Avoiding Dogpiling - using Demand more actively in Community Goals to discourage people from dogpiling on one side for the rewards.

[DemiserofD]

The big problem with these competitive CGs is, they basically encourage everyone to pick one side once it becomes clear that side will win. This means it doesn't really matter if the other side tries really hard, because they'll just get more and more people against them, and whoever gets a head start in the beginning will probably win the whole thing.

A fun way to counteract this could be with Demand. Right now, demand is set to 999999 and locked there, along with prices just being hard set.

But what if demand were actually set to the amount needed to complete the CG, and the price was proportional to the amount acquired? (this would be different from how it normally works, to be clear).

Take this CG as an example. Both sides(and stations) would start with 200,000,000 demand, and 45x prices. This demand is NOT hard-capped: it can and will be slowly filled! As this demand is slowly filled, that price multiplier would slowly decrease(though not all the way; maybe it would cap at half the max value).

So, at this point, Mahon, with 25,000,000 tons supplied, would have his priced reduced from the full 45x, down to 175,000,000/200,000,000, or about 39. Kaine, by contrast, would be at 6,764,672/200,000,000, IE she would still have closer to 44x.

This way, players who are supporting for ideological reasons would support the winning side, but players who are in it for the profit would tend to support the LOSING side! Thereby making the entire fight a lot more even, fair, and fun for all involved!

 

[metatheurgist]

Or maybe just quit with the artificial demand for CGs entirely so it's all about ideology?

 

[GroG79]

The CG is going to be rigged anyways....

Just have fun

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Or maybe just quit with the artificial demand for CGs entirely so it's all about ideology?

So do something like having rewards scaled solely with the contributions, so it doesn't matter which side you support? Pure madness, it'll never catch on.

 

[aRJay]

My thought was that CGs could be done blind with the results and progress only visible when the CG completes either at the end time or when one side wins.

Of course this wasn’t as much of a problem when only people playing ideologically or based on some other sort of role play didn’t sign up for both sides.

 

[LiveWeyer]

I think the Power Versus Power CGs need to have the "winner" rewards locked to only pledges of that power.

If there are general "all player rewards" make them a delivery of one item only.

That way only those players who care about the Powerplay piece contribute. While everyone else can continue on their day. Yeah, you may have people hop between powers, but they don't care about Powerplay usually anyways.

I say that knowing most CGs are setup rigged so a specific side will win though and fit better within the FDev narrative they want to tell.

 

[Kira Goto]

Something that would already help is not adding the "One side wins gets extra rewards regardless of pledge" because that actually discourages competition. I would advocate for outright removing it, but I guess making it only for pledges is also an option... though it isn't likely to trouble people much to sign up temporarily for Powerplay, for that CG, even on just its last day.

 

[CMDR Saigon]

Something that would already help is not adding the "One side wins gets extra rewards regardless of pledge" because that actually discourages competition. I would advocate for outright removing it, but I guess making it only for pledges is also an option... though it isn't likely to trouble people much to sign up temporarily for Powerplay, for that CG, even on just its last day.

I personally think this is the key problem. I know of several CMDRs who would on balance "ideologically" support Kaine but supported Mahon because they want the 2 set of PDs!

 

[Kwalidy]

There is no balance to the contest. As others have stated, if you just want the stuff, then go for the winner. You'll get the stuff. There is no value to this as a story guide or community census.

Inara exists, everyone can see how it's going to play out.

The easiest fixes, that require the least effort to program:

Keep players in the dark as much as you can. The less info they have, the more likely they are to actually vote their belief vs vote for the rewards. If players don't know they're in the top X% the might actually play the cg for the entire time and compete as hard as they can.

OR

Make the rewards equal no matter who wins, and only provide the winning PP players with merit rewards.

BUT

Even that doesn't quite work, because if you want to get into the top 75%, pick the loser, you'll have better chances.

I love the game, I love what fdev have done over the last year and some, but this doesn't work in it's current form.

 

[SlickPBW]

I am pledged to ALD. I had no dog in this fight. I fully admit to doing what the OP said; when it was clear that Mahon was going to win, I Cutter-binged from a station that was 1 full Cutter jump away to quickly get near the top of the 50% level. That should keep me from dropping out the bottom of the 75% level. OP is right about how the CG conditions drive exactly this behavior.

If ALD was one of the powers in this CG and that sway was headed the other way, what would a player do? Fight and inevitably lose for his own power no matter what, or cave in and work for the opposing side only to get the probably minimally useful unique PD modules that will probably just take up module storage space?

