Trailblazers | Update 3.4
- Thread starter Phil W
- Start date
Do you really want my three commanders to quit this game after all these years! Cmdrs Uranius, Uranius Antoninus and Uranius Alternis moved over 5 million tons of fortification suppies in PP 1.0
In PP 2.0 FDev has disrepected defenders repeatedly. FDev has decided once again that agressors should get perks while defenders should be penalized. So now afterall this effort building this control sphere (Bang Stronghold) cycle after cycle the countless hours, almost every day of the week, the billions of credits spent, you just take away in one cycle 135,077 control points.
So when designing these changes, how much time, effort, and credits you are throwing away that is an Acceptable level of punishment for a loyal player. Why should I continue to invest in this game, Arx, when I cannot be treated fairly. To those reading, o7. To FDev my deepest disrespect for what you are doing to me.
In PP 2.0 FDev has disrepected defenders repeatedly. FDev has decided once again that agressors should get perks while defenders should be penalized. So now afterall this effort building this control sphere (Bang Stronghold) cycle after cycle the countless hours, almost every day of the week, the billions of credits spent, you just take away in one cycle 135,077 control points.
So when designing these changes, how much time, effort, and credits you are throwing away that is an Acceptable level of punishment for a loyal player. Why should I continue to invest in this game, Arx, when I cannot be treated fairly. To those reading, o7. To FDev my deepest disrespect for what you are doing to me.
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Like colonization (at the start)?
Its like anything, and a lesson that FD eventually learnt with PP1 when that suddenly had nearly everything spelt out.
Any action in ED needs to have very clear and up-front costs / effects so players are informed about sinking time / effort into that action.
This never was the case of BGS. The majority of "how things works" was needed to be found by players, and there were numerous changes which were never much oficially explained --> was needed to manually re-learn how it work ... and it was fun, for me at least for sure till colonisation broke most of main principles for MFs BGS.
Regarding colonisation itself, imo changes were so far very sensible and logical ... which is however not the case of 3.4 update and changes inttroduced for PP2. PP2 in comparison to starting BGS is really an "walk in the park", related to amount of information given to players directly via game UI.
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Not exactly true. For a while, yes, it was black box. But FD did release a BGS matrix later on.
The problem is this was for the 'broad' strokes, and not the 'what if?' stuff.
For example, I spent a good few weeks doing silly stuff like finding out what an assault was worth, ATR foibles, security loopholes etc.
Difference is: BGS was meant to stay, as the name suggests, in the background, not something players would deliberately manipulate. But of course this didn't work out as expected
But Powerplay is meant to be a large-scale competitive player vs player framework, and as such needs transparency and unambiguous rules. Of course, that too hasn't worked out as expected due to people being more interested in turtling in and making various peace treatises, alliances and non-aggression pacts instead of having a 12-way everyone for themselves Hunger Games melee with some Classic Caesar for dressing
Everything Frontier has changed so far with Powerplay has essentially been rebalancing (and mostly fairly minor rebalancing at that) or closing off exploits if people shout loud enough about them.
It needs radical changes - either to turn it into the competitive system Frontier advertised it as, or to turn it into a proper cooperative system - but I wouldn't describe anything so far as being one.
Making alliances is normal behaviour in this game, if was (after 10 years) someone surprised, then he do not know this game playerbase too well. And this is not even the core of problem. Much bigger part of the problem is lack of reasons why to even do UM, and close second behind it is lack of fun ways how to do UM. Players are not a culprit here ...
If this should be fun, then it need to start on low level .. single players, or small groups. If there is not such fun, it will not work ...
The questions should start with: What activities we can give to one player to have fun and/or purpose doing undermining? Update 3.4 do exactly the oposite, on one side it upsets players for lost effort, and on other side it will rise interest to fortify even more and in concentrated effort to avoid decay ... Two loss, zero win here.
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I'm not surprised by all that at all, ZYADA, FUC etc have been part of the parcel for a looong time. It's just funny that lore-wise Aisling and Torval despise each other immensely, in-game their NPC-s murder each other to death everywhere, but players be like "Nope, we're all a big happy family here
"Couldn't agree more. Why should I go undermine something somewhere for a change if the star system I want to reinforce in order to expand from there is being automatically undermined by the game itself more than players ever could bother to and I need to put all my effort trying to undo all that? At this point, it's not players vs players, it's players vs The System.
There needs to be a good reason to undermine, but with 400 billon stars, of which 99.99% are open to colonization and later Powerplay, there really isn't a good answer to "Why should I go and try kick someone else's sandcastle if the sandbox is practically infinite?".
