The End after 2 years and 8 month

Hello, if you came here, then according to my statistics most likely because you wanted to use the route planner, and you are probably wondering what all this is about.

I started this website back in 2014 during the Beta of Elite: Dangerous - which at that time looked like a very promising game to me - when there started to be enough systems so route planing would make sense. The Ingame tools at that time did not really provide an adequate route planner, and it, and a few other pages that did route planning where quite slow. At that time I was quite enthusiastic about the game, despite not really fitting in with the PVE focused community.

When the game launched I learned quite fast that it wasn't for me, the lack of player interaction, the shift of balance that occured right before launch prefering trade over combat based proficiencies, the solo-safe-farm-mode, all that turned me away from the game within two or three month after launch

Which left me running a fansite that would at that time have a few thousand visitors a day, with all the cost of running and maintaining it (server costs, time to maintain the software i build to run it, for a game that I didn't enjoy - at that point I decided to keep the page running simply because i could mitigate some of the cost by running it on the same machines that I used for a few other projects of mine as well, and because I felt that i shouldnt pull the carped from under the feet of all those using it, without alternative.

I came back to peek in the game with several of the major releases, but never really got into playing it as much as i played the beta anymore.

In 2016, when I reevaluated the situation the users had declined to about 800 to 1000 a day, from what I understand because the route planner had become better, but also because there where other options that had gotten better and better. I was close to shutting it down, but when talking with a few guys in the community about it on chat, there was two suggestions pushed to me: 1) i could hand over the site to someone in the community, and they could continue to run it - I declined that, because thats not what I want. 2) I could put a donation button on the website and so have people from the community donate to cover my cost. After giving it a bit of thought, thats what I did, but that option was never used by anyone.

Today i got a message by my provider, that the domain is comming up for renewal soon, and I looked at the situation again. The users have dropped to between 100 and 200 a day almost exclusively using the route planner, and none of the other features of the site, which is not really an awfull lot of people (sorry, as you are probably one of 'em). I'm still not interested in the game, have no connection to the community anymore and nothing out of the newsletters makes me believe that this would change any time soon, so I decided to face reallity and declare this project dead.

In August the domain will run out, and I could have kept the route planner running until then, but frankly, then you probably wouldn't even have read this wall of text, and i rather have you annoyed about it and know this is over, than to fall for a scam by whoever might grab the domain after me.

May you continue to enjoy the game, and find a good replacement. CMDR Peter Powers, cmdr.club, signing out.