Tracking exploration activity

[marx]

Wake up CMDR, we've got season 33 to burn. It began on 2023/10/12 and ended on 2023/12/07. Let's see what happened then...
Not much. As expected, Update 17 was another Thargoid update, with no effect on exploration. By now, Starfield has come and gone, with no effect on Elite's exploration either.

The only thing I would have originally said is that the competition at the squadron leaderboard's top seems to be tiring out, but then a new large squadron came late in the season and took the gold with a big lead. 17.4 billion points for them, which is well over that of silver (5.3 billion) and bronze (4.8 billion) combined. Below the medalists though, basically everything is the same as it was in the previous season: a one-digit percentage difference on the #10 - #100 and #100 - #1,000 ranges. Those decreased by almost the same amount that the top ten increased (due to the new gold medalists).
The legacy leaderboard dropped significantly in percentage, but given the overall minuscule activity there, by absolute it wasn't that big a drop.

What about the crowdsourced data's numbers? That can be summed up quick: they're pretty much all the same as the previous season's. There's little more to be said here, it's as to be expected, when the end of the year approaches and nothing of note happens with exploration.

So, that's about it then. The current leaderboard season will end on February 1 next year, but I plan on posting the year's recap soon after 2023 ends. Not that I expect much to change between now and January, so I could even make it now - but hey, better to do it properly. It's a good opportunity to make a nice chart, at least.
As usual, thanks for reading, and when the time comes, happy holidays, see you then!

 

[marx]

I've been unexpectedly busy this new year, but I finally wrote up the 2023 summary. I've posted it as an update to the earlier post, which had all the years before. Head on there to read what was in 2023.
(Also, note that I had to lower the bottom of the charts to 5,000 systems (weekly moving average), which used to be 10,000: the reason being that the line regularly went below that this year. I'll update the pictures here sometime to reflect that, but for now, the previous years will stay as they are. The spreadsheet has the updated ones, and the whole 2017-2023 chart too.)

Oh, and there was something else of note for 2022 and early 2023, but I'd rather mention this here because it'd be lost between those two recaps. Namely, that while on EDDN, true real explorers Commanders who are over 500 ly away from Sol have generally made up a third of the uploaders at any given time, during the busiest times of the Thargoid war, their ratio fell to around a quarter, and at the very start of the new war, even lower than that. You can check the EDAstro EDDN tracker, it's quite interesting.

Thanks for reading then, and see you in February! Unless Frontier release another post about how many systems have been discovered in the galaxy: in the past two years, they tended to do that sometime in January, on then-Twitter.

 

[marx]

Time for Season 34, which began on 2023/12/07 and ended on 2024/02/01. Nothing happened during this time that seemed to have influenced exploration. The crowdsourced data is remarkably stable, it has barely moved since 2023. May, except a bump down before Starfield and then back up after. So on that front, there's nothing more to say.

Unfortunately, this January Frontier haven't posted the number of systems discovered (yet?). It's not like that was a scheduled feature though, it was just that in 2022 and 2023 January both, they did do that - so I was hoping this might become a regular thing. Maybe later this year, for the tenth anniversary of the game.

Anyway, on to the squadron leaderboards: this was more interesting. Despite nothing happening in-game, there was a marked increase below the top ten squadrons. The top ten was mostly the same as it was in the previous season, with #1 dropping a bomb early in the season, and nobody contesting that. There was more competition below the top three though, with most squadrons coming in closer to each other than usual.
Now, the overall activity is still rather low compared to before, but from the previous season, it was a nice lift up. Meanwhile, the number of active squadrons stayed basically the same, so squadroned people look to have played more.
Exactly the same things can be said for the legacy branch leaderboard too, by the way. Just with tiny numbers in comparison. Still, it's funny to see the same things happening there.

Thanks for reading then, and see you near the end of March!

 

[marx]

While everyone's busy talking about the Python Mk II, have some fun news here. On tonight's stream, Frontier said that 0.06% of the galaxy has been explored. I'm pretty sure they rounded the number down this time. You see, not only would that mean a whopping -75% decrease in exploration activity in the last 13 months, but it would also mean that during this time, the ratio of systems uploaded to EDDN vs total systems discovered would have risen from the usual ~40% to 120% 3.78 million systems discovered, 4.57 million uploaded, oh my!

