Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice....
Its time's like these that I like to type "https://www.elitedangerous.com" in my address bar just to remind myself what exactly fdev sells this game as; how they chose to differentiate themselves from the competition. Go on, do it yourself. You'll get a nice cinematic animation (featuring a lot of gameplay that doesn't actually happen) and then the 4 main "selling points" that fdev chooses as the first real substance to describe their game to new players with. The third of these selling points is "EPIC MULTIPLAYER: Blaze your own trail and experience an evolving, player-driven narrative in a 34th century galaxy of warring galactic superpowers."
Now reading that, you would think that the devs of this game would jump at the opportunity to incorporate a player lead initiative into the story of the game, would you not? And yet, when they are handed basically a blank check when it comes to player lead narratives, when they are given a rare opportunity tell any story they could possibly imagine and have the player genuinely feel as if their choices were what caused that story to take place and not just the dictations of the devs, what do they do with it? They turn it into another shipping CG. They could have put ANYTHING in that area of space. A variation of the brain trees (maybe this could be where the tube worms are if canonn hasn't found them yet), a secret thargoid installation, a guardian installation, a rouge AI, maybe even a generation ship that didn't die out (not sure if the time tables would work for that one). They could have even just made it get thrown off course to a far away system and establish a colonia 2.0 and thrown in a few of the ideas I mentioned above as a concession to the explorers if they REALLY didn't want it going to the cone sector.
But not only did they waste the perfect opportunity to deliver on their promises, they went a step further. And not just a step further, but so far that its hard to imagine how anyone could have thought this was anything but the worst possible decision unless their intent was to harm the player base. They didn't just say "no, you can't jump there," they told canonn that they could. And then canonn told people they were going to. Then people got excited. Maybe they only realized they couldn't let it happen after saying yes, which is why they permit locked all those sectors. But they didn't just say "no you can't anymore sorry," which would have been bad enough on its own but would have stopped people from getting their hopes up too much (maybe as a concession they could have given cannon a tip about a different region of space that has some undiscovered goodies). But instead they waited for everyone to get there, for everyone to invest time and money (both in game and real money) into this, only to cancel it in the dumbest way possible. They let people invest in it when they had every opportunity of stopping them from doing so, but didn't.
The only way I can see fdev salvaging this situation is if they plan on letting the gnosis actually do the jump eventually and are just buying time to make content. Now this would still indicate terrible planning on fdev's part, as they should have just told cannon "we don't have content available yet, wait a few months and we'll have something for you" or just let it happen and strand the gnosis within a small area via permit locking and slowly unlock more and more space as content is developed. The in game justification for that could have been the pilots federation not letting cmdrs enter thargoid infested areas until the thargoid's numbers had been thinned out via cmdrs killing thargoids in the area the gnossis did have access to. Regardless, there are way better ways of handling this situation.
And the beautiful irony of it all is that we only know of this massive mismanagement of the player driven story is because fdev can't even manage their news site correctly and published the story before it actually happened. Really top notch game development there.
I would like to end this with a statement. I *almost* came back to the game for this event. I'm not an explorer and have only gone more than 500 lys from the bubble to unlock palin. But I thought this would be cool and worth breaking out my DBX for. But in the end I chose not to because my past experience with fdev and E:D still leaves a sour taste in my mouth. And for that I would like to thank fdev. Thank you for screwing up so many times before this that you taught me never to give you the benefit of the doubt. Thanks for demonstrating so thoroughly that you can't follow through with your commitments that there's no point in taking you at your word. And thank you for disappointing me so many times before that this time I only laughed.
