It felt like a rush job from the start. From postponing and ultimately cancel it from the year long feedback rounds for various gameplay elements. Even favouring Open Only Powerplay discussion while that wasn't on the cards and never was going to happen
exploration minigame 6 months later
- Thread starter Spacecat
- Start date
It really would have saved a lot of trouble all round, I agree.
Drew Carnegie has already said this, so I hope it’s ok if I just echo that it would be super awesome if we had the choice not to install updates if we don’t like them. I’d still pay to get 3.2 back, for a number of reasons, not all connected with the FSS.
We know it was rushed, they told us on the initial livestream reveal. I think the PPOOFF was just throwing ideas out there to engage with the community & the reaction from the community was considerably more vitriolic than expected - I had been heavily involved in 'meaningful PvP' discussions in the months leading up to PPOOFF and I guess FDev had read through those threads & wanted to put forward a more formal proposal of their own. Note the stated scope of my own proposal in the first paragraph btw.
Quitting the game is easy. Quitting the forum is much harder
Steam charts might be the same, but exploration statistics from EDSM are both more precise and representative of exploration activity. Number of new systems discovered per day, number of bodies scanned per new system, and, curiously enough, even ELWs / systems: all of them are under half of where they were during DW2, and by now, considerably under the time of the Return, too. (Let's not forget that EDSM didn't have data from console users then.)
However, we do have a bit more data, that's entirely official: exploration CGs. As you'll see, there has been a long pause in those, but we've now had two after Chapter Four and the introduction of the FSS.
Let's see...
Interstellar Initiative: The Enclave, Phase 1, 3305 July: Thargoid storyline: 3,879 contributors, 597,895 reports.
Exploration Data for Research Centre, 3305 February: set during DW2, back in the Bubble: 2,654 contributors
Children of Raxxla Appeal for Exploration Data, 3302 December: Salomé storyline, two concurrent CGs: 3,915 contributors
Federation Appeals for Exploration Data, 3302 December: Salomé storyline, two concurrent CGs: 3,546 contributors
Federation appeals for Exploration Data, 3302 September: Thargoid storyline: 7,780 contributors
80 DD-D 774-CE-2 (Jaques) Appeals for Exploration Data, 3302 September: CG lasted four weeks, Jaques storyline: 7,471 contributors
Searching for Barnacles, 3302 July: Thargoid storyline: 8,224 contributors
Exploration Data for Utopia, 3302 June: 6,425 contributors
Jasmina Halsey appeals for exploration data, 3302 May: Federal storyline: 2,096 contributors
Mapping the Cosmos: Planetary data, 3301 December: 5,173 contributors
Doesn't look like the FSS was a big success in getting more people to do exploration CGs, either.
However, we do have a bit more data, that's entirely official: exploration CGs. As you'll see, there has been a long pause in those, but we've now had two after Chapter Four and the introduction of the FSS.
Let's see...
Interstellar Initiative: The Enclave, Phase 1, 3305 July: Thargoid storyline: 3,879 contributors, 597,895 reports.
Exploration Data for Research Centre, 3305 February: set during DW2, back in the Bubble: 2,654 contributors
Children of Raxxla Appeal for Exploration Data, 3302 December: Salomé storyline, two concurrent CGs: 3,915 contributors
Federation Appeals for Exploration Data, 3302 December: Salomé storyline, two concurrent CGs: 3,546 contributors
Federation appeals for Exploration Data, 3302 September: Thargoid storyline: 7,780 contributors
80 DD-D 774-CE-2 (Jaques) Appeals for Exploration Data, 3302 September: CG lasted four weeks, Jaques storyline: 7,471 contributors
Searching for Barnacles, 3302 July: Thargoid storyline: 8,224 contributors
Exploration Data for Utopia, 3302 June: 6,425 contributors
Jasmina Halsey appeals for exploration data, 3302 May: Federal storyline: 2,096 contributors
Mapping the Cosmos: Planetary data, 3301 December: 5,173 contributors
Doesn't look like the FSS was a big success in getting more people to do exploration CGs, either.
EDSM is not representative of the player base or all of the explorers out there. It also tells you nothing about the reasons some people have stopped exploring.
Basically it doesn't really mean much.
Ah yes, this again. Let me counter your opinion with some facts. Same as I did before, just with a few extras added.
Of all the DW2 sign-ups, over half were registered on EDSM. 7,724 participants out of the total 13,615. In other words, 56.73% registered on EDSM, 43.27% didn't. PC users (10,663) made up 78.31% of the total, but by today, console users can also upload to EDSM.
Those who actually completed the expedition: 3,747 in total, 2,598 on EDSM. In other words, 69.33% registered on EDSM, 30.67% didn't. In other words: 33.63% of the EDSM sign-ups finished, while only 19.5% of the other sign-ups did.
