Well, they buffed Engineering, but it took them 9 years to fully fix it. So I guess we can expect Powerplay to finally become balanced and enjoyable in 2033.
Elite Dangerous | Powerplay 2.0 Update
- Thread starter Paul_Crowther
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Once, but it was only a few months ago (engineering).
Let's not get carried away. Engineering is better. It is not nor ever will be fully fixed.
I'm willing to give PP2.0 more time to iron out its issues properly. It's been less than a month. Just a bit disheartening to see so many talking about disengaging from Powerplay due to said issues, I hope that most who've decided to give PP2.0 a chance will be able to be more patient. I had not previously gotten involved in Powerplay, and now that this latest iteration is live, I still think it definitely has the bones of a good gameplay addition to it.
It's meant to be a community effort, not a solo effort. The answer is to get others on board with you and work together!
So unlocking the first module from it should take... checks notes 13 years? What a misguided proposal.
Lots of people love gaming, maybe even having other people around now and then, but they absolutely don't want any sort of relational commitment to other people.
Hmmm. They could merge ARX and merits into one. Then sit back and watch us kill each other. Like Squid Game. Only in England.
Honestly, I'm not sure why people are so riled up about this. I haven't done ANY of the activities mentioned here; I've only played maybe an hour or two on weekdays and a few hours on weekends, and I'm already at rank 30.
I play a BIT more than average, but I've still had time to go to work, cook, clean, socialize.
I think most people are being way over-dramatic, and also underestimating how fast they'll get there. Even an average player playing decently well could get their first module by week 4-5, imo.
It's honestly crazy to me that people expect to get to rank 35 in like 7 hours.
I play a BIT more than average, but I've still had time to go to work, cook, clean, socialize.
I think most people are being way over-dramatic, and also underestimating how fast they'll get there. Even an average player playing decently well could get their first module by week 4-5, imo.
It's honestly crazy to me that people expect to get to rank 35 in like 7 hours.
the reason people are pushing Rares is because it is the only loop that respects a players time. I mean, I can fly to an oddy base, sneak in, download like 5 powerplay datas. takes 30 minutes? how many merits do I get for doing that? 25? in the same 30 minutes I could have made thousands of merits running rares.
same with restarting Oddy settlement missions. they can take a while, especially if you have to fight scavs and want to download all the powerplay data. 300 merits? make it 1000 and I might actually do some.
--- also, setting weekly limits on merits is ridiculous, frankly. if someone wants to grind 24/7, let them. it's the person who plays for an hour a week that needs boosting.
same with restarting Oddy settlement missions. they can take a while, especially if you have to fight scavs and want to download all the powerplay data. 300 merits? make it 1000 and I might actually do some.
--- also, setting weekly limits on merits is ridiculous, frankly. if someone wants to grind 24/7, let them. it's the person who plays for an hour a week that needs boosting.
I know, right? That's the problem with ganking in Star Citizen. "Just play with friends," they say. If I wanted to interact with friends, I wouldn't be there in the first place.
EXACTLY!
Lots of anger here, some of it my own (like 20 pages back). But I've been thinking about this, and I'd like to tender something... reasonable?
1. I actually feel bad for the FDev folks working on this game right now. PP2 is honestly the first huge development since Odyssey, and it really has turned into a buggy mess. I think this is a combination of business/monetization pressure and implementing new systems in an already hilariously complicated game. FDev needs to work on finding a way to rationally monetize continuing operations on ED, a way that will remove the pressure that is causing bad/rushed decisions and not alienate the player base. This is a hard problem. I personally wouldn't mind paying a small monthly subscription, especially if it means new ships immediately getting released for credits and not for ARX.
2. A possible way of limiting the PP2 issue is to limit the amount of merits available. Each player can get a certain amount of merits in that week, and that's it. Nothing more. This would go a long way toward leveling the playing field and preventing obsessive, unfun behavior. Nobody's going to grind rares or pods for zero merits, even if they really want that system fortified/undermined. A way of modifying this for equity would be to take into account the total number of PP players and adjust the Merits Per Week (MPW) allowance upward for low pilot count powers (e.g. Torval) and downward for the opposite (Aisling, Mahon, etc.). This would have an additional leveling effect that pilots seeking higher merit allowance would switch allegiance to the "more profitable" team. If I may indulge a joke, this will prevent PP from becoming The Aisling Duval Show.
3. A more complicated way of dealing with the problem is to set up a diminishing returns system. However, this has the potential to be hilariously complicated. Will the system be per power? Per system? Per task? A mixture of the three? How do you modify the interface to warn players that they're about to do something unprofitable because someone else already saturated it? Lastly, with the servers as taxed as they already are, how do you implement the new algorithms without causing even more bugs and lag? While I'd love to see something like this put into PP2, I also think it's not a very feasible solution.
4. A message to FDev: Please keep listening to the players. We will tell you what we want, what we're willing to pay for it, and what we are willing to tolerate. In dealing with the current crisis, your attention is what really matters. The sheer outpouring of emotion in this thread should tell how you passionate people still are about this game. Please don't take that for granted, and let us travel with you.
o7 fellas
1. I actually feel bad for the FDev folks working on this game right now. PP2 is honestly the first huge development since Odyssey, and it really has turned into a buggy mess. I think this is a combination of business/monetization pressure and implementing new systems in an already hilariously complicated game. FDev needs to work on finding a way to rationally monetize continuing operations on ED, a way that will remove the pressure that is causing bad/rushed decisions and not alienate the player base. This is a hard problem. I personally wouldn't mind paying a small monthly subscription, especially if it means new ships immediately getting released for credits and not for ARX.
