The Thargoid War: Thoughts and Feelings

I think Frontier Dev has been keeping touch with the webapp as well just to see how well the players are doing
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.

the Thargoids are only interested in keeping a sphere around their Maelstroms since the beginning of this year
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.

I suspect that Frontier is doing this to slow down the progress of Thargoid's advancements.
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.

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.
 
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.
I didn't even know about the whole Ion Distributor systems, what are these Ion Distributor production centers and you think that the Thargoids are likely to target those systems that have these productions?
 
Greetings Commanders,

We're checking in again to see whether you're enjoying the Thargoid War at large. We recently posted this thread to ask for feedback on the specific mechanics, let us know about any bugs or issues and technical things of that nature. We'd like thank you all for the feedback you provided. It has been immensely helpful in working with the developers to plan the direction of future changes. We have already started to roll out these plans the form of recent balancing adjustments and changes to the weekly reset system. If you have further feedback of this kind, please make sure to leave it in that thread!

This time, we're checking in to better understand how you feel about the War. Here are some questions to give an idea of what we're trying to understand:
  • Are you enjoying the Thargoid War?
  • Are you motivated to engage in the gameplay associated with the war?
  • Are you optimistic or pessimistic about humanity's chances to win?
  • What do you think of this direction for the narrative?
Once again, please keep any feedback on specific gameplay related issues or suggestion, to this thread. Thanks in advance!
O7
So OpIda tried selling commodities directly to attacked systems and nothing happened, but I just noticed that rescue ships have like 1.1 billion demand for HE suits and water and such. Any chance you could let us know if selling to the rescue ships has any effect?
 
I didn't even know about the whole Ion Distributor systems, what are these Ion Distributor production centers and you think that the Thargoids are likely to target those systems that have these productions?
Ion Distributor is one of the commodities which is only produced by a relatively small number of systems in a tightly confined geographic region (or in this case, two regions - one near 70 Tauri, and one near Lave) - others include things like Emergency Power Cells, Power Converters, etc. but they're all safely distant.

So, unlike most non-rare commodities, it'd actually be plausible for the Thargoids to take it out (especially the 70 Tauri centre) without having to take out 99% of the bubble anyway.

It's the closest non-interchangeable thing [1] to any maelstrom, and I did wonder earlier on if they'd make a specific effort to capture it. They're not [2].

[1] Engineers, rares, Powerplay HQs, regional goods, lore capitals, universal outfitters ... basically anything which gives a system importance beyond "people/players live there" and isn't duplicated hundreds of times across the bubble
[2] Unlike every other regional good, it has a second production centre already (has had for ages, no idea why) ... and it's only used for a few Shock Cannon unlocks ... so the inconvenience would be relatively minor. But at least it would show willing.
 
From a narrative perspective, if Update 15 is supposed to push out some new thargoid tactics that will give them momentum again, it is critical (narratively) that they not have that momentum going into Update 15. So regardless of where the actual battle lines are drawn, I wouldn't be surprised if there needed to be a sense that humanity was getting the war under control before it drops, hence the nerfs. I would guess the dev team just misjudged how things would shake out, which is understandable, considering the scale of things and size of the community.

Since I was also name-checked, I just want to be clear that I'm not insulted by the game, and while I don't particularly care for the narrative direction, it's not a big deal for me. I just found the galnet as a form of the dev team giving advice to a player community which had already tried to follow it and been stymied by the mechanics that the dev team itself was responsible for implementing in the first place to essentially amount to taunting from the developers. And if that wasn't their intention, they just don't have a solid enough grasp on what organizing a community like this into shared goals entails to be giving this advice. They have the numbers that tell them players aren't focused on alerts, but showed no indication that they understood why and just repeatedly said "go to alerts" without putting anything there for players to engage with. I strongly suggest you read this account of trying to follow the direction being offered. The complete lack of individual feedback on "did I accomplish something" does not help players feel like these activities are worth doing. The missing element wasn't the developers saying "KILL MORE ORTHRUS."
 
<snip>... to be honest I'm not a big fan of interceptor combat. I think a fight with an interceptor takes much too long and feels very gamey, very "designed" [1]. The combat is essentially a long winded process of chipping away at the interceptor while pressing the right buttons at the right time to counter the various special actions the interceptor can launch (the swarm suicide, panic shield, caustic missiles, lightning weapon, shutdown field). There's not much tactical manoeuvring involved and it boils down to tracking a target disk that moves sideways in an unpredictable fashion (scouts even more so).

So by now fighting Thargoids has become very repetitive and tiring for me (I'm not so young anymore) and I'm done with it. Rescue missions are fun but also quite repetitive. For now I returned to my pre-war mix of activities. Nevertheless, I'll certainly visit the Thargoid invaded systems for some action from time to time....<snip>
Totally after the fact... but sipping my morning coffee I realized what it is that bothers me about Thargoid combat. It is the fact that my freedom to engage Interceptors as I see fit has been removed. One can only defeat an Interceptor by precisely following a detailed prescription built into the game by the developers: keep cool, keep circling, expose heart, destroy heart, dodge swarm, dodge caustic missiles, dodge lightning weapon, dodge shutdown field, repair hull, repair modules, synthesize heat sinks. Rinse and repeat and do it all within x minutes otherwise the Interceptor will go into rage mode and victory becomes impossible.

