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Would You Explore More if Return Was Easier?
- Thread starter Schmack
- Start date
I haven't read the DDA. Why would I? I play the game that's in front of me, not the game that's in my daydreams or someone else's. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't but that's just how I roll.
So I misunderstood what you mean by "nothing out there" - I thought you were talking about reality, not something else.
(By the way, don't you think it's a bit disingenous to loudly suspect someone is deliberately misinterpreting you when your point depended on whether or not they had read entire massive threads of material that you have no way of knowing they read, or not? Maybe the problem is that you didn't make your point very well? That's just something to consider.)
Been there, done .... a tiny bit of it. I crossed the US on a 1985 honda vt500 ascot in about 2 weeks. By the end, my buttocks were sending formal wax-sealed letters of intent to secede and start a new person. But, actually, it's exactly that kind of experience that makes me understand that when you are talking about large self-similar systems, there's a certain point past which "exploring" them makes no sense at all. Unless it's satisfying in its own right.
When I go to make rice with my dinner, I do not examine each grain. I pour a cup of rice into my rice-cooker and add water, then hit "cook" and ignore it. But each of those grains is interesting and unique. In fact, one of them might be, somehow, important. I might have just boiled the mutant rice grain that would have produced mega-crops and made me a billionaire.
Whatever. The thing that's interesting to me about this stuff is that we don't really think about how our experience is affected by our sense of scale but it always is, really deeply. I wonder often why Universal Cartographics would bother to pay me perfectly good credits for a scan of a neutron star 20,000ly from anything human, which is just like every other neutron star. How many neutron stars do they need in their database before the neutron stars become like grains of rice?I feel like I experienced the midwest and the high desert on my motorcycle trip but, in fact, I explored one road between San Diego and Albuquerque. There were an infinity of other sights I didn't experience. I saw a wild badger (!) and thunderstorms and felt like I had an experience but my sense of scale utterly limited it. I saw miles and miles and miles and miles of corn in Oklahoma. I actually hardly saw Oklahoma, at all.
What I remember were interesting nuggets: the hotel I stayed in, the strip club I hung out in to avoid the thunderstorm where I was the only customer for 5 hours and the coffee was amazing, the delicious tacos at the stand in Las Cruces...
I think the issue with exploring in Elite is that the stuff we think of as interesting tends to be human-scaled and human-created. That's why so many posters commenting on exploration say they wish they'd find wreckage, lost civilizations, aliens, whatever. Because if you imagine that there's one restaurant somewhere in Oklahoma and there's nothing else but corn and roads: Oklahoma isn't a very interesting place to be until someone finds that restaurant. And, as soon as they find it, nobody wants to go because now it's been found.
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My usual return journey:
I'm in a Brown dorf field, 16000Ly from Sol, we've got half a tank of gas, three cigarettes, it's dark and I'm wearing sunglasses.
My Eyes are Augmented.
Let's hit it.
Also we burn straw men here. Long shall we remember the something something somethingth of november.
Never made a guy up from old clothes and then burnt it? Great fun, for the whole family.
I'm in a Brown dorf field, 16000Ly from Sol, we've got half a tank of gas, three cigarettes, it's dark and I'm wearing sunglasses.
Let's hit it.
Also we burn straw men here. Long shall we remember the something something somethingth of november.
Never made a guy up from old clothes and then burnt it? Great fun, for the whole family.
Don't hit it. It's a bomb. Ohmygodjc.
I'd like to see perhaps additional ability to mount more than the standard FSD into multiple modules to where it stacks to get the longer jump distance from say 35 years to 50 years. Make it pricey for the added fsd modules and make it limited to what exploration rank you are... This unlocked ability allows you to add the benefit to non exploration prone ships to increase limited jump ability at the cost of a module. This is 3300... You can't tell me that someone hasn't been able to increase fsd range, just like you can't tell me that someone hasn't tried to market a power plant reinforcement package or shield barrier to prevent a very high dollar ship from being no more fragile than an asp through the sub targeting weakness. Put it out there as an available modification... Give the commanders what they want to grind for.
