PLEASE MAKE POWERPLAY IN "OPEN ONLY"

Whatever your POV is, thats whats being discussed here.
Most of the time. OK, Almost, most of the time. Mind you, I have to say that the words; hiding and cowards, haven't been added to the argument in this thread. Which is a major improvement, to many of the other threads, on this subject.
 
But in Powerplay you can kill what you like, as there are no rules against it, and despite it being nerfed it still rewards you. The simple act of shooting another rival pledge cannot be the basis for blocking them.

And the analogy is apt, because a tackle happens all the time in football, just like conflict in Powerplay.
If I am going to be shooting at another player. I don't see the need to block them, it would defeat the object of the exercise.
 
Sandros suggested changes condense activity down considerably (by a factor of 15 or more) and make everything inbound. It takes the sprawl and makes it almost multi arena like.

Which is why, should Sandro's suggested changes take place, I suspect that many of the less combat oriented, non-PvP, Open Powerplayers will switch to Powerplay missions rather than hauling. Accomplishing your goals in Powerplay in Open is currently about avoiding PvP, after all. If we actively sought out PvP, we'd be PvPers. If we were playing in other modes, we'd be PvEers. Instead, we're kind of stuck in the middle.

Interference from non-pledges might also come from the often neglected 'freedom fighters' though in Open PP- you get that for free here. Plus, engineers now have toys that make life a bit more difficult for haulers.

I know all about them, even if I've rarely encountered them in the game.

Its not about straight up killing though. Its disrupting your enemy and minimising the same disruption to you so those who are collecting and moving can do so. Its also self organising, in that activity zones become hot organically as more and more gather together (as seen in that massive wing fight video- that was spontaneous).

As I mentioned earlier too, we have new weapons like reverb torps / mines, ion mines, drag munitions, phasing. With teams working for and against you its a whole new way of approaching Powerplay beyond plain hauling and shooting.

In your example, pledges would protect you, because they have to. Combat expansions have overwatch, as well as others picking off wounded ships.

And this:

it's far more fun to play inefficiently than the alternative

Is exactly why Open is needed- Open breaks the 100% reliability of Powerplay solo / PG activities. It introduces disruption into a system that has become static and that NPCs cannot help with.

Open is needed, yes. Open-Only Powerplay, on the other hand, will drive away far more players than it attracts in the long term IME. What you describe above? I sincerely doubt it will work in this game. There are no Power-wide in-game communication channels. The way instancing "works" in this game means that you are just as likely to be instanced with "overwatch" as they are to be instanced with opposing players, that is rarely. I've played enough PvE/PvP hybrid games to know that kind of thing rarely works as advertised, and those were MMOs with a client/server architecture designed by developers who had actual multi-player and MMO experience.

As for the "super-competitive"... in an Open Only environment, they're far more likely to combat log, fiddle with router settings, and outright cheat than play "fair." I would rather have them playing in other modes, than playing in Open and waste my precious play time on a cheater who'll combat log at the first hint that things aren't going their way... assuming that the risk/reward balance is sufficient for me to even consider PvP an option, or course. Under Sandro's proposal, their efficiencies will cancel each other out, and maximizing the size of the Powerplayer population would mean that Frontier would be more willing to continue improving it.

Fair enough you dislike combat- but, Powerplay regardless of mode at minimum depending on Power is 1/3 combat.

You say that, but in those four months, the only combat merits I ever earned was the opportunistic ones that I gained from killing an NPC who interdicted me. But then again, my typical play window at that time was at the start Powerplay cycle, so there was plenty of hauling to do.

Its tedious because its mundane with nothing happening. This is why a lot of people including myself want interaction with players here to influence this.

You're wrong there. The threat of NPCs is always present, should I desire that kind of excitement. It becomes tedious because I'd learned the destination system. That's why I like missions: they don't take me to the same few systems, so I know where the best routes and approaches are. That's why I'm currently 50kly away from the Bubble, and getting further every play session, and exploring primarily via parallax: each system I explore is completely virgin territory, and doesn't even have navigation aides unless I choose to create them, so I'm flying by feel.

A system I've never visited before is a pleasure to fly through. A system I've flown through dozens of times can be relaxing, as long as its broken up by systems I rarely visit, so their configuration has changed enough that I need to relearn the optimal routes. The same two systems over and over and over again? 😱

Another player who's interrupting my play session without even showing showing me the basic courtesy of even a communications macro? They can be fun, once moon, to test my skills against, are tolerable in small doses, annoying in moderate doses, and utterly tedious in large doses. Given that I'm not a combat oriented player, and that they are inevitably flying some form of PvP-meta ship, there are no real decisions to make, and thus no real gameplay value.