So yeah, the real number is probably something like 0.061% or 0.062%, and they just decided to round down. If the EDDN / total ratio held the same, then that's where it would have landed.

Since the first stream of the year, with the news that the game is getting more development and not less, exploration activity has seen a nice increase too, by the way. From what I've seen, it's the same in other areas as well. So far, it's usually around 20% here, but I'll get back to this when the squadron leaderboard season concludes, as that'll be when we can compare with that too.

 

[marx]

We had an interesting season with Season 35, which ran from 2024/02/01 to 2024/03/28. Now, while nothing happened in-game that would influence exploration, something important had happened outside that certainly left its mark on exploration activity too.
To recap, on January 31, Frontier held a video stream about what they plan for the further development of the game, and this led to a significant boost to activity. Before it, there was plenty of speculation about the game being well on its way to maintenance mode: after it, there was a visible increase even in exploration activity, even though no exploration-related updates were announced, and it turned out that the "mysterious" key feature rework was only Powerplay: so, it looks like there's plenty of appetite. Let's see how this happened in detail then.

I'll start with the squadron exploration leaderboard now, since that was the more interesting part this time around. Even if the absolute points weren't exactly high, it has been a long while since there was a competition this close at the top. A total of six(!) squadrons were all close to each other in points, with things quite undecided even to the last hours, with the difference between #1 and #6 being only 1.3 billion points the last time I looked at it. (Somewhere around 1 AM.) Looking back at the last season leaderboard today, there have been relatively significant sales at the top even in the final hours, with over a billion points' worth of data sold in the top three. Still, I'm not going to change my methodology just for this, as while it's significant for those squadrons' results, it's still only 1 billion out of the 52.8 billion total of the top 10, so I'd rather not mix in later results with the earlier ones.
In any case, overall squadron activity was up not just in the top ten, but also the lower brackets, #10 - #100 and #100 - #1,000. I'm not saying it was overall high, but things have certainly improved noticeably. What was high though was the increase in active squadron numbers, both in absolute and in relative terms. Around +1,610 squadrons (161 pages) more than the previous season, an increase of 22.7%. Note that that's even larger than Season 27, with the new Thargoid war, which was +1,490 squadrons and +15.94%. (Followed by a drop of -1,910 the next season. Oops.) So it seems like squadrons' exploration activity in general was improved, just by those news only, nothing in-game yet.

How does it look in the crowdsourced exploration data then? There's a visible improvement over there too, although not as much. I'd say it's worth noting that the increase was higher than the amount that was "lost" to Starfield's launch and then gained back afterwards. It's also worth noting that the increase in squadron competition as the end of the season drew nearer and nearer wasn't reflected in the crowdsourced activity, which again makes me wonder about just how many explorers might be inside and outside squadrons. But, again, no decent estimate on that.
By today, the increased activity seems to have settled down, but it settled down to a higher level than where it stagnated before. Mind you, this current level is still the same as what the worst of 2022 was, and less than half of what was the worst before Odyssey. So, there should be plenty of potential and room for improvement.

As for the the current season, there's not much on the horizon yet: it'll end near the end of May, and the next major update is scheduled somewhere during the summer (assuming it doesn't get delayed again), so there are two more development streams to come, with the second one just at the very end of the leaderboard season. The Python Mk II was originally said to come before the next update though, so we'll see - who knows, maybe most everyone will rush back to the bubble to buy one when it will come

Oh, I almost forgot about the legacy branch, I still keep track of its squadron data. No changes there.

Thanks for reading then, and see you later!

 

[marx]

Here's Season 36, which ran from 2024/03/28 to 2024/05/23. Compared to the last one, this was less interesting, despite the game getting interesting updates: there was the first new ship variant after many years, the Python Mk II, and more importantly, there were the SCO FSDs. Especially since the latter's later variants (sorry) could be engineered to be better than the CG-exclusive drives from back then. Now, I don't know how many explorers flew back to the bubble after this surprise addition (might be fun to look into later), but none of the above was reflected in the exploration activity numbers. Neither on EDDN, nor on the squadron leaderboards.

