Elite Dangerous - Powerplay 2.0 Merit Changes

[Darkfyre99]

I think (if I've undestood at all correctly, someone will hopefully correct me if I'm in the woods) big part of the issue with rare goods was people using fleet carriers to sidestep the quantity limits. Do a loop for rares, dump them on FC; do another loop for rares (since your hold is empty now); rinse and repeat until you jump the FC to where you want to sell and get showered in merits and swing the PP around.

Fleet carriers unbalance just about every trade-based source of merits. I can hop between most stations in under four minutes, so that and my cargo hold size will determine how many merits I can “dump” into a system. If I sell/donate a commodity faster than it generates locally, then my hop time will gradually increase by forty-five seconds per extra jump.

A fleet carrier greatly extends a player’s range, decreases intersystem travel times, is a hundred times larger than the largest ships’ cargo hold, and jumps can be done when you’re not playing. I’ve been aiming for an average of 10 merits/ton for donation missions. Can you imagine someone showing up to a system with 750,000 merits worth of commodities, and their only constraint is how fast donation missions are offered?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The problem is how they invalidate normal trading. They need to be inferior to normal trading in at least some cases, like when there's good system states.

Ship capacity could achieve that a bit as well.

Rares can be worth more per tonne but still less per trip because the trip is longer and you can't just load up 800t at once.

(Of course, some of the highest-profit bulk trade options you can't load up 800t at once either)


But I do agree that having rares as the "reliable, always works, rarely the best" option, with various mining and bulk trade (and PP commodities) likely to have at least one which is better in any specific system, would be a good and interesting balance point.

 

[Martind Forlon]

Fleet carriers unbalance

This can be solved with making merits zeroed when transferred into FC storage. Imo there is zero need for use of FCs for PP purposes (except fleet transport). You can even pay nice bonus for some rares which are on stations with long SC flight ... bcs it is not very effective jump FC there every time. Mostly will be onetime activity, which is imo exactly what should be "rares" about. Also it can easily make "=" between "rich" cmdrs and "poor" cmdrs ... all will have the same starting point (in regard to involvement to PP2.0).

 

[Chaines]

I don't care that they earn that rate of personal merit gain really.

Your diversified approach is not really useful when it needs to be applied to one system to combat a method that is generating at that rate there. So if someone is using a farming method, your opposition must be as fast as theirs or you can't overcome it. In some systems that's not horribly hard to do but in others the options for undermining/fortifying may be completely unbalanced and there is simply no reasonable counter to one or the other. That rate of return has not been my experiance to date in doing all the other assorted play. I'm in the top 10% so I'm not exactly bad at it but I'm not pulling 10K an hour at all.

I'm also very sceptical that the bombs are anything other than what the bombers are chuckling about, specifically that they are using the 1T method. When you see 20-30K control points per hour for 5 hours I'm doubting very hard that this is just diversified play at settlements and pulling power ships and easy going trade. The specifics of how they achieve it or exactly how many are involved are opaque to me but the system traffic is something like 13 in the last 24 hours. So it's not some vast army of randoms just playing the game dumping 170K in 6 hours. So seems as though a wing or two are just PG hauling from external carriers to the station. That's control points too because that's all we can see from the outside.

Don't forget some people are still sitting on hundred of data from the exploit, and they can drop thousand of merits in minutes if they ever want/need to

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Don't forget some people are still sitting on hundred of data from the exploit, and they can drop thousand of merits in minutes if they ever want/need to

Though only once, only to the very specific system it was obtained in whether or not it's still at all relevant strategically, and they can't have more than 2000 of them each and maybe not even that.

There were few enough people exploiting that bug in the first place that if they haven't already sold up now that merits are re-enabled for data they're not going to make a noticeable difference later either.

 

[serakfalcon]

Though only once, only to the very specific system it was obtained in whether or not it's still at all relevant strategically, and they can't have more than 2000 of them each and maybe not even that.

There were few enough people exploiting that bug in the first place that if they haven't already sold up now that merits are re-enabled for data they're not going to make a noticeable difference later either.

