Powerplay Lazy PowerPlayers / lazy fdevs?

[Quantis Trap]

OK. That's harsh, but it made you look.

I've been in Elite Dangerous since less than a month after release and I often see my fellow commanders going above and beyond in their dedication to the game.

Now that I've finally found the time to dig into powerplay, I see a ton of lazyness happening in fortification. When some systems are over fortified by 27 times and others are starved it makes me wonder.

Mainly, it makes me wonder why Frontier hasn't put simple changes in place to stop the laziness. All frontier would have to do is make it so we wouldn't get our merits when fortifying a system over say 150%. It would also be nice if they would give merit bonuses for commanders who fly to father away systems.

 

[Darth Ender]

You may think it's easy to put some kind of conditional like if(fortified >= fort_trigger * 1.25) return 0; but it's almost definitely not. It took months to get the 10cr thing fixed and that was just an aesthetic issue.

But yes, seriously. Stop rewarding people for fortifying beyond the trigger if it has no additional impact. it makes no sense in-game for someone to reward you to do something that is pointless.

 

[ever]

I disagree. There is a valid point in allowing systems to be over-fortified and -undermined. Since this is a team game, if you are not actively looking to be a part of something, you are more or less useless. If you want to play a team game as a lone wolf, you should be allowed to do it. Thus making your contribution useless for you team. Why should there be a mechanic in place, that makes your Power more effective, when you are not, or do not want to be?

 

[Quantis Trap]

I disagree. There is a valid point in allowing systems to be over-fortified and -undermined. Since this is a team game, if you are not actively looking to be a part of something, you are more or less useless. If you want to play a team game as a lone wolf, you should be allowed to do it. Thus making your contribution useless for you team. Why should there be a mechanic in place, that makes your Power more effective, when you are not, or do not want to be?

You ask why and I have a simple answer. It is a team game, but it has a leader. If I was the leader of the power and I saw useless over fortification like is happening, I'd stop rewarding it. In fact I'd send hit squads after Yahoo's who were misallocating resources!

 

[Darth Ender]

Yes, in the logic of the in-game universe if we can ever say that with a straight face. It makes absolutely no sense why a power leader would reward activity that is completely ineffectual.

There are two solutions. The easy one, stop rewarding personal merits to lazy players. This is brain dead simple to implement.

The other solution is to change how powerplay behaves and create an effect for over-fortifying (and undermining) like perhaps it creates an effect into the next cycle where the balance of the merits are already applied.

 

[bigity]

Or, you let player organization count for something. If everything is forced into effectiveness, it becomes a pure question of how many CMDR-hours can be put up by each faction.

 

[Figgy878]

Maybe if there was a voting system (composed of the players within each corresponding major faction) in game to prioritize targets for undermining/fortifying/preparation etc, you would be more likely to have more players to be more useful because the information is right there in their faces. If the game wants us to work in teams, it should give us the means to do so in-game. Players shouldn't have to go on forums to find out what our factions are trying to accomplish when the only way to make a difference is with a unified effort.

 

[Red Fox Four]

Guathiti is my primary system for bounty hunting. It's relatively close to Kamadhenu... and I think, if my memory serves me right... the fortification on it is 43.000 vs 0 opposed right now.

So yes, people are "farming" the merits by simply hopping to one of the closest systems and dumping all their stuff there.

I agree that the merits earned shouldn't be a flat rate.

It should be based on distance from HQ, but I also think they should be adjusted by a factor dependent on whether there is an opposing action going on or not.

E.g. if the opposing faction is equal to the fortification then there could be a x1.5 bonus multiplier to the merits earned when fortifying that system. Likewise, an already heavily fortified system should provide 0 bonus, and as suggested by other, once it reaches trigger x 1.25 then you get no more merits from fortifying that system. The bonus multiplier should also scale, based on the delta between fortification and the enemy opposed values. E.g. scaling from 1.0 if you are leading, 1.5 if the values are within a specific range of eachother, and 2.0 if the enemy is leading. (These are just arbitrary numbers for the sake of example, and would obviously have to be fine-tuned).

Consequence of this would be encouraging commanders, from both factions (fortifying and opposing) to bring their efforts into the systems where they are fighting each others progress by simply rewarding them for doing so. This creates contest and makes the game more dynamic and livens up the whole powerplay.

Right now you can choose to offload a bunch of reports 20Ly away in an already overly fortified system for X merits... or you can travel 200Ly and offload a bunch of reports... for the SAME amount of merits.

It's pretty obvious that when the rewards are the same for two different choices, then everyone will go for the choice that gives you the most reward for the least time spent... and that's by ignoring the long flights and simply farming the short jumps.

