News Important Community Update (01/03)

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Greetings Commanders,

We’ve had a number of questions from our community eagerly awaiting news on the future development for Elite Dangerous. We wanted to share a development update with you which talks a little more about our upcoming development plans. It’s a long read but we wanted to be as open as we can at this stage with where progress is and what information we are able to share. There will be more news and updates over the coming months.


Beyond

It’s been a little over two months since Beyond – Chapter Four, our final instalment in the Beyond season, arrived and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response from the community. Beyond allowed us to deliver a year of free updates to Elite Dangerous in order to build, enhance, compliment and connect the content that has been added since launch. This step in the ongoing evolution of Elite was vital. The long-term vision for the game, even from the early days, has always been ambitious and we are committed to supporting the game with that vision in mind. All of this is made possible by the support of our amazing community. We were truly delighted that from Beyond - Chapter Four, we’ve seen one of our highest ever player counts with many hundreds of thousands of Commanders jumping in and taking to their cockpits together. Thank you!


The Next Era

Back in August, we mentioned that the team had begun work on the next major era of Elite. We believe this will be a defining moment in the history of the game and it will be our biggest update yet.

In that post, we explained that the content was still very early in development, so we won’t be ready to announce it for a while. To give this more context, in order to realise the ambition for this update, and the size and scope of the content we wish to bring to the Elite Dangerous galaxy, we estimate this major milestone will be ready by the latter half of 2020.

As development progresses, we will share more news and announcements on features, as well as timelines regarding this upcoming content for Elite. We can understand that having a long wait for news can be frustrating, but we truly believe that this will be the single most impactful update for our community. Having a development team dedicated to this milestone is our continued and unwavering commitment to making Elite Dangerous the most authentic, ambitious, and expansive evolving space game in the world.

As mentioned in our previous post, this new era will be paid for content and all lifetime expansion pass owners will have this included in their pass.


What now?

We know that waiting for a mammoth update like this one is going to feel like your 3rd run to Hutton Orbital. But don’t fret, we’ve got plenty of updates, content, and plans happening as we progress through to this monumental milestone.

As well as the team of developers working on our next big milestone, we also have a smaller development team focused on adding to and improving the existing game between now and that time. This will take the form of regular game updates and development supported events.


Development supported events

One of the biggest changes will be the way that we create and support in-game events and activities. Starting in the coming months, we will be looking to change the way that in-game events happen. The aim here is to create ongoing, engaging, and varied sets of content that are supported by the development team which players will be able to actively engage in.

We have listened to community feedback regarding Community Goals and while they are an incredible tool, they have become somewhat routine for many Commanders. We felt that we needed to adjust them to be more event-related while taking our in game events a big step further. We will gradually be changing our community goals and their frequency, using them within a larger schedule of development-led events to help us create more improved, meaningful and engaging experiences.

As well as Community Goals, we will also be using things like new scenarios, reputation and reward boosts (such as Superpower reputation increases), BGS and global galactic changes, in-game interactions, new game assets and much more to make game-wide events that tie into the game world. The aim is to constantly create new and exciting events and campaigns for you to get involved in and shape, which will focus on and benefit different types of players.

Outside of the game, we’ll communicate with you about these events, how they work and what goes into developing Elite Dangerous.


Regular updates

In addition to the weekly and monthly activity happening in Elite, we will also be releasing a series of updates roughly every 3-4 months. The first two of these updates will primarily focus on new player and welcoming experiences, and we will also be introducing a number of quality of life improvements for the entire player base, of which we will have more news on in the coming weeks. This will help ensure that new players are able to better progress through the game, and therefore help bring more players through to our very awesome, very welcoming community. We will also have additional game tweaks, benefits and bug fixes for all players. In the subsequent updates we will be focusing on bringing in new features, perks and content, including a range of exciting new additions to the game that will build up to this new era.

It is important to note that these updates will not take the same level of content or size that we have seen from our previous updates in Beyond or Horizons, as the majority of the development team will be focusing on the new era.