They already bombed one system but it's been taken care of.

 

[yianniv]

Can you imagine someone showing up to a system with 750,000 merits worth of commodities, and their only constraint is how fast donation missions are offered?

Oh, yes, please!

 

[mtfatboy3006]

Fleet carriers aren't the balance problem people who don't have them think they are. For one thing, they represent a substantial gameplay investment and should confer some advantages as a reward. For another, they don't save that much time. Filling up a fleet carrier still has to be done one cargo run at a time, and then that same cargo has to be reloaded and hauled to the destination, and cargo to and from a fleet carrier doesn't transfer like cargo to or from a station, where you hold the button down and the rate of transfer accelerates, it transfers at a fixed rate of one ton per button press--when it works right, and it's buggy right now, with transfers often failing or only transferring a few tons. The advantage in being able to stage a carrier close to a source and fill it up is offset quite a bit by the extra delays of hauling each load twice, transferring it to and from the carrier, and having a 15 minute nominal (20-60 minute actual) jump delay. Any remaining "advantaged" was time banked in advance grinding for a carrier and maintaining its upkeep. A well-engineered long range cargo ship can skip the middleman quite effectively and just offload the cargo once at the most convenient station, at no significant disadvantage to a player packing a carrier. I didn't bother using my carrier to transfer rares, because I wasn't willing to commit such a huge amount of time to hauling rares, and that is the only thing that allowed players to "exploit" rares: the willingness to sink hours of tedious gameplay into it. It doesn't really matter if they had a carrier or not. They had the time and inclination to run a rares loop 30 times.

Carriers are advantageous in circumstances where they allow players access to bulk markets far away from a delivery point--like buying commodities for a community goal in distant markets with fresh supplies, and there the advantage is being able to fill your ship's cargo hold in one stop where people closer to the CG are fighting over scraps. That makes hauling each load twice advantageous. (On the flipside, I've been stuck with massive quantities of CG goods and hours wasted loading them onto a carrier when I misjudged how much I could deliver by the deadline). Carriers let miners out in the black ditch their goods, fill up on limpets, and keep mining. They don't do anything to erase the restrictions on buying rares. If anything, they make the process more tedious.

 

[DemiserofD]

Because making one thing worse (nerf), doesn't make other things better (buff).
It might improve the relative value of the things (balance), but if the absolute value is still the same then it has obviously not been buffed by a nerf elsewhere.

Especially for the people who consider the pace of progress too slow... for those players nerfing the faster options to bring them in line with the slower otions really isn't in any way functionally equivalent to a broad buff.

That's the thing; while the rate of approach to rewards may have been too slow before, now it's clearly far too FAST. You rank up for sneezing now.

What they really need to do is divide all user merits by 4(restoring symmetry between system and player merits), divide rewards by 4 at the same time, and then rebalance the REWARDS. Instead of unlocking the first module at rank 35(which was effectively rank 9 pre-buff), you unlock the first module at rank 10 - then the next module at rank 15, then the next at rank 20.

You also shift the bonuses; rather than getting a 20% reduction in rebuy in your power's space at rank 5 or whatever, you get a 100% reduction in rebuy in, say, Fortified Systems. Then, at rank 15 you get a 100% reduction in rebuy in Exploited systems. And instead of getting a 5% bonus to search and rescue at rank 5, you get, say, a 50% bonus to search and rescue at rank 5, and then 55% at rank 10, and so on.

So players don't feel the NEED to grind rank 100, it just becomes a gentle incentive.

 

[sacred aardvark]

I didn't bother using my carrier to transfer rares, because I wasn't willing to commit such a huge amount of time to hauling rares, and that is the only thing that allowed players to "exploit" rares: the willingness to sink hours of tedious gameplay into it. It doesn't really matter if they had a carrier or not. They had the time and inclination to run a rares loop 30 times.

I was doing rare runs in a 200t cargo ship. The rare limits meant I usually couldn't even fill that up before the markets within a reasonable distance of each other were dry.