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+rep for the Blue Brothers reference!
I would not explore more if it was easier. Exploration is too easy as it is so if anything, it needs to be made harder. But I would explore more if the payouts were better.
Nope. Returning is half the fun
It's not like you have to backtrack along the route you took, after all, and there's always more new things to see.
And, yeah, exploring is already too easy. Heck, we should have it so it's somehow more difficult (or dangerous) to go to places without Nav Beacons.
It's not like you have to backtrack along the route you took, after all, and there's always more new things to see.
And, yeah, exploring is already too easy. Heck, we should have it so it's somehow more difficult (or dangerous) to go to places without Nav Beacons.
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Nope. Returning is half the fun
It's not like you have to backtrack along the route you took, after all, and there's always more new things to see.
And, yeah, exploring is already too easy. Heck, we should have it so it's somehow more difficult (or dangerous) to go to places without Nav Beacons.
^this. I always take a new route home - hell, I'd be impressed if you managed to stick to the same route out and home (if the trip is longer than a few hundred LY)
I don't care how on- or off-topic you got on that one: I love the lyrical description. +rep just for that.Been there, done .... a tiny bit of it. I crossed the US on a 1985 honda vt500 ascot in about 2 weeks. By the end, my buttocks were sending formal wax-sealed letters of intent to secede and start a new person. But, actually, it's exactly that kind of experience that makes me understand that when you are talking about large self-similar systems, there's a certain point past which "exploring" them makes no sense at all. Unless it's satisfying in its own right.
When I go to make rice with my dinner, I do not examine each grain. I pour a cup of rice into my rice-cooker and add water, then hit "cook" and ignore it. But each of those grains is interesting and unique. In fact, one of them might be, somehow, important. I might have just boiled the mutant rice grain that would have produced mega-crops and made me a billionaire.
I feel like I experienced the midwest and the high desert on my motorcycle trip but, in fact, I explored one road between San Diego and Albuquerque. There were an infinity of other sights I didn't experience. I saw a wild badger (!) and thunderstorms and felt like I had an experience but my sense of scale utterly limited it. I saw miles and miles and miles and miles of corn in Oklahoma. I actually hardly saw Oklahoma, at all.
What I remember were interesting nuggets: the hotel I stayed in, the strip club I hung out in to avoid the thunderstorm where I was the only customer for 5 hours and the coffee was amazing, the delicious tacos at the stand in Las Cruces...
I think the issue with exploring in Elite is that the stuff we think of as interesting tends to be human-scaled and human-created. That's why so many posters commenting on exploration say they wish they'd find wreckage, lost civilizations, aliens, whatever. Because if you imagine that there's one restaurant somewhere in Oklahoma and there's nothing else but corn and roads: Oklahoma isn't a very interesting place to be until someone finds that restaurant. And, as soon as they find it, nobody wants to go because now it's been found.
Write a blog next time you go; I'd read it! And please feel free to visit this ex-Brit now in Colorado if you ever motor through again.
This is exactly why so far I've not travelled further than about 4000 ly out. There's still a vast amount of unexplored systems without the need to go further.
I wish there was something interesting to actually find while exploring. Because we have fuel scoops we can travel all the way across the galaxy. As a result, the point of exploration IMHO should be to find that one thing that is truly worthwhile - signs of other forms of advanced life (be they derelict ships, radio signals, city lights on the night side of planets, what have you).
Going to Sag A* (or wherever) is mostly meaningless as anyone can do it with ease, many have, and the only "risk" is ship damage; it's simply a question of how much time you want to spend. Unfortunately, the only damage you incur 99.999% of the time is because you were distracted by watching a YouTube video or something while cruising; binaries can be easily avoided if you just take a close look at the galaxy map and plot your route accordingly.
The payouts are so meagre that they are not much of an incentive to explore. So IMO we need something special to look for and something that requires actual effort to obtain (simply jump - honk - jump doesn't cut it in my opinion and isn't worth any accolades). As it is, the only "challenge" in exploration is to return in one piece and that is really not that difficult - I think most explorers exaggerate that aspect of exploration. And judging by what people post in the exploration forum, the main reason to explore is to take a pretty picture or two.
