COMPLETED CG Brewer Corporation Planetary Survey Initiative (Exploration)

[Jmanis]

I just think the levers available need to be relatively balanced, and when shooting down a Clean Novice Sidewinder has about as much effect as killing a Wanted Deadly Python or something... where's the fair fight in that?

Technically, it's not the range. Under the to hood, these do have different values relative to their challenge.

The problem comes about from scale and a bit of the fact FD want to make a fun game.

The trick with the BGS is it doesn't reflect contributions. It reflects trends. So the BGS has always been inherently unbalanced, which is fine, but needs tweaking and expectation management. It basically means one player committing crime and 10 handing in bounties would have a comparable effect to 100 players committing crime and 1000 handing in bounties, even though the linear effect is substantially larger (e.g a net gain of 100m bounties, rather than just 1m bounties)

And so that weights number of contributions more than their value. If it didn't, the ability for groups to subvert everyone else would actually be much more severe... and it means a single player in an Anaconda doesn't absolutely drown out the effect of a hundred players in sidewinders (even though the linear effect of the Anaconda would be much more)

That inherently values 100 novice sidewinder kills over one deadly Anaconda because it has to... but this cuts both ways right? This also means that killing the weakest pirates has a comparable effect to killing the weakest cargo haulers, which is easier to scale than killing hundreds of system authorities or Pirate Activity site pirates. I actually think in terms of BGS effects, this is fine... but it's not something we'd work through quickly in this thread.

But this dovetails into something I've been saying all along, which is firstly, there's broader issues around how the BGS is applied in the game. Bluntly, i don't think Lockdown shutting down services as a game mechanic is good... but i temper that in saying neither do i think station lockout when hostile is good, for similar reasons as lockdown; it shuts down play for no good reason.
But secondly, the BGS simply doesn't impact enough. The fact there's players coming here who've been at this a long time and don't know what a Lockdown is or how to counter it is, imo, testament to that.

The BGS should be like the weather... you put your head out and it's raining, so you put a raincoat on, or grab an umbrella... or it's warm, so you take your jumper off and switch your shoes for thongs.... or in Elite's case, there's riots outside, so you take your riot shield out, or run very quickly. A common player reaction for many posting here was the BGS equivalent of people never having seen rain before... and that's a failure of the BGS implementation imo; not being present enough for players to understand the effects through natural play to such an extent that when a CG comes up, players can understand firstly that it can happen, and secondly what to do about it.... regardless of what those effects are.

 

[CMDR Lefty Jackson]

Moral of the story?

I would say it's a question...how many commanders would have joined the fight if they had no worries they'd lose their data? I suspect the lockdown would have ended much sooner.

Considering the very nature of the scenario with all the technology to wonder the stars with hyperdrive, how is it that there is no technology to save data to some kind of interstellar cloud server on a station, like a digital locker, for safekeeping till you are ready to turn in that data? Seems like a no brainer, the pilot can access said data from their ship and retrieve as desired, like a module or ship transfer.

And why the heck are these ships so advanced, yet you have things such as Supercruise Assist or a freakin' docking computer taking up module space? Those things should be standard ship features, not a module. But I digress.

 

[Rainbro]

Taking into account that it had been a long time no bounty hunting CG happened, any combat-oriented events such as this one should have brought a huge number of players, and the lockdown should have been lifted in no time, by a landslide.
I checked the progress of the lockdown situation daily, and it was only sliiightly progressing a tiny bit every day.
At first I blamed it on not enough players getting involved (or not even aware of the situation in the first place), but got recently aware of ways to check how much bounty vouchers were cashed-in daily, and I am not too sure anymore.

Either the BGS is broken, and the progress to lift the lockdown should have been much greater than what it was. Then FDev decided to step in to correct that.
Or indeed, not enough players participated, and FDev corrected that to make an end to the endless frustration expressed by the players on the social media (which was not good for the state/popularity of the game, and I am glad it stopped).
Or there was a strong opposition from whoever put effort to have the system locked down, and more players decided to join the effort (I was considering doing this at first, but seeing no progress, I decided to stick with bounty hunting instead) until the very last day, then the tables turned.

All in all, I hope to see more events like this happen in the near future, and see players winning/losing from either side FAIR AND SQUARE WITH NO AMBIGUITY* this time.

