Tracking exploration activity

[LifesAJourney]

I wonder, however, if it's just Odyssey's fault. Maybe it's also about "all cool things have already been explored"? Depending on what you consider funny/interesting I feel like it's become really difficult to find undiscovered stuff nowadays. Sure, there are still millions of unknown ELWs out there but if you'd rather look for nebulae, rare stars, galaxy extremes, and other stuff of this "type", it now requires an enormous amount of time, dedication and luck to discover something noticeable. If you like sparse areas and galaxy fringes, you are lucky if you find one unexplored system in 5-6 jumps.

Apart from KOI 1701 1, what really interesting has been discovered in 3307...?

So, what I'm saying is that in my opinion it gets harder and harder to find the motivation to hit the Black. Only psychopatic exploration lovers who doesn't need any specific motivation as such are still out there.

 

[angusmadmac1]

I wonder, however, if it's just Odyssey's fault. Maybe it's also about "all cool things have already been explored"? Depending on what you consider funny/interesting I feel like it's become really difficult to find undiscovered stuff nowadays. Sure, there are still millions of unknown ELWs out there but if you'd rather look for nebulae, rare stars, galaxy extremes, and other stuff of this "type", it now requires an enormous amount of time, dedication and luck to discover something noticeable. If you like sparse areas and galaxy fringes, you are lucky if you find one unexplored system in 5-6 jumps.

Apart from KOI 1701 1, what really interesting has been discovered in 3307...?

So, what I'm saying is that in my opinion it gets harder and harder to find the motivation to hit the Black. Only psychopatic exploration lovers who doesn't need any specific motivation as such are still out there.

I've just finished visiting all the region's and now off to find some stuff I haven't found before . I have to admit that The chances of finding anything "new" to the game is "null" but there is always a "chance". But it is pretty empty out there . I don't visit geo signs on planet seen it done it , bios I will look at and I have no interest in exobiology game play . I think the frontier don't understand why people explore and that shows ( my own opinion ).

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Apart from KOI 1701 1, what really interesting has been discovered in 3307...?

Eos Ausms KX-U e2-831 just fit into 3307 and was pretty neat.

I wonder, however, if it's just Odyssey's fault. Maybe it's also about "all cool things have already been explored"? Depending on what you consider funny/interesting I feel like it's become really difficult to find undiscovered stuff nowadays.

Well, it does depend if your motivation is "undiscovered" or "undiscovered to you", certainly.

I found two new bio species on the same planet the other week, while just hopping around near Colonia. Sure, they were only new to me, but that's fine.

 

[Hedy]

Personally I keep going for the unexpected views, mainly Neutrons and mostly circling the core. I still find nothing better than sitting alone on a planet watching the strangest of configurations cross the space above.

 

[marx]

I wonder, however, if it's just Odyssey's fault. Maybe it's also about "all cool things have already been explored"?

Depending on what you consider funny/interesting I feel like it's become really difficult to find undiscovered stuff nowadays. [...]

Apart from KOI 1701 1, what really interesting has been discovered in 3307...?

It really does depend on what one considers interesting. For example, I discovered two new anomaly types a month ago, which I thought to be quite interesting, but few others did. I ended up with a grand total of two players messaging me, looks to be around six visitors to the systems, and as you can see, no replies to that post either. Obviously most people don't consider Notable Stellar Phenomena to be all that interesting. (And these two were even right next to already-known NSPs, so if more people were looking for such, these should have been found much sooner.)

Odyssey's new exploration content was interesting for some time, and fun to look into, but in my opinion it's mostly a solved matter by now. Once that's done, there's little gameplay to it.
I don't think many people expected that the expansion's new exploration content will be less interactive than Beyond's NSPs were, but well, there we have it.

So, what I'm saying is that in my opinion it gets harder and harder to find the motivation to hit the Black. Only psychopatic exploration lovers who doesn't need any specific motivation as such are still out there.

Oh, looking at the Discords of various squadrons who do exploration, I beg to differ. There are still a good number of new explorers out there, it's just that the retention rate has always been quite low - and the FSS hurt it even more. Although I do wonder if there might have been fewer new explorers since Odyssey, but that's quite difficult to tell: with having considerably more stuff to do in the two bubbles, it would make sense.

