Discovery Scanner [Weekly Update] - 25/04/2022

Due to the nature of E:D's netcode Frontier's operational costs are minimal to the point of being statistical noise on their expense reporting. In other words they don't have the convenient "running servers is expensive!" excuse to justify a monthly rent.

while it may not justify a monthly subscription, i'm pretty sure their infrastructure cost it's not exactly insignificant
 
I do miss the Interstellar Initiatives. I wonder why Frontier abandoned those?
They reestablished the Galnet writing team and made plot a year-round thing again? The only difference between the Initiatives year and the Colonia Bridge/NMLA/Azimuth/Salvation story arcs this past year is that there aren't months-long periods of silence in between events. Well, that and people really like the special module rewards they started offering.
 
while it may not justify a monthly subscription, i'm pretty sure their infrastructure cost it's not exactly insignificant
Turn on the network meter while in Solo mode and fly around. That's their entire per-client network load. Scale it up to 20,000 concurrent connections (3-5x the current load) and you'll see that wouldn't even stress reasonable consumer fiber.

If you want to see what the networking would look like in a proper client-server configuration start a PG, invite a wing mate, fly missions together and watch the network stats. Jumps from a dozen or so bytes/s to thousands. Now we get into tiered bandwidth pricing and you need additional servers to mediate who's doing what and handling NPC actions.

Elite Dangerous' operational costs are minimal.
 
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The only difference between the Initiatives year and the Colonia Bridge/NMLA/Azimuth/Salvation story arcs this past year is that there aren't months-long periods of silence in between events.
I disagree. The activities surrounding the IIs were way more enjoyable that those of late. Of course if you're a trucker, you'll likely think differently than I am, but as a combat pilot, I have found the CGs to be woefully lacking of late.

And if all I was interested in was a good story, I'd just read a book. 🤷‍♂️
 
I disagree. The activities surrounding the IIs were way more enjoyable that those of late. Of course if you're a trucker, you'll likely think differently than I am, but as a combat pilot, I have found the CGs to be woefully lacking of late.
Oh, well sure, that I'll grant. I don't know why they stopped pairing cargo CGs with parallel bounty hunting goals, but at least in weeks without a competing event it would be nice to see them come back.
 
When new content?
I fully expect a surprise announcement on Thursday full of ship interiors, on-foot thargoid combat, base building, a surprise fix to planet tiling (even though they told us they weren't, those crafty devils), and a complete overhaul of powerplay! Could there be a new ship coming?.....maybe!
 
I fully expect a surprise announcement on Thursday full of ship interiors, on-foot thargoid combat, base building, a surprise fix to planet tiling (even though they told us they weren't, those crafty devils), and a complete overhaul of powerplay! Could there be a new ship coming?.....maybe!

Yeah, me too.
 
Turn on the network meter while in Solo mode and fly around. That's their entire per-client network load. Scale it up to 20,000 concurrent connections (3-5x the current load) and you'll see that wouldn't even stress reasonable consumer fiber.

If you want to see what the networking would look like in a proper client-server configuration start a PG, invite a wing mate, fly missions together and watch the network stats. Jumps from a dozen or so bytes/s to thousands. Now we get into tiered bandwidth pricing and you need additional servers to mediate who's doing what and handling NPC actions.

Elite Dangerous' operational costs are minimal.

It's not about bandwidth, but about having server farms running 24/7 supporting the load. And people supporting those servers
However the bandwidth do matter in multiplayer when people won't allow port forwarding or upnp and instead rely on using FDev's turn servers.
(the game is p2p so, if people do use port forwarding or upnp, the vast majority of traffic will be direct peer to peer traffic)

Check this, but keep in mind it was 2015 and in the mean time the infrastructure was probably expanded as the game evolved
 
Hey where are the 3a, 4a, and 6a double engineered fsd's? The 5a fsd was given as a reward in a cg in Nov. 2020 and was available at a tech broker about 3 months later. The last cg event to give out the new Fsd's was more than 3 months ago so are they coming soon?
 
Hey where are the 3a, 4a, and 6a double engineered fsd's? The 5a fsd was given as a reward in a cg in Nov. 2020 and was available at a tech broker about 3 months later. The last cg event to give out the new Fsd's was more than 3 months ago so are they coming soon?
They are still in limbo regarding the official fix for applying experimental effects on them. But seeing how the latest rewards moved away from double engineered modules, it may well be they'll never hit the tech brokers.
 
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Heh
 
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