If I may; how should Beyond address this in your opinion?
From the perspective of someone who does read it quite a bit, and still misses things:
1) Rethink its position in the interface - it's not prominent in either the cockpit or the station. (The whole cockpit interface is getting a bit cluttered with the new Horizons features, so this might need a much larger redesign)
a) As a stop-gap, perhaps separate Powerplay and Galnet out into separate buttons on the left panel.
2) Move the auto-generated Powerplay stats from the Galnet screen onto the Powerplay screen - with Galnet removed, there'll be a spare box on the left they can go in to (though it'll be an interesting piece of layout work)
3) Send an inbox message when new Galnet articles appear, ideally with a way to get to Galnet directly from the inbox message. I do read Galnet, but with it being out of the way on the interface it often takes me a few days to read new articles because I forget it's there.
4) More frequent articles. At the moment, other than the semi-automatic AEGIS / station status articles, and the weekly CG articles, there's *maybe* one other article a week which is often quite short. If there was a new non-automated article most days, people would check it more frequently. There are various characters - Powerplay leaders, Engineers, AEGIS heads, corporate press offices, etc. - all of whom might have personalities and opinions on current events. Let them regularly comment on what's going on and put forward arguments for the various sides.
(Obviously this is a suggestion with a *substantial* ongoing workload in writing and translation, but I think long-term would give a very high payoff in terms of engagement with the storylines. I'm actually quite worried about Galnet Audio - depending on how it's implemented - because of its potential to increase the per-article workload and so mean we get fewer articles.)
a) I understand there's some lore that Galnet is controlled by the secret conspiracy to stop people finding out anything interesting. Introduce a new crusading editor and their comedy sidekick who keep narrowly escaping from bizarre accidents if you have to.
b) Don't just concentrate on the main Thargoid plot with it. There are other sources for material as well.
- look at the old RIG news in FFE. Some utterly irrelevant celebrity gossip will add a bit of life to it.
- the Independent and Scientific journals in FFE sometimes ran multi-part series on aspects of galactic life. Have articles on the history of the universe - use "50th anniversary of bombing of Rockforth Legal Academy" as an excuse to talk about the evolution of independent systems law, for example. [1,2]
- foreshadow and follow-up on CGs on more than just the weekly "it's here" cycle. For example, we had a CG recently in Ogmar to build a new Coriolis station. That could have had an article a few weeks before the CG talking about overcrowding at Dervish Platform, and an article today describing the ribbon-cutting ceremony as its hammers started to rotate.
[1] Ending the weekly "top 10 systems in Boom" BGS lists was the right decision for Galnet, but does take away one of the major in-game sources of information about what BGS states actually do.
[2] A lot of articles like these would be fine to re-run once every year or so, to bring them to the attention of newer players and fill a slow news week.
c) A lot of in-game events *don't* currently make Galnet - or at least not in much detail. By reading Galnet I can find out that some old INRA bases have been discovered, and that they were a bit morally dubious. There's a lot of extra information in the data beacons at those bases ... but the text of those beacons isn't available in Galnet, and neither is the location of the bases. So if I want to find out what's up beyond the extremely short Galnet summary, I need to either look out of game at other player's screenshots or coordinate lists, or happen to run into another player who already knows, or repeat from scratch the tough search process used to find them originally.
All of the in-game discoveries - INRA bases, Guardian bases, Thargoid bases, etc. - could in theory have separate articles ready to go. When a commander first loads the asset, that inserts their name(s) into the article and queues it for publication a few days later. (Again, obviously, a lot of work to prepare them all!)
d) Return of the player news submissions, somehow.
5) Make Galnet searchable and if possible hyperlinked between related articles. So if you e.g. read an article about Thargoid attacks in Maia, you can jump around and find the other articles about Thargoids, Maia, etc. quickly.
...
On a more general point, there's a *lot* of in-game information which a lot of people don't realise is actually there. Galnet is one, the substantial information provided on the commodities and trade is another. In some cases the interface makes it hard to find if you don't already know it's there ... in other cases it's in plain sight on the interface but it's easy to miss if you don't know why you should look at it.
There's perhaps a case for a significant interface redesign - but in the meantime:
- some more tutorials focused on the non-combat side of the game: have a trading tutorial, have an outfitting tutorial, have a Galnet tutorial (or introduce it in one of the early tutorials), have a basic exploration tutorial
- in CQC, on the loading screen for each match, there's a set of short tips on how to fly, what distributor pips do, what the powerups do, etc. Put the same sort of thing on the spinning-ship loading screens for the main game. Even hints that there's something on the interface to pay attention to might help.
On the more significant redesign side, consider a "help overlay" - press a button and lots of "what is this" labels appear over the main interface.
...
Anyway, that's probably way more than will fit into Beyond, but hopefully there's something useful in it.
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