Instead, on both, activity has peaked from last season and is slowly declining to the usual levels. They are still better than what was the lowest so far, at least. The squadron leaderboard had some excitement. Although the competition was nowhere near as close as it was the previous season, that one was the anomaly, and this one is more like the usual, where it's the top two squadrons that compete the most. The excitement came from being quite close too, with the #2 squadron executing a final-hours bombing run, but that wasn't successful this time. Now, I have from Discord the final numbers for the top 10 from ten minutes or so before closing, but other than those, they aren't much different from what I recorded several hours before, so I'll be keeping the numbers I recorded, to be consistent with the numbers below the top ten. (I'd rather not use top 10 from later but top 100 and top 1,000 from earlier.)
How do those look, then? The same as what I said before: numbers are down from earlier, but not the lowest yet. Seems more like a return to form, even if said form is still really low compared to previous years.

The exact same thing goes for the EDDN numbers. No surprises hiding in there - or at least, none that I noticed.

The next season will last until the middle of Summer. Now, the Powerplay 2.0 refresh update is slated as then, but with no precise dates released yet, I expect it'll be around the end of the season anyway - we'll see. Based on some WIP snippets in the streams we've seen, exploration data might play a larger role in undermining some powers: whether that's for better or for worse remains to be seen, but if it'll really go that way, it should be interesting to see its effects on exploration activity. That said, even if it happened for whatever reason, the most effective way would be to farm known systems in / near the bubble, so the effects of larger groups of people doing that would mostly only show up on the squadron leaderboards, not the EDDN numbers.
But anyway, it might not happen, and PP 2.0 might not be released this season either. We'll see.
As usual, thanks for reading, and see you later!

 

[LifesAJourney]

I don't know how many explorers flew back to the bubble after this surprise addition

I did!

 

[marx]

It's that time again: Season 37 is over, which ran from 2024/05/23 to 2024/07/18. Nothing happened relating to exploration, and the PowerPlay 2.0 update was delayed once again. As such, it should be little wonder that there has been no noticeable swing in activity anywhere, and in general, it has slowly slid down to the levels it had before the January news when Frontier announced their development plans for the game. However, this activity is still sustained by somewhat fewer squadrons than before, so in general, the per-squadron activity actually remains higher than at the lower times.

At the top of the PC exploration squadron leaderboard, there were four squadrons all closely competing with each other (although I didn't see any chatter on Discord servers I'm on about this), and while I was at first glad that I won't have to hang around to see any bomb this time, but then there was a big one. A medium-sized squadron came up from somewhere below the top 100 to take the gold trophy by dumping 9.7 billion points (so, 19 billion Cr) in the final hours. Interestingly enough, without this one, the squadron activity would have remained almost exactly the same as in the previous season. In the #10 - #100 and the #100 - #1,000 ranges, it has remained the same, even though there were 8,000 squadrons active during that season, and 7,000 now.

Meanwhile, the legacy branch appears to have lost a relatively significant amount of squadron activity, but since activity there is so low in absolute terms, I wouldn't think much into this.

Moving on to EDDN numbers: in a similar vein to the squadron leaderboards, they slid back to the levels they were before, from 2023. June to 2024. February. No surprises to talk about here.

That's all for the previous season then. As for what might be coming next: the current season will end in the middle of September, the month in which PowerPlay 2.0 is currently slated to release. We'll see, but even if it does before the middle of the month, its effects (if any) on exploration will likely only be seen in the leaderboard season that starts after it. Now, the Python Mk. 2 will release for everyone in August, but given that it's at best an average ship at exploration, I don't think many explorers would rush back to the bubble to buy one.
See you in September then, and thanks for reading!

 

[marx]

Less grind brought more player activity. Who would've thought, eh?
I mean, bookkeeping stuff; Season 38 is over, which ran from 2024/07/18 to 2024/09/12. There were two noteworthy events during this time, related to exploration. First, the so-called "Type-8 Update" on August 7, the highlight of which (sorry, T8) was that Engineering got some serious grind reduction all over the board. This had led to quite a noticeable increase in general activity, which also translated to a similar increase in exploration activity... but not entirely similar, and it's where the differences are that might be interesting.

First off, the PC exploration squadron leaderboards didn't increase by that much. They went back to around the level of where they were in Season 35, which was the time when Frontier made their anti-doomer announcement(s) about their upcoming plans for the game. In this season, there was once again a significant increase in number of squadrons on the leaderboard, matching almost exactly in both the relative increase and the absolute number of Season 35. Compared to the previous two seasons, more of this was felt in the #10 - #1000 ranges than in the top ten's. Pretty close results in some places between the top ten, although looking at records between when I checked the numbers at midnight and then where the season closed, the top squadron still dropped in a billion points in the final hours. That billion was about twice the total output of the legacy PC squadrons: although they were tiny the previous seasons anyway, the current season was barely over half of what the previous season produced there.

