Sure, but define "exploration" (maybe the video did?). Odyssey added over a hundred different plant types (not counting colour variations) and a wide range of extra landable planets; before that Beyond added a whole bunch of NSPs and their various contents; both were extremely rapidly dismissed by Explorers as an example of Frontier not understanding them [...]
Were they really? To date, I see plenty of explorers liking the different planet types and the new thin atmospheric planets, and it can be evidenced by how many popular screenshots showcase these. Seems like they are popular. However, the reason why NSPs were quickly forgotten is mostly that there are so few of them out in so tiny parts of the galaxy, and that the small ones (basically, anything that's not around a nebula) are difficult to spot
even if you found the NSP, to the point that most new players think that the filler content, the metallic crystals and such, are the entire point of the signal.
Oh, and there's the near-complete lack of rewards and reasons to find some of your own.
It's a pity, because as actual content goes, NSPs are mostly better than the Odyssey exobio plants: they are much more interactive. A number of them can even be actually dangerous. I do like how most of the Odyssey flora look, but you can't really do much with them.
Mind you, one NSP was accidentally made as what I'd call the ideal distribution: the Albulum Gourd Molluscs. They cover an entire region (this was the accident), but their spawn conditions are rare enough that they aren't all over the place
and most explorers will still unexpectedly come across them at least once.
I've been on several group exploration expeditions, I've spent a lot of time as part of various exploration communities, and I don't understand Explorers either, so I don't see why Frontier should.
Well, because it's their job. (Assuming there is still at least one game designer left whose tasks extend beyond Thargoid gameplay.)
Thing is, exploration communities have changed quite a lot since DW2 ended, and to me it seems that your "Explorers" caricature was built on experiences before then. (For starters, AFAIK all of its organisers quit exploring, and so did many (likely most) of its participants.) New communities would then form around Discords and squadrons, and a new understanding also emerged: that a handful of well-coordinated explorers can find more interesting things than hundreds let loose uncoordinated would.
Also, Observatory Core was a game changer too - to the point that I think Frontier would do well to learn some of its lessons.
Speaking of which, there was another event that provided some excellent lessons, and what it was built on was entirely accidental. I'm talking about finding the lost green gas giant, on the At the Eldritch Gate expedition. What provided its reason for existence was that way back when, a player found something extremely rare, but they really know that, and all that they left behind was a single screenshot and a few short diary entries of their various other finds on their journey. All of them vague, no system or even sector names, just the general area. Searching and finding it based on these ended up being a significantly more interesting and fun expedition than any other I've been on. (Sorry, DW2, but it's the truth.)
Now, Frontier could do something similar as well, just intentionally so. Put a new asset at the end (like another megaship with voice logs), and bam, there'd be more players exploring - until somebody finds it, that is. Sure, it wouldn't be a lasting solution, but it's still something quite interesting that could engage people... and wouldn't even require any extra coding.
Now, given the likely size of the Thargoid War communities, I'm very definitely not saying that next year shouldn't be Exploration Year - if the AX fans got a year, there's enough explorers to justify that too! - just that it won't be what turns around falling player numbers or whatever the hope is for it.
A more realistic hope I'd say would be increasing player retention, at least for exploration. While that's a problem with the entire game in general (the reasons I think would be mostly obvious), for exploration, it's even more so, by a significant margin. And yet, it could be better, because it
was better before Beyond Chapter Four. Of course, the game was four years old at the time, while it's coming up on nine today. However, there's still no other game out there that can offer you a 1:1 scale realistic galaxy to explore, so playing to that strength and increasing the quality of the gameplay that actually utilizes said setting would be a worthwhile endeavour.