Finally, Qohen Leth wrote that DW2's participants scanned 50,844,000 bodies (planets and stars) during the course of the expedition. I haven't verified this (I don't know exactly how he did this, whether this was done only on the EDSM database or if it was somehow extended after that), but I can tell you that during the expedition's timeframe, 66,508,740 bodies were uploaded to EDSM in total.
Well, tell me: given these, how exactly is EDSM data not representative for exploration activity? Even a quarter of the total systems discovered over the lifetime of the game were uploaded to EDSM, which in the absence of game logs, of course wasn't available from release. But we're looking at trends and rates of change here, not the total sum.
Especially if Steam charts are good enough for you now, whereas they weren't in the past. Steam doesn't even include all of the PC players.
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Can you show your method which you used to determine 10-20 people?
Is it more meaningful than marx' method?
@pico, funny you questioned my 1000s which was in jest, but not Max' 10-20.
Double standards?
And well done going the personal insult route instantly buddy. Classy as always
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I suppose the secret lies in understanding what constitutes as "representative". Numbers given by Marx are hugely representative for any statistical survey.
What bothers me about steamcharts is what's missing, despite all the money they've invested into this. They might as well have done something entirely different, nothing at all, or focus on park simulator games.
What bothers me about steamcharts is what's missing, despite all the money they've invested into this. They might as well have done something entirely different, nothing at all, or focus on park simulator games.
I forgot about that. I think i would have preferred that to just filling a sphere of circles. At least you were checking for something and deciding, giving the illusion of doing something, rather than just forming a pattern.
Yeah, I would prefer this as well, because at least it involves searching for something.
Honestly, you could replace the four bars with Biological / Geological / Xeno / Human (or Other) and it would be good to go.
But the chief problem is that the long POI scan times already conditioned explorers to just ignore the POI scan, especially since it's just Bio/Geo out there.
1) You don't even need to use the FSS for exploration CGs, as these CGs have nothing to do with exploration and everything to do with buckyballing through as many systems as possible.
2) A lot of people are probably burned out on exploration after DW2. I'm sure this would also be the case if we still had the ADS. My trip to Colonia and back burned me out on exploration for quite some time, and this was before the FSS was introduced.
Quitting the game is easy. Quitting the forum is much harder
not if you make it look like an accident!
for a moment i thought you were responding to a steamchart ... same boilerplate nonsense response.
dude, maxyfactor my love, you're really beyond silly here. he is just providing raw data. in this cesspool of subjectivity and overvalued opinions that's something to be grateful for. if there is data, and there is no reason to doubt it, and very well knowing its constraints, context and special circumstances if any, there is ground to form a picture of reality that is (usually) more accurate than no picture at all, or one based solely on your (feverish) imagination.
but you just jumped into conclusions, pulled 2 of the same old strawmen in a row just to dismiss the little data we have because 'it'd doesn't really mean much', that is, it doesn't suit you.
and at this point i'm not even surprised but you just left me wondering ... how's life inside of the head of a fanatic?
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Old ADS and DSS was dull and flat gameplay.
New FSS is an improvement but it becomes quickly repetitive. Exploration gameplay still need some attention from fdev to be more engaging.
But the scanner gameplay is only half of the required job. We need more things to find that are not damn rare to be found. FSS is quick boring because we scan 99.99% of the time planets and moons. We need more cool stuff to see out there.
My proposal to improve the FSS would be insta scan of bio/geological signals and insta discover of all moons around a planet when you scan the first one.
Filters are also required.
I woukd like for example to turn off rocky planets and asteroids or maybe turn off uss's in the bubble.
A fair point. The fact remains though that the exploration CGs after Chapter Four had half as many participants as the ones two years ago. (I count the two Salomé CGs in total, although I have no idea how much of an overlap there might have been between the two.) It should be said though that the one that was timed to be during DW2 was most likely hampered by this, but the officially promoted Interstellar Initiative wasn't.
It's good that you're sure, but we'll never know, so that's irrelevant. Moreover, what is actually important is how many people were turned off of exploration, not whether or not there were any. Sadly, we don't have the relevant data from DW1. The one thing we do know is there haven't been as large a decrease before as there has been now. The second-largest was I believe after the FSS plans were announced, and a smaller one after the Return was mostly done.
However, thinking on it a bit more, it would be unfair for me to say that the FSS is responsible for any and all changes. It's the Chapter Four exploration update as a whole, instead. The FSS is a major part of it, and the only one which actively made the game worse for a part of the player base, but perhaps more gameplay mechanics and more content would have made things better. However, the update under-delivered on both players' expectations and official promises, and what we do have is still riddled with bugs (Codex), seven months later.
It is quite amazing we've found all these new alien lifeforms in deep space, and how little that means. Some things, like space pumpkins, actually feel less interesting than before.
It doesn't need to be, have you ever heard of sample sizes?