All our hopes lie with a winking cat.... I suppose dev-led CGs can't be worse than this ... can they?
[Solved] (?) - Archambault Terminal - Nuclear Threat Closes Starport...
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"Long and drawn out" is what they've done here, but only because they took an exciting idea, cut it up into tiny snippets to release weekly, and shoved in some filler articles for good measure. And then it ends with the cultists just allowing random people with guns near Cole, because god forbid anything interesting happen.
Was this entire storyline just so the "Week in Review" articles wouldn't look too empty?
GALNET: Imperial Princess is going to marry some Federal dude!
ME: Really? So that will change the whole political landscape of the game? The Feds and the Empire will become BFFs?
GALNET: Nah, they called off the wedding.
GALNET: Famous actress disappears during hyperspace jump!
ME: OMFG! Is this a thing now? It could happen to me?! I'm scared!
GALNET: Nah, it was just a hoax.
GALNET: Someone is trying to overthrow the Empire!
ME: So the Emperor is in danger of being usurped? Is there going to be a massive community goal battle where we find out who wins the throne?
GALNET: Nah, the antagonist was captured and shot.
GALNET: A space station is under threat of being EXPLODED BY A CRAZY GUY WITH A NUKE!!!!
ME: Oh wow! So we have to work together, go in there ninja-style and save the station?
GALNET: Nah, they shot him.
GALNET: Hey...
ME: Talk to the hand.
ME: Really? So that will change the whole political landscape of the game? The Feds and the Empire will become BFFs?
GALNET: Nah, they called off the wedding.
GALNET: Famous actress disappears during hyperspace jump!
ME: OMFG! Is this a thing now? It could happen to me?! I'm scared!
GALNET: Nah, it was just a hoax.
GALNET: Someone is trying to overthrow the Empire!
ME: So the Emperor is in danger of being usurped? Is there going to be a massive community goal battle where we find out who wins the throne?
GALNET: Nah, the antagonist was captured and shot.
GALNET: A space station is under threat of being EXPLODED BY A CRAZY GUY WITH A NUKE!!!!
ME: Oh wow! So we have to work together, go in there ninja-style and save the station?
GALNET: Nah, they shot him.
GALNET: Hey...
ME: Talk to the hand.
There's nothing to be surprised of: galnet plots have never had any correspondence with in game assets and or events - excluding CGs, the times when Drew Wagar was writing them to give hints about the rift and to hype his book, and when player-submitted galnets were a thing. For me it became clear that none of the plots either in galnet or in outposts logs would never have any purpose in-game when Adam Woods labeled them as "those ministories that you seem to love so much" during last year's lavecon.
The fact that they finally tried to give any basis to a galnet story by placing a corresponding minor faction in game battling against the bgs inflexibility - only because they could set the station to lockdown with a reason, thus preventing the players/BGS from altering the storyline - could've led someone to believe this time it was going to be different. It wasn't, it never is
Fdev should learn to be less of a deus ex and more of a dungeon master. So much potential for player driven subplots going to waste every week.
TBF, at least now some of the galnets led to a CG: a boring outcome, but still an in-game event. Unfortunately, the game simply does not allow to develop subplots because everything we see (markets, missions, factions) is tied to the rules of BGS without escape (once again, consider the lockdown at archambault as a workaround to this problem). They could've made a CG where the CoT asked for slaves to sacrifice or void opals in exchange for not blowing up the station, sure, but what after that? Leave the minor faction in game and the BGS will take over: they cannot make the faction give out particular missions, they cannot make the faction control the market to, e.g., export religious pamphlets or whatever icon of Tothos, they cannot make the faction spawn security ships that behave like religious nutjobs rather than police officers, they cannot shutdown particular services of the stations controlled by the factions because, e.g., "material trading is immoral according to tothos!". The BGS does no exceptions - resistance is futile.