FD: when you make poorly thought out CG’s, you get exactly what the OP describes. With the same amount of effort, a well thought out CG could be so much more. As a side note, in my opinion paying such a high return of credits is also setting the wrong expectations for the future. I was watching the system chat in the CG system, and I saw so much discussion from self proclaimed new players going from just starting out to fully funding their FC only from their trade proceeds. They didn’t give a darn about the story line, the power conflict or the shiny but marginal modules. They all jumped on the winning side like the OP described and will soon have their FC’s. That’s how you are teaching them about how CG’s “should” be. Prepare yourselves for their future “feedback” if this doesn’t happen in the next CGs.

 

[Danieros]

Huge fan of the idea - introduces an underdog bonus and makes a better use of the demand mechanic.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Take this CG as an example. Both sides(and stations) would start with 200,000,000 demand, and 45x prices. This demand is NOT hard-capped: it can and will be slowly filled! As this demand is slowly filled, that price multiplier would slowly decrease(though not all the way; maybe it would cap at half the max value).

The optimal strategy with this is not "see Kaine is losing, switch your allegiance to Kaine (losing any accumulated Mahon rewards) for higher payouts". The optimal strategy is "do a few runs for Mahon anyway to secure top 75% on the winning side" then "run a bunch of trade loops in the Kaine system to benefit from the higher prices without draining the demand" [1]

The other thing is, it's not merely enough to stop encouraging people to join the winning side. The winning side is the winning side because given a completely clean choice, in the early hours of the CG before it was in any way possible to predict the winner, players still went for Mahon over Kaine by about 3:1. So you could "prevent dogpiling" by making the CG results completely invisible until the CG is over - you don't see how many have signed up, or what the total delivery is, or what tier the CG has reached - you just see your contribution and whether that positions you as top 25% etc. And the CG would still be a ~3:1 walkover for Mahon when the results came out at the end. Yes, that's "better" than the 4:1 it currently is, but it's hardly going to make a difference to who wins.

Active manipulation of the rewards once that initial split has been seen would probably be necessary - a Kaine backer announces that they'll be providing a 3rd set of modules to the top 50% in the Mahon CG should Kaine win, or Aisling Duval announces joint work with one of Kaine's consortium on escape pod manufacture, so Duval pledges now also get merits+cosmetics if that side wins. It'd take that level of adjustment - and even then it might not be enough - and very obviously Frontier won't want the accusations of bias that would involve.

But lacking that, competitive CGs are always going to be "decided" in the first day or so, because there's no reason to expect the people showing up in the first day to be deciding for reasons unrepresentative of anyone who might show up later, and pre-tuning the CG setup so that the first day participation is equal to statistical margins is well beyond Frontier's (or anyone's!) abilities to do consistently.

[1] Or if the demand drains from non-CG fulfilment too, "benefit from the higher prices in the short-term and sabotage Kaine's efforts to discourage others signing up with them" as a double-win.

I say that knowing most CGs are setup rigged so a specific side will win though and fit better within the FDev narrative they want to tell.

This one certainly isn't in that sense. Identical CG type and commodities, CG systems right next to each other both with short supercruises to large pad stations. Nor have any of the recent Powerplay-themed ones been quantitatively skewed, for obvious reasons.

There was absolutely no quantitative reason to pick Mahon over Kaine or vice versa as someone showing up early, but Mahon still had a 3:1 advantage in the first couple of hours.

Qualitatively, Mahon has had a decade of development as a character and Kaine has showed up much more recently because they finally realised it was a bit weird to have the Alliance, of all powers, be the one without any internal disagreement shown. It's not surprising that Mahon gets more support. And yes, you can view that as Frontier "rigging" it too (unintentionally, over a decade) - but to counteract that, Frontier would need to know that Kaine has a baseline strength about a 1/3 that of Mahon, and therefore make Kaine's CG in some way "easier" (lower targets, for example, or higher-supply commodities) to encourage people to go there. And then the people who only consider the quantitative aspects would say "unfair, they clearly want Kaine to win!".

Kaine managed to fail to reach T1 once on a completely non-competitive CG where the T1 target was set at a mere 8 million tonnes. They are not someone people are going to support in a quantitatively "fair" fight. (Which is why I'm supporting them - I like backing the obvious underdog and it was her or Patreus)

(There have been at least a couple of CGs where that sort of qualitative aspect has led to the side offering clearly superior quantitative rewards - in one case, as far as side A gives a module, side B gives nothing - being won by the side which people liked better)

 

[Robert Maynard]

That way only those players who care about the Powerplay piece contribute. While everyone else can continue on their day. Yeah, you may have people hop between powers, but they don't care about Powerplay usually anyways.

Indeed, if Inara data is representative of the player-base as a whole, c.5 in 9 players are not pledged to Powerplay, those players would still not need to care about Powerplay in the slightest and could pledge to a side of their choosing for the duration of the CG only to contribute to such CGs - then ditch the pledge once the CG finishes.

Noting that CGs are a generally popular feature - so to try to lock the majority of the player-base out of contributing may not be well received.

