Loss of merits

[Thanewright]

From my post here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=157842&page=5&p=2419639&viewfull=1#post2419639

Going by the numbers this morning, the formula seems to be:
Merits carried over = (merits earned (not total) last week) + (merits earned week before)/2 + (merits earned week before that)/4

So you get last week's (earned, not total) merits in full again, half what you earned the week before and (I presume, wait 'till next week to find out) quarter of the week before that.

 

[Scrat]

From my post here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=157842&page=5&p=2419639&viewfull=1#post2419639

Going by the numbers this morning, the formula seems to be:
Merits carried over = (merits earned (not total) last week) + (merits earned week before)/2 + (merits earned week before that)/4

So you get last week's (earned, not total) merits in full again, half what you earned the week before and (I presume, wait 'till next week to find out) quarter of the week before that.

So there is either a bug in the manual or in the game^^

 

[Thanewright]

So there is either a bug in the manual or in the game^^

Alternatively the manual is right, and the extra large carry over (and the bizarre carry over from last week) are specials for the first few weeks, to get people started, seeing as you don't have a bank of merits from week-2, week-3, etc.

 

[Jmanis]

Alternatively the manual is right, and the extra large carry over (and the bizarre carry over from last week) are specials for the first few weeks, to get people started, seeing as you don't have a bank of merits from week-2, week-3, etc.

Correct. Because the last Powerplay cycle finished a day early in error, people got to keep 7/8ths (or something like that) of their merits rather than just 50%. (EDIT: I can't find the dev quote, but I definitely read it.)

Additionally (because the OP asked). You get the pay from your ranking at the *end* of the cycle. So, I made rank 3 last cycle and got paid 1000cr like I was rank 1. I'm rank 4 now at the start of this cycle, but got 500k as per my rank 3 from the previous cycle.

 

[random_tangent]

Stop thinking of it like "decay". Instead, think of it like this. Every cycle is a separate entity. It's not that you LOSE 50% of last weeks merits when you start the next week, it's that your balance starts from zero each cycle + a bonus from previous weeks.

So, in week 1, you earn 10k merits. At the beginning of the next cycle, you start from 0 again, but you get a bonus because you took part last week, of half your previous week's total - 5k. If you had been taking part the 2 weeks before that, you would also get a bonus for those weeks too, of 25% and 12.5% respectively. Now, imagine you earn another 5k to take you back to 10k at the end of cycle 2.

At the start of cycle 3, you go back to zero, then your bonus for "previous participation" is added in. That amounts to 50% of your total from the previous week - 5k again, because you finished week 2 with 10k - and 25% of your total from week 1 - 2500, because you finished week 1 with 10k too. So, you start cycle 3 with 7500. Imagine again, you maintain 10k, but this time you only have to earn 2.5k

Now, at the start of cycle 4, you go back to zero again, and your bonus is added (again). This time, it is 12.5% of your week 1 total, 25% of your week 2 total, and 50% of your week 3 total. Respectively, these figures are: 1250, 2500 and 5000. So, you start the 4th cycle with 8750 merits, meaning you only have to earn 1250 to get back to 10k and maintain rank 5.

After 3 weeks, totals are no longer added, so this is your equilibrium situation. At the start of week 5, your week 1 total is no longer added. You start with 12.5% of week 2, 25% of week 3 and 50% of week 4. Because you've had 10k at the end of every cycle since you started, you still start with 8750.

If you can keep earning 1250 a week, it will carry on like this forever.

 

[CMDR Mansoul]

From my post here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=157842&page=5&p=2419639&viewfull=1#post2419639

Going by the numbers this morning, the formula seems to be:
Merits carried over = (merits earned (not total) last week) + (merits earned week before)/2 + (merits earned week before that)/4

So you get last week's (earned, not total) merits in full again, half what you earned the week before and (I presume, wait 'till next week to find out) quarter of the week before that.

+1 and thank you! This is the first time I heard something that makes sense. The text in the manual pretty clearly has as the only possible interpretation "you lose half you merits each week". If they meant something else, they should have said something else.

 

[random_tangent]

+1 and thank you! This is the first time I heard something that makes sense. The text in the manual pretty clearly has as the only possible interpretation "you lose half you merits each week". If they meant something else, they should have said something else.

This is what they said:

Your merit total from the previous cycle is halved then added to your current cycle value. After two cycles, its value is halved again before being added. After three cycles, the value is halved once more. After four cycles the value is no longer added.