I'm making basically the same merits with mining as I was with rare hauling. If this was excessive for rares, I guess mining is about to eat dirt too...

They don't do anything to erase the restrictions on buying rares.

Do they not? I was under the impression that the limits on buying rares was on how many you have in your cargo. So dumping the rares to a carrier would let you get another load since your cargo has zero now. This would certainly erase some restrictions on buying rares.

Being able to do loops of a small area to pick up more than the limit, by dumping the cargo to the FC and collecting multiple runs without needing to do the 300ly round trip to sell them... and jumping the carrier while you're offline so you save on that travel time. Yeah seems kinda advantageous, beyond what I feel a FC should do; since it's bypassing a limit that presumably was put there for a reason.

However if I'm mistaken and you can't purchase rare goods with an FC beyond what you could without a FC, i.e. the markets check how many you are in possession on your account instead of in your ships cargo... then yeah there probably isn't an issue and I stand corrected.

 

[photomankc]

Don't forget some people are still sitting on hundred of data from the exploit, and they can drop thousand of merits in minutes if they ever want/need to

Yes. A HUGE swing and miss by FDev leaving all the hoarded data in inventories.

It is true that it is mitigated somewhat because it is tied to the system it was collected from.

 

[sacred aardvark]

That's the thing; while the rate of approach to rewards may have been too slow before, now it's clearly far too FAST. You rank up for sneezing now.

What they really need to do is divide all user merits by 4(restoring symmetry between system and player merits), divide rewards by 4 at the same time, and then rebalance the REWARDS. Instead of unlocking the first module at rank 35(which was effectively rank 9 pre-buff), you unlock the first module at rank 10 - then the next module at rank 15, then the next at rank 20.

You also shift the bonuses; rather than getting a 20% reduction in rebuy in your power's space at rank 5 or whatever, you get a 100% reduction in rebuy in, say, Fortified Systems. Then, at rank 15 you get a 100% reduction in rebuy in Exploited systems. And instead of getting a 5% bonus to search and rescue at rank 5, you get, say, a 50% bonus to search and rescue at rank 5, and then 55% at rank 10, and so on.

So players don't feel the NEED to grind rank 100, it just becomes a gentle incentive.

Ow... cracks neck Sorry, bit of whiplash from that topic pivot...

Yeah I too would prefer if the rewards were more front loaded. I know I was looking through the ranks yesterday to see at what rank can I go "ehh, good enough" and skip the final ranks, or leave them to gather "accidentally" when I'm doing other stuff. Though I suspect FDev spread them out so that people would indeed stay engaged in the PP for longer. I don't really expect them to rebalance the whole ranking system at this point, but maybe they might.

OTOH, I don't necessarily see a point in compressing the rewards into less ranks, and then making the ranks take longer. You can gain ranks over level 100, so I'm confused why it would matter what the "final" rank is when you're "done" with the rewards. What I would imagine matters to most players who don't care about PP itself, is how fast you can get to the point where you're "finished" with whatever PP bonus you were after. For some the front loading would be good enough, for others they'd still feel the need to go for the full bonuses despite the increased grind.

Whether the current rate of progress is appropriate, too fast, or too slow, I'm not sure of since I'm not privy to what FDev had intended for it to be.

Personally, I feel my current rate of about a rank per hour feels okay-ish; basically means I finish every play session with a rank or two and will take about a 100h playtime, or couple months real time, to finish the lot should I go for it... And 'lots of ranks fast' instead of 'less ranks but slower' does have the benefit of a more consistent dopamine hit from the "DING! You're one step closer to your final goal!", which is nice for my stupid monkey brain.

Of course if you're already at your final goal, or got mad skilz y0 and gain double or quadruple the merits I am... I can see how it could easily get annoying... and I might change my view in a couple dozen million credits when I swap to a bigger mining ship if my pace takes a massive leap.

 

[mtfatboy3006]

Do they not? I was under the impression that the limits on buying rares was on how many you have in your cargo. So dumping the rares to a carrier would let you get another load since your cargo has zero now. This would certainly erase some restrictions on buying rares.

