Powerplay kills the fun!

[Ian Doncaster]

What in- game effect that i should care about is going to happen if i bump out, say, Archer, and put in Torval, with my band of merry commanders? The various effects aren't worth getting out of bed for when you know what good rewards look like,,, so what's the draw?

There's an interesting consequence of the Powerplay setup too, which means that most Powers you can get the payout bonuses pretty much regardless of whether your Power controls territory or not.
- bounty payouts: you don't have to hand them in where you collect, so you can always hand them in at your Power's unassailable HQ
- exploration/exobio: likewise
- S&R/Salvage: again, you can hand in anywhere
- trade: most of the boosts to trade goods are on goods which don't have particularly high BGS variance on the sales price, so you probably need more than your Power's HQ system, but only so far as to get a good mix of economies. The general trade boosts are 25% or less which is a lot weaker than most BGS states would give on the well-stackable commodities

On the other side, abilities which really benefit from being large:
- minor faction reputation gain (Winters, Duval, Kaine, Mahon)
- bounty cancellation (Delaine)

There are some passive bonuses from the territory control but as they're now entirely undocumented they can't really motivate making systems change colour, and they're generally far less significant than the active bonuses anyway

PP2 is a multiplayer strategy game, get involved with your power's discord or even better a powerplay active squadron and you will see what it is all about.

I tried that at first, but my Power's major player groups - as with most Powers - are big on non-aggression pacts and alliances and diplomacy and so on [1], so if I want to actually attack anyone I need to go it alone anyway.

And if I just want to reinforce or do uncontested acquisitions, they don't really need coordination.

[1] They are entirely right that "everyone gangs up on Winters and agrees not to attack each other" would be near-optimal Powerplay strategy for 11 out of 12 powers, but it's not a style of play I'm interested in, and I don't really have the motivation or charisma to put together my own "what if we attacked Grom instead?" squadron

 

[Felix DiCestria]

Yeah that about sums it up as I understand it too.

• Gief rewards, and
• My power is best power

What do you mean by the third group "anti powerplay"?

In the Plieades there is a group that is commited to keeping the Powers out of the Plieades. Antal had established a presence there which bacame more apparent with the transition to PP2 and mobilised resolve to boot Antal from the nebula. Something that was achieved quite quickly.
Similar groups likely exist within the Bubble as well but haven't been able to do anything that effective and likely won't during the general rush to obtain modules.
How this all plays out once colonisation starts is anyone's guess.

 

[Darkfyre99]

I want to see them let their game mechanics rest on their merits. Remove all the bribes rewards. Let's see how popular it is then.

I’d still be doing it, because for me it’s all about advancing the Neo-Abolitionist Movement’s (AKA Aisling Duval) agenda. The glut of rewards is more of a disincentive than an incentive IMO.

Seriously… I’ve got all these credits and materials, with nothing to use them on. I’ve earned eight care packages this cycle, and I can’t be bothered to redeem any of them, because my material bins are full. I’ve been profligate with my philanthropy, and yet my net worth soars like never before.

Which is par for the course with this game. It’s been in Monty Haul Campaign mode since before release, and rewards reached “You can buy your own ship for that!” levels since the Passengers update.

Well… whatever. The rules are what they are, and in the end it’s just an excuse plot to fly my virtual space ships, so I’m still having fun. Which is really what matters.

 

[Jmanis]

There's an interesting consequence of the Powerplay setup too, which means that most Powers you can get the payout bonuses pretty much regardless of whether your Power controls territory or not.
- bounty payouts: you don't have to hand them in where you collect, so you can always hand them in at your Power's unassailable HQ
- exploration/exobio: likewise
- S&R/Salvage: again, you can hand in anywhere
- trade: most of the boosts to trade goods are on goods which don't have particularly high BGS variance on the sales price, so you probably need more than your Power's HQ system, but only so far as to get a good mix of economies. The general trade boosts are 25% or less which is a lot weaker than most BGS states would give on the well-stackable commodities

On the other side, abilities which really benefit from being large:
- minor faction reputation gain (Winters, Duval, Kaine, Mahon)
- bounty cancellation (Delaine)

There are some passive bonuses from the territory control but as they're now entirely undocumented they can't really motivate making systems change colour, and they're generally far less significant than the active bonuses anyway


I tried that at first, but my Power's major player groups - as with most Powers - are big on non-aggression pacts and alliances and diplomacy and so on [1], so if I want to actually attack anyone I need to go it alone anyway.