* PS: I am not yelling

I don't think it's a given that it "should" have brought a lot of players. This is an unexpected situation for most of the playerbase, the inbox message will have helped but I doubt it would draw in such crowds as to completely overwhelm a dedicated opposition who were already there. If nothing else, it evidently didn't - progress was basically deadlocked until today, why would there be such a sudden jump in participation on this one day but not any before?

7 billion credits though, that is a lot. That's about 10℅ of the last bounty hunting CG, so slightly better than an equivalent day of that which had 2300 participants. It's not out of the question that a big group spent the previous days gathering all that, but that would be a really weird strategy if so. In basically every area of the BGS, if you put in an overwhelming amount of work at once, most of it will be wasted due to soft caps. That 7 billion would likely have had a much bigger impact if handed in over time. Could be argued as having the surprise factor, but that was incredibly risky for the amount of work it would have taken.

I don't know the fine details of how the sliders work, but based on my experience with the rest of the BGS, it just seems like either:

1) a decent sized group with either very detailed BGS knowledge or not enough to know the potential drawbacks farmed billions and then dropped them all at once, completely wiping out the pro-Lockdown gang's efforts despite being evenly matched otherwise, and this massive effort simultaneously failed to even stabilise their influence (it dropped 5℅ at the same time as this decisive victory)

2) Frontier edited the security status.

Never going to have definitive proof, and I recognise this could just be cope from me who wanted to see the Lockdown persist to see what GalNet said... But, they've already acted once this CG to help lift the lockdown. They've openly edited lockdowns out in the past. And it's really weird that this huge bountry drop perfectly nailed the security increase but apparently did nothing to stop Brewer's worst drop in influence. I think 2) is more likely.

 

[Kira Goto]

Or... more likely it was not godhanded but the Pirate Activity state ran its full week course and ended naturally.

It was not Pirate Attack (think that’s the actual state name) but Lockdown. Lockdown is a state which lasts until the security slider moves back into the yellow-ish area, it appears at least. I don’t think it specifically has a timer.

If I had grounds to suspect “foul play” (so to speak, not literally) from Frontier it would be on the basis that the lockdown magically lifted at around 3 PM [local/CET] but the BGS tick actually happened relatively consistently around 9 AM (by elitebgs.app) and its own data suggests this was no different for today (the inara graphs also show some minor influence changes for 90578 around 9 AM). Yet later on in the day Brewer lost about 5% influence and the lockdown mysteriously dissipated (if it had been done via regular BGS means surely then the inf number of Brewer would not have dropped quite as much - unless there’s undocumented Odyssey settlements present in system and they were not affected by lockdown, allowing missions to shuffle numbers around).

Is this a huge game changer, no. The CG would have been “successful”, anyway. But it’s still a bit meh and people just got their wish by complaining enough that they couldn’t contribute to something which is primarily narrative fluff and provides a free reward which can be easily obtained through the technology broker anyway. And because they - or some at least - insisted on coming in last minute with their deep space discoveries (that are in no way valued more highly for the goal) instead of handing in partway through.

 

[Jmanis]

Is this a huge game changer, no. The CG would have been “successful”, anyway. But it’s still a bit meh and people just got their wish by complaining enough that they couldn’t contribute to something which is primarily narrative fluff and provides a free reward which can be easily obtained through the technology broker anyway. And because they - or some at least - insisted on coming in last minute with their deep space discoveries (that are in no way valued more highly for the goal) instead of handing in partway through.

I think the takeaway for FD here is that nobody likes their progress or ability to play taken away arbitrarily... regardless of whether you're a CG supporter or one of the antagonists.

In that context, FD should be thinking very carefully both about the BGS, Lockdown, and the consequences of manual intervention.

 

[DemiserofD]

I don't think it's a given that it "should" have brought a lot of players. This is an unexpected situation for most of the playerbase, the inbox message will have helped but I doubt it would draw in such crowds as to completely overwhelm a dedicated opposition who were already there. If nothing else, it evidently didn't - progress was basically deadlocked until today, why would there be such a sudden jump in participation on this one day but not any before?

7 billion credits though, that is a lot. That's about 10℅ of the last bounty hunting CG, so slightly better than an equivalent day of that which had 2300 participants. It's not out of the question that a big group spent the previous days gathering all that, but that would be a really weird strategy if so. In basically every area of the BGS, if you put in an overwhelming amount of work at once, most of it will be wasted due to soft caps. That 7 billion would likely have had a much bigger impact if handed in over time. Could be argued as having the surprise factor, but that was incredibly risky for the amount of work it would have taken.

