PLEASE MAKE POWERPLAY IN "OPEN ONLY"

[Rubbernuke]

And do you know how many youtube videos people can have. I can have 7 my self because I have 7 Clash of Clan accounts. And ask my family or friends to vote a certain way so is not Valid. Now if FRONTIER had their own poll. They can set it on player accounts. People who play the game.

So if I bought several copies of Elite I could skew the vote? If I won the lottery I could have Open Powerplay tomorrow

But the view on this forum and from Obsidian Ants forum in the same. I know you don't like it but you can see it for yourself.

Of course the other question is, how do you ask people? What would the question be since few people know or care about Powerplay in comparison to the games population. You would have people with genuine concerns mixed with slippery slopers who would vote the earth flat again against people who play the feature or those who are genuinely excited to have Powerplay change.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Even FDev would never know until they put it in the game.

Indeed.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

So if I bought several copies of Elite I could skew the vote? If I won the lottery I could have Open Powerplay tomorrow

Indeed, but so could others. I would guess it would balance out unless we have some major whales playing ED who would be so invested they would buy so many copies to skew things in their favour.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Indeed, but so could others. I would guess it would balance out unless we have some major whales playing ED who would be so invested they would buy so many copies to skew things in their favour.

So we can agree then that all forms of democracy have failed. May I suggest a Powerplay Danceoff to settle this.

 

[Wolf Starslayer]

You don't get a vote, you don't get no dance-off; this ain't no democracy. You get to sulk in a forgotten area of the forums and complain to the cobwebs.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

So we can agree then that all forms of democracy have failed. May I suggest a Powerplay Danceoff to settle this.

A bake off would be better, then we could eat the results of the competiton!

 

[Bashy81]

So we can agree then that all forms of democracy have failed. May I suggest a Powerplay Danceoff to settle this.

A bake off would be better, then we could eat the results of the competiton!

We should settle this in the old way.. stripped-out shieldless cutters headbutting a station under autodock, at dawn... last one alive wins, briefly, but is cursed to spend the next year being accused of being an unrepresentative sample of a subset of a subset of a slippery ganking slope, that seeks to deprive any & all deprived & noble minorities of their birthright. Hmm, no more coffee for me this morning..

You don't get a vote, you don't get no dance-off; this ain't no democracy. You get to sulk in a forgotten area of the forums and complain to the cobwebs.

<<CITATION NEEDED>>

 

[Lestat]

So if I bought several copies of Elite I could skew the vote? If I won the lottery I could have Open Powerplay tomorrow

Don't know why you would waste your Lotto on Several copies. But whatever floats your boat. I would hope you help players on consoles who can't afford Open mode.

But the view on this forum and from Obsidian Ants forum in the same. I know you don't like it but you can see it for yourself.

See here The thing. Anyone can Vote on Obsidian Ant Youtube even your Grandma and your extended family people even using dead people Email to vote. Please note. Some Companies if someone wanted to swing a vote their way. You can pay to have that done.

Of course the other question is, how do you ask people? What would the question be since few people know or care about Powerplay in comparison to the games population. You would have people with genuine concerns mixed with slippery slopers who would vote the earth flat again against people who play the mode or those who are genuinely excited to have Powerplay change.

If Frontier need to ask the right questions. I don't think Players should know what the poll about when they post it. But ask a group of questions. And start off by asking honest questions. How do you feel taking parts of the game away from some of the players that they already enjoy? Should Slow internet or slow computer prevent some players from playing parts of the game? Should parts of the Console gameplay be removed because they don't pay a subscription?

See questions that give more of an honest answer. It does not tell the group of players it Power play Open only. It makes people think. Hay they are people too.

Believe it or not. Shadow of war will take me a week or two to download.

 

[Rubbernuke]

You don't get a vote, you don't get no dance-off; this ain't no democracy. You get to sulk in a forgotten area of the forums and complain to the cobwebs.

True, FD have said its not a democracy. All we can do is discuss what FD have said to us and hope they are paying attention.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Don't know why you would waste your Lotto on Several copies. But whatever floats your boat. I would hope you help players on consoles who can't afford Open mode.

Or make a feature thats worth paying for.

See here The thing. Anyone can Vote on Obsidian Ant Youtube even your Grandma and your extended family people even using dead people Email to vote. Please note. Some Companies if someone wanted to swing a vote their way. You can pay to have that done.

So now its a grand conspiracy? You do know its Powerplay we are talking about, right?

If Frontier need to ask the right questions. I don't think Players should know what the poll about when they post it. But ask a group of questions. And start off by asking honest questions.

