General Comprehensive list of needed changes to Powerplay activities to respect player time, effort and risk doing it

[Rubbernuke]

There are places where merits could be earned harmlessly - an Acquisition system that's not contestable and has already passed the threshold, an Undermining target which has already been beaten beyond any practical hope of recovery.

For cross-power allied player groups (bleh...) allowing you both to fortify your systems rapidly by swapping kills on each other (which gets you merits, which makes the next round of kills more effective, oh dear) would be a feature.

But also you have to fly out and organise it- if the value of the kill is 'normal' then the action becomes tedious since you have to effectively run x instances. I expect there will be sad individuals willing to try, but of you have to go through the process and only earn 60 merits for five minutes of flying in, swap instances, go through rebuy, fly out, swap client, kill, swap client etc its not practical.

A long (long) time ago I did a proposal for PP that had a value called 'trust' in that the more you lose for a power the less that person can do- I think in this case we need something similar where when a power loses because of you, they block you out. For example being deliberately crap loses ranks where failure demotes if you continually fail- this would require adjustments to merit generation though.

That's a bit excessive, though, and probably just acts as a discouragement to pledging for part-timers to close down a very niche situation in practice (explorer returning to a system which actually contains a hostile player) - on the fluff side, if Frontline can be widely praised for transporting mercenaries for both sides into the same CZ, surely Apex can do the same.

The line has to be drawn, and its an exploit thats also illogical lore wise. The game has made far too many concessions and suffers greatly for it.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The logic in both cases seems inescapable. FDev have previously said merit gain would be linear, I think. Would introducing a per-player, per-activity, per-cycle falloff (maybe kicking in at approaching-outlier levels) have any prospect of ameliorating the downside of these changes?

For competitive activity (i.e. affecting system status) a pile of alts is a bypass for that and taking out the "per-player" bit of it would be a nightmare. And sure, more alts = more money for Frontier but it doesn't solve the balance issue itself.

For non-competitive activity (i.e. primarily caring about your own rank) I don't really mind how fast a few outliers do it anyway. The vast majority of players are going slower than I am (currently rank 15)

 

[Gabriel H]

And sure, more alts = more money for Frontier but it doesn't solve the balance issue itself.

Your premise is based on FDev wanting balance, as opposed to financial gain. Long-term balance would keep the gaming going, but that presumes they want to. I'm not saying that FDev want to kill the game, but they sure do seem hell bent on giving it a shot.

 

[Insane4un]

I like the idea of escalating reward based on notoriety, but even your numbers are far too low given the downsides of continual crime.

So I'd say each point is worth 50%, that way the most punished activity is the most rewarding if you do it a lot, something which needs to be encouraged in PP rather than easy legal ways.

The numbers are there just for them to get the Idea on how to approach it. It's not my job to fix this game. And I don't have the same quality data as they do.

This makes power kills 25% more effective in Reinforcement as compared with Undermining, for exactly the same kill otherwise. There are already too many incentives to Reinforce as opposed to Undermine.

Reinforcement should be easier than undermining, because it changes dynamic on strategic scale, but numbers are up for debate and for FDev to figure it.
Also keep in mind that if PP commodity get the much needed buff, undermining will get one more option to use.

I like the idea in principle but I suspect this will just get exploited by

• pledge alt to enemy power
• put alt in Sidewinder
• shoot alt
• repeat

As we're seeing with data ports, escape pods and rares it is absolutely fatal if an activity has a "normal" way to do it, and a "niche" way to do it which is ten times quicker but clearly not how it's supposed to work.

Smart codding is needed to address that. Problem is, is smart codding achievable at all?

It could be mitigated by the alts total merits made that week, plus the value of the ship- plus that you have to fly the ship out manually.

So, a bog standard alt dummy target would be worth no extra since it has made no merits and flies in a Sidewinder.

Smart Codding moment

The incredibly condescending tone really helps get your point across...

10 years watching them pushing DoA updates does that. I fixed the "tone"

I think this is completely the wrong approach. You are just doing the same thing Fdev did, putting arbitrary numbers down and hoping it will all work out. You also completely ignored exploration, exobiology, mining and a few other methods

Numbers are just to give the general idea. I am sure FDev can do it and figure out the right numbers. Because I can't. I don't have data on entire player base activity.

For cross-power allied player groups (bleh...) allowing you both to fortify your systems rapidly by swapping kills on each other (which gets you merits, which makes the next round of kills more effective, oh dear) would be a feature.

Unfortunately, that's a risk. And I am not sure if smart codding is even able to mitigate that.