Anyway, you hit the nail on the head with the motivation part. Frontier never really added any new motivation, new reasons to explore the galaxy for. When they did at some motivation for exploring near the bubble for, activity shot up: I'm talking about the Thargoid and Guardian stuff. But since that's almost entirely handcrafted, it ran its course relatively quickly - compared to how the Forge's generated galaxy has basically carried exploration for the seven years since the game launched.
Adding deeper motivation to finding new discoveries (as opposed to farming stuff already discovered by others, such as in "exploration" CGs) would help a lot though. Unfortunately, that's not really something that could be done as a side project by an employee or two... and right now, Frontier have much more pressing concerns with Odyssey anyway.

 

[marx]

FD have posted the current number of systems discovered (on Twitter, see here): it's 222,083,678. I've added this to the sheet, so, let's see what it translates to!

The previous number we had was on 2021/05/27, about a week after Odyssey launched. Since then, 13,752,808 new systems have been discovered in total, leading to an average of 57,543 new systems per day - which is the lowest it has ever been. Ouch.
The previous lowest was 64,141 between the game's launch and 2016/03/17 (bear in mind that the game wasn't on consoles for most of this period), and the second was 66,044 between 2021/02/05 and 2021/05/27.

As an added curiosity, while the new on EDSM / new on total ratio rose up to 47% the last time, now it's back to 40%, which is the level it usually hovers around. Also, out of the 222 million total, there are currently 70 million systems uploaded: slightly under the third then.

Well then, see you next week when the squadron leaderboard season ends!

Update: actually, see you the week after that, since I won't be able to log in-game next week, so I can't look up all the usual info.
Update2: actually 2, I derped, for some reason I thought the season would end a week sooner. No changes then.

 

[Rogue I]

Last season's Xbox exploration top 10. o7

 

[Zieman]

Last season's Xbox exploration top 10. o7

same for PC:

Looks like someone's quite miffed with FDEV , wonder if that squadron will be left alone...
Pretty impressive for one man squadron though.

 

[marx]

First, to @Rogue I and @Zieman : thank you! I don't need the PC numbers though, I only need the consoles because I can't look those up myself. I have the PS leaderboard top ten for this reason too as well now. (Just in case someone else was thinking of posting those here too.)

Looks like someone's quite miffed with FDEV , wonder if that squadron will be left alone...
Pretty impressive for one man squadron though.

Probably won't be, what with evading the profanity "filter" and such. If Frontier even become aware of it, that is. They might not pay enough attention on their own to notice this unless somebody reports it.

This season's numbers to come soon too. I just realised though that I made a mistake last season, and the total for the #100-#1,000 fit was 218 billion instead of 260 billion. Ouch. Scrap what I wrote about the total of the last leaderboard season then: the now-corrected figures put the total at pretty much the same level as the season before it.

 

[marx]

As I promised, here are Season 21's results for exploration squadron leaderboard activity, and EDSM activity for the same time. (Minus a few days, but it's not like there are going to be less systems and bodies uploaded.)

First off, the squadron leaderboard results. Here, activity was up a bit, with bigger competition for the top three. Then as the end of the season was closing in, a surprise happened: out of nowhere, a one-man squadron with a rather crude name suddenly dumped 8.8 billion points (so 17.6 billion Cr) onto the leaderboard, shooting all the way up to #3. So, rather than keep a comfortable bronze place, the squadron previously there had to rush more data back to regain their position, which they did. This underscored pretty well how much of an impact single Commanders who played a lot and hoarded data can have. (Hm, I should probably look into this a bit more, see if I could glean anything on this from the crowdsourced data.)
...um, I meant that singular Commanders, not that Commanders who aren't in a relationship

So anyway, with these eleventh hour sales, the top ten's total increased considerably more than last season's. It wasn't all just this though, activity outside of the top ten improved as well. Not exactly by a lot, and it still hasn't quite gotten back to the levels it used to be around (despite the Odyssey mapping buff), but hey, an improvement is an improvement.

One more thing worth mentioning is that the number of PC squadrons (pages on the leaderboard) has again decreased, although only by a minimal amount. Still, to date there have only been three seasons (including this one) when this happened, usually there were always a couple hundred more pages, so a couple thousand more squadrons.

Oh, and looking at the consoles, the situation there seems to be the same. Slight improvement in the top ten's totals (I don't have the data required for the #1-#1,000 fit), roughly the same number of squadrons as last season. Personally, I'm somewhat surprised that the same amount of people are still hanging around, what with Frontier's ongoing silence on when Odyssey will be released for them. Let's salute the hardy explorers!


