My post said metallic ring. You can't laser mine platinum in a metal rich ring, even in a platinum hotspot, the platinum is not on the surface.
Powerplay kills the fun!
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it's not tho...... I don't mine in metal rich but 1 person told you you won't find platinum laser.mining in metal rich rings . .I can't comment on if this is true or not but it ISNT conflicting with someone telling you they get their platinum from metallic rings.as they have different stuff in
OK, I think I understand better now... but here's my point.
I think it's fair to say you have greivances with the mission system, and you think PP2 does a better job of it? I won't grandstand on your grievances, but I would say that if you have issues with the mission system, they should be fixed in the mission system, not by making PP2 fill that gap.
To go back to one of my key points:
PP2 as it currently is, is just a reward wrapper for doing specific tasks. That's the mission system. The difference is that's the point of the mission system... the point of PP2 should not be to grip-up the shortfalls of the rest of the game... it should be a feature in it's own right. The fact so many activities have been disabled from Powerplay shows:
- How much FD still need to do to fix the core game, and that they will persistently have issues with all their major updates until they do this; and
- How dependent PP2 is on the rest of the game, instead of being a feature in it's own right.
If the mission system needs fixes, FD should fix the mission system, not give it a PP2 crutch. The whole point of PP as a concept is that strategic group vs group interaction. Rewards shouldn't be weekly merits for doing specific tasks (which isn't very strategic in and of itself) and care packages... the reward should be the Power is in control, with the value of that put out by the effects of that Power... which is a whole other thing; Powers do not sufficiently shape the galaxy.
Task lists, if they were to exist in Powerplay, should be as high level as "Destabilise Torval in System X"... "Hack 20 billboards" is entirely the domain of mission boards and factions. It has no reason to exist exclusively as a "Powerplay activity"
One of the best things to come out of OG PP at the time (which isn't relevant thanks to the busted economy) was the Torval->Delaine slave runs that were entirely dependent on how those two powers shook out. Those sorts of effects should be widespread, across all powers, and the real rewards of Powerplay (which, as far as I can tell, are still pretty mundane).
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Words are hard.
Essentially this- an old argument of mine is that PP has to offer something no other part of ED offers otherwise whats its role?
What FD need to do is now expand and improve PP2 like they did with the Thargoids, otherwise they repeat what they did with PP1 (as in, run away from it). Despite my criticism of PP2 its a solid foundation, it just needs building on.
You are counting your chickens before they hatch. You should check after the server tick and see if you still in the top 10, and post the actual list then, only that counts
I mean, I was in the top ten early on Friday but I'm sure I'm not any more 
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top 10 should be really hard to make tho. I must admit I do wonder if fleet carriers are a way to get to top 10. I am just guessing of course but if you store a load of mined goods on a carrier it will be a lot faster to deliver then. of course this would mean you would not consistently make top 10 but once every few months would be far easier. I don't have a FC to test however
Nope, you don't need FC to get to top 10, because you mine and sell in the same system
Nope, you don't need FC to get to top 10, because you mine and sell in the same system
And with SCO it doesn't take long to offload your stuff and get back to mining.
I think those hitting the top 10 are either mining many hours a day, every day, or they have found some exploit that isn't well known yet.
Powerplay 2.0: Rareplay at inception, not Platplay...Nope, you don't need FC to get to top 10, because you mine and sell in the same system
actually, it's not plat, most people do core mining, like monazite and such, or so I hear in my PP discord
You are counting your chickens before they hatch. You should check after the server tick and see if you still in the top 10, and post the actual list then, only that counts
Nope, of course I'm not, I posted all that as an illustration of "not necessary with mining only".
And the whole purpose was to get the damn 'there's something that goes 1 to 100' thingy off my back
. Now I'm back to my normal gameplay.
I assume you can't repeatedly sell to your own carrier...Nope, you don't need FC to get to top 10, because you mine and sell in the same system
I can't think of an in-universe justification. I suspect it's to make balancing Powerplay activities a bit more interesting - mining is very powerful, but only in certain systems. If you could just hop out to an out-of-bubble system, fill your hold with Pristine Platinum, then sell it to any Powerplay system with an Industrial economy (which with Odyssey bases is "almost all of them") it'd need to be much less effective to stop all the other options being too weak by comparison.
"Metallic" and "Metal-rich" rings are not the same thing. Both that statement and the ones you've been given in this thread are correct.
As far as how to make merits from mining goes:
- you need a system which has a good mining opportunity. That might be a pristine reserves metallic (not metal-rich) ring so that you can mine Platinum at maximum pace, or more usually it would be core mining of some sort which could be any type of ring and doesn't require Pristine reserves so gives you a wider choice of systems.
- the system also needs to belong to a Power already [1].
