What a waste...

[Sentience]

Agreed. Sooo many places FDev keeps dropping the ball with ED.
ED sort of just threw all its stuff on the front lawn and it's up to players to find individual pieces, with no clear path connecting anything.

Eventually some other enterprising space sim game that may or may not be in development will eventually eclipse ED in terms of content and the way it's presented to the player.
If or when that day comes, the exodus will be swift.

 

[Spacecat]

It's cool that they added these things, actual content involving them would be nice. Let's hope they develop that in "Beyond".

 

[insanephoton]

If your main focus is things that are put in the game with an announced, known location (the Cannon Megaship, for example, CQC resources, or Jaques Station), then I would be with you 100%. Frontier should indeed utilize these resources, and point players to them using in-game mechanisms in a somewhat convenient fashion.

If you are also referring to things like the Generation Ships, Ancient Ruins, or Thargoid bases, then I would say absolutely not.

These things are Exploration content (regardless of what the Travelers or Cartographers might feel), and there are a fair number of people for whom this is their primary content interest. These people take their (likely limited) game time to search for these things, figure out any riddles/puzzles, and they do this (largely) as a collaborative community. They are willing to spend their game time doing what the vast majority of the community isn't willing to do, and we all benefit from their efforts. This is something that absolutely should not change until long after the discoveries have been made, and the puzzles worked out at the very least, if ever.

Do you understand that Frontier would be taking away a very large portion of their content if they started pointing the general community towards it? What would there be for the Explorers to find?

Frontier is actually going about this the right way - designing this type of content in such a way that it takes some time for it to be found, and that it takes a community effort to completely discover and figure out. That does indeed mean that a fair number of people will be left out of the discovery and puzzle portions; that is, unless they too decide to take their game time, and add their own efforts to the collective, and be part of the whole.

When it comes to this kind of content, Frontier should never, ever, cater to the desires of those who are just looking for a guided experience that requires minimal effort/time, and provides maximum reward. That mentality is never satiated, is just the tip of the iceberg, and catering to it will sink the ship for certain.

Riôt

I have to disagree. Once a discovery is out there, especially if it's been mentioned on Galnet there should be missions to them. As for things being 'Exploration Content', there is no such thing. We have virtually no tools for exploration, just the 'honk' and scan planets to earn extra credits. All we really have is a small subsection of the community playing treasure hunt when FDEV drop in some new morsel of content, and everyone else watches the result on youtube.

It could be argued that groups like Canonn are the reason that exploration is in such a poor state. If you can keep a high profile group happy by throwing them a few puzzles then there's no need to develop some engaging gameplay and there's no point in giving players tools to find stuff, if some pleb might stumble across something and spoil the treasure hunt. It may be a cynical view, but the impression is that reason we don't have the tools to find things is that there isn't much to find. What content that does exist just follows a trail of breadcrumbs hidden behind a puzzle. With so much of the effort having been spent of the puzzle there is precious little gameplay value in the final discovery. However atmospheric the Thargoid base is. or how great the voice acting for the generation ships is, there isn't necessarily a good reason to visit these things personally. Is there any reason to visit a generation ship if someone else has uploaded all the audio log entries onto youtube?

Why should content be reserved for a subsection of the player base, as things stand we regularly see threads decrying the lack of content. If the only way of finding things is by going through Canonn we might as well declare exploration gameplay dead and buried.

 

[Kaltern]

<blunt mode on>

Frontier simply don't listen to players when it comes to game direction. Slight design flaws, yes, but never anything to do with the actual direction.
We could suggest all sorts of things, and we'll never know if they're being acted upon, or why they can't/won't do certain things that keep cropping up.

Frontier seem to want to act like the infallible software development and publishing company, that never get it wrong. Hubris in upper management is sadly the standard way to run companies such as these - always start of small, humble... then get larger, expand, and interact less and less with their customers.

Communication has dropped to an all time low. A community manager is just another way of saying 'PR guy' - we don't want PR. We want details, What's to come, things being worked on.. you know stuff that would be actually interesting.

I don't bother starting suggestion threads anymore - it's a waste of my typing and eloquence skills!

<blunt mode off>