An open letter to Frontier Development

[Good Whiskey]

From observation, Frontier seem to be a very conservative company when it comes to their planning. If a budget is approved for that year for a product, they normally stick to it.

So what you're saying is that this particular entertainment company employs a fiscally-conservative budgeting methodology that avoids budgeting for entertainment. Because that is the most logical conclusion we can draw from both your statement and Frontier's inaction on interactivity.

There is £40 million in the bank, but no money for lurid tales about Pranav Antal's countless illegitimate children on GalNet.

 

[Micha]

Thank you,

CMDR Kai Zen

That... was masterfully well presented. Cmdr, I applaud you. And it perfectly sums up my own opinions about this particular aspect of this wonderful game, expressed far more eloquently thatn I could ever have hoped to do.

@FDev: You have an absolutely amazing community at your disposal. Make use of it!

 

[metatheurgist]

I have no idea why Frontier is so averse to creating exciting stories about this galaxy for us on a regular basis. Genuinely. I'm stumped.

I think it comes down to 2 things.

No saving the princess. You can't have everyone in the galaxy be Luke Skywalker, it just doesn't work. That's not to say you can't craft stories that aren't that but still be good but It's much harder. And arguably the mechanics to pull that stuff off isn't in the game. It's also clear from a lot of the "I/We want to be masters of the universe!" posts that a lot of people want to save the princess to some degree, but FD have wisely stuck to their guns in that regard.

The game isn't as well developed as they want it to be (related to what I wrote above). There could be stories they want to tell but the game just isn't in the state where they can do so. Maybe they thought we'd be fighting land armies or sneaking into bases by now. They could spend a lot of time doing these stories with the available half-baked mechanics or they could wait for development to roll out. But then they could be shooting their load early.

 

[Good Whiskey]

I think it comes down to 2 things.

No saving the princess. You can't have everyone in the galaxy be Luke Skywalker, it just doesn't work. That's not to say you can't craft stories that aren't that but still be good but It's much harder. And arguably the mechanics to pull that stuff off isn't in the game. It's also clear from a lot of the "I/We want to be masters of the universe!" posts that a lot of people want to save the princess to some degree, but FD have wisely stuck to their guns in that regard.

The game isn't as well developed as they want it to be (related to what I wrote above). There could be stories they want to tell but the game just isn't in the state where they can do so. Maybe they thought we'd be fighting land armies or sneaking into bases by now. They could spend a lot of time doing these stories with the available half-baked mechanics or they could wait for development to roll out. But then they could be shooting their load early.

I get this. What perplexes me a bit is that they haven't even provided us with a steady flow of fluff.

Seriously, how great would it be if regular stories and updated audio popped up telling us about an occurrence in X system, or the recent water shortage on Y planet, or the new data storage development in Utopian space? Hell, make some of them amusing. Have fun with it. It's a game. But do something small every day or week. There's nothing wrong with a bit of whimsy or filler that adds to the fabric of this fictional future society. It doesn't take a lot of money to paint richer backdrops to our experience here.

You just have to care enough to do it.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

I partially disagree. The fact that Galnet is "empty" actually shows how little content there is in the game. All the things listed are group activities by players. It doesn't cater to solo players or those that live in time zones incompatible to those "community" events. I think Galnet in its current state actually sums up perfectly my experience with the game as it currently stands.

The community goals were 24 hours a day for 7 days. What time zone doesnt click with that?

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Or even if they just made a bunch of pre-recorded audio files talking about different system States that would be accessible when you're in the system and would kind of....

is there code that would take preexisting texts and audio clips and arrange them to equal the system name, the station, the faction, and the state into a coherent sentence?

Oh wait, like the local galnews at stations but in your right panel where news used to be? Click that after entering system, or 'dl' it from nav beacon and listen to whats what in that system. Why not put those to a playable audio news station

 

[Good Whiskey]

I really don't think a letter that long is going to change FD mind, its done, now get over it. Move on. And I don't care Mick what you think. I do think however that some people think that just becasue they have a minor podcast and that they have a few friends, that some how they speak for everyone, they don't and i'll assume that there drunk on their own importance to start lecturing a company they have no power in.

Just gonna point out that it was an open letter penned and promoted by content creators and players that prompted Frontier to focus on fixing longstanding issues with the game in the January patch. We are consumers of one of Frontier's products. Many of us have invested real time in this game. Sure it's just entertainment, but when you really enjoy something, you want to see it do well. Constructive feedback is how things really get done, like it or not. It has an impact.

Based on the way you're posting, I think you're just in a bad mood about something unrelated and are looking to pick a fight, but this really isn't the best hill to charge up and die on. Even if you're just doing some light trolling. If it makes you feel any better, you can come to my thread about how bad the paint jobs in this game are and berate me for being a whiny flake with silly hangups about computer game skins.

