News Powerplay trigger

[DreccoDen]

... Couple that with the pressure of today's Horizons for XBox release (which will be making real money, contrary to PP which I don't think was in season two yearplan at all) and you got a recipe for community disaster brewing which probably could be avoided alltogether if it happened on another day.

Without PP, Eangerous is just a space sim. Surely I am not the only XBox player holding off from buying Horizons to see how FDev handle this current PP situation?

 

[AreZee]

...
Like said, they screwed it up big time, but those things do happen, and sometimes cannot be detected beforehand.
...

That's the thing in my eyes. I know FD has the guts to do a break in powerplay. They delayed 2.1 with a reason and it was a good decision! You have to have the courage from a business point of view to make a big decision like that. I really believe we should have a break in pp to sort things out. And by that I don't only mean the big problems with the cycle tick, but all other things related to pp too. Put some lore too it, just say all HQ are bombed by UAs and they have to be put on hold - whatever

 

[maddog_uk_69]

I think there's two parts to what's happened and people's reactions to it:

1. The technical issues that led to the PowerPlay cycle tick not happening
2. The human issues that have informed the way FDEV has reacted to (1)

There was an initial flare of anger once the implications of the missed cycle tick really started to sink in and players/representatives from various powers started to realise what it meant for their goals, strategies, and all of the potentially wasted work that they and their teams had put into the cycle.

This was then compounded by FDEV's response, both collectively and individually. I can't say I saw anything that qualified as "abuse". An understandably exasperated call for Zac to show some understanding of what was going on (when his communications thus far objectively demonstrated a distinct lack of said understanding) doesn't really count, to my mind. EDIT: Note that I'm not necessarily referring to techincal understanding, but simply understanding of people's frustration when they see their work go down the drain.
As I said in a previous post, FDEV wanted this level of involvement from players. Well, such a level of involvement requires commitment and effort and even personal sacrifice from those players, in terms of the time spent formulating strategies and then carrying them out. In Winters we have smart people who chew over the best course of action and we have dedicated players who spend frankly heroic amounts of time and credits to make those strategies fly. I know this is true for players in all the other Powers too. When we struck at Mahon a couple of cycles back, and put something like 23 of their systems on the block, they even had players taking time off work in order to complete the necessary actions to avoid turmoil.

Once again, FDEV wanted this.

It really should surprise no-one when those committed, involved players react badly when they feel their commitment and involvement is apparently brushed off by FDEV.

So, the technology in question doesn't allow a (relatively) straightforward roll-back of the game state. Fair enough, it is what it is. However, we do know that FDEV can manually override things, and that's where it starts to get ugly. Winters was left with a couple of very specific problems relating to expansions that have potentially very long term (and potentially unrecoverable) detrimental effects to us. While FDEV may not have been able to do anything about the cycle over-run and the activities that happened in that extra two hours, they could counteract some of the more serious side-effects, but now we have a situation where it looks to all intents and purposes as though they don't want to. Or, they really still don't understand the implications for the players in their own game.

Both possibilities are, frankly, a little depressing.

 

[Martin Schou]

those things do happen, and sometimes cannot be detected beforehand.

You can rarely detect hiccups beforehand, and I'm fairly certain that this is a relatively small bug that had massive consequences. Like toppling a single domino while you're setting up a massive chain.

My issue isn't so much with the bugs, because those happen. They're really annoying, but they happen. My issue is with how it's handled, and so far the only time that big PowerPlay bugs have been handled decently was when ALD had her cascade turmoil in week 6. Everything else has been handled somewhere between poorly to badly to not at all. This one falls squarely in the realm of utterly horrendous.

Combine that with Sando's comments in this thread, and you'll notice that Frontier's decision on the preparation to expansion has made Patreus a collapsing power, because they cannot possibly get any expansions this or the next cycle, which brings them to a minimum of six weeks running with no expansions all while being in the bottom three.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Martin> I asked about the eventuality of a power going into collapse due to bugs, and was told it would not happen and would be subject to a DM decision. What that means is anyone's guess, but I assume before a power is collapsed it goes through a human check.

 

[jprelph]

No further updates from FD on PowerPlay so I assume the solution is as outlined yesterday and they're just not going to answer their customer questions on this any more?

 

[Rubbernuke]

No further updates from FD on PowerPlay so I assume the solution is as outlined yesterday and they're just not going to answer their customer questions on this any more?

Sandro is about. He just responded to Martin on another thread.

 

[jprelph]

Sandro is about. He just responded to Martin on another thread.

Yep, I saw, I'm hoping that this issue is not being addressed directly because they're discussing things internally. Even if they came in and said "Yep, we messed up and we know this has affected some powers badly - we're looking into it" I'd feel happier - the fact that the solution was described as being only a "moderate" problem is I think what has irritated people the most because it a) isn't and b) suggests that there's a misunderstanding with some people within FD about how PP works and/or the amount of time and effort people are putting into it.

