Not unreasonable to suggest that was the test system for whatever was going on. Suppose it all depends whether they can look back that far.
Sol Powerplay Update
- Thread starter Phil W
- Start date
Does this have something to do with the powerplay payments not been made and the leader board not working last week.
Please don't leave it disabled.
After a sufficiently effective solution has been developed and tested that will prevent this happening again.
Until then disable anything required to mitigate the issue.
It will happen again as long they are not moving all powerplay interaction to be server side.
Again, this is the second time that such massive exploit with settlement data is happening, supposedly fixed the first time, there will be 3rd time if they let powerplay to be client side, I have absolutely 0 doubt about it.
Pretty much every exploit or imbalance that's had to be barred so far in Powerplay has had nothing to do with client-side control over the interaction:
- you can store up exploration/exobio indefinitely: that's already stored server side
- you can stockpile rares on your carrier: carrier inventory is likewise already stored server side
- you can scan the same wake over and over (did they ever fix that, by the way, or is that not important because it's only exploitable to reinforce?): client side bug, arguably, but it's not triggered by people hacking their client or otherwise cheating, it's just a bug
- the original data download bug: again, a bug, but not triggered by modifying or hacking the client data, it was just a bug (and they could have implemented the same bug server side by not putting a duplicate check there)
- you can kill tourist ships to get escape pods much faster than intended: just bad big-picture design, the ships are supposed to be there and they're supposed to drop escape pods
- you can hatchbreak your own stronghold carrier to get escape pods much faster than intended: likewise, just bad big-picture design, but all the individual components worked as intended
- you can shoot down SLFs forever around an enemy stronghold carrier: again, no client-side hacking involved, they just paid out a lot of merits for how easy they were to kill.
- you can park an AFK bounty build in a RES and rack up merits indefinitely: oops, that one still works, but again you can't undermine with bounties so it's apparently not a problem. Also not a client/server divide causing the issue.
There's been no evidence presented this time either that the excessive rate was due to people hacking the client data as opposed to just making use of a bug.
Bugs and balance issues and weird interactions between different components can be implemented on a server too, is the point.
So far as I know the fix in the original is still perfectly intact and still working - people would have been rather louder (and rather more certain of the problem!) if that wasn't the case.
If there's a second exploit discovered with Odyssey data downloads ... that's probably because that's the only undermining method left that's vaguely competitive with reinforcement in its non-exploitative form, so figuring out a way to do it twice as fast / ten times as fast / etc. gives you something powerful, whereas figuring out how to do megaship scanning ten times as fast still doesn't let you get anywhere.
The same argument could be used to permanently disable bounty hunting as a merit source for reinforcement/acquisition. That might be rather unpopular with the majority of players who are doing it non-exploitatively too.
(We all know Frontier are never going to fix it being AFKable)
FC currently wash the goods and even if they waren't (which I hope they will fix soon because even for regular PP trading, not having a FC for long range trading is a pain), I don't see the issue.
Same for exploration data, I see no issue with those as they are insanely time conssuming to get.
Wake scan is a poor method of reinforcement, yes it's an exploit but given you have other legal method which are just way better (cough 1t trading cough) no one is complaining about it because it just not a viable method by default.
Escape pod disabled, problem solved.
SLF merit strongly reduced, not viable anymore.
AFK bounty build not viable either, bounty payout of target in RES is far much lower than compared to megaship / space installation defense, and an AFK build cannot use KWS, so the merit payout is really poor (again compared to other method) by default.
I'm absolutely not against the possibility to snipe and yes I conssider that storing rare and goods (collected from infrastructure failure systems) in FC for bombing should be possible, since you still spend time to load the thing in your FC and spend an entire week or more for the merit bombing done by explorer, I see 0 issue with that.
Here we are talking about million of undermining merit dropped at the very last fews hours before the cycle ends, I saw the thing in real time a couple of cycles ago on Sol.
The average for a single settlement raided with 6 / 7 data port is about more or less 1k undermining CP for a single CMDR, x4 for a full wing, so even by being generous and conssidering it's the work of a full wing, it's still about 250 settlement raided, do you see the problem? And this is only for 1 million underming CP, the problem is that we were far to just 1 millions underming CP total.
Beside, the fact that FDev are disabling settlement data and even (for the very first time) doing a rollback is a clear sign that something was really wrong with those undermining.
Remember we are talking about a game where the most explosive cheat we saw in Elite were most of them CE related, precisely because yes... client side.
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I forgot about that one. Yes - another reinforcement-only exploit which already has all the key data stored server-side...
The point isn't the merits/hour rate as compared to a player who is bounty hunting hands-on, though. The point is that AFK builds can run 167 hours a week, so even if they're a tenth of the per-hour efficiency of doing it properly, they still come out ahead of all but the most dedicated players (and someone with multiple alts and multiple computers can run them all simultaneously)
Problem "solved" by taking a chunk out of the legitimate and intended gameplay too, yes. A few more "solutions" like that and there won't be a Powerplay left.
I don't dispute that. My point was that none of the other previous or current exploits actually involved a client hack. Some of them were fixed, some of them have been allowed to continue because they're reinforcement-only and no-one really cares if a system gets reinforced "too much", but none of them were because of insufficient server-side validation and there's no reason to believe this one was either.
Oh trust me I would really like that they remove the sofcap in powerplay trading, as a trade based power, being forced to sell everything one by one to be efficient is alienating.
Would have been easy to find an alt solution for this one.
Creat a new type of escap pod, like I dunno "powerplay agent escap pod" and make only those one usuable for powerplay, make them spawn exclusively from powerplay ship and powerplay related signal source, that should have largely solved the exploit issue about them.