Being able to do loops of a small area to pick up more than the limit, by dumping the cargo to the FC and collecting multiple runs without needing to do the 300ly round trip to sell them... and jumping the carrier while you're offline so you save on that travel time. Yeah seems kinda advantageous, beyond what I feel a FC should do; since it's bypassing a limit that presumably was put there for a reason.

However if I'm mistaken and you can't purchase rare goods with an FC beyond what you could without a FC, i.e. the markets check how many you are in possession on your account instead of in your ships cargo... then yeah there probably isn't an issue and I stand corrected.

You're not mistaken about clearing the purchase limit, you're mistaken about how much long it takes to load everything on a carrier vs the alternative, delivering it in a properly outfitted long range cargo ship (which takes much less time and effort to get than a carrier).

Assume a small loop, call it 3 stations. I take my carrier nearby. I run the loop: 3 jumps, 3 cruises, 3 docks, 3 launches, then I jump to carrier, cruise, dock. Transfer cargo. Repeat.

Instead, I take a long range cargo ship. 200 ton capacity, like you mentioned. I run the same loop. I jump to my point of sale 150ly away: 3 jumps. I cruise, I dock, I transfer, I repeat. This process adds 3 jumps. The point of sale is two jumps further away than my carrier, and it takes me one extra jump empty to get back to it. That's 3 extra minutes. How many loops are we going to do? Let's call it ten. In ten loops, I've spent 30 minutes more than the guy with the carrier. But he still has to fly his carrier to the destination, load his cargo on his cargo ship, take it to the station, and offload it still. The more loops we compare, the more loads he still has to transfer from carrier to point of sale. He hasn't really saved any time. What time he did save he actually spent earlier in the game taking waaaaaaay longer to get his carrier than I took outfitting an Anaconda.

 

[Sneake Llama]

You're not mistaken about clearing the purchase limit, you're mistaken about how much long it takes to load everything on a carrier vs the alternative, delivering it in a properly outfitted long range cargo ship (which takes much less time and effort to get than a carrier).

Assume a small loop, call it 3 stations. I take my carrier nearby. I run the loop: 3 jumps, 3 cruises, 3 docks, 3 launches, then I jump to carrier, cruise, dock. Transfer cargo. Repeat.

Instead, I take a long range cargo ship. 200 ton capacity, like you mentioned. I run the same loop. I jump to my point of sale 150ly away: 3 jumps. I cruise, I dock, I transfer, I repeat. This process adds 3 jumps. The point of sale is two jumps further away than my carrier, and it takes me one extra jump empty to get back to it. That's 3 extra minutes. How many loops are we going to do? Let's call it ten. In ten loops, I've spent 30 minutes more than the guy with the carrier. But he still has to fly his carrier to the destination, load his cargo on his cargo ship, take it to the station, and offload it still. The more loops we compare, the more loads he still has to transfer from carrier to point of sale. He hasn't really saved any time. What time he did save he actually spent earlier in the game taking waaaaaaay longer to get his carrier than I took outfitting

One big thing you missed.

The Braben Tunnels. Or getting stuck in them. When taken that into consideration, just 1 jumping between rare market and fleet carrier saves ALOT time not being stuck in a hyper jump.

That and hoarding rares on a carrier makes for some nice Merit bombs last minute before tick. Effectively not letting your adversary react to the onslot until the next cycle. And sometimes that's all you need to to take a Fortified to Exploited. Or exploited to unoccupied. Which can have devastating consequences.

It's not all about time saved or speed.

 

[DemiserofD]

Ow... cracks neck Sorry, bit of whiplash from that topic pivot...

Yeah I too would prefer if the rewards were more front loaded. I know I was looking through the ranks yesterday to see at what rank can I go "ehh, good enough" and skip the final ranks, or leave them to gather "accidentally" when I'm doing other stuff. Though I suspect FDev spread them out so that people would indeed stay engaged in the PP for longer. I don't really expect them to rebalance the whole ranking system at this point, but maybe they might.