And if I just want to reinforce or do uncontested acquisitions, they don't really need coordination.

[1] They are entirely right that "everyone gangs up on Winters and agrees not to attack each other" would be near-optimal Powerplay strategy for 11 out of 12 powers, but it's not a style of play I'm interested in, and I don't really have the motivation or charisma to put together my own "what if we attacked Grom instead?" squadron

Yeah, so this all tracks with my understanding.

• Pledging gives access to a bunch of extra rewards for doing, well, not much different... and seems to be usually indifferent to the power supported.
• The effects that Powers have which are experienced by both pledged and unpledged aren't enough to swing any changes in behaviour in the already unbalanced economy (Ol uncle Eddie being in control isn't going to have me ditching high value mineral trades for food anytime soon)

The second of those points is what I thought would be the draw of doing Powerplay... ascribing to a particular power so your activities benefit them and get their specific effects in place which serve to further reinforce your activies... so if I'm mining, that helps give Torval a footing over time if I pledge to her, and when she eventually takes power, it makes my mining efforts drastically better (for me and anyone else)... but if Delaine comes along and steals the scene... unless I want to start yo-ho-hoing, my mining endeavours are probably going to be slow-going.... and then this would extend to complex interplays where maybe Arissa and Archer busy are slapping each other, while Patreus benefits from commanders undertaking very lucrative weapons shipments into those regions... but indirectly affects the outcome of that slapfight depending on who sees the lion's share of the supply.

Instead, the only motivation to see a power grow and expand seems deeply consigned to just this.

 

[SergMx]

I'm almost there.
Back in the PP1 days I heard that some groups of people were doing strategy, etc. I wonder if there is such a thing now? I myself play PP2 with only one goal, to reach rank 100. I don't really understand the whole strategy thing.
I understand playing strategy when I play TotalWar, XCOM, etc. but playing strategy in Elite is kind of weird.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I want to see them let their game mechanics rest on their merits. Remove all the bribes rewards. Let's see how popular it is then.

My guess would be [1]
- bounty hunting and combat zones and similar would stay fairly popular, as would AX combat
- exploration wouldn't be affected much, though people probably wouldn't bother actually scanning the plants instead of looking at them
- most missions would never be done again except by a few BGS groups
- trading and mining would mostly stop, though Colonisation might rescue them
- piracy would be unaffected
- Powerplay would lose a fair number of players but relatively little total activity (and would therefore be what kept trading and mining going at all)
- CQC wouldn't get any less popular
- people might still do passenger missions as a way of finding tourist beacons (though of course you don't actually need to take the mission)

[1] I'm assuming here that "rewards for activity" would be replaced with some sort of "your assets go up at a constant rate over time" or "all ships and modules are free" so that people weren't limited to Freewinders forever, or the inability to fit certain modules would also be a problem for things like mining.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Yeah, so this all tracks with my understanding.

• Pledging gives access to a bunch of extra rewards for doing, well, not much different... and seems to be usually indifferent to the power supported.
• The effects that Powers have which are experienced by both pledged and unpledged aren't enough to swing any changes in behaviour in the already unbalanced economy (Ol uncle Eddie being in control isn't going to have me ditching high value mineral trades for food anytime soon)

The second of those points is what I thought would be the draw of doing Powerplay... ascribing to a particular power so your activities benefit them and get their specific effects in place which serve to further reinforce your activies... so if I'm mining, that helps give Torval a footing over time if I pledge to her, and when she eventually takes power, it makes my mining efforts drastically better (for me and anyone else)... but if Delaine comes along and steals the scene... unless I want to start yo-ho-hoing, my mining endeavours are probably going to be slow-going.... and then this would extend to complex interplays where maybe Arissa and Archer busy are slapping each other, while Patreus benefits from commanders undertaking very lucrative weapons shipments into those regions... but indirectly affects the outcome of that slapfight depending on who sees the lion's share of the supply.

Instead, the only motivation to see a power grow and expand seems deeply consigned to just this.