We don't want to use up our limited time in Elite to generate 20,000 CPs and more every week to get the status increased. The rewards are far too low for that. This would mean that small groups of players would no longer be able to level up independently without quitting their jobs.You level up for weeks and are punished harshly. The idea itself may be good, but not like this.
For me the change of (re-)introducing the decay stuff is radical enough that I wouldn't describe it as balancing anymore. Together with the deactivation of various activities (and keeping us in limbo about their future), as a single player I don't see a good reason to continue playing this. I'll wait until it has stabilized (just as colonization) and will revisit it then. Let's hope it won't deteriorate to the same level version 1 did.
Yes, that's fair. Though it has such a weird effect I'm not sure whether to describe it as "radical change" or "radical stasis".
Current approximate statistics for this week:
- 17M reinforcement
- 2.3M player-generated undermining
- 93M decay undermining (and probably a bit more so far undetected, probably closer to 110M)
So in that sense, we've certainly got the situation where:
- Reinforcement outweighs undermining 10:1
- Frontier: we'll be bringing in some changes to encourage competition between powers
- Reinforcement now outweighs player-generated undermining closer to 20:1 most weeks (the CG is distorting things a bit right now, sure), but it's also been converted to a PvE contest versus the much larger decay effect anyway
But on the other hand despite the huge size, decay is set up so that it cannot possibly change any system states, whereas there is a chance albeit a small one that some of that player-generated undermining might flip a system. It'll be interesting to see once the week is over whether it's even made that much difference to how rapidly systems are getting successfully reinforced.
It feels like it might have way more effect by annoying people into giving up on Powerplay than it does by actually changing anything material related to how the remaining ones act.
There is one more matter, maybe not so clearly visible, in regards to some of players interest with PP2.0. And this are experienced BGS players which on one side face destruction of old BGS play related to PMFs (defense, offense and diplomacy skills were very needed and it was nicely balanced in the end), and on other side they did not yet found PP2.0 appealing enoug to even give it a try. These players may face quite a serious problem with interest to continue play ED. Imo PP2.0 may be really good successor of "old" BGS, but it need rather bigger changes related to bucket of activities which affects PP2.0 for make it fun and balanced. Actually, imo there is at this stage not any real reason to do not make everything for affecting PP2.0, and I mean here things, which are still valid only for BGS. Old BGS PMF play is practically dead now and without possibility to go back. Only full move forward makes sense if one still like strategical play in ED.
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My hunch is that big groups barely feel the sting--they can still push a system from Exploited to Reinforced in one week easily (what does it take again; 10 players putting in 33k points each?). Strongholds are harder, but I don't think impossibly so (how many points do you need to get to stronghold, again?). And since most systems don't need to be above 25% strengths, there's no brushfires to put out.
But small cells of less than 10 people have their work cut out for them. Exploited to Fortified--sure, doable even solo if one is willing to grind >30k points every week without a pause. Strongholds? Not a snowballs chance in Hell...
I think a lot of "casuals" are at the CG or maybe too discouraged by the decay mechanic to continue. With 72000 merits I'm halfway through Kaine's top 10%; usually ~40000...50000 merits leave me at upper half of top 50%. If anything, the decay mechanic has made me more stubborn at getting "my system" to where I want it
Even though it feels like trying to swim against a flash flood.
Delaine is one of the most vulnerable powers (due to BH) to random undermining...
...unless entire bubbles are being collapsed (10-15 systems at once), that happened a few times and the effort was definitively worth the result.
Yes. Everyone should have that sort of thing if Frontier want undermining to happen. More fun than decay, at least!Delaine is one of the most vulnerable powers (due to BH) to random undermining...
(Though Delaine doesn't seem particularly out of line with the other powers in terms of average real undermining per system, or the fraction of systems receiving various amounts of weekly real undermining - being smaller and out on the edge perhaps helps)
It's an effective attack, certainly, but still not giving you a direct benefit - and after eight months of massive reinforcement, most powers now are at the stage where everything is so cross-linked you can't do that anyway. Fun while it lasted...
Another thing that needs to be balanced. Limit any system to link only to the closest Stronghold or Fort, if it's broken, it will slip out of the powers influence at the end of the next cycle unless sufficiently reinforced to establish a new link to the next closest Stronghold or Front. That would force defenders to work actively to keep their systems together and make hard decisions about what systems to keep, what to let go if the local Fort/Stronghold is successfully attacked.