96 hours to locate a base...? SHENANIGANS!!!!

I am calling Shenanigans. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and yet it was never THIS obvious.

Let me back up. While my IQ isn't all that high, probably mid double digits, I have often wondered about the probability of a lone explorer finding a McGuffin that furthers the game canon in a game with a 1:1 scale galaxy.

(In no particular order... and I have more, but haven't had enough coffee yet to remember them all)
* Jaques station goes missing. Everyone is wondering where it might be. A lone explorer finds it 21k lightyears away... Huh. Wow, that's pretty dang cool.
* There are capital ships in the game. Oh, here is how I found them.... Huh. That's cool. Um... ok.
* Alien probes, planetary barnacles, unknown artifacts... Huh. That's... odd. How did you locate... nevermind, I wanna go see 'em too.
* Thargoids are coming. You can get a really cool, really scary cutscene if you go to THIS area of space while carrying THIS specific item on board. Huh... now just how in the blue blazes did you know... you know what, I'm sold. I wanna do that too.
* Less than 96 hours after seeing an old Inara Base for less than 2 seconds in an already busy trailer, said base is found.

Ok. Look, I get it. there are 400 BILLION (say it like Carl Sagan!) star systems. Devs want to advance the story. Get the word out. Get everyone excited about something coming down the pipeline. But, come on... really?? This just has the overt feeling of someone from Frontier telling a buddy to go look at this system, these co-ords.

If you are going to be cryptic and say there are still lots of mysteries from day 1 yet to be discovered in the main bubble, yet this happens so soon after seeing it at FdevCon or whatever it was... that's just shenanigans.

Look, you have me. I am playing your game. In fact, it's on another screen as I type this. I really, really love this game. No matter how many times I take a break from playing, no matter how long that brake may be... I am still here. I am still playing. I have invested SO much time into this game, and I am not sorry one bit. It is my little slice of heaven in a world gone mad. But ... really? REALLY?!? How about just leaving breadcrumbs in the GalNet and let us find stuff?

If I was that lucky, I would buy lottery tickets.

Sorry. End of Not Enough Coffee Rant.
 
* Jaques station goes missing. Everyone is wondering where it might be. A lone explorer finds it 21k lightyears away... Huh. Wow, that's pretty dang cool.

I think you dont understand it. This one was for example found by using the galmap filters. As it is populated, it just jumped out on the map to anyone in the area. Same with asteroid bases. Its not magic, its using a few buttons and mouseclicks.
 
Setup.... like the guardian Ruins mission. One guy found it by definitely not hacking the code... then we all spend nights and nights looking for the others only to find out they are the same. Eeyup. Check out my rant thread on that one. Still read it sometimes to remind myself of the Stockholm nutters in the fandom.
 
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong and I offer my mia culpas and fall on my sword.

As for looking inside game files... I thought these were kept server side?

I still love this game. I still love flying ships through space. FDev would have to be caught murdering puppies or some such everytime I fire up the game to make me quit.
 
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong and I offer my mia culpas and fall on my sword.

As for looking inside game files... I thought these were kept server side?

I still love this game. I still love flying ships through space. FDev would have to be caught murdering puppies or some such everytime I fire up the game to make me quit.

About game files being server side. The 3d assets have to be on the client machine, so I personally can't help feeling paranoid that some folk have found a way to de-crypt or look into game files to see what is new / has changed or locations of objects. The Inra Base discovery was the most recent suspicious find. Still not sure how they found that.

I really wish ED could make finding this stuff more logical. There have been many times I have loaded the game thinking, "I am going to go and see if I can find any new stuff"...then when you are in game, the futility of searching planets etc for objects...even when you know there is some thing there, becomes disheartening.

I get it's a double edged sword. If you make the bread crumb trail to this stuff too easy, or even slightly easy, players will have everything discovered in a few days. But when all your mysteries are being discovered through bugs and glitches and exploiting game mechanics or suspected file diving, perhaps it's time for a re think.

To me there is a huge irony that looking at and fixing this area would have also helped quell the constant complaint legit explorers have that there is nothing to do while you are exploring and the complaints that exploring mechanics are so basic.
 
