TLDR: I'm wondering how important simulation accuracy and realism are for everyone to be interpreted as a joyful game experience. In other words: how much realism is acceptable for each individual. Therefore I introduced some definitions and a scale. I invite everyone to participate as I am genuinely interested in people's perception of this topic(s). Details below. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hey everyone! Following all the discussions lately I must admit that there is something I genuinely want to understand. A lot of discussions lately focus on the acceptable level of realism within SC. One argument, which is brought up immediately is that the game should be "fun". It is said that there must be a good compromise between realism and non-realism. And that's exactly what I want to learn more about. As far as I know, no one ever defined what "fun" really means in regards to gameplay, features and realism. And just to be clear about this: simulation is not the same than realism. Those 2 words mean totally different things. "Simulation" means an approximation of reality while using more or less sophisticated models which try to replicate the physical reality as close as possible. Simulated can only be things for which there exists a physical counterpart in the real world. Examples would be gravity, radiation, the human metabolism, the behavior of weapons, the effect of food, physical damage, newtons laws, flight physics in low gravity regimes, aerodynamics, the progagation of sound, space weather, orbital mechanics, and so on. "Gameplay induced simulation" means the introduction of systems, methods or effects, which pretend to have some physical foundation, but which don't have any counterpart in the real world. They try to mimick physical reality to some extend and are just in the game for making it playable in a senseful way. Examples would be the gravity generators, the quantum drive, tractor beams, salvage laser, laser weapons, and so on. Realism decribes how detailed a certain process is modelled in the sense of how many singular actions (pleasent and unpleasent ones) need to be taken to accomplish the desired process in direct comparison to what the same process would be alike in the real physical world (if existing). Example: Jumping directly into the cockpit of a ship from any place vs. getting into the cockpit involving all the sub-processes (go to station, ride with the train, spaceport, spawn the ship, go to hangar, ....). The more you process-cherry-pick while only combining the pleasent subprocesses with each other and neglecting the unpleasent ones, the less realistic a process can be described. Same counts for reducing the overall number of subprocesses wether or not a subprocess is a pleasent or an unpleasent one. Now to find out, how important those things are in context of an enjoyable gameplay (=fun), I would like to define a specific scale for each of the 3 items above: Importance of Simulation: 0 (I absolutely don't care about the physical accuracy and/or the implementation of effects) to 10 (Everything which is not 100% accurate is not worth my time) Importance of Gameplay induced simulation: 0 (do whatever you want, I don't care as long as it is supporting the gameplay) to 10 (Sorry, but no, I can't live with all the crap introduced into the game.) Importance of Realism: 0 (the less action the better. I just want to do stuff in the game and not spending time with preparing stuff) to 10 (The more realistic the better!) For me personally the importance of these things is as follows: S 7 G 5 R 8 EDIT 1: You know what's really funny? My posting was moved from "General" to "Off-Topic" by a moderator. Every dev tells you that the most important feedback you can give is whether or not the things he programmed are fun or not. Currently we have a constantly ongoing dicussion about "realism vs.fun". With my posting I tried to find out how important aspects of simulation and realism are for people playing the game (genuinely interested, no sarcasm!). I'm not discussing fun in general or looking for more and more definitions of fun while quoting the internet here, but for "fun" following the rules proposed in my posting. I think that's a legit thing to do and once people would participate, it would deliver relevant information for durther development. What happens? Not working. Of course. The majority of people are replying weird stuff and/or infromation I wasn't asking for and the best of all is the CIG-Moderator, who moves this whole topic to "Off-Topic" because in his/her opinion the topic is not contributing to further development. What?????????? But whatever, doesn't matter really as well. I'll count it as one more unsuccessful try of contributing to development. EDIT 2: I have renamed the topic of this posting and have rewritten some parts of my original posting to be more precise on the topic and added a TLDR.