I don't know the fine details of how the sliders work, but based on my experience with the rest of the BGS, it just seems like either:

1) a decent sized group with either very detailed BGS knowledge or not enough to know the potential drawbacks farmed billions and then dropped them all at once, completely wiping out the pro-Lockdown gang's efforts despite being evenly matched otherwise, and this massive effort simultaneously failed to even stabilise their influence (it dropped 5℅ at the same time as this decisive victory)

2) Frontier edited the security status.

Never going to have definitive proof, and I recognise this could just be cope from me who wanted to see the Lockdown persist to see what GalNet said... But, they've already acted once this CG to help lift the lockdown. They've openly edited lockdowns out in the past. And it's really weird that this huge bountry drop perfectly nailed the security increase but apparently did nothing to stop Brewer's worst drop in influence. I think 2) is more likely.

As far as I know, each bucket is functionally limited in how much impact in terms of influence it can make in a particular day. The first 4 million credits worth of bounties are worth as much as the next 100 million, which is worth as much as the next 2.5 billion.

However, Bounty Hunting is not the only way to impact influence. Lockdown significant limits the impact of economic actions for that faction's influence(makes missions and exploration completely unavailable, for example), but not motion on the security slider. So it's entirely reasonable that a faction could be functionally capped out in terms of positive security actions, see massive SEC gains, yet still lose INF overall, because other factions can still take advantage of trade, missions, and exploration, while Brewer could not.

It would only take a few people dropping off their exploration data at a nearby station when they realized Brewer was in lockdown to have this effect.

My point being, it doesn't really mean anything that their sec went up but their inf went down. That could happen for any number of reasons.

---

More than that, it also wouldn't really take anything like massive coordination to achieve this effect. Pirate Activity Signal Sources churn out bounties at an extremely rapid rate. Four players in a wing running them could probably manage upwards of a hundred million credits worth of bounties - EACH.

So in practice, that's just about 70 man-hours in a day. Spread among 4 players in a wing, that's 17.5 hours of gameplay. And I highly doubt only 4 players were working there!

 

[Cmdr Beachy]

Anyone else spotted were back out of lockdown? I just successfully handed in 750 reports

So looks like all that bounty hunting over the last 4 or 5 nights was worth it after all

 

[Zador]

Thought I'd do a bit of exploring before the CG ends, and was pleased to get first mapped on several bodies less than 60Ly from the CG system

 

[aRJay]

View attachment 417474
o7 to everyone that helped with bounties

Right on Commander.

I whine since 2018 2017 and where is my Panther Clipper? Where??

Still in the hanger on Raxxla waiting for you to collect it in person.

 

[Spaceman-FXL5]

I'm sorry, but you guys trying to explain 'things' and 'effects' of either players or FDev interventions in the last 2 (or 30) pages (29-30) is total
If players did it - fine - shows that players can respond to BGS, if FDev did it - fine - it goes with their desired narrative.
That's 30 minutes of my life I will not get back - ever.

 

[Jmanis]

I would say it's a question...how many commanders would have joined the fight if they had no worries they'd lose their data? I suspect the lockdown would have ended much sooner.

So... there's a thinking here which i just can't comprehend because it seems oblivious to risk, in a game full of risk, whether it's just NPC pirates or a badly timed boost when your cat knocked a stapler onto your keyboard.

There was always a bit of a meme in EVE with people complaining about suicide ganking opening their thread with " So there i was, on afk autopilot with my entire asset base in the hold, with no shields or armour..."

The ED analog of course being"so there i was, with a cargohold full of LTDs in my shieldless, weaponless, armourless T9"... or in this case, billions of credits of exploration data. I suspect a good deal of participants aren't actually invested in the CG, rather they're career explorers who've seen the opportunity to cash out more than they normally would for the umpteen billions they've accrued from being in the black for years.

And that's purely greed. Like... (figurative) you do you... if seeing that dollar figure go up is what gets people their daily dopamine, like i do fleeing from some ATR... go for it. But there's no moral highground here... not for me or that explorer... no case to be had that either cause is "more worthy"... it's just pure unfettered greed in wanting 20b instead of 10b back. Again. That's fine.

