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Hi pilots!
As always, you’re covered with a new recap of the Elite Dangerous news, for February.
Check out “The Outpost #112”!

Follow us on Twitter @RemlokEN, and join the community on Discord.

 

Summary:

• Frontier News
  • Roadmap: The Future of Elite: Dangerous
• Powerplay and Lore
• Community Goals
• Pics of the Week
• Videos of the Week

Frontier News

Roadmap: The Future of Elite Dangerous

There’s a lot to say, prepare a glass of UAlcohol and some cookies from Leesti. Take a deep breath. Think of something that pleases you, like the first time you took off with your Sidewinder. Exhale through your nose. Let’s go!

On February 19, thanks to Lead Designer Adam Bourke-Waite, Frontier finally gave us some precise information about the “Background Simulation – BGS” gameplay. Even though many bugs currently exist in all parts of the game, the BGS community held by the largest and most vocal groups of players have motivated the first official communication since December 11, when Chapter 4 Beyond was released.

There are so many bugs currently that I can no longer maintain an accurate list as I did at the beginning of the year. So we will put these problems aside, accept them, and focus on the latest communications from Will Flanagan, Lead Community Manager.

Message de Will Flanagan, Lead Community Manager

Hello Commanders,

We wanted to give you an update on the current state of the Background Simulation and detail some changes we are going to be implementing in an attempt to combat some of the issues that have been flagged up.

Before that, we would like to thank all of your who shared your feedback on the forums, across social media and on Discord since the release of Beyond – Chapter Four. With these reports, we were able to identify issues with the simulation and while we could not reply to each of you individually, please rest assured that we have read your feedback and investigated details in the galaxy’s databases and server logs where possible.

As we’ve mentioned previously, this is an on-going process, so some tweaks and changes are still likely to come as we release more updates of the BGS.

We’ve been taking a really in-depth look at how all of the galaxy’s factions have reacted to having multiple states active at once and to how the galaxy reacts to each and every player action in the core of the background simulation, and are ready to release some more changes to the live game servers today from 1:30 PM (UTC).

While we don’t usually put changes like these out on a Friday, we’ve heard your feedback and believe it is better to give you the weekend to try out them out and provide any feedback you might have. Next week, we’ll be able to take a look at your comments and assess the impact these revisions have had.

Please find the details below:

Faction Influence

• Most cases reported – where you had performed a lot of positive influence actions to a given faction, but saw minimal increases or even a decrease: this is due to the way the system distributes influence and has to keep everything at 100% maximum (this can be lower when some factions in the system are in a conflict).
• At the current time, if you are trying to support a faction in a system, we would recommend that you try not add too many positive influence inputs to other factions that system, especially if they have relatively low influence.
• After extensively analysing the live galaxy’s data and logs, we have re-balanced equations which convert player actions into influence.
• We have also looked at the amount of movement that occurs per tick and you may find movement is slightly slower. This is done for two reasons:

Faction Conflicts

• The Outbreak state no longer breaks War and Civil War scoring (a fix we introduced two weeks ago).
• From Beyond – Chapter Four, Faction Conflicts were changed to run for a fixed duration, keeping a daily ‘score’ for each faction, and then the overall Conflict result was determined by the number of days that a given faction ‘won’. The days won are announced in the faction status local news articles in that starsystem.

Starting Conflict

• To reduce the number of Conflicts in the galaxy and to make them more meaningful, Conflicts will now only be triggered during invasions or when one or both factions control an asset that’s at risk by that Conflict.

Player actions affecting a daily Conflict score

• Previously, the day’s score was determined by diverting faction influence inputs (subject to the usual rules of combat actions affecting War and Civil War and non-combat actions affecting Elections). However, we’ve now changed faction Conflict scores to be driven by their own set of equations.
• We’ve kept the relative balance of how each action is weighted against others, but it should now be much harder to lose a day in a Conflict by accidentally putting positive inputs into your opposing faction.
• Fixed Conflict Zone objective causing incorrect influence changes when they occurred during the tick and whilst a Conflict state was in the process of ending.
• To be clear, influence changes after any Conflict should be the ±4% change. This is designed to separate the winners and losers of a Conflict, so that it doesn’t immediately restart.

Winning Conflicts

• We’ve stopped awarding bonus days won if one side beat the other by a huge margin (designed to allow a faction to force a draw by heroic efforts if it was losing 4-0),
• Conflicts will now end earlier if there aren’t enough days of the Conflict remaining for the losing faction to at least achieve a draw.
• This should make Conflict results less confusing and further reduce the number of Conflicts going on around the galaxy at any point in time.

Balancing player actions for War/Civil War

• Winning Conflict Zone objectives is the most obvious way to help win a war.
• Most combat missions, combat bonds, bounty hunting and violent crimes will all contribute towards a War or Civil War.

