 This is Witchspace news for Friday the 14th of January 2022, I'm CMDR Buur In Elite Dangerous News this week, both ends of the Brewer Corporation Colonia Bridge CG are smashed out of the park, there's a billion credit Bucky Ball prize up for grabs this weekend, there's a new World First solo Hydra kill from the AXI and the Odyssey Effect continues to bite Frontiers share price as it publishes its interim results and January trading update to the stock market. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe and remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications and if you'd like to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. Next week's community goal saw the third part of the new Brewer Corporation's Colonia Bridge project crowdsourcing at least some of the resources needed to build a total of six brand new starports to complement the 56 new permanently anchored mega ships that have already been subject to community goals of their own all of which is strung out in a corridor stretching between the bubble around Sol and the Colonia area toward the centre of the galaxy. The stated goal of the project is to provide refuel and repair facilities for vessels making the 22,000 light year journey to and from the Colonia region. When completed the new corridor will further complement the already existing Colonia connection superhighway of surface starports. When you pull all of this together with the now fairly regular player driven fleet carrier trips between Colonia and the bubble the superhighways make the once moderately terrifying trip between Colonia and the bubble much more of a reasonable proposition to the more travel adverse commanders. The Brewer Corporation have further stated that they believe the creation of the stations in the third phase of the bridge will spawn micro communities of their own between the two previously largely disconnected pockets of humanity. If true this could potentially mean that you could trade or indeed pirate your way between Colonia and the bubble actually making the trip profitable. The community goal last week whilst making pure profits for its participants in terms of straight commodity sales as well as credit payouts from the CG's completion was also once again rewarding the hugely popular pre-engineered frame shift drives that commanders have so keenly craved from the previous CG's. Being in sizes 3, 4 and 6A the FSD's come pre-packaged with increased range and faster boot sequence. So popular were the FSD rewards in fact that between them the bubble and Colonia ends of the CG saw huge participation numbers all week from commanders eager to ensure that they got a chance at the freebie FSD's. The website in ARRA that is only capable of reporting what commanders report to it via the use of third party monitoring applications like the EDMC was reporting that the CG was being attended by upwards of 17,000 commanders. Again this is just commanders that are reporting to ARRA the actual number will be much higher. There was also a community driven push to ensure that the top tier was reached in time before the CG ended on Thursday morning with hashtag tier 5 for Alcor being just one of the hashtags being used on Twitter to keep momentum going. Overall a hugely popular and very well attended community wide event that should start to yield visible changes in the game starting on the 27th of January when the new starports are deployed with later services coming online further down the line. There's a new community driven and funded race event that is awarding a mega credit prize pot this weekend which will see prizes ranging between 250 million and 1 billion credits being claimed by 3 skilled pilots. In the joint venture between the player groups of the new pilots initiative and the Bucky Ball Racing Club the 1,750 million prize pot will be divided up for the first, second and third best entries in a simple time trial event that sees competitors getting the best time they can between 5 fixed starports. The race has been running all week in fact but as of this recording there is still time to take part in the event as entries have until 9am server time on Monday the 17th of January to be submitted. Full details of the new pilots hustle event are linked in the video description below. In a staggering world first this week Commander Mechon of the AXI did something that I honestly would have said was impossible a solo kill of the top tier NPC in the game a Thargoid Hydra class interceptor in wait for it the humble sidewinder. The full video of the commander's amazing achievement you'll find linked below suffice to say whilst the side he used was a highly engineered purpose designed custom build there is no small degree of inhuman level pilotry on display in the 28 minute video that shows just how capable the pilots of the AXI are. I'm glad they're on our side presumably now this has been done the next target is to achieve the same again but this time on foot nothing would surprise me anymore with these guys bravo commander bravo. Frontier developments published its half year interim results and trading update to the London stock market this week as a result of the financial analyst reports that are generated off the back of these updates from Frontier we end up with an interesting look behind the curtain at the company. One of the main headlines from the report is that the company has narrowed its financial profit forecast for the coming year