Elite Dangerous | Powerplay 2.0 Update
- Thread starter Paul_Crowther
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More accurately, the amount of merits you earn from trading high-margins does seems to be calculated like this:
Margin x Sale o Price
_____________
f(quantity)
Where quantity produces rapidly diminishing returns. A commodity that generates 20 merits for one ton, might generate 30 for two, 35 for three, 40 for five, and 50 for ten… approaching one merit per ton for a hundred._____________
f(quantity)
I tried doing a number of scans last night.
I do not believe I saw that bubble come up saying certain number of merits earned, so it looks like that may have been turned off as well.
So far the only thing that seems to earn merits for me is destroying wanted vessels.
Do you mean megaship or wake scans? Because I definitely got the usual 20 merits for regular ship scans yesterday. I was in a reinforcement system, if that makes a difference (although it shouldn't afaik).
Can we just skip right to the part where nothing earns merits and PP2.0 is officially declared "balanced?"
We might just end up with that. It's either keep playing whack-a-mole with whatever the highest earning activity is until everything is equally mediocre, or just eliminate merits from activities and the leaderboard and make it so you get merits from the weekly challenges and that's it.
I turned in 300 Million in organic data last night. Aside from the merits that netted for the weekly task (4000 I think), that little adventure was worth a whopping 1000 merits. The math aint mathing for most activities.
Or, and stay with me here because this concept is going to blow actual minds in Cambridge, the sprint team could sit down and actually do some game design work to figure out a balance.
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mining is great for power play... but personally I can't get quite that high (at least not working for LYR) maybe different powers are different or maybe I am not quite such a good miner.
however what mining is blooming awful at is earning ARX. given ARX earning is kind of meant to be non partisan, ie you get them just for playing how you want......
it really could do with getting a boost. (where as for some inexplicable reason things like material trading pays loads)
Yo - any updates on whether FDEV will fix trading and the merits received? Or if they don't see a problem with it?
At this point it almost completely kills trading as a legitimate form of merit gain. Example, last night I made a 90% profit on 380 units of coffee with the demand being extremely high ( in the millions I believe ) selling one at a time gave me 4 merits but selling almost all of them gave me 96 merits. I should get a full 1520 merits in that case. It is utterly ridiculous.
I can scan 5 ships at a station I get more merits than that.
I understand that things aren't always easy to fix, but can we at least get a "yes we're working on it" or a "we don't see a problem with it"?
This looks rather nice, I'm quite pleased 
Powerplay is currently borked. I just tested several actions in a system that my power (LYR) controls and I was trying to reinforce. Giving the station 1100 tons of gold (via mission) didn't net a single merit. Neither did selling it to them outright (43 million in profit-no merits). Neither did selling them a quarter million in cartographic data. The only two things I could get merits out of were scanning ships and blowing them up.
Constant messages of "failed to connect to comms server" and crashes related to transaction server.
So yeah.....I hope they're working on it. I don't remember even Odyssey being this bad on release.
I've never had merits from normal delivery missions - is that what this was? If so, I don't think it's meant to give merits.
Trading only gives merits at 40%+ profit - what was the mark-up on this sale?
UC data has a per-body threshold of nearly 700k CR, below which you get zero merits.
(1) It was a "source X amount of this commodity" mission. A support/donation mission. Why wouldn't this type of action reinforce a system and reward the player merits?
(2) The profit on this trade was at better than 90%.
(3) In that case, handing in UC data earned in the normal course of gameplay, i.e not dedicated exploration trips, is useless. This seems contrary to FDevs statement of "Just play the game and you'll earn merits and help your power."
I've not tried support/donation missions - some of those do appear to be listed in this thread listing PP activities: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/powerplay-2-0-activities.629227/
Hmm, was it sold at the Power's HQ? If not then I'm all out of ideas.
Yup, it's odd to have such a high bar.
Definitely not sold at Lembava.
I just repeated the experiment with another thousand tons of gold in a different system that I'm reinforcing. Same result. No merits earned for an extremely profitable trade.
I suspect now that the goods are tainted. They must be flagged in such a way as to keep the player from using vast quantities of stolen and laundered commodities to affect control points. At least, that's the only working theory that I can come up with ATM.
I suspect now that the goods are tainted. They must be flagged in such a way as to keep the player from using vast quantities of stolen and laundered commodities to affect control points. At least, that's the only working theory that I can come up with ATM.
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