Your Questions Needed - Join the Elite Tutorial Livestream - Everything You Need to Know About the Background Sim

[Buchs]

My primary question

1. How is player trade influence awarded? a) Is it based on transactions, credits, profits? I suspect it is transactions, but if so what constitutes a transaction? Can I boost influence more if I buy and sell more than one product. For example instead of just buying/selling a ship load of the most profitable commodity can I help influence by buying/selling a smaller amount of the top 5 most profitable commodities on each trip. Or is it something like any pilot buying/selling any amount of goods for any amount within a certain time period (or without undocking) constitutes one transaction?

like a poster above said I don't want to waste time doing things that don't help. I would rather spend time on things that are actually helping push influence up. right now I can't seem to make any useful conclusions from testing regarding trade influence, so any info is helpful.

Bonus Questions

-Are there diminishing returns on positive influence actions at higher influence levels?

-https://community.elitedangerous.com/node/362 gave use some very useful info on how player activity affects the BGS. My question about this is what does the low/med/high modifiers on missions mean? does a low trade mission give a +1 while a high gives +3 or does it work totally differently. Also do we get double influence for trade missions when in Boom state?

-What is the boom bonus "pool" that we consume? is it credits, transactions, or individual commodity trades?

-When we do a trade mission that increases Boom (an up arrow next to boom when we complete it) does it only increase the stat that triggers a boom state or does it also add to the "pool" of an existing Boom.

I would love some kind of BGS feedback for each system. Right now testing is very inconsistent and half the time we can't even tell if any of the actions we are taking are even helping or if there are other players in the system affecting influence.

 

[Ozric]

Thanks I thought I avoided it quite nicely too!

Influence percentages, changes in influence. a history of influence. Active states, pending states, recovering states, a history of various states for a system and/or faction. Location of faction expansions, dates of expansions. Those are just some of the possibilities off the top of my head that could be introduced. Some of the data could be made visible or all of it. It's up to FDev whether or not they want to do it.

It has the potential to eliminate the need for faction and influence tracking tools (i.e daily manual input of data in spreadsheets or other tools) but it will also level the playing field and open up the BGS to the entire community which could potentially be a good thing for the game.

You see to me the majority of that is quite a scary prospect, especially the influence stuff. Level the playing field say you, give ultimate insight and power to the groups who seek it I say.

 

[DaveC]

You see to me the majority of that is quite a scary prospect, especially the influence stuff. Level the playing field say you, give ultimate insight and power to the groups who seek it I say.

And I would agree with you

 

[Nodor]

Can you talk about how the faction states in a system effect (or do not effect) the prices, quantities, and consumption of commodities?

Does the background trading simulation change to account for boom or bust states? For instance, if the simulation says 1,000 platinum moves from A to B every week, if one of the systems changes from neutral to boom/bust does that number change?

 

[Ozric]

These are possibilities.
Not necessarily what we want.

Especially the data that does not change more than once a day will not be complicated to generate, read, and expose via an API.
(EDIT: Our opinion forming process has not been finished. But since we spend something between 2 and 10 hours a day entering data into various BGS related tools by hand, the API has it's appeal.)

I do fully appreciate the amount of effort groups like yours put in but

Some of the things you list already do come out in the API, but all of them, is definitely not what I would want

One of the problems that EvE has with it's API being what it is, is purely that no-one needs to do anything in game. Everything can be accessed through websites or programs, you spend more time interfacing with those than you do with the game itself. What impetus is there then for the designers and developers to make things for the game? The advantages you have by having every piece of information at your fingertips out of the game is forcing you in to having to use these tools in order to have any chance of competing with others.

I'm not going to get too deep into the API discussion again I have made my feelings clear in the past and I stick by them, I do not think it would be a good thing at all.

 

[Talarin]

Just to chip in on the API line of thought - a nice compromise would be to expand the client-side logging so that interested players could simply upload a CSV to their chosen platform.

Stops people having to manually enter data but they'd have to actually visit the systems/stations they wanted to collect data for.

 

[Szyslak22]

You see to me the majority of that is quite a scary prospect, especially the influence stuff. Level the playing field say you, give ultimate insight and power to the groups who seek it I say.

Yeah, that's the essence of the internal debate at AEDC as well.

Personally, I'd love to see pending and recovering states added to the system map, and have an easy way to extract the data from the system map that you're viewing. I wouldn't want a galaxy wide API where you could poll any system or faction.

 

[DaveC]

Just to chip in on the API line of thought - a nice compromise would be to expand the client-side logging so that interested players could simply upload a CSV to their chosen platform.

Stops people having to manually enter data but they'd have to actually visit the systems/stations they wanted to collect data for.