Meanwhile, the numbers from EDDN paint quite a different picture. With a few days' offset, the exploration activity increase followed the general activity increase. However, over time, the two decoupled, and exploration kept going. By the time it might have started to slow down, the news of the Mandalay came on Aug. 28, that we're going to have a new exploration-focused ship. The last time we got one was the Diamondback Explorer, way back in 2015. Sure, the Krait Phantom became a big hit with explorers, but that was unintentional, as that variant was announced as a lighter multi-role ship more suited to fast smuggling and combat, and it just happened to be great at exploration. Even the Phantom was at the end of 2018. Anyway, back to the main topic: with those news, crowdsourced exploration activity had kept on increasing. To date, it had kept going, although it seems it might be stopping now, but it's too soon to tell. In any case, it climbed back up to the same level as it briefly reached in February, and that was just an announcement, not an actual update to the game. I'll be curious to see how (if) activity will change when updates come, although in regards to exploration, that's a new ship, and Powerplay 2.0 is a major feature rework that'll most likely be at most tangentially related to exploration.

Back in November then, and as usual, thank you for reading this! (Unless you didn't, in which case you should, as there's a Raxxla clue hidden in there)

 

[marx]

The age of Asps in front of things is over. The time of Mandalays in front of things has come.
Fun fact: since 2024. Oct. 31, which was when the 4.0 Mandalay Update has released, 96% of new exploration screenshots are now Mandalays. (Source: IMITFU.)

Ahem. I guess I should be more serious. So yeah, Season 39 is over, it ran from 2024/09/12 to 2024/11/07, and the grossly overpowered Mandalay Update was on 10/31. I could, and will, go on about the update, but most people reading this will be interested about the squadron leaderboard stuff, so let me just hop to that first.

But first, a small recap. The Li-Yong Rui tripling bonus used to apply to squadron leaderboard points, all the way up till Season 15, because the Hutton Orbital Truckers demolished the Season 14 leaderboards with it, scoring 76 billion points back then. After that, Frontier removed the bonus contributing extra points to the squadron leaderboard. There were also times when boosted payouts from "exploration" community goals had boosted points as well, but those didn't apply to entire seasons. Now, I don't know yet if Powerplay 2.0's new exploration bonuses apply extra points to the leaderboard or not, but with the merit grind being as it is, I strongly doubt many people would have gotten a high enough rank for that.

So, in this season's squadron exploration leaderboard, we have a new record: Endurance Exploration has demolished the squadron leaderboard with 38.9 billion points. About 25 billion of that was from well before the update, so that wasn't even done in preparation for a day-one exploration bombing of Powerplay... and at the same time as Frontier nerfed the gain flood from trade, they also temporarily disabled any PP gains from selling exploration / exobio data. The future of that is uncertain, and whether there are people still holding on to their data or not, who knows. The #3 squadron was from one player dumping 15 billion points for the update, so Powerplay 2.0 did influence things in a way. Then there was increased competition between squadrons all in the top 10, all of which combined make up for a highest new total of the top 10. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Moving lower down, while the top 100 and the top 1,000 did see some nice increases over the previous couple of seasons as well, no new records were set there. This season was mostly about the most committed squadrons. There were around 9,850 squadrons (= 985 pages) active during the season, which was another nice increase on top of the previous season's increase, and bringing it back in line of the highs around Season 25. (Can't tell what it was like before, as it turned out that the squadron data we recorded then were afflicted by the infamous bug.)

Over at the legacy boards, there were ~140 squadrons active (= 14 pages), with a nice increase of points, but only relatively. In absolute numbers, the output is still quite low: if all of the legacy points were combined into one squadron, it would have scored somewhere around #30 on the live branch.
I heard from the XBox side that there were 78 pages at the end, which would be around 780 squadrons, but that's all for now - should get some screenshots at the season's end. Assuming that PS numbers would roughly be the same (they pretty much always had been), that would mean a rough estimate between platforms of 85% Odyssey PC, 14% legacy consoles, 1% legacy PC. That's not half bad, given that it usually used to be split 80% / 20%, back when they were still developed for, and not in maintenance mode. (Unless for some reason the Playstation's numbers would no longer match the XBox's.)

