Why the FSS is better than the previous system.

Riverside

Riverside
sleutelbos said:
1) It is equally great on hotas, if you bibd it well. Better even, because I can do it one-handed so can drink while scanning. :)

2) If you cant work ut out, use your controller on pc just for the fss.

3) the constant 'combat kids' 'tunnel vision' etc ad hominems make it hard to take you seriously. If your point relies on randomly insulting other people, who aint even part of the discussion, your point seems weak.

As mentioned, I use the FSS using HOTAS, am on my way to the formadine rift, have scanned a metric ton of bodies and discovered tons of stuff. Exploration hss never been this awesome! Then again, I am also a combat kid.

Because I am not only elite explorer, but also got the real elite rank. :p
Click to expand...

Regardless of the method used the end result is that finding stuff on planets is way easier than before. I just found a planet with Bioluminescent Anemone, never found those before.
 

Enderby

E
Why do i have to manually tune the fss? Why cant it scan on all frequencies (or whatever they are) at once?

To give us some fun? A challenge? Well, erm... that didnt work.
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
CMDR Karrde Sun said:
Well given the honk doesn't discover objects.. there's still no competition when you put it down to gamey gamplay gains.

Removing the credit reward from the honk and letting visual and flight explorers be on their way never occurred to them it seems.

Someone got tunnel vision internally and was determined to remove it because of.. idealism??? it seems. They even introduced the most cheezy idea of flash shared communal exploration data so combat kiddies wouldn't implode if they were forced to use the fss or fly to the nav beacon in bubble (without the old ads).

Can you imagine that.. no honk and combat players in the bubble? Even frontier weren't that silly. Yet somehow people out of the bubble have to suck it up now.
Click to expand...

The new system is designed for "surveyors" rather than "explorers".
 

Genar-Hofoen

Genar-Hofoen
Collins dictionary defines explorer as:

An explorer is someone who travels to places about which very little is known, in order to discover what is there.
Click to expand...

Isn't that exactly what everyone in the game is doing?

You're travelling to different star systems about which very little is known, in order to discover what is there.

In order to discover what is there, you need tools to survey the star system.

FSS : allows one to discover there are stars and possibly other bodies in the system

Surface scanner (Probe mapper) : allows one to discover if there are Points of Interest on a body.

And so if the Surface Scanner tells you there are PoI's and where to go, then you venture down to them and you discover what's there.

I'm failing to see why folks are saying "what we have in game isn't exploration". What we have in game is the very definition of exploration.
 
Last edited:

CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost

C
Genar-Hofoen said:
…
Isn't that exactly what everyone in the game is doing?

You're travelling to different star systems about which very little is known, in order to discover what is there.
…
Click to expand...

My personal little theory on this topic is, that different people have different definitions of "travels to places".
Some seem to consider traveling to the system to be the travel part of the definition you quoted. Others seem to consider the planet/moon to be the destination of that travel aspect.

The old system annoyed the first group as it instantly revealed the information they wanted to discover - "how does the system look like". This was no problem for those who considered the planet/moon the thing to discover as they had to go there to detail surface scan it.

The new system reverses the situation. It is great for those who consider the system the destination. They get to the system and then reveal the map step by step. Not having to bother with going to the various planets/moons if they don't want to.
The second group is annoyed as without a system map they can't decide what planet/moon they want to explore by traveling to that object. And after using the FSS there is no need to go there anymore as the objects are now known and there is no need to travel to them anymore.

One group says they are exploring a system - as the contents of the system is unknown at first.
The other group sees the FSS as surveying - as all it does is creating a map of the system without having to fly to the objects.
 

sollisb

Banned
S
Genar-Hofoen said:
Can we have a succint definition of what exactly is meant by the word "explorer"? That'd go a long way towards amiable discussion IMO.
Click to expand...

Apparently it's someone happy to play the same mini-game over and over again while travelling somewhere.

Once you can do that, you can now call yourself an 'Explorer'.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
sleutelbos said:
A real explorer is whatever you do. What other people do must be called something else. :)
Click to expand...

No, you've got it all wrong...

One is a surveyor, some 'real explorers' have said so :)

As surveyor one doesn't need an instant picture of what one has discovered to know if one has discovered anything, just get on with surveying the bodies present in a system, simple :D



It is amazing just how much passion is generated by so few about something so trivial!
 
Last edited:

Genar-Hofoen

Genar-Hofoen
CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost said:
My personal little theory on this topic is, that different people have different definitions of "travels to places".
Some seem to consider traveling to the system to be the travel part of the definition you quoted. Others seem to consider the planet/moon to be the destination of that travel aspect.

