Elite Dangerous | Powerplay 2.0 Update

[Ozric]

Sounds like a bug. Do you already have an issue-tracker link? Might help if others can contribute to it, so it gets above ignore-level.

I'm not sure what part you'd raise as a bug, or even what the bug might be. It's very difficult to know what things should and shouldn't be doing.

I imagine given the BGS and PP were intrinsically linked for 9 years, Frontier said that the new system would not affect the BGS because that's what they thought would happen. And then when they turned it on...

Dont push your faction on the new system and just let it be there. Presence dont cause conflicts so diplomacy is fine.

Yeah we won't be pushing, and while it probably won't be an issue in this situation, there are a lot of BGS groups who take things a bit too seriously.

If PP 2.0 is going to be having such a big impact on the BGS through massively increased activities, then the wider implications for those who truly dedicate themselves to it could be pretty severe.


Actually... I wonder if them removing the limit on player contributions to PP has had some kind of affect on the limit that's normally applied to BGS contributions...

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I imagine given the BGS and PP were intrinsically linked for 9 years, Frontier said that the new system would not affect the BGS because that's what they thought would happen. And then when they turned it on...

Things can certainly be literally true - Powerplay's actions have largely been designed not to intrinsically have BGS effects, or only minor ones, and also to give Powerplay groups no reason to care which minor factions are present or controlling particular systems - without necessarily describing the full outcomes.

If PP 2.0 is going to be having such a big impact on the BGS through massively increased activities, then the wider implications for those who truly dedicate themselves to it could be pretty severe.

That's the key thing, I think - a big change in incentives can have a major indirect effect even though nothing in the BGS itself has changed at all. The change back in late 2020 to increase bounty payouts was carefully done not to change the individual BGS effect of any bounty at all. But the increase in bounty hunting it caused had measurable effects on the overall state of the BGS nonetheless.

About half the Powerplay actions have no BGS effect at all ... but the other half do (or encourage gameplay which might) in such a way that the system controller is most likely to gain influence from it [1].
(To a large extent this is also true of any non-Powerplay action that a random player might perform in a system, of course. If someone had posted "hey, we think Raxxla is in [one of your systems]" then the rush of players coming to check it out might have done something similar, temporarily. But Powerplay gives players longer-term incentives to go to systems they might otherwise have never visited.)

Actually... I wonder if them removing the limit on player contributions to PP has had some kind of affect on the limit that's normally applied to BGS contributions...

I'm reasonably sure that there is no major general change to how the BGS works - low-to-mid-traffic systems seem to be behaving normally, the influence levels and patterns out Colonia-way are basically normal despite slightly increased traffic, etc. There have been a few oddities around conflicts seeming to get "stuck" but nothing obvious otherwise.

The BGS limit was never a per-player one anyway (at least not for the sort of activities people were likely to do as "background" activity) so I doubt that's had an effect.

If it's just a change in incentives and player distribution, then as you say it's hard to say it's actually a bug: it may just be a new normal that people need to get used to.


[1] Which, inconvenient as spare expansions can be, is at least better for BGS players than incentivising people to do things which benefit secondary factions and sticking every system into a control war.

 

[Ozric]

Things can certainly be literally true - Powerplay's actions have largely been designed not to intrinsically have BGS effects, or only minor ones, and also to give Powerplay groups no reason to care which minor factions are present or controlling particular systems - without necessarily describing the full outcomes.


That's the key thing, I think - a big change in incentives can have a major indirect effect even though nothing in the BGS itself has changed at all. The change back in late 2020 to increase bounty payouts was carefully done not to change the individual BGS effect of any bounty at all. But the increase in bounty hunting it caused had measurable effects on the overall state of the BGS nonetheless.

About half the Powerplay actions have no BGS effect at all ... but the other half do (or encourage gameplay which might) in such a way that the system controller is most likely to gain influence from it [1].
(To a large extent this is also true of any non-Powerplay action that a random player might perform in a system, of course. If someone had posted "hey, we think Raxxla is in [one of your systems]" then the rush of players coming to check it out might have done something similar, temporarily. But Powerplay gives players longer-term incentives to go to systems they might otherwise have never visited.)


I'm reasonably sure that there is no major general change to how the BGS works - low-to-mid-traffic systems seem to be behaving normally, the influence levels and patterns out Colonia-way are basically normal despite slightly increased traffic, etc. There have been a few oddities around conflicts seeming to get "stuck" but nothing obvious otherwise.

The BGS limit was never a per-player one anyway (at least not for the sort of activities people were likely to do as "background" activity) so I doubt that's had an effect.

If it's just a change in incentives and player distribution, then as you say it's hard to say it's actually a bug: it may just be a new normal that people need to get used to.


[1] Which, inconvenient as spare expansions can be, is at least better for BGS players than incentivising people to do things which benefit secondary factions and sticking every system into a control war.