2. A possible way of limiting the PP2 issue is to limit the amount of merits available. Each player can get a certain amount of merits in that week, and that's it. Nothing more. This would go a long way toward leveling the playing field and preventing obsessive, unfun behavior. Nobody's going to grind rares or pods for zero merits, even if they really want that system fortified/undermined. A way of modifying this for equity would be to take into account the total number of PP players and adjust the Merits Per Week (MPW) allowance upward for low pilot count powers (e.g. Torval) and downward for the opposite (Aisling, Mahon, etc.). This would have an additional leveling effect that pilots seeking higher merit allowance would switch allegiance to the "more profitable" team. If I may indulge a joke, this will prevent PP from becoming The Aisling Duval Show.
3. A more complicated way of dealing with the problem is to set up a diminishing returns system. However, this has the potential to be hilariously complicated. Will the system be per power? Per system? Per task? A mixture of the three? How do you modify the interface to warn players that they're about to do something unprofitable because someone else already saturated it? Lastly, with the servers as taxed as they already are, how do you implement the new algorithms without causing even more bugs and lag? While I'd love to see something like this put into PP2, I also think it's not a very feasible solution.
4. A message to FDev: Please keep listening to the players. We will tell you what we want, what we're willing to pay for it, and what we are willing to tolerate. In dealing with the current crisis, your attention is what really matters. The sheer outpouring of emotion in this thread should tell how you passionate people still are about this game. Please don't take that for granted, and let us travel with you.
o7 fellas
You don't have to directly interact with them, but if you're trying to play a multiplayer game without any cooperation at all, your efforts are gonna get crushed by the people who actually work together. Not sure what else to say, really.
Have you been taking along the powerplay malware to upload, as well? Done efficiently I was making ~2k merits per hour running settlements, stealing data, and so on. Not top tier by any means but not terrible.
Yeah... In non PP systems all lockers and data ports are empty. I went back to a PP system, and everything was there again.
As well as basically killing off the last really viable way now of gaining merits, the other benefit of the rare good runs, it gave really good areas for organic PVP because Cmdrs were all going to certain places which created great places for open interaction and game play, that's now gone which is shame. I honestly don't think Fdev understand how the player base works or wants, we don't want grind for years to unlock PP modules being told to do certain PP tasks in solitude, we want fun and open game player interaction.
I believe the complaints about the merit grind are largely in relation to the goal of progressing one's rank, rather than relating to trying to shift a particular star system in any direction.
yeah, my group was calling in protectors for gankers attacking those doing rare runs (they were like combat version of fuel rats), that was a community thing killed now that no one is doing rares
missions for hacking holograms were also broken, couldn't complete last week or this week, no holograms in systems specified.
I can't help but feel that people wouldn't be as eager to use these massively overtuned glitched methods if literally anything else actually earned merits at a close to reasonable rate.
We had the same "oh you'll earn the (thing) just by playing the game!" with engineering and people complained for years about the massive grind, resorting to relogs and all sorts of nonsense just to get it over with, fdev finally updated it earlier this year to massive praise, finally people can actually earn as they play...
... and then they repeated the exact same mistake with powerplay merits.
Take powerplay commodities. 1.5 merits per ton. 30 tons per half hour. So I can get 45 merits a time doing shuttle runs to a station.
How about something slightly riskier? Uploading malware? Well, I get 96 merits for that, so I have to do it 8072 times to max rank.
I get 10 every half-hour, so even if I can get a loop to a settlement fast enough to use them as quickly as I earn them, that's 17 days straight without sleep or rest doing nothing but standing there at a dataport uploading as fast as I can.
In practice, 10 out of every 30 of those minutes would be spent on uploading alone, not to mention travel to the settlement, disabling alarms (or powering up) and so on.
And that's one of the better earners. No wonder people are jumping on every exploit they can find.
And that's just for personal progression, never mind actually achieving something in the game where we're talking hundreds of thousands of merits per system to move the bar a single block even when completely unopposed.
We had the same "oh you'll earn the (thing) just by playing the game!" with engineering and people complained for years about the massive grind, resorting to relogs and all sorts of nonsense just to get it over with, fdev finally updated it earlier this year to massive praise, finally people can actually earn as they play...
... and then they repeated the exact same mistake with powerplay merits.
Take powerplay commodities. 1.5 merits per ton. 30 tons per half hour. So I can get 45 merits a time doing shuttle runs to a station.
How about something slightly riskier? Uploading malware? Well, I get 96 merits for that, so I have to do it 8072 times to max rank.
I get 10 every half-hour, so even if I can get a loop to a settlement fast enough to use them as quickly as I earn them, that's 17 days straight without sleep or rest doing nothing but standing there at a dataport uploading as fast as I can.
In practice, 10 out of every 30 of those minutes would be spent on uploading alone, not to mention travel to the settlement, disabling alarms (or powering up) and so on.
And that's one of the better earners. No wonder people are jumping on every exploit they can find.
And that's just for personal progression, never mind actually achieving something in the game where we're talking hundreds of thousands of merits per system to move the bar a single block even when completely unopposed.
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