Well, this turned out to be a long post, prompted by Darkfyre99's reply, but there is a conclusion that I'd like to share in a tl;dr form from its end. That is this following part:
The developers have gone out and said that there is going to be next to no new content for a long time, so
if Frontier wanted to increase - or even maintain - player activity in exploration too, the only way now would be to improve the FSS and finally address player feedback on it, and start fixing serious bugs in all parts of exploration which will be a year old in December.
However, that's a big if. Judging by their actions so far, they don't seem concerned with player retention until the next expansion. We'll see with their December bugfix update if this really is the case or not.
So, let's see.
But players who rely on just glancing at the spectrum, looking for signals between the two "AL"s, are going to miss a lot of ELWs and WWs since the way the FSA works, size outliers for ELWs and WWs will appear in the bands for Rocky-Ice and Water Giants respectively.
Do you have proof of this? Size outliers for WWs
might appear in the water giants category, which are rare enough that players might mistake
them for WWs. However, ELWs are very constrained in size (probably The strictest), and I've yet to see even the lightest of them (gravity near 0.4g) drop down to the RIW range on the barcode.
As I understand it, while the rate of discovery for ELWs and WWs on EDSM has dropped, the rate of discovery for AWs has skyrocketed.
Furthermore, aside from a drop just after the introduction of the FSS, slightly more systems are being submitted to EDSM on average than before the FSS, despite the FSS taking longer than the ADS to determine if a system is "worth exploring."
You can look up the exact statistics and analysis yourself, but let's see what you understood wrong here.
The rate of discovery for ELWs and AWs both skyrocketed during Chapter Four's launch and DW2, and dropped like a rock after the latter ended. Since then, ELWs are back to slightly under the same levels as they were before the FSS, AWs are still scanned twice as much as they were before, and systems, the same levels as before... but all of these with console players added into the mix after Chapter Four, mind you.
There was also much more interest in using the FSS up until DW2's end, with 50% more average bodies scanned per system.
So basically, there was a skyrocketing of exploration activity for half a year, then all the gains from the golden opportunity of DW2 were gone, and with console support added into the mix, we're back at and slightly under the same activity as used to be the standard for PC players only. The only thing that changed is that stars are much more prevalent now (great!) and AWs are added at twice the rate before the FSS.
We don't know how many console players there are uploading to EDSM, but at least we do know that roughly 20% of the DW2 participants (both signed up and those who finished, although the latter's ratio decreased a bit) were on consoles.
So, depending on where the actual ratio (outside of expeditions) is, if activity has truly remained the same then that's because the number of console explorers (uploading to EDSM) is insignificant.
This tells me that the ADS did a much better job at cherry picking valuable worlds than the FSS does, despite the fact that it takes less time to scan them than before.
Just the fact that people scan many more ammonia worlds than before shows us that the FSS does a much better job at cherry picking valuable worlds. Then there's also that you needn't fly anywhere, so even though an AW is not nearly as valuable as an ELW/WWTC, it's still worth the time required to click them.
Then there's also the fact that the FSS shows you without uncertainty all the body types there are in the system. Even if you haven't memorised the barcode ranges yet, the game explicitly tells you what is found at your current position on it.
For example, suppose you were looking for amphora plant candidate planets. Which means that there has to be a landable metal rich planet, and the system must contain an ELW or a water giant or a gas giant with water-based life.
Now. Consider how such a system would look on the system map, and how its FSS barcode would look. It is of course much easier to get it from the latter.
I'm not saying that better cherry-picking is a bad thing, but saying that the previous system was better at it than the one designed to pick out body types with complete certainty is incorrect.
As for the rest of your long explanation of your interests, and how the FSS fits them... No offense, but you were quite self-centered there. Why? Because you are quite alone in your interests - historically, I don't think there was anybody focused on sharing with the community the examples you've offered us - and yet you say that they come from the "proper" way of using the FSS. The developers even talked about and showed us what it was designed for: to cherry-pick out body types, to scan every body in systems faster, and to not have to explore more for POIs. My interests, and the interests of many veteran explorers, used to be more than these, but few people would say that ours were the primary interests of the majority of explorers, and the "proper" way to explore. If there even is a "proper" way to explore, and I don't think there is (I dislike talks of true explorers), then at most it's the one that the developers focused on.
However, moving on from one's self, at the end of the day, not only is exploration in Elite a niche activity, but the majority of it is people exploring while going from known points A and B - mostly the Sol-Colonia-Sag. A* lines, and not scanning whole systems. Frontier knew this (or could have known, if they bothered to look at the data), so of course the FSS and its changes were designed with this primarily in mind. Look at how the only major thing they changed about the FSS based on feedback was that honking would still give you credits.
Crucially, there is one major flaw with this, one major flaw with how the FSS caters to cherry-picking body types, scanning faster and rewarding more: the question of
longevity. Concerns about this were raised during the focused feedback thread's time too, that once people get bored with these,
as they have always done, then for the more rare things that remain after this, which keep some (not all!) people exploring, the FSS as planned will be inferior. Some minor changes could have gone a long way there, but Frontier were unwilling to implement anything more.
As far as we can tell from the data, unfortunately this turned out to be right. (Then there's also that the vocal proponents of the FSS tend to be those who don't explore a lot, and support for it over time played is pretty much always decreasing.) The initial enthusiasm for exploration that was sustained by DW2 far longer than new update bursts tend to happen (which historically was one month, sometimes two) is all gone. Sure, in the couple of months following DW2, you could say that people were exhausted from exploration, but it has been half a year since DW2 reached Beagle Point, and activity has been stagnating since four months. The Chapter Four launch and DW2 introduced a lot of people to exploration who were new to it, and at best, the number of them who stuck with exploration
so far was more or less equivalent to the number of those who were turned off from exploration by the changes. Wouldn't it have been better to at least not turn off groups of people? (For the record, in my opinion even in alternate timeline where Chapter Four was missing the FSS, nearly as many people would have been turned off after DW2 simply because most went for the promise of lots of new quality content, which was why the expedition was formed in the first place... and there turned out to be barely any new content, and mostly of low quality too.)
The developers have gone out and said that there is going to be next to no new content for a long time, so
if Frontier wanted to increase - or even maintain - player activity in exploration too, the only way now would be to improve the FSS and finally address player feedback on it, and start fixing serious bugs in all parts of exploration which will be a year old in December.
However, that's a big if. Judging by their actions so far, they don't seem concerned with player retention until the next expansion. We'll see with their December bugfix update if this really is the case or not.