But lumping that around to cry foul that things didn't go your way, and that you're "unable to do anything" because of the 10b credits you're holding? Sorry... is the term "risk management" fake news or something now?

Every exploration system/ scan is increasing that risk overhead... both fiscally and in terms of getting your name against the discovery. Every time, that increasing number of reports becomes a bigger and bigger rod for your own back should something go awry. This is equally true for crime... I'll need to go do some activity to counter balance things and pay off this bounty now... because the equivalent would be continuing to do this, accruing a 10b credit bounty and claiming its not fair that you can't fight a Lockdown without risking that 10b overhead.... you either mitigate the risk by removing it earlier in smaller chunks, or wear the fact it could bite you hard when you least expect it. And that's all on the individual.

Incidentally, for combat players (whether PvE or PvP) there's inherent risk management needed to be learned to succeed... so people think it's somehow "unfair"... but the reality is they've just poorly managed that risk.

Note: of course, there's affected players here who've been playing a month or so, and this is their first CG and they're a bit overwhelmed.... Welcome to Elite! Take this for the experience it is, and hopefully it'll equip you well for the future challenges you face in the game, and equally teach a bit more about how the BGS works.

 

[Jmanis]

That's 30 minutes of my life I will not get back - ever.

Incidentally, your "complaint" here is exactly the sentiment of people who take issue with FD intervening.

 

[Rainbro]

As far as I know, each bucket is functionally limited in how much impact in terms of influence it can make in a particular day. The first 4 million credits worth of bounties are worth as much as the next 100 million, which is worth as much as the next 2.5 billion.

However, Bounty Hunting is not the only way to impact influence. Lockdown significant limits the impact of economic actions for that faction's influence(makes missions and exploration completely unavailable, for example), but not motion on the security slider. So it's entirely reasonable that a faction could be functionally capped out in terms of positive security actions, see massive SEC gains, yet still lose INF overall, because other factions can still take advantage of trade, missions, and exploration, while Brewer could not.

It would only take a few people dropping off their exploration data at a nearby station when they realized Brewer was in lockdown to have this effect.

My point being, it doesn't really mean anything that their sec went up but their inf went down. That could happen for any number of reasons.

---

More than that, it also wouldn't really take anything like massive coordination to achieve this effect. Pirate Activity Signal Sources churn out bounties at an extremely rapid rate. Four players in a wing running them could probably manage upwards of a hundred million credits worth of bounties - EACH.

So in practice, that's just about 70 man-hours in a day. Spread among 4 players in a wing, that's 17.5 hours of gameplay. And I highly doubt only 4 players were working there!

I would consider any group that can put 70 man hours into a single tick to be decently sized. That is a solid effort, though I agree achievable. I just find it unlikely that that sudden boost came out of nowhere without at least a smaller attempt earlier on, even just as a test to assess if such an effort was needed or massively overkill (especially with the risk of soft-caps).

I dunno. It just seems like the comparative movements between both sides went like +1,+3,+2,+3,+70...if it was players then they really went out of their way to make it look weird.

 

[Jmanis]

As far as I know, each bucket is functionally limited in how much impact in terms of influence it can make in a particular day. The first 4 million credits worth of bounties are worth as much as the next 100 million, which is worth as much as the next 2.5 billion.
However, Bounty Hunting is not the only way to impact influence. Lockdown significant limits the impact of economic actions for that faction's influence(makes missions and exploration completely unavailable, for example), but not motion on the security slider. So it's entirely reasonable that a faction could be functionally capped out in terms of positive security actions, see massive SEC gains, yet still lose INF overall, because other factions can still take advantage of trade, missions, and exploration, while Brewer could not.

I would consider any group that can put 70 man hours into a single tick to be decently sized. That is a solid effort, though I agree achievable. I just find it unlikely that that sudden boost came out of nowhere without at least a smaller attempt earlier on, even just as a test to assess if such an effort was needed or massively overkill (especially with the risk of soft-caps).

I dunno. It just seems like the comparative movements between both sides went like +1,+3,+2,+3,+70...if it was players then they really went out of their way to make it look weird.

That's not how the buckets work @DemiserofD

It's not buckets based on activity type, rather It's buckets based on effect (essentially). Specifically for this context, you have a bucket for increasing security and one for decreasing security for each faction... not separate buckets for bounty hunting, scenario effects on security etc.