If anything like this was possible, players would find new reasons to play (i.e., to support a subplot) because doing it would have a tangible effect on the bubble that's more than "oh look, the Minor Faction I pushed gained another station/system", and the galnet writer(s) could get new materials to write almost on a daily basis (e.g., I could totally see groups of players role-playing support for the CoT Warrior's Sons style, if it had any effect different than pushing every other faction in game).
The fact that they finally tried to give any basis to a galnet story by placing a corresponding minor faction in game battling against the bgs inflexibility - only because they could set the station to lockdown with a reason, thus preventing the players/BGS from altering the storyline - could've led someone to believe this time it was going to be different. It wasn't, it never is
Fdev should learn to be less of a deus ex and more of a dungeon master. So much potential for player driven subplots going to waste every week.
TBF, at least now some of the galnets led to a CG: a boring outcome, but still an in-game event. Unfortunately, the game simply does not allow to develop subplots because everything we see (markets, missions, factions) is tied to the rules of BGS without escape (once again, consider the lockdown at archambault as a workaround to this problem). They could've made a CG where the CoT asked for slaves to sacrifice or void opals in exchange for not blowing up the station, sure, but what after that? Leave the minor faction in game and the BGS will take over: they cannot make the faction give out particular missions, they cannot make the faction control the market to, e.g., export religious pamphlets or whatever icon of Tothos, they cannot make the faction spawn security ships that behave like religious nutjobs rather than police officers, they cannot shutdown particular services of the stations controlled by the factions because, e.g., "material trading is immoral according to tothos!". The BGS does no exceptions - resistance is futile.
If anything like this was possible, players would find new reasons to play (i.e., to support a subplot) because doing it would have a tangible effect on the bubble that's more than "oh look, the Minor Faction I pushed gained another station/system", and the galnet writer(s) could get new materials to write almost on a daily basis (e.g., I could totally see groups of players role-playing support for the CoT Warrior's Sons style, if it had any effect different than pushing every other faction in game).
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For the love of Tothos, do I have to do all the killing FDev?
They just did a hack - they placed the minor faction with 0 inf and in lockdown so that it couldn't have any effect on the rest of the system nor any player could affect them.
It's still more than we ever had before as far as I can remember.
It's probably going to be Will reading Galnet to us during the Thursday streams.
"And the leader of the Children of Tothos has posted this loooovoely picture of him and his cat sacrificing civilians to his god"
Become? The superpowers have had basically peaceful relations for at least two years now. In theory that storyline went through into the "hacked VIP robots" story - but the connection was fairly weak.
I suspect its purpose was more to introduce the Rochester family - but their impact has been pretty slow as well.
The "it was a hoax" article was quite clearly a cover-up. An anonymous source claims to have seen them with no corroboration? Case closed!
There might well be more to come on that one later.
They did have a community goal battle. The loyalists won, by a long way. They could have had a second one to make sure, but really it wasn't close enough that it would have made a difference.
This is one of the problems with Galnet articles and player involvement - players claim that they want the ability to change the galaxy ... but in practice a majority of players will oppose any specific major change. The players could collectively have made the usurper win ... they didn't.
Same problem the Thargoid story has - the players:
- want to see the Thargoids being a threat and damaging the bubble
- but they don't want to personally lose to the Thargoids in a fight
- or have the systems they personally care about destroyed by them
Definitely agreed on this one, though. Even if actually blowing up the station is outside the technical capabilities of the game, they could have had the nuke only partially work and only blow up half the station, set the station to damaged, and go from there. That would still have been something!
Having gone to the trouble - unlike some of the other stories - of setting it in a definite visitable place ... they could at least have done something with it.
(Not every Galnet story ends with "nothing happens" either - the Alliance has a new President, the Duradrive is available as a commodity, etc. - but no-one remembers them because the change is pretty small)
Drew Wagar's story - while extensive - didn't have that much in-game event to it either, considering it was spread over an entire year.
