Yes, of course, if they were in supercruise, but we know there were not, as there is almost no persistence of NPCs. Its just FD spawning NPCs for the sake of spawning NPCs where there is no need for NPCs to spawn in those locations.
Powerplay 2.0 : what we know from partners' streams
- Thread starter Bard Voronwe
- Start date
Yes, of course, if they were in supercruise, but we know there were not, as there is almost no persistence of NPCs. Its just FD spawning NPCs for the sake of spawning NPCs where there is no need for NPCs to spawn in those locations.
Don't NPCs spawn anyway when you fly down to or land on a planet? Of course, right now they're police, civilians or occasionally pirates, rather than Powerplay ships.
Well it is a limitation- because abstraction is trying to approximate a situation.
The way to deal with it is to make stealth and detection more of a thing as well as location- in that if you are seen, your chances of having an NPC is higher than if you are not detected by ships. So you'd then build a more accurate and representative abstraction, rather than just having blunt off /on.
This should apply to murder, mining- anything really. So if you are super careful, you get rewarded for it.
They often do, but not normally hostile (unless its police and you have a bounty).
In the tests done by Burr it was (as i understand) 100% of the time PP ships that spawned after he had pledged. Not even randomly different ones, always PP ships.
If it was random, then someone could drop in first, check to see what spawned, and if not PP ships can give the all clear for everyone else to drop in. If PP ships, then jump out and reset the instance and try again.
Still, a lot of faffing around just to be able to enjoy a meet up somewhere where NPCs have no business being.
Why should any of this even be necessary? We are talking about quite a specific situation where PP NPCs are spawning with no good reason. For sure, stealth and detection being more of a focus could be interesting for gameplay in regions where PP activites are going on such as bases, mission POIs, or whatever. A random part of a planet though?
I'm not even sure what gameplay value you think this adds and why you push back against the idea of simply not having PP NPCs spawn randomly when landing on a random spot of a planet.
Territory is territory- if you are sneaking about a stronghold why should you not see an NPC?
Like I said, it should be that NPC spawn rates for PP are based on distances to strongholds, or that you could go even more granular by using distances to stations within systems themselves that have power presence (like I suggest here https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...needs-overhauling.627916/page-6#post-10428567 )
Because the danger is FD can't switch off 'random spots' like you suggest, and instead lobotomise the lot, killing any semblance of NPC threat.
Or pirates and you have cargo.
Elite Dangerous does a lot of compartmentalising of content - this POI for this, that environment for that - to the point that enemies showing up at all except in a carefully-designated "go here for shooting" location gets complaints. It would not hurt for Powerplay to be an exception to that where maybe a freighter does need a few guns, maybe a combat ship should bring a few other modules for opportunistic work on other merit sources, etc.
You could have been followed. Same as the NPC pirates that (sometimes) show up if you drop into a random part of a ring to do some mining - the game doesn't actually track the system supercruise enough for them to drop on your low wake, so sometimes it just puts them in on the assumption that they might have.
If non-Power NPCs continue to show up (and not shoot you because you have no cargo or bounty) ... you can be scanning them and adding to your Power's fight for the system. If Power NPCs don't show up from time to time as well, you can do that in perfect safety all week.
If it's that important, don't put the meetup in a PP-aligned system. Judging by the numbers in the previews, that's going to be well over half the inhabited systems in the bubble, all uninhabited systems, and all inhabited systems more distant than the Pleiades.
With some carefully chosen first-strike attacks on various Powers' weak spots, it could be a lot fewer systems than that after the first couple of weeks, too...
Who said the system he even tested in was a stronghold? All i got from him was that it was a planet within PP space, which is a fair chunk of the bubble.
Maybe there is a case to be made for high sec systems which are major PP systems to have PP NPCs flying random patrols over areas of nothingness (not sure what the case is... but maybe you can think there's a case for it), but a majority of places there would be zero reason from a lore perspective and, as i said, from a gameplay perspective, zero reason for it.
I'll ask you once again, what is the gameplay reason for PP NPCs appearing over random barren spots? What does it add to the game from a PP perspective? What is lost if they don't appear?
What? They could easily code to stop PP NPCs randomly spawning in remote areas of planets. Well, they should be able to unless their code is a whole lot worse than i could imagine.
And what do you mean lobotomizing? Is this a strawman? We are talking about random PP NPC spawning 100% of the time in random areas of planets well away from any possible PP activities.
Oh, and since your bring up PP strongholds, in Burr's testing, it wasn't always the controlling Power's NPCs that spawned. Sometimes it was NPCs from opposing powers. How does that fit into your logic?
If it stay like this, PP2 will be emptier than PP1.
PP2 has many improvements over PP1 that are already gaining the interest of those who gave PP1 a pass. The old ethos system being removed, the removal of the voting system that was plagued with 5C activity, the removal of CC which was another part of how 5C could injure a power since they could be forced to grab a system via the aforementioned voting mechanic that costs more CC in overhead than it returned (this would cause the whole power to enter turmoil then the people doing 5C would manipulate things so that useful systems would be dropped before the harmful system could be). While we have not gotten our hands on this system yet, there is more good things I am seeing than potentially bad.
All these payouts are nice boons. However, what's the incentive for players that already have more credits saved than what to do with it all. With a credit balance of 10+ billion, is well, means anything in the game is buyable at that point.
