Aegis station repair statistical analysis

[DeathStroke]

Having just watched Obsidian Ant's latest video (https://youtu.be/oorW4aBHNzM), I was wondering about just how much work it would take to get the stations working.

So I created a spreadsheet, filled it in with data seen in OA's video, and made excel do some math.
Spreadsheet link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1feEDnIM3xJoGI0Q59Xeeo0woAS9oQzdTxLdL_zvLgno/edit?usp=sharing

If we take the numbers from Liman Legacy, and use max cargo configs for the 4 ships (Cutter, type 9, Anaconda, and Python), we can calculate the approximate man-hours needed to repair the stations.

If we get commodities from Oort Orbital in Pleiades Sector KC-V c2-4, we have about a 20 minute round trip (if someone has exact numbers let me know, I'll update the spreadsheet).

If we use a cutter the number of trips is 16,901, which is about 5,634 man-hours. Type 9 is 8,387 man-hours, Anaconda is 9,534, Python is 15,280.

All of this is just for Liman Legacy, a single station.


I don't think these are reasonable numbers. The only time we see these kinds of numbers is during CG's, which the reward is substantially higher.

So either these stations will take YEARS to repair (if ever), or FD will have to change something. I.E. make NPC's deliver part of the cargo.


FD, we don't need another waiting mini-game, we have plenty already, please change the way station repair works.

 

[damon8r351]

Right. *cracks knuckles*

Let's be about it then.

 

[Mangal Oemie]

I don't think it is really the commodities required. Looking at the numbers in the vid, it's atrocious, actually. most at 1-2% when it only requires a couple of hundred. While a single CMDR would be brutal to fix the whole station, a single CMDR should be able to make a decent dent into this.

There may be a political reason. These are Aegis stations, the big war mongers who many feel got what they deserved. If this were Alliance stations, I would be all over this, and be hauling right now. But Aegis (INRA)? It's probably preferable their stations don't get restored.

 

[Cmdr Eran Mintor]

They need to offer incentive to repair the stations because really that gameplay is no more exciting than slave trading.

 

[Julio Montega]

The stations are damaged and on repair.
What about their defenses?
Why can't we pillage and plunder them for serious profits
at the hazard of police ships preying on perpetrators?
Why is there no love for raiders?

Back to topic:
Thanks for calculating the rough numbers.
The CG boredom kicks in again.
One can argue the numbers are so high,
as to force the players to organize and pick their
targets to get back online.

I ask, why should we bother?

 

[insanephoton]

I don't think it is really the commodities required. Looking at the numbers in the vid, it's atrocious, actually. most at 1-2% when it only requires a couple of hundred. While a single CMDR would be brutal to fix the whole station, a single CMDR should be able to make a decent dent into this.

There may be a political reason. These are Aegis stations, the big war mongers who many feel got what they deserved. If this were Alliance stations, I would be all over this, and be hauling right now. But Aegis (INRA)? It's probably preferable their stations don't get restored.

Some of us are still miffed that we were railroaded into conflict when FD promised us that player choice would dictate the plot. As long as the attacks are confined to AEGIS stations there is no hurry to repair them. Sometimes doing nothing is the most powerful statement you can make.

 

[Vasious]

So 8,387 man-hours in a Type 9

So that would be a hour for the average number of contributors in a trade CG, assuming they all had Type 9s.

That does not sound that bad,

If the Community rallied to the cause, then might not take that long

I dont agree with the assertion that "So either these stations will take YEARS to repair (if ever), or FD will have to change something."

It is doable by the community.

The question is motive not targets

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

I think there could be a slight problem with that calculation.
You are assuming that the commodities required are all available in large quantities close by.

Without that assumption the required time can get much higher.

 

[Aussiedroid]

Part of me thinks, let the stations burn. Only because I think they look cool and add some variety.

Another part of my thinks, these stations are huge and would expect repairs to take months not days or weeks. But as good are delivered that there is a gradual return to normalcy (fires start going out, debris is cleared, then eventually remaining station services come online). It may not be that way though and be an on/off scenario once the required goals are hit.

