Anarchy Factions / Systems - Influence Loss Reports

[Riverside]

Its funny. Players want to influence the galaxy.. They do by an masse raiding anarchies and thus tanking them.
Now.. If you keep chopping down trees; the forest will disappear over time.


But no.. This is suddenly all Fdevs fault. No one looking at themselves? Or at the get xx fast tutorials?

The C&P rules changed with the introduction of Odyssey, producing a marked additional downward influence effect on lawless factions. Players do what players do, in large numbers trends emerge. It's not unreasonable that the game designers didn't anticipate the scale of the change in player behaviour that happened, but the very existence of this thread suggests the actual effect doesn't match their expectations and that there was some intention to tweak the balance when this thread was created.

Assigning blame isn't going to help fix the problem.

 

[Screemonster]

The C&P rules changed with the introduction of Odyssey, producing a marked additional downward influence effect on lawless factions. Players do what players do, in large numbers trends emerge. It's not unreasonable that the game designers didn't anticipate the scale of the change in player behaviour that happened, but the very existence of this thread suggests the actual effect doesn't match their expectations and that there was some intention to tweak the balance when this thread was created.

Assigning blame isn't going to help fix the problem.

The thing is, this isn't the first time a change in the game's incentive system has had a huge effect on player behaviour, or the BGS.

The december updates to mining didn't have that much of an effect on the methods of finding decent sell systems, but they had a very outsized effect on where people went to mine. With painite no longer being a clear winner, the traffic at the double-painite sites dried up. Things like the egg, for all their effect on other parts of the game such as the overall economy, had the effect of concentrating players. Now, with the effect of overlaps reduced, people largely go mining at whatever site is most convenient for them which has had the effect of scattering them across the bubble. At the very least, there's no particularly outstanding super-good locations that urge people to go there to the exclusion of all other places, and mining not being as OP as it used to be as an earner means fewer people are mining in general.

Bounties, on the other hand, got a big boost and certain systems spiked - places like Ys used to be complete backwaters, but now it's a system with a halfway decent port and only a single system with an anarchy faction within 10ly, it's a great little spot for stacking missions to beat the hell out of the pirates in that one system. Naturally, the pirates have been kicked down to the bottom of the table.

I can't help but think that the only thing it would take to make anarchies competitive is to make their missions pay worth a damn.

 

[Fake Newts]

it seems to me the place to make changes is to the on-foot notoriety & general hassle of accruing bounties on foot in lawful settlements.

I would like to see these kinds of changes, although it's important to remember that notoriety was only activated for feet content at update 6, and the worst effects of the anarchy massacre were before that. So it'd need a more complex solution.

People are right to be sceptical of bandaid solutions, we are too, but given it's been 5 months and no respite from Fdev we'd welcome any bandaids they have. Just disable civil unrest for anarchists, just turn off the negative INF from settlements until a balance can be struck. Hell, godhand all the settlements out of our hands right now, we won't miss them. Just do something.

This is suddenly all Fdevs fault. No one looking at themselves?

Mate, you do understand that this is a videogame right? No player is under moral obligation to balance the game for themselves let alone for other players they don't interact with. It's the role of design to anticipate and minimise players' tendency to minmax, and harness it to promote the kind of gameplay the developers want to see.

Source: https://youtu.be/7L8vAGGitr8


Here's a short video briefly touching on some of these design issues. People win at chess by following the rules and reaching checkmate. If there were an additional rule that said you could win by throwing a pawn at the opponent's king until it falls over... maybe remove that rule.

I represent one of the groups that has been struggling hardest with Odyssey's very real anarchy bias and at no point did anyone in our discord think about blaming anyone other than Frontier, because the buck stops with them in terms of game balance. (edit: and by 'blame' I don't mean that in a hostile way, I'm willing to believe they didn't anticipate this result. They have a difficult job. I am less thrilled about their response time though...)

You don't need a YouTube grind guide to figure out that having notoriety and bounties is annoying, that's just obvious. Spending your time in lawless settlements produces the same results without that annoyance... So yeah, people are doing it. Hell, we'd probably be doing it if we weren't on the receiving end because we're playing Elite: Dangerous on its terms and have no incentive to play according to whatever niche code of ethics you're promoting here.