1. Add bonus multiplier to Merits based on distance from HQ
2. Add bonus multiplier to Merits based on whether fortification is being opposed or not
3. Add a hardcap on getting Merits from systems that are already past trigger (by 25% or similar)

 

[amigacooke]

Sadly, all that Powerplay means to me now is 1k free credits per week. I can't bring myself to go on more trips to cart treaties here and there.

Now, if there were missions that gained merits ....

 

[GaryII]

I can't bring myself to go on more trips to cart treaties here and there.

Now, if there were missions that gained merits ....

Same here, I grinded for Rank 5 for 15 weeks, but that really started to feel like second job..so i quit it..now I go few times in week to some distant system in case there are critical undermining..

 

[Red Fox Four]

Sadly, all that Powerplay means to me now is 1k free credits per week. I can't bring myself to go on more trips to cart treaties here and there.

Now, if there were missions that gained merits ....

Well, you can make your own mission... if you kill enemies in their control systems you get 30 merits per pop rather than 10 merits per pop in the Crime Sweeps. You can also steal cargo from enemy logistic ships and get +1 merit per cargo if you bring it back. Granted, I never tried the cargo thing myself.

As for the Rating 5 thing... if you have 100million you can effectively buy rating 5.

Once you bought rating 5 it is self-sufficient. Meaning... 5000 out of your 10.000 merits transfer over to next cycle... but you also get 50 mill salary.

So you take those 50 million, buy the 5000 merits you need to get back up to 10.000 and voila... rating 5 secured for 2nd cycle as well.

Of course, this requires you log in every week to ship those 5000 reports to ensure you keep getting the 50mill required to do so.

 

[Darth Ender]

there are two decent options ...

1. You stop rewarding players who are mindlessly grinding beyond the trigger. This is not going to magically force them to do effective activities. they'll just do different useless ones since there are plenty of low hanging fruit and everything worthwhile will take more effort.

Alternatively
2. You simply carry over the balance of fortification and undermining to the next cycle. At cycle end, that cycle's triggers are subtracted and if any merits remain they are immediately applied for the new cycle.

While this wouldn't change much for idiots who grind the same system every week to 300% fortified it would have an interesting effect on accidentally over-fortifying and over undermining systems.

 

[Martin Schou]

When some systems are over fortified by 27 times and others are starved it makes me wonder.

Well, which would you rather have - 100,000 fortification merits wasted in a single close-in system, or 100,000 preparation merits put into a single close-in system? Now combine that 100,000 preparation system with powers that have combat expansions, and you've just guaranteed that those powers will constantly expand into the crappiest systems available.

Because really, that's what you'll end up with. The people who are doing this aren't doing it for PowerPlay, they're doing it for the bonuses they get, and they don't care about any ill effects their actions may have, and they'll pick the path of least resistance. Maybe that's what you're looking to do - I mean, it would be rather funny to see Hudson and ALD stuck in the bottom 3 until they're so bereft of resources that they trigger a collapse, but it shouldn't happen because the power's own pledges are ignorant of aPowerPlay and are only in it for the rewards.

 

[Hribek]

The reason for allowing fortification over 100% is also technical. Consider the following situation:

• Your power has a low or negative CC budget for current cycle and cannot prepare any systems. (e.g. because of undermining merits handed in seconds before end of previous cycle - if you expect that and fortify a lot, the opposition can just decide to not hand in their merits and easily prepare bad systems from within your power, so very low CC or slight turmoil can actually be preferable, because that's a temporary situation, while expanding into certain bad systems is going to permanently hurt your power, because those bad systems can be impossible to lose).
• Your power has no expansions because it didn't successfully prepare any systems last cycle. (see above, also possibly out-prepared by another power even if enough CC was available last cycle)
• All systems of your power have been fortified to 100%. (e.g. to get out of turmoil while losing as few systems as possible)

In this situation, the only way to get merits is via combat - undermining/opposition of other powers. If you limit even that to just 100%, you find yourself with CMDRs unable to get merits in any way whatsoever.

 

[Bikky]

You're also ruling out 10's of 1000's of people achieving rank 5.

If there's only say 100,000 merits attainable, and there's 2,000 players pledged to a faction, that means only approx the first 800 will maintain 10k, (5400 Merits per week needed due to decay rate).

Then people will drop out of PP, because it just won't be worth it for them not getting the 50mcr/week. And I mean it won't be worth it. When prep wars come along people spend 100's of millions in a week. I myself (one of the lower spendees of my group) spent 60Mcr in the prep race. We didn't want the system, but didn't want the oppo to have it, who then had to spend 100's of millions the following week trying to expand against our undermining.....

So it's not lazy having systems over forted. Some people go away on holiday/computer issues, and use those close to home systems to stack up their merits to keep the 10k.