It's going to depend upon the player, naturally. For me, I'm playing a character who's views on Imperial Slavery have changed. In her youth, she considered it a positive thing, a safety net that rescued her from a bad situation. She failed to realize that her situation was the ideal, not the reality for many Imperial Slaves in the Empire. So when PowerPlay 1.0 began, she supported Arissa Lagivy-Duval, who was very much the traditional Imperial. But as time passed (and Frontier failed to change the Imperial Slave trade to resemble the one in the lore) she realized that that the system was corrupt, and ALD failed to address how many of her citizens were kidnapped, abused, or even treated like... a Federation corporate employee.

As a result, after Distant World 2, she threw her support to Aisling Duval. In every system she controls, the slave trade, regulated or otherwise, is shut down. That is my motivation for participating in PowerPlay 2.0. And given the outcry over PowerPlay 2.0 not implementing the effects of AD on the systems she controlled, to the point where Frontier fixed that issue, I'm not alone in this motivation.

 

[Jmanis]

It's going to depend upon the player, naturally. For me, I'm playing a character who's views on Imperial Slavery have changed. In her youth, she considered it a positive thing, a safety net that rescued her from a bad situation. She failed to realize that her situation was the ideal, not the reality for many Imperial Slaves in the Empire. So when PowerPlay 1.0 began, she supported Arissa Lagivy-Duval, who was very much the traditional Imperial. But as time passed (and Frontier failed to change the Imperial Slave trade to resemble the one in the lore) she realized that that the system was corrupt, and ALD failed to address how many of her citizens were kidnapped, abused, or even treated like... a Federation corporate employee.

As a result, after Distant World 2, she threw her support to Aisling Duval. In every system she controls, the slave trade, regulated or otherwise, is shut down. That is my motivation for participating in PowerPlay 2.0. And given the outcry over PowerPlay 2.0 not implementing the effects of AD on the systems she controlled, to the point where Frontier fixed that issue, I'm not alone in this motivation.

Sure. I too have my own roleplay hat. But colour me unimpressed if the "killer features" of PP2 are things as baseline as "Slaves become illegal when X has control", which is nothing new, even prior to Powerplay... which still leans into my point of PP2 being unable to stand on it's own merits, instead being just a "reward layer" on top of things we could already do.

 

[Jmanis]

I'm almost there.
Back in the PP1 days I heard that some groups of people were doing strategy, etc. I wonder if there is such a thing now? I myself play PP2 with only one goal, to reach rank 100. I don't really understand the whole strategy thing.
I understand playing strategy when I play TotalWar, XCOM, etc. but playing strategy in Elite is kind of weird.

Honestly, I could care less for the "strategic group vs group" part of Powerplay. I get that this sort of gameplay is some people's jam, more power to them, and at a level Powerplay should (and does) facilitate that.

What I care about is the effect the Powers have on the universe, as an opportunity to be sought out and exploited. That's what "seeing the impact of the powers on the universe" is, not reskinned stations.

Before PP2, the area I kick around in was a Torval region, then became an Aisling region, for the longest time. Since PP2, it's become an Archer region...not that I could tell when power changed hands in PP1 or 2, because there's little to no impact on the world. It's business as usual.

Powers are meant to be notable individuals commanding significant power and influence across the inhabited sectors. I shouldn't have to name names[1] to explain how such people exist in our lives right now, and fortunes are made and lost by many, based on the actions of those individuals and the effects they and their organisations/supporters have on the world.

Instead, the Famine BGS state has more impact than Powers ever could, and that's pretty pathetic imo, but it speaks to what effects should look like:

• Famine results in food being priced in a way that, pre-economic-bungling, was actually a competitor for best profits in the galaxy, and likewise medicines with Outbreak
• Infrastructure failures shut down entire stations
• Wars/civil wars result in warzones popping up where you go earn bonds
• Various other states have strong market impacts, wiping out supply of many commodities.

These are significant, localised impacts. Likewise, Power influence should have comparable impacts across their whole sphere of influence, concentrating with the more extreme of those effects within their stronghold systems.

If you're a Federal mining outpost in the middle of a Torval stronghold, knock supply of minerals down to a hundred tonnes or so at-most and force the sale at 200 cr/t. Make Antal restrict many luxury goods/drugs, while fetching a very high price on the black market.... make all pirate-NPCs in a Delaine stronghold fully engineered threats. Make any wars against Imperial forces in Patreus Acquisition systems pay quadruple bonds for their opponents kills.