Balancing player actions for Elections

• Players need to concentrate on non-combat actions that positively affect their chosen faction, while avoiding positive actions for the opposing faction. You can also provide negative economic actions onto the opposing faction.
• Non-combat missions, commodity trading (and smuggling), search and rescue work, selling exploration data and helping out with scenarios at installations and megaships are all good ways to contribute towards an Election.

Economic and Security states

• Many of you have commented that the investment and Civil Liberty states are easy to achieve and sustain across the galaxy, and that Lockdown and Famine are very rare.
• We’ve already made a several changes for how negative actions apply negative economic and security effects, and also how quickly the EP & SP bars drain back towards the centre. We expect to make further tweaks once we’ve analysed the results of this set of changes.

Therefore it’s up to us to carry out new tests, questions, and report bugs and problems to Frontier via their forums: Bugs Report.
If you only speak French, visit our Remlok Community Discord, where you can write your reports in French!
The English speaking community is welcome too! 🙂

 

Then come more thorough details on what we can expect from 2019 and 2020 for Elite: Dangerous.

The message is quite well turned and is willing to be transparent about the game development. Explanations for the game follow-up current slowdown are provided; are highlighted the 2019 updates and the content that will be expected of them, but also some of the most important information: the next big Elite: Dangerous update is scheduled for mid-2020.

Now, don’t panic, let’s read what Will has to say and analyse the meaning of this communication.

They remained silent for a long time, due to their previous unsuccessful tests where clumsy communications resulted in the ire of the community. This is a new attempt at communication, more calm and transparent. The community would deserve a little better, but this is a first step. Let’s see how it goes.

Frontier plays the honesty card, proposing a 2019 draft plan, an estimate of the new era as a smell of a brand new Elite: Dangerous, or at least an improved version in every respect pushing the simulation even further.

Message de Will Flanagan, Lead Community Manager

Greetings Commanders,

We’ve had a number of questions from our community eagerly awaiting news on the future development for Elite Dangerous. We wanted to share a development update with you which talks a little more about our upcoming development plans. It’s a long read but we wanted to be as open as we can at this stage with where progress is and what information we are able to share. There will be more news and updates over the coming months.

Beyond

It’s been a little over two months since Beyond – Chapter Four, our final instalment in the Beyond season, arrived and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response from the community. Beyond allowed us to deliver a year of free updates to Elite Dangerous in order to build, enhance, compliment and connect the content that has been added since launch. This step in the ongoing evolution of Elite was vital. The long-term vision for the game, even from the early days, has always been ambitious and we are committed to supporting the game with that vision in mind. All of this is made possible by the support of our amazing community. We were truly delighted that from Beyond – Chapter Four, we’ve seen one of our highest ever player counts with many hundreds of thousands of Commanders jumping in and taking to their cockpits together. Thank you!

The Next Era

Back in August, we mentioned that the team had begun work on the next major era of Elite. We believe this will be a defining moment in the history of the game and it will be our biggest update yet.

In that post, we explained that the content was still very early in development, so we won’t be ready to announce it for a while. To give this more context, in order to realise the ambition for this update, and the size and scope of the content we wish to bring to the Elite Dangerous galaxy, we estimate this major milestone will be ready by the latter half of 2020.

As development progresses, we will share more news and announcements on features, as well as timelines regarding this upcoming content for Elite. We can understand that having a long wait for news can be frustrating, but we truly believe that this will be the single most impactful update for our community. Having a development team dedicated to this milestone is our continued and unwavering commitment to making Elite Dangerous the most authentic, ambitious, and expansive evolving space game in the world. (Okay, we take note. The best space sim game in the world…. despite the other triple A’s under development, such as Star Citizen for example, or Eve Online. After all, it’s two years of active development + months of concept just for this new era… To be continued…)

As mentioned in our previous post, this new era will be paid for content and all lifetime expansion pass owners will have this included in their pass.

What now?

We know that waiting for a mammoth update like this one is going to feel like your 3rd run to Hutton Orbital. But don’t fret, we’ve got plenty of updates, content, and plans happening as we progress through to this monumental milestone.

As well as the team of developers working on our next big milestone, we also have a smaller development team focused on adding to and improving the existing game between now and that time. This will take the form of regular game updates and development supported events.

Development supported events

One of the biggest changes will be the way that we create and support in-game events and activities. Starting in the coming months, we will be looking to change the way that in-game events happen. The aim here is to create ongoing, engaging, and varied sets of content that are supported by the development team which players will be able to actively engage in.

We have listened to community feedback regarding Community Goals and while they are an incredible tool, they have become somewhat routine for many Commanders. We felt that we needed to adjust them to be more event-related while taking our in game events a big step further. We will gradually be changing our community goals and their frequency, using them within a larger schedule of development-led events to help us create more improved, meaningful and engaging experiences.

As well as Community Goals, we will also be using things like new scenarios, reputation and reward boosts (such as Superpower reputation increases), BGS and global galactic changes, in-game interactions, new game assets and much more to make game-wide events that tie into the game world. The aim is to constantly create new and exciting events and campaigns for you to get involved in and shape, which will focus on and benefit different types of players.

