Open-Only in PP2.0?
- Thread starter August Lagrange
- Start date
Not sure why this is being said to be honest, trade and exploration data do require station ownership but bounties are still by far the most effective and powerful lever to pull when doing BGS. This is not an issue with any established faction since they have other systems to collect BV's from.
You can also collect BV's for a faction that owns no systems: If you kill pirates within the vicinity of an asset owned by a faction (Stations, Space installations, odyssey settlements, megaships, etc) the bounty will be issued by that faction and not the controlling faction.
Systems also have a multitude of stations and these stations can have a multitude of owners, same with planetary ports and odyssey settlements, which are dockable, have markets and universal cartographics, most of the time.
If anything, it is actually fairly rare for the controlling faction of a system to own every asset in the system, and owning every station can be a detriment too. First off, other factions only go into conflict if either owns an asset, and being able to lock up influence or just waste people's time by putting them in conflict is very valuable. And secondly, if it is a social faction (Communism, Democracy, Cooperative, Confederacy and some Theocracies but nobody except their moms care about the latter) it just opens up more opportunities for smuggling.
On the topic of open only, it's pretty disenheartening when your faction owns only a single coriolis, and you see 100 cutters in the traffic report and you see your faction's economy slider go down, and the influence start to nosedive and distributed equally among the rest, because you know for certain that certain players are doing smuggling into your station, but there is nothing you can do about it to defend your own station from this because certain invisible 'players' are doing it in Solo mode while claiming in the forums that they play open only.
Last edited:
I don't see why it's wrong to promote more player interaction. At the end of the day Open-Only Powerplay doesn't have to make PvP the most effective way of playing it, but it adds a certain level of fairness and fun to the game.
Nearly all big powerplay player groups already internally enforce an open-only, no combat logging policy. But when you know this can be bypassed by other powerplay groups, you do start to think it happens even if you have no way to know for certain. There's a reason most powerplay PvP happens on discord servers with everyone accusing the others of hauling in PG
Of course, when a man on a merchant ship meets an enemy on an armed, protected and maneuverable ship, he has a lot of fun and is very fair.
That hasn't stopped Winters players who haul to do everything.
That depends upon the player in the merchant ship, naturally.
As a player who typically is in that merchant ship, I’m the kind of player who does enjoy testing my evasion skills against other players, and gets a bit of a thrill at being chased… in small doses. In large doses it gets rather annoying… primarily because I almost always succeed in evading and escaping from them, there’s no point in fighting back due to not being in a combat ship (unlike NPCs), and I don’t get rewarded for success. Not rewarded for some mostly academic “threat,” but actual succeeding in my objective in the face of actual player opposition.
The reasons for this are three-fold:
- I don’t fly with my focus on Netflix, and thus I'm aware of the situation around me, and can recognize the warning signs of a possible player threat long before they get in range and/or an angle to interdict me.
- I don’t fly a cardboard box with engines in the name of “efficiency.” Not because of the proverbial "danger" of flying Open, but because it’s much more efficient, and and a lot more fun, to fly fast and “dangerously.” A good pilot willing to take chances can make two runs for every “safe” pilots one, and you can greatly reduce your risk simply by sacrificing a little cargo space.
- I don’t follow the “common forum advice,” which really should be titled “how to waste time and get destroyed by using this one weird trick.” Most “murder-hobos” target merchants because they lack skill to kill PvPers, and rely on their targets to cooperate with their own destruction. Don’t follow their script, and you’ll throw them off their game so badly that successfully evading or escaping from them is rather easy.
(“griefers” find it frustrating to play in an environment that won't cooperate with maintaining their illusion of being big bad PvPers).
Which is why I think that Open Only anything will do more harm than good. Becoming a toxic player requires means, motive, and opportunity. The tri-mode system addresses all three issues, which is to everyone's benefit.
Except genuine griefers, naturally.
Its rarer in the wider game (except for CGs and certain areas). In Powerplay its harder to avoid and you are rewarded at a strategic level for 'winning' that flight by helping your power (which results in personal gain too).
