Anarchy Factions / Systems - Influence Loss Reports

[Jmanis]

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 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)

The stats I ran a while back with missions sum things up well, to a point. I dont have them on hand, but IIRC it's something like, for every mission board generation in a typical region of space, you'll get the following missions:

• At least two missions targeting each anarchy faction within a 20LY range
• A 1 in 20 chance of a mission targeting a random non-anarchy faction
• All other missions supporting non-anarchy factions.

So this is basically, for a typical random 100-mission board, there's

• ~20-30 missions which hurt the ~10 anarchies in range.
• ~5 missions which will randomly target one of the ~60-odd lawful factions in range; and
• ~70 missions supporting lawful factions.

Throw onto that the ongoing position that "Positive influence and states == Player Success", while "Negative influence and states == Player Failure"... anarchies which by-and-large cause negative influence and states are simply not incentivised.

It's why things like a criminal mission board which explicitly offers incentivised missions specifically targeting only lawful factions is needed, to allow the same magnitude of targeted effects that currently support lawful factions.

By-exception rules for Anarchies is, tbh, the wrong way to do it.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Was that the only measure FDev applied?

At that point, yes, that I remember. Update 10 had a few more Anarchy-friendly features in theory:
- Pirate Attack on a non-Anarchy faction directly transfers influence to the local Anarchy faction (thematic, but ultimately useless as a balancing tool)
- Anarchy factions don't have a security slider any more - since they had no real way to increase it (stops some unwanted state outcomes but probably marginal for influence levels)
but the main reason for the levelling off in the decline of Anarchy factions was that by then players had figured out how to dump their Odyssey settlements.

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

The problem here is that there is already no formal link.

BGS reacts to players doing things in a system
Powerplay also reacts to players doing things in a system (a different but overlapping set)

It's only broken from the specific perspective of players who want a particular minor faction to be in a particular situation in a system. From the point of view of "players do stuff and the system responds", everything is working as designed.

 

[Donald Duck]

It's only broken from the specific perspective of players who want a particular minor faction to be in a particular situation in a system. From the point of view of "players do stuff and the system responds", everything is working as designed.

Which would be the perspective of each player (group), wouldn't it? Add that some larger ones even have the additonal problem that "their systems" are being spread amongst several powers and besides of managing this, they get unwanted bgs movements and/or even expansions triggered for "reasons unknown"?

So this design has some flaws which should be adjusted...

 

[Ian Doncaster]

So this design has some flaws which should be adjusted...

Sure, but identifying what they are might be tricky.

Player group A wants the state of the factions in system X to be Y.
Player non-group B (larger, perhaps much larger) is also doing actions in system X.

A design goal such that the smaller group A can enforce state Y on the system despite being outnumbered in terms of the raw inputs they're providing is tricky to achieve by any sort of numeric balancing.

The only option I can see specific to Powerplay would be to remove Influence effects from all actions except missions, since Powerplay doesn't - for the most part - incentivise doing missions. Obviously that would lead to a very different experience for any conflict between BGS groups and leave Anarchy factions specifically very vulnerable to non-Powerplay attacks because of the ease of targeting missions onto them and their own generally poor mission selection.

 

[Donald Duck]

Sure, but identifying what they are might be tricky.

Yeah, that's why I am pointing at what was done back when this problem (for anarchies) came up the last time. Idk if detaching INF from bounties in anarchies is that complicated, presumably it is as it might influence some other variables and that (what influencing what how when why) seems to be out of control anyway atm...

Or by "simply" ironing out paradoxes about what an anarchy actually is or not - one way or the other. After working an anarchy bgs for 5 years I dare to say that the black box of events to counter has become too big and it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to accept this as properly designed.

Whatever, as there should/will be adjustments coming anyway following pp2.0, why not take care of this too?

 

[Fake Newts]

Increased traffic is an increased headache for anarchy factions due to the bias already mentioned.

Circa Odyssey Fdev did a couple of things to lessen the impact of random traffic on anarchy factions, but nothing to make passing traffic likely to support us. I believe the best 'fix' in the long term would be to overhaul criminal activities so that it's actually fun and rewarding beyond individual players' RP. Piracy missions, for example, could be popular (lots of people express interest in piracy) but as a set of mechanics it frankly barely works at all and the missions themselves are extremely laborious and poorly balanced even if you're determined enough to engage with the janky systems. Smuggling is another example that has faded into obscurity.

There would almost certainly still be more players wanting to white-hat rather than black-hat, but if anarchy factions and criminal activities in general were to receive a "Mining 2.0" or "FSS" style overhaul it would at the very least make it seem like a viable playstyle and some traffic would become beneficial. I realise the chances of this are slim, and we're more likely to see more charity reprieves if anything, but a guy can dream.

As an aside, re-valuing trade for BGS would help controlling anarchies. PP traffic has been gobbling up rares at Zhen dock since launch but we don't see any benefit from it whatsoever, on the contary we now have to prop it up daily because of (presumably) the number of anarchy NPCs being caught in the crossfire. You'd have thought with people doing roaring trade at your primary starport you'd get some INF to rub together but nay, I guess we can eat biowaste forever.