Appreciation thread for the community heroes of the Thargoid War

yttrbio

Y
As the last of the titans blows up and we await what comes next, I wanted to give folks an opportunity to express appreciation for the community members who went above and beyond the call of duty to make a major impact far beyond their own game play. As with many Elite: Dangerous activities, the incredible efforts of community members outside the game to gather, analyze, and report information to the community at large helped steer us towards impressive outcomes that frequently caught even the development team off guard. While there are few tangible rewards for these efforts, it's worth reminding folks that their efforts are appreciated.

Please limit posts here to positive expressions of appreciation, and save the arguments and discussions for other threads.
 
Last edited:

yttrbio

Y
Dark Session, who developed and maintained the Defense Council of Humanity Overwatch site (dcoh.watch), collated information from dozens of disparate sources to provide near-real-time information to commanders across the galaxy regarding the rapidly-evolving status of hundreds of systems involved in the war. Always quick to adapt to changing war rules and new user requests, Dark Session's efforts were indispensable to distributing data to inform the coordination efforts of dozens of groups and thousands of pilots.
 

yttrbio

Y
Aleks Zuno managed and maintained the forum's invasion coordination megathread to keep forum users informed about ongoing events and helping coordinate cross-group war efforts. These efforts created a clearing house for new information, shared plans, and helpful advice. This thread also eventually served as a location for Aleks Zuno to coordinate the enormous, industrial-scale sampling activities that, for reasons still-unknown, became the only effective means of pushing back the Thargoid Invasion for much of the war, eventually leading to humanity removing all the thargoid presence surrounding multiple titans well before the developers had implemented the final stage of the war.
 

yttrbio

Y
Ian Doncaster studied the pattern of Thargoid behavior when placing new alerts and collaborated with other researchers to eventually crack the code on the AI's alert placement algorithm. Ian Doncaster built the Narwhal Nose prediction system from these efforts, allowing commanders and groups throughout the war to plan not just the current week's fight, but carefully plan attacks in the most effective locations to minimize Thargoid advances in future weeks, eventually leading to the efforts to completely strip the titans of their surrounding control systems.
 

Aleks Zuno

Aleks Zuno
Definitely ample thanks to @Phill P for mobilising massive Invasion evacuation and anti-Alert efforts throughout via the Post-Disaster Evacuation Service with a lot of testing and refining of the methods involved, for the very interesting video series covering all story events with a regular Thargoid War feature, and for taking much time to write extremely detailed answers and insights of which every word is worth reading!
 

Miseri

Miseri
Yes accolades and a heroes bounty for the champions of makind but what we really need to focus on now is making those who started this war PAY ...
i mean uh, yay the war is over .
 

XenosAurion

XenosAurion
I would like to thank everyone in Aegis Reforged Coalition, the Aegis Archons that came from them, and every person who aided our effort to restore Aegis' good name. Without this coordinated coalition of CMDR's, I don't think we would have ever united under one banner to represent humanity quite like we did. Furthermore, I would like to thank LiveWeyer, Treemanboy1, Pikkels The Bard, and Blazowsky for welcoming me into the quasi-early days of Reforge Aegis and permitting my mad theories to take form into refined and measurable information. It was the start of a wonderful community that I felt I could really be a part of and feel like I was contributing rather than being a statistic in a horde of pilots. Their encouragement, leadership, and friendship are something I have never quite experienced before and it will be difficult for future communities to outmatch. I hope to prove that I am worthy of maintaining a friendship with them and continue to make our community a better place and eventually build a home once colonization lands.

I want to thank Yttrbio in particular. Without his help and encouragement, we would not have turned the tide of the war with the discovery of sampling's ridiculous effectiveness, we would not have gathered as much (intimate) data about the Orthrus. Without Yttrbio, I would have given up as a researcher long ago, but his confidence, determination, and willingness to cooperate with my ideas kept my spirits high until they could soar on their own.

I want to thank LadyLucida, whose programming expertise shined light onto combat effectiveness, sampling effectiveness, and all things Thargoid. Her revision and additions of the Thargoid glyphs and study of the Orthrus Interceptor would have been missed without her keen eye. Above all, I enjoyed working on Thargoid study projects with LadyLucida, such as our sound catalog, the ReAegis Witch Head Nebula survey and mapping after the incursion in coordination with AESA, and several other projects I can't think of off the top of my head. She helped us understand Thargoids in a whole new light which we never would have been able to see. LadyLucida's stalwart dedication to the PX movement enabled Operation Thunderstruck to be the powerhouse movement it became and did what everyone thought would be unthinkable: she got AXI to do PX activities and convinced PX players (under YKE Technologies) to allow AX activity to a certain degree. Absolutely legendary! Above all, I appreciate whole heartedly that she humored me and my ideas when few others would, or could, not.

I want to thank Kingkarper01. His friendship and tolerance for my American misunderstanding of British culture prove his diplomacy skills are above and beyond many leaders I've worked under before. He is a good friend, and like everyone I've had the pleasure to meet, work, and fly with, I wouldn't have gotten far without them. His aid in financing and mapping the ReAegis Witch Head Nebula survey and the subsequent repair of the Hanna Enterprise starport with meta-alloys is a gold mark on a long list of accomplishments and an experience I won't soon forget. May his everlasting coup of Aegis Reforged Coalition continue!