Even if we did want to blame players for their behaviour how would that help matters? Browbeat them into abiding by this intrinsic code of honour? Forever? I'm sorry I'm being harsh here but this isn't the first time I've heard this idea pushed and it frankly (edited to be less inflammatory) winds me up.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

I still think the easiest band-aid solution would be to make anarchy settlements give less and worse loot instead of having stuff you can't get anywhere else - at least for now.

I've often seen people mention how the fact that anarchy factions don't really retaliate against crimes where a criminal organization or mafia, which anarchies are mostly portrayed as in elite, would.

Would having different reputation thresholds help or hurt anarchies - basically making anarchies more trigger happy and shoot you on sight at unfriendly or some other arbitrary threshold closer to the default reputation.

Even making all hostile missions to anarchy settlements trigger the "base is pre-alerted" wrinkle could be an interesting, maybe fitting, gameplay touch, but again not helpful if it just results in more anarchy dudes dying if stealth isn't an option.

 

[Rainbro]

Would having different reputation thresholds help or hurt anarchies - basically making anarchies more trigger happy and shoot you on sight at unfriendly or some other arbitrary threshold closer to the default reputation.

An improvement to reputation or allowing anarchies to set bounties for attacks on that specific anarchy faction seem like the smartest fixes to me - but I expect the game right now isn't set up to allow for that. So I guess anarchies will just have to wait until the devs get around to it :/ you can wait, right? Nice

 

[Screemonster]

Here's how to fix the stick:

• Remove crime reporting entirely (not just authority response) in areas where the system link is inactive.
• In surface areas where there are no alarms or alarms are disabled, crimes committed on foot are not to be reported but ship-to-ship crimes are.
• Change the trigger for incurring a murder bounty to "An NPC discovers the body" instead of upon death.
• NPCs that discover a crime and are unable to report it (due to the alarms being off) should attempt to reactivate and sound the alarms.

That ought to make doing your dirty business at lawful settlements less of a problem, as well as rewarding actual stealth instead of going loud. The first point will also make little lawless pockets in otherwise lawful systems for space crimes too.

As for the carrot:

• Leave all lawful mission rewards where they are. Takedowns and raids already give you some extra gravy if you scan for bounties and collections are risk-free.
• Theft and illegal assassination missions should pay double what they do now, instead of the paltry pay buff they get compared to collect/takedown missions. About a million for an assassination feels about right when you consider the time spent flying there, landing and finding them - compare a pirate lord assassination, which pays the same ballpark and most of the time they find you.
• Heists, sabotage, espionage, infiltration, shutdown - anything that requires you to disable an alarm to access the data point? These should easily pay on a par or better than their horizons equivalent - these being the missions to scan beacons at settlements and kill generators. I can do a horizons generator kill without dropping my throttle and it pays a couple of million with a six-day mission window for... basically the amount of time it takes to complete the glide, deploy hardpoints, and boost out of masslock again. Compare that to the time it takes to shut down a generator, especially if you're doing a covert job. (maybe those horizons missions are intended to be done in the SRV, but who does?)
• Settlement massacres are a MASSIVE inconvenience afterwards and should produce an equally MASSIVE reward. Tens of millions shouldn't be unreasonable considering the time they take and the bounties/notoriety you incur.

Fixing stealth, along with a pay buff, would make criminal activity actually worthwhile. Do you do it slowly like a ghost and avoid your bounties? Or just go loud, eat the bounty and notoriety, and just stack as many as you can for crazy cr/hr?

 

[O'Roarke]

It doesn't help that there are influencers recommending people to go "farm materials in Anarchy sites", rather then just explaining to their followers on how to steal. They apparently only know the psychopath route.

Anarchy systems should have their own "spin" on the Crime and Punishment system, only then reversed.
Something that is equally annoying to players, game mechanically speaking, but plays out differently then the C+P system.

Like accruing credits as a "Reprisal" - for damages done to an Anarchy faction -- this equivalent to a "bounty" would slowly decay over time.
And accumulating "ire" from zero to ten (cap) - for being a thorn in their side -- this equivalent to "notoriety" would NOT decay at all.
So the anarchy system works the other way around compared to the legal system.