Just speaking for myself, I don't find hauling things overly fun so I don't have a motivation to help. The alien story & progression so far hasn't griped me either. Perhaps if it did then I would find some level of motivation there to pitch in to progress the story. As someone said above, why should I bother?

 

[Flin]

It's an analysis on incentives and motivation.

Personally was motivated to help people off the ships with key materials as incentive.

Repairing by shipping in commodities, not so much.

Are the mission board (at least the controlling fraction, Aegis) offering related fetch and delivery missions?

 

[kofeyh]

Some of us are still miffed that we were railroaded into conflict when FD promised us that player choice would dictate the plot. As long as the attacks are confined to AEGIS stations there is no hurry to repair them. Sometimes doing nothing is the most powerful statement you can make.

If you continue to believe the developer saying anyone has any say or player choice would influence at this point, I'm not sure who is the more foolish. We never had any say, will never have any say and it was always going to be conflict. Frontier hasn't allowed player direction since the DDF was shut down, when it became apparent there were too many cooks in the kitchen and nothing was happening.

The focused feedback is simply that; feedback. Whether or not Frontier process any of it, or simply see it as white-noise now, is anybody's guess.

Frontier always made it clear that Thargoids would not be peaceful; they went to the effort of shoving them some 400 LY out to make them, essentially, an electable. Player choice, is something Frontier say, to try and give people a sense that what they do matters.

It doesn't; nothing we do, matters. Everything critical to the path ahead is pre-set. Folks can remain in denial about that, and continue to believe they have some sway, or understand the reality, and figure out if they can continue, with that knowledge.

We never had any say, friend; choice in elite, is mostly an illusion. I am sorry. But that is, how it is. This is something folks continue to refuse to accept; and will forever be dissapointed as a consequence.

Lastly? Doing nothing, achieves nothing. The silent acceptance, is why they continue; they have no reason not to.

--

edit: for whatever reason if there was data presented in the OP, or a link to the relevant vid; it's gone.

 

[Broon]

Yeah, dashing into burning stations was good fun! The rewards were the gameplay, not the credits or mats. I had a blast.

When that week was over and I saw the next phase was repair I decided to give it a go and even went and found some cargo racks and got to it. But after a few runs it began to feel like a trucking CG without the any sort of real payoff and the levels needed to attain even the goal/payoff of repair seemed unreachable even for one station, much less multiple stations.

Hence I left and went back to my fun stuff in the bubble.

Count me in on the disenchanted list for that scenario.

 

[DeathStroke]

So 8,387 man-hours in a Type 9

So that would be a hour for the average number of contributors in a trade CG, assuming they all had Type 9s.

That does not sound that bad,

If the Community rallied to the cause, then might not take that long

I dont agree with the assertion that "So either these stations will take YEARS to repair (if ever), or FD will have to change something."

It is doable by the community.

The question is motive not targets

From my research, only 2,000-3,000 CMDR's participate in trade CG's (at least the latest ones, ~6 months).

Even if 8,000+ CMDR's had type 9's, and put in at least an hour each, ONE stations would get repaired. Which you're not going to get 8,000+ CMDR's to support Aegis, you're not going to get 8,000 CMDR's to trade that much without significant monetary reward, and you're not going to get 8,000+ type 9's.

I think there could be a slight problem with that calculation.
You are assuming that the commodities required are all available in large quantities close by.

Without that assumption the required time can get much higher.

That is a possibility. I based my calculations off a system that had some of the commodities needed, but did not check to see if they had ALL commodities needed. Even if they did have all needed, that one stations does not have enough to repair even a single station. Since calculating this exactly would be very complex, I simplified it a little. Close enough for a proof of concept.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Some of us are still miffed that we were railroaded into conflict when FD promised us that player choice would dictate the plot. As long as the attacks are confined to AEGIS stations there is no hurry to repair them. Sometimes doing nothing is the most powerful statement you can make.

How do you know there hasn't been. Plenty of people have attacked the thargoids that didnt attack us at the beginning.

 

[Whitehair]

......

Ever considered that the numbers are so high for a reason?