I am calling Shenanigans. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and yet it was never THIS obvious.

Let me back up. While my IQ isn't all that high, probably mid double digits, I have often wondered about the probability of a lone explorer finding a McGuffin that furthers the game canon in a game with a 1:1 scale galaxy.

(In no particular order... and I have more, but haven't had enough coffee yet to remember them all)
* Jaques station goes missing. Everyone is wondering where it might be. A lone explorer finds it 21k lightyears away... Huh. Wow, that's pretty dang cool.
* There are capital ships in the game. Oh, here is how I found them.... Huh. That's cool. Um... ok.
* Alien probes, planetary barnacles, unknown artifacts... Huh. That's... odd. How did you locate... nevermind, I wanna go see 'em too.
* Thargoids are coming. You can get a really cool, really scary cutscene if you go to THIS area of space while carrying THIS specific item on board. Huh... now just how in the blue blazes did you know... you know what, I'm sold. I wanna do that too.
* Less than 96 hours after seeing an old Inara Base for less than 2 seconds in an already busy trailer, said base is found.

Ok. Look, I get it. there are 400 BILLION (say it like Carl Sagan!) star systems. Devs want to advance the story. Get the word out. Get everyone excited about something coming down the pipeline. But, come on... really?? This just has the overt feeling of someone from Frontier telling a buddy to go look at this system, these co-ords.

If you are going to be cryptic and say there are still lots of mysteries from day 1 yet to be discovered in the main bubble, yet this happens so soon after seeing it at FdevCon or whatever it was... that's just shenanigans.

Look, you have me. I am playing your game. In fact, it's on another screen as I type this. I really, really love this game. No matter how many times I take a break from playing, no matter how long that brake may be... I am still here. I am still playing. I have invested SO much time into this game, and I am not sorry one bit. It is my little slice of heaven in a world gone mad. But ... really? REALLY?!? How about just leaving breadcrumbs in the GalNet and let us find stuff?

If I was that lucky, I would buy lottery tickets.

Sorry. End of Not Enough Coffee Rant.

Yeah, I am 99% sure that all our "Discoveries" are being done utilizing code scraping tools and comparing them to old data to find new locations that had the data changed. The likely hood of finding 1 station on 1 planet with literally trillions of possible combinations is not possible to calculate within our lifetime let alone find it.

The other possible method is searching through the skybox files to find the ones that closest matches the screenshot from the video and then searching just those systems. You cannot find a fix point in space without having at least 6 known reference points. Having a screenshot that doesnt provide any distance information and seeing 2 constellations provides the person with Zero points of reference.

Both of these methods are viable and untraceable and can be done with little coding knowledge. The most difficult part of making a "Discovery" is to come up a story that is convincing enough as not to be obvious that you had cheated to find the "discovery". Sometimes that takes a whole 10 minutes to come up with that story. Unless FDEV hands us the information on a silver plate from a listening post, then there is no possible way we could have found any of "Discoveries" in the last year. The only legit ones we made were given to us via in game mechanics.
 
Without claiming any special knowledge or expertise, I find most of the list pretty plausible:

*Colonia - FDev hid Jaques Station in a Nebula and explorers like Nebulae, that cuts the odds of random discovery down quite substantially. I remember when it was initially found there were a whole bunch of diary entries on the News board indicating a planned trail of breadcrumbs which FDev never got the chance to lay. I'm happy to put this down to dumb luck :)
*Capital Ships - Weren't these found via numbers stations? As in, people followed the clues in game, they were just kind of quick because they were looking for puzzles to solve and were good at solving those puzzles when they found them.
*Thargoid Cut-scene - There were a whole bunch of pilots carrying Unknown Artifacts in the Pliedies systems, it's pretty regular thing to do there, FDev flipped a switch and it started to happen to commanders there. The second and third reports of this were minutes behind the first one, indicating it wasn't super-rare or hard to find if you happened to be in a popular section of space, carrying a popular black-market item.
 
I am calling Shenanigans. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and yet it was never THIS obvious.

