Star Citizen - Is it all a time sink?

Hello Citizens!
Today I'm going to over some popular "time sinks" in the game and talk about how they might actually be deliberate. Enjoy!
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[explodogames]

Me letting the dog out, getting a drink, taking a piss, checking on the kids, taking out the trash, or straightening my room up .... what do you mean there is nothing to do in QT? That is my most productive time during play and i would like to keep it that way lol

[goself]

As with all things, they need to balance and adjust the time sinks. The bottlenecks can be helpful for strategy, making means of avoiding those time sinks strategically a strong move.

[louieavi]

Immersion and realism is a huge part of the attraction of this game. Elevators to pad, planets, moons all have distance. Distance is taken into account in many ways. Actually playing the game "is" a waste of time. But if it brings you pleasure, then who's to say anything was wasted. The health of the body does take maintenance. I quote quite often that Star Citizen is not a game, but a space simulator. Going to the store takes time driving there. Being in an elevator riding to the 30th floor takes time. So why wouldn't a quantum jump take time based on a calculated distance?

[skitsnack]

As for the food and drink resetting when logging out, it should only happen when you do it in a major city or spacestation. If you log out in a ship then it should not reset so you actually need to prepare for a long journey.

[Commander_ZiN]

Getting blocked by elevators trying to get to your ship. Just spending 30mins getting out or city and drinking, messing with ship loadout etc. Cities feel like a big waste of time right now.

[xxbeatleadxx]

I don’t mind the time it takes to set yourself up to do certain tasks. It becomes tedious when you spend 20 minutes setting up your mining modules and getting food and drink into your backpack, fine some ok rocks, then 30k and have to do it all over again.

[OneLovePsych]

It’s a space sim… period. I’m looking forward to Starfield and I’m HYPED AF, the story is gona be rich and there won’t be these wait times. That being said, SC is a SIM, we enjoy it for the realism. It’s only gona get better.

[honorabledodger]

Set your respawn on a station so you can get to your ship fast.

[michaelray]

Yes, and you hit the nail on the head at the end, all the different "oh it's just a few minutes to do xyz" time sinks all add up to a lot of time spent prepping, waiting, running, riding, traveling, navigating systems, and I think even shopping can be better.

[canopyjunkie]

"nothing to do in I think this is going to be a great thing during large fleet ops, giving SC players time for a bio break, drink refill, snack, catch up on discord chat channels, etc CIG has stated QT is going to be more engaging though.

[obiwonton]

SC the ultimate elevator, train simulator BUT hey we finally gotta call ATC keybind.

[thelordsanguine]

The most painful timesink I think is just using the inventory ui and purchasing items.

1: buy item(s): slowly clicking around clunky shop-panel ui, that has prompts for every purchase you make... = 10 secs per purchase of clicking "ok" on purchase complete lmao

2: opening inventory: loading items takes a good 5-10 seconds

3: mousing over USEFUL items (aka equipment): e.g looking at a multi-tool with addons, the tooltip doesn't show what's installed so if you have two of them, you equip both and compare to see which is the one you had ready last time or whatever - super painful = good 30-40 seconds if your dealing with checking attachments on equipment, otherwise 2-5 secs per item to check specifics

4. "equipping": sometimes double-clicking from inventory works, sometimes it just doesn't, so the default is to drag and drop on your character. Latter = 2-10 seconds per equipment piece

5. "arranging": There's no shift-click insta move items from backpack to local inventory... so everything is DRAG AND DROP, SO TEDIOUS




So if you're like me, who unequips everything after landing, so as not to die from elevators sometimes and risk permanently losing equipment, putting everything back on and sorting out storage on your character can take up to 2-10 mins.

2-5ish mins = Just straight up equipping armor quickly and guns for some quick bounty fun with friends, maybe some extra

Up to 10 mins = Including above: Plus equipping flares, med/oxypens, spare ammunition in quickslots; arranging accessories for multitool, medic tools; sorting out supplies (food/drink, more medic/munitions)

HOWEVER if you're buying equipment to prepare for a mission or whatever, you're looking at a good 15mins minimum to be at takeoff. Then there's the travelling and dealing with the map-routing interface lmao.

[bioskyline]

the biggest time sink in the game: leaving crusaders atmosphere....

[lian]

Big problem is that you cannot do several things at once, not that there are tedious tasks. For example, taking the metro is long, but I could check my loadout and prepare myself and my ship while waiting. The thing is you can't do that because you can't do much in your mobiglass and you might miss the door opening and such. Just imagine all the stuff you could do to prepare your next jump or trip while in those wait-time. Why do I have to be in front of the hangar to do the insurance claim then wait 10 min, when I just spent 5 min doing nothing to get there? We should be able to do a crapton of things from anywhere in the verse during downtime not just from those buggy interactive screens.

[CyberiusT]

Umm... It's a sandbox game - with no actual goal, iow. Of f'ing course it's a time-sink. That's kinda the definition. Sure, there's a lot of broken stuff atm, and the will be more busywork to fill some of the empty bits like quantum travel, but it's still going to be a time-sink even when it's done.

[CrueOndanet]

I definitely do not miss the random interdictions.

[Maestr_]

Honestly I Feel this all adds to the immersion and realism of the game. Let's remember that Star Citizen is not just a "Simple" game, but a SIM, an Open Virtual All Immersive Universe. The More Realistic, The Better.

[Sarazoul]

About the food and drinks being understood as only providing buffs/debuffs, and not killing you.

That's actually what CIG said VERY early on. I believe in 2014. They said you couldn't die of hunger or thirst, but you would have debuffs like blurry vision, etc...

That changed obviously.

I don't really mind the current system, but I just thought it was worth mentioning that the people saying that the current system is different from what they originally said, are not wrong

I can't tell you where exactly this was said as it was so long ago. But it was.

[imtimbabay]

….aren’t all video games timesinks? Like the time we spend playing is only for our enjoyment.

[joshthepagan]

I suppose you could always just play ED if you want to sit in a ship and go from a station to shoot things