FDEV's Region Names

[The Reverend]

• Zulu Romeo's trip the core. Got plenty of coverage in online magazines at the time and made waves in game too, being the first trip of its kind.
• Distant Worlds 1, largest event of its kind at the time. Again made big headlines in game and out.
• The GMP itself, not an event but a project by explorers for explorers and one that thousands made use of, and one the press certainly wrote about during its heyday.
• The formation of the fuel rats, majority of which where/are explorers, and based on helping explorer's out in the black. They've had official livestreams dedicated to what they do and received plenty of coverage in game and out (gaming press write ups).
• Apollo 50th Anniversary Expedition, didn't get the coverage it deserved but was another large scale event that explorers organised and ran.
• Enigma Expedition - as above.
• August Exodus (first Colonia colonization event), I remember reading about this in magazines at the time as it was the first major expedition out to the rediscovered Jaques station. Another exploration lead initiative.
• The establishment of the Colonia Citizens Network. Not an event in itself, more like a series of them instigated by explorers for explorers, and again covered by the media of the day.
• The Premonition Event, 2nd only to DW2 for press coverage and the in game impact it had across discords, forums, YouTube etc.
• The Gnosis Event, originally an exploration event that got switched at the last moment into pew pew. But initially another that made a big impact at the time in game and out.
• Distant Worlds 2. The biggest of them all. There's no other player run event that got the press coverage this one did, the current Thargoid stuff still doesn't come close yet (and thats FDevs doing in anycase). When it does, I expect to hear about it on mainstream radio, read about it in the New Scientist, and see a major gaming magazine dedicate a whole string of major articles to it (akin to what DW2 acheived).
• The launch of DSSA Initiative. This was the first major Carrier-based initiative. Again explorers leading the way with major projects based on brand new content. Frontier even covered it at one point, although briefly.

They all had one thing in common though. They were all created, organized, and ran by players.. predominantly made up explorers.

That should be pinned so if ever a dev decides to wander into this forum one day (its only been about 5 years since the last one did), they can see a reminder of what their players were capable of- when given the incentive.

That's the mark of a good game and a dedicated playerbase, which UO had, and Elite still has

Barely.

 

[Orvidius]

I used to play a mmorpg years ago call UO (Ultima Online) and it was the same in that game, the players themselves being the ones that created the most memorable moments, some that were still talked about years and years later. That's the mark of a good game and a dedicated playerbase, which UO had, and Elite still has

Yeah, that takes me back. I was there, as a wave-1 Counselor and wave-1 Seer too. In many ways UO was a mile wide and an inch deep too, but the players breathed life into that world.

ED has definitely had its moments, with player events that are spoken of years later. As much as I love higher jump ranges and fleet carriers, it's hard to deny that something was lost along the way too. The vast unknown has shrunk considerably. And the expeditions don't carry the same sort of "weight" that they once did. Sadly I missed a lot of the early exploration events here as well since I didn't dive hard into all of this until about version 2.3 early in 2017, despite being a kickstarter backer. But I saw the Salome event, and was aboard the Gnosis when it made that fateful jump.

I think it's still possible to capture that sort of experience again, I'm just not sure who will spearhead it or how much FDev involvement can be expected these days. Right now FDev is all about the Thargoid war, but players still have all of the agency they need to organize their own events.

 

[Hellrider]

Then frontier wiped away 3 or 4 years of early historical history of exploration when they added their own regional overlay that pretty much made the GMPs versions obsolete overnight. Only a few GMP regions were adopted, and only then because of a community backlash at the time. It wouldn't have been so bad if fdev had actually added some context or regional write ups for the ones they implemented, like the GMP had been doing since 2016.

And after it, at top of the cake they wiped years of planetary exploration by re-generation of all planets.
Even planets which were discovered.

 

[marx]

Well, I guess this is going to be mostly off-topic now, but there are a few things I wanted to add:

As much as I love higher jump ranges and fleet carriers, it's hard to deny that something was lost along the way too.

That something would be having any difficulty with navigation. When jump ranges of explorer builds used to be in the lower 30s, and a cardboard Anaconda could barely reach 40 ly, journeying through sparse areas wasn't trivial. Now, at around 50 ly, even the route plotter can automatically carry you through almost any area, and since jump ranges have climbed well in excess of that, the galaxy became a mostly-homogenous disc. This isn't even mentioning fleet carriers, of course.
Finding your own way through sparse areas used to be fun (or at least, it was for me), but there's no need for that now, unless one is deliberately restricting their jump range.

Anyway, back to expeditions:

I think it's still possible to capture that sort of experience again, I'm just not sure who will spearhead it or how much FDev involvement can be expected these days.

Frontier's pretty good about promoting player events and expeditions these days, so that's a plus. However, after DW2, they've never added the same amount of in-game content and support to expeditions: in fact, as far as I know, they've never added any.

