96 hours to locate a base...? SHENANIGANS!!!!

[Edward Lewis]

I am calling Shenanigans. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and yet it was never THIS obvious.

Let me back up. While my IQ isn't all that high, probably mid double digits, I have often wondered about the probability of a lone explorer finding a McGuffin that furthers the game canon in a game with a 1:1 scale galaxy.

(In no particular order... and I have more, but haven't had enough coffee yet to remember them all)
* Jaques station goes missing. Everyone is wondering where it might be. A lone explorer finds it 21k lightyears away... Huh. Wow, that's pretty dang cool.
* There are capital ships in the game. Oh, here is how I found them.... Huh. That's cool. Um... ok.
* Alien probes, planetary barnacles, unknown artifacts... Huh. That's... odd. How did you locate... nevermind, I wanna go see 'em too.
* Thargoids are coming. You can get a really cool, really scary cutscene if you go to THIS area of space while carrying THIS specific item on board. Huh... now just how in the blue blazes did you know... you know what, I'm sold. I wanna do that too.
* Less than 96 hours after seeing an old Inara Base for less than 2 seconds in an already busy trailer, said base is found.

Ok. Look, I get it. there are 400 BILLION (say it like Carl Sagan!) star systems. Devs want to advance the story. Get the word out. Get everyone excited about something coming down the pipeline. But, come on... really?? This just has the overt feeling of someone from Frontier telling a buddy to go look at this system, these co-ords.

If you are going to be cryptic and say there are still lots of mysteries from day 1 yet to be discovered in the main bubble, yet this happens so soon after seeing it at FdevCon or whatever it was... that's just shenanigans.

Look, you have me. I am playing your game. In fact, it's on another screen as I type this. I really, really love this game. No matter how many times I take a break from playing, no matter how long that brake may be... I am still here. I am still playing. I have invested SO much time into this game, and I am not sorry one bit. It is my little slice of heaven in a world gone mad. But ... really? REALLY?!? How about just leaving breadcrumbs in the GalNet and let us find stuff?

If I was that lucky, I would buy lottery tickets.

Sorry. End of Not Enough Coffee Rant.

Hello,

Just wanted to clear up that we absolutely do not feed groups with any private, secret or privileged information in order to progress the story.
In all honesty, we're consistently blown away by how quickly players find these things we've put in to the game. Players have used star maps, trailers, and lots of other different ways to find interesting locations in the past. Ways we didn't expect... ways that challenge us to make even more interesting and tricky ways to unlock new information.
It's worth mentioning that data mining is against the EULA, and we do not condone this way of gaining data or information about the game (or other similar ways of obtaining this information that goes way above my technical understanding). We implore people to not spoil the experience of others... it's just not cool quite frankly.

Once again, the implication that we're feeding information to players is incorrect, and that sort of speculation is potentially harmful... so try to avoid doing that. Thanks.

Ed

 

[Alec Turner]

Hello,

Just wanted to clear up that we absolutely do not feed groups with any private, secret or privileged information in order to progress the story.
In all honesty, we're consistently blown away by how quickly players find these things we've put in to the game. Players have used star maps, trailers, and lots of other different ways to find interesting locations in the past. Ways we didn't expect... ways that challenge us to make even more interesting and tricky ways to unlock new information.
It's worth mentioning that data mining is against the EULA, and we do not condone this way of gaining data or information about the game (or other similar ways of obtaining this information that goes way above my technical understanding). We implore people to not spoil the experience of others... it's just not cool quite frankly.

Once again, the implication that we're feeding information to players is incorrect, and that sort of speculation is potentially harmful... so try to avoid doing that. Thanks.

Ed

Nice one Ed - thanks for chipping in!

 

[Kerrash]

Can we /thread now?

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I would like to point out hole in logic about giving tips to specific groups - why give such tips so close after reveals? Wouldn't it make more sense to give them *after* people have tried actually to discover it?

Let's just be frank - ED players are very innovative by nature and lot of them find excitement of discovering secrets laid down by FD. This offers interesting challenge. So location of the base...I think explanation given by discoverer is solid one.

 

[Knightshark]

Hello,

Just wanted to clear up that we absolutely do not feed groups with any private, secret or privileged information in order to progress the story.
In all honesty, we're consistently blown away by how quickly players find these things we've put in to the game. Players have used star maps, trailers, and lots of other different ways to find interesting locations in the past. Ways we didn't expect... ways that challenge us to make even more interesting and tricky ways to unlock new information.
It's worth mentioning that data mining is against the EULA, and we do not condone this way of gaining data or information about the game (or other similar ways of obtaining this information that goes way above my technical understanding). We implore people to not spoil the experience of others... it's just not cool quite frankly.

