There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not Powerplay should be Open Only.
There are some fair points here; namely, that right now, there's little way to directly counteract the actions of an opposing faction, and that things are biased against combat. Instead, you need to just counter-grind them, doing more work than them in the same time period. This can feel unfair to players who want to be able to go out and directly stop these players, instead, as well as biasing against the combat side of things.
The current balance of power is clearly tilted away from Combat, especially in Open. Combat is slower, and playing in Open has no real benefits with many downsides, such as being killed by enemy factions, or even killed by just random gankers. If your objective is playing efficiently, then being in Open is clearly a poor choice. Okay, fair enough, these are reasonable complaints.
But does that mean open-only is a reasonable solution to these problems?
I don't think so. There's a fundamental problem with this proposal, and it has to do with balance of power, and what players will do in response to that balance.
What is the goal?
Firstly, as we talk about trying to fix this bias in the balance of power, what is our desired goal? After all, while the current form isn't fair, we don't want to take things too far and make them just as unfair to the opposite side. Clearly, if having the balance of power shifted to one direction(cargo hauling) is unacceptable, then having it equally shifted the opposite direction(combat) is no better. It's not solving the problem, just moving it from one pole to another.
And that's the problem with moving Powerplay to Open-Only. It shifts the balance of power ENTIRELY to the combat, putting it 100% at the whims of the combat players.
Why? Because no matter what you do, a pvp-optimized build will ALWAYS beat a cargo-hauling build. The current state of combat balance ensures that even
attempting pvp in such a case simply doesn't work, because the other player will have a massive advantage from using cargo space for combat modules. Yes, the cargo hauler can often
escape, but that will often mean high-waking away, which simply resets the fight, getting them nowhere.
Yes, the cargo hauler can bring escorts, but again, that puts power 100% in the domain of the combat players, with the cargo hauler a subservient second class.
To make matters worse, while Cargo haulers must face these challenges, as they MUST go to several pre-determined locations that can be defended, enemy combat ships face no similar restrictions. If your only goal is to destroy a target faction, all you need to do is drop in on a ring repeatedly and blow up civilian ships that spawn, and then the cops that follow. There is no way to locate a player doing this and no way to stop them, open or solo.
Is this truly a solution, when the net result is moving the balance of power
entirely into the combat players' court? And what would the actual end result be?
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What would be the net result of changing Powerplay to Open-Only?
Many people hope that it would result in many more players playing in Open, giving them more and better opportunities for rp-based combat, but I suspect the exact opposite would be true. The players who don't currently play in Open do so because they don't enjoy pvp. Not enjoying pvp is different from not enjoying any aspect of pve content; pve can be balanced to allow any player to complete it, with time and effort. Pvp is different; by nature, it will
always skew towards the top 20% of combat pilots, who will win 80% of the time(See the
Pareto Distribution). This means that, for many pilots, succeeding in a pvp context is quite literally impossible. It's not something you can work your way over, it's simply out of reach forever.
Making Powerplay open-only offers these players a choice; forcibly experience something they don't like(and often literally cannot win at, due to the fact that pvp always biases towards to most skilled players)....or don't do powerplay at all.
I strongly suspect that the net result would be SOME players moving to Open to try to continue, but as pvp rapidly comes to dominate the powerplay experience, and players discover that becoming skilled enough at pvp to succeed requires a much larger investment of time and effort than they're willing or able to put forward, the end result would be a powerplay far less active than even the current diminished version.
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What is a more realistic solution?
The fundamental problem with this approach is that it assumes you can
force players to engage in an activity they don't enjoy. This may work with short-term activities, like unlocking an engineer or a few ships, but Powerplay is nowhere near short-term. It requires sequential investment over long periods of time, and if players have a game they don't enjoy, they'll respond by just
not playing.
So what
is the solution? It might seem obvious, but
make the game fun to play.
The most fundamental problem with Open right now is that the default two encounters you'll have with other players are A: Ignoring them, or B: Being killed by them. This is because these are the things the game does best at facilitating! It makes these two things EASY, while making most other shared activities frustratingly difficult by default!
If you're doing a wing mission and you see another player and you want to work with them, you need to go through multiple menus and requests, just to join together in the same wing. And then, afterwards, you're left with a 'friend' you most likely will never see again, requiring yet more menu fiddling to get rid of them. Most often if you're traveling and you see another player, that player will be going in an entirely different direction from you(and you have no way of knowing), so there's no point in anything other than a quick waggle of your wings. There's no way ingame to communicate with other members of your faction, so trying to coordinate action with other members requires the assistance of out-of-game apps and forums. BGS manipulation is completely obscured, so it's impossible to tell if another player is helping you or hurting you. Opening your ship for multicrew as often results in them shooting a station as actually helping you. And so on, and so forth.
THESE are the ways that the game should be changed to make Open Play more desirable and used. Facilitate
positive player interaction, and make the process easy and fun, not a chore.
But don't just assume you can
force players to engage in a game they not only dislike, they have no chance of winning. They'll do exactly what anyone would do in that situation.
Leave.
