The Revolutionary Jotunheim Resistance and the Ngadjal Situation - A plea for help from Frontier

Some of you may already be aware, but myself and many of my friends have spent the time since launch operating out of the Jotunheim system conducting many experiments, some successes and some failures. We've fought, in-system, primarily for the RJR (Revolutionary Jotunheim Resistance), and their expansion into the neighbouring system of Ngadjal is in many our of minds our crowning achievement.

During this time we have been plagued by several bugs and flaws. We've experienced some problems with, for example, the civil war over Laird Station between the Gold Company and the Jotunheim Clan - it hasn't ended yet, but fighting in the civil war zone for the clan seems to have no benefit, and claiming their combat bonds at Laird actually seems to help the Company rather than the clan.

But all that is fine - it's about understanding the game and figuring out what to do. Our biggest problem is not in Jotunheim, but in Ngadjal.

Our faction expanded into Ngadjal several weeks ago now, and the combined efforts of hundreds of players, with at least a dozen running missions at any given time during our big pushes, has been significant. Meanwhile, however, the influence of the system have been unbelievable. Despite concerted efforts and lulls in activity where we've done nothing at all to compare, the influence has steadily dropped by 0.1% every few days.

We had hoped that with recent fixes to the queue and results being sent to the wrong system, we'd finally see some success, but there has been nothing - our biggest push yet over several days and the result was... a 0.1% drop in influence, down to 8.0%, the same as the end of the several days previous where we'd suspended operations completely.

So now we're on a time limit - the more the influence slips, the less opportunity we'll have to do anything. But nothing we've done has had any impact.

So please, Frontier, if you could look into this and let us know what's going on, we're willing to do whatever we need to help you figure it out. We've been working on this since the game launched, and morale is flagging. As I mentioned, this is the combined efforts of hundreds of players, with no opposing forces working against us, and frustrations our building.

Things about the system that might be useful:
1. It's an Imperial system, with two outposts, each owned by a different faction, and a relatively small population.
2. It is completely undiscovered. It's data is not even purchasable.
3. It was, at least initially, completely dominated by RJR missions, though they seem to have become much rarer now despite only a total 1.0% influence drop.

Please, just let us know what's going on and if all that hundreds of hours of effort was wasted or not, or if things might be able to start working.

And yes, tickets have been filed, none were ever responded to.
 
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Yeah. I've been part of this whole push and it's got me really discouraged for the game. I was so excited when we got the RJR above 80% influence, and even more-so when they went into Expansion status!

But... nothing.

The civil war seems completely pointless--no matter what we do, it doesn't seem to do anything.
The time I've put into Ngadjal has meant nothing.
Even us pushing RJR into basically perma-boom hasn't really done anything to the station, or available commodities, or available components...

Frontier I really like your game--I kickstarted it!--and hell I like buying skins but these faction things being broken so badly--with no explanation at all from you--is incredibly discouraging.

And that you're worrying about fixing the dumb logoff exploit instead of core gameplay functionality, and not being upfront with "hey, this stuff is broken, this stuff is working, and this stuff we're not sure about, we could use players help in experimenting" is really frustrating.

...and now with this dumb Beta Sculptoris thing all the streamers are playing in Solo or Private mode so I can't even streamsnipe.
 
I'd like to echo everything Glyph has brought up; the system influence stuff could be a really enjoyable mechanic for players to interact with the game. Honestly I wouldn't even be upset with finding out it's non-functional currently even if that meant past time spent on it was wasted, so long as it means time spent going forward isn't wasted. If the system is still in progress I'm sure we'd be happy to submit reports or focus on a system for the devs to keep an eye on; if it's a known issue that is being worked on knowing that would be great too, so I can spend time exploring or doing something else until it's functioning properly. If the direction of influence is still being discussed internally then that's fine too.

It'd just be nice to know if something is broken or not and what the plan is for the short-term.
 
I really do not mind what is essentially bug-testing this part of the game - I find it fascinating but everything we've done points to something not working right, and I too would appreciate someone at least telling us we are not wasting our time.

I understand systems don't flip in a day, but we've seen factions way, way more active with not nearly as much activity. Please hear us, Frontier!
 
I've been helping with this effort as well, and its very frustrating to see absolutely nothing come of what I've done. I surely hope that this gets addressed soon, its very discouraging to see a large group of people work hard to push the influence up, only to LOSE influence in that system.
 
