I didn't get around to writing my usual speculation and commentary last week, after Delaines (and Antals) Expansions were bugged and you couldn't earn merits in either the Resistance Pockets or Supercruise, I really couldn't be bothered taking the effort to write anything.
Last week had the launch of Engineers, 1.6 / 2.1, which would have had some impact on PP participation. Obviously Merits in Antals and Delains expansions are way down because the bug was only fixed in the last 12 hours of the cycle.
Undermining was nearly non existent last cycle, but you can see the difference using a direct comparison to a previous cycle.
Also the raw data looks to be 1.5 to 2 hours old from when the cycle should have ended, or maybe 4 hours old from when it actually ended.
All "snipes" are not included, and all "overtime" fortifications are also not there.
Above are the merit total for cycle 52 and cycle 41. 41 had expansions for both ALD and Hudson, 42 didn't.
On the total merits chart, things aren't that much different for Aisling, ALD, Delaine, Hudson, Mahon and Winters.
The Effective Merits chart shows much more grinding was going on, and also systems didn't need to be fortified to 100%, because of the lack of undermining.
The Total Opposition chart shows the story. About 1/4 or less normal merits in undermining and opposition to expansions.
And on the effective opposition chart you can see 4 powers didn't even get a single system undermined.
Speculation and Commentary
Normally I would speculate on what happened during the week and what might happen the next week for each of the powers, but this time I will just have a more general approach.
Participation in PP (well, number of merits) has been reducing over the past month or so, some of that might have been due to players preferring to play in the Engineers Beta, maybe not.
Cycle 52 had several changes other than new feature to distract the player base from PP.
Robigo
A favourite place for player to exploit the long range smuggling missions, to accept the slaves for free, and then just sell them on the local market for 100% profit.
Its hard to know what % of fortifiers and preparers used this method to fund their weekly expenses, but I suspect it was quite a lot.
With Robigo being UA bombed, and not being able to offer missions, these players need cr from somewhere.
Torvals Imperial Slaves have seen their supply smashed last week, some popular systems dropping from 600000-800000 down to under 500 (not 500000)
New profitable routes will be found, and cr from missions might be useful, but it will take time for the Robigo money printers to be replaced, which will probably hurt Fortification and Preparation numbers, and hurt the trade expanders, particularly Winters and Mahon, who were recently seeing very large amounts of opposition to their expansions.
AI Difficulty
The AI was much improved, it has been nerfed somewhat now, but it is still better than it was before 2.1
The increased difficulty of AI was a very contentious issue for many players.
Personally I enjoyed the new AI and all I think needed to be changed was the level of ships that some players were seeing, not changing the actual difficulty of each level. Elite ships should be really difficult, but most players should not be running into them all the time.
The new harder AI did make undermining more difficult, and as seen in the charts, undermining just stopped.
When interdiction difficulty was increased undermining dropped to around 1/2 the normal levels, this is far more worse than that.
It may take several weeks for new strategies to be worked out to improve undermining merits per hour, but its likely the lone underminer will earn far less merits than the lone combat expander.
This means undermining from Delaine, Patreus, ALD, Antal and Hudson may be greatly reduced going forward.
Undermining from Sirius, Mahon and Torval is probably very low, Aisling players probably do a moderate amount of undermining, and Winters players do a very large amount of undermining.
Extrapolating this out, whoever Delaine, Patreus, ALD, Antal, Hudson, Sirius, Mahon and Torval undermine, will get much less than they usually would.
Whoever Winters, and to a lesser extent Aisling, undermine will get a larger % of the total undermining than they do right now.
Security Response Times
This is the other half of the decrease seen in undermining merits.
The security forces once again turn up, but the security level of the system has so much more to do with it now.
I was getting a response time of 35-40 seconds in high security systems.
This really shouldn't be an issue for wings of players undermining, but for the lone underminer, killing combat PP NPCs in that time isn't easy, and killing a wing of ships in that time is very difficult.
ALD and Hudson get increased security in their systems, so undermining them is now more difficult than undermining the other 8 powers generally.
I'm not sure what else influences the security level, but I suspect population and government type probably do, so Federation and Alliance space, with its higher population, probably also has many high security systems, and fewer low security.
There are already massive differences between what bonuses the different powers have (by design, some are just not as good) but this is quite a large buff to the two powers who probably need it the least.
ALD and Hudson already have expansions that are nearly impossible to stop, and they are both quite hard to undermine into Turmoil, but this may make it impossible to put either of them into Turmoil.
If this is true, Imperial attack will focus much more on just Winters, and Federation attacks will move to Patreus and Torval.
This will mean more Turmoils for these 3 powers, they all may be able to fortify enough to only lose loss making systems, but with systems being lost, they will be taken by other powers who are close.
So ALD will be able to grow more from the Pateeus and Torval system, and Hudson and Mahon will be able to grow more from the Winters systems.