Then there's that the player base simply isn't there. DW2 was started on the promise of the Codex first, on having lots of things to find out in the galaxy, then there was the promise of new exploration gameplay. Let's just say that those aspects fell short. (The blame for that is entirely on Frontier, of course.) Now there's nothing like that on the horizon, and moreover, after the FSS people have explored significantly less, so there aren't nearly as many to recruit from.
3,747 players finished DW2, and considering everything else, I think even reaching a quarter of that today would be all but impossible. Even if the expedition ran across live and legacy branches both. (Well hey, that's another thing that has to be considered.)

But then, I wonder: what would such high participant numbers even be needed for? Beyond boasting about them, of course.

Then there are group efforts going through the galax, which leads to another question that I'd say is worth pondering: which would be better for everyone, one expedition with 200 members going one way, or four expeditions with 50 members each (so, the same total) going four different ways?
I'd say it's the latter, assuming we are talking about exploration of course. Better to spread out over the galaxy too, not just the usual Sol - Colonia - Sagittarius A* triangle.

By the way, in case anyone is wondering (now that I mentioned spreading out over the galaxy): out of the 90 Odyssey bios known, 57 are found all over the galaxy, so about a third of them appear only in certain regions - regions which tend to cover the various galactic arms.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Frontier's pretty good about promoting player events and expeditions these days, so that's a plus. However, after DW2, they've never added the same amount of in-game content and support to expeditions: in fact, as far as I know, they've never added any.

Though that's also true of every expedition before DW2, as I recall.

The Green Gas Giant rediscovery got a Galnet article recently.

3,747 players finished DW2, and considering everything else, I think even reaching a quarter of that today would be all but impossible.

900 would still be the second largest number completing an expedition by a very substantial margin, of course. The largest expedition I went on was only a quarter of that size and still had extremely busy meetups.

As you say, still plenty of recent expeditions in the 50 to 200 participant range, which is more than enough to meet other people.

This isn't even mentioning fleet carriers, of course.

I think that'd be another thing which any really big expedition (especially one wanting to "make the news") would need to contend with - the previous expeditions, even with increasing personal jump ranges, you did still have to haul yourself across the galaxy, and might find something - at least on the "ringed ELW" level - in the systems you passed through. So getting a few thousand people to do that was an immense organising achievement, and getting even a couple of hundred going the same way a very substantial one. And it'd need to be done over the course of several weeks so that people who weren't in racing builds or able to play every day could keep up.

Nowadays you could do an expedition of DW2 equivalent length with a fleet carrier, stopping at a new waypoint each day and have the whole thing done in a couple of weeks, with virtually no-one on board visiting systems outside the waypoints themselves. Everyone could still have fun, but there's nothing particularly newsworthy about carrier tourism tours - there's plenty of those going on.

It's not a surprise, perhaps, that the one expedition which did get an in-game mention since was one where a carrier was a very useful support tool but the participants still had to do their own flying for that expedition's key achievement.

 

[marx]

Though that's also true of every expedition before DW2, as I recall.

The Green Gas Giant rediscovery got a Galnet article recently.

Hm, I suppose GalNet articles are technically in-game content. However, they're not something that players can engage with. So, I'd rather call those promotion too.

900 would still be the second largest number completing an expedition by a very substantial margin, of course. The largest expedition I went on was only a quarter of that size and still had extremely busy meetups.

As you say, still plenty of recent expeditions in the 50 to 200 participant range, which is more than enough to meet other people.

Oh, naturally. DW2 was an outlier - The outlier - and as you say, even a quarter of it would be the second largest today.
But then, looking at EDSM numbers again, it turns out EDSM expeditions have never really been that large. Which does make sense. Of course, since a while now the site has been culling people from the participants list if they didn't upload anything during the expedition, so that's something worth keeping in mind too.

Nowadays you could do an expedition of DW2 equivalent length with a fleet carrier, stopping at a new waypoint each day and have the whole thing done in a couple of weeks, with virtually no-one on board visiting systems outside the waypoints themselves. Everyone could still have fun, but there's nothing particularly newsworthy about carrier tourism tours - there's plenty of those going on.

It's not a surprise, perhaps, that the one expedition which did get an in-game mention since was one where a carrier was a very useful support tool but the participants still had to do their own flying for that expedition's key achievement.

Well, yes. There has always been debate about whether waypoint expeditions are exploration or not, and my opinion has been that the exploration there is what people do along the way: however, it's quite clear-cut that if you take out the travelling part, then there goes the exploration too. Like you said, carrier tourism tours.

So yeah, I suppose there's also that with fleet carriers added, travel-based expeditions are out, expeditions with objectives are in. Keeping an eye on a bunch of Discords, it seems to me that there are plenty going on. They don't register them on EDSM, of course. The interesting part is that the addition of fleet carriers have also made people want to stay exploring together around specific areas in the galaxy more, and there are even anchored carrier communities: in this sense, carriers have not only helped expeditions, but also ate a bit of their lunch too. I find it better though, that there are more activities to choose from.