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Stellaris Dev Diary #180 - DLC Visibility Experiment

Hello everyone!

We hope you are enjoying your time with 2.7 and the 4 year anniversary of Stellaris! It’s very fun to see how far the game has come, and just as interesting to imagine what the future can hold.

We want to make sure that Stellaris is well-prepared for more content in the future. Something we’ve learned, especially with CK2, is that a long tail of new content can make it very difficult for players to see what kind of DLCs are available for the game. As we recently announced, Stellaris has more than 3 million players, and we want to make sure that players – both new and old – have an easier time finding content that they might like.

In order to improve visibility, starting today and lasting for a couple of weeks, we’re going to be running a couple of experiments that will be looking at DLC visibility within the game. We will be running a controlled experiment that will split up the player base into different groups, where each group will get a slightly different experience (or no change, in the case of the control group). The experiment will only affect the main menu and empire creation/selection, and will not have any effect on the game as you are playing. The purpose of this is to gather some insights into what kind of visibility features are actually helpful.

Before you grab your laser-powered pitchforks and plasma-illuminators, and complain about development focus, rest assured that all of this work has been done by an external team (who has done a great job btw!) and has had no effect on the development of Stellaris as a game :)

I want to emphasize that even though we want to improve the visibility of content for the game, it will never come at the expense of the game experience itself, so you don’t need to worry about that. It is very important for us that our players are able to immerse themselves in the Stellaris universe and to have fun while they play.

And because a dev diary can’t be complete without pictures or teasers, here’s two icons related to some future content. What could it be..?
merciless_teaser.png
 
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e/ So after working in the home office for weeks now you get to enjoy staying at home during a pandemic without working from home?

OT: i am uni teacher, i was for 3 & 1/2 months on HO and even the quarantine is released more or less in our end of world, i would give all my gold for staying at home without working if it continued. the HO stuff (videocon every day, instant phoning etc) is mentally debilitating and exhaustive, NOT doing any mandatory wurck even being locked down is still golden ;) the stress is released effectively once you are truly master on your own with your time and mind.
 
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e/ So after working in the home office for weeks now you get to enjoy staying at home during a pandemic without working from home?

As a software engineer who's also been working from home for months now, I would greatly appreciate a vacation.

Working from home doesn't make work better, it makes being home worse. I honestly miss being able to cleanly seperate my work time from my home time.

Now, I do find it irksome that after pretty much a month of radio silence they tell us we're getting *another month* of radio silence, but them working from home isnt really a luxury.
 
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I was more referring to the fact they've been stuck at home al lthis time, and now that there are holiday, they still can't go anywhere and are stuck at home for even longer - As in: This would drive me nuts!
 
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As a software engineer who's also been working from home for months now, I would greatly appreciate a vacation.

Working from home doesn't make work better, it makes being home worse. I honestly miss being able to cleanly seperate my work time from my home time.

Now, I do find it irksome that after pretty much a month of radio silence they tell us we're getting *another month* of radio silence, but them working from home isnt really a luxury.

I'm missing my reaction buttons for some reason, so: yeah, this
 

First pic looks like someone inciting a revolt (the black things in the bottom look like fists).

So my guess next xpack is going to be:
* Espionage (in Civ games spies often had an action to incite revolts)
* Internal politics (2nd icon; don't think it's going to be diplomacy since we already got a recent DLC about it)
* Rebellions (I hope for more impactful rebellions like the original Star Wars movies instead of several chanceless one planet minors emerging in a rebellion)
 
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First pic looks like someone inciting a revolt (the black things in the bottom look like fists).

So my guess next xpack is going to be:
* Espionage (in Civ games spies often had an action to incite revolts)
* Internal politics (2nd icon; don't think it's going to be diplomacy since we already got a recent DLC about it)
* Rebellions (I hope for more impactful rebellions like the original Star Wars movies instead of several chanceless one planet minors emerging in a rebellion)
Black thing in the bottom is skelly. Necromantic civic? Or maybe weird Ancestor veneration :D ? Second is probably internal politics.
 
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I was more referring to the fact they've been stuck at home al lthis time, and now that there are holiday, they still can't go anywhere and are stuck at home for even longer - As in: This would drive me nuts!
middle class problems
 
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