Let me back up. While my IQ isn't all that high, probably mid double digits, I have often wondered about the probability of a lone explorer finding a McGuffin that furthers the game canon in a game with a 1:1 scale galaxy.

(In no particular order... and I have more, but haven't had enough coffee yet to remember them all)
* Jaques station goes missing. Everyone is wondering where it might be. A lone explorer finds it 21k lightyears away... Huh. Wow, that's pretty dang cool.
* There are capital ships in the game. Oh, here is how I found them.... Huh. That's cool. Um... ok.
* Alien probes, planetary barnacles, unknown artifacts... Huh. That's... odd. How did you locate... nevermind, I wanna go see 'em too.
* Thargoids are coming. You can get a really cool, really scary cutscene if you go to THIS area of space while carrying THIS specific item on board. Huh... now just how in the blue blazes did you know... you know what, I'm sold. I wanna do that too.
* Less than 96 hours after seeing an old Inara Base for less than 2 seconds in an already busy trailer, said base is found.

Ok. Look, I get it. there are 400 BILLION (say it like Carl Sagan!) star systems. Devs want to advance the story. Get the word out. Get everyone excited about something coming down the pipeline. But, come on... really?? This just has the overt feeling of someone from Frontier telling a buddy to go look at this system, these co-ords.

If you are going to be cryptic and say there are still lots of mysteries from day 1 yet to be discovered in the main bubble, yet this happens so soon after seeing it at FdevCon or whatever it was... that's just shenanigans.

Look, you have me. I am playing your game. In fact, it's on another screen as I type this. I really, really love this game. No matter how many times I take a break from playing, no matter how long that brake may be... I am still here. I am still playing. I have invested SO much time into this game, and I am not sorry one bit. It is my little slice of heaven in a world gone mad. But ... really? REALLY?!? How about just leaving breadcrumbs in the GalNet and let us find stuff?

If I was that lucky, I would buy lottery tickets.

Sorry. End of Not Enough Coffee Rant.

A few things, Jacques was found cause the system showed up as "Independent" on the galaxy map. So amongst all these grey dots there was a bright yellow one. FD forgot to reset that. And it still took a long time.

The capital ships were found because there were clues and directions left behind. It really wasn't that difficult once we started finding the clues.

Barnacles were in the game for months until someone found one. And once we knew they were in/around nebula's others started being found too. I suspect we've only found a small portion of them. Not that it matters, they've all been the same. The Unknown Artifacts were in USS sites. And not that uncommon either. Wasn't exactly a needle in a haystack. Unknown Probes WERE a needle in a haystack and took forever to find. The first bunch were in highly guarded military convoy's and we only managed to get a few of them. Took months before someone found one orbiting an Ammonia world, and they're fairly common there. Surprised it took us that long, frankly. The Thargoid/Ammonia world connection has been known to us the whole time. It made sense. Plus, the devs confirmed there was an easier way to find them other than the convoys so we were intentionally looking for USS's that had them.

The Thargoids would hyperdict you randomly around the Pleiades. You didn't have to have any item in your hold. That was fake news.

The INRA base? Yeah that one stinks. Within a few days after being revealed, someone knew EXACTLY which planet to look at and apparently where on the planet to find it. We've seen how long it takes to find bases on these planets with the Formidine Rift bases, and it's longer than a couple guys spending a weekend.
 
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I really wish ED could make finding this stuff more logical. There have been many times I have loaded the game thinking, "I am going to go and see if I can find any new stuff"...then when you are in game, the futility of searching planets etc for objects...even when you know there is some thing there, becomes disheartening.

I can only give my most recent example.
I read an article on Reddit about someone finding a base that mentioned "Silver Comet".
I remembered "Silver Comet" from a Galnet article almost 3 years ago. In that article were mentioned the systems of Quiness and Alioth.
I visited Quiness and found a listening post.
The message from that listening post led to the Karins system.
In the Karins system I found a blank marker which had another base and some NPCs.

I think that's how Frontier want us to find content "the right way".

Shortcutting that and suggesting a planet 1 hour after saying "I don't know where to look" is disingenuous at best. They knew which planet the base would be found on. Another player came along and found the base from regular eyeball scanning a short time later.
I don't blame the player who found the base because they still used the old fashioned way of finding planetary features.
I blame the player who suggested the planet. To go straight to a planet that quickly isn't lucky guess. That's foreknowledge. So someone either told them, or they read the info from somewhere.
 