 

[DemiserofD]

That's not how the buckets work @DemiserofD

It's not buckets based on activity type, rather It's buckets based on effect (essentially). Specifically for this context, you have buckets for increasing security and decreasing security for each faction... not separate buckets for bounty hunting, scenario effects on security etc.

The buckets, as far as I know, are split into Trade, Exploration, Missions, and Bounty Hunting. If you have one group doing 10x effort in Bounty Hunting, and another group doing 1x effort in all four, the group doing all four will win - even though they put in much less overall effort. The 10x group's faction will go up in security, but down in influence.

Lockdown prohibits the use of three of the four buckets.

 

[Jmanis]

The buckets, as far as I know, are split into Trade, Exploration, Missions, and Bounty Hunting. If you have one group doing 10x effort in Bounty Hunting, and another group doing 1x effort in all four, the group doing all four will win - even though they put in much less overall effort. The 10x group's faction will go up in security, but down in influence.

Lockdown prohibits the use of three of the four buckets.

Nope. That's definitely not how they work. Do you have any source for where you're getting that from?

EDIT: For what it's worth, you might be conflating your understanding with some other effects, like how the effect of Trade for an individual will taper-off, but that's not related to buckets.

EDIT2: there's a snip from an FD livestream i can't find right now which shows a sample journal transaction, which has things like "security_up" and "security_down" as the relevant buckets.

 

[DemiserofD]

Nope. That's definitely not how they work. Do you have any source for where you're getting that from?

EDIT: For what it's worth, you might be conflating your understanding with some other effects, like how the effect of Trade for an individual will taper-off, but that's not related to buckets.

https://sinc.science/guides/sinc/The%20Complete%20BGS%20Guide%202024.pdf

Based on my personal testing, influence is subject to diminishing returns as I said, but economy and security are not. Moreover, per Ian Doncaster, buckets are not calculated on an individual level, but rather on a per-tick basis.

 

[Jmanis]

https://sinc.science/guides/sinc/The%20Complete%20BGS%20Guide%202024.pdf

Based on my personal testing, influence is subject to diminishing returns as I said, but economy and security are not. Moreover, per Ian Doncaster, buckets are not calculated on an individual level, but rather on a per-tick basis.

So, that breakdown of buckets in that guide doesn't show any sourcing for the assertions being made... also the bits being referenced actually don't support the claims about the buckets in that guide... in fact the screenshot captioned "documentation of buckets" contradicts that position and supports my own... showing state effect based buckets, not activity based buckets.

Soecifically, although i don't have the references to hand, all FD - sourced info I've seen before much like the screenshot in that guide reference state- related buckets, not activity related ones. I've never heard them talk about "exploration" or "mission" buckets.

 

[DemiserofD]

So, that breakdown of buckets in that guide doesn't show any sourcing for the assertions being made... also the bits being referenced actually don't support the claims about the buckets in that guide... in fact the screenshot captioned "documentation of buckets" contradicts that position and supports my own... showing state effect based buckets, not activity based buckets.

The guide is the source, lol. It's the accumulated knowledge of the people who have been playing the BGS for upwards of a decade.

It also gels with my experiences. For influence purposes, at least, you definitely want to combine multiple factors or you'll see much diminished returns.

If you don't trust me, Ian Doncaster expanded on how it works in a thread I made a few days back: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ortant-specifics-inside.633710/#post-10547185

 

[Jmanis]

The guide is the source, lol. It's the accumulated knowledge of the people who have been playing the BGS for upwards of a decade.

Ahuh. How's that contest anything? You realise you've described a group of which I'm a subset of, right?

The source is a player, not anything from FD, so it's instantly contestable... and the sources that player has included actually support my position.

It also gels with my experiences. For influence purposes, at least, you definitely want to combine multiple factors or you'll see much diminished returns.

If you don't trust me, Ian Doncaster expanded on how it works in a thread I made a few days back: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ortant-specifics-inside.633710/#post-10547185

I don't see anything from Ian's post contesting my position here.

The point of contention here is the definition of a bucket, not how they work. I maintain, I've never heard of an "exploration bucket" and nor is that post contesting that notion.

The guide you linked literally has this in it:

That's not "exploration" or "mission" buckets... that's state-based buckets. It's absolutely no basis to claim that activity buckets like "mission" or "exploration" exist.

I get what you're saying... but you're incorrectly conflating two very, very different concepts here.