 This is Witchspace news for Friday the 19th of June 2020. I'm CMDR Buur. In this week's news, Elite's player numbers surge. Odyssey details are confirmed in a PC gamer interview, there's changes to Frontier's community team, there's a new Elite Dangerous podcast from two prominent streamers and much more. If you enjoyed this video consider subscribing to the channel and also click the little bell icon to make sure you don't miss any of our future videos that stuff really helps us smaller channels. With the release of fleet carriers and the announcement of the Odyssey expansion to the game the number of concurrent players in the game has surged in the last week to surpass a previous post launch high that was set in 2015 with the launch of the Horizons expansion. It's currently impossible to garner absolute player numbers across all platforms as Frontier don't currently release that information publicly, however we can gain a broad idea of what the numbers in the game are doing via the website SteamCharts.com that monitors and tracks player numbers for games played via the Steam platform on PC. According to the website the number of concurrent players last peaked on Steam at around the 18,000 mark at the end of 2015 when the Horizons expansion launched, there's been a few peaked since then but that was the highest. That all changed however with the launch of fleet carriers and the announcement of Odyssey this month when that number surged at one point to over 21,000 concurrent players. Since that day it's consistently hit the 16-17,000 mark to reiterate again this is just concurrent players active in one part of the PC platform at one time it doesn't account for the many players that have purchased the game direct from Frontier and it doesn't account for players on PlayStation or Xbox so what we're seeing here is an indication of a trend rather than an absolute number. The data has been further backed up by reports we've received from the fuel rats that the number of rescues they are performing has similarly surged. Fuel rat and streamer Sky the Shark told us the fuel rats have been hit hard with the surge in player numbers with at one point 16 rescues happening simultaneously. According to the fuel rats stat tracking website there has been on average around 200 rescues daily in the last week that's a four fold increase over the daily average for the previous 12 months. Once the hubbub from carriers settles somewhat it's only natural that the number of players connecting with the game will settle down but you can expect those numbers to surge very significantly again when more details on Odyssey are released and then concurrent player records will almost certainly be broken yet again with the launch of Odyssey next year. There was a brief PC gamer interview last week posted on YouTube with Piers Jackson a game director at Frontier working on Elite Dangerous. Whilst the interview has no solid new details it does confirm a couple of things that we'd assumed about the upcoming expansion. Firstly that the expansion will allow players to land on and explore planets with thin atmospheres whilst that seemed a fairly obvious detail from the Odyssey trailer it oddly hadn't yet explicitly been stated by Frontier. Secondly the existing airless worlds in the game will be getting a visual makeover from the new tech being deployed with the Odyssey expansion. This is something we'd assumed would probably be the case but it hadn't yet been explicitly stated. I've linked to the 5 minute interview with Piers in the description below. Long time community manager at Frontier Will Flanagan announced this week that he's leaving the community team and moving on within Frontier to become a product manager with the company. Will's dark sense of humour trademark kimono and mug of hot water will undoubtedly be missed within the team and the community in the game. Thanks for everything Will, it's been an absolute pleasure. On the back of Will's departure comes the announcement of the arrival of new lead community manager Arthur Tolmey. Arthur is an avid gamer and has been playing Elite Dangerous since its launch on the Xbox. Arthur joins the existing trio of Tim, Steven and Bruce. Welcome to the Galaxy and Community Arthur. A new collaborative podcast from the Twitch streamers Psykit and Mal for the Win will be going live this coming Monday the 22nd of June. The Flight Assist podcast will be dropping two episodes on Monday and then weekly episodes every Monday thereafter. The show will be available on all your favourite podcast apps and feeds as well as via the Flight Assist website which is linked in the description below. A new edition of the Galaxy's favourite quarterly magazine Sagittarius Eye drops this week covering everything from fleet carriers to bobble heads the always professionally produced magazine is available in the written form or in a podcast variant from the link in the description below. There's a new Elite Racers event starting this month that sees ships across various classes touring the five starter engineer bases racing for the best time to complete the designated courses in any order that is also linked below and finally this week I stumbled across a cute little tool on reddit created by commander1upnuke filling your details upload a picture and it creates a pilots federation license for you that you can download as a PNG file. That's it for now thanks very much for watching we'll be back later this week with more videos until then 07 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack we very much look forward to seeing you next time.