 

[metatheurgist]

I get this. What perplexes me a bit is that they haven't even provided us with a steady flow of fluff.

Seriously, how great would it be if regular stories and updated audio popped up telling us about an occurrence in X system, or the recent water shortage on Y planet, or the new data storage development in Utopian space? Hell, make some of them amusing. Have fun with it. It's a game. But do something small every day or week. There's nothing wrong with a bit of whimsy or filler that adds to the fabric of this fictional future society. It doesn't take a lot of money to paint richer backdrops to our experience here.

You just have to care enough to do it.

They did have that sort of filler. The problem with the filler is a lot us got tired of being told about stuff we couldn't find in the game. Rogue robot in system X? Go there, nothing. Murder investigation in system Y? Go there, business as usual. We decided we'd rather not have it.

You could create stories based on system state and natural events (and that's basically what the local news stuff was) but the galaxy sim is so basic that that stuff is boring. This is part of what I meant by a living galaxy in the other thread about "What I want in ED".

 

[Micha]

Having caught up in this thread now, I must've missed the community outcry against "fluff" articles in GalNet. Real shame if that was indeed the trigger that killed off GalNet.

The simple solution would have been to grade each article into "Report", "Rumour", etc. to give a level of believability/impact to each article.

The ideal solution (for me) would have been to bring back the concept of multiple newspapers from the heady days of Elite2. Have the "BBC" news (ie, GalNet) which is more serious and neutrally covers major events and happenings in the Galaxy at large.

Then have politically-aligned papers for each of the major powers covering news stories with their particular slant, or stories only of interest to that power or their territories.

Finally have "fluff" papers (ala "The Sun") which cover smaller scale stories, unsubstantiated rumours, and general tin-foil-hattery.

Players should then have an idea of how much credibility to lend towards an article and whether to investigate it themselves or not.


Personally I never had an issue with the fluff pieces as long as they weren't too unbelievable. A missing ship in a particular system? Sure, what impact would that have for the general masses? Perfectly believable to arrive in that system, have a poke around, but find nothing.
Conversely a major catastrophe/terrorist act/whatever, it's fair to say that that should have some sort of visible impact in the system and if it's just "business as usual" that's more difficult to swallow.

Doing this sort of thing properly would require FDev to put aside a few headcount towards proper storywriters though.

 

[Kaocraft]

Could we just get a browsable archive of Galnet please? Maybe put it in the codex or something?

 

[amigacooke {macOS}]

Really, what do you do actually? Your not a shareholder, your not a member of the board, you just dictate a letter that some players don't care about. What can a letter like this do other than waste FD time to read it, when they should be working. NOBODY CARES CMDR KIA. YOU HAVE NO POWER!

I bet you're feeling a bit foolish after this rant.

 

[amigacooke {macOS}]

Snip

Having authoritively stated that the poster would not be listened to, he was listened to. If I'd been that brash and wrong, I'd feel foolish

 

[Deleted member 38366]

My 2 cents :

• for as long as in-game related GALnet entries are all marked with a "Show on Galaxy Map" Button (like CGs already had) while fluff Articles are not - bring back the fluff as desired
• re-instate the entire GALnet Archive in-game, so older or even very old GALnet Articles can be read (= GALnet no longer empty as it is now and we have a very long News History to show off after all; plus, Players interested in old GALnet articles don't have to visit external Websites)
• a simple "Search" field to search Keywords inside GALnet is something I've sometimes missed to hunt down old Articles

 

[Vaye Anders]

So I'm a redactor of a news site tied to my faction. We had 2 tasks:
1. Translating GalNet articles to our faction's native language
2. Writing our own articles about well...anything happening in and around our faction.

For the last month we had literally nothing to do and it hurts our staff. Why? GalNet articles were easy to translate but we had to publish them ASAP if we wanted to keep our audience interested. Now we have a bit of a problem because some of us were recruited solely to translate GalNet, we learned a bit about journalism throughout this year of translation but not enough to write a good article on our own.

Writing on your own about BGS or events is harder (especially BGS) and takes a lot of time and skill. Additionally, faction events and BGS events don't happen very often and we have 4 people to cover them so you have to be quick and grab the topic before others do. I like writing on my own but I miss GalNet's stories, they were an important part of my Elite life, now I only have my own roleplay.

TL;DR GalNet was an important part of the game for some people and now that it's gone, we lack things to do.

 

[Phoenix_Dfire]

So what you're saying is that this particular entertainment company employs a fiscally-conservative budgeting methodology that avoids budgeting for entertainment. Because that is the most logical conclusion we can draw from both your statement and Frontier's inaction on interactivity.

There is £40 million in the bank, but no money for lurid tales about Pranav Antal's countless illegitimate children on GalNet.

