The road to 2.1 & store feedback

Zac Antonaci

Head of Communications
Frontier
The development team are now hard at work on “The Engineers” - the next major expansion in the Elite Dangerous: Horizons season, so as we did in previous releases we’re taking a break from Michael’s regular weekly dev updates.

Instead, over the coming weeks we’ll be going into more detail on Horizons 2.1 The Engineers in the newsletter sent to you every Friday, and we’ll also be reviving our sneak peeks.

This week we want to share with you something we’ve been thinking about for some time, in response to the many requests we’ve had since the Kickstarter.

Naming NPCs, renaming planets and even having a named surface marker to commemorate a special person, thing or event, are all things you’ve been asking for. We are considering adding these items and more to the Frontier Store, including star system naming and creation and naming of new surface starports. We would love to know your opinion on this, and gauge interest.

In order to keep these items special we would limit the availability of each, and if it works well, we would have a batch in each future expansion too.
 

droscoe

droscoe
Holy cow, yes, that would be awesome!

Creation AND naming of starports? Here take my money...

I'm curious how the mechanics will work. Will our name be displayed as the "founder'' of station X in the info panel? Do we get royalties or passive income? Crazy ideas, really.

Looking forward to updates! Great job so far!
 
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Alex Brentnall

Alex Brentnall
Zac Antonaci said:
The development team are now hard at work on “The Engineers” - the next major expansion in the Elite Dangerous: Horizons season, so as we did in previous releases we’re taking a break from Michael’s regular weekly dev updates.
Instead, over the coming weeks we’ll be going into more detail on Horizons 2.1 The Engineers in the newsletter sent to you every Friday, and we’ll also be reviving our sneak peeks.
This week we want to share with you something we’ve been thinking about for some time, in response to the many requests we’ve had since the Kickstarter.
Naming NPCs, renaming planets and even having a named surface marker to commemorate a special person, thing or event, are all things you’ve been asking for. We are considering adding these items and more to the Frontier Store, including star system naming and creation and naming of new surface starports. We would love to know your opinion on this, and gauge interest.
In order to keep these items special we would limit the availability of each, and if it works well, we would have a batch in each future expansion too.
Click to expand...

Needs to be carefully done imo.
Price it too low and the number of requests to change a system to "Big Thingy number 7" will be astronomical. Too high and they'll claim that FD is struggling for cash or fleecing it's players.

Personally not that interested but I understand why others are. I'd do it on a case by case basis like the Special Effect charity ones in the livestream. Maybe set this one up where a % goes into FD coffers and a % goes into charity. Doing it as an auction/blind auction also indemnifies FD from being seen as moneygrubbing since it's the price that the players are willing to pay (and the charity aspect would be awesome too).

Creating new starports and expanding human space is something I'm fully in favour of but within reason. Having one or 2 nebula stations are great but if you give people too much choice we will end up with a facility at every major landmark in the universe. Would prefer that human space expand outwards as it would naturally if thats the right way of phrasing it. :)

Just my thoughts.
 
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Libluini

Libluini
So someone could pay to name a planet I discovered? I'm not sure I'm OK with this. Could we do this like the internet forum Something Awful and give us the ability to re-name named planets when we don't like the name, but for half the price if it's our discovery?
 

Luniticisi

Luniticisi
Seriously though, Will this be moderated ? .. if someone wants to pay you X-amount of £ $ to name a system Bling'D'Bong will that be possible, obviously you will filter out offensive stuff (or will you ???) but will this be a free for all as long as you pay the £ $ ?
 
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Arubeto

Arubeto
Only if names have to adhere certain naming conventions. Don't want to run into NPCs with stupid "d3AAthp@pwnL00lZ" names (you can tell I am not very good with such names :p) all the time.

Edit: even with naming conventions, I am not to fond of the idea. I think renaming stations or planets for money is actually giving too much power to individuals. I'd rather prefer places to be named in some coherent way by FD than see crazy, totally unfittingly named stations at every corner.
 
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Dr Roly

Dr Roly
I hate the idea of "pay to name" planets, star systems. For me, the knowledge that someone could pay RL money to name something in our game universe would make the ED galaxy feel significantly less real. Competitions to name things in the galaxy, with names chosen by FD would be much better IMO. Competitions could be run outside the game or within ED, in for form of CGs etc.
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I'm all for FD exploiting new revenue streams without spoiling the feel of the game. I realise this is a purely subjective opinion, but I would support things like paid NPC names and ship names. Maybe FD could even sell specific ship names (similar to how you can buy number plates for your car IRL).
 

CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE

CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE
In the lead up to 2.1 I would like to see a couple of streams as was done in the lead up to 2.0 (obviously on a smaller scale as this is not the headline feature). This would make up for lack of dev updates.

Alex Brentnall said:
Needs to be carefully done imo.
Price it too low and the number of requests to change a system to "Big Thingy number 7" will be astronomical. Too high and they'll claim that FD is struggling for cash or fleecing it's players.

Personally not that interested but I understand why others are. I'd do it on a case by case basis like the Special Effect charity ones where a % goes into FD coffers and a % goes into charity. Doing it as an auction/blind auction also indemnifies FD from being seen as moneygrubbing since it's the price that the players are willing to pay (and the charity aspect would be awesome too).
Click to expand...

Agree this needs to be handled carefully, especially as I believe some of the naming so far has been for lost loved ones. I like the charity idea. But I'm all in favour of FD creating new revenue streams if it helps develop the game.
 

sensai25

sensai25
Luniticisi said:
Seriously though, Will this be moderated ? .. if someone wants to pay you X-amount of £ $ to name a system Bling'D'Bong will that be possible, obviously you will filter out offensive stuff (or will you ???) but will this be a free for all
as long as you pay the £ $ ?
Click to expand...

Very good question :

Imagine 1st planet : Grosse
2nd Planet : Fesses

(translation for FD team : 1st : Big, 2nd : Bott*m)

Very concerned about that, it would kill immersion.

You ll have to moderate every langage ?!!
 

edgar

edgar
Would there be an option to allow groups of players to chip in together to name something?

PLEASE Frontier ensure that naming requests are properly vetted to filter out names that are very jarring, or inappropriate to the ED setting.
 
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