Here is one. At 1:20. 64% has no interest in Thargoids.
Another disappointment
- Thread starter Mark julian
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Not again
so more than 1/3 has some interest in this content, ignoring fact, that YT surveys...well...I'm not watching them so I cannot vote.
Its like the mythical steam numbers ? But as Fdev don't give out those numbers so we have to use the next best thing ? And depending on the readership of the channel would be different ?yammiks would be lower and burr higher ? It's a guesstimate like every other number bandied around . I can say in my peer group there is 0 interest in the thargoid war ? But I know that skewed ( console player
)Indeed, thats why I look at inara traffic, imo much better than random surveys.
And in invasions I sometimes seen something like CG level traffics, I also see amount of groups and cooperation between them at this field, so wouldnt say, that "noone care" XD
ah. A Youtuber that isn't exactly known for AX asks his community of mainly explorers if they care for AX and still it comes out with 36% being interested. I don't think that survey proves your point. Also, interpreting 45% "neutral" as being not interested is... bold.
When looking at such polls, always consider who is asking the question, who is the focus group, how the question is asked, and how the results are being interpreted. Ask the same question in a more combat or, dare I say, AX focused community and you'll get a very different result.
For in-game figures, and noting that there are ways to participate in the Thargoid content without shooting any actual Thargoids which wouldn't show up here, the proportion of squadrons with AX scores in any season has recently tended to be around 25-40% of the total number of active squadrons (with the high point just after Update 14 introduced the war, and all of this an improvement on the ~10% of active squadrons figures before the war). Since a squadron only needs one of its members to shoot down a Thargoid that will be somewhat an overestimate on proportion of players (on the other hand, the most common squadron sizes are 1, 2 and 3 players, so probably not by too much)
Apply whatever arbitrary adjustment you feel like to account for players who don't join squadrons having different behaviour to those who do, of course.
The more interesting figure there to me isn't whatever this might imply about the raw percentage of players "interested" in Thargoids ... but that Update 14 increased the squadron participation from ~10% to ~40% (when new) and ~25% (sustained). In other words, Frontier putting considerably more effort into the Thargoid content roughly tripled the number of players interacting with it.
As before, it's also worth noting that "a quarter of players" would be a massively popular feature if true. Recorded long-range exploration activity roughly doubled from baseline while the Distant Worlds 2 expedition was on. Based on figures released by the DW organisers, Frontier, and various in-game metrics, roughly 1-2% of active players participated in DW2. So that suggests a similar proportion of players participate in long-range exploration at any time (with maybe a bit more than that being interested in doing so). You can get similar results from the exploration-focused(!) EDSM data: SagA* all-time visitors are 16,691 including repeat visits - approximately 1% of Shinrarta and a third of even the 100th most popular bubble system (which is definitely getting to "never heard of it" territory) for the same time period.
I'm not saying this to downplay DW2 - getting 1-2% of all active players to do anything together and temporarily doubling the amount of exploration taking place was a massive achievement for its organisers. But if DW2 was a great and popular success, the Thargoid content getting easily ten times the interest might need a few more adjectives.
(And if Frontier can repeat the success in AX with getting a sustained tripling of activity in Powerplay, that will most definitely be interesting... though the squadron leaderboards have a limitation there which makes it much harder to infer participation from them)
Apply whatever arbitrary adjustment you feel like to account for players who don't join squadrons having different behaviour to those who do, of course.
The more interesting figure there to me isn't whatever this might imply about the raw percentage of players "interested" in Thargoids ... but that Update 14 increased the squadron participation from ~10% to ~40% (when new) and ~25% (sustained). In other words, Frontier putting considerably more effort into the Thargoid content roughly tripled the number of players interacting with it.
As before, it's also worth noting that "a quarter of players" would be a massively popular feature if true. Recorded long-range exploration activity roughly doubled from baseline while the Distant Worlds 2 expedition was on. Based on figures released by the DW organisers, Frontier, and various in-game metrics, roughly 1-2% of active players participated in DW2. So that suggests a similar proportion of players participate in long-range exploration at any time (with maybe a bit more than that being interested in doing so). You can get similar results from the exploration-focused(!) EDSM data: SagA* all-time visitors are 16,691 including repeat visits - approximately 1% of Shinrarta and a third of even the 100th most popular bubble system (which is definitely getting to "never heard of it" territory) for the same time period.
I'm not saying this to downplay DW2 - getting 1-2% of all active players to do anything together and temporarily doubling the amount of exploration taking place was a massive achievement for its organisers. But if DW2 was a great and popular success, the Thargoid content getting easily ten times the interest might need a few more adjectives.
(And if Frontier can repeat the success in AX with getting a sustained tripling of activity in Powerplay, that will most definitely be interesting... though the squadron leaderboards have a limitation there which makes it much harder to infer participation from them)
To that point: Inara listing 7600+ pilots in the Taranis system in the last 24 hours doesn't look like "the majority isn't interested". And that's just the pilots that report to Inara.