I think the majority of that makes sense. I've not been in-game to check that actual system traffic, but according to EDSM only 45 ships in the last 7 days have passed through. We only noticed at the start of the week how much it had shot up, so unfortunately I didn't keep check on the initial push to see how many people there were and how long it took them to break through that ~50% influence barrier that we always seemed to encounter.

Hopefully Frontier can check and make sure that nothing else has gone wonky. If they do decide to bite the bullet and reset it*, they can sort this out at the same time.

* I do realise they almost certainly won't

 

[Ian Doncaster]

but according to EDSM only 45 ships in the last 7 days have passed through.

My normal guess would be to multiply that by about four to get the actual traffic, though with very large error bars.
(Still, for this the Crimes/Bounty report might be a useful measure too - if they've all been bounty hunting as a convenient way of generating bulk merits, and then cashing the bounties in afterwards because why not get paid too...)

 

[eXpErT]

Just give back my dam pods and bartender back!
Holy crap this is annoying.

 

[vanFace]

I'm not sure what part you'd raise as a bug, or even what the bug might be. It's very difficult to know what things should and shouldn't be doing.

I imagine given the BGS and PP were intrinsically linked for 9 years, Frontier said that the new system would not affect the BGS because that's what they thought would happen. And then when they turned it on...

Well, the developers said what things should and shouldn't be doing. Their product, however, behaves in a different way. They have not changed their communication since, so I'd see this as a bug. It is not the customer's duty to wrap its head around what internal mistakes the developers might or might not have done.

 

[Knuttin Atoll]

The AFK farm... I don't get why. I built a turreted Type-10 for sure, so when I get tired of trying to pick off swarming NPCs one by one I can just drift through them casually in a death cloud, but why would I fake playing a video game to go do something else? The illogic is baffling. I'm faking work right now to talk about the game I can't play until I can get home and play it. That's the natural order of things. Besides, the rebuy cost on a fully engineered battle boat is too much overhead for an operation like that. If a guy wants to buy merits, there are donation missions. Plus, all those wasted mats from blown up NPCs just drifting until they despawn--there's no satisfaction in that. It's like those kids who put in more effort devising a way to cheat the test than it would take to pass it honestly only to bypass the benefit of having learned something. I'm going to bypass the gameplay to get the merit so I can unlock the module, so I can bypass outflying the opponent to win the fight, so I can say I'm the best at a game I haven't actually played much and never enjoyed to people who don't believe me and/or don't care. Must be city folk.

Turreted T10? Heck yes! To fly...for fun...

I never engaged in it (mainly because I think it's wasteful in terms of electricity consumption) but I can at least understand why people do it.

When progress is considered slow and repetitive and the game's design is simple enough to automate it then people will end up doing it. And yeah for those who just want the modules I can totally see AFK farming getting a popularity boost, which might mess up the game for those who want to play PP legit.

Just another argument to decouple the modules from PP but would players still bother with PP to the same extent?

And mats gathering is no longer an issue due to Frontier's solution being HGEs filled with hundreds of them.

 

[Ozric]

Well, the developers said what things should and shouldn't be doing. Their product, however, behaves in a different way. They have not changed their communication since, so I'd see this as a bug. It is not the customer's duty to wrap its head around what internal mistakes the developers might or might not have done.

The problem is, like Ian pointed out, it could well have been the same as if a large group of players had decided "this month we're going to push the majority faction in this system". Powerplay might have just guided them there, but then it might also have done something to the way influence is distributed in the system.

So I don't know for certain if it's a bug or not and I can't easily reproduce it, this coupled with the futility that is the issue tracker makes me not want to make a ticket. I'm a QA for my job and I wouldn't just raise bugs if I found something a bit odd but couldn't explain it I say this as someone who has opened 91 issues on the issue tracker

 

[Wily Rites]

Well, the developers said what things should and shouldn't be doing. Their product, however, behaves in a different way. They have not changed their communication since, so I'd see this as a bug. It is not the customer's duty to wrap its head around what internal mistakes the developers might or might not have done.

Those aren't bugs, they're features!

This is an often stated phrase in the programming world. I was pondering this just yesterday whilst collecting materials out in the sticks, that materials disappear into another dimension, if you run them over without them having been selected, I'm sure this was never planned but got left in ... Because it is a feature, not a bug!

[Tears out another clump of hair]

 

[vanFace]

So I don't know for certain if it's a bug or not and I can't easily reproduce it, this coupled with the futility that is the issue tracker makes me not want to make a ticket. I'm a QA for my job and I wouldn't just raise bugs if I found something a bit odd but couldn't explain it I say this as someone who has opened 91 issues on the issue tracker

Yeah, the issue-tracker is a problem all of its own. However, I sure hope you - as QA - are at least discussing things with the developers if it is so odd you couldn't explain it. In my job, QA files bugs for things that were never in the specification to begin with, because it feels wrong to them. And most of the times, they are spot on with their feelings, even if this will never fit into a defined process whatsoever. Then again, we do "agile" inside of waterfall, and yes, it is as awkward as that sounds.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

There is a report at https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/67308 though it seems to be mostly useless in that none of the people reporting it - out of, presumably, habitual BGS paranoia - have given any affected system or faction names, dates of events, details of things tried, etc.

