This is why I worry about the future of ED - it's FDev themselves

[Leadfoot]

The last thing players want often turns out to be the things they asked for.

And if I may be so bold as to accentuate on that statement......

I had never played the original game so I was not familiar with the occasional Thargoid interdiction. Since playing this version of ED I've been hearting nothing but "When are the Thargoids coming?????"

Then they came. Seems not that many people want to be pestered by them. If they're in USS sites they get ignored. If they actually hyperdict players, just sit still and don't shoot and they go away.

I'm not hunting them directly myself but still think that (1) normal weapons should be able to be used on all types of their ships and (2) hyperdictions should take place at random intervals. Just like (1) original Elite and (2) everyone was begging for.

Be careful what you wish for, they say.

 

[Sylow]

Then they came. Seems not that many people want to be pestered by them. If they're in USS sites they get ignored. If they actually hyperdict players, just sit still and don't shoot and they go away.

.
Also remember the Gnosis. So many people, who all the time were "Thargoids need to be a threat". And then, when they were on board of an expedition ship heading for Thargoid territory and Thargoids actually attacked, it apparenly was absolutely bad and FD never should do anything like that again...
.

 

[znôrt]

but when the commanders who have put the hours in and who have a valid opining seemingly have to fight like hell to justify why a change is needed, or a feature required, I hope - when the NDA has expired

lol, 'fight light hell' ... discussing on a forum or making a video doesn't usually induce ptsd and are actually quite enjoyable activities. i do it for fun!

a bit blinded by celebrity noise, maybe? from those blessed 17, all but two were completely unknown to me and i've been around the forum from day 2.8. alec turner is a great contributer and master race organizer, obsidian ant is elite's long time emblematic and laconic old news tv host, but i really don't think they would like to be seen as justice warriors. i like both, but i don't think their opinions on the game should be considered more important than anyone's.

but most of all, this is not crowdsourcing. it's a company marketing a product. what you could reproach frontier is two things: one, trying to appeal to wildly different audiences at once and second, their ambiguity in letting people believe that player discussions actually matter (in the big picture), which just leads to false expectations and disappointment (but lots of delicious salt on the forum! [haha]).

I have some faith in FDev

you only need faith for the unknown. after 4 years and several financial reports i've a pretty clear picture about what frontier is up to, and that's why i don't worry about the future of ed at all! (some expectation adjustments and frustration management might be required).

 

[znôrt]

oh, i left out tj. what can i say ... i guess i could blame someone ...

 

[WR3ND]

...

It does seem a little strange to me playing as a survivalist as I happen to prefer to when there isn't really all that much to survive unless I go looking for trouble, beyond maybe the random gank or something.

 

[Kubicide]

Who are "the customers"? This customer wants and expects a version of the long-running Elite franchise and is mostly satisfied with the one we have. (If I wasn't satisfied I'd play something else).

CQC / Arena, Multi-Crew, Thargoids, beige-ification, Search & Rescue missions... Do I really need to say more?

 

[whiptail]

ED does not continue to thrive! Do you have any metrics at all to back up your assertion?
There are none. But judging by the metrics that are available, aka, Steam, ED is not thriving, in fact it's losing interest.

This argument here is the weakest of all arguments. Steam as a metric for Elite is flawed. I have multiple accounts and over 4000 hours played. One of the accounts was purchased through steam. My hours in game according to steam are 1.3hrs played. Do you know why, because once I learned I didn't have to go through steam to play Elite I never loaded steam Up to play Elite again. I never use steam to play a game if all they do is open a launcher for me.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

CQC / Arena, Multi-Crew, Thargoids, beige-ification, Search & Rescue missions... Do I really need to say more?

Don't forget PP.

 

[znôrt]

But judging by the metrics that are available, aka, Steam, ED is not thriving, in fact it's losing interest.

wow, not seen steamcharts for a while but they are indeed at an all time low!
not saying we're doomed, but ... run!!!!!!

never mind, they will go up again soon(tm).

cue in barrage of 'steamcharts is the devil!!!' posts ...

 

[Chaparral]

This argument here is the weakest of all arguments. Steam as a metric for Elite is flawed. I have multiple accounts and over 4000 hours played. One of the accounts was purchased through steam. My hours in game according to steam are 1.3hrs played. Do you know why, because once I learned I didn't have to go through steam to play Elite I never loaded steam Up to play Elite again. I never use steam to play a game if all they do is open a launcher for me.

Oh so your sample size of one trumps actual reported user data.

You people are so silly. No one contends that steam user data represents the entire population of users. That is ridiculous. Of the people that PURCHASED THE GAME THROUGH STEAM, FEWER are playing the game right now than before.

If you feel threatened that this may be projected to people that purchased the game directly from Frontier, that's on you.

I purchased 3 accounts, and I play an average of 2 hours per week, and devote far more time to other games. I used to play about 20+ hours per week. My engagement with ED is significantly less.

So MY sample size of one trumps YOUR sample size of one HA!

Let's be reasonable, Steam data is like a speedometer of steam-purchased copies of Elite, and right now - we are definitely under the speed limit in that population.

 

[whiptail]

. Of the people that PURCHASED THE GAME THROUGH STEAM, FEWER are playing the game right now than before.

I did Buy a copy through steam, but steam doesn't log my hours since I don't use steam to launch the game. the fact that steam isn't necessary to play the game makes this an invalid metric no matter how much you wish it to be one

 

[StuartGT]

Don't Worry Op no one else is


Tencent(FD shareholder) is the largest Chinese mobile game company .....

Correction: TenCent is the largest gaming company in the world.

