Reflection on research activities

Abyss Odyssey

A
o7 CMDR,s !

Playing Elite Dangerous two years researching our Galaxy I came
to the conclusion that it is impossible to find randomly any at least a little important object.
However, research communities such as Mercury 7 or Distant World are gathering in groups of several dozen players,
finding just a few hours what other people are looking for years!
I have the impression that FD just merge information to such gaming communities to spur interest
play and push lone researchers on fruitless searches or to attract potential customers to buy ED.
I would like to hear your opinion here.
 

Klarg

Klarg
I'm currently a few thousand ly from the bubble searching for gan romeo. no sign of him but so far I've randomly found an old megaship that was a listening post for thargoids (closer to the bubble) and a guardian ruin in a nebula very far out. Both were already known about (discovered) but not to me. Is possible to randomly find stuff.
 

VR SenseiMatty

VR SenseiMatty
Abyss Odyssey said:
o7 CMDR,s !

Playing Elite Dangerous two years researching our Galaxy I came
to the conclusion that it is impossible to find randomly any at least a little important object.
However, research communities such as Mercury 7 or Distant World are gathering in groups of several dozen players,
finding just a few hours what other people are looking for years!
I have the impression that FD just merge information to such gaming communities to spur interest
play and push lone researchers on fruitless searches or to attract potential customers to buy ED.
I would like to hear your opinion here.
Click to expand...

Fully agree, I've been part of DW2 expedition and I only found a couple of undiscovered biological signals on planet (bark mounds). All other cool stuff where already pin pointed and plotted on the official route, so they were not new discoveries.
I've said multiple times already. If Frontier wants to give proper tools to explorers, these should be at galaxy map level. They should hire 1/2 developers that put things manually in the galaxy rather than relying only on stellar forge.
 

Autoculto

A
Several dozen Cmdr's ? Well I suppose it would take you 2 years of searching to equal what several dozen Cmdr's can achieve in 9 days.
Except 14,000 players went on DW2 so you do the math. It's like the old saying "many hands make light work"
However a lot of the finds are located in nebulas and they have long been picked clean now. I did randomly find a stellar phenomena once but I'll admit this stuff is hard to find as an individual Cmdr
 
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Miczi

Miczi
During my first (and only so far) journey to SA*, I found 2 stellar anomalies and one black hole. I don't remember if I was the first discoverer, but it doesn't really matter - it is possible to randomly find interesting stuff on your own. It is rare, but that's why we call it interesting stuff.
 

Turd Ferguson

Turd Ferguson
I have found a few random new discoveries but it was always just known biological/geological POIs in new systems.

I've never found stellar phenomenon....even a previously discovered one. Only time I've seen one is when I deliberately went to one.

I do think that at least SOME discoveries are leaked to certain player groups or certain players so as to be discovered at a time when FDev wants to run up their "active player" numbers amd increase activity.

Right now, I don't think there's anything "new" to be discovered or FDev would have leaked it. There is no benefit to have undiscovered content in the game. Its a waste of dev resources.
 

babelfisch

babelfisch
SenseiMatty said:
Fully agree, I've been part of DW2 expedition and I only found a couple of undiscovered biological signals on planet (bark mounds). All other cool stuff where already pin pointed and plotted on the official route, so they were not new discoveries.
I've said multiple times already. If Frontier wants to give proper tools to explorers, these should be at galaxy map level. They should hire 1/2 developers that put things manually in the galaxy rather than relying only on stellar forge.
Click to expand...
Even if those 1/2 people somehow manage to put a million things into the galaxy manually...
That's 1/400,000 star systems. Your chances to find something would be just as low as they used to be.
 

[Diplomacy] Carnegie

[Diplomacy] Carnegie
All (I think) of the NSPs I've found have been in M class systems. If you're filtering them out of the route planner (people do, because they're considered 'boring') then you're not going to find them.
 

Dommarraa

Dommarraa
Abyss Odyssey said:
o7 CMDR,s !

Playing Elite Dangerous two years researching our Galaxy I came
to the conclusion that it is impossible to find randomly any at least a little important object.
However, research communities such as Mercury 7 or Distant World are gathering in groups of several dozen players,
finding just a few hours what other people are looking for years!
I have the impression that FD just merge information to such gaming communities to spur interest
play and push lone researchers on fruitless searches or to attract potential customers to buy ED.
I would like to hear your opinion here.
Click to expand...
Sorry matey, thats pure paranoia.

Canonn have been accused of being fed info for YEARS, and it has simply never happened (Well 1 clue we got from a passing random "player" smells quite badly of a leak, but it wasnt from anyone official at FD).
Its down to hard work, organisation, smarts and !!NUMBERS!!.
 

VR SenseiMatty

VR SenseiMatty
babelfisch said:
Even if those 1/2 people somehow manage to put a million things into the galaxy manually...
That's 1/400,000 star systems. Your chances to find something would be just as low as they used to be.
Click to expand...
No because when these are manually placed they can add gameplay in the galaxy map to investigate and you would be able to see area that needs a more detailed investigation.
We can't have this gameplay now because the features are procedural generated so not even stellar forge knows that they are there until you drop in the system.
 

metatheurgist

metatheurgist
Dommarraa said:
Sorry matey, thats pure paranoia.