A few things, Jacques was found cause the system showed up as "Independent" on the galaxy map. So amongst all these grey dots there was a bright yellow one. FD forgot to reset that. And it still took a long time.

The capital ships were found because there were clues and directions left behind. It really wasn't that difficult once we started finding the clues.

Barnacles were in the game for months until someone found one. And once we knew they were in/around nebula's others started being found too. I suspect we've only found a small portion of them. Not that it matters, they've all been the same. The Unknown Artifacts were in USS sites. And not that uncommon either. Wasn't exactly a needle in a haystack. Unknown Probes WERE a needle in a haystack and took forever to find. The first bunch were in highly guarded military convoy's and we only managed to get a few of them. Took months before someone found one orbiting an Ammonia world, and they're fairly common there. Surprised it took us that long, frankly. The Thargoid/Ammonia world connection has been known to us the whole time. It made sense. Plus, the devs confirmed there was an easier way to find them other than the convoys so we were intentionally looking for USS's that had them.

The Thargoids would hyperdict you randomly around the Pleiades. You didn't have to have any item in your hold. That was fake news.

The INRA base? Yeah that one stinks. Within a few days after being revealed, someone knew EXACTLY which planet to look at and apparently where on the planet to find it. We've seen how long it takes to find bases on these planets with the Formidine Rift bases, and it's longer than a couple guys spending a weekend.

A victory for reason.
 
I must say I do find the finding of the Thargoid scout and the INRA base a bit hard to believe. I mean, I get that you can do sky-box triangulation and stuff to _maybe_ get to the right planet but do you know how big a planet is?!?! I mean, if someone pointed me at Earth and told me to find, errr, I dunno ... the site of the Burning Man festival (i.e. something quite big who's location I don't already know) ... it would take months if not years.

Some interesting comments from the INRA thread in response to "how was it found" ..

You have to ask to CookieJarviz. He seems to had an intuition that it could be this one, so we headed up there to see.
Same dude who discovered the Octagon Scout?

It was all skybox matching at first.

IMPORTANT NOTE : I have literally ZERO idea about how the system/planet was found. I just joined Alex in voice who straight told me about CJ's lead, that is all. The skybox match I tried was strictly done once in orbit of the planet.

Really an hit and miss, I circled around the planet several times until I thought of being close enough. Glided down to the surface, straight toward the canyon that was under me. From there just following the canyon's general direction; there was an awful lot of surface POIs on my radar in that area, I aimed at them at first but was only finding System Defense Force vessels every single time, which led me into a circling chase of about 50kms in radius, until I had the Milky Way's bright light contrasting with the surface on the screen (not even talking about the ambient occlusion near fat rocks on the ground that let you think you found something, the deception every time :D).
There was an object near a few rocky ridges that was creating some aliasing with the heavy contrast right in the middle, so I headed there, and bam.

I realized long afterward that it wasn't the same as the trailer, I was so focused on the background that I entirely forgot to compare.

Of note, I spent a few thousand hours licking planetary surfaces back during the CoR exploration CG in search for the bases, so had a fair few ideas of how to "enhance" the yoghurting experience already :D

-----

About the above : Reduce all your graphic settings to the absolute minimum (planets looks like yoghurt at this stage, hence the term), try to find "contrasty" lighting conditions, and something I like doing : licking the surface upside down with the camera angled straight up your head
 
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I must say I do find the finding of the Thargoid scout and the INRA base a bit hard to believe. I mean, I get that you can do sky-box triangulation and stuff to _maybe_ get to the right planet but do you know how big a planet is?!?! I mean, if someone pointed me at Earth and told me to find, errr, I dunno ... the site of the Burning Man festival (i.e. something quite big who's location I don't already know) ... it would take months if not years.

Some interesting comments from the INRA thread in response to "how was it found" ..

Same dude who found the scout found the planet with the base?

Sounds like someone at FD is feeding him info. Nice job.
 
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