Elite Dangerous History - Part 3 - The Glory Years, 2015-2017

[drew]

I'd count the Salome storyline as an official Frontier event, rather than a community-driven one.

Frontier's involvement was minimal - the vast majority was done by the community - and Frontier disowned the event the week before it was due to occur, thus they can claim no credit/blame for it. The responsibility for the event lies with me alone.

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[M_72]

There's two types of event in that list, though. (I'd count the Salome storyline as an official Frontier event, rather than a community-driven one)

1) Ones which were community-driven but had significant Frontier support in terms of providing additional assets or events (Gnosis, DW2, Colonia), usually with several thousand participants
2) Ones which had participant counts around 1000 players or less (DW1, early exploration milestones, etc.) that were fully community-organised.

There are plenty of the second sort going on still nowadays - there was a recent carrier-based exploration trip with around a thousand participants which visited Colonia this weekend (and required some CG-style teamwork and logistics planning from various existing residents to support) setting massive new daily traffic records for the region ... EDSM lists a bunch of >100-participant expeditions both recent and planned ... Colonia's recent Anarchist Wars were entirely community-driven and involved over a hundred players on the various sides ... Operation IDA is pretty big and basically organised itself during that time period ... Buckyball racing is still going strong ... there are plenty of player groups with >100 player counts regularly organising their own events ... I've missed far more than I've included from this list, just in the last year.

Perhaps what's happened is that the community has grown so much since those early days [1] that an event with "merely" hundreds of participants just doesn't get the same attention nowadays - that's just one moderately important player group. Even DW2, for all its immense scale and organisational effort, only involved a few percent of total players.


[1] Of course, even in those earlier days, there wasn't just one "community" or even one "exploration community" either. The Dangerous Games were convincingly won by a huge community group which had grown up around the Elite series before ED even existed ... and which barely anyone in many other communities had heard of. I wonder if that was a wake-up call to Frontier's community management team as well.

I agree with this. There are certainly different categories of events, and I think the nature of them has change over the years too.

I do think the period mentioned was a period of grand adventures and large scale events, ones that made headlines way beyond the ED playerbase. DW2 (for example) may have had what? 15,000 players?, a tiny fraction of Elite accounts like you said, but it received unprecedented coverage in the gaming press and even mainstream news, with New Scientist writing about it, and Gameranx listing it as their 2nd most epic gaming event in history (that video alone had nearly 5 million views). I really can't see that kind of thing happening again tbh.

Since then there's been plenty of sub-1000 player initiatives going on like you said, but as a golden era I think the years mentioned in the OP were pretty much 'it'.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Frontier's involvement was minimal - the vast majority was done by the community.

I think we must be using very different measures of Frontier's involvement in activities and what we consider "minimal" here - though I certainly don't disagree that the community did a lot more!

For Premonition - and this is just the stuff I can remember as being obviously visible - setting up the various Dynasty sites, the Zurara, the various POIs in Tionisla, Teorge, and elsewhere, running the exploration CGs, posting and translating the various Galnet articles, adding custom multicrew options for the final event.

I would be thrilled if Frontier got minimally involved in any of the community events I participate in nowadays, by those standards Everything else on the list I was replying to was a success as a community event with Frontier contributions somewhere between "none at all" and "a lot less than that".

Premonition I'd put more alongside Dangerous Games, or the Colonia Expansion Iniiative more generally - absolutely reliant for its success (and it still being talked about and having consequences today) on the community/ies picking it up, getting invested in it, and doing most of the work in organising and publicising ... but also not something that the community could have done unilaterally in anything like its final form.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I do think the period mentioned was a period of grand adventures and large scale events, ones that made headlines way beyond the ED playerbase. DW2 (for example) may have had what? 15,000 players?, a tiny fraction of Elite accounts like you said, but it received unprecedented coverage in the gaming press and even mainstream news, with New Scientist writing about it, and Gameranx listing it as their 2nd most epic gaming event in history (that video alone had nearly 5 million views). I really can't see that kind of thing happening again tbh.

