When I started playing this game, I was super enthusiastic about it, pledging for Archon Delaine, coordinating with the Kumo Crew, and even building a small but very talented PMF that persists to this day under fine leadership on the PS4 platform. I personally burned out on the whole thing, though, when I came to understand just how much Risk-averse, PvP-averse players simply negated the entire raison d'etre of a militaristic/piratical faction like the Archon's. I bought into advertising about a robust political and military space strategy game that Frontier hyped Power Play up to be. What I found was carebears grinding away happily in solo mode, indeed, an entire private group community thousands strong literally playing their own game outside of the overall ED playerbase and very much outside of anything Frontier ever intended for the game to be, well beyond the scope of purpose Private Groups were ever meant to serve. In short, what I found was that all of the advertising about Power Play as a robust political and military strategy game were made into outright lies by Power Play being fully available in Solo and Private Group modes. It made the entire thing pointless. Fix it and a lot of people like myself will come right back to ED.
Not everyone wishes to stay in Solo, but as 2 out of 3 platforms you can play Elite in requires extra payment to play in PG or Open, saying that Powerplay is not for them is kinda unfair.
Subscriptions in online gaming are a fact of life. It's $10 a month for PS+, and just $60 for the year. I don't know what the price is on XB1, but I can personally attest to how cheap it is on PS4. And that's got nothing to do with ED - it's not ED charging people for PS+. It's Sony. And Playstation players know good and well that most multiplayer games, indeed,
ALL of the good ones, will require PS+ for online play. I'm sorry, but this is practically a non-argument. And rather than PP, they can BGS to their heart's content - adopt a MF and take over their whole region with the thing grinding away in solo and pat themselves on the back for a job well done and good for them. But I bought this game on Frontier's promise of a grand PvP strategy game, not to grind against ghosts.
Literally paid money to Frontier based on a lie.
You also mentioned how rare it is to see players in Open. That's because they don't want to risk having space violence visited upon their pixels, and since the game doesn't give them any reason to, they just don't. So you don't see them in Open. Because they aren't there.
You're right. Let's put everything else behind paywall then. Wanna see thargoids? that's 5€ per month. How about engineers for another 5€? Just cause they already had multiplayer function behind paywall, let's start locking them out from other stuff too
Best idea ever
Pfft. Lots of games do even worse than that, like COD with Warzone being free and the entire rest of the game behind behind two separate paywalls (the game price plus the multiplayer service subscription price). PP being behind the multiplayer service subscription paywall would be nothing compared to most games' paywalls.
Merits should still count as full value for personal benefits (modules and special benefits of PP rank for the player). But their effect on fortification etc would be reduced (maybe halved?).
Nah. No contribution
at all. This type of player is happy to grind their life away with no adversarial interaction. Halve their contribution and they will happily grind twice as hard to have the same invincible (i.e., immune to confrontation) effect on the PP map.
That some players can't accept that others don't need to play with them to affect the game is no fault of those who choose not to play with them.
You're right, it's not their fault. It's Frontier's fault for creating a game feature that is PvP by nature and allowing it to be impacted by players without exposing themselves to the players of their enemy factions. And it's long past time Frontier corrected the mistake.