Elite Dangerous has an incredibly passionate, enthusiastic and talented community, and we’re committed to supporting Elite now and for the future. We would like to take this opportunity to say, once again, that none of this would be possible without the continued support and dedication from our community – so, thank you. Keep sharing your feedback with us, and if you have any questions feel free to share them with us by posting in this thread. We’ll try and answer as many of them as we can.


The Elite Dangerous Team
Thank you very much.
 
I've got the lifetime expansion pass and I paid a bunch on top of that, including another account as I'm sure many if not most of the lep'rs have also contributed far more than that initial purchase.

there's a lot of people who would pay a subscription if it guaranteed the hiring of a decent writer for content and guaranteed dev time to implementing said content in the form of complex missions, inserted content to stumble upon, bgs related galnet stories that dont necessarily require dev work, and vetting user provided galnet stories again to facilitate role playing (this is the most important).

Lets say this person gets paid 80,000 usd a year. That's about 6,666.67 per month. That means at 5 bucks a month, we'd need just 1,334 subscribers in the entire world and this would be free for fdev to do. If it turns out more are willing then the subscription could drop ...if there are 6000 players left who play per month, 12 bucks a year would probably be an easy sell for ongoing content from a dedicated person who's only job is to produce content (or review user provided content) for this game.

Interesting and affordable numbers.

But I absolutely loathe subscription software and it’s connotations with pay to play, and would have a real problem deciding whether to keep playing Elite if it went this route.
 
if they just tie cargo to the ship ...then when you swap ships your cargo stays in your previous ship (if desired) ...no potential for exploitation as there is no difference here than if you had just docked your ship and stayed in it. Your amount of "storage" space is totally dependent on your ships ..just as it is currently and you can only access your cargo by switching to the ship with it. Ensuring that the feature doesn't create any new loopholes, but allows you to store a ship that has cargo without first offloading it or transferring it to your new ship.

real storage can be vetted out separately if desired. I consider that a separate issue from being able to swap ships without needing to swap cargo.
One potential issue is ship transfers they would have to be disabled for any ship with stored cargo, even with that sorted I am still certain that stored cargo won’t happen.
 
I've got the lifetime expansion pass and I paid a bunch on top of that, including another account as I'm sure many if not most of the lep'rs have also contributed far more than that initial purchase.

there's a lot of people who would pay a subscription if it guaranteed the hiring of a decent writer for content and guaranteed dev time to implementing said content in the form of complex missions, inserted content to stumble upon, bgs related galnet stories that dont necessarily require dev work, and vetting user provided galnet stories again to facilitate role playing (this is the most important).

Lets say this person gets paid 80,000 usd a year. That's about 6,666.67 per month. That means at 5 bucks a month, we'd need just 1,334 subscribers in the entire world and this would be free for fdev to do. If it turns out more are willing then the subscription could drop ...if there are 6000 players left who play per month, 12 bucks a year would probably be an easy sell for ongoing content from a dedicated person who's only job is to produce content (or review user provided content) for this game.
One idea is to do optional subscriptions. Just need something to give them in game. How about twice the value in arx and some xp bonuses?!

Do a bonus for each dollar payed per month per sub. 1 dollar equals 2 dollars in arx a month added plus 1%xp bonus to everything and maybe 1% price drop on ships... Problem is inflation at that point. It would probably be based on the lb. Unless you want to give everyone a price cut. Maybe make it account wide so it also effect linked accounts..

If we had more credit sinks subs could be things to make it easier and F2P is the mode where you work for everything.

Rebuy cost are only for while paying the sub. Ship/module costs are premanent as long as you own the module and it's relevant. But you cannot rebuy for the discount while not using the subscription.

Examples:
Tier 1: 1$/month; 1% bonus to xp in all forms; -1% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)
Tier 2: 2.5$/month; 2.5% bonus to xp in all forms; -2.5% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)
Tier 3: 5$/month; 5% bonus to xp in all forms; -5% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)
Tier 4: 7.5$/month; 7.5% bonus to xp in all forms; -7.5% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)
Tier 5: 10$/month; 10% bonus to xp in all forms; -10% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)

etc.

Some things could be adjusted. Like the rebuy could be higher or split from the ship/module cost and given separate values.