That should keep Mahon in 1st, Hudson in 2nd, but should start ALD overtaking Torval and Winters and returning to the top 3.
Undermining and Fortification Balance
With Long Range Smuggling, and Long Range Smuggling exploiting, more and more players had access to much larger amounts of cr to burn on fortifications.
The introduction of the Cutter also was a big buff to fortification, although all players for every power who fortify either have Duke rank, or will be working on it, it does give a slight advantage to the Imperial Powers, because its an Imperial Rank.
With the AI and Security response changes something will need to be done to buff undermining, but the problem is, one week is too early to see how bad it is, but you also can't just leave it like this, because no-one will go into turmoil.
1) The 3 obvious ways to re-balance it are to remove all security responses on PP ship combat.
2) Increase the number of merits from 30 per kill
3) Increase the amount of fortification required per system.
I think option 3 is terrible, no-one wants to fortify more, and it will basically sink Aisling.
Option 2 is easy to implement, but a useful number will be hard to change to.
Number 1 might be the best option, but will require a programming change, which is probably unrealistic.
Bugs and Cycle End / This Cycle
The major bug last cycle was the Delaine and Antal expansions.
Antal players don't want to expand (like everyone) and had a very hard trigger, so there probably wasn't that big an issue with their expansion not working, but it did rob their players a method to earn their merits.
The Delaine expansion was more wanted (but still not that much because its a horrible loss maker) and Delaine was able to win it in the end, but there really isn't a good outcome for it.
Having only 12 hours to expand is ridiculously unfair, but at the same time, the expansion was bugged and there was no real reason for anyone to oppose it who wanted it to fail.
The cycle not ending at the correct time causes far too many issues.
What was undermined, fortified, who won expansions, or preparations, this is all just a mess.
The official response form Zac was FDev can't roll back the numbers to the correct stopping time.
That doesn't really give any options, rolling back the whole week (which probably wouldn't fix anything) must also be impossible.
From what I can tell, Mahon should have much less CC, maybe be in turmoil, but probably not.
Other than that, I'm not aware of any big things that should have happened, most expansions were not opposed, and there was no real undermining.
The second issue is whats happened to the preparations.
They are just continuing, which means no-one has any expansions, but all the Powers have new CC balanced for this week to spend on preparations.
The CC to spend needs to be rolled back to last weeks CC if the preparation period is being changed to 2 weeks, instead of the usual 1, but Winters and Patreus are now in Turmoil.
How can they have CC to spend now?
I don't know how the mess of this week can be resolved, and whatever is done can't be fair to all 10 powers and their players.
Last week had the launch of Engineers, 1.6 / 2.1, which would have had some impact on PP participation. Obviously Merits in Antals and Delains expansions are way down because the bug was only fixed in the last 12 hours of the cycle.
Undermining was nearly non existent last cycle, but you can see the difference using a direct comparison to a previous cycle.
Also the raw data looks to be 1.5 to 2 hours old from when the cycle should have ended, or maybe 4 hours old from when it actually ended.
All "snipes" are not included, and all "overtime" fortifications are also not there.
Above are the merit total for cycle 52 and cycle 41. 41 had expansions for both ALD and Hudson, 42 didn't.
On the total merits chart, things aren't that much different for Aisling, ALD, Delaine, Hudson, Mahon and Winters.
The Effective Merits chart shows much more grinding was going on, and also systems didn't need to be fortified to 100%, because of the lack of undermining.
The Total Opposition chart shows the story. About 1/4 or less normal merits in undermining and opposition to expansions.
And on the effective opposition chart you can see 4 powers didn't even get a single system undermined.
Speculation and Commentary
Normally I would speculate on what happened during the week and what might happen the next week for each of the powers, but this time I will just have a more general approach.
Participation in PP (well, number of merits) has been reducing over the past month or so, some of that might have been due to players preferring to play in the Engineers Beta, maybe not.
Cycle 52 had several changes other than new feature to distract the player base from PP.
Robigo
A favourite place for player to exploit the long range smuggling missions, to accept the slaves for free, and then just sell them on the local market for 100% profit.
Its hard to know what % of fortifiers and preparers used this method to fund their weekly expenses, but I suspect it was quite a lot.
With Robigo being UA bombed, and not being able to offer missions, these players need cr from somewhere.
Torvals Imperial Slaves have seen their supply smashed last week, some popular systems dropping from 600000-800000 down to under 500 (not 500000)
New profitable routes will be found, and cr from missions might be useful, but it will take time for the Robigo money printers to be replaced, which will probably hurt Fortification and Preparation numbers, and hurt the trade expanders, particularly Winters and Mahon, who were recently seeing very large amounts of opposition to their expansions.
AI Difficulty
The AI was much improved, it has been nerfed somewhat now, but it is still better than it was before 2.1
The increased difficulty of AI was a very contentious issue for many players.
