Ive neither the time nor the inclination to go into a 7 page response. You have my opinion.
Succinct...look it up.
I believe that CG's have lost their way
- Thread starter SlickPBW
- Start date
Succinct...look it up.
Cool, so "No difference whatsoever" it is.
Whilst the 'rewards for 1 tonne' thing feels odd I'm still delivering a carrier load, becuase that has become my standard...
Certainly the ZP CG was obviously marketing, this one might serve to slow down the pace of colonisation as supplies are drained for the summer.
Certainly the ZP CG was obviously marketing, this one might serve to slow down the pace of colonisation as supplies are drained for the summer.
It's a tricky one. I agree with all of Jmanis' points that the CG mechanism is massively outdated, clunky, superseded in multiple ways by newer game mechanics like Powerplay, Trailblazers, the former Thargoid War, etc.
On the other hand, despite all of that, nothing else succeeds in getting players together into one system and avoiding the problem that the player base is spread across 20,000 of them. (Er. 70,000 of them and still rising at about a thousand a week. Ah well.)
I think Frontier would quite happily not do them and they've tried to get rid of them on multiple occasions with them being almost entirely on hold for most of 2019/2020 and very limited in number for 2023/2024 - but nothing else seems to have that same effect or succeed as well at bringing players together.
So that really leaves "plot events" as the driver for them, and Frontier haven't had a significant team on those since their redundancy round (and not really since the end of the NMLA storyline - which was excellent and included some very creative CGs! - in 2022). Unless Frontier go back to having a properly funded plot team (and they should!) CGs are always going to be a bit aimless.
The recent Panther CG pair (rewards at 100%, including an engineered point defense module) had
- a total of 16,634 participants
- total tonnage 84 megatonnes
- top 75% tier at around 7% of the mean delivery (340t)
- top 50% tier at around 30% of the mean delivery (1500t)
- top 25% tier at around 125% of the mean delivery (6400t)
Going back to the NMLA storyline years (and going pre-Odyssey on that!) to this CG: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/deliver-food-to-support-the-marlinists-trade.563123/ which offered the same point defense module, and also had a station-boosting plot-related goal for a popular NPC group
- a total of 8,718 participants
- total tonnage 55 megatonnes
- top 75% tier at around 20% of the mean delivery (1300t)
- top 50% tier at around 50% of the mean delivery (3750t)
- top 25% tier at around 125% of the mean delivery (8100t)
The people doing "top 25%" deliveries are still doing them at much the same rate they always have. The top 75% band in CGs has always been pretty low (not quite "1t" but very often "one trip in a T-9" / "one HazRES bounty run" / etc) where less than an hour's effort in a reasonably optimised ship will secure it comfortably.
The newer CG model is getting historically very high participation numbers and tonnages even when compared with CGs taking place in the run-up to Odyssey when hype and player activity numbers overall were even stronger than today.
Anyway, to answer your literal question, six of the last 50 have been allowed to reach their final target, with another six which have just aged out of the "last 50" part of the same set of CGs as the oldest of the six.
[1] Which is mainly a matter of luck. If any players have a "well obviously this CG will get X total tonnage and Y participants" model which doesn't require waiting until at least a couple of days into the CG to give reasonably accurate numbers they're keeping quiet about it, and Frontier with their fuller data obviously don't have one either.
1) The Panther is at least 50% faster on deliveries than any previous ship. That probably won't affect the top 75% band quite as much because lots of people won't be using it yet, but it will put some upward pressure on it nonetheless.
2) A strong reward keyed to a threshold tends to boost it (the record is almost 6000t for pre-engineered FSDs and the cargo racks do seem popular)
3) It's a four week CG which probably won't multiply it by four (because it will increase the breadth of participants and the "just do 1t" ones aren't going to do 4t because they have four times as long) but will boost it a bit
It's certainly possible that it'll end up somewhere above 10k after four weeks. Still reachable without needing the Panther, of course - that's just a fairly normal "top 25%" target for pre-Panther 1-week CGs, and well within "top 50%" hauled a week at a time for four weeks.