But then of course, the moment the data becomes relatively easy to get hold of, people are more than happy to share it on web tools (like trading). And before you know it, you can use those tools to see whatever data you want. At which point you may as well just have an API to get hold of the whole damn thing anyway.

But like Szys and Elem have hinted at, this is a discussion we've had going round and round at AEDC for a while. So I'll not drag the thread any further off course.

 

[jimbeau1571]

Can you explain clearly how the mechanic of where you will expand to works, or gives us a tool so we can search for a faction to negate the trawl through what can be a hundred systems looking for our minor factions expansion system.

 

[Saool]

Why is murder and shooting the local police by far the most effective method of reducing a factions influence? In civil wars it renders war zones pointless and makes it very easy for a very small number of commanders to torpedo a system?

 

[Szyslak22]

It is a bit of a tangential topic isn't it. Back on topic:

Michael's chart shows that selling exploration data is the only thing with a +1 to boom. But anyone that works with the BGS knows that boom is extremely easy to trigger from missions and probably even normal trading. We can barely touch a multi-system minor faction to raise influence without causing boom.

Have the devs taken a look at how easy it is to cause a boom right now and verified that everything is working as intended?

 

[jc4hokies]

Are there any internal discussions to balance how Open/Private Group/Solo modes influence the Background Sim, with the goal of incentivising player faction conflicts to occur in Open?

 

[ADAMANTIUM]

Greetings from the 8th Dragon Squadron! We're glad to see a stream dedicated to the BGS as our faction specialise in BGS manipulation/system flipping. Or at least we did, until we became a recognised player faction with the 1.4 update....

We've experienced a long list of issues with the BGS. We've reported bugs, posted here on the forums, and attempted to get answers any way we can. We've never had acknowledgement or resolutions to any of our problems with the BGS, so we hope you will be able to address a few of our questions.

• Are there currently known issues with Player Factions and the expected behaviour of the BGS, and if so, will these be resolved in 2.1? When we were first added as a player faction we were in a WAR state almost immediately, which we comfortably won, but did not take control of any additional stations. We then leapt straight into EXPANSION, and our BGS woes have continued ever since. In some cases it has required manual intervention to set the status to what we would consider to be ‘correct’.
• Is the only way to take over additional stations within our controlled systems to work for an opposing faction, and against our own faction, in order to drop our influence and trigger a war/election? This seems very counter-intuitive! Most recently (from November 2015 to March 2016 - see the link below) we decided to use this method to take over additional station(s) in Patocuda as we had been unable to raise our influence above 70% or trigger any state other than BOOM. Will this mechanic change in 2.1?
• In the above example, an ELECTION state was triggered between Feudal (us) and Dictatorship factions - seems odd that these types of faction would have an election rather than a war. Is this correct as far as the intended BGS behaviour is concerned?
• Is there a different method/process for taking over planetary bases as opposed to orbital stations? We have so far been unable to acquire any. Again, is this an effect of being a player faction?
• How does the BGS decide what stations change ownership following WAR or ELECTION?
• What causes our player faction to constantly revert to a perpetual BOOM state, regardless of our actions in our owned system(s)?
• What is the best/fastest way to end a BOOM state, or prevent a faction from continuously defaulting to BOOM?
• Can we expect to keep seeing War/Civil War states with no conflict zones appearing? We control Kolabinates, and there are wars there every few days, but no CZs have ever appeared! The local populous have taken to fighting in the Star and Garter, and it's making a terrible mess.

Our recent efforts have been recorded and presented here:
https://public.tableau.com/views/8t...uence?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&:showTabs=y

 

[CMDR Endincite]

Sorry if already asked:

What determines the value needed to actually seize an asset in a conflict?
We've seen faction win with a lead of over 10% and seize nothing, while just yesterday a station changed hands with the winning faction having only a 4% lead at the end.
If population is a factor, it's entirely counter-intuitive.

 

[Vingtetun]

Oooh. Lots of questions! Hi Dav.

1. Do exploration data drops affect expansions. I ask as during peak ding we dropped some huge data loads and our expansion went to the least likely system by the rules you published. Over 30ly away and with 9 factions already existing.

2. What might cause you not to enter war or election when you are at parity with another faction for an extended period and they are not at war in other systems

3. Does attacking authority skimmers count as a kill total in terms of assaulting an owning faction

4. Do pending states always happen or can they be prevented once they become pending?

5. Why does the crime figure increase in proportion to the bounty hunting figure at times. We had 2 weeks where no matter how much we did, crime was 10 million ahead. We spent a week pushing 80 million a day into bounty hunting and the crime stats kept up with us. We stopped and immediately the crime stats dropped down. If bounty hunting 'detects' crime and therefore adds to the stats, how would you overtake it ever?