Example:
Tier 5: 10$/month; 10% bonus to xp in all forms; -10% rebuy cost; -15% and ship/module (cost universal)
 
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One idea is to do optional subscriptions. Just need something to give them in game. How about twice the value in arx and some xp bonuses?!

Do a bonus for each dollar payed per month per sub. 1 dollar equals 2 dollars in arx a month added plus 1%xp bonus to everything and maybe 1% price drop on ships... Problem is inflation at that point. It would probably be based on the lb. Unless you want to give everyone a price cut. Maybe make it account wide so it also effect linked accounts..

If we had more credit sinks subs could be things to make it easier and F2P is the mode where you work for everything.

Rebuy cost are only for while paying the sub. Ship/module costs are premanent as long as you own the module and it's relevant. But you cannot rebuy for the discount while not using the subscription.

Examples:
Tier 1: 1$/month; 1% bonus to xp in all forms; -1% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)
Tier 2: 2.5$/month; 2.5% bonus to xp in all forms; -2.5% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)
Tier 3: 5$/month; 5% bonus to xp in all forms; -5% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)
Tier 4: 7.5$/month; 7.5% bonus to xp in all forms; -7.5% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)
Tier 5: 10$/month; 10% bonus to xp in all forms; -10% rebuy and ship/module (cost universal)

etc.

Some things could be adjusted. Like the rebuy could be higher or split from the ship/module cost and given separate values.

Example:
Tier 5: 10$/month; 10% bonus to xp in all forms; -10% rebuy cost; -15% and ship/module (cost universal)

If you really want to just spend money to spend money, you can send me your $1-$10/month to me. I'll put it to better use.
 
I get that the new update is going to be a paid update and the biggest in Elite history. I agree with this and will be happy to buy it. With that statement I also believe it is only fair to have two questions answered
1. Will the update require me to uninstall and redownload the game?
2. Will the update require new hardware on the user end?
I am very happy with the game as is but new stuff is always welcome. But having to build another pc or buying a new console might be a bit much my gaming hardware budget as it is very small it would be nice to know how much more I need to invest in playing new stuff in a video game if the number is to high I will continue as is please make this very clear long before release to avoid buyers remorse Thank you o7 fly save commanders.
I feel an answer to these questions will not leak any content at all but will give us something to work towards and consider
 
I get that the new update is going to be a paid update and the biggest in Elite history. I agree with this and will be happy to buy it. With that statement I also believe it is only fair to have two questions answered
1. Will the update require me to uninstall and redownload the game?
2. Will the update require new hardware on the user end?
I am very happy with the game as is but new stuff is always welcome. But having to build another pc or buying a new console might be a bit much my gaming hardware budget as it is very small it would be nice to know how much more I need to invest in playing new stuff in a video game if the number is to high I will continue as is please make this very clear long before release to avoid buyers remorse Thank you o7 fly save commanders.
I feel an answer to these questions will not leak any content at all but will give us something to work towards and consider

To the best of my knowledge, the hardware requirements have not changed.
Of course, if you are close to capacity on your current hard drive, you may need to change to a higher capacity drive, as any kind of DLC will require storage space.
I have not heard of anyone who started with vanilla Elite having to un/re-install to add Horizons, so it should be a safe assumption that this and any future DLC will operate in a similar manner.
 
To the best of my knowledge, the hardware requirements have not changed.
Of course, if you are close to capacity on your current hard drive, you may need to change to a higher capacity drive, as any kind of DLC will require storage space.
I have not heard of anyone who started with vanilla Elite having to un/re-install to add Horizons, so it should be a safe assumption that this and any future DLC will operate in a similar manner.
I am of the mind that the game itself is at its limits and that is my fear of having to restart and why everything goes wrong with updates
 
I am of the mind that the game itself is at its limits and that is my fear of having to restart and why everything goes wrong with updates

Having just as much knowledge about how the Cobra Engine works as you, I suspect there's something else at work here that throws updates into a tizzy when released into the wild, that does not happen during internal testing. My suspicion is that the internal testing environment is "cleaner" or otherwise different from the live environment, thus they don't catch as many issues.
 