Once again, the implication that we're feeding information to players is incorrect, and that sort of speculation is potentially harmful... so try to avoid doing that. Thanks.

Ed

Ah, Shenanigans! (What a nice word!)

 

[GraXXoR]

The best one was putting the probe audio through a spectrum analyser. who on earth thought about doing that?

 

[Jmanis]

The best one was putting the probe audio through a spectrum analyser. who on earth thought about doing that?

Everyone, ever since this.

 

[GraXXoR]

Everyone, ever since this.

I'm sorry, what am I looking at? I see a post about mysterious Soontill Relics.

 

[Jmanis]

I'm sorry, what am I looking at? I see a post about mysterious Soontill Relics.

Michael Brooks post "Have you listened to them".

Maybe you had to be there,but people had spectral analysis tools ready to go before the first Unknown Artefact (Thargoid sensor) was even found by RedWizzard. This resulted in many topics and posts like this one.

Funnily enough, none of that helped find out they emitted morse.

 

[Ozric]

Thank you very much for the clarification Ed, it could have done with coming a couple of days ago though. We all know how passionate the devs are about this game and there's no way that any of them would want to spoil things for the players.

Hopefully we can stop with the accusations against them now.

 

[Rob At Work]

How about the prediction that the first Banacle would be discovered on a Thursday - and it was!

Russell Grant & Mystic Meg, eat you hearts out man, you're rubbish compared to FDev.

 

[B1rdy]

The best one was putting the probe audio through a spectrum analyser. who on earth thought about doing that?

It is actually quite common to "hide" messages in audio. More recent game examples are Battlefield 4, in some sort of easter egg ("Phantom Program"), and in DooM's (4) soundtrack.

 

[aymerix]

As people are asking what went on, this, as best as I can tell, is what happened. (Worth bearing in mind that quite a few people involved aren't native English speakers so there is a distinct language barrier at play throughout.)....

