Thanks Drew, it is such an honour, I can't express it more. Your article was such a pleasant surprise. Also you make a great point that seems to have been glossed over - Frontier are indeed planning on working on PP, regardless of whether SEPP win.
I just want to put something into context. A year ago, the exploration community was dead silent. They didn't even have a sub-forum. The vast majority of community push came from sectors like combateers, people into the background sim, the open vs solo debate. It was often dirty, rough, rude and Frontier listened and worked on things bit by bit. There were bumps along the road but most of the people who were making the noise back then got directly addressed and saw massive improvements come along.
The exploration community got their sub forum but were still silent. In the typical explorer fashion, they didn't want to get involved (and still don't - see what I say at the end), they just wanted to share pictures, logs, challenges, records. It went on like that for a while.
At some point they noticed that yet another update was planned with no exploration content coming and some of them decided that, learning from the other play-style advocates, noise is what Frontier need. So they started making noise. They started showing up in the Q&As, the AMAs, poking and prodding. At first the response wasn't encouraging: "we are content with the system of exploration and aren't planning on changing it". And why would they? Explorers don't say anything. They can't be that big a contingent. They must be pretty happy. They don't do much for the game as a whole. The galaxy is already the biggest selling point. Let's just work on combat and other things people are complaining about.
So instead of whining and complaining - it's not in our nature - we just decided to make noise in other ways. "Prove ourselves" as it were. Not all of it was planned that way, and much of it was by accident, but we eventually started showing that the exploration community is big, is important, is significant, deserves some dev love. Distant Worlds was the first big example, bringing in more publicity than most other events combined. The devs LOVED it. I have to say nobody, not the organisers, not any of the explorers themselves knew it would be that BIG, but it did massively change their self identity and motivation to make global changes to the game. And since then everything has changed. The tone has changed. Frontier have changed their position of "we are happy with exploration as it is" to "we are planning improvements in the long term". Little but significant updates to exploration were added in the patches of 2.0 onwards, unlike we had seen (at all) before it (as Drew said - exploration has barely changed, if at all, since the game was released - Horizons is a notable exception but it also hasn't had significant changes or work, and there is so much untapped potential, so the motivation for all this noise remains the same).
So again, we want to make noise. We want to show that the exploration community is important to the game as a whole. We want to show that explorers aren't just eccentric lone wolves who like pretty shiny things, but can mobilise and do stuff just as well, if not better, than the other communities. We want to do it in a friendly, inclusive, apolitical way. We want to do it positively, without whining and complaining and long reddits about how "Frontier are so bad at x y z and I'm quitting". We want to do it with action, with great events, great movements.
When SEPP, a 100% exploration based group, who PROVED that they are good enough to engage in Background Sim mechanics and PP simply by being one of the 5 auto-qualifiers, got in, we decided to ask all explorers to back them. For the sake of having a power for explorers, for the sake of changing PP, for the sake of improving PP, for the sake of the benefits that could come with it, and YES, the sake of making MORE NOISE that explorers can't be ignored.
Nobody is saying Frontier will go "Oh, the explorers won DG, let's scrap season 2's gameplan and introduce ELW landing next week". Of course not. But we just want to show them, as I've said over and over, in a nice, friendly, fair way, that we want more and we deserve more and hopefully Frontier will slowly adjust their long term plan.
The small things added here and there will turn into medium things. Season 3 might include a few big exploration updates. Season 4 could be completely exploration based. We don't know but we are going to try. This is why Erimus and I support SEPP, why we ask explorers and DWE pilots to support SEPP (and emphasised "no pressure" from the start). Explorers can choose, and can disagree and it's all fair and all valid.
That's it, can't say it better than that. Please just refer to this anytime someone asks "I don't see how SEPP winning the DG can make any difference".
It can.