The only suggested mechanism beyond "other people are playing the game in our systems" is that maybe mission influence (as the main brake on a controlling faction) is somehow broken. I'm setting up a few specific tests of that now.

 

[Chaines]

You can make merits by bounty hunting or trading, so of course it's gonna also influence the BGS. but if only your faction was pushed up, it's possible people went bounty hunting a lot and sold their bounty vouchers in the same system, giving the controling faction a huge boost in influence.

 

[Nowski]

That is incorrect.

Kind of depends what is meant by "targeted changes" - if they mean "we weren't trying to change anything in BGS but YMMV " then working as vaguely intended I suppose.

The wording is open to interpretation. Guessing, I'd take it as "there's no code in PP2/Ascendency that directly changes the existing BGS implementation" which, bearing in mind the significant changes in player activity it induced, is fairly plausible afaics.

 

[Ozric]

Yeah, the issue-tracker is a problem all of its own. However, I sure hope you - as QA - are at least discussing things with the developers if it is so odd you couldn't explain it. In my job, QA files bugs for things that were never in the specification to begin with, because it feels wrong to them. And most of the times, they are spot on with their feelings, even if this will never fit into a defined process whatsoever. Then again, we do "agile" inside of waterfall, and yes, it is as awkward as that sounds.

I pity you for that flow

I don't have direct access to developers, but I've raised this here and I've also raised it in a place the community team can see it. That's all I can do really, other than contributing to the issue Ian has linked.

There is a report at https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/67308 though it seems to be mostly useless in that none of the people reporting it - out of, presumably, habitual BGS paranoia - have given any affected system or faction names, dates of events, details of things tried, etc.

I didn't deliberately not mention names, but the lack of information on that issue is quite frustrating. I will add to that issue now so thanks for that. Look forward to seeing what your tests yield.

The wording is open to interpretation.

Indeed, as it often is Though I'm not convinced it's purely down to increased activity.

 

[Ozric]

My normal guess would be to multiply that by about four to get the actual traffic, though with very large error bars.
(Still, for this the Crimes/Bounty report might be a useful measure too - if they've all been bounty hunting as a convenient way of generating bulk merits, and then cashing the bounties in afterwards because why not get paid too...)

150 Cmdrs in the last 24 hours! And I think you're right about the crimes and bounties

 

[Ian Doncaster]

150 Cmdrs in the last 24 hours

...and close to a billion credits of bounties cashed, which is roughly 10-20% of the pace of a typical bounty CG.

Tough to think of any possible "balance" change which could both let you regain control in the face of that and leave bounty hunting effective for you in any other circumstance.



As an aside: looks like EDSM doesn't seem to be counting every EDDN visitor - it may be limited to those with EDSM accounts too. At the moment, EDSM says 6 in the last 24 hours, my EDDN tracking says 22 in the last 24 hours, an actual of 150 wouldn't be unexpected at all for that EDDN rate. (And looking at my EDDN tracking, that seems to have been a pretty constant rate for the last week)

 

[sacred aardvark]

I was pondering this just yesterday whilst collecting materials out in the sticks, that materials disappear into another dimension, if you run them over without them having been selected,

In my experience they don't disappear, but because you don't pick them up if they're not selected you likely end up bumping them into the next county, but they're still there if you go after them to pick them up.

 

[Wily Rites]

In my experience they don't disappear, but because you don't pick them up if they're not selected you likely end up bumping them into the next county, but they're still there if you go after them to pick them up.

I think I saw one fly off once, at a rate of knots too, no tell where it was going!

 

[sacred aardvark]

I think I saw one fly off once, at a rate of knots too, no tell where it was going!

If it's something I actually care about, I try to find it in the contacts menu so I can get it targeted and figure out where in the high-explosive double hockey sticks it flung off to.

If it's something that's a dime a dozen, it's a case of okibyeee and just grabbing the next one.

 

[aRJay]

If it's something I actually care about, I try to find it in the contacts menu so I can get it targeted and figure out where in the high-explosive double hockey sticks it flung off to.

If it's something that's a dime a dozen, it's a case of okibyeee and just grabbing the next one.

I had the geyser version of this happen to some mat that I had targeted when it fell into the geyser, I was lucky enough to see it disappear off the radar going almost straight up where it vanished out of range. Some time later I was heading back to the ship and saw a mat lying on the ground nowhere near where I had see one heading for the stars.

Point being your missing mat is probably not going to stay in the few hundred metres range of your sensors.