Ive been seeing this too, Exactly. We thought we may have been hijacking our own influence somehow, which led to some conversation with our Squad. The BGS is broken, and does not seem to be working like it has been described by the community or the dev team.
Bounty Hunting - Good or Bad?
- Thread starter GKhan
- Start date
The bounty rebalance increased bounty payouts by 4-10x but appeared not to change the BGS influence for individual bounties compared with the old scheme. (So a bounty of 100k would have had effect X before, and a bounty reported on the kill message as 100k would still have effect X now, though you'd get paid about 500k for it)
However, total bounty payouts in systems appear to be about 10x higher. So that suggests more people are bounty hunting, which means more bounties are being handed in, and if people are using KWS this will tend to be an equalising force on influence by providing a substantial bounty volume to low-influence factions (even more so if there are superpower factions present).
"Other players exist" is not a flaw in the BGS or understanding ... though it's certainly looking like the recent bounty rebalance has changed "average" player behaviour enough to generate significant effects in certain systems with higher player traffic levels.
If you want to prove that community understanding / dev statements are wrong, do a clean experiment:
- find a system with no activity: no traffic, crimes or bounties reported in the local news, and no influence change for a few days - plenty of them around the edge of the bubble
- do some bounty hunting in that system (without a KWS, so you only pick up bounties for the controlling faction)
- see what effect it has on influence (the controlling faction should go up, by a predictable amount)
If the result is "influence of the controlling faction goes down" despite you only handing in their bounties, and traffic, crimes and bounties reports only contining your own activity ... then that's unprecedented. Present the details for consideration.
"I did X but my faction's influence went down" is so easily explained away by "other players did some work for other factions as well" that no-one is going to want to throw away all the current models without results which can't be explained by that.
Since you have commented on nearly every single post I have made to the forums, where I am asking questions, and trying to learn how all of this works, you should also know that there have been a lot of us testing this, in several different systems. We dont know for certain which systems do, or do not have players, and we have tried to find some that do not, and test further from there. Things dont always work like you or the others on here say they should, and I am suspecting that several of these "States" are very broken, or causing unintended effects. Expansion and Investment, and most certainly Infrastructure Failure too. Handing in bounties causes our security to go up, and Influence down, on days we do nothing - no change.
I have a ton more Data, but like you said, its difficult to know what other contributing factors that there may be.
This universe exists on Xbox and Ps as well right? The actions taken there also affect things here?
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Traffic Reports as well as Bounty and Crime Report in any local station work cross all platforms.
Traffic lists all Ships having jumped into the system in the last 24 hours independent of mode (if the same ship jumps in twice, it is counted twice).
So - it is rather easy to get an idea of traffic (if you know your or your players group traffic in the last 24 hours, you simply subtract that from the traffic report).
Most basic things shared here have been tested in "zero traffic" systems. which m,eans: zero traffic beside the test traffic in the traffic report 8amnd no other indications of actions).
out of interest - the systems you are working...
- how much traffic total list the traffic report in local stations for the last 24 hours? and how much of that traffic is yours/your groups traffic?
- same for bounty hunting. the bounty report - how many claimed bounties and what total value lists the Bounty report for the last 24 hours? and how much of that has been yours/your groups?
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No activity = no change suggests you've found a quiet-enough system.
And this is specifically handing in bounties just for that single faction? (a KWSed set of bounties I would expect to see security up and inf down for the controlling faction in most cases, because the secondary bounties will be more valuable to the lower factions, but you get the security boost regardless)
If so, very curious.
Those are all states with fairly strong (very strong, for Infrastructure Failure) effects on the system market prices. Plausibly that could affect things quite substantially in at least some systems, depending on what else was going on. And of course Infrastructure Failure has the direct influence cost, which can be very noticeable in higher-population systems.
But I don't see anything obvious in a general case - on this graph for example the controlling faction is sometimes in Infrastructure Failure and sometimes in Investment, sometimes in both and sometimes in neither.
Trakath (Eol Prou YD-W b17-5) - History
cdb.sotl.org.uk
Similarly here (a system with less passing traffic and more mostly-supportive traffic)
Aurora Astrum (Eol Prou PX-T d3-1609) - History
cdb.sotl.org.uk
What sort of effects are you seeing from those states?
Correct - though the traffic / crimes / bounties reports are cross-platform, so that helps tell if there might be someone over there.
Been testing some things in quite systems the last week and nothing out of the ordinary. Bounties handed in for the faction I support gave them pos inf, just like before the changes. The only thing I suspect now is that more people are bounty hunting and many of them will use a KWS as it's "free" millions for them. You can cross-reference the bounty boards to see how much extra bounties were turned in compared to what your group did.
i assume you talk about single redeem values, not total redeem values? so each hand-in 10 mio, vs. some weirdness when handing in 50 + mio for a single faction?
I meant combined values for a single faction in same system. We haven't ruled out weirdness happening because of handing in a lot of bounty value for a faction all at once, but I think in that case the limit would be 20M.
Is that 50M in new money or old money?
There's a faction near me that handed in ~150M/day in old money when it was under severe BGS pressure, and they won, so if it does do weird stuff it either does it even higher up than that or there's something specific about the systems being tested - states? - that's adjusting the effects.
(I should say, having taken two years to convince anyone outside Colonia that "invasion expansions" were a real thing, it's entirely possible that the BGS does weirder things then the current conventional models suggest, especially in situations which are hard to do "clean" experiments on. I'm thinking of alternative explanations within the conventional model because it'll be all the more exciting a result if you manage to rule those out too. Keep really good records and keep experimenting!)
There's a faction near me that handed in ~150M/day in old money when it was under severe BGS pressure, and they won, so if it does do weird stuff it either does it even higher up than that or there's something specific about the systems being tested - states? - that's adjusting the effects.
(I should say, having taken two years to convince anyone outside Colonia that "invasion expansions" were a real thing, it's entirely possible that the BGS does weirder things then the current conventional models suggest, especially in situations which are hard to do "clean" experiments on. I'm thinking of alternative explanations within the conventional model because it'll be all the more exciting a result if you manage to rule those out too. Keep really good records and keep experimenting!)
Interesting. Plenty of systems around here with >50M new money bounties, all responding more-or-less as I'd expect on an assumption of how much of that is KWSed secondaries and how much is primaries. Certainly no sign that large primary bounty hand-ins are going negative...
The difference between "old money" and "new money" behaviour can nevertheless be pretty striking in a busy high-bounties high-traffic low-intent system.
Deriso (Eol Prou LW-L c8-260) - History
cdb.sotl.org.uk
Similarly in this system, controlling faction looks to be stabilising out 15% lower than normal.
Ogmar (Eol Prou LW-L c8-306) - History
cdb.sotl.org.uk
wouldn't be a similar effect be observed, if bounty redeems influence effects calculate with the new values, but had the same sigmaoid applied as previously? besides added activity
if
a) pre BH buff: KWS secondary bounties don't make much difference, because on the low side of the sigmaoid (20k here and there). Controlling faction bounties is on the upper side pre-(soft-)cap.
b) afterBH buff: KWS secondary bounties are now on the pre-soft-cap of the sigmaoid, but upper side. Controlling faction bounties are far into "diminuishing returns"-land. so relative KWS secondary bounties are more effective.
just bringing this up, because (beside the lowish killed ship penalty) getting bountie vouchers to redeem has no effect pre-hand ins, so i think it strange to have "pre buff-values" counting. how would it work? does the tick-algorythm pick up bounty voucher redeems and divide it through 4? Or is the sigmaoid changed by such an factor? or does FDEV store "original value" and just multiplies it in payout and transaction tab?
Possibly, not sure. But I trust that the tests showing it wasn't using the new values were done correctly.
I would have expected on a system with ~10-20M total old money bounties that even KWSed amounts at ~10% of that would be well into the logarithmic phase of the graph, though.
Looking at the bounty reports, Deriso is up 5x on total bounty credit value, but Ogmar is up more like 10x, which suggests increased bounty counts as well as credit amounts.
Yes, yes, you win, I should have recorded the count and not just the credit value all along
maybe "These may (rarely) appear to be issued by the Pilot's Federation." might be a hint how that change is applied. ...
i totally forgot about thatYes, yes, you win, I should have recorded the count and not just the credit value all along
less data is more data? more data is more data!from a bubble perspective KWS-secondary bounties are from all over the place though - a KWS-run at a high or haz res as well as CNB gave you and gives you bounties from all over the bubble.
i haven't been KWS-bountyhunting in colonia - but if the same applies there, those would be in many cases from factions not present in colonia. an while 25k for jaques will do nothing, 100k might do much more.
if those tests have been done with high number-single-redeems-for-one-faction, the non-difference between old and new values could be down to caps.
on the other hand the quote above from the balancing thread concerning pilot federation combat bonds makes it likely, that in fact we are redeeming old bounties and get some fancy magic additional payout. which would speak for old values counting itself.
In Colonia I got mostly secondary bounties for factions in the system. There is sometimes the odd instance where you get lots of pirates from a bubble faction and the secondary bounties reflect that.
I still think more people now use a KWS as the payouts are worth to have it and just turn it in wherever. I did yesterday around 20mil new money and had 5mil or so KWS bounties extra.
Single solo combat MM now pay more... its not just KWS more players are learning this so more bounties are earned…
Make sure your systems are not being flagged as home to an MM giving station... on the websites... http://edtools.ddns.net/pve
Combined With allied and the new bounty pay outs solo combat missions stack so lower factions will be selected not just the controlling faction
If Your systems is flagged as giving MM with lower factions as well offering MM then players will target them now...
As more players learn this more systems will be targeted...
Make sure your systems are not being flagged as home to an MM giving station... on the websites... http://edtools.ddns.net/pve
Combined With allied and the new bounty pay outs solo combat missions stack so lower factions will be selected not just the controlling faction
If Your systems is flagged as giving MM with lower factions as well offering MM then players will target them now...
As more players learn this more systems will be targeted...
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The second tick of testing gave a different result. We redeemed a hair under 100M with 20+ chunks and the inf went up. Curious. The moderate bounties keep working as they are supposed to too. Early to say, but things might be also normalising a bit in general.
Speaking of KWS, I do occasionally use it, but never redeem those bounties in the systems unless I specifically want to give a lesser faction inf.
Speaking of KWS, I do occasionally use it, but never redeem those bounties in the systems unless I specifically want to give a lesser faction inf.