Again the issue is that Powerplay requires something to come after you. If NPCs are again anemic in V2 only other players can fill that gap opportunistically. So YMMV technical issues aside its one option.
Who don't exist in Powerplay, since all combat has context.
They don't exist (or are vanishingly rare) among pledged PowerPlayers. I remember what it was like during the first few weeks of PowerPlay as a hauler. The players I'd encounter were almost always unpledged, and I'd encounter them on the way to pick up fortification merits, rather than carrying them. For some strange reason, they vanished after a few weeks, never to be seen again, leaving behind the extremely rare antagonistic PowerPlayer.
Though to be fair, it wasn't too long after that that I realized I didn't enjoy any of the ways to acquire merits, and switched back to the BGS manipulation, only with a PowerPlay focus, rather than an excusively anti-Fed focus.
But if you are expecting trouble and pledged already, everyone is a potential threat. Its not like anyone hauling in PP is thinking "I'll have a nice chat with this rival, and see if that rival PMF allied to an enemy Power also wants a chinwag".
Regardless of what you do in PP, its all antagonistic because ten other powers and allies want you to fail. In the wider game you don't have that- its just you doing your thing.
I think that's why the non-pledged wanna-be griefers vanished after a few weeks. There's a world of difference between trying to kill a player who is expecting trouble from antagonistic players, and the typical player who isn't.
Hence why PP and the rest of the game are different in this regard, and why if more people outside of PP took that approach it would be a much lesser problem (but now this crosses into the C+P thread).
And when a powerplayer that likes PvP gets bypassed because someone is playing in solo, he also does not have a lot of fun and does not think it is fair.
I beg you to remember that what is being proposed isn't to make the entire game open-only. It's powerplay only. Normal, non-powerplay players can still and should still have the capability of trading or mining in Solo mode, that is not being taken away from you.
What's important to keep in mind here is that when you're hauling something for powerplay you are directly harming someone else's powerplay efforts. Why should they not be able to stop you from doing so?
There is no permadeath in this game, and any player worth their salt has more than enough credit to eat through countless rebuys. With SCO's existing, prismatic shields existing, and point defense existing, it is less likely for you to get interdicted, it is less likely for you to get blown up, and it is less likely someone will hit a grom missile on you to stop you from jumping.
Of course it's never really fun to die... I don't have much fun when I get killed playing League, but... I kind of sign up for it no? I don't go out there proposing that healers can't get killed by assasins because the healer can't realistically fight back. You can protect yoursel and avoid the situations where you'd die though, you just have to put a bit of effort.
For the record, in all my years playing Elite I don't think I've even killed a handful of players. 3 total. When I support open only PP I'm setting myself up for dying a lot more though since I do a lot of trading, and that's okay
![[VR] Bulbulunufus](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/261/261245.jpg?1671230473){kind=avatar}
The difference is, this is a game, whereas the guy in the merchant ship dies a grizzly death with his crew, or has to bargain for his life at great cost.
Don't know what will happen in PP2, but PP1 not only fights, but also delivers ...
Yep - particularly with the nature of weaponised expansions that damage the CC of another power when successful, or those that deny a good expansion that another power could have had to the same area, that T9 flying coffin you're piloting is full of 700t of bombs that cumulatively will do more damage than any rebuys you take.
700t of bombs...
What? Can you make some sense please? No offense. PvP is part of powerplay.
Question: Do you play powerplay? Have you ever done any powerplay at all?
There is no reward advantage over killing commanders over NPC in any mode ?
PVP isnt necessary and can be a waste of resources trying to find 1 Commander while your enemy blow up many of your factions NPC's.
Groups have taken a token PVP a tried to make it relevant ?
PVP isnt necessary and can be a waste of resources trying to find 1 Commander while your enemy blow up many of your factions NPC's.
Groups have taken a token PVP a tried to make it relevant ?
Because that's not the goal of open only.