I agree with you, but for different reasons. Powerplays 'gameplay' is horrific, but I stuck with it all these years for the players and interactions between them in and out of game. I dearly want FD to come in and say a three modes wonderland is coming but sadly its not. The options are few and (IMO at least) Open has the most future potential.

I think the basic disconnect is what we consider gameplay. For me, gameplay is about the decisions I need to make. Do I work against this Federal faction in this system, or that Federal faction in that system. Do I install another cargo module in my mission runner, or a passenger cabin? Do I have the time to investigate a USS on my flight path, or should I keep flying to my destination? Should I install weapons on my ship to fight the occasional NPC pirate, or should I fly a pure blockade runner?

In game activities are what I do once that decision has been made, but they are activities, not gameplay, to me. Calling activities gameplay is a bit like calling pressing a button is gameplay IMO.

That is why I'm attracted to the potential of Powerplay, even if Frontier's execution is pretty atrocious. More factors to consider = more decisions to make = more gameplay for me.
 
If I am going to be shooting at another player. I don't see the need to block them, it would defeat the object of the exercise.

Thats exactly why the block tool would need to be changed. Its abused like a proxy shield currently as well.

The fine line is what tools stop what, since we have a language filter, and strong reporting tools. The ultimate aim is to ensure players are safe but not a the expanse of the feature.
 
Thats exactly why the block tool would need to be changed. Its abused like a proxy shield currently as well.

The fine line is what tools stop what, since we have a language filter, and strong reporting tools. The ultimate aim is to ensure players are safe but not a the expanse of the feature.
I don't believe that the block function can be used during combat; only after the fight is over, however that is achieved. So it can't be used as a shield, can it? Only after escaping or the re-buy screen. To escape, means a win and the re-buy is a loss. Game objective has been achieved, either way.
 
Its the total opposite; by having mixed modes people simply go for the easiest and most efficient route which happens to be in solo and PG. That just makes everything a one dimensional gathering race where your opponents can't be tripped up but dictates the pace of the overall game.

If I play in solo, I can get rid of a shield and know it does not matter. If I do that in open, there is a high chance I'll be turned inside out. Because I'm in open and that there is a chance of interception I change my behaviour regardless of if I meet someone or not.


This is the thing I'm most skeptical about, regarding PPOO. The underlying premise is that Powerplay is all about the PvP, and yet I'm expected to believe that PvPers, those most likely to play in Open, are mostly hiding in Solo/PG, bored out of their minds, because it's efficient to do so. That a PvPer is less likely than the average player, the significant majority of which play in Open, to fly in Open. I think it's far more likely that the Powerplayer-base is at least as likely as the general player-base to play in Open, and only a few hyper-competitive players would willingly choose a mode that isn't suited to them for some minor advantage.
 

Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
Paradoxically opposing open only powerplay you have much more probabilities to get bored players who grief at interstellar initiatives.
Pan-modal access to features ensures that players can choose which mode from which to participate in them, including Interstellar Initiatives.
 
Open is needed, yes. Open-Only Powerplay, on the other hand, will drive away far more players than it attracts in the long term IME. What you describe above? I sincerely doubt it will work in this game. There are no Power-wide in-game communication channels. The way instancing "works" in this game means that you are just as likely to be instanced with "overwatch" as they are to be instanced with opposing players, that is rarely. I've played enough PvE/PvP hybrid games to know that kind of thing rarely works as advertised, and those were MMOs with a client/server architecture designed by developers who had actual multi-player and MMO experience.

At the very least I'd like to try it for a set amount of time, mainly as the massive expansion fights I have been involved in had exactly that- overwatch wings, CZ farmers, intruders. If after that time its jusdged a mistake then fair enough.

You're wrong there. The threat of NPCs is always present

But its not intelligently presented. I know instantly what every NPC is doing at a NAV, in SC and so on. They pop up and move like clockwork. If FD could make NPCs like players then I'd be all for it.

Another player who's interrupting my play session without even showing showing me the basic courtesy of even a communications macro? They can be fun, once moon, to test my skills against, are tolerable in small doses, annoying in moderate doses, and utterly tedious in large doses. Given that I'm not a combat oriented player, and that they are inevitably flying some form of PvP-meta ship, there are no real decisions to make, and thus no real gameplay value.

But its the act of fortifying and the situation that is the gameplay there. You have the mundane (hauling) being interrupted by the player who is a genuine threat. The only ships that ever interdict me are weak and frankly pointless.

I think the basic disconnect is what we consider gameplay. For me, gameplay is about the decisions I need to make. Do I work against this Federal faction in this system, or that Federal faction in that system. Do I install another cargo module in my mission runner, or a passenger cabin? Do I have the time to investigate a USS on my flight path, or should I keep flying to my destination? Should I install weapons on my ship to fight the occasional NPC pirate, or should I fly a pure blockade runner?