Moving on to the crowdsourced data: during this squadron leaderboard season, activity on EDSM has been climbing up slowly but steadily. This is good, although given how low it went before, what this means is that it has climbed back up to the bottom levels of 2019 and 2020. No anomalies, outliers or such to report either: perhaps the only thing that might be of some interest is that the Planets / Systems ratio (which excludes stars, so it shows how many bodies players have pewed with the FSS) is a bit more "compressed" than usual. Which might be more people adopting the same scanning habits, or it might just as well be mostly random chance over the two months.

It might be worth quickly recapping here at the end that two weeks ago, Frontier posted the updated numbers on how many systems have been discovered in total by then, and the simple calculations then showed that the rate at which they were added set a new negative record, although not by much. See my post #146. So, this is the backdrop for all of the above.

That should be all then. Thanks again for reading, and see you when Season 22 ends!

 

[Zieman]

nevermind, was too hasty...

 

[marx]

eh, #4

It was to #3 for a short while, and as I wrote in the sentence after the part you quoted, the previous #3 regained their position after.

Edit: no worries, it was just a small mistake.

 

[marx]

Time for Season 22's results, which ran from 2022-02-03 to 2022-03-31, and the EDDN activity over the same time.


First off, the squadron leaderboard results: this time around, the top 4 squadrons competed quite close to each other, until Canonn pulled ahead around the later stages by dumping enough data to nearly double their then-current score. It has been a while since #1 pulled ahead from #2 by this much, and those were before the LYR nerf too. It has also been a while since #2-#4 were this close too, and it's quite interesting how significantly all three squadrons there differ from each other.


What about the total though? Curiously enough, the estimated total almost exactly the same as the previous season. The top ten have set a Post-Odyssey record, and did quite well Pre-Odyssey too. (Again, usual disclaimers: Odyssey bonus payout, no more LYR score bonus.) However, because the #10-#100 range saw a decrease as large as the #1-#10 increase, and #100-#1,000 remained the same, the season remained the same as before.

As for the number of squadrons, with a modest increase there (2,853 pages of ten squadrons, which is +27 above the last season), there's a new record. Although unless there ever will be a significant drop, larger than the one after Odyssey's launch, we'll probably reliably say this every season or so.

About the consoles: I don't have their leaderboard data yet. I'll update this once I do, so, would somebody mind sending them over please? Thanks in advance!


On to the crowd-sourced exploration activity numbers then! Final numbers are still subject to change, as a few days are missing - I need a few more days from today to estimate the number of revisited systems - but a few days shouldn't make much of a difference. So, starting from just around the start of February, activity has clearly started trending down again, even faster than before. It looked all set to establish a new negative record by the end of March, but then on March 10, a capital-class shipstorm happened as Frontier announced that Odyssey won't be coming to consoles. Right after these news, activity on EDDN started going... up.
Not a large spike up, mind you, just about larger fluctuation levels that happen from time to time - but before this, it had been going cleanly down. Considering how the news was received generally, this wasn't what I expected to see. Although I guess it makes sense too - especially when we consider that Update 11 launched five days later, which brought some new fleet carrier content, that might have lead to folks moving around more. (The way that the auto-scanned Stars / Systems ratio went down might indicate this too, but that's speculative.) I'll be curious to see how all this compares with the console squadron leaderboards.
By the end of the season then, crowdsourced activity was just about tied with season 20, the current lowest record holder. If we look at it on a monthly basis though, 2022. March did set a new negative record, although just barely below the previous one. We'll see where things go from here then.

Thanks for reading, and see you in eight weeks! Unless some unexpected news pop up, of course.

 

[Rogue I]

Here's the Xbox leader board. o7

 

[marx]

Once again, it's time: here are Season 23's results, which ran from 2022-03-31 to 2022-05-26, and the EDDN activity over the same time.

Back on March 15, Frontier made their infamous "no Odyssey for consoles" announcement, and while the effects across various communities were immediately visible, there were only a couple of weeks left till the end of that season then. This season marks the first full leaderboard season after that announcement. Now, I don't have the PS top 10 statistics for neither season 23 nor 22, but I do have them for the Xbox side, and historically, they've both been pretty much equal. So, how do the leaderboards look?