How do you feel taking parts of the game away from some of the players that they already enjoy?

Should parts of the Console gameplay be removed because they don't pay a subscription?

The first is not an honest question. You are involving emotion. Its down to FD to juggle numbers and any net gain from making the change. Games are luxury items, you buy them or buy into them. If FD see more money via a feature being used more, then they will choose that.

Should Slow internet or slow computer prevent some players from playing parts of the game?

Why can't my GT 1030 not play Crisis at 4K? Games as a service change. You are saying over a decade (its projected lifespan) that nothing can change in ED?

See questions that give more of an honest answer. It does not tell the group of players it Power play Open only. It makes people think. Hay they are people too.

FD care about money, and if the game generates it.

How about these for actual questions?

1: Do you play Powerplay? How often have you used the feature and in what mode? Why did you use this feature (and why in that mode)?

These filter the people who don't know what they are talking about from those who do. Then you'd ask:

2: Do you think this feature would benefit from being restricted to Open only? Would weighting merits in favour of open be an option?

If you answered no to question 1, then you'd ask:

3: If Powerplay was restricted to open or used a system to reward playing in open, would you be tempted to play it? Would moving Powerplay specific modules affect your choice?

 

[Myrm]

PowerPlay does not interest me as a whole. I am only doing it to get Prismatic shields.

 

[Lestat]

Or make a feature thats worth paying for.

What I read on this topic. Not everyone can pay for everything.

So now its a grand conspiracy? You do know its Powerplay we are talking about, right?

I am looking at polls that can be fixed. Not so easy if Frontier does the polls and uses Accounts. They can use the IP Address, Credit Card, User real name address. So it one person One poll.

The first is not an honest question. You are involving emotion. Its down to FD to juggle numbers and any net gain from making the change. Games are luxury items, you buy them or buy into them. If FD see more money via a feature being used more, then they will choose that.

They are all Honest Questions and emotions should be put in the poll to make it fairer. Lucky for us Frontier cares about its users. It does not focus on player PvPer greed.

Why can't my GT 1030 not play Crisis at 4K? Games as a service change. You are saying over a decade (its projected lifespan) that nothing can change in ED?

Old game.

FD care about money, and if the game generates it.

Frontier care more about customers than Greed.

 

[Rubbernuke]

What I read on this topic. Not everyone can pay for everything.

Which is surprising exactly how?

I am looking at polls that can be fixed. Not so easy if Frontier does the polls and uses Accounts. They can use the IP Address, Credit Card, User real name address. So it one person One poll.

I bet myself, WorldsGreatestForumDad, Bashy, Rinzler etc all have seventy sock puppet accounts. Maybe I'm Bashy, or he is me?

They are all Honest Questions and emotions should be put in the poll to make it fairer. Lucky for us Frontier cares about its users. It does not focus on player PvPer greed.

Frontier care about money, because they are a buisiness and not a charity. They are paid to be nice to you so you stay and buy more stuff.

How does emotion make it fairer? Surely objective improvement and making something unattractive to users attractive again is what makes sense in the end?

Old game.

Games as a service mean someone in the end will lose out. So far ED has ended 32bit support, Mac support, certain graphical effects are not in console versions, and as time goes on discrepancies will become greater.

player PvPer greed.

And here we are. PvP players are all baby eating fascists who want to ruin your game with a change that has a great deal of merit to it.

Frontier care more about customers than Greed.

Frontier are a listed company. They want to make games that sell, and if you have a part of that game that is not pulling its weight you do something about it. Sadly FD want to fix PP as cheaply as they can, and from those options tabled we have some interesting choices. To do nothing is frankly condemning the feature.

 

[Bashy81]

Don't know why you would waste your Lotto on Several copies. But whatever floats your boat. I would hope you help players on consoles who can't afford Open mode.

See here The thing. Anyone can Vote on Obsidian Ant Youtube even your Grandma and your extended family people even using dead people Email to vote. Please note. Some Companies if someone wanted to swing a vote their way. You can pay to have that done.

If Frontier need to ask the right questions. I don't think Players should know what the poll about when they post it. But ask a group of questions. And start off by asking honest questions. How do you feel taking parts of the game away from some of the players that they already enjoy? Should Slow internet or slow computer prevent some players from playing parts of the game? Should parts of the Console gameplay be removed because they don't pay a subscription?

See questions that give more of an honest answer. It does not tell the group of players it Power play Open only. It makes people think. Hay they are people too.

Believe it or not. Shadow of war will take me a week or two to download.