You would have done, because there was literally nothing like it at the time. People forget how groundbreaking it was.

No, I wouldn't have.
At that time, my tolerance for PC games was limited to The Hitchhiker's Guild to the Galaxy (an Infocom text-parser game). The rest of my time was devoted to the study and practice of Kapu Kuʻialua, (3rd year), which would transition into the study and practice of SAMBO (samozashchita bez oruzhiya), and Krav Maga - then following an injury, the study of Zui Quan lasting up until 2004, when an automobile accident made further practice a near impossibility for the better part of two years. That's when I really started into PC gaming, I did a little console gaming from time to time, mostly RPG's. I did indulge in the occasional FPS play though, with Quake, Unreal Tournament and America's Army topping my lists.

Elite simply wouldn't have appealed to me back then either, as it just wasn't the sort of thing I would have looked for in a distraction.
 
No, I wouldn't have.
At that time, my tolerance for PC games was limited to The Hitchhiker's Guild to the Galaxy (an Infocom text-parser game). The rest of my time was devoted to the study and practice of Kapu Kuʻialua, (3rd year), which would transition into the study and practice of SAMBO (samozashchita bez oruzhiya), and Krav Maga - then following an injury, the study of Zui Quan lasting up until 2004, when an automobile accident made further practice a near impossibility for the better part of two years. That's when I really started into PC gaming, I did a little console gaming from time to time, mostly RPG's. I did indulge in the occasional FPS play though, with Quake, Unreal Tournament and America's Army topping my lists.

Elite simply wouldn't have appealed to me back then either, as it just wasn't the sort of thing I would have looked for in a distraction.

PC didn't play games in 1984, they had spreadsheets. You had the BBC, ZX Spectrum and Commadore 64. Compared to the games at the time, there was nothing like it.
 
PC didn't play games in 1984, they had spreadsheets. You had the BBC, ZX Spectrum and Commadore 64. Compared to the games at the time, there was nothing like it.

It was pretty ground breaking at the time, I remember being awed by the graphics and open-ended play. We had a 32kb BBC model B with a disk drive that chuntered away each time I docked so the full on original experience. I was already Elite long before my friends eventually got Elite for spectrum 48ks & Commodore 64s, a Vic20 or ZX81 had more games to choose from but the games themselves weren't in the same league as Elite.

Later versions made for computers with more RAM make the original look less impressive, the technology was moving fairly quickly at the time. We'd had an Acorn Atom (4kb IIRC) before the Beeb, the BBC was a powerhouse in comparison. For a short time it was the platform & game to have.
 
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No, I wouldn't have.
At that time, my tolerance for PC games was limited to The Hitchhiker's Guild to the Galaxy (an Infocom text-parser game). The rest of my time was devoted to the study and practice of Kapu Kuʻialua, (3rd year), which would transition into the study and practice of SAMBO (samozashchita bez oruzhiya), and Krav Maga - then following an injury, the study of Zui Quan lasting up until 2004, when an automobile accident made further practice a near impossibility for the better part of two years. That's when I really started into PC gaming, I did a little console gaming from time to time, mostly RPG's. I did indulge in the occasional FPS play though, with Quake, Unreal Tournament and America's Army topping my lists.

Elite simply wouldn't have appealed to me back then either, as it just wasn't the sort of thing I would have looked for in a distraction.


As far as i know the PC didn't play games in 1984. You had the Apple MAC released that year and the IBM PC Jr and PC/AT , at a whopping $4000. The rest of us meanwhile used ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64's and BBC micros. The earliest 386 didn't come out until 1986 in the guise of the Compaq Deskpro
 
As far as i know the PC didn't play games in 1984. You had the Apple MAC released that year and the IBM PC Jr and PC/AT , at a whopping $4000. The rest of us meanwhile used ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64's and BBC micros. The earliest 386 didn't come out until 1986 in the guise of the Compaq Deskpro
I had a Timex Sinclair 1000 in the early 80's. Not that it qualified as an actual pc, but still thought it was almost worth a mention. Almost...;)

SR o7
 
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