On the Xbox, activity has dropped like a rock. While the number of squadrons remained almost exactly the same (783 pages last time, 781 pages now), activity went down by around 60%, it's just over a third of what it was in season 22. Granted, the previous season was actually quite high compared to earlier seasons, but even when we compare to the worst season (that I know of), this one has set a new negative record by far.
Of course, all this was entirely to be expected. Did this translate to increased exploration activity on the PC though? (Well, AFAIK profile transfers aren't implemented yet.)

Short answer: it didn't.

When it comes to the squadron exploration leaderboards on the PC, there have been slight decreases from the previous season, and while overall it doesn't look good, there have been slightly worse seasons before. An interesting tidbit is that the #10-#100 range performed somewhat better than usual, especially compared to both the top ten and the #100-#1,000 range: I wouldn't read much into this though. From the numbers, it's pretty much business as usual. During the final week, there was a race between the top two squadrons, but that was decided by the winners dropping such a large amount of data that they nearly doubled their points.


Over on the crowd-sourced data, there was a bit of stagnation, then activity going up some, and then trending down again: the usual fluctuations, still trending down slightly, just low enough to barely set some new negative records. (A few days are still missing because of the revisited systems, but they should make no significant difference.) Unfortunately, I've never noted down the EDDN statistics of how many hits come from console, but going by memory, that seems to have halved or so. So with that in mind, it's actually good that activity here didn't stop as well... yet?

Lately though, it seemed to me that exploration groups have been more active, plenty of initiatives, expeditions and the like going on, but this didn't seem to translate to much more new data. However, there is still one thing to consider that might hint towards this: the bodies scanned per system (excluding the auto-scanned stars) have consistently increased, and are now at the level where they briefly were when the FSS was new. (Then the influx of starry-eyed new explorers realized that the Exploration Update didn't live up to the promises, and this also dropped like a stone.) This started since the end of March and has been going on since, so it doesn't look like the usual fluctuation. Personally, I suspect that it's due to folks wanting to feed third-party apps like Observatory with more data, as they allow them to notice good finds much better. The FSS and its barcode doesn't help with finding good-looking stuff or with Odyssey-landable planets, valuable flora and the like, but external utilities do - as long as we feed them more scans. Group efforts see players encouraging (or often even requiring) other players to share their data too.
Meanwhile, the auto-scanned stars per systems count has remained largely the same, so it doesn't look like there were mass migrations neither towards nor away from the core.


Well, that's about that then. If anything else comes up, I'll just add it here later. But hey, Frontier, if anyone's reading this (which I very much doubt, but you never know), exploration could use some of that "key feature overhaul" you mentioned for 2023

To everyone, see you with the next update in eight weeks, and have fun!

 

[SpaceTrash67]

o7 Marx-

I like to tally our squadrons exploration against the backdrop of total exploration - and I came across a 'gap' in the data - it appears that the data for one of the seasons is missing - as I was trying to fill in some missing data somewhere @ Season 19 & 20? Notice how we have the regular, 8-week intervals....then your table jumps 4 months - but the value shown for 2021-08-19 "Season 19" - was actually season 20 - which ended on 2021-10-14??? So it must have been missed earlier??

Here's the message for Squadron Gold I got on Oct 14:

And here's the screenshot of 'Last Season' (that just ended on Oct 14) - so I could record the values at a later date...Our squadron points total are from Oct 14 - but are those shown ending on Aug 19 in your spreadsheet

I also know for a fact that in a previous 'squadron' / LRH3305 'expedition' slowly returning from Beagle after DW2 - we dumped all our points and took 1st place in Dec 12, 2019 ("season 8') - but those points are shown in your table for 'Season 7' in October 2019....Here a screenshot from one of our members the last day of that season (@ Dec 11, 2019):

So I think the 'missing season' is going pretty far back?

Not trying to make work - just trying to nail down the seasons once and for all....

Cheers!

 

[Rogue I]

The xbox top 10 of last season o7.

 

[marx]

@SpaceTrash67 : good catch, thanks! What happened was that on that sheet, I accidentally switched the dates from "starting on" to "ended on" with season 20. The dates on the "Exploration leaderboards (PC)" sheet were fine, there was no season data missing, and this was just a text error: I fixed it now, of course.

 

[Rogue I]

 

[angusmadmac1]

Ouch ....not even half of the last leaderboard for Xbox