Why not decay down to 0? What's wrong with independent systems?
Trailblazers | Update 3.4
- Thread starter Phil W
- Start date
I'd go even further and say bring back the one merit equals one control point. Would make the buffs/nerfs actually influence the control points generated and also speed up the pp game.
Basically you don't want people fighting the SYSTEM rather than each other, like was the case in PP1.0.
You want people to fight, and enjoy fighting, even if that fighting ultimately doesn't much matter. That's what they're trying to do, at least. The challenge is making that meaningful when the game doesn't really have a functional economy or anything particularly worth fighting over.
So you want that people quit playing PP?, and just make some merits for a care package when needed with undermining and don't care about the rest of PP, you forgot to mention that you increased the necessary CP to change a system to fortified, so does this mean I get a decay bc I can't change it to fortified because of your increase till the tick? So going in circles and waste my time?
The numbers are exactly the same. 700k for fortified. It's also exactly as easy to get a system to fortified as before, you just get less merits, because the additional merits (or their loss) is calculated after the control value change. There was one comment here (now deleted) deriding Fdev's math skills, and while it could be voiced better, it is somewhat spot on. Whoever changed this only cared for the appearance for those unable or unwilling to understand how the pp system works. Arguably the system is now even more skevered towards the defender, because the merits for offence (already hard to get because the one meta activity [data] was disabled) are worth less control points.
I believe there is another change to merits that is not mentioned in the patch notes:
I believe there is an additional nerf on merits (unsure on Control Score, it's hard to get a clean pull on this) when working on a system that has reached its current stage cap and will promote (or capped stronghold). I saw merit rates as low as 25% of normal (where I would have expected to see the 45% of normal with the -20% + -35% penalty).
Can other powerplay powers corroborate this?
Additionally, I think as feedback for these changes you need to ease up on the anti-undermining window of 24 hours if you think that's a valid design choice. I tried to respond to undermining in real time this week and at best saw the sliding scale move from -20% to -10% penalty.
I believe there is an additional nerf on merits (unsure on Control Score, it's hard to get a clean pull on this) when working on a system that has reached its current stage cap and will promote (or capped stronghold). I saw merit rates as low as 25% of normal (where I would have expected to see the 45% of normal with the -20% + -35% penalty).
Can other powerplay powers corroborate this?
Additionally, I think as feedback for these changes you need to ease up on the anti-undermining window of 24 hours if you think that's a valid design choice. I tried to respond to undermining in real time this week and at best saw the sliding scale move from -20% to -10% penalty.
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I certainly saw that for a capped Stronghold - 10 merits for a ship scan in a normal one, only 5 in the capped one.
(With ethos bonus, so it would normally give 5 CP, so 20 merits in a neutral form)
(With ethos bonus, so it would normally give 5 CP, so 20 merits in a neutral form)
The merits/CPs ratios is creating a lot of headhaches... we really hope they remove the current way of showing multipliers (redundant) and display on the UI the amount of earned merits as well as the contributed CPs. This not considering that affecting personal merits, doesn't really produce the effect they're looking for... imho for some it is even better as they don't get clogged by care packages.
...or you earn them in a cumulative number "CLAIMABLE CARE PACKAGES: XYZ", then you decide what type of random materials (suit, raw/manufactured/encoded) they contain with a button like "CLAIM SUIT CARE PACKAGE", "CLAIM SHIP CARE PACKAGE" that you press on the fly.
Ohh, that's an interesting one, it should address most of the CP being wasted on capped stronghold grinding without outright disabling any buffering against attacks. But not everybody is going to notice it and stop reinforcing capped strongholds if the change continues to be fully undocumented and not mentioned anywhere on the UI... it's a big problem with these new multipliers. It's not enough to list them individually since they're all stacking with each other.
It's becoming a huge mess to try keeping track of what really matters - how much CP your actions actually did when there up to 4 multipliers in play.
Only if people know what's going on. For Grom, one of our capped strongholds is also a premier plat mining spot. So it's forever over-capped all the time. If you look up how to make a ton of merits, you can find the plat mining map for it, you run that, you sell your goods, you get some merits, and you don't realize this isn't anywhere near as good as it is.
Omicron Capricorni B has had 417,727 control points put into this cycle so far, the cycle when reinforcement was further nerfed 2 different ways, and people are still pumping platinum merit sales into the system.
EDIT: And the decay mechanism means next week a ton of people are probably still going to pump into it, and cap it again, so the nerf to overcap merits also fights with decay.
I think the in-game UI should list both control points generated, along with merits, and ALL the merit penalties at play, if that's the road we're going down. Some players might question a 6 month old guide on merit rates if they see 3 separate penalties pop up. (base -35% penalty, no recent UM penalty, overcapped status penalty) Additionally even if the in-game UI doesn't list it, all the information should be listed in the merit log journal entry. Action, control points, penalties.
The overcapped penalty should be removed from exploited -> Fort and fort -> stronghold promotions.
Finally, if Fdev really wants to address why UMing isn't going on, they need to address the UM levers. They're all so weak except for settlements. UM Mining can be ok but since no one gets an ethos bonus no one does it. Add a better bulk trade UM lever (smuggling as been suggested by many people in this thread in other threads, and would be great). Make the standard UM penalties lower.