- Trailer is shown and INRA base is seen (I think we all know that. I certainly saw it and even said "INRA confirmed" in the livestream chat there and then.)
- Alex and the other French guys start looking for the base. They do this around Alioth because of lore from Frontier First Encounters.
- They post what they're doing on the forum
- Cookie offers to help. Confusion and semi-argument temporarily ensue. In amongst that Cookie says:
.....- He doubts the site will be findable and that their only chance is if they stumble on a listening post
.....- That finding the site through the skybox would not be possible as there's nowhere near enough to work from in the clip from the trailer.
- Cookie says that INRA never went a huge way out of the bubble and that he reckons it'll be in independent space
- Alex explains why they're searching around Alioth
- Cookie decides to start looking for odd systems around Alioth. He reasons that it must be an unpopulated system in order for the base to have remained undiscovered for so long. He also seems to think that it would be a named system - it's not worded very clearly though.
- There's a bit of debate about whether it would still be in an unpopulated system, or whether the system might have been settled after the base was built.
- Cookie says that it would be stupid of INRA to have built the base in a populated system as they don't want it finding, and so it would be an unpopulated system. He doesn't actually directly respond to the point about whether it might now be populated.
- Cookie asks what colour the planet is in the clip, and whether others think it's white and maybe therefore an ice planet.
- Alex makes a beige joke. Also posts a 4k version of a screenshot from the livestream, with luminosity and contrast boosted.
- There's a bit of debate over whether it might be looking around the California nebula as there's the Turner research base, and the Turners are linked to the events in FFE. Consensus is it's too far out to fit with FFE lore.
- Cookie reports that he's finding a lot of Convoy signal sources in his current system, which he thinks is weird as the system is unpopulated.
- Cookie posts a picture of a planet from the system which he thinks looks like the one from the trailer, in the sense that it has ravines <clarification point - one can be seen in the background in the screenshot from the trailer> and it all looks to be the right colour.
- <Clarification point - I was reading this all after the site had already been found, and I was a bit dubious about the above point as EDSM showed 3 planets in the system, all of which looked to be a match, but no - checking in the system map shows the is just 1 planet in that system whose colour matches the screenshot.>
- Cookie says he's going to take a look and asks if anyone wants to join.
- Cookie vaguely agrees with someone else's argument that checking the California Nebula for Aegis research sites is what everyone should be doing, but says he wants to search the planet a bit more though he doubts he'll find anything on his own as the planet's too big.
- Alex can't go himself due to RL, but passes the info on to the rest of his group.
- Alex reports various cmdrs are on their way.
- There's a bit of debate over whether the Pleiades can be seen in the screenshot from the livestream, and a joke about INRA being on Raxxla.
- Alex reports EfilOne is on site and has found something.
- EfilOne posts a screenshot, along with a link to the logs and the site co-ordinates.
- Alex thanks Cookie for his help and says it was very good intuition. <Clarification point - there's no sign at all of Cookie himself saying it was intuition. Nothing in the discussion to that point seems to have revolved around intuition either, so this may have just been a lost in translation moment.>
- Excitement, and lots of posts ensue. Some people ask for an explanation of how it was found.
- EfilOne posts an explanation of how he found the site on the planet. Summary:
....- he says it was all skybox matching at first
....- he says he then circled the planet several time until he thought he was close enough. <Clarification point - language barrier going on, but he appears to mean close to the right area, not close enough to the planet.>
....- he says he then glided to the surface into the canyon that was below him, followed it for a bit, chased various POIs but only found system defence force ships, saw a few things that turned out to be nothing, and eventually saw an object which was creating some aliasing with some heavy contrast in the middle, which he headed towards and that turned out to be the site.
....- he then explains he's spent a huge amount of hours doing planet searches in the past and so knew how to approach it well.
....- he then runs through the graphics settings he uses for planet searches and gives other tips on how to do it.
- People misinterpret EfilOne's post and start asking how it's possible the planet could have been identified through skybox matching when there's so little to go off.
- Confusion starts going into overdrive. People start saying they can't see any explanation of how the planet was found. People start asking for proof of how the planet was found via skybox matching. Other people start saying that the skybox matching would have been impossible and the first accusation of file dipping is made.
- EfilOne edits his post to clear things up. He says (with "IMPORTANT NOTE:" as a prefix) that he doesn't know how the planet was found, was just told about the lead by Alex and that the skybox matching was only once in orbit.
- A few more accusations fly but things are pretty civil for a while
- A few (seemingly) light hearted comments get a bit misread, and talk starts about favouritism and so on and so forth. People are still wanting to know how it was worked out. Cookie hasn't commented and all the demand for answers starts going to Alex. Alex gets increasingly asked to explain Cookie's side of things. Alex obviously can't. People just ask him more. Tempers start to fray.
- There's an amusing aside where the meaning of 'handbags' has to be explained.
- Very bizarrely, some people who've been on the thread from the start begin throwing accusations around about skyboxing the planet, despite having been there for the through the bit where the planet was identified.
- One of the other guys from Alex & EfilOne's group does a post on ideas of how to proceed now that this site has been found.
- Everyone ignores that post and continues throwing more and more accusations around.
- Despite the entire contents of the rest of the thread, people start accusing Alex of refusing to reveal any of how the site was found.
- Things get worse. If it's not datamining, it's tip-offs. FD are accused of being in on it, people start demanding that the Devs reveal what really went on.
- People start saying they don't want to play the game anymore if the only way to do anything is through cheating.

So there you go, that, as far as I can tell, is what happened.

Reddit did what it does at some point in amongst all of that. This thread got started up at some point too. I only came to the original thread in question pretty late in the day, but have waded through pretty much all of it. Not going to read through all this thread and reddit too.

Sorry for my english, but I have to say:
It is exactly the sequence of events. Efilone checked a suggestion as we made it all the weekend (many of us were not in the frontier expo. We started the researches on saterday @9h BST). If we had any information on "why Hermitage system?" we would say it. We don't know how this system was found ATM

Some points:

Yes. we have specialists of the lore, and we look in the old Elite lore (the missions who speak about the INRA especially)
Yes. Everything we do is available in our specifit discord Chan (in french, sorry for that) : https://discord.gg/u267JXR You're welcome of course and have all of our discussions, links, google docs, etc. (look at the pin elements)
NO, Absolutely NO : We NEVER have ANY information from Frontier. That's totally wrong.
No, we NEVER try to hack the game files (Personally I don't know how we could make that).
No, it isn't a conspiracy (unless you speak of cooking frogs and snails. In this case, give me your address, I send it to you )

Yes we research (in the lore mainly). And yes Efilone research and was lucky. Nobody said something different since the beginning.

Actually, we trying to find the trailer base (always by using the lore mainly)

Hopefully this explanation can help.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

The best one was putting the probe audio through a spectrum analyser. who on earth thought about doing that?

If you had played Portal, you might have known.

 

[Goose4291]

Hello,

Just wanted to clear up that we absolutely do not feed groups with any private, secret or privileged information in order to progress the story.
In all honesty, we're consistently blown away by how quickly players find these things we've put in to the game. Players have used star maps, trailers, and lots of other different ways to find interesting locations in the past. Ways we didn't expect... ways that challenge us to make even more interesting and tricky ways to unlock new information.
It's worth mentioning that data mining is against the EULA, and we do not condone this way of gaining data or information about the game (or other similar ways of obtaining this information that goes way above my technical understanding). We implore people to not spoil the experience of others... it's just not cool quite frankly.

