Hello Commanders!
We have the results from the ship transfer poll.
For reference, we posed a simple, two option question:
POLL: Should transferring ships and modules to your location take time?
1. No, the transfer should be instant.
2. Yes there should be a delay of 5 minutes minimum, 100 minutes to cross the human bubble, edge to edge.
As I stated in the initial post, we were already leaning fairly strongly towards having delivery times, but we wanted to get a snapshot of player sentiment to help us with our final deliberations.
39,902 people voted, of which 38,045 have validated Elite Dangerous accounts. We’d like to thank you for your participation.
Seventy percent of the vote was in favour of having delivery times.
This result has helped us confirm our decision to move away from having instant ship transfer, which we arrived at after much internal discussion, helped in part by vigorous debate on our forums, Reddit, etc.
It’s always great to be able to include feedback from you, the Commanders who play Elite: Dangerous, and we feel this has been a positive experience.
We're still pushing ahead to try and get ship transfer in for 2.2, we just don't want to guarantee it, just in case. At a guess (i.e. not to taken as the ultimate fact) if it doesn't hit 2.2 beta, it would hopefully drop in before 2.3.
We'll be finessing the final times, which might end up being a little shorter (we wanted to be as extreme as possible in the poll to make the potential consequence as clear as possible), but it will likely be in the same ball park, as these times will represent bulk freighter transport, which is not fast.
Q: Bulk Freighter NPC models?
No, sorry. It's just how we rationalise the delivery times. However, it would be cool to have visual representations of these in the future (no ETA, no guarantee).
Transporting ships to Jaques will definitely take a much longer period of time, given its great distance from the human bubble.
It's probably worth noting though that, regardless of how long the final delivery times are (they might get a little shorter than the numbers stated in the poll, but they probably won't be on the fast side), you won't have to swap ships (or buy endless amounts of Sidewinders) when retrieving a ship.
In addition, ships with small jump ranges can be transported even if they could not make jump distances required for the journey.
We're looking to implement a "sell ship remotely" feature at the same time as we add the ship transfer feature, to allow Commanders to sell ships docked in distant systems.
The delivery time would be a minimum of around five minutes, representing basic logistics of getting your ship loaded into a bulk carrier, followed by an additional time cost per light year to be travelled. The ballpark we are looking at would mean a delay of around 100 minutes if you transfered a ship from one edge of human space to the other (around 300 light years).
There would be no chance of losing ships transported by bulk freighter. Cost (in either case) will be proportional to ship value and distance to be travelled. If we end up with a delivery time, the cost will be lower than if we have instant transfer.
Although we might impose limits, theoretically very long distances could be traversed by bulk freighters, so, yes, traveling to Jaques would be possible, with an extremely long delivery time.
For clarity: the reason we are looking at ballpark figures of 5 mins to 100 minutes is two reasons:
- There's an amount of basic logistics in getting a ship booked and loaded onto a bulk freighter, hence a minimum 5 minute delay.
- We will use a X seconds per light year formula to simulate the speed of a bulk freighter.
The idea is that the delivery time can tick down regardless of whether you are playing the game or not.
We are talking about the ability to have a ship stored at a distant location transported to your current location. The same for stored modules. At no point are you (the Commander) able to fast travel - you must always manually fly a ship.
In general, the ability to fly back and pick up a ship has a few issues: that you are doing the journey twice (even if the first journey is in a faster ship) and that you are forced to leave a ship at the pick up location. In addition, your time is completely filled by the logistics task. The ability to have ships delivered, even at non-optimal jump rates, is arguably better.
Secondly, just because we currently don't have bulk freighters in the game does not mean that we won't have things like this in the future (regardless of whether we have timed or instant ship deliveries) or even that they don't exist in the lore already (I believe the concept of mega freighters has always existed in Elite lore in some way).
And although we may finesse the final times to be a little faster or slower, the concept is that these freighters are built to be able to get everywhere, with minimal crew, but not amazingly quickly.
(Responding to a question about sending a ship from your current location to a remote destination) Personally I quite like it, but it's outside of the current remit for 2.2. If we end up with timed deliveries, it sounds like the kind of thing we could consider in the future (no ETA no guarantees! //content.invisioncic.com/a283374/emoticons/smile.png ).
A lot of folk have been asking about exact formulas for ship/module delivery times. The answer is that we'd have a minimum time (e.g. 5 minutes) and then extend this based on a "seconds per light year" formula, to approximate the kind of times a bulk freighter delivery system might result in. The example times I used for the poll represent the kind of times we're considering. It's possible that we might reduce them a little, but they'd likely be in that ball park, and I'd rather folk were shown the longest possible times for the poll to focus their mind on what the consequences could be.
And just to be clear, this is not "design by committee". It's a very useful way for us to take a snapshot of player sentiment a feature's details. As I stated in the initial post, we're leaning towards having a delay, but seeing that there are interesting pros and cons on both sides of the fence, we think a poll, in this instance, will provide us with useful information. The final decision, as usual, will be ours to make. Great though this poll and debate are turning out, I don't want to give the false impression that it's the "new" way of doing things. It just happens to be, in our opinion, a good thing to do at this time.
The feature "ship transfer" may come in a little hot, or delayed, based on decisions we make about how it's going to work. The community is not to blame for this! It has just created an interesting question that means we might have to take more time over than we originally thought.
Also, about the idea to allow Commanders to action ship transfer to systems other than the one they are currently at (a "push" rather than a "pull" if you will): I have stated that I personally quite like the idea, at face value. However, we haven't looked at it closely yet. Clearly, it's a significant increase in scope (anyone who says otherwise is incorrect) and we'd have to have a serious think about potential ramifications. This does not mean we will never look at it. It simply means that we aren't going to look at it for the foreseeable future. It's certainly not "the way we wished it worked".