As for the crowdsourced data numbers: there's not much there yet, given that there has only been one week since the update, and even that time has been marred with server troubles. Before the release, activity peaked at the same peak it did back in February, and slid down to briefly touch the same low as before. The week since the update appears to have seen a marked increase, an easily visible one when looking at EDDN events, and this was what brought season 39's numbers from a low to an okay-for-post-Odyssey level. How it's going right now looks promising so far (as I said, you can just look at the charts and notice it right away), especially as the next upcoming major feature was recently announced to be colonization. However, we don't know yet how (or if) exploration will feature into that, so who knows. Powerplay 2.0 brought little new to exploration, and even what little it did was disabled (temporarily, or so FD has said) after a few days, so right now, it's practically irrelevant for most explorers. We'll see how it goes from here, but I wouldn't expect much for exploration from it.

So, it's all Mandalays all over the galaxy. I'm not a fan of how they've thrown balance out the window with it, but it is what it is. It certainly has the looks. We'll see how far the increase in activity will go, and how long it'll last - but given how the core issues of exploration have remained unaddressed, I guess the question is whether they'll last until colonization is released, whenever that will be. Back on the yearly roadmap, the then-secret major new feature was said to be the end of this year, but seeing how much this update had slipped, I'd expect it'll be next year instead.
Certainly not in eight weeks, which is when I'll be seeing you all for the next season leaderboard update, plus the wrap-up of this year. Thanks for reading!

 

[marx]

As luck would have it, the current squadron season ended soon after the new year, so here comes a post summarising both. Happy New 3311/2025!

I'll start with the leaderboard season, then the year's graph and recap will go into the same post as the other years have gone. Edit: that'll have to wait until tomorrow though.

So, season 40! From 2024/11/07 to 2025/01/02. This was the first full season where Powerplay 2.0 was in effect, and it turned out that the new LYR bonus also applies to exploration leaderboard points. As a recap, up till Season 15 (which ended four years ago) their tripling bonus applied too: at that point, a squadron absolutely demolished the leaderboard, and Frontier swiftly disabled that. Was it a bug? An oversight? Either way, it's back, except it's not something you have to maintain anymore, but a permanent 2x bonus once you get it.
In other exploration-related news, the Cobra Mk V also released on Dec. 12, and despite it and the Mandalay both being in "Early Access", the two have displaced most other exploration ships in popularity, with the new Cobra taking a second place thanks to it being better at exobiology. Plus the SCO stabilization is just that good.
Then there was the Titan Cocijo CG in Sol, which was over on Dec. 17. Many explorers flocked back to the bubble in order to take part and get the set of double-engineered SCO FSDs, which we all assumed were going to be exclusive for some time at least. So many players flew back that this event is visible across a number of data, so that was fun to see. Once the new drives were handed out, and unlocked for general purchase too, many flew right back out again.

Now that I was talking about the data too, let's see the results. First, the crowdsourced data from EDDN: with the Mandalay, activity shot up, steeper than anything since DW2's CG in the core ended. It peaked for a short while at a level just below from where Odyssey crashed, then slipped down to a level that was still twice the usual activity, until the start of December. Then it began heading down, which coincided with Cocijo making its way towards Sol. Then of course there was the Cobra Mk V, which many planned to pick up on day one. As things are now, at the end of the year, we're seeing activity climb at a steady rate, though not nearly as steep as it was at the Rise of the Mandalay. If you look back at earlier years though, the December holidays were always flat lines, except when there was a major update at the time.

All in all, in the 8 weeks of this season, the total activity rose significantly, and reached just below the level that it was last time back in 2022 Q1, Season 22. While that point itself was quite low by earlier standards, compared to what went on today, this was still a doubling in a short amount of time.