This type of "railroading" doesn't cut it for me. I like fighting human NPCs much more because I can create many different loadouts many of which I can get to work (unfortunately NPC combat tactics are a bit one-dimensional, but ok).

Curated narratives are a form of railroading your players. IMHO this does not fit very well into an open world game. A narrative should be open itself so players can engage with it and take it further as they see fit. Maybe to some kind of conclusion, maybe not.
 
I have some extra thoughts:

1) The AX Brace Module should be compatible with the military slot. It fulfills the purpose of such a module as it is has a relation to a hull reinforcement, but just reinforcing the ship for AX weapons rather than against AX fire, and also the fact that it's effective purpose is military in the context of increasing firepower for battle.

2) Limpets need to be sold in stations under attack. The Caustic Heatsink may have reduced the need for that overall, but not eliminated it. If buying Limpets is a subsystem of the marketplace code, then reopen the market, I'm not sure why it's actually closed in the first place - if people are there, then they need food etc.. commerce still operates in a war, people still had to buy food in London during the Blitz for example, so therefore markets stayed open until they could no longer function, which in the case of Elite is signified by the actual port/station being operational. The market could be limited to absolute essentials such as food etc., and stuff for the war effort, and likely there won't be much for sale, rather just demand for the critical items would be high. This should all aid in the effort, an army marches on its stomach as is said.
 
I'm enjoying it. The new AX equipment we've been given plus the facts that thargons don't appear at surface locations and NPCs help; all this has brought AX combat within my skill range.

With limited playing time I find that there are too many things I want to try out!
 
  • Are you enjoying the Thargoid War?
    No. In fact, I recently returned to playing ED after two years, and before I did, I asked around about whether I could avoid the Thargoid War. I've generally found PvE in ED too difficult for me, and I'd understood fighting Thargoids as "endgame" content, so even if I didn't find it disgusting, thematically, I wouldn't have participated in it.

  • Are you motivated to engage in the gameplay associated with the war?
    As far as I can tell, the gameplay is just combat missions for people with specialized ships. I don't see any way to participate. This still has me puzzled: a large proportion of the playing community is focused on exploration, and a fairly large part of that has been interested in searching for anything related to the apparent ongoing narrative. FDev applauds explorers from time to time, and there's a great deal of intrinsic interest in exploration in ED, but FDev doesn't seem to put a moment's thought into how to integrate exploration into the game narrative. This is especially frustrating given how much the explorers have written about how exploration could be integrated into the game narrative. If explorers spend thousands of hours searching for clues to the big mysteries, doesn't that suggest that maybe you should set out some clues to the big mysteries for the explorers to find? Why is it so hard to look at what people are actually doing, and work with that?

  • Are you optimistic or pessimistic about humanity's chances to win?
    Why did FDev even ask this question? Obviously, it's not a real war, and the war ends when FDev decides to end it. There have been a few hints about the Guardians having fallen back to a last refuge, that suggests we might have some sort of grim outcome where we fall back to Colonia for a last stand. However, given the disruption to the basic mechanics of play, I think that's unlikely. Whatever happens, I assume we'll get some absurd Hail Mary plan to draw the whole story to a conclusion.

  • What do you think of this direction for the narrative?
    At least with Frontier: First Encounters, there was a choice, with the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the conflict with the Thargoids. As far as I can tell, we've never had any choice, though players have looked for one, for years. Even the cosmetics imply that we were supposed to have a choice: fight the aliens or ally with them. But nope. Sorry. The message of the game narrative seems to be either, anything unfamiliar is evil and must be destroyed, or, humans are innately evil. Either interpretation is loathsome. This is not what I want from science fiction. And this is why I prefer to stay away from the apparent game narrative.
 
  • ...
  • What do you think of this direction for the narrative?
    At least with Frontier: First Encounters, there was a choice, with the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the conflict with the Thargoids. As far as I can tell, we've never had any choice, though players have looked for one, for years. Even the cosmetics imply that we were supposed to have a choice: fight the aliens or ally with them. But nope. Sorry. The message of the game narrative seems to be either, anything unfamiliar is evil and must be destroyed, or, humans are innately evil. Either interpretation is loathsome. This is not what I want from science fiction. And this is why I prefer to stay away from the apparent game narrative.
My take FWIW is that First Encounters did indeed give us a choice, but it was a corporate one. FD actually said that humanity's initial reactions to the Thargoids would determine the narrative. A few tried peaceful interactions but by far the most common reaction was to see how we could explode them. (This could have been predicted and probably was). And here we are.
 
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As far as I can tell, the gameplay is just combat missions for people with specialized ships. I don't see any way to participate.
Well, combat is not the only way.
See 'Thargoid invasion - Next target systems?' https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/thargoid-invasion-next-target-systems.612125/ and check out the first post (regularly updated) and the updates at the end of the thread from the OP and others.
Best option may be...
Cargo transport of the critically wounded from an damaged port has a strong effect. Look for the "significant damage" status.
Those missions don't require combat but you may occasionally have to run from some Thargoids when you leave the damaged port.
 