Not earned, not "lose half each week". They talk about how merits are ADDED to follow on cycles, not how they DECAY or are REMOVED. They also, quite clearly, say TOTAL merits from the previous cycle. Not merits EARNED in that cycle, but TOTAL merits from the previous cycle. The language is unambiguous. If the post you quoted is true, then the manual is incorrect.

 

[jgm]

I'd suggest that this should be a cause of great embarrassment to FD, but they appear to have no shame. There have been any number of posts on the forums for the past three weeks trying to read the tea leaves of this most fundamental interaction between a player and their power, and they haven't been bothered to explain how it works.

Sometimes FD do great things, but so often fall over on the simplest things. This seeming inability to type a paragraph of text with a couple of examples showing how it works and putting to bed multiple discussions involving hundreds of users is a shining example.

 

[random_tangent]

I'd suggest that this should be a cause of great embarrassment to FD, but they appear to have no shame. There have been any number of posts on the forums for the past three weeks trying to read the tea leaves of this most fundamental interaction between a player and their power, and they haven't been bothered to explain how it works.

Sometimes FD do great things, but so often fall over on the simplest things. This seeming inability to type a paragraph of text with a couple of examples showing how it works and putting to bed multiple discussions involving hundreds of users is a shining example.

It blows my mind that they haven't 1) edited the manual and 2) stickied a thread here explaining it for the avoidance of doubt.

I don't believe the comment in the manual is ambiguous, but I do believe the system is TOO COMPLICATED! I know, I know - people will complain about stuff being dumbed down. The problem is not that it can't be deciphered or calculated. The problem is that it isn't intuitive. I can't just look at my merits and say "that's in the bank, this is what I'll have next week". Instead I have to look back over my history for the last 3 weeks and add fractions of those totals. It should be a flat 10% decay, not a "start from scratch + bonuses from previous weeks".

 

[SteveLaw]

No of course not, I know I need to make 10000 merits weekly, which I have been doing but I thought decay only occurred if you stopped playing the game for sometime,

You may be confusing it with Faction Reputation decay.

 

[Rauminen]

It blows my mind that they haven't 1) edited the manual and 2) stickied a thread here explaining it for the avoidance of doubt.

I don't believe the comment in the manual is ambiguous, but I do believe the system is TOO COMPLICATED! I know, I know - people will complain about stuff being dumbed down. The problem is not that it can't be deciphered or calculated. The problem is that it isn't intuitive. I can't just look at my merits and say "that's in the bank, this is what I'll have next week". Instead I have to look back over my history for the last 3 weeks and add fractions of those totals. It should be a flat 10% decay, not a "start from scratch + bonuses from previous weeks".

Nope, it's fine as it is. It's not decay, it's a bonus. Merits start from 0 (zero, null, nuku, nothing) each week. Then bonuses are added. You shouldn't be thinking about this as "money in the bank" - this is more like status earned that week.

You do have a point though: what we would need is a personal screen that displays your merit status and how it is calculated exactly. It's not complicated, you just need to see the numbers. I'm sure you can add together 4 numbers, even without a calculator.

 

[Temple604]

Edit : would like to know if the system is working exactly as documented

 

[Lunchmoney]

I have to admit not yet, haven't seen a link to download.
.

It's in a sticky/announcement thread on this very forum.

 

[random_tangent]

Nope, it's fine as it is. It's not decay, it's a bonus. Merits start from 0 (zero, null, nuku, nothing) each week. Then bonuses are added. You shouldn't be thinking about this as "money in the bank" - this is more like status earned that week.

You do have a point though: what we would need is a personal screen that displays your merit status and how it is calculated exactly. It's not complicated, you just need to see the numbers. I'm sure you can add together 4 numbers, even without a calculator.

You realise you're more or less repeating word-for-word an earlier post of mine from this thread, don't you? I'm well aware it isn't a decay - as I said, I'm the one saying that in this thread, in my first post.

This sort of thing is precisely what I was trying to avoid in the post you quoted. It isn't about how hard either you or I think it is to work out. The fact that there are SO many threads created by confused people, and so many posts within those threads where people seem to have tied themselves in knots trying to figure it out, is the reason it's too complicated.

That said, at the very least they should add a display in-game to show how your start-of-cycle value is calculated, showing how each of your previous weeks' totals have been fractioned and added. It should also tell you what you'd start next cycle with assuming your merit total stays as it is, so you know how far you are away from where you need to be at any given time.

 

[Corvax3]

Please can someone explain why I have just lost over 6000+ merits, overnight.
It has changed nothing else, no bonus of 50 mil credits, I was already lvl 5 rating in the faction,
I had over 16,000 merits when I logged off yesterday, now I log on and I have just over 10,000 merits.
I need answers please.