It has been a long three years since I joined Elite Dangerous, a busy and packed three years of learning, research, exploration, and action. This community has left an impact on my life I could never forget, it has changed me permanently and helped me through dark times, even if it may have occasionally started some of those dark times.
 

Phill P

Phill P
Watching groups come together who didn't even know each other before has been a highlight for me. The war has had its ups and downs, particularly the difficulty changes which at times appeared to be done by going from one extreme to the other and players have burned out, come back and burned out again but never given up.

The way players have come together from all over to figure out how the war machine works and then come up with plans to slow it, stop it and reverse it have been outstanding.

Thanks to everyone involved whether in a squadron, a faction or just the solo pilots who wanted to help and came to us for advice. Way too many people to mention, you know who you are. Special thanks to our friends at Ida and Marauder Shadowguard, our staunch allies since the start. War makes soldiers of us all and we have seen everybody doing a bit of everything - AX pilots doing rescues, rescue and delivery squads doing AX and everybody doing sampling :)

Oh gods, sampling, not gonna miss that at all.

  • So, Mr P, do you suffer from any PTSD? Perhaps from trying to rescue under fire?
  • No, not really, it's been hectic but a challenge, both to our ship builds and our skills.
  • Well then from trying to fight the aliens and getting blown up a lot?
  • Not really, all part of the experience.
  • So how about all the sampling you did? You organised Operation Kleenex didn't you, to clear the Alerts while the hardcore AX pilots cleared the Controls, in order to stop the Titans' ability to expand from both ends? Mr P? Hello? Can someone help, he's collapsed.

What comes next is the question for me. More Titans seem unlikely but then I also can't see an asset like the Titan vanishing forever. Given that they have at least some knowledge of our mindset now I would expect more surgical and surprise attacks, but all we can do is wait and see.

Meanwhile, a vacation in the black in the Mandalay for a while is looking very attractive.
 

SergMx

SergMx
I too would like to join in congratulating the various AХ groups. Thank you for teaching us how to fight the Thargoids! Thank you for helping us save the Earth !

Now turn in all the AХ weapons to the warehouse (it has been increased to 600) for long term storage and you can go on a well deserved vacation.

The Earth is saved, the last Titan is destroyed - we will not need to fight with the Thargoids in the foreseeable future, about waiting for PP2 and Colonization.
 

Mr Lindsay

M
No one has mentioned him specifically yet, so I'll just say that Commander Mechan has put a good shift in over the last two years, and was probably the best for this I saw on YouTube. Organising the Xeno Strike Force to encourage more players to fight together, putting up build guides and combat guides on the YouTube Channel, as well as crucially giving regular updates on the state of the war and giving people warning of when Titans would become vulnerable so they could plan ahead.

I was using multiple information sources through the Thargoid War, but I think if you were only subscribed to Mechan's YouTube and didn't look at any other content outside of the game, you'd have had enough information to fully take part.
 

Ayane

Banned
Ayane
If it were not for CMDR Mechan and his attempts to educate the masses on how to get into AX combat I never would have and would have missed out on some of the best fun I have had in the game. I know he is just the face of a bigger team of people that have worked to put together the training materials so thanks to them all.
 

Aleks Zuno

Aleks Zuno
Thanks to @Shayan al Nasarwa and @PapaDragon_I for representing Stellanebula Project by coordinating with everyone in English on behalf of so many Commanders from Germany! Their actions kept the systems around Titan Oya extremely well-contained throughout, and ever since the first push to expose Titan Taranis—in November 3309, before Titans could actually be attacked—it has been quite the blessing to have Commanders from SNPX engage with the level of planning and combined action needed to reach the first four Titans.

For some fun on the ground, take a look at their Spire Site SRV race!
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Seconding the above - and some personal additions.

Big thanks to yttrbio for the tireless and rapid weekly updates of the spreadsheets, which were essential in the early days for trying to figure out what was going on, and then provided a compact format to feed into prediction tools. The whole research project would have got nowhere without those - and a lot of the early facts now taken for granted but fundamental to all future work were their discoveries too.

Aleks Zuno and all at INIV need special credit for their work in testing hypotheses, by selectively clearing (or not clearing) particular systems to set up situations, developing tools to rapidly test theories against previous observations, and suggesting a wide range of explanations for the Thargoid's actions. Without all of that, we might still be at the stage of "the Thargoids behave like this, except when they don't"
 

Aleks Zuno

Aleks Zuno
For representing AXI and XSF with some amount of overlap I have yet to discern, thanks to @Starsong, @Grimscrub, @Medi0cr3 and @CMDR Mechan for a lot of coordinations and operations, both in the containment stage with a notable two-week taming of Titan Taranis and also in the exposure stage starting with clearing the top strength Taranis system alongside the necessary Spire site operations.

Even if that attack would turn out to be premature and give Titan Taranis time to recover, said recovery still was weak enough to destroy it as soon as we had Nanite technology, and helping to make successful that collective Titan exposure model gave us all something we could repeat for the first four Titans. This included the Titan Oya event, for which the turnout was immense, and many involved with that event stayed with us for the following drive towards Titan Hadad.
 

Codger

Codger
For me it was CMDR Mechan and his great info, as well as a video by Atlas Grand Gaming about how to join the fight in an unengineered ship. Even though I had a fully engineered ship, I was having a lot of trouble until I watched how he approached the situation in his weaker ship. Because of that I managed to succeed and do my part to kill off the last Titan.

Thanks to them in particular, and everyone who contributed. Fantastic community we have.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom