Elite Dangerous | Powerplay 2.0 Update

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It's a spurious argument at the best of times. When it's 4am in the UK and everyone (most) are asleep, players in Australia are free to do as they please as there is nobody there to defend.

That said, I think that there needs to be some penalty to control scores for merits obtained in non-open play, but merit values themselves should not be affected.
My night is daytime in the UK. My morning is evening in the US. Your argument doesn't add up.
 
Pretty sure all this 'PP unplayable now' is just people trying to pretend there are no Merit fountains from fdev.

And if they're watching - there totally aren't any Merit fountains any more ... nothing to see here officer!

Based on past experience with similar but different situation - exobiology - I would be very hesitant to put any player effort into PP 2.0 until things get settled. Possibly in a couple of weeks. Or months. Realizing its just a game, but I got burned by being an enthusiastic exobiologist and then having my efforts equal jack squat with the first "rebalance".

Its better to pursue other goals until its settled.
 
There is absolutely no need to insult other people, especially when some of those Content Creators have been playing since Alpha. So let's keep things constructive please.

You said, among other things, they weren't "real players". Which shows how little you know about the people on that program and how little you know about why they were given early access.

It's very easy to say you think there should have been test servers, without needing to make any disparaging remarks about other people regardless of who they are and what they do.
Dear @Ozric , English is not my first language, but I can't see any offence to anyone in @Poonjabby 's post either. Even with the help of Deepl.com, I can't agree. The post is simply criticism, and some of it is even constructive.

Best regards.
 
Based on past experience with similar but different situation - exobiology - I would be very hesitant to put any player effort into PP 2.0 until things get settled. Possibly in a couple of weeks. Or months. Realizing its just a game, but I got burned by being an enthusiastic exobiologist and then having my efforts equal jack squat with the first "rebalance".

Its better to pursue other goals until its settled.
Early exobiologists were luckier though, since they had to do far less to reach Elite V. But at least you are rich like Scrooge McDuck if you pursue that path today. Elite V equals a fully equipped fleet carrier with 20 years upkeep paid and spare cash for quite a few ships.
 
You said, among other things, they weren't "real players". Which shows how little you know about the people on that program and how little you know about why they were given early access.

It's very easy to say you think there should have been test servers, without needing to make any disparaging remarks about other people regardless of who they are and what th

The post is simply criticism
Let it go Randy it's not worth it, he missed the entire point of the post. Rather than understand the players frustration he turned it into a post about content creators.
 
I really wonder how some things are not anticipated?


Rares: You have the data and you made the formula, how hard is it to look at the most distant one and factor in someone spending a week loading it into a carrier? Which OF COURSE E-D players will do. Are you aware of mining?


Data: We intend for one commander to download one data one time. Maybe check that is the case after you use the terminal?


SLFs: Lets have the carriers swarm the attacker with SLFs. They are hard to hit with bullets (because they often have the gimbal aim offset for some reason) so lets make them worth lots of merits. Did you forget that seekers exist?


PP Commodities: Lets allocate each commander some dozens of cargo per 1/2 hour and then lets make control scores that must be moved by some 4 to 6 orders of magnitude. The cargo counts for 1.5 merits. That's a lot of coding for something that is utterly without use. It's like hauling in PP1 but so very much more bad. Did anyone in internal testing actually try to haul PP goods for either progression or strategy?


Strongholds: Provide good radius of control so desireable but also have defenses that are all but useless. I like that they offer oppertunities to attack the power holding them as well but they offer the defender little to nothing. The only feasible counter to sustained undermining is hauling. So the attacker gets fun wing combat. The defender gets GGGRRRIIIIINNNNDDDDD. While undermined why not offer some type of 'uprising' signal sources that allow the other team PvE combat options to defend the stronghold? Also did nobody in internal testing try to land at them and notice that NPCs take every available pad in seconds?


Modules: This is a hard one. As others mention it's two contests in one and objectives are very different for both groups. Like the old PP1 situation where the nearest PP control system was fortified to 1000% by module-shoppers who were just on their way to rank 3 by the fastest possible method we see people who just pile rares into the easiest loop to gain ranks as fast as possible. You are not going to change that behaviour. No amount of lectures is going to work.

So you are left with decoupling the modules from merits in my mind. If you envision it as a time-of-loyalty reward then make it based on time pledged but that is still flawed so it just ins't great really. The other option would be to lower the merit grind for the first module and let the shoppers change loyalty like they did before. I'd rather see them come and go than be in the ranks for weeks smashing things you don't want smashed to get their sugar-cubes from the dispenser.

One last idea I believe that could help is: lowering the threshold to getting a few modules AND simply offer an "unlock token" that lets the player decide which PP module they want to unlock at each threshold. Now it doesn't matter at all what particular module you want so pledging to the power you most enjoy is the default. You also are able to get the ones you most care about up front. Those of us that are in it for the sandcastle building will go on progressing anyway. We don't need another module driving it.
 
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I really wonder how some things are not anticipated?


Rares: You have the data and you made the formula, how hard is it to look at the most distant one and factor in someone spending a week loading it into a carrier? Which OF COURSE E-D players will do. Are you aware of mining?


Data: We intend for one commander to download one data one time. Maybe check that is the case after you use the terminal?


SLFs: Lets have the carriers swarm the attacker with SLFs. They are hard to hit with bullets (because they often have the gimbal aim offset for some reason) so lets make them worth lots of merits. Did you forget that seekers exist?