Paying off your reprisals would help reduce Ire provided it isn't too high; an Ire higher then three cannot be bought off.

In order to reduce high Ire (like 4, or the cap of 10) you'd have to do certain favours on top of paying a serious chunk of change.
Maybe hauling 500 units of Selected Slaves from a system to Gabriel Enterprise in Harma, whom will all "aid in the production of Kumo Burgers".
Or maybe assassinating a prominent Politician in an Anarchy system that'll dump a serious chunk of influence towards the local Anarchy faction, and take a serious hunk of influence from their own faction.

Why would you want to drop your Ire?
Well, at an Ire of 1 you'd no longer be able to cash in bounties at a star system's legal administration for factions outside that one star system -- and you'd be told that "it's not legal to bypass regulations like that -- you of all people should know that, Commander".
At an Ire of 2 you'd lose the ability to pay off bounties at an interstellar faction.
At Ire 3 you'd lose the ability to pay off fines at an interstellar faction (because "such a beacon of order as yourself shouldn't need to use a facility like ours").

Higher Ire ratings would have dedicated Pirates or Corsairs stalk you and interdict you (similar to the ATR), or maybe take special care at just pulling cargo out of your big ship with a hatch breaker as you're trying to haul it to a destination -- they don't have to fight and destroy a player, just be a real annoyance.

Maybe at Ire 7+ you'll be interdicted by a wing of two vipers and an eagle -- the eagle tags you with a hatch breaker and maybe tags you with an FSD interrupt dumbfire, the vipers each dump four cascade torpedoes into you; one Viper in front of you, one Viper behind you; and yes like ATR they have engineered ships that do 895m/s in a boost so they'll be able to pull that off.
"The Kumo Crew sends their regards, Commander!"

Players that keep hammering Anarchy factions because it's really easy-mode for Odyssey material farming and bypasses a lot of downtime for performing badly suddenly find out that they're losing all sorts of other easy amenities in life!
And if they push it too far, they are facing seriously annoying consequences.

And you'd have another game mechanic you'd have make a judgement call on how far you'd like to push it.

 

[OcipXiron]

Ahoy, space pirates!

We've received reports of the recent Odyssey update negatively affecting influence for anarchy factions and systems in the BGS. If your minor faction/system of choice has been affect, could you please reply to this thread with the following details:

• The name of the faction
• The name of the system
• What you were trying to do vs what actually happened
• Approximate dates you attempted the action

Make sure your reports concern incidents that occurred since 28 May. Please do not post replies to other comments, or post anything off-topic lest your comment be removed. We would like to keep this thread clean and efficient for feedback.

Your feedback will be immensely helpful in identifying and resolving this issue.

Yarr and O7

Edit: we ask for dates so that we can isolate and examine specific events. We understand that some issues are "always on" but please give specific instances where possible.

Unfair how odyssey wars are drastically affecting anarchy bgs in horizons on console specifically. Since there is no way to engage those in odyssey atm. Smh

 

[Riverside]

Unfair how odyssey wars are drastically affecting anarchy bgs in horizons on console specifically. Since there is no way to engage those in odyssey atm. Smh

You think the mats farmers are in open, and would go elsewhere to farm if they were shot at by another player?

It's possible the meta inf increaser for anarchy factions is in Odyssey's missions, I think your time might be better spent trading & selling explo data to any lawless stations & that can be done on any plaform, in any mode, without Odyssey.

 

[Cmdr Aos_Si]

Here's how to fix the stick:

• Remove crime reporting entirely (not just authority response) in areas where the system link is inactive.
• In surface areas where there are no alarms or alarms are disabled, crimes committed on foot are not to be reported but ship-to-ship crimes are.
• Change the trigger for incurring a murder bounty to "An NPC discovers the body" instead of upon death.
• NPCs that discover a crime and are unable to report it (due to the alarms being off) should attempt to reactivate and sound the alarms.

That ought to make doing your dirty business at lawful settlements less of a problem, as well as rewarding actual stealth instead of going loud. The first point will also make little lawless pockets in otherwise lawful systems for space crimes too.