OTOH, I don't necessarily see a point in compressing the rewards into less ranks, and then making the ranks take longer. You can gain ranks over level 100, so I'm confused why it would matter what the "final" rank is when you're "done" with the rewards. What I would imagine matters to most players who don't care about PP itself, is how fast you can get to the point where you're "finished" with whatever PP bonus you were after. For some the front loading would be good enough, for others they'd still feel the need to go for the full bonuses despite the increased grind.

Whether the current rate of progress is appropriate, too fast, or too slow, I'm not sure of since I'm not privy to what FDev had intended for it to be.

Personally, I feel my current rate of about a rank per hour feels okay-ish; basically means I finish every play session with a rank or two and will take about a 100h playtime, or couple months real time, to finish the lot should I go for it... And 'lots of ranks fast' instead of 'less ranks but slower' does have the benefit of a more consistent dopamine hit from the "DING! You're one step closer to your final goal!", which is nice for my stupid monkey brain.

Of course if you're already at your final goal, or got mad skilz y0 and gain double or quadruple the merits I am... I can see how it could easily get annoying... and I might change my view in a couple dozen million credits when I swap to a bigger mining ship if my pace takes a massive leap.

Well the thing is, it would still take 100 to get all the modules and bonuses, it would just be frontloaded to reduce the impetus to get to 100 asap.

So you might get modules at 10, 15, 20, 25, 35, 45, 55, 65, 75, 85, 95.

 

[mtfatboy3006]

One big thing you missed.

The Braben Tunnels. Or getting stuck in them. When taken that into consideration, just 1 jumping between rare market and fleet carrier saves ALOT time not being stuck in a hyper jump.

That and hoarding rares on a carrier makes for some nice Merit bombs last minute before tick. Effectively not letting your adversary react to the onslot until the next cycle. And sometimes that's all you need to to take a Fortified to Exploited. Or exploited to unoccupied. Which can have devastating consequences.

It's not all about time saved or speed.

Braben tunnels also equate to 60 minute carrier jump delays. And bombing before the tick is only more effective than delivering steadily over time if it coaxes your opponent into sitting on her kiester thinking she has it wrapped up. Carriers confer huge advantages in other areas of gameplay. In this one, they're just gameplay flavor.

 

[Jack Winter]

I came back to play a bit, I found the missions easily enough. what was a little harder was finding the Donations in quantitity.
For the missions it seems you want an Extraction system with Extraction Station. For the donations it seems like Refnery system and Refinery station.
I was collecting (stealing) Palladium, Gold and Silver and then Donating the same.
I was buying and reselling to myself at the lowest posible ammount. Dont know if that makes a diffrence towards the profit scale for merits but did it anyway ??
Well thats whats been working for me anyway.

Donations seem too few and far between for it to be worth the time though.

Indeed, then I don't know what happened to the places I used to steal before. Thanks, just went and found a nice system to load up in.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

And bombing before the tick is only more effective than delivering steadily over time if it coaxes your opponent into sitting on her kiester thinking she has it wrapped up

Even the smallest Power has 400+ systems and even the largest Power doesn't have the player count to fortify everything up to max-Stronghold / undermine all their possible enemy target systems down to 500k below Exploited just in case someone is storing something up.

The ability to pick where you place your 500k merits in a single quick set of actions after you've seen where your opponent has moved and placed their 1000k merits for the week is incredibly powerful, far more so than the numeric value of the merits or to an extent how time-efficient it is to get them: carrier loading could be slower than normal rare transport and that would still be excessively good.

 

[spayce_wyzard]

With the trading thing and having to sell 1 ton at a time.. I've never heard of a game that punished a player so severely for having access to better stuff.
I did some testing where selling one ton at a time gave me 52 merits for a really good item. Selling two at a time gave me 76. That is a 14% decrease in merits because I sold two instead of one. I don't fully understand the need for such a massive dip. Some people are saying you get around 12% of the original merit gain from a full load vs singles. Can we recommend fixing this?