 

[Martin Schou]

Sandro is about. He just responded to Martin on another thread.

Yeah, it seems I missed the bit about it not actually being active at the moment. I clearly misunderstood that.

 

[Ben Ryder]

Cross post on today's fixes

Power Play is still utterly messed up

1 - Patreus is in Turmoil and might lose his capital? (Utter nonsense?)
2 - Patreus is in Turmoil and it does not know which system he might lose if he does not fix his balance and no one knows which system to attack
3 - All powers have not got the expansions they prepared last week expansion. A terrible waste of players time and effort
4 - Merits earned in combat are bugged. Making the remaining 1/3 of power play almost entirely pointless
5 - Preparations from last week have been carried over to this week, however the value of the systems have dramatically changed making the majority of them worthless. This means billions of credits and hours of player time *must* be invested to fix this problem caused by FDevs latest 'fix'
6 - Nominations did not work last cycle and are not working this cycle either

The parts of Power play
System Values CC - Massive swings from positive to negative making all planing almost entirely pointless
Preparations - Utterly broken and the fix for this has been placed on the players shoulders
Nominations - 100% broken
Expansions - 100% broken
Combat Merits - Bugged. Ongoing reports of them not working. No expansions-also means only bugged undermining is available
Fortification - Delayed and made nearly entirely pointless

This is what I can see from a five minute glance at Power Play. Its take me longer to write this post than to find these bugs.

FD can not seriously expect people to want to be part of a new power when there are constant issues with every existing one. I think the new power players will find their enjoyment of Elite will be undermined rather than enhanced. I woud recommend that they withdraw from the Dangerous Games until the bugs are fixed and spare themselves a whole galaxy of pain.


I usually try and be upbeat and positive but this really is a poor state of affairs.

 

[dciskey]

Also, preps being carried over mean Patreus and Winters wasted their time and credits last week, because they can't prep this week. Especially annoying for Winters because we won a prep war against ALD, and FDev is essentially handing the expansion to them with this "fix".

I'm an Xbox player; I had thirty bucks and a chunk of time set aside for Horizons today, but my only recourse for this nonsense is to hold onto my money. I'm considering filing a ticket for the 20M in preps I spent on HIP 47328, but I'm honestly also considering whether my gaming time is better spent elsewhere. If this situation isn't bad enough for FDev to fix it properly, how bad do things have to get?

 

[Rubbernuke]

Just logged in and its all still broken. Prep nominations busted, preparations all wrong.

Flicking around Powers its the same story. Patreus screwed up, Torval makes no sense.

 

[lassombra]

Is your first point that FD should care as much about the opinions (or lack of opinions) of those who play powerplay passingly, and without real concern, as of those for whom powerplay is the primary focus of their Elite game time? I hope not, because that doesn't make any sense.

No, my point is that people here are talking like they're some kind of community appointed leader, when in reality they are only the leaders of the minority of players. FD should care about all of the people who play power play. Maybe the rank 5 players have more cause to have an opinion, because of the way they are playing it. But everything in this thread suggests that those de-facto leaders don't think that the way more casual power play players participate is not valid. (Note that I got the same tone from most of the people when I went back and read the extensive 5th column discussion. Almost everyone was trying to figure out how to get rid of the people who were just playing it for some kind of personal gain).

"this was mostly a rant fest with a bit of harassment towards FDev thrown in"

I strongly disagree. I'm as against the unnecessary vitriol as you are--but it's not at all accurate to say that this thread is "mostly" a rant fest. Powerplay is a game, with rules, and set outcomes that are achieved by operating within those rules. When the rules change, A WEEK of player time is potentially wasted. That's *hundreds of hours* of game time spent working toward objectives that were achieved but not granted. That's not nothing. Bringing that to the devs attention, and objecting when the solution involves a "just play on, and ignore the fact you just wasted your time for a week," isn't "ranting." You're confusing tone for intent. Yes, some people seriously need to cool it, but there are legitimate concerns here, and it's not necessary to pretend their concerns are illegitimate in order to object to the presentation of those concerns.

I have two separate and distinct points which just happen to intersect. My first point is that there are several times as many players not represented here as are. My second point is that the ones represented here have (for the most part) been disrespectful to the people who work very hard to provide a fun game for them.

"This is a game which we get to continue to play for free. Engineers expansion was free and FDev could have done a little joke of an expansion, and people would have complained but moved on because it's not like they were paying anything more for it. We all payed for a game. We payed for access. We are not paying for ongoing development"

Here you've gone right off the rails. We paid for the game, and many of us paid for the expansion--"Engineers" was *not* free. That we pay in large lump sums for a season--a year of development--instead of in monthly installments doesn't make it less true that we're paying for the on-going development. And even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't be relevant. The development is on-going and we're the people who care most about powerplay. There's nothing wrong with giving feedback to the developers when we disagree with the decisions they make regarding 'fixing' bugs in the feature, when those bugs impact us as players. No developer worth their salt ignores the opinions of their most dedicated players--FD sure doesn't.