Organized Groups have the information and capacity to educate and teach users that these merit penalties do nothing to slow our actual goals, sure it'll affect how some merit seekers play, but even now they aren't incentivized to UM, the highest merit rates are still in acquisition.
This will mean 10000 human players rule billions of npc.
Meaning, if no players pay attention to something, it will reset to 0. This is opposite to "breathing Galaxy".
I wouldn't do decay at all - it is still 1way change.
I would add random +/- change with magnitude dependent on how much current BGS happenings corresponds to liked by Power.
I guess, they just wanted BGS/PP to be separated for some reason, so it is 1-way decay.
Some more data to support this undocumented change when a system changes stages. I was delivering 750 PP Commodities to a reinforced system today. Each delivery was worth 2,340 merits until it crossed the SH threshold. Once that happened, merits earned immediately dropped to 1170 for 750 commodities.
Also, ship scans dropped from 10 merits each to 5.
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Or at least only apply when they hit the promoted+25% cap on progression in a single week.
UM Mining also having the problem that it only works in precisely the systems the other side can reinforce that way, so unless you're at Standard+Standard SSP+BFP you'll still be going slower per person than they can manage.
But certainly any half-decent reinforcement method, even at the -75% for reinforcing an already capped system, is going to outdo almost any undermining method even at the ideal +60% situation (ethos bonus, +15% UM bonus, no SSP, no BFP) for personal gains. Given that the reinforcement:undermining ratio - ignoring the six CG systems - is currently approximately 20:1 in favour of reinforcement, there's plenty of room for Frontier to take some bolder action here than a few +/-5% pieces - a flat 10x (i.e. 1000%) multiplier to the control point and merit values of all undermining actions would still leave it an unbalanced mess but might move the overall ratio a bit closer to level.
The problems go beyond just the scoring of the levers themselves, of course.
- Undermining (unlike Reinforcement and some of the forms of Acquisition which aren't too picky about locations) can almost never be done except by someone deliberately trying to Undermine. So there's very little "casual" Undermining just from players going about their business without paying much attention to Powerplay (but there is a lot of casual reinforcement). Fix that and they probably won't need an artificial CP decay at all.
- Undermining doesn't benefit the attacker strategically in any significant way: you don't get any benefits to your Power from carrying it out, and it's a lot more expensive than just acquiring one of the many thousands of uncontested systems would be (some of the organised groups might be willing to do it just for the fun of the fight, sure). I've suggested elsewhere that the conceptually simple fix for this is "if you cause an opponent to lose a system, and it's in control range of you, it immediately flips to become yours"
0 merits in undermining for me this cycle so far. i'm too busy in reinforcement, or securisation of recent acquisitions, and i want to implement a PP in a colonised system, so i had to fortify a system to reach this colonised system, but since this update it's more than difficult.
so after nearly one week, my conclusion is that this update is a fail, i'm not playing as Fdev seems to want, and those bonus and decay are complexifying PP 2.0.
so after nearly one week, my conclusion is that this update is a fail, i'm not playing as Fdev seems to want, and those bonus and decay are complexifying PP 2.0.
Both Standard penalties is still 70% merits/control score like for like action per my last testing.
I think the suggestion you've made that a successful UM skips the acquisition phase would mean the opportunity cost of UM could be worth it.
It would also then become a tradeoff of performing a cross power UM campaign as it might result in unintended consequences for the goal of the campaign.
You wouldn't even need to skip the acquisition phase to make it worth it, I think. It should just be UM control score over the minimum line are added to acquisition the next week.
Then additionally, if you made it so acquisition control score over the minimum line up to 15k-30k go into the exploited status, this would also drive the powers to be more dynamic which is Fdev's goal. Every organized group has to make sure to dump R merits into the acquisitions every week otherwise they fall over to one errant commander slaughtering a settlement (even with data offline).
While personal merit rates are heavily penalized this update (even more so with the undocumented overcap nerf). Your contributions towards control score in reinforcement are as strong as ever. Keep it up, you can get it out there!
We don't yet know how hard it'll be for CMDRs to fight the decay mechanism, I'm hoping power groups will be open to helping helping extend coverage when asked for expansions if it's a problem.
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For me over the weekend it was the usual ~4000 control points per signal source session (on average 8 black boxes, 24 wreckage components plus opportunistic combat). So reinforcement works like it did before; now the question is will the 12000...20000 CP-s per cycle I can realistically manage be enough to overcome decay at >95% progress? If yes, it is possible to solo push a system to Fortified state, although it would be a lot of work and no weeks off allowed. If no, well, it becomes a Red Queen race and the decentralized nature of PP 2.0 diminishes since now you need an organized group to have any meaningful progress.
I think it would only be fair if activity above, say, 3000...5000 CP-s during a cycle would cancel the decay at the end of cycle. Still no weeks off allowed, but at least you can realistically maintain the progress even if you can't put in all the hours to increase it.
I think it would only be fair if activity above, say, 3000...5000 CP-s during a cycle would cancel the decay at the end of cycle. Still no weeks off allowed, but at least you can realistically maintain the progress even if you can't put in all the hours to increase it.
Interesting - I found credit donation missions to work at 100% in Standard:Standard, but I haven't retested that for a while. Probably should...