 

[sacred aardvark]

You're not mistaken about clearing the purchase limit, you're mistaken about how much long it takes to load everything on a carrier vs the alternative, delivering it in a properly outfitted long range cargo ship (which takes much less time and effort to get than a carrier).

Assume a small loop, call it 3 stations. I take my carrier nearby. I run the loop: 3 jumps, 3 cruises, 3 docks, 3 launches, then I jump to carrier, cruise, dock. Transfer cargo. Repeat.

Instead, I take a long range cargo ship. 200 ton capacity, like you mentioned. I run the same loop. I jump to my point of sale 150ly away: 3 jumps. I cruise, I dock, I transfer, I repeat. This process adds 3 jumps. The point of sale is two jumps further away than my carrier, and it takes me one extra jump empty to get back to it. That's 3 extra minutes. How many loops are we going to do? Let's call it ten. In ten loops, I've spent 30 minutes more than the guy with the carrier. But he still has to fly his carrier to the destination, load his cargo on his cargo ship, take it to the station, and offload it still. The more loops we compare, the more loads he still has to transfer from carrier to point of sale. He hasn't really saved any time. What time he did save he actually spent earlier in the game taking waaaaaaay longer to get his carrier than I took outfitting an Anaconda.

Let me see if I got this right...

So for non FC the loop would be:
start: be in buy system 1 and buy goods (abg from now on), jump to buy system 2 abg, jump to buy system 3 abg; travel to sale system, 3 jumps; sell goods; travel to buy system 1, 3 jumps; goto start.

For FC, the loop(s) would be:
Loop 1: start: be in buy system 1 abg, jump to buy system 2 abg, jump to system 3 abg; jump to system 1 and offload to FC; goto start
Do loop 1 until FC is sufficiently stocked or you get bored, set the FC to jump (maybe even while you log off and go to bed or work or whatever, thus being unaffected by any jump delays)
Loop2: Log in arrived at new system; do back and forth trips between FC and sale station, until you get bored or FC is empty; set FC to jump to buy system 1 and log out to do whatever. goto start

You seem to not value the ability to separate the buy and sale into two separate optimized loops, while also potentially using offline time to cover any FC jumps. You're seemingly also ignoring the possibility of using two different ships for the loops alongside your FC for flexibility; a fast runaround with more limited cargo (maybe even with ability to dock on non-large pads if needed) for gathering the goods for the first loop, and then a massive cargo hauler to get everything faster out of the FC at the sale point without needing to worry about jump ranges (or again using a smaller ship if needed because pads, not every system has a station with large pads). You could even park your FC next to the sale stations parent planet if available, reducing the time spent traveling to and from while unloading.

I don't know if it's significantly faster overall, and it might well not be; but it's definitely sidestepping limits on rare purchases that were set for presumably some reason. And hey, if it's not actually faster or really that beneficial to use an FC for rare goods transport, then no real harm in flagging FC'd rares, yeah?


Also, while it might not have anything to do with FC's... I do presume there's more to rares being disabled than people grinding out merits in a cargoconda, since other stuff was considerably buffed close to levels of what I'd seen from rare hauling; while rare merits were not just nerfed but completely disabled.
Has there been anything more than "disabled while being investigated"? I've missed it if there has.

Oh and someone do correct me if I got something wrong with the FC abilities, I don't have one so am just going on what I've read and seen about them regarding their capabilities (jumping close to planets, carrying multiple ships, multi kiloton cargo space, offline jumping etc). I could be well wrong on things or they might have been changed. The videos I've seen of cargo transfer certainly don't seem as tedious as you imply it to be, so that's changed I guess and other stuff might have changed too over the years. :/

Though having said all that...
I do think there should be a significant advantage for owning an FC, considering the price and upkeep; so I don't really see all of the above as an issue from a personal merit or credit perspective. If I ever get one I'd sure hope it feels """OP""* for that amount of dosh.
Though as others have pointed out, it might be excessive from a system merit perspective; I don't pay enough attention to that level of PP to... well, frankly, to care... but it doesn't sound great for those who do.

*by which I mean more 'sufficiently powered' than actually 'over powered'