As for the carrot:

• Leave all lawful mission rewards where they are. Takedowns and raids already give you some extra gravy if you scan for bounties and collections are risk-free.
• Theft and illegal assassination missions should pay double what they do now, instead of the paltry pay buff they get compared to collect/takedown missions. About a million for an assassination feels about right when you consider the time spent flying there, landing and finding them - compare a pirate lord assassination, which pays the same ballpark and most of the time they find you.
• Heists, sabotage, espionage, infiltration, shutdown - anything that requires you to disable an alarm to access the data point? These should easily pay on a par or better than their horizons equivalent - these being the missions to scan beacons at settlements and kill generators. I can do a horizons generator kill without dropping my throttle and it pays a couple of million with a six-day mission window for... basically the amount of time it takes to complete the glide, deploy hardpoints, and boost out of masslock again. Compare that to the time it takes to shut down a generator, especially if you're doing a covert job. (maybe those horizons missions are intended to be done in the SRV, but who does?)
• Settlement massacres are a MASSIVE inconvenience afterwards and should produce an equally MASSIVE reward. Tens of millions shouldn't be unreasonable considering the time they take and the bounties/notoriety you incur.

Fixing stealth, along with a pay buff, would make criminal activity actually worthwhile. Do you do it slowly like a ghost and avoid your bounties? Or just go loud, eat the bounty and notoriety, and just stack as many as you can for crazy cr/hr?

These are great ideas and would certainly be an improvement on what we currently have.

 

[OcipXiron]

You think the mats farmers are in open, and would go elsewhere to farm if they were shot at by another player?

It's possible the meta inf increaser for anarchy factions is in Odyssey's missions, I think your time might be better spent trading & selling explo data to any lawless stations & that can be done on any plaform, in any mode, without Odyssey.

My playstyle consists of station raiding and making small profits off npc cargo.. cant do that if anarchy factions arent in control such a bummer

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

• The name of the faction: Raiders of Helveti
• The name of the system: HIP 11218
• What you were trying to do vs what actually happened: Trying to do missions that benefit the Raiders of Helveti, they gave me a mission to target their own settlement.
• Approximate dates you attempted the action: Just now, november 4 2021

I've been having issues with sometimes there being no missions for them on ship mission boards since the latest update too.

https://imgur.com/a/gw5wKdC

Source: https://imgur.com/a/gw5wKdC

 

[aclout]

So, any change in the upcoming update, or another bitter winter of discontent awaits?

 

[Vandaahl]

• The name of the faction: Raiders of Helveti
• The name of the system: HIP 11218
• What you were trying to do vs what actually happened: Trying to do missions that benefit the Raiders of Helveti, they gave me a mission to target their own settlement.
• Approximate dates you attempted the action: Just now, november 4 2021

I've been having issues with sometimes there being no missions for them on ship mission boards since the latest update too.

https://imgur.com/a/gw5wKdC

Source: https://imgur.com/a/gw5wKdC

Can confirm. For the faction I support, I've seen multiple missions asking to disrupt their own production process. Not sure if there is any negative effect from it though, as the inf should go the one issuing the mission. It looks daft though.

 

[Screemonster]

Can confirm. For the faction I support, I've seen multiple missions asking to disrupt their own production process. Not sure if there is any negative effect from it though, as the inf should go the one issuing the mission. It looks daft though.

Yep, I've run into this too. It happens mainly in the systems where the majority of the settlements to anarchy, but that's probably just statistical probability since none of them have no other valid targets.

 

[CMDR Rabbit]

Can confirm. For the faction I support, I've seen multiple missions asking to disrupt their own production process. Not sure if there is any negative effect from it though, as the inf should go the one issuing the mission. It looks daft though.

I had that reaction too but now i wave those off as competing groups within the faction itself.

Be kind of neat if that became part of the mechanics though, like if you could support a specific mission provider (instead of always flipping to a new one as your rep increases).

Sort of, gaining influence for the faction as whole gains that specific faction member some influence within the faction, and of course, failing missions or abandoning them could cost that person too.

And then they sick the bounty hunters on you.

Its probably more complicated than its payoff in play warrants, i just like the idea of having a more long standing working relationship with a faction member from my own little internal narrative pov.