- you need the system to have an economy which buys that mined commodity (generally Refinery/Tourism for core gems, Industrial/High-Tech for laser mining)
- you ideally need the system to currently be in the combination of BGS states which boosts the prices of that specific commodity. Boom/Investment + Civil Liberty is a good start, if you're trying to be really optimal then some of Pirate Attack, Public Holiday and Expansion are also useful for some commodities. Many of these states are short-lived so a system won't stay optimal for long. The higher the price per tonne, the better.
- if the system doesn't belong to your Power, you want one with "Standard" (or maybe "Moderate" if it's otherwise ideal) System Strength Penalty and Beyond Frontline Penalty so that your merit earning isn't slowed. Paesia is a great system for Aisling Duval pledges, decent for Nakato Kaine pledges, and pretty terrible for everyone else. So a specific system someone else recommends might not work for you. (If the system belongs to your Power you can ignore these values)
- don't do anything which might remove the "mined" flag from your cargo before you sell it: don't rescoop cargo you've dropped for any reason, don't try to store it on a FC, clear any full refinery bins before you dock
That will optimise your per-tonne merits; the rest is entirely down to how many tens of hours you can commit to it and how efficient a miner you are. Certainly it's possible to get a million merits a week this way because people do; I'm neither an efficient enough miner nor someone who enjoys mining enough to do it that much.
[1] Let's ignore mining for Acquisition purposes for now, because that's just going to add more complications.
No, for two reasons:
1) Carrier markets don't count for Powerplay purposes at all - the ability to set arbitrary prices would break a lot of it.
2) Sticking the goods on a carrier removes the "is mined" flag and makes them entirely unusable for mining merits (you can use your own carrier and the cargo transfer option rather than the market for Powerplay tasks which don't have this restriction)
I sometimes wonder why FD listen to the people who want fast travel and longer jump range, but not those of us who just want mission timers to go away.
Besides the red skull for threat-level missions, we could at least have a yellow rolling-pin icon for missions which could cause domestic issues.
Ian has already summarised it well as always, but yeah the vast majority of my rank 50 or so merits I achieved through mining (laser mining Platinum & Osmium), and core mining (whatever is available, ideally Monazite but given the RNG element not always guaranteed). The price per ton makes a big difference when it comes to earning merits.
For that to really work out though, various factors as described in his post need to align. I eventually managed to find a couple of systems (one respectively for core/laser mining) on my own by first searching Inara (of course ...) for Pristine Metallic rings in systems aligned with my power, to have the right economy (many were extraction/refinery and didn't pay well enough) that are also in Boom state (didn't try others, as Boom is widespread enough). Then I needed to check whether I could sell the mined commodities in the same system or had to go elsewhere (which means you have to then find a fitting selling market, so same-system mining is always preferred, even if that doesn't necessarily align with objectives from a PP strategic view).
I'm half expecting a nerf whenever Frontier decide they might want to patch the game this year, as merit earning of mining (and stupid 1t at a time trading) are by far the best merit earnings in my experience so far. I need to take breaks in-between mining sessions though which is why I'm still 'only' half way through the progression/unlock grind.
For that to really work out though, various factors as described in his post need to align. I eventually managed to find a couple of systems (one respectively for core/laser mining) on my own by first searching Inara (of course ...) for Pristine Metallic rings in systems aligned with my power, to have the right economy (many were extraction/refinery and didn't pay well enough) that are also in Boom state (didn't try others, as Boom is widespread enough). Then I needed to check whether I could sell the mined commodities in the same system or had to go elsewhere (which means you have to then find a fitting selling market, so same-system mining is always preferred, even if that doesn't necessarily align with objectives from a PP strategic view).
I'm half expecting a nerf whenever Frontier decide they might want to patch the game this year, as merit earning of mining (and stupid 1t at a time trading) are by far the best merit earnings in my experience so far. I need to take breaks in-between mining sessions though which is why I'm still 'only' half way through the progression/unlock grind.
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While the answer from the Q&A is indeed a bit weird (there's no system "value" per se in PP2 anymore), I'm not sure if it's right to say SSP is a leftover. I think it kinda makes sense. PP is about changing opinions and it's harder to convince billions compared to a few tens of thousands of inhabitants. High pop systems have a certain inertia and the couple tons of commodities I just delivered don't have the same effect on a huge populace as they'd have on a couple of families in a backwater station.
Whether it would be good for gameplay to change that is another question, but I think intuitively SSP makes sense.
They could nerf mining just by linearising the merits for trade profits (so selling 100 tons gets 100x the merit of 1 ton) and returning rares trading.
I certainly agree with the intuitive case for higher-population systems being slower to move, but then SSP should also make Reinforcement of the system slower by a similar amount, as opposed to a ten-thousand inhabitant backwater taking exactly as much reinforcement as a multi-billion population system to turn it into a Stronghold.
But even then without some intrinsic benefit to owning system A over system B, that still wouldn't make the higher population system more "valuable".