Not quite - Inara tries to compensate for the lack of universal reporting by scaling the estimate based on surveys comparing 3rd-party data with in-game traffic reports, to try to get a reasonably close guess on the 7600 figure. And it's trying to match to traffic reports, so it's aligning to visits rather than unique CMDRs with that number. Having done similar compensation estimates myself around Colonia, you should probably expect "half-to-double" to be the accuracy for any individual system, though more likely to be close-to-right in higher-traffic systems.
Still, taking out that compensation to measure a different way: EDSM (using EDDN data, which will pretty closely match what Inara has access to) says about 600 in the last 24 hours compared with about 200 for Shinrarta, 60 for Deciat and 25 for Sol (and about 30,000 for all inhabited bubble systems combined in Live or 30 for all combined in PC Legacy) so that's really quite busy!
Hmmm... the mouseover on the Inara traffic report isn't quite clear. It says "based on the Inara commanders [...] it may not reflect the actual traffic". I know Inara tries to guesstimate with CG targets and such. Maybe @Artie can clear this up?
I think its a little unfair to compare the two. For starters DW2 was purely a player written and driven event that when you look back on had very little actual DW2-exlusive 'content' to work with. It had the CG of course, but the only thing unique about that was its location. The rest of DW2's "content" came in the form of peripheral events that players wrote themselves - they had no input from Frontier. Compared to the amount of actual things to do and the gameplay content Frontier have put into the Thargoid war, DW was literally bare bones. Yet despite that it had, what? 10,000- 15,000 participants. That's remarkable. Its appeal and success was more down to the success of DW1 laying a good foundation for it, and how well DW2 was presented and promoted when its time came around... plus its exploration focus, which is always going to attract players.
One thing that DW2 did exceptionally well though - better than anything FDev themselves have done imo - was capture the imagination of people outside of the game itself, the gaming press and on-lookers, many that didn't even have or play Elite. It was talked about far and wide (and still is!). Even frontiers Thargoid storyline has never had as much press coverage as DW2 did (eg. New Scientist articles, mainstream radio interviews with organizers, and NASA astronauts all mentioning DW2 during its height too, countless magazine articles and so on). Maybe that's the sign of the times though, and Elite no longer has the outside interest it once had?
Maybe, or maybe not. As I said, I'm not downplaying DW2.
DW2 roughly doubled (while it was going on) the number of people doing long-range exploration (and also set a tonnage record for a mining CG that's unlikely to ever be beaten)
The Thargoid War roughly doubled (sustained, rather than the initial spike) the number of people taking part in AX content.
In both cases the point is the same - further events and content around a particular piece of gameplay can significantly increase the "number of players who are interested" - rather than that being a static thing which Frontier should use to assess what to do next. And as you say, DW2 getting a doubling on rather less resources than Frontier have put into the Thargoid content is very impressive, even with the advantage of starting from a lower baseline.
One of the things DW2 had going for it is that it is (or perhaps, since we now have Fleet Carriers, was) something that could be done uniquely in Elite Dangerous. There's plenty of games where "fight aliens" is the pitch and while ED has put some unique innovations on it it needs far more explanation than will fit in an article as to why they're important - whereas DW2 "thousands of players travelling for real-life months on an expedition far from safety to get to the other side of the game map" can hit all the unique points in one sentence.
Yes it does.
Since Taranis is the weekend's big news, it makes a lot of sense that a significant portion, even a majority of the players logging in this weekend would be those who are interested in this content. Extrapolating that to the majority of players, or even the majority of nominally active players, is an enormous stretch.
Unless the topic is uselessly vague or overbroad, the majority isn't going to be interested. Asserting the majority isn't interested is a useless statement only exceeded in it's nonsensicality by claiming the opposite. One is irrelevant, the other is irrelevant and almost certainly wrong.
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what romaticising his solitude does to a commander smh...
thousands of players log in for a joint effort. old players dust off their battleships. new blood joining the war effort en masse. vigour renewed, guns blazing, glory and death!
game daed indeed :c
i would describe myself as uninterested in the thargoid war and wished fdev has choosen a different route to develop this game further. but i participated a little in the thargoid storyline with doing rescue/supply missions, gather all this materials needed to enter the maelstrom and build specialised ships to survive in thargoid space, visit the titans and the spire sites ... no fights.
only because its a challenge and a new experience and to prove if i could.
only because its a challenge and a new experience and to prove if i could.
I'm one of those long inactive players who'll log in today just to see what happens. I have zero interest in the Thargoids, none. I do however have an interest in one-off groundbreaking events though, since they're a rarity in this game these days, so would like to witness the surprise that frontier have cooked up, the one where you all think the war is won but today's event turns out to be the destruction of the bubble and the beginning of a far more interesting timeline for Elite with humanity finally scattered to the depths.
Not going to happen is it.
But what the heck, I'll log in for an hour just incase, then wonder why I bothered when it turns out to be another false dawn / damp squib of an event frontier's budget allowed for.
And noone care, because youtuber said that, remember.
I think, that @Ian Doncaster provided pretty good arguments "why pretty big chunk of players is interested by x".
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