To make the War worth fighting for, the reset has to go, And This Is Why.

[Nuts0]

The weekly progress reset for defence against Thargoid invasions is flawed no matter how much the requirement for victory is nerfed. It must be changed into a system where progress rolls over and this is why :

• Currently, the minimal amount of action required to impact the gameworld is to fully fill the progress bar of an entire star system within one week, which is also the maximum as there is no progress beyond that threshold.
• The outcome is binary, anything other than complete victory is the wiping of players progress.
• If it take 4 days to fill the bar, there is nothing of value left to do for the remainder of the week.
• If you cannot garner the resources to perform that set amount, your participation is void, meaning you have no agency.
• There is no strategy at play other than reducing the number of targeted systems to whatever your available resources may swing.
• For a majority of organisations that number is 0.

With a progress rollover system in place, it becomes :

• The minimal action required to have an impact in the gameworld is the amount needed to move the bar by one pip within one week.
• There is further progress to be made beyond that threshold.
• The outcome is progressive, even in defeat the win of a pip can feel like a victory.
• If it takes you 4 days to gain a pip, you can spend the remaining 3 helping your neighbor get his.
• If you cannot garner the resources to retake a system, you can make it easier for the next week, and hope to attract more people to your cause, maintaining some agency.
• More complex strategies layered over multiple weeks can emerge to best allocate your resources.
• The number of orgs able to make visible impact is greatly improved and a game of politics may emerge as orgs try to attract the help of larger groups by laying the ground work in the first few weeks of a system invasion.

Some clarifications :
Under such a new system, progress is still lost if the system falls to the Thargoids, but it would take multiple weeks and redirection of efforts is made possible since the minimal valuable contribution within a week is now a single pip.
The war is made easier, but in a more elegant way than a straight nerf to the system progress bar. The war is still a losing battle as long as the Thargoids expand faster than what the players can defend and retake. System under Thargoid Alert still only have one week before they turn into Invasion. The key is still to find out how to win those.

There are a number of possible implementations of a rollover mechanism.

• Half (or any fraction) of the number of pips gained are credited at the start of the next week cycle (rounded up). The simplest in principe, but still very rigid.
• Momentum based system : the % of progression made the current week is a multiplier applied to progression made on the next cycles.(if you fill half of the bar one week, next week requires now 66% the amount of effort that it would take to fill, and stacks if you keep making progress for the week after). Because a momentum system scale exponentially, and because humans are terrible at gauging momentum, it would make multi weeks strategies extremely interesting to try to execute. It would reward taking risks by waiting for preparation before to fully commiting to a defence, as well as reward smaller orgs capable of stacking positive multipliers in the early weeks of an invasion.

It will not happen, for a couple of reasons.
It would require programming work more costly than nerfing the weekly progress bar. It would give much more agency to the players than Fdev is ready to give ( since instead of the annecdotical defence of a single system per week leaving the slow creep of Thargoids unnafected, players could devise complex strategies that can't easily be anticipated). This new found agency might result in unneeded intervention from Fdev in deciding the outcome of the war (since players might be able to stop Thargs advance by blocking them along a line of defendable systems). This would risk making the planned narrative redundant.

I think it would have been truely awesome.

 

[Nuts0]

Addendum 1 : nobody is winning the war.
Current implementation is a lose-lose scenario for both Players and Thargoids. The system is weighted in a way Players cannot slow Thargoids in meaningful proportions, we may retake a system or two per week but it is mostly symbolical and doesn't shape the dynamics of the war.

But the Thargoids are not winning either : their advance is so slow that it would take years for them to get any meaningful progress done ! There will never be a last stand at Sol 3 because they cannot possibly reach it. There will be no Dunkirk fleet carrier exodus to Colonia as most of the bubble will never be touched by the invasion. And so our resistance has no stakes attached to it because it will play out roughly the same anyway. This begs for a more dynamic system for the war, where systems can flip either way more often.


Addendum 2 : How is it so much different if progress rolls over.

Consider these situations :

• In current system, if you lose a defence by getting 90% progress by end of week, it is a crushing blow, all is undone and you'd have to commit even more effort the next week in order to change the outcome, possibly with less motivation to start with.
• In a rollover system, getting 90% progression is still a decent achievement. If the system is not lost because you were smart enough to make your push with at least one more week of invasion remaining, there is now a much better chance to succeed next cycle. You probably go at it with renewed energy knowing victory is within your grasp. In both scenarios the Tharg made the same exact advance that week. In one of them people still enjoyed the outcome.
• In a rollover system, losing at 90% progression the last week of an invasion is still a major crushing blow. But it was a conscious decision to make a desperate last stand, and it makes all the difference.

In a broader sense, in current system there is a very high probability that your personnal contribution is meaningless : If you put effort in a system that doesn't fully win, it's negated. If you put your efforts in a system that wins in the middle of the week, and then you don't find elsewhere to win again, even that participation is meaningless cause the system would have won without you, taking a bit longer and the outcome of the weekly cycle is still strictly the same. In a rollover system, progression is an order of magnitude more granular and there is a very low probability that your efforts would be wasted, granted you chose your target with a little bit of insight.