With that, I'm segueing into the squadron exploration leaderboard results. The top 10 wasn't as competitive as it was in the previous season, so this time around, it was more of a return to form - with the LYR bonus now again contributing to it, mind. It'll probably take some more time for enough people to mine enough to get their merits to max rank. On the other hand, the number of active squadrons shot up by 25%, from 985 pages in the previous season to 1,242 now. That one is a new record from Season 25 onwards - due to the leaderboard bug, we don't have reliable data on this from the first 24 seasons. (Well, except the very first season!)Also, with these many squadrons, the top #10 - #100 and #100 - #1,000 ranges look interesting. The former was a step down from the previous season (note that that was significantly higher than what has been the usual these days), though still performing well, while the lower ranges did even better than last time. Well enough that the entire total of #1 - #1,000 came out better than the previous season's.

Moving on from the live PC board, to legacy, and as a surprise, to the XBox's top ten: this time around, I've had two people send in screenshots of the XBox exploration leaderboard, so we can again compare that to the PC boards. While I don't have data from the PlayStation side, historically the two had been roughly the same, with XB having somewhat more Commanders producing somewhat less points, and PS having somewhat fewer Commanders producing a bit more points, both balancing the two aspects out and leading to pretty much equal numbers. I have no idea how things are on the consoles now, but if we assume that PS still equals XB, then we get the following:

• Number of squadrons: Live PC: 87%, Legacy PC: 1% , Consoles: 12%
• Top 10's totals: Live PC: 92.6%, Legacy PC: 0.8%, Consoles: 6.6%

Over the years, this used to be a 80% / 20% split between PC and consoles most of the time. Personally, I expected the new numbers to be worse than this, so hey, well done!

Finally, looking to the future: as far as we know, no major updates are planned for the current leaderboard season. Unless something unexpected happens, we'll see where the activity levels settle down to, now that the big events of yesteryear are done.


That's all for today CMDRs, thanks for reading! Have fun out there, and take care not to unintentionally SCO into anything! (I did that once myself already.)

 

[marx]

Here we go, season 41, from 2025/01/02 to 2025/02/27. Funnily enough, I was technically wrong when I said that "as far as we know, no major updates are planned for the current leaderboard season", because the colonization update did happen yesterday. Not that that one day would have made much of a difference, but still, it's amusing - to me, at least.

Anyway, what did we have during the season? The Mandalay released for credits on this last day, so we'll see just how hard it'll dominate (it already does the screenshots) now that anybody can buy it without spending Arx. There was also an exploration CG, as much as these are about exploration, which included a silent 4x bonus on the data sales. Thankfully, this didn't apply to the leaderboard points. The LYR bonus however still does, and enough time has passed by now that the "heavy hitters" of various squadrons appear to have levelled up their pledges now. So I'll start off first with the squadron leaderboard results: as it might be expected, there was a significant jump up in how many credits all of the three ranges I track (the top 10, 100, 1000) produced. The overall number of active squadrons decreased, but it's still on a decent level, it's just that the previous season was an outlier. Still, this illustrates the effect of the LYR bonus nicely - fewer squadrons producing significantly more points.
The interesting thing is that the LYR effect seems to have been more prevalent in the lower ranks: while the top 10 produced roughly the same amount of points as it did during the previous (peak) season, but now with significantly stronger competition, both the #10 - #100 and the #100 - #1,000 ranges pushed out significantly more points, to the tunes of +33% - +50%.

About the legacy branch: on PC, they've produced even worse, with only 90 squadrons active, and the only reason why the total wasn't the lowest was because one Squadron of One (literally their name) still put in 233 million points to take the up. As for the consoles, I have no data on them this time, but if somebody sends me some, I'll update this.

Let's compare that with the crowdsourced data from EDDN: after the drop of Cocijo and the consequent rise when people get their shiny new FSDs and went out again, activity peaked up to the level it was just before Odyssey, stayed there for a bit, and it seems to have started going down again. We'll see if colonization will impact this in any way, since right now, it's a bubble hauling activity. Then of course there is that the popular Mandalay is now available for credits, so I wonder how many will pick one up now and use it to head out into the galaxy again.

Also, Frontier haven't released their annual "here is how many systems you all have discovered to date" update, so if someone could poke them to do that, that'd be great.

Well then, thanks for reading, and see y'all again near the end of April! By then, hopefully we'll have Gutamaya Corsairs to lithobrake with.

