Notice GalNet changes

[Vayporz]

Ive been playing ED for about 2 years now. I wasn't an early adopter, I wasn't there for Salome, nor did I see the introduction of engineers, power play, or planetary landings. These were all in place when I started. I didn't start with a little starter playground of systems or a stock sidewinder with Autodock. That doesn't mean I "walked uphill both ways in a snowstorm" to land at my first planetary outposts. It did mean I remember running the landing training about 20 times on night. I'm a slow learner.

Also, I had a group of dedicated commanders who shared their understanding of the game's structures within these forums, and others such as Reddit . Not only that, these and other commanders worked to build tools like Inara, Eddb, EDSM, and Coriolis.io that I still use today. The community is what makes this game playable. For example, imagine Void Opal mining without a forum to help you share and figure out the best way to use a pulse wave, Coriolis to test fast and maneuverable mining builds, sites that share data on mining rings, and eddb, or edmc, to find markets for you sells. Imagine wanting to go explore an area of the galaxy with a large area of unexplored systems. You can't figure that out on the Galaxy map made by FDev, but you can go to EdAstro and see it, no problem. None of this was FDev's doing. They didn't build these tools. In fact I think they now build the game expecting Commanders to have these tools at the ready.

So, Little by little the community has taken more and more responsibility for making ED marketable for FDev. Consider the upswing in steam purchases of the game in association with DW2. The majority of press given to them this year, I suspect, came from community-lead events and not FDev developed stuff.

So Fdev decides to stop writing the off Camera items... One more thing for the community to pick up and do... and probably do better. Since these off camera stories never contributed to in-game changes or mechanics (a pity IMHO), no affect on gameplay. But I hope sooner than latter FDev realizes that without a vibrant and strong Galnet, not just an in-game version of a forum post on II, or new ships, they have lost a powerful tool to shape and control the Lore of their game -- for the community will fill this void, as it has in every other shortcoming.

Are you sure FDev you want to lose an avenue to control your game's Lore?

 

[Commander Biscuit]

So your writers are also coders?

And I say writers, did you really need more than one to produce a short article every day or two? If people are happy about this, I'd ask them how much labour they imagine this is saving.

 

[Lokesh]

Not cool! The fluff is what made it seem alive! (Most real life news has no affect on us... I'm not going to run off to help with a car crash from last week)

Will new content be equal to the old or are we talking less overall news?

 

[Dean Demon]

So your writers are also coders?

Nowhere near the same thing as they have a completely different skillset, i can code very well but my writing skills wouldn't be up to the same standards. Also am quite disappointed by the upcoming change to galnet, all the stories made the universe feel alive even if they had no impact on gameplay so it looks like ED is moving in another direction.

 

[Commander Biscuit]

Nowhere near the same thing as they have a completely different skillset, i can code very well but my writing skills wouldn't be up to the same standards. Also am quite disappointed by the upcoming change to galnet, all the stories made the universe feel alive even if they had no impact on gameplay so it looks like ED is moving in another direction.

That's exactly the point I'm making. I get that ED is being run by a small skeleton crew, and individuals in such a team can be expected to wear many hats, but like I said, these are short articles, one every day or so, and I can't imagine that diverting the manpower will make any difference to us at all.

I got a few laughs from some of the articles, and they also made me speculate about future content. I think they were an interesting aspect of the game, and now they're gone and people are sealclapping because they think it'll bring them space legs.

 

[Lightspeed]

FD decides Galnet will no longer publish "fake news."

Promises new ships and modules.

Forum decays into Doomed Mode.

 

[Kaocraft]

Don't get why people are cheering for this. All they're saying is that Galnet is going into maintenance mode.

 

[VerticalBlank]

Don't get why people are cheering for this. All they're saying is that Galnet is going into maintenance mode.

I'm a dev. I know full well that "maintenance mode" is where software goes to die.

 

[bluecrash]

Hello Commanders,

Our galaxy is filled with a plethora of stories, places, and people, which are all part off the rich canon of Elite Dangerous, explored through many of our GalNet articles.

While GalNet provides an understanding of life in the 3300s, it hasn't always had a direct impact on your gameplay. We have been reviewing the effect this has had on your in-game experience, along with your feedback, and as a result, we’re going to be reducing the number of GalNet stories that we produce and instead focus on covering in-game content.

In the foreseeable future, GalNet articles will concentrate on in-game activity, such as Interstellar Initiatives, the release of new ships and modules, and significant narrative developments. With this change, we will be stopping the 'off-camera' narratives that we have previously published via GalNet.

We hope you have enjoyed the many stories that we have told, and as always please share your thoughts and feedback with us.

Now we won't have to wonder if you are hiding mysteries. I wish you all released puzzles like you did the first two years.

 

[RooksBailey]

So Fdev decides to stop writing the off Camera items... One more thing for the community to pick up and do... and probably do better. Since these off camera stories never contributed to in-game changes or mechanics (a pity IMHO), no affect on gameplay. But I hope sooner than latter FDev realizes that without a vibrant and strong Galnet, not just an in-game version of a forum post on II, or new ships, they have lost a powerful tool to shape and control the Lore of their game -- for the community will fill this void, as it has in every other shortcoming.