When I talk about gameplay I am probably mixing my words, but its making emergent activities that results in unpredicatble gameplay.

Its using my skills- shipbuilding, outfitting, anticipating danger and preparing, and then flying out and getting that job done. Each haul of PP merits should be tense and exciting self made mission, not monotonous. But its also having 'sweaty palms'- the game just pushing you out of a comfort zone. You just escaping. With other people these moments are generated spontaneously and at random. In Solo or PG, you'll sometimes /maybe face one PP NPC that is beyond easy to get away from even with no engineering. It has no life to it, and is why lots of pledges stopped doing it.

PP gameplay is also co-ordinating and finally fighting in these massive scuffles, scrambling to fight off a rival or protect someone. It may seem that its unworkable to you, but persoanlyl I've seen sparks of this happen throughout my years playing the feature. Open would hopefully join all that together in one congruent feature.
 
I don't believe that the block function can be used during combat; only after the fight is over, however that is achieved. So it can't be used as a shield, can it? Only after escaping or the re-buy screen. To escape, means a win and the re-buy is a loss. Game objective has been achieved, either way.

No, you have pledges from powers who block rivals they come across from the history tab.
 
This is the thing I'm most skeptical about, regarding PPOO. The underlying premise is that Powerplay is all about the PvP, and yet I'm expected to believe that PvPers, those most likely to play in Open, are mostly hiding in Solo/PG, bored out of their minds, because it's efficient to do so. That a PvPer is less likely than the average player, the significant majority of which play in Open, to fly in Open. I think it's far more likely that the Powerplayer-base is at least as likely as the general player-base to play in Open, and only a few hyper-competitive players would willingly choose a mode that isn't suited to them for some minor advantage.

My take on Open Powerplay is that its not pure PvP- the label in itself is misleading IMO in this context. In my head its more about outfoxing your rivals- escaping, using cunning (either piloting or through outfitting/ ship choice). Like I said before you won't really know until you try it and see what patterns form.

Ideally I'd love FD to say for the next 3 months Powerplay will be open only, and after that we will decide from feedback / player data wether to keep it permanently.
 
I don't believe that the block function can be used during combat; only after the fight is over, however that is achieved. So it can't be used as a shield, can it? Only after escaping or the re-buy screen. To escape, means a win and the re-buy is a loss. Game objective has been achieved, either way.

As the block feature works currently, I could see a potential "pirate" moving to interdict me, add them to my block list, and then lead them on a merry chase through the system, and in the unlikely event that they successfully interdicted me during my braking maneuver... because they're blocked, we would each end up in a separate instance.

I consider this kind of thing to be in extremely poor taste myself. If they managed to get an interdiction tether on me, despite my best efforts to avoid it, I think they've earned that interdiction mini-game, and/or getting a chance to shoot me. If I actually wanted to deliberately waste their time, I'd lead them away from the primary entirely until either they got bored and turned back (allowing me to use some Supercruise techniques to race ahead of them to my destination), or I get bored and jump out and back again, and hope that their PvP-metaship only has a 2D FSD installed. ;)

The problem is that the way instancing "works" in this game, that "pirate" can't tell the difference between that, the two of us sharing an instance with a third player who has a decent connection to us both but extremely poor connections to each other, one of the kids coming home and watching Netflix.
 
I don't even care to read through the whole thread, but this whole discussion seems pointless to me for one reason:
Elite is not designed as MMO game. It's a single player game with OPTION to somehow (to some extent, in one way or another) share some of that experience with others.

In Open I can block another player, increasing my chances of not being in the same instance with him.
Blocking function is essential to this game and will not be suspended for open only powerplay, so players of one faction can simply block all other players of another faction.
Even without blocking, you can be in the same place, like starport, but not seeing the same people as someone else, becasue there might be multiple instances.
You can have poopooty connection and game will prefer to band together those with better pings, etc.

Whatever your opinion is on how would it be cool or not, Open only anything is simply not in the realm of possibilities for this game because of design philosphy.

also do not forget about all the other things that would limit this suggested interactions aswell...

No platform crossplay, but we all share the same universe... imagine what would happen if the majority of lets say PS4 players decided to go for supporting "
Aisling Duval", for not other good reason that she has cool blue hair... so they do all the fancy PP stuff to support her in open on PS4, and what are PC and XBox players going to do to stop the PS4 players? Then we are basically back at the square one again, with talks about people that take "lazy" route of today playing in solo/pg...



Time zones, players do not play at the same time around the world, so you do not play in the major time zones of the other players in your "area", like if you are in europe, and play 12 hours the normal evening hours, then you are less likely to encounter other players... as the instacing prefer to place you in instances with other players from the same region.



