Pretty much why I'm not actively doing anything towards this effort right now. My main account is a few hundred LY away from Barnard's Loop now, not because I'm looking for the Meta-Alloys, but because I want to go out there as I haven't yet. If I found them, whoop de doo, but I'm not looking there anymore.
My second account farmed UA's long enough to get a Vulture and is now smashing Conflict Zones back home near Sitakapa to flip systems for the Imperial factions in that region. Granted, I just bugreported a war that the Imperial faction won, but didn't flip the station over, so the BGS isn't all that hot either, but when I run 1m worth of combat bonds into station, I get roughly a 2.5% bump in influence for my supported faction; that is, I do something, and I get the expected results. There's a pulse, I can track it, I can work out what's going on. If there's an influence swing against me despite my best efforts, it means someone is working against me, but I can interact with it. I can find somewhere else, fight back, all sorts of things.
I got the sads about Walker Survey before (which still hasn't been affected with another 50 delivered by my second account), because everything in the news gave all the indicators that "Selling UAs at stations causes issues for them". FD concurred with that train of thought by publishing a variety of player and non-player articles pointing the finger at the UAs, yet Walker Survey still stands. Who knows why, and we'll probably never know, because unlike the Civil Wars I fight...
This has no pulse.
There's nothing to follow. Literally. We barely found the free-floaters despite the idea floating around (from Riz and others) about 7 markings on the UA, 7 sisters and all that jazz, but it was chance. It was also complete chance that we found the UA shell, mostly as it happened to be in the area we were working in.
Now we have meta-alloys, which are by all accounts likely to be found in an area somewhere out there, just like the UAs. And just like the UAs, there's nothing to track, nothing to go "Ok. This is a clue, but how do we interpret it...". Somewhere, in some region of space, there's these alloys sitting there, and nothing to indicate, even in the most convoluted manner possible, they're there. A while back in a dev update pre-horizons, I
made the claim that placing content somewhere out in the black, with nothing to go on at all, was a pretty poor idea. If you read that thread further though, most people seem to disagree. I had a mate who used to do geo-caching, and one of the disparaging comments he'd make of people who placed them poorly was "It's like they just had them sitting in the back of their Ute, drove around, and when one bounced out, he'd call wherever it landed the cache*".
Without anything else to go on other than "They're out there, somewhere", there's no gameplay to engage with, and it feels like the meta-alloys have just bounced out of the Ute somewhere^.
Maybe some people do enjoy just fumbling in the dark til they actually hit what they're looking for... more power to them, but I already sat prostrate before the altar of the RNG trying to get a UA Convoy spawn in known systems, and getting nowhere, and this kinda feels the same.
* As opposed to good caches, which led you through various stages of searching, trivia and a path of discovery before, after a dozen or so stages and some problem solving skills, you'd finally find it, kinda like escape rooms.
^ Unless they *are* within the shell somewhere, and we're just terrible searchers
