Oolite Bulletins

One of many design decisions that either annoy or leave you scratching your head - like exiting hyperspace right up-close to the star instead of out-system!

Speaking of design decisions that leave you scratching your head (or, alternatively, screaming with all the power in your lungs: "W T F !!"): Spamming the Request Clearance key outside an outpost, hoping that someday, somehow, you will manage to get permission to dock. The solution proposed in the forums for this is even more absurd: Drop to solo mode, dock and then return to multi.

Yeah. Right. Immersion.

<sniggers> No such problems for us Solo players!

For anyone not in-game who may be interested in the various load-outs, the ED Shipyard is handy - not guaranteed 100% accurate, but close enough.

I'm hoping the outpost problem is more a case of "not implemented yet" rather than "design decision". A robust multi-dock docking queue implementation is difficult enough with only one player doing weird things at it (I'm not convinced ours is completely bug free yet). Their current implementation does work well enough for almost every station in the game, of course, since players seem to either congregate in huge numbers in a tiny area of space or spread out to <1 per system, with very little middle ground.

another_commander wrote:

Speaking of design decisions that leave you scratching your head (or, alternatively, screaming with all the power in your lungs: "W T F !!"): Spamming the Request Clearance key outside an outpost, hoping that someday, somehow, you will manage to get permission to dock. The solution proposed in the forums for this is even more absurd: Drop to solo mode, dock and then return to multi.

A problem I had was I'd request permission and I'd get a message telling me to wait at 7.5km. so I'd politely wait just beyond 7.5km, spamming the request button and not getting anywhere. Eventually I figured out the message meant that they wanted me to come within 7.5km to ask for clearance.

It appears that ED is now available through Steam. That's much sooner than I'd expected - down to poor sales figures, perhaps?

cim wrote:

Cody wrote:

The ADS has me scratching my head, I must admit - 1.5 million too.

Certainly an oddly set-up item that - the 1000 LS range on the Intermediate is too low for general exploration where often it won't even find the first planet in a system (and for the extra cost it's barely an improvement on the Basic) - but the ability to locate everything in the system instantly makes things a bit too easy.

[...]

As it is, since even a detailed surface scan only ~doubles the survey value of most objects and often not even that, it's ridiculously more efficient to jump in, ADS while scooping, and jump out again. That takes less than a minute, while a full survey can take half an hour even in a reasonably compact system, most of which is flight time.

That seems really daft - not just from a game-design point of view but from a sales and marketing point of view. Exploration and discovery - being the first to see something, and plant your name on it - is, I would think, an important part of the appeal of the game. By making it a push-button, one-minute operation they've tossed away a huge chunk of appeal for new players. OK, granted, there are however-many-billion star systems out there, but at this rate it won't take long for, say, 100 hard-core early adopters to tag-explore a significant percentage of all the systems. New players will find themselves in a huge bubble of empty systems with other guys' names plastered on them, and no realistic hope of doing any accredited exploration of their own until and unless they can catch up with the early adopters' wave-front.

I'm assuming, too, that these snapshot "explorations" percolate back even into single-player games, yes? So even if you don't want to make nice and social, and just want to explore your own galaxy at your own pace, you're stuffed ...

Letting a one-minute push-button operation earn half of what an involved 30-minute operation would earn is bad game design. Letting the same one-minute push-button operation flush away a part of the game's appeal to new players just seems wilfully stupid. What on earth was the rationale behind the ADS?

Disembodied wrote:

I'm assuming, too, that these snapshot "explorations" percolate back even into single-player games, yes?

<sighs> Yes, I'm afraid they do - it's all one universe, whether in Solo, Group, or Open!

Disembodied wrote:

I'm assuming, too, that these snapshot "explorations" percolate back even into single-player games, yes? So even if you don't want to make nice and social, and just want to explore your own galaxy at your own pace, you're stuffed ...

I'm fairly sure - judging by some of the tags I've seen out here - you only get your name on it if you bother to do a surface scan. I've seen a few gas giants where the giant has a "discovered by" and its moons don't (well, won't until/unless I make it back to civilisation safely...) - the giant you can scan at several hundred LS, the moons you need to be within 10 or so and if you're going for maximum profit it's not worth getting into the gravity well. And you get paid most of the full amount for confirming someone else's survey - I made over a million just from scanning systems I was passing through while buying bits for my exploration trip - so it's not that big a deal if someone's already been there.

I'm currently at around 250LY from Sol, probably about 75 from the nearest starport, outbound, and I'm starting to find a few systems which haven't had anyone surface scan anything more than the primary star. Not yet found anywhere without even that, which is interesting: there seem to be more explorers than I thought there would be, and I'm not on a route to any big tourist spot, so far as I know.

I actually quite like the "discovered by" tags, now I'm out of human space - you see the same names again every few systems; you see systems where the inner 1000 LS of planets are tagged with one name and the rest with another - it gives a nice sense of following in the footsteps of previous expeditions with improving technology; if it was a solo game, I think they'd need to pre-generate a whole bunch of NPC expeditions to give the same effect, which isn't impossible but I don't think they'd have thought of needing to in advance.

(In human space, it's a bit weird to have "Discovered By CMDR Explorer 931" tags on a planet orbited by a station - those should already be "discovered". To quote the great Terry Pratchett, "But they weren’t explorers and didn’t count.", I suppose.)

It's only a "problem" in so far as "maximum profit per hour" and "what you might think exploration involves" aren't particularly close - but then again it's not as if explorers actually have much use for money, as you get extremely marginal benefit from using a really expensive ship.

Disembodied wrote:

What on earth was the rationale behind the ADS?

Like a lot of things, I think, it's "good enough" for 1.0 and it probably was better to get the game out once all the major bits were at least playable rather than spend another year or two until they ran out of Greek letters in endless test refinements.

cim wrote:

Like a lot of things, I think, it's "good enough" for 1.0 and it probably was better to get the game out once all the major bits were at least playable rather than spend another year or two until they ran out of Greek letters in endless test refinements.

Well, that's slightly more hopeful, but it still sounds like they didn't really think about exploration as being a significant attraction to players. They've built a game with all this scale, and then let people burn right through it. People should still be exploring in the Sol system, for heaven's sake: maybe there's just cometary halo objects and rocks left to chase, but there could still be interest and value in pinpointing, mapping and sampling them.

Disembodied wrote:

They've built a game with all this scale, and then let people burn right through it.

Aye, the list of visitors to Sag A* attests to that. Tragic!

Thanks to the sterling efforts of Zieman, the list of BBC Elite systems in ED grows:

• Aona
  Arexe
  Ededleen
  Ensoreus
  Erlaza
  Isinor
  Larais
  Legees
  Leoned
  Oresqu
  Quator
  Qube
  Qucerere
  Qutiri
  Ra
  Ritila
  Teorge
  Teveri
  Tianve
  Tibionis
  Zarece

Plus the ten Home Worlds, of course! Zieman reckons that's the lot for G1 though! Are they only from G1 (as looks likely)?

I did a search for a few from higher galaxies and didn't find anything, but if that's all the G1 systems included I probably didn't search for enough higher ones. It wouldn't surprise me if there'd be an explicit exclusion in the name generator, though.

Some surprising absences on the G1 list - no Xeer, no Inera.

cim wrote:

Some surprising absences on the G1 list - no Xeer, no Inera.

Yeah, I was surprised at that. As for the other octants: alas, no Zaquesso, and no Cequququ! Oh those Cequququian shrew steaks - so tasty!

Tried my hand at a couple of posters in a retro style for the game