So firstly, console players can create numerous CMDRs for free & switch between them at will. PC players have to pay for a new copy of the game for each CMDR they wish to save. If Powerplay went OpenOnly, if they want to do Powerplay then Console players would have to have an online subscription (with all the other benefits that enjoys), PC players get Powerplay at no extra cost. Overall, PC players would still have the bum end of the deal for most people there tbh, but at least there is a financial balance of some kind. It really isn't a gross injustice.

Secondly, are you sure you don't want to blame Russian Hackers for rigging the Obsidian Ant poll? It wasn't brigaded, the ratios at the start and at the end remained stable within a few percentage points, and the number of votes kept rising consistently.

Thirdly, you mean Frontier should be asking loaded & skewed questions to suit you. If it was kept even more general, & out of a gaming context altogether, surely that would help players really not know what the poll was about when they post it? That way, you could ask a fair & balanced general question like "should baby seals be clubbed to death by trolls" and be sure of getting the answer you want. If you look at the way Obsidian Ant posted it, his questions amounted to "should people be allowed to remain free to choose how they want to do powerplay" versus "should powerplay be restricted to one mode only" To someone without a better understanding, the natural answer to that is to cry "FREEDOM" and vote for things to stay the same. Despite this, despite OA being an exploration-heavy content provider, who doesn't do combat AFAIK & has almost zero PvP content, the vote still came back consistent with the forum vote, strongly in favour of OpenOnly. In another context, 53% to 47% is apparently a democratic mandate. 53% to 25% however is a landslide, and 53% was only as low as it was because the vote was split between two 'change' options.

I recently spent 4 months on a contested theoretical-max. 2mb ADSL line, 5 miles from the nearest exchange. I feel your pain. Loading times between systems & dropping to instances could be nasty. But so what? sometimes I tended towards quieter spots, but we had expansions going on during that time & it wasn't gamebreaking or a big problem.

 

[varonica]

Nice copypasta rhetorical device. It is supposed to be for dismissing spurious claims, but can just as easily be used to lazily dismiss any argument you personally disagree with, as in this case.

No, a claim of fact was made, that's completely different. The basis for debate and argument is that any claim of fact, when called on, should be backed up by evidence. On the other hand you can say, it's my opinion, I believe, I suspect, as much as you want, but if a claim of of fact is made then it should be backed up by the evidence when called out.

It's a basic logical fallacy, Hitchen's Razor;

Overview. The concept is named, echoing Occam's razor, for the journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens, who in a 2003 Slate article formulated it thus: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence".

 

[Bashy81]

I stand by what I said, it's absolutely true. Hitchen's Razor, the 'rhetorical device' I was referring to, can be easily used to lazily dismiss any argument you personally disagree with. It can be used to place a ridiculous burden on people who are trying to discuss issues in any depth, by attempting to force them to justify every tiny well-known detail. It amounts to trolling, a lot of the time.

This may not have been your intent, in which case I apologise for my tone, but in anycase, Rubbernuke kindly provided links for you to some of the evidence I was referring to originally. I trust you can at least go back a page or two to find that..

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I bet myself, WorldsGreatestForumDad, Bashy, Rinzler etc all have seventy sock puppet accounts. Maybe I'm Bashy, or he is me?

I thought you were Derek Smart.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Point 1: They can be used by people in PG. Does this mean PP should be removed from solo but not PG, since PG has parity with open?

Point 2: Agreed that it does mean there isn't parity. That is why some people want NPC wingmen and want to see their NPC crew in cockpits. To bring parity.

Point 3: Powerplay does not require people to be in the same instance/mode/platform to work.

Powerplay failed because of point 3. Not because it was a bad design. You have to put people in the same place.


Point 2 they get someone in a fighter bay. Some games want people to use group play. See world of warcraft dungeons and raids.

Point 1 see why powerplay failed in your point 3.

Not hard to figure out. Dont know why people try and argue about it otherwise. Its completely pointless to do so.

Nope.

Powerplay failed because of bad design. There is an extremely limited number of activities, while the base games has a terrific mix. The rules of the game encourages 5th column play to disrupt a Power over the actual undermining mechanism. And said mechanism includes a "once then done" immunity to undermining via fortification, as opposed to a contest. The design has limited appeal in the first place, combines it with rules almost guaranteed to ensure stagnation, and tops it off with making it easy for hostile players to disrupt a Power from within.

Compared to that, the "impact" of modes is negligible. Let's do the math, shall we? I'm kind of curious to see how that might shake out.

We have to make some assumptions, of course, because Frontier isn't providing any hard data on the subject:

1. The PowerPlayer base reflects the overall Elite Dangerous player base.
2. The overall player base reflects the Steam player base.
3. The Steam player base represents about a quarter of the overall player base, with an even distribution between non-Steam PC players, XBox, and PS4 players.