 

[Donald Duck]

Ahoy, space pirates!

We've received reports of the recent Odyssey update negatively affecting influence for anarchy factions and systems in the BGS. If your minor faction/system of choice has been affect, could you please reply to this thread with the following details:

• The name of the faction
• The name of the system
• What you were trying to do vs what actually happened
• Approximate dates you attempted the action

Make sure your reports concern incidents that occurred since 28 May. Please do not post replies to other comments, or post anything off-topic lest your comment be removed. We would like to keep this thread clean and efficient for feedback.

Your feedback will be immensely helpful in identifying and resolving this issue.

Yarr and O7

Edit: we ask for dates so that we can isolate and examine specific events. We understand that some issues are "always on" but please give specific instances where possible.

Is more or less the same happening again because of Power Play 2.0?

Bruce G is no more, so who would take care of this now?

Back then this was - iirc - taken care of but forgotten again later down the road, as it seems...

 

[Cyanidex]

Is more or less the same happening again because of Power Play 2.0?

Bruce G is no more, so who would take care of this now?

Back then this was - iirc - taken care of but forgotten again later down the road, as it seems...

I dont know whats going on but BGS is definitely broken. We couldn't stop influence increase to stop expansion in couple of our systems with Aisling's %100 influence bonus and with 4 more CMDRs.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The root cause of both is likely the same:
- Powerplay has brought a lot of people back to the game
- Powerplay has caused those people to go to systems they might not otherwise go to
- people playing the game in a system makes its BGS more active, by design

For an Anarchy faction, more players = reduced influence, in general.
For a non-Anarchy controlling faction, more players = increased influence, in general.
(And for Powerplay specifically, it incentives a lot of varied actions but not in general the mission boards, which are the main way that non-controlling factions get influence in non-Anarchy systems)

Back then this was - iirc - taken care of

Back then there was a very specific problem - scavenger-class on-foot enemies belonged to the local Anarchy faction, and so harmed its influence when they died in large numbers. That was fixed by reallocating them to the generic "Pirates" faction.

The wider problem for Anarchies is that the game since the original 1984 Elite has very strongly incentivised players to carry out legal over illegal actions, and that's not solvable by a little bit of rebalancing of how the BGS deals with those eventual outputs: that needs a complete rethink of what "legal" and "illegal" mean, what actions are incentivised and how, and so on.

(But also: I think Frontier's aim for "Elite Dangerous strategy games" has moved to more comprehensible and transparent ones - the Thargoid conflict, Powerplay - rather than trying to support as a balanced game the emergent BGS play that players put on top of the "systems aren't static" background effects layer. There hasn't been a BGS rebalance noted in Patch Notes since Odyssey Update 10, back at the start of 2022, so almost three years ago)

 

[Donald Duck]

I dont know whats going on but BGS is definitely broken. We couldn't stop influence increase to stop expansion in couple of our systems with Aisling's %100 influence bonus and with 4 more CMDRs.

Yeah, the leverage between BGS and PP seems broken and should be re-arranged or decoupled somehow.

Back then there was a very specific problem - scavenger-class on-foot enemies belonged to the local Anarchy faction, and so harmed its influence when they died in large numbers. That was fixed by reallocating them to the generic "Pirates" faction.

Was that the only measure FDev applied? I could kick myself for not documenting these events back then, but I strongly believe that they also had 'turned off' INF by bounties.

The wider problem for Anarchies is that the game since the original 1984 Elite has very strongly incentivised players to carry out legal over illegal actions, and that's not solvable by a little bit of rebalancing of how the BGS deals with those eventual outputs: that needs a complete rethink of what "legal" and "illegal" mean, what actions are incentivised and how, and so on.

It is not easy and I understand it concerns a niche, but since FDev had already applied measures to counter that they could do it again. My best guess would be to adjust lawlessness in inhabited systems to the one of uninhabited systems.

When a wild west bounty hunter shot a wanted criminal somewhere in the prairie they had to drag the body back to civilization to get the bounty. And it had no influence on the native anarchistic tribe (a civil society without state- and/or government-like structures) on whose land that shoot-out had happend...