.
Personally I would have it if they did add an autopilot, then it would take substantially longer then if you did it manually. Like 2-3 times as long.
LOL. It takes 'only seconds', plus a loading screen of 40 seconds. Per jump. Which you often need thousands of. Which means thousands upon thousands of hours of 'waiting + pressing J'. What is actually your problem with having other people who are not you automate this? Why do you care so much that you want them to not have it their way if it doesnt influence you in any way whatsoever?
I totally agree with the above. Sleutelbos has defined the point perfectly.
FD won't do it though, not because they cannot but simply because they do not understand the way in which players are affected by this abysmal game mechanic. Devs never play the game, except when they are working on it. They have no idea what it feels like to waste hours/days pressing 'J' tens of thousands of times with nothing else of interest to do in the meantime.
I used to play ED every day for several hours but now have not played in many months. The repetitive jump mechanic is one of the principal reasons for me quitting ED.
I live in hope though: If ever there were candidates for paid DLC, an autopilot has to be one of them. I for one would willingly purchase such DLC.
Or, it should have a challenge added.
Make travelling a distance longer than - say - 1000LY increasingly difficult (up to a maximum, not just increasing forever). So you can go Sol-Pleiades-California okay, and you can hop around between deep space bases within a few thousand LY of Sol, without too many issues.
Travel to Colonia? Well, it's a few thousand LY between rest stops - expect it to be a little tricky to make it to the next highway base, especially once they start really thinning out as you get past Rohini.
Travel to Beagle Point? Actually requires a serious effort - maybe even teamwork for all but the most skilled explorers - to travel that far without resupply. And then you still have to get back.
Make it not just a matter of honk-jump, so you have to stop at least every few systems to deal with something (be that fixing wear-and-tear, scooping from a gas giant, picking up materials to repair modules, etc.) and the question of "why can't we automate 100 consecutive honk jumps" goes away, because no-one is ever doing that anyway.
Make fuel scooping from stars like it was in FE2/FFE - a really dangerous "last resort" option which guarantees damage to your ship even if you do everything right. Sensible people scoop from gas giants, which is still a little tricky but safe enough once you get the hang of it. People travelling shorter distances just pack extra fuel tanks instead of a scoop, and do some semi-economic routing.
...
The problem in this case with automating it is the nature of the automation. It shouldn't be faster to automate the travel than it is to do it manually. But large chunks of the current travel time are loading screens, so firstly should get faster as hardware progresses - and on average have, since 1.0 - and secondly it makes no sense to show ten loading screens to load one system.
If you can travel while logged out at a "as if you were honk-jumping" rate based on your fuel scoop and FSD, you can just set it, go to bed, and get up 20,000 LY away ... which is a solution, but then why can't you autotrade overnight and wake up 8 hours * trade route * tonnage richer? It's not as if basic A-B trading is difficult or interesting either.
Conversely, if it's just a basic "scooping computer" which flies around the star at a safe distance until full then automatically continues the route, how is "waiting for 5 hours not pressing J" better than "waiting for 5 hours occasionally pressing J". It's basically still the "log out and wake up richer" question except with the extremely marginal risk that something will interrupt the autopilot and you wander in to a rebuy screen in the morning.
...
So *even though* it might be a bit late to add some challenge to long-distance travel, I think that's the direction Frontier need to go in. They've already multiplied jump ranges by ~8 since the 1.0 release and people still aren't satisfied with that - and won't be until you can jump 10,000 LY at once. So they need to try something different.
There isn't any risk right now either. Which is the whole point. if there was some engaging gameplay involved in long-distance traveling we wouldn't have this topic. But there is no risk, no challenge, no skill requirement. So far I haven't seen a single compelling argument against optional automation of this mechanic, beyond "I want people to play the way I do".
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Absolutely agree. But FD is very averse to adding challenge to their products. Its not just ED, PC and JWE are pretty much without any significant challenge too. The idea that you can run at 0% hull integrity without even noticing it is insane. And exactly the way plenty of explorers like it.
There are two schools of thought. One is that the Galaxy is BIG and we should feel it is big whenever we try to reach its distant parts. The other is that the Bigness introduces tedium if the mechanic to reach those distant parts is broken down into small mechanics (mostly pressing K or J or a key) rather than one big one to reach a destination.
I feel that the Elite community has grown. It fully appreciates that space is Big, but would now appreciate a mechanic to get somewhere distant more quickly. The early explorers have reached the distant places, have claimed their places in history, photographed them in detail, and probably (mostly) don't feel the need to do it all again.
In part, Michael Brookes felt this too and introduced the neutron highway mechanic to overcome some of this tedium ( minor jumps are turned into 4 at once), but after "exploring" the Galaxy, the more distant parts could certainly now benefit from an even bigger multiplier mechanic to reach them.
The question then becomes, is it good for the player base as a whole ? I think, probably, yes. We have moved on from the excitement of a few explorers discovering mysterious things at the Galaxy rim. The masses don't have the patience, and perhaps the time, to repeat the steps they took.
Then there is the future ..... an intergalactic one, perhaps, requiring an inter-galactic drive? Once again, the long distance explorers might find fresh challenges, while the rest of us would find more local discoveries near the outer reaches of our own Galaxy. But a mechanic to get there even faster would, in the long term, be a benefit rather than a hindrance to game enjoyment.
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