[Solved] (?) - Archambault Terminal - Nuclear Threat Closes Starport...

[Redden Alt-Mer]

The Far God storyline about six months ago had some surface sites discoverable in-game. Indeed, one of the complaints about that was that the surface sites were found by players but it was a long time before Galnet - which had been talking about other Far God stuff - got around to acknowledging it.

More recently there was an in-game attack on the Gnosis megaship (which, like the Dynasty surface sites, had its own share of bugs)

Touché - I forgot about the Far God one. The Gnosis one was a consequence of an in-game event, and possibly the worst spoiler in the history of the game, after Ed spoiling all the guardian modules months before they were in game

 

[Jmanis]

That is kinda my point: not only it's not free, it's probably so expensive to do due to how hard it is to code exceptions to the BGS that it's not worth doing it

As I said in another thread but will reword for here. Ian's post referred to writing new missions and commodities which would require coding effort. But FD have literally so many existing mechanics which would require no new coding, just injection of new content (Place debris field at position X, system Y, add a beacon in fixed location which displays message Z). If that requires new coding; that is, taking the server-side source code and editing/recompiling/deploying, then FD have done an atrocious implementation of their game and would need to go back to the drawing board.

Any sane software developer will have APIs for that, so the closest thing to coding is one-liners to call functions which inject content in the game. I'm not going to rewrite the whole thing coz it'd take me an hour to do, but there's so much they could've done using existing mechanics and no/minimal coding.

News comes after the event. Using a news service to seed content is just about as backwards as it can be.

I said in another thread...

"...it's been a common complaint that Galnet articles precede in-game changes. While it'd be nice if they happened at the same time, I'd prefer a galnet update after the ingame event occurs, rather than before. "

It was a bit of a throwaway comment at the time, but since several people have referred at least to the idea that "News happens after events"... well... I agree in principle... but look at (RL) modern news. Sure, an initial occurrence event might take an hour or so to report on... but once a situation is active and monitored by media outlets, reporting is in the order of minutes, if not seconds.

Distance is no issue in ED, as it's been repeatedly shown long-range FTL comms is commonplace. So when Children of Tothos first took Archambault, the reporting might've happened in an hour, up to a day, sure. Incidentally, the reporting happened before the event in that situation anyway, so it was a balls-up.

But after the initial event, any media outlet worth it's salt would be watching those events like a hawk (that's why jobs like Foreign Correspondents exist). Reporting of developments in news media should be almost instantaneous under such circumstances, not with an hours-plus delay like with the defusal of the situation.[1]

I'd just briefly comment on your mention of "...using a news service to seed content...."... I don't think anyone is asking for that (unless you're using some weird use of the word seed)... but what's Galnet meant to do? Realistically, it's to notify players of "things of interest going on in the galaxy". If a new type of Guardian ruin pops up in some unexplored sector, I don't think anyone's expecting that to pop up in Galnet (although, once again, https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/uid/5b85650c7833577a59438189 ). But if there's events affecting the general public in areas of human populated space then they should definitely be appearing, and if it's an enduring event, it should be in almost-realtime with the event.

On Galnet being for commander-driven events... FD tried that, it was a trainwreck. I'll stop short of mentioning all the times my articles about actual in-game activity from my group got ignored, but when certain high-visibility writers posted about it from some other rando, it'd get published.

[1]There is a counter-argument of "But how can news have 100% clarity on the event to report on it?". Well... for one, Galnet is run by the Pilot's Federation, which is basically the most connected intelligence network in the game so it's feasible. But throwing that away for a moment, why couldn't it be like this?

Thursday tick happens, Archambault changes back to normal control, Galnet article goes up saying "Reports are coming in that shots have been fired aboard Archambault station. Station security appears to be ramping up activity as chaos breaks out amongst the civilian population. Media reports suggest that the FIA may be making a move on the Children of Tothos, but the situation is too volatile to get a solid read on events. The situation continues to be monitored but events appear to be reaching a closing point."... I'm no wordsmith but that took 30 seconds to write. Players then have a chance to go out and see "Oh, station is back to normal now" and an article follows up the next day with the more detailed stuff about the agent taking them down.