Personally I enjoyed the new AI and all I think needed to be changed was the level of ships that some players were seeing, not changing the actual difficulty of each level. Elite ships should be really difficult, but most players should not be running into them all the time.
The new harder AI did make undermining more difficult, and as seen in the charts, undermining just stopped.
When interdiction difficulty was increased undermining dropped to around 1/2 the normal levels, this is far more worse than that.
It may take several weeks for new strategies to be worked out to improve undermining merits per hour, but its likely the lone underminer will earn far less merits than the lone combat expander.
This means undermining from Delaine, Patreus, ALD, Antal and Hudson may be greatly reduced going forward.
Undermining from Sirius, Mahon and Torval is probably very low, Aisling players probably do a moderate amount of undermining, and Winters players do a very large amount of undermining.
Extrapolating this out, whoever Delaine, Patreus, ALD, Antal, Hudson, Sirius, Mahon and Torval undermine, will get much less than they usually would.
Whoever Winters, and to a lesser extent Aisling, undermine will get a larger % of the total undermining than they do right now.
Security Response Times
This is the other half of the decrease seen in undermining merits.
The security forces once again turn up, but the security level of the system has so much more to do with it now.
I was getting a response time of 35-40 seconds in high security systems.
This really shouldn't be an issue for wings of players undermining, but for the lone underminer, killing combat PP NPCs in that time isn't easy, and killing a wing of ships in that time is very difficult.
ALD and Hudson get increased security in their systems, so undermining them is now more difficult than undermining the other 8 powers generally.
I'm not sure what else influences the security level, but I suspect population and government type probably do, so Federation and Alliance space, with its higher population, probably also has many high security systems, and fewer low security.
There are already massive differences between what bonuses the different powers have (by design, some are just not as good) but this is quite a large buff to the two powers who probably need it the least.
ALD and Hudson already have expansions that are nearly impossible to stop, and they are both quite hard to undermine into Turmoil, but this may make it impossible to put either of them into Turmoil.
If this is true, Imperial attack will focus much more on just Winters, and Federation attacks will move to Patreus and Torval.
This will mean more Turmoils for these 3 powers, they all may be able to fortify enough to only lose loss making systems, but with systems being lost, they will be taken by other powers who are close.
So ALD will be able to grow more from the Pateeus and Torval system, and Hudson and Mahon will be able to grow more from the Winters systems.
That should keep Mahon in 1st, Hudson in 2nd, but should start ALD overtaking Torval and Winters and returning to the top 3.
Undermining and Fortification Balance
With Long Range Smuggling, and Long Range Smuggling exploiting, more and more players had access to much larger amounts of cr to burn on fortifications.
The introduction of the Cutter also was a big buff to fortification, although all players for every power who fortify either have Duke rank, or will be working on it, it does give a slight advantage to the Imperial Powers, because its an Imperial Rank.
With the AI and Security response changes something will need to be done to buff undermining, but the problem is, one week is too early to see how bad it is, but you also can't just leave it like this, because no-one will go into turmoil.
1) The 3 obvious ways to re-balance it are to remove all security responses on PP ship combat.
2) Increase the number of merits from 30 per kill
3) Increase the amount of fortification required per system.
I think option 3 is terrible, no-one wants to fortify more, and it will basically sink Aisling.
Option 2 is easy to implement, but a useful number will be hard to change to.
Number 1 might be the best option, but will require a programming change, which is probably unrealistic.
Bugs and Cycle End / This Cycle
The major bug last cycle was the Delaine and Antal expansions.
Antal players don't want to expand (like everyone) and had a very hard trigger, so there probably wasn't that big an issue with their expansion not working, but it did rob their players a method to earn their merits.
The Delaine expansion was more wanted (but still not that much because its a horrible loss maker) and Delaine was able to win it in the end, but there really isn't a good outcome for it.
Having only 12 hours to expand is ridiculously unfair, but at the same time, the expansion was bugged and there was no real reason for anyone to oppose it who wanted it to fail.
The cycle not ending at the correct time causes far too many issues.
What was undermined, fortified, who won expansions, or preparations, this is all just a mess.
The official response form Zac was FDev can't roll back the numbers to the correct stopping time.
That doesn't really give any options, rolling back the whole week (which probably wouldn't fix anything) must also be impossible.
From what I can tell, Mahon should have much less CC, maybe be in turmoil, but probably not.
Other than that, I'm not aware of any big things that should have happened, most expansions were not opposed, and there was no real undermining.
The second issue is whats happened to the preparations.
They are just continuing, which means no-one has any expansions, but all the Powers have new CC balanced for this week to spend on preparations.
The CC to spend needs to be rolled back to last weeks CC if the preparation period is being changed to 2 weeks, instead of the usual 1, but Winters and Patreus are now in Turmoil.
How can they have CC to spend now?
I don't know how the mess of this week can be resolved, and whatever is done can't be fair to all 10 powers and their players.
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