I agree with your intentions here--again, some of the vitriol in the thread has been ridiculous and unacceptable. But that the tone, not the content. There's no need to dismiss the content in order to object to the tone. My 2 cents.

I firmly disagree with you. I purchased Elite + Horizons because I wanted to play the game in the state it was in. If I would only have been interested in paying that price if it had Engineers, I would have waited for engineers. FDev's continued development doesn't draw funds from the existing player base. They could just as easily close shop tomorrow, and we'd all be left with a very expensive file set on our hard drives. Nothing we are doing now is paying them to stay open. They are continuing development in order to continue to attract new customers. The fact that they marketed it and bundled it as a season pass is just a benefit to early adopters.

Keep in mind, I myself make more than the average game developer in the UK and I work in far less stressful development situations. These guys aren't necessarily paid overly well but they certainly work hard and don't deserve the disrespect and entitlement I have seen here yesterday and today.

 

[Starwolfe]

And you should also know that while it's a viable technology, maintaining such a stack is itself many full time jobs, and it is entirely possible that instead of live backups, they may actually use the cycle to trigger a backup of powerplay related data. Noone on the outside can possibly know what the actual stack looks like, or what kind of backup routines are actually employed. Just because incremental backups, transaction logs, transaction based data are all things that could exit doesn't mean they do! That kind of stack is a lot of work to create and maintain, and while absolutely necessary for finance and medical fields, 99% of other fields (including games) rarely will employ such a stack. They will not keep excess data just hanging around, they'll keep the most useful pieces of data, and overwrite that with changes. It's much faster and allows for cleaner, quicker retrieval. However, it opens the door to bugs that cause loss of data, which appears to be the case in this instance. They know what PP looked like when it finally cycled, and they can do things with that data, but they can't go back and pick another point in time always. Lots of things about this game lead me to think that it is not transactional data stores, so a snapshot taken at the exact right time of all the right data is the only plausible way, and who knows if that exists or not (the devs might not even know for sure).

Unpopular opinion:

Spoiler

This thread has had, what, 50 active users? Maybe a hundred? Let's say 200 to be generous (is that possible? Not sure). That's only 20 players per power. I don't think anyone here is going to pretend that 20 players make up all of the power play activity for their power in a week. No, it's at least hundreds. Probably closer to the thousand mark give or take per power. That means that the people speaking on here, and the stated "de facto leaders" are only the leaders of the meta-gamers. People who are willing to / inspired to go outside the game. I myself am one of those meta-gamers and I agree with what is being said here is the ideal for me and my faction (the put it on ice stuff) but I represent a minority. What we have here is an extremely vocal minority slinging insults at the devs who may or may not actually speak for the majority of players who were affected. There are probably 5 or more players who aren't speaking up for one reason or another for every one who has chimed in here.

I agree power play is broken. I agree that it would be nice if it was more predictable and matched what we think we know about it / what FDev has said about it. But I also know that the majority of players using power play are not meta-gaming it as a full time hobby, they are playing it as one aspect of their time in the game. (Note that these probably are not rank 5 players I'm referring to, and the vocal people in this thread probably do represent the majority of rank 5 players, as well as people like me who are up and coming rank 4's

I wasn't going to chime in here because this was mostly a rant fest with a bit of harassment towards FDev thrown in, but it has hit a point where people are using half-knowledge and assumptions to justify their indignation and harassment, and that is ing me off as a technologist. There is literally nothing about this process that is "unacceptable" or an absolute outrage. If this stuff had happened with an offline game would people have been as vocal? No. This is a game which we get to continue to play for free. Engineers expansion was free and FDev could have done a little joke of an expansion, and people would have complained but moved on because it's not like they were paying anything more for it. We all payed for a game. We payed for access. We are not paying for ongoing development. Noone in this thread is funding the huge amount of money that FDev has just spent resolving this to some extent! For an idea of the money, taking current average salaries in Europe (not narrowing down because I forget where they are) we're looking at about 10 copies of the new bundle in order to fund the developers time that appears to have gone into just this issue!

No one who has spoken on this thread (even Zac) knows the whole story. Not one of us know the technology stack or what exactly the story with snapshots is. For all we know there are no backups or snapshots that tell the story and the devs have been trying to figure it out from what they do know which might not be much more than we do! So let's all take a chill pill and let FDev do the best they can with the situation.