 

[shevek]

If the target is completable in a week, just complete it and move on to the next system.

 

[Star Wanderer]

Something to consider:
With "Roll Over" - you will have an endless war that would require 24/7 attention , it would frustrate players, people will burn out.
With "Weekly resets", you can finish one system in 4-5 days and than have free time for the next 2-3 days to do other things.

 

[Nuts0]

If the target is completable in a week, just complete it and move on to the next system.

This means that all organisations capable of putting in that amount of participation will be able to freely win systems on a weekly basis, making the war look too easy for them. On the contrary, all organisations that don't have those resources in player time commitment, cannot feel any sense of agency in the dynamics (not even the outcome, the dynamics) of the war.
With a rollover of participation, both those issues are solved. War is still made hard, cooperation is still paramount, but so many more players can feel they have a sense of agency on how it plays out at the micro level.

 

[Nuts0]

Something to consider:
Will "Roll Over" - you will have an endless war that would require 24/7 attention , it would frustrate players, people will burn out.
With "Weekly resets", you can finish one system in 4-5 days and than have free time for the next 2-3 days to do other things.

The roll over mechanism allows for so much more granularity in your personnal efforts and contribution that you can freely chose to input only 4-5 days of participation if you so wish, exept you have more freedom where to put that effort in and when since in the current system if you don't participate before the current target is won, then you have nothing of value to offer.

Balance is indeed paramount as giving more stakes to players can indeed make it more addictive and cause more burnout, that is a fair point. but the current system solve that by making it pointless to participate, which I think is inelegant.

 

[LordLocksley]

The weekly progress reset for defence against Thargoid invasions is flawed no matter how much the requirement for victory is nerfed. It must be changed into a system where progress rolls over and this is why :

• Currently, the minimal amount of action required to impact the gameworld is to fully fill the progress bar of an entire star system within one week, which is also the maximum as there is no progress beyond that threshold.
• The outcome is binary, anything other than complete victory is the wiping of players progress.
• If it take 4 days to fill the bar, there is nothing of value left to do for the remainder of the week.
• If you cannot garner the resources to perform that set amount, your participation is void, meaning you have no agency.
• There is no strategy at play other than reducing the number of targeted systems to whatever your available resources may swing.
• For a majority of organisations that number is 0.

With a progress rollover system in place, it becomes :

• The minimal action required to have an impact in the gameworld is the amount needed to move the bar by one pip within one week.
• There is further progress to be made beyond that threshold.
• The outcome is progressive, even in defeat the win of a pip can feel like a victory.
• If it takes you 4 days to gain a pip, you can spend the remaining 3 helping your neighbor get his.
• If you cannot garner the resources to retake a system, you can make it easier for the next week, and hope to attract more people to your cause, maintaining some agency.
• More complex strategies layered over multiple weeks can emerge to best allocate your resources.
• The number of orgs able to make visible impact is greatly improved and a game of politics may emerge as orgs try to attract the help of larger groups by laying the ground work in the first few weeks of a system invasion.

Some clarifications :
Under such a new system, progress is still lost if the system falls to the Thargoids, but it would take multiple weeks and redirection of efforts is made possible since the minimal valuable contribution within a week is now a single pip.
The war is made easier, but in a more elegant way than a straight nerf to the system progress bar. The war is still a losing battle as long as the Thargoids expand faster than what the players can defend and retake. System under Thargoid Alert still only have one week before they turn into Invasion. The key is still to find out how to win those.

There are a number of possible implementations of a rollover mechanism.

• Half (or any fraction) of the number of pips gained are credited at the start of the next week cycle (rounded up). The simplest in principe, but still very rigid.
• Momentum based system : the % of progression made the current week is a multiplier applied to progression made on the next cycles.(if you fill half of the bar one week, next week requires now 66% the amount of effort that it would take to fill, and stacks if you keep making progress for the week after). Because a momentum system scale exponentially, and because humans are terrible at gauging momentum, it would make multi weeks strategies extremely interesting to try to execute. It would reward taking risks by waiting for preparation before to fully commiting to a defence, as well as reward smaller orgs capable of stacking positive multipliers in the early weeks of an invasion.

It will not happen, for a couple of reasons.
It would require programming work more costly than nerfing the weekly progress bar. It would give much more agency to the players than Fdev is ready to give ( since instead of the annecdotical defence of a single system per week leaving the slow creep of Thargoids unnafected, players could devise complex strategies that can't easily be anticipated). This new found agency might result in unneeded intervention from Fdev in deciding the outcome of the war (since players might be able to stop Thargs advance by blocking them along a line of defendable systems). This would risk making the planned narrative redundant.

I think it would have been truely awesome.

Very well put. Agree on 99%.

Unfortunately, as you say, it's highly unlikely this will happen, but not for any of the reasons you state. FDev have many tools and ways to overcome any of the drawbacks you mention.

No, it won't happen because doing this would be as much as FDev admitting they made a mistake with the system, even when the community warned them in advance.