It's really too bad we have fuel scoops. If we didn't have them then exploration would be challenging and limited to the immediate vicinity around Known Space. Of course, to expand that area would require the game building new space stations on the edge of Known Space as new "jump off" points which could be a whole mini-game in itself.
I know people say it cannot happen, but I for one would not mind if exploration got a complete "do-over" including wiping of all discovery firsts, ranks, etc. I've done quite a bit of exploration so I would have a lot to lose too. I think only a small subset of the player base would be effected to a meaningful degree, but that's just speculation. But I'd only support this if something truly interesting was put in its place. Flame on!
Going to Sag A* (or wherever) is mostly meaningless as anyone can do it with ease, many have, and the only "risk" is ship damage; it's simply a question of how much time you want to spend. Unfortunately, the only damage you incur 99.999% of the time is because you were distracted by watching a YouTube video or something while cruising; binaries can be easily avoided if you just take a close look at the galaxy map and plot your route accordingly.
The payouts are so meagre that they are not much of an incentive to explore. So IMO we need something special to look for and something that requires actual effort to obtain (simply jump - honk - jump doesn't cut it in my opinion and isn't worth any accolades). As it is, the only "challenge" in exploration is to return in one piece and that is really not that difficult - I think most explorers exaggerate that aspect of exploration. And judging by what people post in the exploration forum, the main reason to explore is to take a pretty picture or two.
It's really too bad we have fuel scoops. If we didn't have them then exploration would be challenging and limited to the immediate vicinity around Known Space. Of course, to expand that area would require the game building new space stations on the edge of Known Space as new "jump off" points which could be a whole mini-game in itself.
I know people say it cannot happen, but I for one would not mind if exploration got a complete "do-over" including wiping of all discovery firsts, ranks, etc. I've done quite a bit of exploration so I would have a lot to lose too. I think only a small subset of the player base would be effected to a meaningful degree, but that's just speculation. But I'd only support this if something truly interesting was put in its place. Flame on!
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I disagree almost completely, there's more risk the further you go from mistakes and the further out you go the further from help you are. Do you think the great european explorers of the past were irrelevant because they weren't exploring closer to home? The further you go the more valuable the data is, prime example, look at the furore about the Data recently obtained about Pluto.....by your definition that data is irrelevant because we already more or less knew a lot about Pluto (where it was, did it have a moon etc etc). But the data obtained is priceless as it's knowledge.
On top of all that it's just a game mechanic that would make it more profitable to embark on a long distance exploration trip, anybody can go 1000ly with a reasonable amount of preparation.....going further takes a bit more dedication IMO.
I think both of you make good points and they can be reconciled by the fact that neither of you is taking into consideration the supply side of exploration information. Yes, closer to home scans are more valuable because they are more easily exploited. But that data is also easier to obtain so more people would do it and the net effect of that is to run down the price of closer-to-home data.
On the other hand, data that comes from systems thousands of light years out is less valuable because it has little practical value. But the fact that so few people go out that far to obtain it makes it more valuable as the supply of such data is constrained.
Every Little helps
What really needs to happen is random events (celestial and not) and exotic stellar phenomena during your travels.
Would National Lampoon's Vacation (the original not the horrible remake that is currently investing movie theaters) have been nearly as awesome/hilarious had Clark and his family driven straight to the amusement park without any incident while making good time?
Come on Russ! getting there is half the fun!
Would National Lampoon's Vacation (the original not the horrible remake that is currently investing movie theaters) have been nearly as awesome/hilarious had Clark and his family driven straight to the amusement park without any incident while making good time?
Come on Russ! getting there is half the fun!
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Agreed but I do think the distance travelled makes the information more valuable as it is rare information. And even if it's not exploitable it's "knowledge" and that has a value all of it's own.
Also ultimately this is about getting people to explore more so more payouts for "exploitable" information closer to the bubble, and more payouts for "knowledge" on systems further out with a danger money bonus for braving it so far from the bubble and help.
Plus FD putting more interesting things to discover out in the Galaxy!