On the other hand, despite all of that, nothing else succeeds in getting players together into one system and avoiding the problem that the player base is spread across 20,000 of them. (Er. 70,000 of them and still rising at about a thousand a week. Ah well.)
I think Frontier would quite happily not do them and they've tried to get rid of them on multiple occasions with them being almost entirely on hold for most of 2019/2020 and very limited in number for 2023/2024 - but nothing else seems to have that same effect or succeed as well at bringing players together.
It kind of is the point, though. Back when a CG was the only way to get an extra station or two, that was an exciting goal. Now you can get one personally for less tonnage than you might haul to a CG, a CG to set up a new station has to have something really special about it.
So that really leaves "plot events" as the driver for them, and Frontier haven't had a significant team on those since their redundancy round (and not really since the end of the NMLA storyline - which was excellent and included some very creative CGs! - in 2022). Unless Frontier go back to having a properly funded plot team (and they should!) CGs are always going to be a bit aimless.
And yet people still do. Despite the rewards being available at top 100%, the relative curve of contributions for the higher tiers looks basically the same as it always has, and participation levels are at a historically high level. Frontier have actually provided a nice controlled experiment here!
The recent Panther CG pair (rewards at 100%, including an engineered point defense module) had
- a total of 16,634 participants
- total tonnage 84 megatonnes
- top 75% tier at around 7% of the mean delivery (340t)
- top 50% tier at around 30% of the mean delivery (1500t)
- top 25% tier at around 125% of the mean delivery (6400t)
Going back to the NMLA storyline years (and going pre-Odyssey on that!) to this CG: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/deliver-food-to-support-the-marlinists-trade.563123/ which offered the same point defense module, and also had a station-boosting plot-related goal for a popular NPC group
- a total of 8,718 participants
- total tonnage 55 megatonnes
- top 75% tier at around 20% of the mean delivery (1300t)
- top 50% tier at around 50% of the mean delivery (3750t)
- top 25% tier at around 125% of the mean delivery (8100t)
The people doing "top 25%" deliveries are still doing them at much the same rate they always have. The top 75% band in CGs has always been pretty low (not quite "1t" but very often "one trip in a T-9" / "one HazRES bounty run" / etc) where less than an hour's effort in a reasonably optimised ship will secure it comfortably.
The newer CG model is getting historically very high participation numbers and tonnages even when compared with CGs taking place in the run-up to Odyssey when hype and player activity numbers overall were even stronger than today.
Several of them have been on track to complete on their initial goals - the recent war CG with ground CZs, for example - or for now, this current one. Frontier have adjusted the targets and added extra tiers to ensure it lasts the week. It's easy to make a CG which completes - just set the target, which Frontier have full discretion on, to be relatively low - but it only really feels interesting if it's rushing to the final tier in the early hours of Thursday morning, not if it's done by the Friday evening, and that's much more about Frontier guessing perfectly first time on the target [1] versus the participation levels than anything actually under meaningful player control.
Anyway, to answer your literal question, six of the last 50 have been allowed to reach their final target, with another six which have just aged out of the "last 50" part of the same set of CGs as the oldest of the six.
[1] Which is mainly a matter of luck. If any players have a "well obviously this CG will get X total tonnage and Y participants" model which doesn't require waiting until at least a couple of days into the CG to give reasonably accurate numbers they're keeping quiet about it, and Frontier with their fuller data obviously don't have one either.
Top 75% for a trade CG rarely exceeds 2000t, but there are a bunch of things on this one which mean it'll likely end up higher.
1) The Panther is at least 50% faster on deliveries than any previous ship. That probably won't affect the top 75% band quite as much because lots of people won't be using it yet, but it will put some upward pressure on it nonetheless.
