Is there going to be a fuel quantity rebalance for ships in 3.17 to make refueling necessary and to force more planning? Or are current fuel tank values going to be left as is for testing, similar to how medical gameplay is useful but not mandatory?
TL;DRFuel will be rebalanced in 3.17 so refueling is needed roughly every hour and a half to two hours of flying, as an initial pass that will likely be adjusted per ship or across the board.
It will be rebalanced now. The sweet spot that we're going to be looking for is how often do you actually need to refuel. We don't want it to be like you have to refuel every 15 minutes or every 20 minutes. It should be that it takes longer. It's not something that you go through or have to think about every single time. Ideally an hour. So my sweet spot I think is basically between an hour and a half and two hours that you need to be thinking about it. That's just from straight flying. Now, obviously that'll depend on what ship you use, how you fly it, so on and so forth. And then also, if we're talking about quantum fuel, then it also depends on how far you're jumping, where you're jumping to, so on and so forth. I think that we are doing a rebalance for it, but again, I think this will be our initial stab, and then from there we'll do tweaks and tuning as it goes. It might be that we're hitting very specific ships afterwards, or it might be we just do a general rebalance as well.
I think it's really important because we have gained so many new players over the last year, folks who it may be easy to forget or some folks may have never been made aware: our live environment is still an alpha testing environment. So we are going to use that opportunity. However this goes out, when 3.17 drops, whatever the rate is when it drops, it is very likely to change, to be adjusted, as Todd said, either on an individual ship basis or across the board. We're going to use this opportunity to find that sweet spot.
Even when it's in PTU. So we're doing initial passes and then we're doing adjustments. And then from there, once it goes live, I'm sure we'll be doing other adjustments for any other subsequent patches that we have. So if we see any outliers or anything there that needs to be wrangled in, we will go in and fix it.