In terms of raw player numbers, the current bounty hunting CG is at 15,173 and rising.

DW2 I think was around 13,000 for advance signups, probably more like 8-10,000 actually showing up.

Obviously getting 10,000 for a multi-month trip is more impressive than getting 15,000 to jump a few systems over, shoot some stuff for a couple of hours, and head off again. But there's more to it than just sheer mass headcount.


And excluding DW2 ... most if not all of the other events on your list were also sub-thousand players. DW2 was a big outlier, and will likely remain that way until DW3. One might equally have concluded in early 2018, after DW1, that the era of really big expeditions was in the past, and while there'd been some fun expeditions in the 2-300 range, there wasn't going to be anything like Distant Worlds again. Until there was, and more. (though, with Fleet Carriers now in the mix, what DW3 actually looks like might be a bit different to the first two)


What we're missing at the moment - with the Gnosis being the last one - is the ability to have high stakes where even if you fail you'll remember trying combined with sufficient mass participation (and high hundreds would do!) that it becomes the topic of discussion. Plenty of community-organised things have done one or the other ... if I knew how to get both I'd be organising it rather than posting here.

 

[marx]

I think we must be using very different measures of Frontier's involvement in activities and what we consider "minimal" here - though I certainly don't disagree that the community did a lot more!

For Premonition - and this is just the stuff I can remember as being obviously visible - setting up the various Dynasty sites, the Zurara, the various POIs in Tionisla, Teorge, and elsewhere, running the exploration CGs, posting and translating the various Galnet articles, adding custom multicrew options for the final event.

I guess I would say that the event was player-organised, but heavily supported by Frontier. In fact, I'd say that it was The most supported one: no other player event had voice-acted logs made for them, for example.
So now, after that comment, let me ask @drew , as I'm curious: what would you have liked, what kind of involvement would it have been in your ideal scenario?

Personally, the only thing that comes to my mind would be Frontier taking a direct hand in organising the players in the event, and I doubt if that would have gone down well. (For instance, whichever side lost the conflict(s), some of them would inevitably blame FD for designing the event against them.) But I wasn't involved with the event at all, so there might well be obvious things that I couldn't think of.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Frontier's involvement was minimal - the vast majority was done by the community - and Frontier disowned the event the week before it was due to occur, thus they can claim no credit/blame for it. The responsibility for the event lies with me alone.

Cheers,

Drew.

You were gamed pretty hard is what I heard. I think it's not the right way to give up creative control, pretend there is a popular vote but there never is one because it was kinda rigged from the start.
I rather prefer to play / consume the artist's genuine work than being duped to believe I had any part in the process when I actually didn't.

 

[drew]

I think we must be using very different measures of Frontier's involvement in activities and what we consider "minimal" here - though I certainly don't disagree that the community did a lot more!

For Premonition - and this is just the stuff I can remember as being obviously visible - setting up the various Dynasty sites, the Zurara, the various POIs in Tionisla, Teorge, and elsewhere, running the exploration CGs, posting and translating the various Galnet articles, adding custom multicrew options for the final event.

I would be thrilled if Frontier got minimally involved in any of the community events I participate in nowadays, by those standards Everything else on the list I was replying to was a success as a community event with Frontier contributions somewhere between "none at all" and "a lot less than that".

Premonition I'd put more alongside Dangerous Games, or the Colonia Expansion Iniiative more generally - absolutely reliant for its success (and it still being talked about and having consequences today) on the community/ies picking it up, getting invested in it, and doing most of the work in organising and publicising ... but also not something that the community could have done unilaterally in anything like its final form.

Fair play, I was thinking of the actual day of the "event" itself, rather than the entire Premonition affair. If you count all that - yes... a lot of Fdev involvement indeed.

Cheers,

Drew.