Some clarity about the mechanics would great because spinning one's wheels and not getting any consistent result is frustrating.
 
civil war cooldown timer of 25 days might have something to do with it. Micheal brookes is still looking at bugs, plus u need to remember minor factions cant take over a 2nd system, only large 3 can do that. They havent allowed for multi solar system spanning factions - barring that trade is more important
 
Yeah, seriously, right now it's very frustrating to try to affect the political situation in a system. Not only do the things that affect a faction's influence often seem very counter intuitive, many seem to be broken in one way or another, and many more are almost complete unknowns. The core gameplay of ED (the driving/shooting at space cars part) is hella fun (even with the odd imbalanced thing here and there), but the background sim stuff is really wonky right now, and unless players are expected to never stick around a region long enough to actually affect it's space-politics (in which case why bother simulating them) then there's a lot of fixing, tweaking, and elucidating that needs to be done to address that.
 
This, coupled with my intent to afford and buy a starfighter in real life (good quality Starions are more elusive than any Asp) has somewhat killed my interest in the game. There rests somewhere a Hauler eager to load missions and getting none worth the name of its faction.
 
I'd sure like to know if we are doing something wrong or the game has something wrong with it. It's maddening to not know if we can even affect the game world at all, and with Frontier's dodging of spelling out how mechanics work it just weaves a thick ribbon of doubt. I'd certainly like and appreciate "Oh yeah things are broken sorry" but the complete lack of a clear answer just makes Frontier seem dishonest. It's a shame because a month ago I would have defended them and made up excuses for them. Now though? It's getting tougher.
 
Would highly appreciate a dev response to this. Many of us are watching these experiments and want to have some idea about how to involve ourselves in systems level politics.

Absolutely. I, for one, can't be bothered with the system politics game until it is proven to be working. We're not in beta anymore...
 
Sorry, blackbox. Nothing to see here folks. Move along...

Seriously the devs show little interest in explaining how things in this game work. Most likely because they are not working, and they don't want to admit it.

The faction politics is the only thing that really interests me at this point. Combat is fun, but it needs to serve a purpose. Other then credits...Other parts of the game are little more then a grind, so the politics are a reason to play.

If they work, and if they explain HOW they work. Beta is over guys, time to deliver.
 
Sympathetic bump here, I know how it is. And the way FD handled the whole beta-gamma-early release and post-release service was kind of disrespectful for all the customers.

If you cannot give proper support don't release because holiday season and increased sales prospects, we had two game-breaking bugs for all the influence mechanics for 1.5 months after release. The problem is that this was being developed as it is without proper testing during beta (when it should have been tested). We still have game-breaking bugs like combat bonds cash in's going to the wrong factions if not done in the stations owned by the supported faction etc.

P.S: Every time someone talks about expansions or more fluffy it gives me cancer!
 
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I couldn't move anything even 0.1% and I tried and I tried and I tried..
I can get no satisfaction..

Whatever Frontier did.. I consider their dynamic universe the worst programming job any company ever has done. I don't understand how someone can do so much bugs in rather simple mechanics and I don't understand why they have never ever run a ltitle test on their own and even worse let it be faulty till now and probabily for days to come. Waiting for feedback. fixing a small thing waiting again fixing another... It's really like they don't care to get this working at all. As if they haven't figured out by now that it's not just a simple bug but the whole thing isn't working... I don't understand them.

So my advice. Enjoy Elite by what it present you now: Imersion, DK2.
Forget about reputation, influence, system changes. Forget about every GAME simulation that would make fun and wait for them to seriously address it and get it working once and for all. Else it only ends in more and more frustrating and dissapointment. It's not working. It's not. Yes you read it I love ED but that part is so.. unbelieveable... as if they had taken their caretaker or an unhappy midnless imperial slave to program this background simulation. You can't programm any more broken than that.
 
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So how do you try to advance influence?
Missions?

Are you refraining from all trading/bountyhunting activity in the system?
Do you concentrate on the right missions?

But then... the chances of your actions counteracting each other in such a way that the overall result is -0.1% every few days are basically zero.
Overall a high amount of activity should lead to some influence change, in whichever direction. And not a gradual loss over time.

We had an influence boost up 6% in a day two days ago when we switched our trading activities to another system. So the actions it takes to achieve influence changes in some dirthole aren't not that high.
 
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