I would say yes. As far as they're concerned, they're only going to get so much revenue from ED until New Era is released. They've created a budget based on that and that's why things are so, so quiet. Just to be clear, I don't like the way they're doing this, I'm just explaining what their logic could be behind this approach. I don't mean to sound alarmist but at the moment they are burning their existing playerbase's good will at such a rate, that unless New Era is something special, people will move on.

 

[amigacooke {macOS}]

Snip

I’d suggest that the fact that community managers have mentions the thread and said that a reply is in preparation is a change over what would have happened without the thread. Still, it’s clear we are not going to agree.

 

[Sylow]

As others have pointed out, legal difficulties are present, but they are not insurmountable. It comes down to a question of will (lowercase w ) and resources.

I never said they were insurmountable. If i gave that impression then i am terribly sorry. I just wanted to express that filtering and controling player created content is work. More than many people would imagine.

So if resources are scarce, as FD currently indicated, then it's actally more cost efficient to have an employee write something once or twice a week and roll with it. Just imagine a player created article mentioning three player characters. You have to dig for each of them, find out if they might violate some IP. Also make sure that not only the exact spelling is not used by another IP, but also that they are not phonetical representatives, nicknames of characters in another IP or anything like that.

Just checking all possibilites can be plenty of work and it's a bit of a minefield. In contrast just one or two articles a week, written in 20 minutes each, would already go for such a long way and would be so great for the game! So under the assumption that resources are limited, this might be the best compromise and i'd already be quite happy if this would happen.

But Elite Dangerous needs its story back; INRA, Thargoids, COL70, permit locks, Halsey, the Dark Wheel, Raxxla, even the machinations of the Power Play characters. It's a vast canvas upon which incredible stories can and should be told. Lore and narrative is an essential backdrop for player activities.

Absolutely! Gimme, gimme!

PS. Frontier have acknowledged this thread on their recent livestream, a good first step.

Awesome! Let's hope we get something back.

 

[Stephen Benedetti]

Greetings Commanders,

We would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to voice their concerns and feedback around the reduction of GalNet articles, as well as sharing with us suggestions on ways that we could utilise existing community groups and content to re-introduce them.

We wanted to expand a little more on the details of what led us to this decision. While the previous narratives that were told through GalNet articles gave an insight into what life was like in the 3300's, they also gave players an expectation that these stories were unfolding in-game, and that commanders could fly out to the system and see or even engage with what was happening (which they could not). This, in part, contributed to our reason to shift the focus of GalNet articles to in-game narratives and occurrences, over out-of-game ones.

However, we also want to mention that the narrative/writing team are not solely responsible for writing GalNet articles, but also a number of other duties that contribute to the creation of Elite Dangerous. With the advent of the Fleet Carriers update and the 2020 release, their efforts have been focused on ensuring that all of the text required for it is done in time. Although they are an extremely talented team, they are a small team, which means that we had to prioritise some content over other content, such as GalNet articles. Although we love seeing the incredible content the community news outlets create, editing and implementing it into the game still demands a degree of focus that we do not have currently in scope for the writing team.

We hope that provides some context to why, at the current time, the plans for GalNet articles are unlikely to change. That said, we have passed this feedback on to the team for consideration and will keep you updated if there are any changes.

 

[saberius]

Thanks you for your reply Stephen,
whilst I am aware it's not their only daily or even weekly task, and I can appreciate they are incredibly busy.
One did wonder why the Galnet site has not actually updated for over a month. This fact alone does point to the OP's predominant query.

 

[Factabulous]

Greetings Commanders,

We would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to voice their concerns and feedback around the reduction of GalNet articles, as well as sharing with us suggestions on ways that we could utilise existing community groups and content to re-introduce them.

We wanted to expand a little more on the details of what led us to this decision. While the previous narratives that were told through GalNet articles gave an insight into what life was like in the 3300's, they also gave players an expectation that these stories were unfolding in-game, and that commanders could fly out to the system and see or even engage with what was happening (which they could not). This, in part, contributed to our reason to shift the focus of GalNet articles to in-game narratives and occurrences, over out-of-game ones.

However, we also want to mention that the narrative/writing team are not solely responsible for writing GalNet articles, but also a number of other duties that contribute to the creation of Elite Dangerous. With the advent of the Fleet Carriers update and the 2020 release, their efforts have been focused on ensuring that all of the text required for it is done in time. Although they are an extremely talented team, they are a small team, which means that we had to prioritise some content over other content, such as GalNet articles. Although we love seeing the incredible content the community news outlets create, editing and implementing it into the game still demands a degree of focus that we do not have currently in scope for the writing team.

We hope that provides some context to why, at the current time, the plans for GalNet articles are unlikely to change. That said, we have passed this feedback on to the team for consideration and will keep you updated if there are any changes.

Thanks Stephen! please continue to focus on the new content (and related Galnets!). While there is a vocal clique who want fluff to entertain them I'm sure the majority of us are more interested in new actual content with FC & 2020