6. Boom has an effect on markets, outfitting and ships in the shipyard. How do we measure what effect we are having during boom?

7. When in an election, if no missions spawn for the faction you are supporting, what actions can you take that have an effect?

8. Do rebuy, refuel,restock and repairs at stations count as injecting cash into that system coffer? We assume that exploration data doesn't harm a faction's cash as the data is considered an asset.

Some of this will help us understand what is going on in one system. We expanded as we did into others, we took the same actions and nothing we do causes election or war. As soon as they come out of lockdown their influence jumps anything up to 16 percent in 24 hours. So we nuke them down to our level and boost ours... hover there for days on end and nothing happens. So, tinsel and repeat

 

[Shintai]

Boom today is almost a defacto state standard for used systems. Is there a plan to reduce this super easy mode trigger effect?

The BGS itself got so huge supply and demand for nearly every system. That any goods movement is completely miniscule compared to the demand and supply. Is there any plans to correct this, and make it more dynamic?

Wealth seems to be a static factor, at least in the reported sense. Is there a way to make this both more dynamic but also reported? We can already see some systems showing poor or wealthy at a station. But it seems 100% static.

A solution to the above could perhaps be to use boom and bust to change wealth factors. But also use supply and demand to trigger these. No goods moved, bust. Lots of goods moved, specially out (0 stock left for example) boom.

There doesn't seem to be any way to change a system security. The security factor seems to be assigned between a mix of minor faction and the system itself. Any plans to change this, again to a more dynamic method.

System populations are completely static today, at least in showing. Is there any plans to make this dynamic? There should obvious be some kind of limits in place. Stations of different types should operate within a scale. Planets as well, high population would center around earth type planets obviously. Player actions should affect these. So a player less system would be in decline. While very active systems would rise in population. Some systems may have high lower limits due to historical reasons.

The BGS current got systems populated that got no stations. Can you confirm that planets we cant yet land on is already populated with bases? And in that case, can we flip these bases, despite we cant seem them?

The BGS also got systems populated that doesn't contain any stations or planets. Examples like Kvenland and Ross 620. Will issues like these be solved as well?

Is there a system for faction destruction in place? We already know new factions can be added manually. But since one goal of the BGS is to create new powerplay players. Minor factions then have to spread and become powerful enough. So there must be some kind of faction destruction functionality. This would also be a way to cleanup dead player induced factions. Should things work against them. A way could be if a faction over a certain time for example was below a certain percentage.

In systems with few planets, for example 1 or 2. When a war or civil war happens, there seem to be a lack of combat zones. Is that's something you are aware of? Combat missions may also be missing, while the donations for war missions are still there.

 

[Ziljan]

What determines the selection process for system expansions?

What about systems outside or at the edges of a bubble? Can you ever expand into a system like Canopus, Robigo, or Varati? Or are those systems "safe" from outside influence beyond PP?

 

[Walt Kerman]

I think the BGS should move slower actually, but have more meaning for the smaller movements - more visual effect that the BGS has on the system. I also think some states should be able to overlap with others. The reason why people want it to move faster and get frustrated is because you can only have one state at a time. For example, the market can't be booming during an election.

You tell me considering the following* (numbers in days):

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/attachment.php?attachmentid=95574&d=1452983563

Considering states can last for several weeks for me it's far too slow and there's little point in engaging in it (other than to let it do what it will and ignore it) - was that the desired intention by the FDEV team ?




*Taken from this thread which is worth a read.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

This week is all about the Background Simulation with Dav Stott and Adam Bourke-Waite. So put your questions in the chat below for us to look through before tomorrow!

Looking forward to this one.

Make sure you join us on our official YouTube channel at 19:00 BST on Thursday April 14.

https://www.youtube.com/user/FrontierDevelopments/live

We have located some of the parameters that determine a systems expansion location. Due to outliers to our predicitons we realize that there are other parameters controlling the selection process. Can you expand our knowledge on what those are.

Often we have seen a low influence faction getting pushed out of a system when another faction expands into it. Instead of dieing off, they invade the system of the invader. Is the shuffle of factions intentional? Is there an actual way for factions to die?

 

[Bacalao]

I think the BGS should move slower actually, but have more meaning for the smaller movements - more visual effect that the BGS has on the system. I also think some states should be able to overlap with others. The reason why people want it to move faster and get frustrated is because you can only have one state at a time. For example, the market can't be booming during an election.

I really like this.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

I have one question, but don't know if it will be able to be answered....though I live in hope:

-With the 2.1 Update, in what ways are the developers going to be making the outcomes of the BGS appear more visible/tangible to players?