Zac, I agree with the statements about how this solution as proposed does not work wrt. preps. Winters would have expansions this cycle, but will not next cycle. This means that while most of us are simply skipping expansions forward a week, Winters is losing her expansions. This is unfair to everyone. It is unfair to Winters because they would have those expansions this week, but now will not. It is unfair to the rest of us because it means that we are playing a rigged game where player actions aren't the only thing that controls our destiny, and we can't expect a fair game as a result.

You are right that is an unpopular opinion, because I know for certain some powers kind of are run and held afloat by barely 20 people.

Most of the grinders in Hudson for example go to combat expansions, or fort close systems like Groombridge for merits. The result is the core of the hard work required to be done is the longer-haul fortifications and the millions spent in preps - most of which are not done at this time by the majority, but instead by the minority.

So yeah, a small group that is screaming bloody murder is the reason why several powers are doing what they are.

 

[CMDR Wylder]

Hey guys,

Just a quick note to let everyone know that this morning’s server maintenance cycle appears to have had a slight module malfunction and have missed the Powerplay trigger.

I just wanted to make you aware that the server team are working on the issue now and there will be another server maintenance cycle shortly which should fix the issue.

Thanks!

UPDATE 11:27 - We've seen the reports suggesting that no expansions have happened this cycle. The team are investigating and we will uypdate this thread shortly.

UPDATE 12:12 - The team have investigated the lack of expansions this cycle and this was caused by the preparation not being correctly counted in this morning's cycle. To make sure that everyone's work is not lost, the team have restored last weeks' preparation efforts back to the live galaxy ready for next week's cycle.

UPDATE 17:54 - Thanks for your patience. The dev team have spent many hours investigating the issues with the PP tick. The team have reviewed what the errors in the data would mean and the state of play were the bugs not to take place. Based on that we have the following issues and actions that we are taking to address them.

Patreus HQ in turmoil - This is an issue that will receive a fix. More news will follow once we have more details
Preparation not added - This has been added to the live game this cycle
Triggers being extremely high - This is a display issue. The actual values are correct but they are displaying incorrectly. This display issue should be fixed in the next point release coming very soon

With the preparations, we have seen a lot of feedback regarding the effect that the changes to preparations would make to each power. After review the team believe that the powers in turmoil would still be in turmoil even with these changes and so the difference between having the preparations last week and moving it to this week should be moderate.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience while we investigate the issues.

You know I'm normally very quiet about things and bugs and problems around here - it's
a game after all. However this complete and utter cluster**** is completely inexcusable. This "slight module malfunction" and "moderate" impact have completely destroyed 1000's of collective hours of work over the past weeks by those of us pledged to Winters. Your response to this crisis has been pitiful at best.

I know you don't care about any of that - that fact is painfully clear to those of us directly involved - but here's something you probably do care about. Over the past several months I've been actively recruiting people to join this patch-work of a beta exercise you *****'s call a game - that ends now obviously. I'll be working as hard as I can to make sure as few people invest in this **** as possible. Stuff you - and stuff your lame %*^%&*^%*^$##^%^*) apology for any inconvenience.

 

[Insinnergy]

If they are not going to pause PowerPlay to fix things...
And they are going to roll the prep lists over...

Then it only makes sense that the previous week's CC totals to Spend are also rolled over to this week for all Powers.

This would go some small way to ensuring Winters and Torval and any other power who had their Prep list set up they way they wanted it last cycle are able to complete their Prep/Expansion strategy at the end of the this cycle with minimal interruption or disadvantage.

Yes... I realise some Powers are in Turmoil this cycle...
However FDev forcing a Power in Turmoil to have a positive CC balance and being able to have their preps as expansions next cycle would be par for the course for the quality of PowerPlay so far, so I see no issue with it.

 

[Rubbernuke]

This sorry situation is like walking up to Garry Kasparov during a match and tipping up the chessboard, apologising and setting up the board almost randomly.

A lot of people are losing faith in the game as it stands.

 

[Martin Schou]

This sorry situation is like walking up to Garry Kasparov during a match and tipping up the chessboard, apologising and setting up the board almost randomly.

A lot of people are losing faith in the game as it stands.

That's not a fair analogy.

It's like the impartial observers of the match has been writing down wrong and downright impossible moves (like b1xe8 as an opening move), and after an earthquake they insist that setting up the board according to their notes is the only way to conclude the match.

 

[Minoo Minou]

This sorry situation is like walking up to Garry Kasparov during a match and tipping up the chessboard, apologising and setting up the board almost randomly.

A lot of people are losing faith in the game as it stands.

Yeah yeah, the game is doomed and all that stufff... FIrst time on a game forum heh?

 

[Rubbernuke]

Yeah yeah, the game is doomed and all that stufff... FIrst time on a game forum heh?

No, I've run the Utopian Reddit that has 500 plus members for 45 weeks and contributed about 15 stories to Galnet and station news in game, and logged over 15 weeks of game time?

What does it say when people like me who eat, live and breathe Elite and Powerplay complain the loudest?