Same with faction modules that were obtained before the drop of 2.0. What are the other incentives in Powerplay 2.0 for taking the time to work up to 100 faction rank? Veteran CMDRs have fully engineered ships and modules to slot in, out or drop into any new ship they purchase on a whim.
What else will Powerplay 2.0 offer to hook veteran players to join, remain loyal to any faction?
I am just joining for the sport of it. When you get to the point where you are so resource rich you want for nothing then the point of doing these types of things become for hopefully the engagement with and against other players. As a player for the federation it's my conflicts against players representing the empire alongside my federal allies that bring me the most enjoyment in this game.
The bonds you form with other commanders you're working with. That's always been the main draw, the modules and bonuses are just sweeteners.
And I'll keep on asking you to read my responses- since I don't know where Burr was I suggested building rules regards distances from strongholds, distances from stations as well as scanned / non scanned rules so that if you are away from all of them you see nothing. That way its logical, adds to gameplay (for many other aspects too) and (I assume) is realistic to implement into the BGS. Or are you one of the players who likes gameplay that does not require too much thinking to do?
Like I said (and you keep on ignoring) its a limit of abstracted and instanced gameplay- V1 does this too (as in, NPCs lacking context). The only way to make it logical is for the engine to take into account if any other power is nearby or UMing.
In any case, what if the NPCs were there to simulate UMing by another power?
That wouldn't be too unsurprising to see. To take the thargoid "bgs" as an example, there were streams where they mentioned making signals and SC traffic to reflect the ongoing things in the system you're present in - that is also the case for human bgs status.
Players doing efforts in a rival PP system making the game emulate that via NPC's, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a thing like that but maybe it was just happening without that being factored in who knows.
If you've already got everything then the same could be said about absolutely any game content. People aren't generally carrying on fighting the Thargoid war because they need another 10 billion AX bonds, etc.
But in terms of incentives I can think of:
- there's various bits of gameplay that you only get to do while pledged
- staying pledged at rank 100 gives you permanent access to all PP modules, which means you don't need to keep "spare" ones hanging around taking up module storage space just in case; the rank structure makes "pledge-to-one-and-stay" a much more efficient way to get module access than hopping around.
- at that sort of "got everything, done everything" level a new challenge is always interesting. I'm certainly hoping that the need to deal with Power NPCs means the weapons on my ship get a bit more use without needing to go to a specific "shoot things zone (Medium)" [1]
- obviously the "change the allegiance of this system" is supposed to be a motivation in itself (plenty of veteran players doing BGS stuff for similar reasons, same with a lot of the AX content)
- if you're into the social side of things then there's a lot of scope for teaming up with other people
[1] Obviously "I could be shot at when I didn't want to be" is an active disincentive to some players, but Powerplay is an explicitly competitive mechanism, and I think Frontier would be better off keeping it that way and providing something else for the people who want peaceful collaboration (we haven't had a decent "colonisation" series of CGs/events for over five years now!).
Just wanted to chip in on the issue of power npc's turning up and spoiling your day. Buur's observations are very troubling indeed, confirming the worst fears of those who worry that PP2 will force us to make a choice between a game where we can have fun/social/event style meetups OR a game where we sign up for Powerplay (or use alt's to have both I suppose). My own circumstantial observation was that when I went to roll the Mandalay down the side of a big crater on Callisto in Sol (while pledged to Aisling), the first time I tried, some npc ships showed up (affiliated to another power) while I was filming and destroyed my ship halfway down. When I tried again more npc's turned up, but it turned out they were non-affiliated local npc's and left me alone. So 
With respect you can't have both. Powerplay is about being part of an explicit conflict (in essence a twelve way struggle for supremacy) and since nearly all activities result in merits you can't be 'let off' when you are in another powers territory- especially places like Sol.Just wanted to chip in on the issue of power npc's turning up and spoiling your day. Buur's observations are very troubling indeed, confirming the worst fears of those who worry that PP2 will force us to make a choice between a game where we can have fun/social/event style meetups OR a game where we sign up for Powerplay (or use alt's to have both I suppose). My own circumstantial observation was that when I went to roll the Mandalay down the side of a big crater on Callisto in Sol (while pledged to Aisling), the first time I tried, some npc ships showed up (affiliated to another power) while I was filming and destroyed my ship halfway down. When I tried again more npc's turned up, but it turned out they were non-affiliated local npc's and left me alone. So
So really there comes a point where you have to choose and deal with the tradeoff, rather than neuter PP2 back to a passive BGS like feature.
Yup, I totally get that.
Although ...
I am quietly going to say, again, that a way to temporarily suspend your pledge (perhaps with something like a 12hr cooldown period before and after to avoid any kind of immediately obvious exploit) would kinda solve the problem?
Once again, explain how stopping random Power NPCs appearing above random non-mission related locations on planets would result in PP2 being neutered.
Consider, flying along in power space, and you drop out of SC. Assuming you're not actively being followed due to a mission, no NPC will ever drop into your instance. Does that neuter PP2?
This only happens due to FD's code that NPCs should appear when you randomly drop into random locations on random planets. It sometimes provides a nice ambience seeing the ships fly overheard as you land and do stuff. It doesn't affect gameplay, it doesn't affect people meeting up for hijinks. All they need to do is remove the possibility of Power NPCs spawning, just keep random regular non-Power NPCs spawning, if they like, or remove them as well, make it the same as it is in space.