and whilst some of that is no doubt due to the problems with Odyssey at launch and the resultant community backlash it is far from the whole story. Theater's latest Jurassic World game sold very well but it wasn't able to yet benefit from the expected extra boost in its sales that the latest Jurassic World movie release will bring as that was delayed a full year due to the pandemic that movie will now be hitting theaters later in the summer this year on the back of which they expect to see a further boost in sales. The time-twisting third party developed first person shooter Lemniscate performed poorly and player engagement was below Frontier's expectations so this also had an adverse effect on the company's financials and share price. Additionally the Warhammer real-time strategy title Age of Sigma that the company is currently working on has also had its release delayed until the financial year ending 2024 and Frontier themselves have stated that this specific issue is hitting the financial forecast the hardest. Whilst the financial reporting and profits downgrade has undoubtedly kicked the company's share price again it's not right to call doom and despair on David Brabant's Cambridge based development house despite seeing a 40% drop in its share price since November. Financial markets are notoriously twitchy and the story is often more subtle and complex than the pure numbers will tell. We know that in the last year the company has expanded its staff by a further 250 people bringing it to around 745 people with a lot of those new staff members being assigned to quality assurance roles. Presumably to help with testing on the raft of high-profile big-name titles the company has in its upcoming portfolio. Fdev also reported that December traditionally a financial highlight for games publishers was the single best December the company had ever had with record revenues being reported. The report from Frontier's stockbroker Liberum makes mention of Elite Dangerous Odyssey specifically saying quote elite dangerous Odyssey has had a very difficult period but Fdev continue to support the game and we believe management is reviewing plans for the Elite Dangerous franchise following the disappointing 2021 unquote. That last sentence is of particular interest nothing will get the attention of a corporation's upper echelons like a swift kick in the financials. But it was encouraging to hear it specifically stated that Fdev are to continue to support our favorite go-to space simulator and elsewhere we've also learned that Frontier are currently recruiting a senior gameplay designer for Elite Dangerous specifically encouraging to hear as gameplay is therefore clearly still being designed for the game. Mentioning Elite Dangerous Odyssey themselves Frontier developments say in their report on the stock market that it had a difficult year resulting from the poorly received Odyssey launch but do go on to say quote we continue to support the game and our passionate players with development updates and we have seen an upturn in player sentiment as a result unquote. Indeed looking at Elite Dangerous on the Steamcharts website which is a moderately reliable source for gauging player engagement with Elite Dangerous if not specific numbers of players we are seeing games in player numbers for the last four months over the previous four months that started with huge losses following the release of Odyssey. That evidence would seem to be further backed up by the large player numbers attached to the community goal last week that we reported on earlier. Whilst the gains from the last four months in player engagement don't bring it anywhere near the highs of immediately prior to Odyssey's release they are demonstrative of a general upward trend as the post release patches bring the game to a better place and it continues to recover from the Odyssey firestorm. We're certainly hoping here at the burpit that with Frontier's public statement regarding the upturn in player sentiment coupled with better communication and upcoming new features and development updates that it bodes well for them continuing this trend going forward in 2022. Understandably so the console release is going to continue being a major issue within the community until we hear something further on this. Whilst the console release was conspicuous by its absence in the financial forecasting we wouldn't expect to see it reported on there until its schedule had been released publicly first to the waiting console community customer base. It's certainly going to be a very interesting year for Frontier the company is clearly expanding and investing in itself but they equally need to see solid profits from those investments this year. They have stakes now in some very big third party IP franchises notably Formula One, Jurassic World and Warhammer and still lots of work to be done to get Odyssey to a more respectable place before addressing the issue of bringing the expansion to the waiting console market. Did you get yourself a pre-engineered frameshift drive this week? Are you going after the bucky ball one billion credit prize pot or do you think you've got a rat's chance in hell of taking out a Hydra on foot now that the AXI have once again upped the ante? Let us know in the comments below. That's it for now, thanks very much for watching, we'll be back later this week with more videos until then 07 CMDRs 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.