And we have not even ventured into the shady realms of players using specific tactics to block other players from instancing with you...by setting some rules in their FW... And on some players they are actually encountering this by no fault of their own, due to their ISP:s implementing stuff in the network that would do the same...
 
I honestly feel that blocking should just prevent comms, not affect instancing.

“Instead of equipping a Shield generator, I just block any perceived threat”

Like, you might as well just play in PG at that point.
 
If they add Power Play open. Then. They need to ban Pvpers. Put them in shadow ban. I am all for trading, pirate and bounties hunters. This would make it fair for players who are forced into open. Who otherwise rather play in solo mode power play.
 
My take on Open Powerplay is that its not pure PvP- the label in itself is misleading IMO in this context. In my head its more about outfoxing your rivals- escaping, using cunning (either piloting or through outfitting/ ship choice). Like I said before you won't really know until you try it and see what patterns form.

Ideally I'd love FD to say for the next 3 months Powerplay will be open only, and after that we will decide from feedback / player data wether to keep it permanently.

Oh, I understand what you're talking about, and what you describe is PvP IMO. So is player-killing/ganking, for that matter, but I would never call a player-killer/ganker a PvPer.

In my experience, though, what you're describing simply doesn't work. Like many other aspects of PvP, the "cunning" doesn't actually happen in the game, but in the meta-game. The use of alts to scout potential targets before a raid, for example, infiltrating the opposing sides forums or chat, and so on. After a while, the whole thing devolves into a game of blind-man's bluff, where the only PvP that happens is when both sides accidentally show up at the same time and place.

When you combine that with the tendency of PvPers to seek out PvP, rather than sitting around doing nothing on guard duty, and you get a situation where non-PvPers really can't rely on anyone but themselves for their own protection. And that was in games that used a client/server architecture, as opposed to what we have in this game.
 
also do not forget about all the other things that would limit this suggested interactions aswell...

No platform crossplay, but we all share the same universe... imagine what would happen if the majority of lets say PS4 players decided to go for supporting "
Aisling Duval", for not other good reason that she has cool blue hair... so they do all the fancy PP stuff to support her in open on PS4, and what are PC and XBox players going to do to stop the PS4 players? Then we are basically back at the square one again, with talks about people that take "lazy" route of today playing in solo/pg...

Pledges are spread quite evenly across platforms. But FD only know for certain. My own Power has a good spread across XB, PS and PC.

Time zones, players do not play at the same time around the world, so you do not play in the major time zones of the other players in your "area", like if you are in europe, and play 12 hours the normal evening hours, then you are less likely to encounter other players... as the instacing prefer to place you in instances with other players from the same region.

This does not really affect Powerplay, mainly as the closer you get to Thursday morning the more synchronized players get if they are doing large co-ordinated attacks. I remember when I was up at 4AM with a guy from Finland, the UK, Africa and Australia hours before the cycle ended to prep snipe.

And we have not even ventured into the shady realms of players using specific tactics to block other players from instancing with you...by setting some rules in their FW... And on some players they are actually encountering this by no fault of their own, due to their ISP:s implementing stuff in the network that would do the same...

This will always be the weakness in the plan, but, until you try you don't know how much of a problem it would be or pose.
 
I will leave if I can't do power play my way. I like how it is. I can play solo or open mode it my choice. I don't want to deal with ganker or PvPers I should not have to.
 
Unfortunately FD chose to make it a bland PvE grindfest, and making it open only, while presenting more opportunties for PvP it will still be a bland PvE grindfest.
It is interesting that you word it this way.
Basically attacking those that do enjoy the current system, and that it has no PvP mechanics. As if they are wrong? maybe just maybe open up to the fact that everything cannot be as you want it? this is the way FDev wants it to be currently. And considering that ever since Powerplay came into existence there has been an outcry to make it open only because some people seem to think that it will give them more targets to attack in open.
But there is nothing that supports that statement, especially given the nature of people's online times and locations. Elite isn't a game based around PvP and expecting that seems to just be setting yourself up for failure.
There are a huge amount of players that do not actively participate in the forum, they simply sit down and play the game the way they want to play it, and then go about their lives afterwards. If the game stops being fun to them, they quit.
How many of these people will quit if a minority of players, by frontier's previous statement about PvP, get their will to turn the focus of the game more towards PvP? that is something these topics never really address, and if they do they simply brush that group of players aside because they are playing the game 'wrong'
 
People are confusing what Open mode can be with what it is now. I'm talking from a perspective of Open Only and what it might be like.
'can' be?
However should it be that? would that really make it better for everyone? as stated in last post, what about those people that aren't active on forum but simply playing and enjoy the game as it is currently, what about them? if they quit because the game changes to something they do not enjoy? That is simply too bad? remember, as frontier has previously stated, the group of people wanting PvP is a minority.
 
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