Rubbernuke is biased, i'm biased, you are biased, we are all biased.
But please, agree, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, and Rubbernuke made a claim. I know he said other things, i'm not contesting those, but he used the point about people not giving reasons ("without reason") as a supporting point for his claims.
I dispute that assertion. That is all.
Well, plenty of proof he gave to you. But I think that you'll not be satisfied anyway because, well, that's what biased means, not to have different opinions, but to sistematically ignore the facts presented to you. (I hope you are not familiar with scientific trials because you clearly lack the concept of bias and that would be a problem it it's your field of work).
Anyway, let's get back to much more serious business.
I want to point out two things you wrote above:
- "I wing with ppl"
- "these folk are on my friends list"
This is consistent with how the Matchmaker works. It puts a priority on instancing players with their friends, and with members of their wing, over latency. I'm talking about being instanced with antagonistic
strangers, where the matchmaker puts a priority on latency. The last CG I did was the first one for DW2. Despite the presence of Distant Ganks, I was not attacked even once, or even saw anyone moving to interdict me.
I was kind of disappointed that that wasn't the case.
Back when Sandro announced that a "significant majority" of players Play in Open, I was shocked by it. This flew in the face of my everyday experience. I was so convinced that Frontier was practicing "there are lies, damnable lies, and Statistics," and so determined to reveal them for the base villians that they were, that I actually spent a week at a CG, simply recording the differences in traffic between my normal play window, and my local prime time. Even though my normal play window coincides with global peak players, nearly twice what it is during my local prime time, I saw only a
fifth of the number of players compared to prime time.
More importantly, though, was that my findings contradicted my theory that Frontier was lying about how many people were playing in Open. Yes, you can be instanced with friends all over the world, but when it comes to random strangers, you're not likely to be instanced with a host you have a bad connection with.
I quoted your answer to Bashy because it was easier to quote and your other answer was in another page of the thread, but I'll try to answer to both.
I understand when you say that it's not gonna be fun for everybody, but you kind of assume that most people are ok with that as it is right now. As I said before this game basically lacks any kind of Open Only game mechanic which isn't a simple "pew-pew" one against the other, as CQC is, and you alwayas talk about BGS, how you find that funny etc, even if you do that in Open Only, which is your choice (as it is mine, btw).
Honestly a renewed Powerplay with the three modes coexistence, with missions etc, would just be a large BGS, and do we really need to copy another game mechanic just... bigger?
Again: I agree with you that Open Only is not the only solution to solve actual Powerplay problems, I never said differently, I only said it's a further tool for the developers to spot abusers, so it's not a bad thing considering the fight against unlegit behaviours in game, to point it out it's not a valid argument against it. For example: if you have got high cardiovascular risk, you don't go to mcdonald's every day because, to reduce it, a healthy diet is not enough. Just a little example to point out how objectivity must be handled: is it an improvement about a particular problem? Then it's useful. Is it not enough? This doesn't make it useless. If you notice I like to be extremly logical about game mechanics, considering human interaction as a variable and not something absolutely certain.
Back to the game mechanics, which is what I find interesting, not hollow discussions about "freedom of speech" to hide how little somebody has to say about the argument.
We all agree Powerplay must be something more variable (to avoid botting), possibly mission driven (to make it more enjoyable to play and less repetitive) with game mechanics capable to reduce or even nullify 5C action (no overhead, higher upkeeps, single system turmoils, etc).
The discussion about Open Only is something different. It's giving the game something that it has not right now. I want to be clear about that because I think it's the central point of this thread. Would it help against 5C or botting? Yes. Would it be enough? No.
But let's talk about game mechanics for a while. You keep saying that there's people that wouldn't like that kind of game.
I agree. I do not deny that. But I want to consider the people that would like that kind of game, and these people don't have, right now, any type of game mechanic designed for their gamestyle.
I'm just saying: let's offer something to those people, and let's face the problems that such game mechanic would face with constructive methods, not denying the same game mechanic at all.
You talked about your instancing problems. Fair enough, many other people have those at some point. I think that what you described was something related to how the block list works right now, which prevent the instancing with other players. It is possible that some of your contacts had many CMDRs in their Block List, literally making impossible for you to instance with them. And about "blocking your connection with a firewall" I'm quite sure it's against the rules, like: ban-risk-against. But I'd have a fair solution for that too: ban people from Powerplay if found guily of tweaking their connections to avoid other players. That would not affect their game progress singularly.
That's the reason why I think that in an Open Only Powerplay the first thing to change would be how the block channel works, blocking only communications in case of abuse, bad talking etc. I've been part of very huge instances to be honest and during the already nominated war between Antal and Delaine I had nobody of my adversaries in my friend list at the time and trust me: I was seeing them all the time.
Another reasonable concern (which I do not read about very often) would be the problem with landing pads occupied by idle accounts just to slow the operations down. Another fair and reasonable concern, that can be solved by changing how the whole docking works: let's make docked ships go "out of the instance" temporairly to make it free again right after. It would benefit other parts of the game, like go to Engineers in Open (the docking bays are usually all occupied).
You see, I know that's gonna be problems, but I'm positive we can find solutions for those problems. As the community found solutions with the many (many) problems affecting BGS, and many other game mechanis.
What I'm asking is something different, more BGS like probably but with the great difference of actual competition with other players, to have something more unpredictable. We've got very fast ships, for example, imagine how that kind of ships would become a decisive factor against other players that wouldn't be able to block you and kill you, making you able to do your part for your Power anyway.
A better Powerplay that would be like a mega-BGS? Well, that would be better than what we have now, but it would be a lost opportunity to give something really different to the community. It would be simply a large BGS. And I don't see anything wrong in giving the game a new layer of complexity, even if it's gonna become a disaster for somebody, it may be what they were looking for in the game by always.