PP Commodities: Lets allocate each commander some dozens of cargo per 1/2 hour and then lets make control scores that must be moved by some 4 to 6 orders of magnitude. The cargo counts for 1.5 merits. That's a lot of coding for something that is utterly without use. It's like hauling in PP1 but so very much more bad. Did anyone is internal testing actually try to haul PP goods for either progression or strategy?


Strongholds: Provide good radius of control so desireable but also have defenses that are all but useless. I like that they offer oppertunities to attack the power holding them as well but they offer the defender little to nothing. The only feasible counter to sustained undermining is hauling. So the attacker gets fun wing combat. The defender gets GGGRRRIIIIINNNNDDDDD. While undermined why not offer some type of 'uprising' signal sources that allow the other team PvE combat options to defend the stronghold? Also did nobody in internal testing try to land at them and notice that NPCs take every available pad in seconds?


Modules: This is a hard one. As others mention it's two contests in one and objectives are very different for both groups. Like the old PP1 situation where the nearest PP control system was fortified to 1000% by module-shoppers who were just on their way to rank 3 by the fastest possible method we see people who just pile rares into the easiest loop to gain ranks as fast as possible. You are not going to change that behaviour. No amount of lectures is going to work.

So you are left with decoupling the modules from merits in my mind. If you envision it as a time-of-loyalty reward then make it based on time pledged but that is still flawed so it just ins't great really. The other option would be to drop the merit grind for the first module and let the shoppers change loyalty like they did before. I'd rather see them come and go than be in the ranks for weeks smashing things you don't want smashed to get their sugar-cubes from the dispenser.

One last idea I believe that could help is: lowering the threshold to getting a few modules AND simply offer an "unlock token" that lets the player decide which PP module they want to unlock at each threshold. Now it doesn't matter at all what particular module you want so pledging to the power you most enjoy is the default. You also are able to get the ones you most care about up front. Those of us that are in it for the sandcastle building will go on progressing anyway. We don't need another module driving it.
Maybe point to where you predicted any of those before they happened? Otherwise it looks like you're just being wise in hindsight.
 
I'll bet player volume is way down today, as we all have no idea how to get meaningful amounts of merits. It seems that FDev is offended that some players have so quickly "beaten" the system that they have completed shut down virtually everything more normal players need to make contributions and advance. Instead of shutting all these things down, they simply had to:

-- cut rare merits something like in half
-- double bounty/power kill merits
-- give back some reasonable benefit from normal profitable trading and exploration data

That would bring the game much closer to balance while allowing the player base to play the game.
 
Early exobiologists were luckier though, since they had to do far less to reach Elite V. But at least you are rich like Scrooge McDuck if you pursue that path today. Elite V equals a fully equipped fleet carrier with 20 years upkeep paid and spare cash for quite a few ships.
Noooo. That was after the first rebalance. Anybody that did exobiology before the very first rebalance got burned. It was after the first rebalance, and then second rebalance that player effort got translated to fast rank and big credits.

It was one of the subsequent rebalances that Frontier made a big mistake and people could zip up to Elite V from fresh new scans. Then they rebalanced again knocking everybody's background rank way down, but keeping everybody's visible rank. But in order to progress players needed their background rank to catch up. Overall there was a series of bad rebalances.
 
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How should this continue? What about a reset?

Since Oddysey I'm unfortunately more and more disappointed.

There were no Onfoot Thags in the Thargoid War and Onfoot CZ is missing in PP 2.0.
There are on-foot goids. They behave more like Sentinels than walking enemies though.
If you do a Restore Power mission, you may meet some.
 
Maybe point to where you predicted any of those before they happened? Otherwise it looks like you're just being wise in hindsight.
LOL.
I would be the wisest man in the world if I were as smart in foresight as my mother-in-law is in hindsight.
(I hope it sounds good enough in English, as I just translated it from my native tongue.)

Sadly that does not apply here. How the hell could he have predicted anything about a system he did not design and therefore could not possibly know anything about?
 
Sadly that does not apply here. How the hell could he have predicted anything about a system he did not design and therefore could not possibly know anything about?
And yet he's expecting fdev to be able to find bugs that they couldn't find (because they didn't). He's had weeks with the code now, so he should have predicted all the bugs other than the initial trade bugs. So he can link to all those reveals. Unless he's a chump and didn't see any of them coming, ofc
 
As I and others have said in the past, FDev should remove all the modules from PP2.0 and make them available at Tech Brokers for mats (maybe work in some of the unused Guardian stuff, hey I'm just spitball'n here) and let PP2.0 be for the people that really want to do "Power Play 2.0". The way it stands right now I'm betting that 80% of players are going to grind their way up the ladder to unlock all the modules (messing with the BGS in the process) and never touch what PP2.0 was meant to be.
 
And yet he's expecting fdev to be able to find bugs that they couldn't find (because they didn't). He's had weeks with the code now, so he should have predicted all the bugs other than the initial trade bugs. So he can link to all those reveals. Unless he's a chump and didn't see any of them coming, ofc
Some bugs can be detected before hand, others can be very difficult to determine until things go live.

But activity balancing for merits? It took me less than 8 hours of gameplay trying out the PP to learn the new mechanics, try out a bunch of activities, and determine which where best for progress. How could a team of people working on this project not know what activities are going to be the most rewarding? I don't get it.
 
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