2) A strong reward keyed to a threshold tends to boost it (the record is almost 6000t for pre-engineered FSDs and the cargo racks do seem popular)
3) It's a four week CG which probably won't multiply it by four (because it will increase the breadth of participants and the "just do 1t" ones aren't going to do 4t because they have four times as long) but will boost it a bit
It's certainly possible that it'll end up somewhere above 10k after four weeks. Still reachable without needing the Panther, of course - that's just a fairly normal "top 25%" target for pre-Panther 1-week CGs, and well within "top 50%" hauled a week at a time for four weeks.
EDIT: checking the traffic report, 25,000 FSD jumps by Panthers, about 10,000 FSD jumps by T-8s, T-9s and Cutters (and another 3,000 by other miscellaneous ships)
So even allowing that the "top 75%" band aren't going to be making as many trips as higher players, this certainly suggests that the top 75% band won't be all that affected by the Panther.
No it doesn't.Yes, but where should you buy things ?Buying affects BGS too.
It does. The effect is considerably smaller than that for selling cargo, but it is there (I think it was early 2022 Frontier made that change).
In the early days of colonisation various low-population edge-of-bubble refinery systems ended up in weird states as a result. Normally of course the effects of buying cargo are masked by much larger other effects from traffic in the same system.
So just to rattle off a really simple one.
A common critique of (Trade) CGs is they don't track the types and quantities of goods delivered, only pure tonnage, so you'll end up with a disproportionally large volume of the easiest, most valuable item.
If only there was a mechanic that could track contributions and quantities needed of a large variety of materials different types, and also track who and how much each person delivered... oh what's this Trailblazer update...
One step further? Remember how everyone threw a couple types of cargo into a station in order to make a bunch of Trailblazer megaships crop up around the place?
How about instead, a half dozen colonisation-esque gantrries, one for each potential megaship, go up in the locations they're going to be built, and the task is to deliver a colonisation-esque diversity of commodities on quantities that total roughly to a CGs worth?
All that's doing is distributing a trade cg across multiple locations and cargo types, and quantifying targets for each cargo type at each site. Then the community might, given a roundly only partially achievable set of targets, coordinate and rally to achieve particular priority targets in the timeframe.
Nah... make single cargo go brr at single station. That's outmoded CGs for you.
A common critique of (Trade) CGs is they don't track the types and quantities of goods delivered, only pure tonnage, so you'll end up with a disproportionally large volume of the easiest, most valuable item.
If only there was a mechanic that could track contributions and quantities needed of a large variety of materials different types, and also track who and how much each person delivered... oh what's this Trailblazer update...
One step further? Remember how everyone threw a couple types of cargo into a station in order to make a bunch of Trailblazer megaships crop up around the place?
How about instead, a half dozen colonisation-esque gantrries, one for each potential megaship, go up in the locations they're going to be built, and the task is to deliver a colonisation-esque diversity of commodities on quantities that total roughly to a CGs worth?
All that's doing is distributing a trade cg across multiple locations and cargo types, and quantifying targets for each cargo type at each site. Then the community might, given a roundly only partially achievable set of targets, coordinate and rally to achieve particular priority targets in the timeframe.
Nah... make single cargo go brr at single station. That's outmoded CGs for you.
Bit off-topic, but somewhat adding here, there was a distinct lack of “shakeups” as well. We had two distinct dev-inserted ‘events’ (I don’t count the Orthrus spam of one Titan as notable enough to count), and those were just one-week disruptions with basically zero effect, before it went back to “Business as usual” the second that week ended.
Or just nothing at all since Sol ended with yet another caustic star appearing momentarily and then it was done. And Shinrarta was dealt with around Monday-Tuesday of that first week it ran out of two possible. From here I have to avoid ranting about the - for me - comparatively poor execution of said ‘events’ in the event that was the Thargoid War, on top of the lack of them. So… I’ll do just that. They’re points I’ve probably already made, scattered around the forum and various points in time, anyway.