The old system annoyed the first group as it instantly revealed the information they wanted to discover - "how does the system look like". This was no problem for those who considered the planet/moon the thing to discover as they had to go there to detail surface scan it.

The new system reverses the situation. It is great for those who consider the system the destination. They get to the system and then reveal the map step by step. Not having to bother with going to the various planets/moons if they don't want to.
The second group is annoyed as without a system map they can't decide what planet/moon they want to explore by traveling to that object. And after using the FSS there is no need to go there anymore as the objects are now known and there is no need to travel to them anymore.

One group says they are exploring a system - as the contents of the system is unknown at first.
The other group sees the FSS as surveying - as all it does is creating a map of the system without having to fly to the objects.
Click to expand...

Thing is, exploration in ED isn't just the FSS. Folks seem to be focusing only on the FSS. They are not taking into consideration the whole of what FDEV have done - it's not just the FSS, it's also the probe mapping, and the going down to a surface to investigate whatever probe mapping hints at being down there.

And not only that, FDEV have combined the exploration mechanics with a lot of the other activities available in inhabited systems.

Yet, some folks are just focusing on the FSS like it's the be all and end all of Exploration. It's not, and IMO only focusing on the FSS is taking a blinkered approach - I know because I used to be that guy.
 

Riverside

Riverside
I'm not an explorer, I'm a Wayward Wanderer ;)

I'm not using that ship right now, it was engineered before 3.0 and I didn't want to lose those mods so I built a second one, named 'Number Two' with both the FSS and new swear filter in mind. The new one jumps 30ly & is once again equipped for anything the game might throw at me while exploring waywardly wandering around in Open. I didn't fit an interdictor in the end, I'm not that kind of player but if I thought about it others will too.




I reached the Cat's Paw nebula yesterday evening, found some Anemones and Bark Mounds along with more geological POIs than I care to count, and this morning fast-tracked ~50 odd jumps to Observation Post Epsilon near the Trifid Nebula about 5,000ly from home to sell my data. This recently after the patch there is a good chance I might not grab those tags around nebulae, particularly in a relatively low jump range ship.

I've done around 350 jumps now, roughly half of those systems were fully scanned using the FSS, with a total of maybe a dozen or so mapped moons that I landed on or was close to one I was landing on. A few water worlds too, some of which I mapped purely for the Tag & the cash (no gameplay associated with it).

I've earned an additional 220,000Cr for Codex discoveries, and bear in mind that that's the reward for the final tier of assisted discovery now, in order to get those vouchers I had to FSS the system, identify the target body, travel to it, map it, travel to a POI and then scan the thing. While getting my name into the Codex gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling I can't help but feel that it is somewhat dwarved by the 43,286,016 credits I earned over the same period. This is in addition to the ~40mCr I reported in previous posts. I've travelled about 5,500ly in a 30ly ship and earned 80+MCr for the easy stuff and about 350kCr for actually discovering things at locations not discovered by anyone before.

There is no way the removal of the ADS can be justified because of exploitability in conjunction with the FSS, the payout without at ADS has jumped enormously. I've earned far more on this short trip than I would normally in the bubble (pre-3.3, I don't board flip).

IMO the reward should be weighted towards mapping & codex discoveries. Just FSSing a system or even just honking scooping & jumping is paying out huge rewards compared to the codex vouchers.

To put this payout into perspective I spent 18 months on a grand tour of the galaxy in a 19ly ship and earned just under a billion when I returned to the bubble in March 2018. And when I took my pilgrimage to SagA* in 3301 I earned just over 40mCr on a two-week, 46,000ly round trip.
 
Last edited:

Yure

Yure
DrewCarnegie said:
You've said it yourself - the changes are all about surveying. Each of the tools provides you with all the information, via a minigame, leaving nothing unknown, and no decision-making to be done.

The FSS minigame tells you exactly which planets have POIs and the probe minigame tells you exactly where they are. There's no player agency left, we're just robots performing repetitive tasks to tick boxes in the Codex.

I get that some people are perfectly happy with that, and I'm glad they're having fun with the new tools, but for others playing minigames isn't our idea of fun exploration gameplay, so we'd like to have some version of the ADS back (with whatever penalties FDev feels the need to apply) so we can have fun again.
Click to expand...

Wait wait... So you are saying because we can long shot survey a planet's composition and then spend time going to it like the old system and actually be able to use tools to determine where something is... We are no longer doing exploration?

