A suggestion in response to Kai Zen's open letter to Frontier

[monr0e]

We all know that Frontier is trying to achieve some polish with fleet carriers, and as a developer myself I understand the level of commitment needed. However, universe immersion is incredibly important if we want to keep Elite Dangerous alive. Frontier staff don't have the resources at the moment to write Galnet articles, so...

What if the community wrote them?

Yeah, that sounds a bit outlandish at first, but bear with me.

We all have a rough timeline, and a general idea of game lore, from the community wiki and from historical Galnet. With that in mind, it might be quite rewarding to flesh out some stories, that have minimal impact on gameplay, as a collective. We could even set out a few guidelines for what can be easily changed and what cannot - for example, we could write an article about a worker's strike leading to a shortage of HN Shock Mounts. This is easily modifiable, I presume, and requires very little time to implement.

As part of this suggestion, I also suggest we create a template for story submissions. Each submission would go "live" on the forums, and be voted on by the community, and the top, say, five articles per week would be given a cursory glance over by a Frontier member of staff (to ensure nothing obtuse, we know what the internet is like here) before being actioned. The latter part of the process should take no more than ten minutes or so - a good way to start a morning with a decent cuppa, I should think.

Another impetus for this approach is PMF involvement - larger PMFs with greater influence could use this platform to make statements about their actions in the black, making the immersion factor far beyond what we had before. Hell, this could be the impetus for huge battles down the line, the kinds of battles that sees CCP make headlines with Eve.

So, to Frontier, I offer the following:

I can build the page required for submitting storylines. I'll do anything I can to take someof the workload off, since I genuinely enjoy Elite and I want to contribute to it. I'll even start putting the word out for folks to start writing stories. I'll organise a roughed-out timeline to make sure nothing goes too far out of the realm of the current game universe, and whatever else I can do.

Yours,

CMDR Joseph Ascott

 

[Ezren]

I know you really like your opinions, but you don't need to make a whole thread about them if a topic already exists. It's just thinking that your post is so extra special.

It's really not. Would have been clearer if you had actually read that thread.

 

[metatheurgist]

Not to mention they already discounted community submissions, for the exact reasons they already failed.

 

[Eckee]

OMG more narratives that cannot be interacted.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

OMG more narratives that cannot be interacted.

Compared to no narrative it is more than welcome. When you read the news paper at home you dont go out and try to find whomever the articles are about anyways

 

[Eckee]

Compared to no narrative it is more than welcome. When you read the news paper at home you dont go out and try to find whomever the articles are about anyways

I also don't get on my spaceship and jump between systems irl, but I do so in ED.
More serious answer, not gonna happen because they stopped writing those fake stories for a reason. They will only write about in-game events.

 

[Eckee]

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.

 

[Good Whiskey]

Wait is this an open letter to the open letter?

Welcome to the New Era.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

I also don't get on my spaceship and jump between systems irl, but I do so in ED.
More serious answer, not gonna happen because they stopped writing those fake stories for a reason. They will only write about in-game events.

Apparently they wont do that either

 

[Broken_One]

Apparently they wont do that either

Appearances can be deceiving lol.

I like my idea better.

CMDRS can make submissions.
Certain submissions are selected
There is some sort of Q and A questionnaire
The story is re-written from the perspective of an NPC reporter


this process could help when FDev knows something that they are not telling or other elements. It would also give a chance for input.

Alternately they could always opt to just publish the story as an oped with a qualifier.

This would both help with the writing and maintain the control of the narrative to further the story-line.

--

Conversely having an entire player written galnet, we would have zero guarantees as to the applicability in the future of the game. They would have to let someone in on the storyline, which would in turn require NDA's etc etc... it would turn out that the writers would just become a part of FDev.

--

But if this is an application I guess it is clever?