Also noting that for a two power CG, like the current CGs, ten twelfths of those pledged (assuming equal distribution) would be excluded by an "only those pledged to one of the powers could contribute to the CG" approach - so rather than just excluding the majority of the player-base it would exclude the vast majority of the player-base.

 

[SlickPBW]

The optimal strategy with this is not "see Kaine is losing, switch your allegiance to Kaine (losing any accumulated Mahon rewards) for higher payouts". The optimal strategy is "do a few runs for Mahon anyway to secure top 75% on the winning side" then "run a bunch of trade loops in the Kaine system to benefit from the higher prices without draining the demand"

This doesn’t work for the current CG. You are not allowed to be signed up to both sides simultaneously. If you want to do work for the other side, you must first abandon the CG for the current side. This will prevent getting rewards from both sides.

Edit: if you mean to stay aligned to Mahon and do runs for Kaine without changing alignment then I see your point.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Edit: if you mean to stay aligned to Mahon and do runs for Kaine without changing alignment then I see your point.

Yes, exactly that.

 

[Uthael]

Oooor... Actually allow for trading between players, create an auction house in every major station and allow players to store goods in a station's vault. This would include engineering materials, too. Create an in-game economy, similar to what EVE Online has.

Then, whenever the game has an issue, create an event around it. When the event resolves, the game patches the issue and the economy rebalances a little.

Events could be generators or sinks. For either money, time, goods or materials. If it's a "sink" event, the rewards could be some harder-to-get modules (fx. V1 SCO of your choice) or getting your name immortalized on a list of participants or some event-exclusive cosmetics.

 

[Elyssaen]

There was a long period of me not playing, so I've a question: is there history to why CG design is so safe? In particular, it's the same reward for each side. Everything we're saying would go out the window in an instant if different sides offered different modules. I'm assuming, though, that they're hesitant to create too much FOMO – to upset players who want both, who want everything.

Say this was a choice between a lightweight + sturdy pre-engineered Concord Cannon, and a long range + overcharged pre-engineered Retributor. I'm not suggesting that's a balanced comparison and that's not necessarily the point... just that it'd make the choice at least a little more interesting.

Oooor... Actually allow for trading between players, create an auction house in every major station and allow players to store goods in a station's vault. This would include engineering materials, too. Create an in-game economy, similar to what EVE Online has.

Then, whenever the game has an issue, create an event around it. When the event resolves, the game patches the issue and the economy rebalances a little.

I'm starting to come around to this idea a bit (slightly and slowly), but I don't follow your second paragraph. What kind of issue? What kind of event? What do you mean about the economy rebalancing?

 

[Uthael]

I'm starting to come around to this idea a bit (slightly and slowly), but I don't follow your second paragraph. What kind of issue? What kind of event? What do you mean about the economy rebalancing?

Examples of two opposite issues:

• Players earn money too slow.
  • Potential temporary solution: make a money generator event (like the last one with mining platinum and getting >400k/t).
  • Effect: players on average have a lot more money from this
  • Potential permanent solution: increase the demand for ores and their price on NPC stations
• Players have too much money.
  • Potential temporary solution: make a PvP combat event where rebuys are disabled and the reward is something unrelated to credits. More value destroyed = better rank.
  • Effect: most players try to participate with the cheapest possible ships that are able to take on more expensive targets. Richest and most daring players bring in more expensive ships, focusing on the reward and trying to take down as many smaller ships as they can. Players on average have less money from this event.
  • Potential permanent solution: increase rebuy cost in certain conditions. For example, if a player dies very far or has a high bounty or fines.

 

[KRISXR]

I see the lopsidedness, figure its about some sort of imposter emotion and mentality of "i'm a winner!". Long range abrasion blaster or the systems/engine focused power distributor, i don't think either of those has any sort of "special" value. My lame brain leans towards the sheepple effect, and they all jump on the band wagon. Because you know they're all winners over there.

I chose Kaine, because i don't want to be in that group. I see any large groups in real life and I become suspicious, my guard's up, i'm looking for the red flags. Besides I like siding with the underdog, they're usually the righteous anyways. Well not in a video game but it's just a mentality thing. You know, because i'm mental!

 

[metatheurgist]

There was a long period of me not playing, so I've a question: is there history to why CG design is so safe? In particular, it's the same reward for each side. Everything we're saying would go out the window in an instant if different sides offered different modules. I'm assuming, though, that they're hesitant to create too much FOMO – to upset players who want both, who want everything.

I don't care enough to check but I'm fairly sure there used to be CGs that offered different modules. What usually happened there was that whichever module the player base decided was better ended up winning.

The real problem here is that CGs should be narrative drivers and the rewards just sweeteners. But just like PP "gameplay" (I use the term laughingly in that case) is secondary to the participation bribes.