 

[shevek]

The big trick is to have a system in place that can herd cats so that random players can go to the right places to help and not be spread out all over the place.

 

[Nuts0]

The big trick is to have a system in place that can herd cats so that random players can go to the right places to help and not be spread out all over the place.

It is true that one of the objective of the design of this war is, like Community Goals, to give players a limited number of systems to congregate to in order to emulate cooperation/multiplayer interactions. However by making the progress bar still too much of a challenge for small player groups alone, even a rollover mechanism will encourage those small player groups to ask for help and involve the majority of the player base in the final push for a given system. In that sense, instead of being stubbornly hitting the wall at HIP 23716 we'd have maybe visited places like Inara, or Obamumbo since last week.

 

[ChaseBears]

Not really. Rollover or not, if you don't put enough effort to defend a system all your effort there is wasted. The war will always involve first-past-the-post objectives on some level or another.
While the 'reset' has its issues, the real issue is that players were able to accomplish nothing. If players can coordinate their efforts to defend even several systems per week - not much in the face of what, 8 maelstroms? - then their efforts will feel rewarded regardless if a rollover mechanic is used or not. Balance was the core problem here, even if its possible to design better mechanics.

 

[Screemonster]

• For a majority of organisations that number is 0.

This is basically my main issue.
For the vast majority of players, it's a case of "go fight where AXI are fighting, or just don't bother because any effort you put in literally anywhere else is completely wasted time". Awful, awful mechanic.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

This new found agency might result in unneeded intervention from Fdev in deciding the outcome of the war (since players might be able to stop Thargs advance by blocking them along a line of defendable systems). This would risk making the planned narrative redundant.

Would that be a bad thing for anyone involved? It's still possible to spin it so that this first wave of maelstroms was just the advance scout fleet sent to determine human positions and force strengths.

I know I say this with hindsight and I along with many players would love an actual fair challenge, but Is there any risk in making it too easy at first and then ramping up the difficulty after players have had time to learn the mechanics?

 

[DjVortex]

There shouldn't be a reset. That just feels artificial and unnatural, and breaks immersion and suspension of disbelief.

If they want some kind of "punishment" for not having completed the goal by the deadline, make the "punishment" feel more natural, logical and fitting in-universe. For example in the form of thargoids sending a boatload of reinforcements that push the humans back (while still giving them a bit of a fighting chance, even if it becomes ten times more difficult). Might still feel a bit unfair that most/all the progress that was achieved is lost, but at least it will feel more natural, immersive and fitting with the in-universe narrative (after all, invading forces sending reinforcements is completely normal and to be expected).

 

[Jabo Zerstorer]

It is true that one of the objective of the design of this war is, like Community Goals, to give players a limited number of systems to congregate to in order to emulate cooperation/multiplayer interactions. However by making the progress bar still too much of a challenge for small player groups alone, even a rollover mechanism will encourage those small player groups to ask for help and involve the majority of the player base in the final push for a given system. In that sense, instead of being stubbornly hitting the wall at HIP 23716 we'd have maybe visited places like Inara, or Obamumbo since last week.

I'm fairly sure by next year this current war mechanic will be seen as fairly easy and not really much of an issue. I can foresee several (2 to 4, maybe more) systems per week being defended against (and then taken back in the following weeks).

 

[Jabo Zerstorer]

There shouldn't be a reset. That just feels artificial and unnatural, and breaks immersion and suspension of disbelief.

If they want some kind of "punishment" for not having completed the goal by the deadline, make the "punishment" feel more natural, logical and fitting in-universe. For example in the form of thargoids sending a boatload of reinforcements that push the humans back (while still giving them a bit of a fighting chance, even if it becomes ten times more difficult). Might still feel a bit unfair that most/all the progress that was achieved is lost, but at least it will feel more natural, immersive and fitting with the in-universe narrative (after all, invading forces sending reinforcements is completely normal and to be expected).

The reset mechanic already exists in the BGS though.

 

[Andrew Gaspurr]

Obsidian Ant nailed it pretty well in his recent video: No matter the challenge and the desired difficulty, you don't eliminate players' progress. You just don't. It's game design 101.
And I agree.

 

[Screemonster]

The reset mechanic already exists in the BGS though.

in what way

if you put a bunch of work into a system then influence moves
it doesn't reset back to where it was if you don't push your faction's inf high enough by the end of the week

 

[Eeekster]

Agreed, reset is a godawful mechanic - has put me off, as it has others.

 

[Kayvan]

MB a reasonable solution would be similar to Powerplay merits: on every tick you lose half of what you gained.
In case of the T-war, this would represent the Goids' pushpack action / counteroffensive.

So if you only manage 90% progress in one week, it would not all be lost but "just" reduced to 45%, and that should easily permit completion in the following week. But the incentive is still there to get it right the first time bc it saves you a lot of war-work in total.

 

[Eeekster]

Any loss of progress, for no reasonable reason, is unacceptable. A weekly 'push-back' is not reasonable - its 'out of game' stupidity. If Fdev wants to slow progress, they can make it more difficult, but given they appear to have just tripled the progress rate, I don't think that is their intention.