From Steamspy, the average and median player plays about five hours over a two week period. That seems really low to me, but who am I to argue with actual data? Also from Steamspy, the sum of peak players over the last week is 39,746. From SteamCharts, the sum of concurrent players per hour over the last 24 hours at the time of this writing is 83,651, and the relationship between that sum and peak players that day is 15.5:1. This brings the total number of "hours played" on Steam, over the last seven days, to 617,964. Divide this by 2.5, and you get 247,000 "players" on Steam. Let's round that up to 250,000 just to make the math easier in the future. Double that, and you get 500,000 "players" on the PC.

Time for another assumption: the PowerPlayer-base represents about 10% of the overall player base. This means that there are 50,000 "players" each week involved in PowerPlay. Of those, roughly 20% are involved with shift work, and thus face no effective opposition when they play. This brings the total "players" that can potentially be your opposition down to 40,000. According to Inara, there are 709 control systems. Divide the "players" equally between these systems, and you get 56 "players" per system. Spread out those "players" evenly throughout the week (2.5 hours in a 168 hour period), and you get an effective player density, at any time, of...

0.8 "players" per system per hour. And this for everything: fortification, undermining, preparation, and expansion. If time spent on these activities are roughly equal, which is one last assumption, that means that there are 0.2 "players" fortifying (aka hauling) and 0.2 "players" undermining (aka "opposition") a system within any particular hour.

But wait, I'm not finished!

That fortifier isn't spending most of their time in that particular system! A good Commander can "speed trade" a T9 from station to station in about four minutes, only one of which would be spent in Supercruise at their destination. Add in an average of four jumps there, and four jumps back, at 45 seconds each, and you get about ten minutes per trip, or six trips per hour, during which there's only six minutes where they could potentially share an instance with an underminer... if said underminer spends all their time hanging around in Supercruise waiting for the fortifier to arrive, instead of, you know, undermining the system.

 

[Rubbernuke]

I thought you were Derek Smart.

Maybe I am? Now that would be frightening.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Some powers play in open because it allows a better game experience / requires more skill, while others attack them in open but fort in solo. One is harder to do than the other, but not rewarded at all. Some might say play in kind but then that stratifies the game into a boring haul-em-up and 'sort of shoot them in expansions maybe'. It can't be all things to everyone because people will choose. Its a bit like being in a war and choosing who can shoot at you. Ultimately the two extremes are either make it all solo or make it all open.

Here's the thing, though. What you said, that some powers play in Open, while others fort in Solo? This claim is made by every single Power I know about. Every single Power has some variation of: "Remember, honorable Imperials fly in Open. Only cowardly Federal scum fly in Solo." Granted, the Powers these days have shifted over to Discord, so I could be missing something, but I really doubt this attitude has changed any.

So either PowerPlayers are less likely than the general player base, the majority of which plays in Open by a significant margin, or PowerPlayers are at least as likely to be flying in Open as the general player base, and the population you see in Open is as likely to be as good as it'll get. And if PowerPlay is truly more attractive to the PvP community than it is to the general player base, then you are expecting me to swallow the idea that PvPers, the group most likely to play in Open because its more fun that way, are all "hiding" in Solo because its more efficient that way, vs the idea that the overall PowerPlayer density is so low (see above), that unless an underminer spends all their time not undermining, it's pure blind luck that they'll encounter a fortifier.

Will that change if fortifying is changed inward, from control systems to the capital?

Perhaps, but here's the paradox of PvP in Powerplay IMO: every ship attempting to blockade a capital system, is not undermining a control system. Every minute spent blockading is only worth a tenth of a fortifier's time, because the balance between fortification and undermining includes the fortifier's transit time as well. To achieve a rough parity with a player undermining a control system, a blockading player has to kill ten fortifiers, per minute, and they need to be successful every time. Each ship that slips the blockade effectively doubles the amount of effort required to undermine a system under Sandro's proposed changes.

And ships will slip through. Because of how instancing works, roughly 20% of ships running the blockade will not have any effective opposition at all. The blockaders will have to guess, correctly, which port incoming fortifiers will be traveling to each time, to even have a hope of intercepting them before they can drop off their cargo, and most players won't make it easy for them by flying via the "Forum Recommended Technique" or AutoCruise. And while the blockaders are busy chasing one ship, others will slip through unopposed. And that assume that everyone plays fair, and doesn't use alt accounts as scouts and decoys.

And all this assumes that traditional fortification will be much more effective than PowerPlay missions. If not, then we're right back to the player density problem.