My take FWIW is that First Encounters did indeed give us a choice, but it was a corporate one. FD actually said that humanity's initial reactions to the Thargoids would determine the narrative. A few tried peaceful interactions but by far the most common reaction was to see how we could explode them. (This could have been predicted and probably was). And here we are.
Yes - and not by a small margin either.

The Federation - traditional competitive CG punching bag for "you've launched an unprovoked military assault and now we're going to slap you down hard" - actually managed to beat the Far God Cult in their "unprovoked military assault" CG by over 2:1 despite Galnet going out of its way to highlight those aspects of it.

Azimuth, who even plenty of pro-war players dislike, lost its own competitive CG by only the narrowest of margins.

The introduction of the war caused a very noticeable spike in activity which has still not completely trailed off (bigger than any since the Odyssey launch, and slower to trail off than anything since Beyond 3.0). The main systems involved in the war remain up there with Shinrarta, popular engineers, and Powerplay HQs as ultra-high traffic systems so there's also been a substantial redeployment of the existing players.

There's never been a completely "clean" peace vs war CG or similar test but it'd be very obviously a walkover for the pro-war side if there was.
 
This type of "railroading" doesn't cut it for me. I like fighting human NPCs much more because I can create many different loadouts many of which I can get to work (unfortunately NPC combat tactics are a bit one-dimensional, but ok).
iu


Seriously, I'm totally with you in this!
 
My take FWIW is that First Encounters did indeed give us a choice, but it was a corporate one. FD actually said that humanity's initial reactions to the Thargoids would determine the narrative.
The trouble with that is, FD didn't give us any way to interact with the Thargoids, except to shoot them. "Do nothing" isn't an interesting choice, and it's also hard to quantify how many players actively choose to do nothing. In a game with combat as a major focus, of course people are going to try shooting things, especially when there's no other way to interact with something.

FD could have done any number of things to have mysterious and ambiguous aliens. They could have sent cryptic messages, dropped clues, all sorts of things. People have spent years looking for exactly that.

And it's not like I object to, "Humanity unites against a violent threat" as a premise, either. That's fine.

What I don't like is presenting a non-choice as if it was a choice, then telling the players they're all sick s because they pushed the only button on the panel. Especially not when players have been actively searching for an alternative and found nothing.

This isn't the first time I've seen this in an MMO. It's a real failure of the industry that they deliberately ignore player input, impose narratives, then insist that's what the players want.

Even worse: in one blurb I saw recently for ED, it was implied that players are selfish for avoiding the war or moving to Colonia. So now we're bad players because we're playing other parts of the game. And somehow FD doesn't read it as a message that a lot of us don't like this narrative, or want to react to it on our own terms.

We're not NPCs.
 
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i do nothing to hurt the goids because there is no better alternative to "vote" for the destruction of the bubble in order to change the game board.

so that's disappointing and a huge miss in the whole war mechanic

also, I'm disappointed in the fact that the stations remain after the goids fully take a system. this war should not be reversible!! the effects should be permanent. if humanity were to win, it should be an activity to build new stations in the reclaimed systems that would be empty of factions or stations. a new bubble would form based on player actions with new super power boundaries and maybe new powers altogether.

that would be interesting. a war where the outcome is an entirely reversible mechanic that brings the bubble back to the state we were at before it started is a pointless war.
 
It's taken me a while to respond to this, but I've settled on how I feel about it now and thought I'd share it on the thread, especially since I've tried out ships with the new enhanced AX weapons.

tl;dr I love the concept, but I dislike the new AX combat. I probably am going to ignore the war, as I don't find the content fun.

I really liked the implementation of Thargoids before the war and the sorts of interactions players had with them, I really enjoyed the Salvation event, the AX combat zones with capital ships, and I like the concept of the war and watching the war play out in game.

However, I don't like the main attraction; the AX combat. It's a huge spike in difficulty over the other PvE combat in the game - Haz Rez, Combat Zones and soling combat wing missions are all much, much easier - and the nature of the new encounters funnels players into adopting a narrow set of specific ships, builds and tactics to engage with the content to any degree that feels meaningful (i.e. without being blown up or forced out after a short while).

I don't find the current AX combat fun to engage with. I don't like how much it feels designed around meta builds and because the encounters can be extremely capricious. I don't enjoy encounters where players are stunned by NPCs and left unable to interact with the game (a primary Thargoid gimmick) and/or when players randomly encounter NPCs they cannot defeat or evade (e.g. the new Thargoid Hyperdictions & Interdictions). As a rule, I think all of mechanics reduce player agency and contribute negatively to player engagement and satisfaction.

I am fine with having content geared towards that play style, even if it's not something I choose to engage with often, I just think it's a mistake for the mainstream content to go in this direction, because it caters to an unsustainably small niche audience and I think doing that does more harm than good to player retention.
 
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