Elite has always been a black-box affair in many of its iterations and especially at launch.
As we are approaching the 5-year benchmark, it's been cracked open more and more.
There is still data buried deep in some interfaces, or totally hidden to the player, that needs to bubble up to the player.
Player activities have been recorded locally at the bounty & ships passing through. A nice touch, but not that helpful.
It's too specific and too buried to be of any use manner by having a UI that allows overview.
In response, we have had communities websites made by the players of Elite Dangerous,
that collect and interpret clumps of data, and have them online as a separate tool, as guides, charts, spreadsheets.
These exist, namely because of the game's lack of in-game UI to do just these very specific tasks. Especially in the games early black-box state.
And I'm okay with that.
It provides touch-points for these Communities to blossom, where individuals can gravitate towards communities that share their own view and interests.
These endeavours have taken a lot of effort of peoples spare time collaborating together as a hobby and with a lot of help from the Devs helping develop an API for the journal.
But then there are a number of issues, which also affects powerplay and squadrons.
1 ) Advertising. It's hard for new players to get acquainted with these communities.
2) These endeavours depend solely on the social dynamics of people and their "spare time".
Community sites/tools can fall apart quickly when key people fall out, or can't contribute.
3) Community-created Guides create hotspots.
If 100 people decide to go Guardian Module hunting and they all use the same guide, they all come to the same single location as provided by the guide.
Creating a player hotspot, and a lack of Online-materials, forcing Private or Solo game-modes.
If the galaxy map (and NOT just the codex) could show off more of the OTHER player discoveries so pilots themselves could pick out different locations instead of funnelled into the same location.
This would alleviate that situation but it brings up an interesting idea.
Being able to see both, player discoveries visualized in the galaxy map (an issue brought up before by others)
BUT
Heat-maps of player activity.
As we are approaching the 5-year benchmark, it's been cracked open more and more.
There is still data buried deep in some interfaces, or totally hidden to the player, that needs to bubble up to the player.
Player activities have been recorded locally at the bounty & ships passing through. A nice touch, but not that helpful.
It's too specific and too buried to be of any use manner by having a UI that allows overview.
In response, we have had communities websites made by the players of Elite Dangerous,
that collect and interpret clumps of data, and have them online as a separate tool, as guides, charts, spreadsheets.
These exist, namely because of the game's lack of in-game UI to do just these very specific tasks. Especially in the games early black-box state.
And I'm okay with that.
It provides touch-points for these Communities to blossom, where individuals can gravitate towards communities that share their own view and interests.
These endeavours have taken a lot of effort of peoples spare time collaborating together as a hobby and with a lot of help from the Devs helping develop an API for the journal.
But then there are a number of issues, which also affects powerplay and squadrons.
1 ) Advertising. It's hard for new players to get acquainted with these communities.
2) These endeavours depend solely on the social dynamics of people and their "spare time".
Community sites/tools can fall apart quickly when key people fall out, or can't contribute.
3) Community-created Guides create hotspots.
If 100 people decide to go Guardian Module hunting and they all use the same guide, they all come to the same single location as provided by the guide.
Creating a player hotspot, and a lack of Online-materials, forcing Private or Solo game-modes.
If the galaxy map (and NOT just the codex) could show off more of the OTHER player discoveries so pilots themselves could pick out different locations instead of funnelled into the same location.
This would alleviate that situation but it brings up an interesting idea.
Being able to see both, player discoveries visualized in the galaxy map (an issue brought up before by others)
BUT
Heat-maps of player activity.
How would you feel If the Galaxy Map had a filter to display Hotspots of player activity?
With a toggle to be able to differentiate between Total / Online / Private / Solo player populations.
Just remember to filter off the Developers accounts so we don't see those secret locations under development.
It can display an average 24-tick recording of the Average System Population of the Pilots.
So under 12 new columns of data in the BGS, we have
| Player Population Based on 10 minutes of activity in a system | 1 tick ( previous 24 hours) | 7 ticks ( previous game week) | 30 ticks ( A month) |
| Online (raw accumulated stats) | 29 | 265 | 6354 |
| Private (raw accumulated stats) | 0 | 23 | 354 |
| Solo (raw accumulated stats) | 3 | 100 | 5688 |
| Total ((raw accumulated stats generated at the end of each tick, so the 3 separate queries for online/private/solo aren't required to do the math at run-time) | 32 | 388 | 12396 |
| Average Player Population ( Total adjusted by timeframe as seen in-game) | 32 | 55 | 413 |
| Depending on DB snapshots, possible duplicate columns of the ticks for counters of these to be appended to during the current tick-phases. |
A pilot is logged as a population of that system when they have existed in the instance(s) of that system for more than XX minutes.
XX Minutes becomes a balance thing of player activity.
I would say 10 minutes denotes a System of interest for a single player.
1+ minute is your honk and go fuelscooper
5+ minutes would catch your average FSS (guestimate).
10 minutes I feel is the golden-lock zone.
Systems with a large number of bodies for extended periods of FSS activity might require 10 minutes, but definitely flying to launch a probe.
10 Minutes would record the quick stop-overs of pilots flying to a station, docking, refuelling/rearming buying commodities.
20 minutes might show off just heavy combat.
It's a balancing act to be sure and with fringe, questions to regulate the data.
Do you count sitting the docking bay? or just in supercruise? on a planet? etc etc.
And of course, this needs to be averaged by unique players
You can have 1 player with 20 instances of interest (board-hopped or did a trace circuit but was in an instance of the system for 10 minutes) in the same system in a single day.
That counts as a player population of one.
2 players with 2 instances of interest (both playing separately or together for 10minutes in the same system), well that's a population of 2.
Hopefully, it will give players an opportunity to see a player factions grouping around a home-system before we get there.
Especially when averages for a week/month could be shown, to which a player guided to a player-faction home system, could stumble into a Visitors Beacon
(one per squadron, to inform, website and times to meet up (taken from the info page of the squadron)).
Powerplay players could see grouping on the fringes of a conflict.
Traders can see the stations of a route that are in use.
Explorers can see groupings of other explorers.
One could see player hotspots out in the fringes and get curious to have a look.
CG / BGS players can see if the majority of activity is Online / Private / Solo
Naturally Disruptive players can, of course, use this to plan attacks, or disrupt community events....of course, but so does every system developed. People always find a way to hack tools to give them a nefarious advantage, and they tend to be the ones already up to speed on community events anyways to sabotage them.
I truly believe that a heatmap might be useful data for players to have.
I just don't know which players, and if it brings value to the community as a whole to incentivize the devs to do the work.
So this is where you come in:
Opinions, tweaks, yays or nays.
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