Outside of the game, we’ll communicate with you about these events, how they work and what goes into developing Elite Dangerous.

Regular updates

In addition to the weekly and monthly activity happening in Elite, we will also be releasing a series of updates roughly every 3-4 months. The first two of these updates will primarily focus on new player and welcoming experiences, and we will also be introducing a number of quality of life improvements for the entire player base, of which we will have more news on in the coming weeks. This will help ensure that new players are able to better progress through the game, and therefore help bring more players through to our very awesome, very welcoming community. We will also have additional game tweaks, benefits and bug fixes for all players. In the subsequent updates we will be focusing on bringing in new features, perks and content, including a range of exciting new additions to the game that will build up to this new era.

It is important to note that these updates will not take the same level of content or size that we have seen from our previous updates in Beyond or Horizons, as the majority of the development team will be focusing on the new era.

Elite Dangerous has an incredibly passionate, enthusiastic and talented community, and we’re committed to supporting Elite now and for the future. We would like to take this opportunity to say, once again, that none of this would be possible without the continued support and dedication from our community – so, thank you. Keep sharing your feedback with us, and if you have any questions feel free to share them with us by posting in this thread. We’ll try and answer as many of them as we can.

The Elite Dangerous Team

 

I found these messages very honest, clean, albeit not very detailed. For me, this is a good first step toward the resumption of communications after a few changes in their teams management. They could have given more clues about the 2018 content; I hope it will happen as soon as possible in March.

We are dealing with a new Lead Community Manager (Will Flanagan), a new Product Manager who joined the team in 2018 (Sally Morgan-Moore), a new Communications Director (Marilena Papacosta) and also some adjustments in production, design and development.

2018 and 2019 allow them to adjust and correct previous developments in the game, in order to give them more meaning by pushing the matter even further. About a hundred developers are actively working on the development of the 2020 Elite Update: Dangerous. When you see what 5 developers can do in two years on other games, imagine a hundred developers. Come on, let’s keep our fingers crossed, 2020 is going to be a revolution for the game.

For now, let’s turn to 2019 and the team’s next communications initiatives. We are expecting new centralised forums and reliable sources told me that will also be present more interesting things greatly expected by the community. Let’s take the time, get ready for the narrative campaigns, create and refine your stories, communications about the future of the game have only just begun and Frontier will adapt to our feedback.

So feel free to comment, criticise constructively, and propose things. I know that unfortunately, the French, German and other communities are not the most followed because Frontier does not have French-speaking community teams, but some people do their best to ensure that you are listened to, that your feedback and reports have an impact. The Elite community is incredibly creative, welcoming and talented. I am sure that supporting Frontier fairly will only be beneficial to us. By “fairly”: understand constructively. There’s no point in spitting on everything that’s done. If it is bad, it is bad and we explain what can be improved. If it is good, we congratulate and propose adjustments.

Thank you for reading, I wish you all the best!
As always, I’m keeping you informed about the latest news on Twitter @RemlokEN and the Remlok community Discord channel. And this is my personal Twitter: @BlackBigBang.

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Powerplay and Lore

Powerplay, continues to operate in game and the powers compete on a variety of military, economic and political fronts to gain new territory and expand their influence on the human world.

 

Galnet.fr proposes the latest news from the galaxy!

• Galnet.fr/en – Galnet News
• GalnetAudioFR – Dubbed Galnet, in French. Let me know if you would like to do this in English! Here are the examples in French.

We are trying to get the Galnet news back on, Frontier apparently removed them for a temporary format and we can’t use the news anymore.

 

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Community Goals

Community Goals allow the community to work together on an ongoing project. Fight, trade, smuggle, explore and help the factions and super powers to achieve their goals.
There is no good or bad sides, write your stories in Elite: Dangerous while earning credits!

◘ Macrosphere Mining Petition (Transport)

• Location: Grandin Terminal | DS Leonis
• Objective: Deliver Benitoite, Grandidierite and Alexandrite
  
• Rewards: Credits
• Progress: 0/8
• Until: 7 mars

◘ Macrosphere Component Requisition (Transport)

• Location: Grandin Terminal | DS Leonis
• Objective: Deliver Aluminium, Auto-Fabricators, Micro Controllers
• Rewards: Credits
• Progress: 1/8
• Until: 7 mars

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Pics of the Week

Feel free to send me your prettiest images and videos via Twitter, Discord or directly in the comments!
Check out the wonderful pictures fromToCoSo, Rtcnmp, Madaxo, Jetsukai, Alex Storch, Phoebia, Kazahnn, PrimetimeCasual, Hanna Hunter, BettleJude, Ghannoush, Coreoski, Deonon et Anthony Hunt !

All ships blueprints, free to download

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Videos of the Week

Thank you to: Eikoop and Radjart

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Feel free to share this article with your friends, and discuss this week’s content!