 

[DeathStroke]

Ever considered that the numbers are so high for a reason?

Of course they're that high for a reason. The reason is bad game design.

How do you know there hasn't been. Plenty of people have attacked the thargoids that didnt attack us at the beginning.

Because they never gave any other options. It's always been run or fight. Name one other action you can take with them. No, 'nothing' is not an action.

 

[Whitehair]

Of course they're that high for a reason. The reason is bad game design.

LOL

 

[kofeyh]

How do you know there hasn't been. Plenty of people have attacked the thargoids that didnt attack us at the beginning.

With respect, day one - they were pulling commanders from hyperspace to scan; this including shutting down ships. It's not a reasonable consideration that thargoids were going to be "good guys" and we're all going to be able to ignore them because that would make them convenient (and thus entirely forgettable) and it's all the combat people's fault.

Frontier is entirely one-dimensional when it comes to good/ bad; assuming anything other than (mostly) what we have, means people haven't been paying attention for 2+ years.

 

[Cmdr-Wotherspoon]

Frontier is entirely one-dimensional when it comes to good/ bad; assuming anything other than (mostly) what we have, means people haven't been paying attention for 2+ years.

Not sure what you mean by Frontier: the game designers? There are substantial moral ambiguities in the game. The tactics and the philosophy of the INRA seem misguided at best; there are many CMDRs who see the beginnings of such an approach from Aegis too. The Thargoids have not been hostile except when feeling threatened; they seem to have a territorial issue with human encroachment into systems containing barnacles, but as we can't communicate with them we don't understand their motives. The back-story of the people who appear to run the galaxy includes the paternalistic belief that it's best to hold back the truth from the people of the galaxy.

There are most certainly choices to make; whether the mechanisms exist to make meaningful impact on the storyline is moot, but at present we appear to have a choice whether to repair these Aegis stations.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I don't think these are reasonable numbers. The only time we see these kinds of numbers is during CG's, which the reward is substantially higher.

So either these stations will take YEARS to repair (if ever), or FD will have to change something. I.E. make NPC's deliver part of the cargo.

Certainly I don't expect to see these stations repaired any time soon - each of them is asking for between 1 and 2 trade CGs worth of goods (the two most recent trade CGs delivered 15M and 11M tonnes of cargo for 7.5k contributors), so would take a week or two to repair on its own if it was made a significant priority by the community and the others were abandoned. With stations presently being lost faster than that ... not much chance of any of them getting repaired soon.

Additionally, some of the goods needed are the localised ones originally used as engineer commodities - those are very limited supply and you would soon be waiting hours to fill up a Cutter.

FD, we don't need another waiting mini-game, we have plenty already, please change the way station repair works.

The question is: why is it important to you that the stations are repaired quickly / at all?

I mean, sure, it would emphasise the strength of humanity versus the Thargoids. It's not impossible, either - trade CGs are ~5-7000 people delivering 10-15M tonnes a week. With 30,000 people the stations could be repaired faster than they're being damaged (the localised commodities would need to be handled as rares). There are certainly considerably more than 30,000 active players.

Obviously that's not what's going to happen - humanity is divided, focused on making quick money, and in its uncoordinated state an easy target for the Thargoids. But it's nevertheless not an impossible task as such. Whether humanity should be united behind Aegis is a question Frontier have left ambiguous, of course.

Also: this is what the community asked for. Frontier could have had the repairs progress by Community Goals - we'd have delivered a little bit of cargo to somewhere, it would have got at least Tier 1, and next week the stations would have been back. Easy, clean, guaranteed success.

The community made clear that it was tired of CGs being used as the tool to progress the plot
- artificial weekly cycle
- Tier 1 is success and is low enough to practically be automatic
- multi-goods CGs don't care which goods are delivered so people just do the easiest ones
- just a bit bored of them

So, now we have something different, and it turns out it's not an auto-win, and ... well, I predicted we'd get exactly this sort of reaction almost 3 weeks ago when the first repair requirements went up, and we'll probably get it a bit more as the maths becomes more obvious to more people