Remember the guy which turbo builded T3 port in several colony during the early days of Trailblazer? Teleport cheat by using CE
What I mean is that if more interaction of the game were server side, you would remove from the root a massive chunk of the hack possibility, since as long the game remain mostly client side, the only thing that FDev can do (and are already doing) is to implement a flag system to flag account doing things impossible and put them under manual review, the problem with this is that you can only take action after that the hack was made, much less to prevent it happening in the first place (and the sanction of just 1 week ban if cheat are detected is clearly not dissuasive enough)..
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Wouldn't excessive merit gains show up on the ALD powerplay leader board?
You could farm tourism settlements via cruise reset and generate over 50k merits per hour.
If the ALD leader board isn't showing numbers in the millions then perhaps the odyssey data hand-ins were generating excessive undermining, more than intended.
You could farm tourism settlements via cruise reset and generate over 50k merits per hour.
If the ALD leader board isn't showing numbers in the millions then perhaps the odyssey data hand-ins were generating excessive undermining, more than intended.
Yes, it's certainly possible to do that. There's no evidence that this is what was happening this time, though.
(Note that their response to that cheat was "revoke their builds and ban their accounts", not "disable hauling until they can make it cheat-proof", though)
Sure, but most if not all of the Powerplay-specific exploits so far haven't been about doing things which are impossible. They've been about doing things which are perfectly possible, and often already server-validated, just unintended in how effective they are. Extra server-side validation of Beluga hunting or 1t trading or SLF kills would have made no difference whatsoever because all the individual steps were perfectly legitimate.
(The need to look for unusual patterns is certainly a contribution to undermining exploits getting shut down fairly rapidly - after all, successfully undermining a system is rare enough to be newsworthy - whereas reinforcement exploits just get lost in the noise if they're not openly carried out by people happy to admit to it)
Tag them with the originating Power and that solves the "hatchbreak your own Stronghold Carrier" problem too while still allowing it for the intended route.
It would have been easy enough to avoid if people wanted to - and presumably in this case they did
- unpledge and repledge last thing on Wednesday to reset your total
- stay pledged, but never complete the initial missions so you don't count as having a leaderboard position or rank
- use a bunch of alts (probably necessary for storing up lots of data anyway) so that no individual account scores that highly
For old dogs like me, Powerplay and BGS are very confusing. I understand lots of people like this style of play, but when things get this level of attention, one wonders what other parts of the game get neglected.
Additionally, the drama is a bit much.
Additionally, the drama is a bit much.
For an old dog like me, there aren't many meaningful things left to do in this game because....well.....I've done them all many times over.For old dogs like me, Powerplay and BGS are very confusing. I understand lots of people like this style of play, but when things get this level of attention, one wonders what other parts of the game get neglected.
Additionally, the drama is a bit much.
PP2.0 represents a possibility to enjoy the game from a political/diplomatic level, which gives me a reason to play with others for the first time in 10K hours.
Now we're going into the fantasy territory of pretending Frontier will ever balance anything though. Yes a lot of this is just bad balancing that clearly benefits reinforcement.
They don't really know how to balance anything though, and they're not gonna hire anyone that can. I mean, rares were disabled for months rather than have one unpaid intern spend 10 minutes typing a 50% nerf server-side to the merit gains during the first 10 minutes of a monday morning. Literally 10 minutes of work for a single person. What we got was months with a disabled feature. It needed no elegant solution whatsoever, no creative way to do something complicated and justify your job. Just halving the numbers to start with then figure out through vibes-based balancing if it was okay now.
Disabling it probably took more work than doing that.
You don't really need 150 people working on a balance team for bi-weekly patches like in LoL or something. A lot of this stuff is just common sense and it's gonna be okay as long as you reach a certain ballpark of balance, not like a competitive ranked game where +5 HP on a character with 3000hp is the difference between 49% and 51% winrate and you're gonna have 30 thousand people on reddit screeching because you nerfed their favorite character.
But here we have activities that are 10x stronger than the next best thing by design and it doesn't really lend credibility to the idea that Powerplay is something where you can reasonably contribute no matter what your playstyle is.
If that soft cap were to be removed, trading high value goods would become the default method of reinforcement, considering how much it rewards for a full haul.
Having the soft cap in there is what makes other reinforcement methods comparable to it, due to its artificial time-sink.
They could remove the soft cap and either reduce the general merit award it gives, or (probably better) make the merit award even less dependent on the precise amount of profit (bringing down the high end but keeping the low end where it is or even raising it somewhat)
"Effective but extremely tedious" (and amenable to automation, though I'm sure everyone involved is honestly doing all the clicking themselves) versus "Mostly useless but reasonably fun" is a poor balance point.
Then just remove the cap and nerf the totalthough. It's a much easier and simpler solution than just trying to balance something good by making it unfun to discourage you from doing it. It's honestly always baffled me a bit how the more fun something is to do, the worse it has to be according to some people. And whatever's effective has GOT to be tedious and boring.
I've always seen this disconnect with mining for example. Simple and boring (Laser mining) = best paid. Engaging, satisfying and cool (Core mining) = Not as well paid. The most fun minigame in mining? (Subsurface) = you're better off picking off pennies from the cracks on the street.
The soft cap is a horrible 'balancing' choice. It's just genuinely terrible. Trying to make something genuinely awful and tedious on purpose is actually just passive aggressiveness from a developer with anger issues to be honest lmao
Not to be a buzz or anything, but I think similar thing is happening in the current CG system.