League of Legends and Fortnite are doing very well, by devhouses owned by TenCent

 

[znôrt]

I did Buy a copy through steam, but steam doesn't log my hours since I don't use steam to launch the game. the fact that steam isn't necessary to play the game makes this an invalid metric no matter how much you wish it to be one

so if you never launched through steam your case has zero impact on the player count history and trends, which is a reasonably good metric (actually, the best publicly available right now) no matter how much you wish to dismiss it.

(nb: this message in no way implies any form of doom!)

 

[Zeeman]

Reading comments about the future of ED, one comment stood out like a sore thumb for me:

"A number of the visitors put some STRONG pressure on frontier on various matters on behalf of wider player audience..."

Obviously we don't know what it was, or what the resistance was, but it's been known for a long time that what a large amount of the community wants, and what FDev thinks they want (or thinks they'll appreciate), are sometimes light years apart.
...

Seems you forgot to quote the rest of that post. I seem to remember that FD did not avoid any questions, and also that pretty much everyone was reasonably happy with FD's answers to their questions.

Z...

 

[StuartGT]

But judging by the metrics that are available, aka, Steam, ED is not thriving, in fact it's losing interest.

This argument here is the weakest of all arguments. Steam as a metric for Elite is flawed. I have multiple accounts and over 4000 hours played. One of the accounts was purchased through steam. My hours in game according to steam are 1.3hrs played. Do you know why, because once I learned I didn't have to go through steam to play Elite I never loaded steam Up to play Elite again. I never use steam to play a game if all they do is open a launcher for me.

wow, not seen steamcharts for a while but they are indeed at an all time low!
not saying we're doomed, but ... run!!!!!!

never mind, they will go up again soon(tm).

cue in barrage of 'steamcharts is the devil!!!' posts ...

Oh so your sample size of one trumps actual reported user data.

You people are so silly. No one contends that steam user data represents the entire population of users. That is ridiculous. Of the people that PURCHASED THE GAME THROUGH STEAM, FEWER are playing the game right now than before.

If you feel threatened that this may be projected to people that purchased the game directly from Frontier, that's on you.

I purchased 3 accounts, and I play an average of 2 hours per week, and devote far more time to other games. I used to play about 20+ hours per week. My engagement with ED is significantly less.

So MY sample size of one trumps YOUR sample size of one HA!

Let's be reasonable, Steam data is like a speedometer of steam-purchased copies of Elite, and right now - we are definitely under the speed limit in that population.

so if you never launched through steam your case has zero impact on the player count history and trends, which is a reasonably good metric (actually, the best publicly available right now) no matter how much you wish to dismiss it.

(nb: this message in no way implies any form of doom!)

Steam data chat? I love Steam data chat

Have forum users learned how to read the data yet? Disappointingly, no Nevermind...

It feels as if people are using Steam stats as the be-all-end-all argument that "Elite Dangerous is [dieing|dead|abandoned|on the death bed]".

Unfortunately for those folks that are attempting to use Steam's player count as ammo for the above... Steam stats only paint a very small picture of our actual player counts.

Elite Dangerous was not originally released on and locked to the Steam platform in 2014. It was made with our own client patcher, our own accounts system, our own developed systems. Completely split away from Steam. We do not force people to launch the game through Steam. At last check, players can download Elite Dangerous from Steam, and not have the Steam client running at all while playing Elite.

The 1,545 that were online during the Thursday morning maintenance cycle, which was extended with the 3.2.1 update being deployed?

That's odd - there are usually many thousands of CMDRs playing Elite Dangerous when the servers are down

Btw, the record low during live uptime occurred during April 2016, with ~1,350 online:

Interestingly, according to Steamcharts that same April 2016 was also the record-low Monthly Average Concurrent, at 2,842 Steam CMDRs.

Meanwhile, the last 30 days has a "Monthly" Average Concurrent of 3,342 Steam CMDRs, the 7th lowest "month" on record.

The stats below (from SteamDB) show a clear downtrend, from Elite Dangerous' best month ever on Steam (Jan 2018, Monthly Average Concurrent was a record high at 7,047) and quickly followed by the launch of major update 3.0 (end of Feb). The next major update is 3.3 arriving next quarter

For the doombringers brokenly misinterpreting Steam stats for Elite's imminent death, I hope they don't re-look look at No Man's Sky's stats following its recent success (I'll make an educated guess in assuming they've brought that game up as a discussion topic a few times), because god damn, a 95% drop in less than 3 months is a bad hit...

"NMS is doomed, they should release more content and features! OMG!" or something.

Hold up, we've heard that before.

 

[StuartGT]

For a lovely follow-up:

There was very little to which a response of "no comment" was given. I even got some answers on playerbase numbers and concurrency records which I've nagged them for years on (I'm obviously NDA'd from passing those on, but I can say the game is very healthy).

 

[znôrt]

I love Steam data chat

true classic, but ...

psst ... that specific quote of brett's is actually a bit embarrassing. it still is no argument against steamcharts revealing trends. i mean, assorted uncultivated forum fans playing that fallacy card is to be expected, but brett ...

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

…
"NMS is doomed, they should release more content and features! OMG!" or something.
…

Haven't they just released a new submarine? (sounds really useful btw)

After playing a few dozen hours after that "resurrection patch" I stopped following NMS closely, but from afar it looks like they do improve their game.

Now back to whatever topic this thread is about.

(I like Elite Dangerous [hehe] )

 

[Tarman]

Is this a doom thread or a panic thread? The distinctions are starting to blur.

 

[StuartGT]

true classic, but ...

psst ... that specific quote of brett's is actually a bit embarrassing. it still is no argument against steamcharts revealing trends. i mean, assorted uncultivated forum fans playing that fallacy card is to be expected, but brett ...

Translation: "I don't like what Brett posted."