The Thargoid war had massive impact on many systems across the populated bubble... but look! Everythings fine! The galaxy actually got interesting for a little while there! That should've been the bellwether for the impact Powers could have on the universe. In that way, it creates a jagged and uneven world instead of the cookie-cutter systems we've got now.

Within this, individuals get a dynamic and significantly shifting environment to interact within, while groups get the opportunity to shape the world by supporting their Power to see these outcomes take effect. And exploiting these conditions can help your power, or hinder others, but also invite counter-productive exploitation.

But nope. +30% credits on Organic Data Sales! Zzzz.

[1] notwithstanding it likely falling afoul of forum rules, so please don't.

 

[SergMx]

The Thargoid war had massive impact on many systems across the populated bubble...

Because the War Thargoids posed at least a minimal threat in the world of Dangerous Elite. What are the NPCs in the Elite world? They're sleepy, unprotected flies. You can ignore them altogether ... on any ship, even the weakest, you can handle them. Sleepy kingdom!

 

[metatheurgist]

Powers are meant to be notable individuals commanding significant power and influence across the inhabited sectors. I shouldn't have to name names[1] to explain how such people exist in our lives right now, and fortunes are made and lost by many, based on the actions of those individuals and the effects they and their organisations/supporters have on the world.

One of the reasons I want to kick the butts of all powers. But I am not allowed to. Freedom Fighters, wherefore art thou? You wouldn't even need to bribe me to do that.

 

[Markov Chaney]

Sure, i do hear about people pushing their Power's agenda, but overwhelmingly, chatter is just about the rewards. Is this really what Powerplay is?

Overwhelmingly on the forum. Plenty of PP 2.0 chatter on at least 12 Discords you're not looking at.

Come to think of it there's a lot of actual PowerPlay on Reddit too.

 

[ptrazor]

Powerplay is fine, but what happend to the goid content removal they developed for like 2 years?
OMG this game is so bad

 

[Cmdr Esteban]

I’ve relocated to the Pleiades largely as a way of “opting out” of the bolted-on PP2 of which I am not a fan.

In the Plieades there is a group that is commited to keeping the Powers out of the Plieades. Antal had established a presence there which bacame more apparent with the transition to PP2 and mobilised resolve to boot Antal from the nebula. Something that was achieved quite quickly.

This is very interesting. I am curious to know how they did that (how does a non-pledged commander affect Powerplay so as to effectively defeat a power?). Do you know how one might get in touch with this group?

 

[Felix DiCestria]

One of the reasons I want to kick the butts of all powers. But I am not allowed to. Freedom Fighters, wherefore art thou? You wouldn't even need to bribe me to do that.

It was done in the Plieades, just pick the power as far from your region as possible and go undermining.

 

[Kira Goto]

This is very interesting. I am curious to know how they did that (how does a non-pledged commander affect Powerplay so as to effectively defeat a power?). Do you know how one might get in touch with this group?

As currently you cannot affect Powerplay without signing up, what they likely did was temporarily sign on to another power and undermine the local fortified or what have you system away.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

I’ve relocated to the Pleiades largely as a way of “opting out” of the bolted-on PP2 of which I am not a fan.

This is very interesting. I am curious to know how they did that (how does a non-pledged commander affect Powerplay so as to effectively defeat a power?). Do you know how one might get in touch with this group?

Mostly members of AXI as I recall, though PDES, Op Ida, and few other AX enthusiasts were involved. Signed up for anyone other than Antal and undermine...

 

[gumbie]

Lol... it's only what I've done since the game's release... but tell me how Powerplay changes that somehow.

What in- game effect that i should care about is going to happen if i bump out, say, Archer, and put in Torval, with my band of merry commanders? The various effects aren't worth getting out of bed for when you know what good rewards look like,,, so what's the draw?

The draw is PP2 as a game. Why do people play chess? the effects aren't worth getting out of bed for.
I can fully understand it doesn't float your boat, but just because you don't like it doesn't mean there is nothing there.

If changing the face of the galaxy is what you are looking for then colonisation looks like it will be more up your alley.

 

[SergMx]

Mostly members of AXI as I recall, though PDES, Op Ida, and few other AX enthusiasts were involved. Signed up for anyone other than Antal and undermine...

They'll have to do it all the time if the Antal builders pay attention.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

They'll have to do it all the time if the Antal builders pay attention.

No way back under PP2 at least til colonisers build out to the nebula.