- there was a pair of competing CGs (not of great relevance to the plot, not particularly unusual for 2018-onwards Galnet)
- there were some Galnet stories related to out-of-game events (very normal)
- there was a large event at the end (the only really unusual bit, and possibly the bit Frontier might be looking to bring back for later stories)
- there were some in-game assets for players to discover (the more recent Far God storyline also had some of those)
- there was some close involvement with a couple of prominent player groups to make it look more interactive (more recently, the Gnosis)
It had the advantage over the current Galnet stories of being built around a strong and divisive protagonist, but I think is remembered as having much more in-game representation than it did.
They could do all of that within current BGS capabilities.
1) There are a few factions in the game which give out unique missions (or, at least, missions with unique text and in-game effect). The engineer invitation missions are the most obvious example which most players will actually have seen, but there are a few others as well.
2) Adding a new rare "icon of Tothos" and making it illegal in all non-Anarchy jurisdictions would make the station export it only when the Children controlled it.
They also have the regional goods (e.g. Reinforced Mounting Plate) which only appear in certain systems on a geographical basis, but are not rare goods, so that's also a possibility.
3) As an Anarchy faction it wouldn't generate system security anyway - but there's an existing "terrorist" NPC archetype that they could use instead. Scenarios, signal sources, etc. being restricted by BGS conditions is already there.
4) Continued shutdown of specific services is a little trickier, but Frontier have previously shut down certain services that a station would normally have without going through the BGS route, and there's already the long-standing feature where the opening or closing of a Black Market is determined by the type of faction in charge.
5) Specific stations (or entire systems) can be locked so that ownership cannot be changed through normal BGS methods either temporarily or permanently.
None of this is free - new mission types or commodities or scenarios will require coding to add them, and lots of translation work for all the extra text they add to the game. So there's definitely a choice for Frontier whether they invest staff time in adding this sort of detail to the ongoing stories, or on developing the next game feature/bugfix. But that's a matter of prioritisation, not capability.
(Personally I think the game is at a stage where slower development in exchange for more detailed and better represented stories makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, given the "two years?!!?" reaction recently, I guess a lot of people would prefer quicker development and minimal-effort stories?)
Don't get me wrong, I'm as far as possible from praising Drew's contributions to the game. It was slow, the story was cheesy, the puzzles were bad, etc. I'm just speaking of Galnet use and, as you said:
And a set of hints in galnet led to their discoveries (then they were buggy and stayed buggy for 6 months, but that's another story). This is more than we got for any of the last year and a half galnet during which none, even the easy ones, had any assets in game (e.g., how easy would've been to add a crashed cobra with a couple of police npcs in systems mentioned by galnets during the League of Reparation subplot? Not going so far as suggesting a decal with "FOR JAMESON" for the crashed ships, or making them emit encoded audio messages from the league, or any other hint/whatnot, just a crashed ship).
That is kinda my point: not only it's not free, it's probably so expensive to do due to how hard it is to code exceptions to the BGS that it's not worth doing it.
The Far God storyline about six months ago had some surface sites discoverable in-game. Indeed, one of the complaints about that was that the surface sites were found by players but it was a long time before Galnet - which had been talking about other Far God stuff - got around to acknowledging it.
More recently there was an in-game attack on the Gnosis megaship (which, like the Dynasty surface sites, had its own share of bugs)
They could and should do this more, but it has happened.
They've managed to set some of these things up pretty quickly in the past. And a lot of the changes they've made over the last couple of years (especially in 3.3) should make it even easier in future.
They don't usually make BGS exceptions, but because player groups tend to bug report them when it stops them doing what they want or goes outside their narrow expectations for how the BGS works, not because they can't. But that's not a technical limitation, and so long as they're at least a bit careful about where they set these things it can be done.
Writing and translation time is probably the most expensive bit (and the most prone to conflict with other priorities, since every new feature will need some of that too), not anything specific to the BGS.