If Frontier wants to cut back on producing the off camera fluff, I think it would be a smart move to invite the community to fill the gap. I always thought GalNet would be best if it was a mix of official in-game news (such a new content, ships, etc.) as headline items, followed by "community spotlight" material like in the newsletter, and then a mix of lore tidbits and maybe even community submitted short stories and news items. That way GalNet would become a real service to the community, sort of like an in-game Sagittarius Eye. The only problem with this is that such a format for GalNet probably would be even more work intensive than what they are currently doing, so I don't see that happening, sadly. But if somebody could come up with a system where GalNet was able to be opened to community submitted content with a minimum of effort on the part of Frontier, that would be a neat thing to do. Maybe turn a part of Galnet into something like Twitter where GalNet would automatically scoop up short, in-game "tweets" from the community and display them as real time unverified news blurbs? In other words, in my comms panel there would be a GalNet tab and I could type a short headline like "Heavy fighting in Laksak!" or "Gankers on the prowl around Felicity Farseer! Be on guard!" and that would be displayed in Galnet as a player-submitted news item? The more I think about it, the more such a system could be a lot of fun for the community and make GalNet seem more like a real news (i.e., timely) service. Galnet would then be the best of both worlds: part official news and in-game content headlines, and part community driven gossip and reporting.

 

[xzanfr]

Could we not just go back to having player submitted stories?
It worked quite well a couple of years ago.

 

[BromeTeks]

Not sure why anyone's surprised, this is standard FDev procedure. If something doesn't instantly work, just stop putting in any and all effort. See: CQC, powerplay, Fleet Carriers (Still don't trust them to pull the rug out on that again), Mobile capital ships, networking tech, the mission system, and so on.

 

[VerticalBlank]

Not sure why anyone's surprised, this is standard FDev procedure. If something doesn't instantly work, just stop putting in any and all effort. See: CQC, powerplay, Fleet Carriers (Still don't trust them to pull the rug out on that again), Mobile capital ships, networking tech, the mission system, and so on.

You left out multi-crew but your point hits the nail on the head. FD have never had the balls to stay on task, follow through, fix stuff, and arrive at the goal. They just give up at the first hurdle.

Compare with No Man's Sky where the devs fell badly at the first hurdle but didn't give up and instead put the time in to carry through their vision.

Where is David Braben right now? Where is Michael Brooks? Why have they not stepped in?

 

[T1-Jafo]

. . . Where is David Braben right now? Where is Michael Brooks? Why have they not stepped in?

Michael Brooks jumped ship and went to work with dinosaurs. I do miss the days when he was an active part of the Elite lore and development. Since he left, to me anyways, it appears Elite Dangerous has slowly but steadily becoming more and more dumbed down and gearing more towards consoles, leaving the PC Master race behind.

As for David Braben, it would be nice to hear something from him in regards to the future of Elite: Dangerous, instead of Froniter as a whole.

I can only hope the New Era when released next winter, will make up for all this.

 

[Kaocraft]

Michael Brooks jumped ship and went to work with dinosaurs. I do miss the days when he was an active part of the Elite lore and development. Since he left, to me anyways, it appears Elite Dangerous has slowly but steadily becoming more and more dumbed down and gearing more towards consoles, leaving the PC Master race behind.

As for David Braben, it would be nice to hear something from him in regards to the future of Elite: Dangerous, instead of Froniter as a whole.

I can only hope the New Era when released next winter, will make up for all this.

I don't hope anymore. I used to Hope - that was sometime after I stopped Eagerly Anticipating but before I began merely Observing.

 

[VR CMDR Novindus]

This vast and largely empty space game has little in the way of character and atmosphere going for it. It'd be great if New Era 2020 has some drastic changes planned to address this, because the little fluff on GalNet wasn't doing too much to fill the void. Removing it now though seems like a bit of insult to injury, or a game of throwing straws to see which one breaks the camel's back first. If there's no decent planned replacement in the upcoming major update, then this is just a kick in the nads.

 

[Juniper]

All smacks of a lazy solution to a self-created problem IMO. It feels like so much of E: D is like this unfortunately.

Sorry.

 

[VR jefranklin18]

Michael Brooks jumped ship and went to work with dinosaurs. I do miss the days when he was an active part of the Elite lore and development. Since he left, to me anyways, it appears Elite Dangerous has slowly but steadily becoming more and more dumbed down and gearing more towards consoles, leaving the PC Master race behind.

That's a very rose-tinted recollection of the early days. It was during this period that all the half-baked placeholder mechanics were introduced.

As for David Braben, it would be nice to hear something from him in regards to the future of Elite: Dangerous, instead of Froniter as a whole.

Not likely to happen. He only pops up when there is something to sell/pitch so I don't actually think his commitment to ED is that great.

I can only hope the New Era when released next winter, will make up for all this.

We have no information about it, have seen no concept art, or whatever so I am pretty pessimistic about it.

 

[aRJay]

That's a very rose-tinted recollection of the early days. It was during this period that all the half-baked placeholder mechanics were introduced.

Not likely to happen. He only pops up when there is something to sell/pitch so I don't actually think his commitment to ED is that great.

We have no information about it, have seen no concept art, or whatever so I am pretty pessimistic about it.

If the placeholder mechanics were fully baked would they be placeholders?

 

[Vetinari]

We have no information about it, have seen no concept art, or whatever so I am pretty pessimistic about it.

Damn, that kills of the running gag about Frontier announcing an announcement date to announce an announcement about a future update that will be announced nearer the time...