CGs themselves… ok, if they work within a given lore context but this current one looks a lot like filler and not at all reflected in gameplay where it seemed like the Trailblazers were all pretty much at their max level of stock ever since the initial colonizing rush subsided. Plus, what do we need a whole month of hauling (plus a week prior) for in an already extremely hauling-heavy environment?
Are you telling me I can just sit on a pad, buying cargo and throwing it away repeatedly to push influence?
It's end of July, and the next three weeks go into August.
FDevs have holidays, and so do we. In my media house, these 4 weeks are also on the slow burner with many people vacationing. And 4 weeks are great for players right now somewhere sun-tanning, not to lose their minds "oh I have 2-3 more weeks here, I won't be able to make it".
In September CG's will again be a week or two.
Last edited:
I agree... but I'll flag (per my last post, which was probably being written at the same time as yours) there's two aspects relevant to CGs; the narrative context which i have no problem with.... and they the mechanics, which are bluntly a blight on the game right now.
CMM Composites is scarcer (harder to source) than steel but gives more profit. I aim to use the CG to fund a carrier for another year, something I do once a year to keep the carrier bank funded. If I am not fussed about the profit (as with the carrierless alt), I will deliver the easiest to get stuff.
Vacation from school = more of the younger crowd playing 24/7!
Not while away on the summer holiday.
Do we still have Vanguards landing in "early August" too? More change for Fdev to support with a holiday-period crew.
Only 2 weeks out of the 6. This is not that place where kids get shipped off to summer camp for 6 weeks for outdoor activities.
But you do ship them all in the same two weeks?
Considering how I have seen the leading faction in my refinery systems constantly on an upward trend at one of the colonization pockets closer to the Bubble (I would say ~200ish ly from the Oya Titan remains, off the top of my head) to the point they would enter expansion… yes.
Doesn’t seem likely anybody was running other BGS things and little to no incoming trade if I had to guess. None of the other systems in the area were observing anything similar to that trend.
Probably, yes.
Suppose I can only agree that the mechanics are kind of what’s holding CGs back, but maybe the setting also has to do with it. As you say the Powerplay ones are, sort of a weird spot where they don’t really have anything to actually do with the outcome - even when the contribution numbers generally match up with how Powerplay states look at the end, to a relative degree - much like the CG running parallel to the Shinrarta Dezhra invasion by our caustic neighbors had little to do with its actual progress. Mostly served as a medium to hand out AX-specific rewards.
… but the Powerplay ones are just a “Go here” by Frontier. Which, frankly, does just invalidate a purely player-driven system and if they wanted competition they could’ve looked at the balance figures a little more closely, rather than leaving the status quo of “Nobody messes with each other’s turf” in place and then using these goals as interim measures while playing balance whack-a-mole. Though I’m sure or would hope there’s more method to it than that. (Not that the Thargoid conflict’s balancing and large absence thereof for most of its period would give me a lot of hope, were I invested)
Something like the Thargoid stuff which was purely PvE - unless you were one of the rare few to roleplay as an opposer to humanity - that could definitely use more manual intervention. If nothing else the Shinrarta and Sol incursions show that those curveballs drew much more attention than the slog of fighting over systems mostly nobody cared for, besides their local owners/factions.
Anyway… I think at least thematically, the CGs would be more suited to say, that thing Frontier has apparently been hinting at of war between superpowers which would be more on a general level than Powerplay, with the presence of that incidental or less of a consideration than the BGS allegiance of a faction. (And if it’s a concern then, I say it shouldn’t be or nothing like Cocijo marching into Sol could ever happen again… I still remember some of the Archer crowd being rather upset Frontier dared to hold a meaningful story event in “their space” and nuking it to zero)
Mechanically, well - it’s maybe just overdue for the war CGs to count wins in CZs instead of just bonds, although I guess the recent-ish Powerplay one simply counting kills immediately sort of works toward that.
Now I’ll take some hours for sleep because my brain is not working at capacity and I probably forgot or jumbled things up in that state.