I'll make sure to write to NASA and tell them to shut Kepler down because it's not a legit exploration tool.

Hey bro... You know you can still eyeball the floor yourself... Like nothing in the new system prevents you from doing beige patrol... Good luck.
 

[Diplomacy] Carnegie

[Diplomacy] Carnegie
Yure said:
Wait wait... So you are saying because we can long shot survey a planet's composition and then spend time going to it like the old system and actually be able to use tools to determine where something is... We are no longer doing exploration?

I'll make sure to write to NASA and tell them to shut Kepler down because it's not a legit exploration tool.

Hey bro... You know you can still eyeball the floor yourself... Like nothing in the new system prevents you from doing beige patrol... Good luck.
Click to expand...

Tell NASA about your FTL spaceship and they'll ask you why you're sitting in it playing with a telescope rather than flying it around.

Also, from Wikipedia on the Kepler Discovery Mission:

"Designed to SURVEY a portion of the Earth's region of the Milky Way..."

So thanks for proving my point.

Finally, whilst I CAN still explore by flying around, it still requires me to play the pointless minigame in order to find objects in the system.
 

Yure

Yure
DrewCarnegie said:
Tell NASA about your FTL spaceship and they'll ask you why you're sitting in it playing with a telescope rather than flying it around.

Also, from Wikipedia on the Kepler Discovery Mission:

"Designed to SURVEY a portion of the Earth's region of the Milky Way..."

So thanks for proving my point.

Finally, whilst I CAN still explore by flying around, it still requires me to play the pointless minigame in order to find objects in the system.
Click to expand...


Yeah... but a true explorer would do it with sensors off... Navigate by stars just like Lewis and Clark.... Luckily you can module off that bad boy and go full immersion.

Fact is 2018 we have more sensors than the game had pre 3.3. Bottom line, it's more realistic surveying and finding stuff with my survey samples than it is to look at emptiness.
 

Miko

M
DrewCarnegie said:
And that's another one who doesn't understand how the FSS works trying to argue that it isn't broken.

I'm starting to wonder if nobody at FDev left the Bubble either.
Click to expand...

The FSS may not be to your liking but to imply it is broken next to the old method is a tad reaching..

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. That much is fact. But the FSS has, for me, opened up a more interesting means of discovering the contents of each system versus the old method which was for me absolutely tedious and definitely wasn't something I would call fun when done system after system.

I guess the compromise that could be offered is the original Advanced Discovery Scanner and Surface Scanner still being offered as a module. The built in FSS can then be the individual's choice.

Just don't complain that FSS users can obtain the same data by digital telescopic means versus you hardcore supercruisers having to travel extreme distances just to oobtain the same information. In this case, I'm willing to bet a good number of you lot arguing against the FSS would resort to utilising it to bypass the old method when it suits your mood. Ironic? 🤔
 
Last edited:

[Diplomacy] Carnegie

[Diplomacy] Carnegie
Miko said:
The FSS may not be to your liking but to imply it is broken next to the old method is a tad reaching..

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. That much is fact. But the FSS has, for me, opened up a more interesting means of discovering the contents of each system versus the old method which was for me absolutely tedious and definitely wasn't something I would call fun when done system after system.

I guess the compromise that could be offered is the original Advanced Discovery Scanner and Surface Scanner still being offered as a module. The built in FSS can then be the individual's choice.

Just don't complain that FSS users can obtain the same data by digital telescopic means versus you hardcore supercruisers having to travel extreme distances just to oobtain the same information. In this case, I'm willing to bet a good number of you lot arguing against the FSS would resort to utilising it to bypass the old method when it suits your mood. Ironic? 樂
Click to expand...

True, it's not 'broken' so much as 'broken for me'.

I'd definitely take that compromise.

I've spent years ignoring mechanics in games that I either think are stupid or make the game too easy. I've played the Elder Scrolls series since Daggerfall and I've never yet paid for training. So I doubt I'll ever use the FSS.
 

Miko

M
DrewCarnegie said:
True, it's not 'broken' so much as 'broken for me'.

I'd definitely take that compromise.

I've spent years ignoring mechanics in games that I either think are stupid or make the game too easy. I've played the Elder Scrolls series since Daggerfall and I've never yet paid for training. So I doubt I'll ever use the FSS.
Click to expand...

I like a challenge and more reward for things but Elite has been lacking in challenge and reward for a long time, essentially, by comparison to other titles.

The FSS is a welcome change for me versus honking then travelling, but I've said that a lot. So maybe FD can offer that compromise to keep you guys capable of playing by your preferred method.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom