ANNOUNCEMENT Game Balancing Pt.3

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

I would mantain BGS as it is, because it involves all the missions in the game and if you make it Open-Only you are just killing solo or private modes. What I would do is making Power Play Open-only. Just two ways to gain merits (combat and transport) make a quite good opportunity to open-only pvp gameplay in hot systems between different powers.

Not to mention it would effectively turn ED in to a messed up version of a pay-to-win game where I lose a large portion of the game if I dont pay extra for PS+.

 

[CMDR RuIncognito]

ahahahahah die gold rush!
what will happen next? place your bets? Blind who were robbed even in the game ...

 

[EidLeWeise]

Bold. I don't see this going down well with players who have spent many hours grinding the ranks. If we were to adjust rank gain, it should affect future commanders only, not diminish people's effort retroactively.

To be honest Bruce, I've hypothesised that as part of "Odyssey's Release" The Bank of Zaonce get's destroyed by the Thargoids, and EVERYONE goes back to 100cr and a Sidewinder - Well maybe not that extreme, but maybe a 'liveable' credit reset, maybe 100,000,000 or so for those with a balance > 1B

 

[Ashnak]

CQC Elite is unrealistic as it stands and the whole content probably needs a total revamp before the ranks are considered.

Amen to that!

 

[Adalphage]

Tell me, how fun is it to be constantly undermined in several systems you own and not be able to do anything apart from outgrinding the people who undermine you because they hide in PG? If it was open only they would have to take risks and this way we don't even know who they are.

I think you don't underestand what making BGS open-only is about. That CHANGES how the game works. You have to obliterate the other game modes, because the BGS is tied to ALL the missions the stations offer. That would not happen, it is not realistic to expect a change like that form FDev, just accept it. Powerplay, on the other side, is more feasible.

 

[Naddesh]

As for different platforms - They are not. We know who some of them are and they are PC players mostly. Lets not kid ourselves, console pop is significantly lower too.

 

[Jmanis]

Imagine how cool the game could be with BGS wars taking place in Open. If you don't want to do PvP yourself, you could ask gankers to join your side with money or something. I'd gladly take an offer of money to escort or gank for a faction. This is the kind of gameplay we are hinting at when we're talking about meaningful PvP.

sounds pretty awful to me.

 

[Dr. Nagi]

David Braben.

"It's essentially a time serving thing, rather than an ability test. So if you postulate that there were such a real thing; every El Presidente or whatever and he want's his daughter taken to somewhere dangerous. They are going to want her to be taken by a pilot who is an Elite pilot. So imagine there are masses of people with contracts going out for jobs to be done, where they want an Elite pilot, most of those Elite pilots know full well that people who have reached the ranks of Dangerous and Deadly are just as good as them at flying. They just haven't served the time."

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOYhoFYIWmw&feature=youtu.be&t=7m57s

That's a bit different, no? It doesn't say they get let in with just the dangerous rank.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Nope, I've tried. Maybe my brain is too small. Try describing what you mean in greater depth. More detail may help with understanding.

No. You're being willfully ignorant. If you speak the language then you understand the words. Otherwise you said it yourself

 

[Naddesh]

I think you don't underestand what making BGS open-only is about. That CHANGES how the game works. You have to obliterate the other game modes, because the BGS is tied to ALL the missions the stations offer. That would not happen, it is not realistic to expect a change like that form FDev, just accept it. Powerplay, on the other side, is more feasible.

You dont understand how simple it would be. Just make the solo / pg actions have 0,1 modifier for BGS. How does it changes other game modes? Everything is the same but states are not modified by those missions.

 

[Jmanis]

Your statement is true to the original intention of BGS but is factually incorrect given its current implementation. Here are some signs that BGS is a PvP (albeit mediated through PvE) activity, similar to any game of chess or Risk etc:
1. Player minor factions are implemented, which groups attach themselves to and identify with actively promoting. This happened in the backdrop of players adopting non-player factions to promote, which is something that still happens.
2. Missions allow influence rewards to specifically push one faction over another.
3. People researched and calculated relative amounts of activity for indicative influence payout. ie they can and do actively use the delivery of trade goods, bounties, combat bonds, cartographic data, in addition to carrying out signal sources and other actions - with the specific intent and result of promoting or attacking certain factions, to the detriment of other factions, with the knowledge that opposing players are doing similar activity against them.
4. Power play powers get specific benefits and negatives from having certain types of government in control of their exploited systems. Therefore power play groups purposefully effect change on BGS, for their own needs and against those of other power play groups, in addition to this bringing them into conflict with groups that proactively engage in BGS.

Unfortunately for your claim, the idea that the BGS is purely a coincidental background simulation to make the galaxy feel alive and nothing more - has been redundant, irrelevant and inaccurate. Both as a result of player actions, and Frontier implemented mechanics. BGS is very much a battleground for players and player groups to carry out conflicts with one another.

None of that sounds like any reason to make BGS open only, to be honest.

 

[Pigletslastand]

@Adalphage it's nice to hear your measured response and I think that would be a start. I however disagree that BGS for solo and PG would be 'killed off' by a balance pass. A small but significant gain for an open only option would most likely not be taken up by the majority of cmdrs. But it would make the game fairer.

 

[Dr. Nagi]

It's from the "Dangerous" in "Elite Dangerous", if you believe the official story that it's not just a marketing tagline that sounded cool but a key part of the lore which states that at Dangerous rank pilots become eligible for "Elite" missions.

Lori Jameson's invitation requirement is the only in-game time this was implemented - the current mission system allocation would I think require the game to be called "Elite Expert".

(Which still sounds better than "Elite: look, it was your job to implement the subtitle" of course)

Ahh, now that makes more sense.
If you're not a backer though you still need an Elite rank anyways to get into Shinrarta.

 

[Deleted member 192138]

No. You're being willfully ignorant. If you speak the language then you understand the words. Otherwise you said it yourself

"So you're saying that all these pips crying out for open only are also in pg/solo hiding or what? You guys all only want people who don't want to pvp? I don't understand. Go fight each other"
Every time I read it, I still don't get it. Sorry.

None of that sounds like any reason to make BGS open only, to be honest.

Okay? I'm not saying those in themselves constitute a reason to make BGS open only. They're a response to your claim that BGS is a background effect only.

 

[Rubbernuke]

None of that sounds like any reason to make BGS open only, to be honest.

The BGS was always the slower, more 'chess by post' type affair and making it open would not really work, mainly because you never really know the intentions of others- you can't see missions, or what they intend to do- too much is obfuscated and anonymized.

 

[Zieman]

Who is selfish and unreasonable here?

You.
You don't understand the situation.
The "ghost people" are the result of multi-platform, 24/7 online game with limited instance size and various instancing filters (like mode selection, friends list, blocking). Were it to become "open only", you'd still not catch many of those who work against your faction. And it could well be that if you get some, the effect might even be negative to your side.

The REAL problem actually is that the BGS is all too easy to influence. Reducing one player's effect on it by a factor of 1000 would be a good start.

 

[Pigletslastand]

I believe that seeing as we are in a balance pass the more Dangerous activity of open should receive a buff. Can anyone argue that is unfair?

 

[Factabulous]

None of that sounds like any reason to make BGS open only, to be honest.

I would almost back Open Only BGS - just to see the look on their faces when they see what actually happens as they get Blocked by every serious BGS player.

I still don't want to put up with the worse networking in Open though, they need to fix that first.

 

[Naddesh]

You.
You don't understand the situation.
The "ghost people" are the result of multi-platform, 24/7 online game with limited instance size and various instancing filters (like mode selection, friends list, blocking). Were it to become "open only", you'd still not catch many of those who work against your faction. And it could well be that if you get some, the effect might even be negative to your side.

The REAL problem actually is that the BGS is all too easy to influence. Reducing one player's effect on it by a factor of 1000 would be a good start.

As I said we know a lot of those ghost people who play mostly on PC, we know their timezones and some of us see them on our friends list being in PG while our BGS goes down We are so big that we have people in most timezones and we would catch enough of them for it not to be a problem. Platform is a small problem because compared to PC playerbase consoles are a ghost town.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Unfortunately for your claim, the idea that the BGS is purely a coincidental background simulation to make the galaxy feel alive and nothing more - has been redundant, irrelevant and inaccurate. Both as a result of player actions, and Frontier implemented mechanics. BGS is very much a battleground for players and player groups to carry out conflicts with one another.

Certainly agreed there - and a lot of the rebalancing of the BGS that goes on has been to nerf things which were absolutely fine (beneficial, even!) to the passing traffic background part of it, but could easily be abused by players specifically setting out to do them.

On the other hand, that background passing player traffic does itself play a crucial role in balancing the political conflict wargame side of the BGS. In a system with no other player traffic, a lone player can "win" a BGS war against another faction with very little effort. In a system with heavy player traffic, that traffic provides an equilibrium which players making intentional changes (on attack, defense, retreat and expansion) have to actively work against even if no-one else particularly cares about the system.

So pushing it more towards a pure wargame would I think lose a lot of the existing depth and manipulation of that inertia that "neutral" passing traffic provides, and end up making more systems easier to control - which is hardly what a wargame should be: in the absence of coordinated player opposition, you need a bit of background "terrain" to work with, and it may as well be generated by other players than by hand-of-FDev.

I probably wouldn't object to some arrangement where Open got a bonus during War and Election states only, where the passing traffic effect is already much less significant anyway - though even then I think it's a case of "be careful what you wish for": pad-blocking, healing beams, short carrier-station supercruise hops, carefully combining mode-switching with the exact definition of "a BGS transaction" ... it could easily end up being incredibly unfun to fight against a group that would rather be in PG, even if you can see them.