Once again, the implication that we're feeding information to players is incorrect, and that sort of speculation is potentially harmful... so try to avoid doing that. Thanks.

Ed

Cheers for that. However, you can see why people logically came to that conclusion based on prior preferential treatment that you've done in the past, which rather than being potentially harmful to the community vibe, actually was.

So we're back to data-mining being the likely suspect. Meh.

 

[Drelthar]

I dunno, I feel like it may have been a mistake made by a QA tester, who played on the live server, with an active friends list.

Someone on that friends list noticed where they were...

Then the miraculous discovery occurs.



Like someone said, "Nothing was intentionally leaked"

 

[Alec Turner]

Cheers for that. However, you can see why people logically came to that conclusion based on prior preferential treatment that you've done in the past

Excuse my ignorance ... "prior preferential treatment?" ... can you give some examples, what sort of thing are you thinking of there?

 

[Goose4291]

Excuse my ignorance ... "prior preferential treatment?" ... can you give some examples, what sort of thing are you thinking of there?

Well you dont have to look far... without getting into overly moderated specifics (usually under the 'naming and shaming' umbrella) its been like this since day one:

Greetings, Commanders.

One thing we’re really keen to do is support player groups as much as possible. There are some really exciting ways that groups can get involved in the game now and we’re working on a way to let you submit Community Goals, create minor factions and perhaps even become a full power in the game. You can find out more about this HERE

Something else we want to do is make sure we are communicating as much as possible with groups. As you can imagine there are hundreds of groups and many thousands of people involved in those groups so it’s hard to speak to everyone in one go. For that reason we’re launching a ranking system called Frontier Ranks.

Firstly, these ranks have no effect on your ability to submit Community Goals, establish a minor faction or become a power, but they will allow us to support player groups as much as possible through closer communication. The ranks are more focused on being able to help the largest and most active groups, but we hope it will be beneficial to everyone, and inspire more amazing groups to come forward

There will be 3 recognised ranks of player groups. If you would like to be added to our list send us an email to groups@elitedangerous.com including your name, type (PVP/PVE), member size, website (if you have one) and contact name and email.

Dangerous – Dangerous groups are anyone that wants to be a part of the conversation. The only requirements are that you have a group and want to hear more news and updates from us. These groups will be added to the database and contacted via email when there are events, incentives or information that they might like to know about.

Elite – Elite groups are groups that have an established and thriving sub-community. They might have an estimate of about 50+ members, run regular events which can be promoted and are supportive of the ED team and community. These groups will be able to submit their activity to us to be promoted in our newsletters, social media or an events schedule which will be creating in the coming weeks.

Triple Elite – The largest and most engaged sub communities belong in the ranks of Triple Elite. They are likely to have a huge and super-active community, with many hundreds of active members and are a positive influence to Frontier and the community as a whole. They will also run public events weekly which we would be able to promote across all of our channels and on an event schedule. Groups that are Triple Elite ranked will be able to attend a regular Skype call, receive increased promotion, prizing for events or competitions (at the community team’s discretion) and ad hoc invitations to studio tours or fan events. As our player groups program develops over time, we’ll be looking at more ways to help the dedicated groups – the Triple Elite members will be the first to hear about what we have planned for groups and how they can get involved in activities.

 

[space voyager]

Hello,

Just wanted to clear up that we absolutely do not feed groups with any private, secret or privileged information in order to progress the story.
In all honesty, we're consistently blown away by how quickly players find these things we've put in to the game. Players have used star maps, trailers, and lots of other different ways to find interesting locations in the past. Ways we didn't expect... ways that challenge us to make even more interesting and tricky ways to unlock new information.
It's worth mentioning that data mining is against the EULA, and we do not condone this way of gaining data or information about the game (or other similar ways of obtaining this information that goes way above my technical understanding). We implore people to not spoil the experience of others... it's just not cool quite frankly.

Once again, the implication that we're feeding information to players is incorrect, and that sort of speculation is potentially harmful... so try to avoid doing that. Thanks.

Ed

I understand. But, could you please give the info to ME next time so I can be a hero?

 

[Alec Turner]

Well you dont have to look far... without getting into overly moderated specifics (usually under the 'naming and shaming' umbrella) its been like this since day one:

Huh, must have missed that. Seems pretty cool actually and I don't see any mention of "groups getting access to insider information" so I'll assume best intentions from FD on that one for now. Thanks for digging it out for me tho.