The whole reason behind you getting 50mil cr is that it equals the price to fasttrack 5k merits, which is what you lose from decay every time if you are rank 5.

so now you have a choice, grind merits every 50 hour for a total of 50 hours or get some merits free and fast track the rest to sustain your rating 5 in the faction.

its only 12 trips in a 452cargo space trade conda. will end up taking you 5,56hour if you take one free respawn of 50 cargo and then fasttrack the rest, deliver, wait for next respawn and so forth

enjoy, hope it helps.

ps. i do agree that the decay is a way of making us grind the same boring grindfest over and over again to participate in something that feels very unimportant, i personally only have the rating 5 cause im already exploring, so why not gain + 200% from it to rank up faster

 

[GuyC_UK]

The whole reason behind you getting 50mil cr is that it equals the price to fasttrack 5k merits, which is what you lose from decay every time if you are rank 5.

so now you have a choice, grind merits every 50 hour for a total of 50 hours or get some merits free and fast track the rest to sustain your rating 5 in the faction.

its only 12 trips in a 452cargo space trade conda. will end up taking you 5,56hour if you take one free respawn of 50 cargo and then fasttrack the rest, deliver, wait for next respawn and so forth

enjoy, hope it helps.

ps. i do agree that the decay is a way of making us grind the same boring grindfest over and over again to participate in something that feels very unimportant, i personally only have the rating 5 cause im already exploring, so why not gain + 200% from it to rank up faster

I never received the 50 mil bonus credits for reaching lvl 5 the first week, which I was entitled to, now even after the Decay deduction I still have 10k+ merits for the second week in a row and still no 50 mil credit bonus, by rights im owed 100 mil now, so whats going on ??
Also not being so savvy with forums and searching for Powerplay Manual, which should have a link in main game manual to start with but doesn't currently, makes it confusing to say the least.

 

[RingoD123]

I never received the 50 mil bonus credits for reaching lvl 5 the first week, which I was entitled to, now even after the Decay deduction I still have 10k+ merits for the second week in a row and still no 50 mil credit bonus, by rights im owed 100 mil now, so whats going on ??
Also not being so savvy with forums and searching for Powerplay Manual, which should have a link in main game manual to start with but doesn't currently, makes it confusing to say the least.

No you weren't! you only worked the first week as rank 1! which earned you 1k credits, which is correct, now if you had over 10k merits before week 1 actually finished, you would have been working week 2 as rating 5 and would have received your 50M this morning. You have to work for a full cycle at that rating to be paid for that rating. In real life, if you get a promotion at the start of the month, do they go back and increase your wage for last months hours? of course not!

 

[jay88]

Edit: I got ninja'd pretty hard

As we say around the lab when someone doesn't know how to use some instrument: RTFM, which stands for Read The F$%#&g Manual (no offence, genuinely trying to help)

You can find it in this pinned thread: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=152185

The explanation about rating decay starts in page 10 and continues to page 11.

Also see this thread with a merit decay calculator: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=158451

incorrect math, see my post in the decay calculator thread.

 

[excalibus]

I never received the 50 mil bonus credits for reaching lvl 5 the first week, which I was entitled to, now even after the Decay deduction I still have 10k+ merits for the second week in a row and still no 50 mil credit bonus, by rights im owed 100 mil now, so whats going on ??
Also not being so savvy with forums and searching for Powerplay Manual, which should have a link in main game manual to start with but doesn't currently, makes it confusing to say the least.

I dunno, its on this particular forum (elite discussions) in the top section and even stands out due to the NOTICE part of the thread title... which is...

Closed: Notice: Powerplay Manual: How-to's

That aside, if you had 10K credits at the time of the PP tick then you definitely should have received 50 million credits in my book... Especially if you earned 10K merits within that week... I am going to make a wild guess / assumption that they have made a boo boo and left of a zero when they set up the parameters so perhaps you should submit a ticket / bug report

 

[Jmanis]

I never received the 50 mil bonus credits for reaching lvl 5 the first week, which I was entitled to, now even after the Decay deduction I still have 10k+ merits for the second week in a row and still no 50 mil credit bonus, by rights im owed 100 mil now, so whats going on ??
Also not being so savvy with forums and searching for Powerplay Manual, which should have a link in main game manual to start with but doesn't currently, makes it confusing to say the least.

Silly question, have you actually gone to a power contact and claimed your salary? Not trying to be condescending, just ruling out the obvious before thinking there's a bug.

It doesn't just appear in your bank.