Canonn have been accused of being fed info for YEARS, and it has simply never happened (Well 1 clue we got from a passing random "player" smells quite badly of a leak, but it wasnt from anyone official at FD).
Its down to hard work, organisation, smarts and !!NUMBERS!!.
Click to expand...
Yep, this is just another version of NPCs cheat.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
SenseiMatty said:
No because when these are manually placed they can add gameplay in the galaxy map to investigate and you would be able to see area that needs a more detailed investigation.
We can't have this gameplay now because the features are procedural generated so not even stellar forge knows that they are there until you drop in the system.
Click to expand...
Trouble is, most people still wouldn't be finding the stuff that way either - by definition.

Let's say that Frontier put forward some investigative gameplay to find the {thing}. If they make it hard enough that only 1% of players are smart enough to solve the trail of clues, then - let's assume you are in the smartest 1% of players - you're competing against maybe 1,000 other people each day (not all of whom will be motivated to compete, of course). It'll be discovered pretty much as soon as someone can fly over there and take a look, and the chances that you find it first are minimal ... and there's no prize for finding it second. Meanwhile the other 99% of players will be complaining that the clues were too hard, and it's unfair for Frontier to require problem solving using stuff not provided in game.

Or, they can make the clues sufficiently vague (e.g. Dark Wheel Station, Formidine Rift Mystery) that they only narrow it down a little, and it's then just a matter of systematically (or otherwise) searching all the systems that might fit the description. Then the thing probably won't get found for years even with combined player effort - and if it is, the actual discoverer will mainly have been lucky than skilled. (And in the meantime, questions about whether the thing is in the game at all yet will be common)

Or they can just skip the clues, as done with a lot of the codex stuff, and leave it mostly to luck and a bit of thought about search patterns, and then there's tens of thousands of explorers out there who might stumble across it so it still won't be you.

They might be able to put together some semi-procedural "search" missions - you get some clues, you follow them from location to location, you find something of "tip off mission" levels of exciting. But either they'll be "you're told where to go to get the next clue" or they'll be harder than that ... but there'll still be EDPoirot up a month later so you too can solve the mysteries without needing to think about it beyond putting some numbers into a website.
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
Can't say I agree with the OP.

Back when Ram Tah announced the existence of the "new" Guardian Sites, I joined in with searching a particular sector and I found something like half a dozen Guardian sites/ruins (in previously undiscovered systems so I was, presumably, the first person to find them) after searching the best part of a hundred systems over a couple of weeks.
None of them were anything special but it shows that it is possible to find things by "brute force", as long as you look in the rightt places, and you look hard enough.

Having said that, I do wish there was more science, deduction and logic involved in finding stuff.
For example, we (now) know the 'goids like Ammonia worlds so somebody who's interested in 'goids can jump into a system, give it a blast with the FSS and then, if there's no Ammonia worlds, they can probably move on without being too worried that they've missed something.

I wish there was more stuff like that involved in exploration; that we could fit sciency modules that provide extra functionality for the FSS, sysmap and galmap and allow us to find things by picking up "signals" and then triangulating the source of them or looking for "anomalies" or "fluctuations" in things that the modules would detect.

Course, if we did have stuff like that then every man and his dog would be able to use it and so everything that could be found would be found really quickly and we'd still be left to moan that "there's nothing to be found".

Putting things into the game to be found and then making it possible to find them using logic while still making them difficult to find is actually pretty darned difficult.
 

Lightspeed

Lightspeed
Some players just have the knack and patience to find things. I never understood how (before biological and geological POIs were highlighted in the NAV panel) they were able to discover these things by flying upside down around and around the planet. But they did !

Now I can locate them, I am still in awe as to how they were able to spot them. They still aren't blindingly obvious until you get close.
 

VR SenseiMatty

VR SenseiMatty
Ian Doncaster said:
Trouble is, most people still wouldn't be finding the stuff that way either - by definition.

Let's say that Frontier put forward some investigative gameplay to find the {thing}. If they make it hard enough that only 1% of players are smart enough to solve the trail of clues, then - let's assume you are in the smartest 1% of players - you're competing against maybe 1,000 other people each day (not all of whom will be motivated to compete, of course). It'll be discovered pretty much as soon as someone can fly over there and take a look, and the chances that you find it first are minimal ... and there's no prize for finding it second. Meanwhile the other 99% of players will be complaining that the clues were too hard, and it's unfair for Frontier to require problem solving using stuff not provided in game.

Or, they can make the clues sufficiently vague (e.g. Dark Wheel Station, Formidine Rift Mystery) that they only narrow it down a little, and it's then just a matter of systematically (or otherwise) searching all the systems that might fit the description. Then the thing probably won't get found for years even with combined player effort - and if it is, the actual discoverer will mainly have been lucky than skilled. (And in the meantime, questions about whether the thing is in the game at all yet will be common)

Or they can just skip the clues, as done with a lot of the codex stuff, and leave it mostly to luck and a bit of thought about search patterns, and then there's tens of thousands of explorers out there who might stumble across it so it still won't be you.

They might be able to put together some semi-procedural "search" missions - you get some clues, you follow them from location to location, you find something of "tip off mission" levels of exciting. But either they'll be "you're told where to go to get the next clue" or they'll be harder than that ... but there'll still be EDPoirot up a month later so you too can solve the mysteries without needing to think about it beyond putting some numbers into a website.
Click to expand...

I'm not so much interested in being the first one to find them. It would be enough to find them independently, without touristic books or codex, and in a nice variation once every 50-100 jumps. At the moment I could only find a couple by luck on the complete DW2 route which is a very bad result. Tbh I expected ti find much much much more things on a trip like that. I came back with a couple of bark mounds only.
 
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