I'd be very surprised if they didn't have far more comprehensive data through their own internal telemetry, too. A slide-off over time as it gets further from the release and the proportion of "something new" : "plays every day anyway" players shifts back towards equilibrium is to be expected, though.I think Frontier Dev has been keeping touch with the webapp as well just to see how well the players are doing
One interesting question is whether this is intentional - it's not bad strategy but it's probably about the least threatening they could do given their military superiority - or whether it's just an emergent property of the overall rules for expansion and Frontier were also hoping for something more exciting.the Thargoids are only interested in keeping a sphere around their Maelstroms since the beginning of this year
It's a possibility, but if true I really don't get why. It's slowed their "time to eat entire bubble" from about 20 years to about 40 years, and their "time to affect anything of critical importance" from about 2 years to about 4 years.I suspect that Frontier is doing this to slow down the progress of Thargoid's advancements.
The early ends of those windows don't seem anywhere near close enough to be needing to slow the Thargoids down substantially to avoid messing up the next stage of the plot or whatever.
Put another way, when Indra arrived it started eating some of the bubble's very limited Ion Distributor production. There's a second production region near Lave so it was never going to be "game over" if they did take all of it ... but it's now over 4 months on and 10 of the 11 "70 Tauri" Ion Distributor systems are still operational. Some of that is to the credit of Indra's defenders, of course - HIP 20485 would have fallen otherwise - but mainly it's because the Thargoids have been advancing glacially slowly and most of the relevant systems are outside their primary range.