 

[marx]

It's time once again: season 42 has ended, it ran from 2025/02/27 to 2025/04/24, meaning it covered the start of colonization, which has been a rather rough ride so far. I'll start with an anecdote first: to me, it seemed like most of the established exploration Discords have pivoted towards discussing colonization instead. On the subject of data though, there have certainly been changes. Now, the overarching theme seems to be that while there has been a significant drop in exploration activity, especially from the "top performers", things look to have stabilized at a level that's still significantly higher than what it had (mostly) been in the last three years. Of course, that's still lower than even before the Odyssey launch, to say nothing about the pre-FSS days, but hey, the game's not getting any younger.

Oh yeah, there was one other event of note during the season: the Gutamaya Corsair did launch, it became surprisingly good for exploration, and in general has generated quite a lot of discussion. It has been a polarising ship, but unlike the Mandalay (and to a lesser extent, the Cobra Mk V), it hasn't made any noticeable impact on the crowdsourced data. (Beyond the gap on the update's day, of course.) As I said before, things dropped down from the previous heights of this year there, but that's no surprise really.

On to the live PC squadron exploration leaderboards then! Well, the top 10 certainly dropped there. Even with overall reduced activity there, there was still some competition - but the #1 squadron pumped a large amount of points a week or so before the end, and that was it, no more question on who's going to win this season. In the end, they have scored more points alone than the rest of the top ten combined.
Lower down the ranks, it was a drop from the previous season (or two), but back to business as usual. Except with the permanent LYR bonus now, of course, which would at least offset some of the activity "lost" to colonisation. One thing worth of noting though: the number of active squadrons in this year increased by a third, going from 1,034 pages (so, around 10,340 squadrons) to a new record of 1,366 pages (~13,660 squadrons). So Trailblazing certainly brought back (or in) a large number of people.

There is one large negative outlier though. Now, I don't have any data on the console leaderboards, but the legacy PC exploration leaderboard was decimated, and not in the Roman way, but the other way around. While the number of active squadrons there barely decreased, down to 89 now, "active" is a stretch when the #1 squadron of the season scored 21.9 million points. So, the lights are still on in the legacy PC branch, but practically everyone has left to blaze it on the live version. ("It" being their own trail, of course.)

That's pretty much it for this season then. Looking forward, we'll probably get an unknown new ship during the current one, and probably more on what Vanguards will be - and hopefully, colonization will be stabilised and fixed. See you in eight weeks then, and thanks for reading!

 

[marx]

It's time again: Season 43 ran from 2025/04/24 to 2025/06/19. This has been the first full leaderboard season since colonization was added, and it might be the last one before Vanguards change how squadrons work. That depends on whether the update will come out by the middle of August, or not.

Now, the effects of colonization have been visible in exploration activity too. On both the squadron leaderboards and the crowdsourced data, things have gone down significantly in this season, almost back to the low levels to where they were before the Ascendancy update (Mandalay, and Powerplay) brought significant growth. On the squadron leaderboards, this is less visible, but let's not forget that since the previous update, the LYR bonus has once again been active for squadron leaderboard points, and it's a permanent unlock now. By my estimate, the current season's squadron exploration activity is down to pre-Ascendancy levels, if we were to adjust for the LYR buff. Especially if we're looking at the #10 - #100 and #100 - #1000 ranges, where it most likely has a smaller effect anyway.

Oh, and before I forget, a word about the Legacy PC branch: 59 squadrons. and the top ten's combined total is 109 million points.

Over on the crowdsourced data activity, the trend is quite clear: this season has been a constant line down since the colonization update. When and where it'll stop is anyone's guess. It's still above the lowest normals of some previous post-Odyssey years, but not by a whole lot.

So yeah, colonization has likely siphoned off some of the renewed interest in exploration that came with the Mandalay. Now, this is just a personal anecdote, but to me it seemed that the amount of chatter on the majority of exploration Discords (that I'm on anyway) has gotten lower, too. Or maybe it's just the places I'm on - I wouldn't put much stock in this.


What's to come in the foreseeable future then? There'll be Vanguards, which will overhaul squadrons, and whether it'd lead to increased exploration activity is anyone's guess. (If squadron carriers can jump more than 500 ly, there'll certainly be a brief gold rush.) But it's a moot point, because the same update should bring the Panther Clipper Mk II. Of course, this might not be out until the next season - but hey, who knows, maybe Frontier will make it outjump the Mandalay! (Nah, but one can dream.)

Anyway, if the current season ends before its scheduled eight weeks, I'll post an update then, and if it doesn't, then next post will be in August. Thanks for reading!