Remove the people from open and I’ll happily play.
If you want more people in Open, the best way to accomplish it are QOL features to make Open more desirable.
- Thread starter DemiserofD
- Start date
Remove the people from open and I’ll happily play.
I do support that this is a more positive approach to incentivising Open play, by making cooperative interaction easier than just kablammo’ing each other. It’s a much better launch pad in my opinion!
Well the Microsoft tax as you called it is hardly new is it. I’d understand the indignation a little if that were the case.
Now that I think more deeply about it, just the powerplay tab might not be sufficient.
Perhaps a better approach might be something like a message that gets sent to you. "A nearby(less than 20ly away) player in your faction has made a Wing mission public! Click accept to swap over to Open mode and join them!"
At the same time, a faction reputation would probably help too. Pilot's federation might not care if someone's a mass murderer, but I bet each individual faction would mind, and would keep track of that guy that killed 2500 of their pilots over a few years.
And I'm not saying no to your suggestion- it just can't be prioritised over actual game content, since its duplicating what exists to a lesser extent. All of this is possible now, it just takes slightly more legwork and Discord in a background window.
Doesn't matter how long it's been around, it's still another unnecessary pay wall. I can completely understand paying for XBL to get free games every month or discounts, but using it to lock players out of online games is scummy behaviour.
You bought the Xbox.
The whole point of having ingame factions is to make cooperation simpler and easier. If you need to use external services to cooperate anyway, you may as well not have an ingame faction at all.
The first priority should be integrating existing features so that they facilitate other aspects of gameplay, and, together, become more than the sum of their parts. This serves to multiply available features, rather than simply adding to them.
It's akin to using all heavy duty shield boosters, rather than mixing in some resistance boosters to multiply the value of your shields.
And again, I'd love to have this in game. However I know it would come at the expense of something else, and if that was the case I'd file this under 'nice to have'.
Ultimately it comes down to what's best for the game as a whole.
New content is all well and good, but if only a small portion of the playerbase uses that content, due to a lack of ground-level QOL features to get players in the door, then those new features are a poor devtime investment.
Ultimately, getting as many players as possible into the existing content, of which there's quite a bit already, is much more important than any amount of new content, which would be unused by a significant portion of the playerbase.
Frankly, I think you're being a bit shortsighted here. The best way to get additional content for powerplay is to get more of the playerbase interacting with it, and you can't get that without drawing in those new players. By rejecting one in favor of the other, you're essentially rejecting both.
Nice choice of meme there commando using a picture of a well know anti-semite and a certain phrase frequently mentioned by a crap Austrian painter from the 1930's.
People make Open sounds like the wild west where every single CMDR shoots at another just for existing. After playing for years, I will make this incredibly plain. YOU ARE ONLY BEING SHOT AT BECAUSE YOU ARE IN A POPULAR SYSTEM. Do your research on popular systems so you know what systems to take caution in.
What's my sources? I help do system maintenance for Lavigny's Legion. We're in 32 systems and ALL our activities involving faction BGS & Powerplay are conducted in Open. I encounter maybe 4-5 CMDRs outside of LL when in our systems. If you're encountering people in places like Deciat, Wyrd, Shinrarta Dezhra, Asellus Primus, Kamadhenu, Nanomam, Rhea and others, these are high traffic systems for a reason. The very fact that I can do BGS in a bi-weave Python and not get bothered by anyone is a testament to my experience and a discredit to this wild west rhetoric I keep reading about.
What's my sources? I help do system maintenance for Lavigny's Legion. We're in 32 systems and ALL our activities involving faction BGS & Powerplay are conducted in Open. I encounter maybe 4-5 CMDRs outside of LL when in our systems. If you're encountering people in places like Deciat, Wyrd, Shinrarta Dezhra, Asellus Primus, Kamadhenu, Nanomam, Rhea and others, these are high traffic systems for a reason. The very fact that I can do BGS in a bi-weave Python and not get bothered by anyone is a testament to my experience and a discredit to this wild west rhetoric I keep reading about.
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Pretty much this. But I'd also go even further and say that increased communication would actually further deter me from entering open mode. In most multiplayer games, if I have randomers trying to communicate with me, my usual emotional response (which I am too polite to forward to the perpetrator) is to think "why is this person trying to talk to me, they should just shut up and play the game".
Rather than further differentiating us from the NPCs that populate the galaxy, I'd much rather that NPCs were made more engaging and human-like in their behaviour. That being said, if FD made these kind of communication channels and gave NPCs the required scripts to interact with them, that would be pretty fantastic. I'd much rather cooperate with some procedural NPC with their own personality and goals for a bit rather than a human. Converge NPC and player dynamics, rather than make them diverge.
Going onto OP's post, one phrase that very much concerns me is "reputable members of the faction", which could easily mean those who have reached allied reputation with them, but a lot of players would interpret as being some kind of discord cabal that involves players upvoting and downvoting each other's messages in order to create their own echo chamber.
Unfortunately, making actual AI is somewhat difficult, so I don't think making NPCs that are indistinguishable from humans is a very realistic solution.
If you're the sort of person who simply doesn't enjoy contact with other players, friend OR foe, then Open will never be a mode for you, no matter what changes are made to it. But the number of people utterly against player contact is a relatively small portion of the overall playerbase.
As far as one group of people taking control of a faction is concerned, I don't really see the problem, to be honest. Groups of players ALREADY control many of these factions and it hasn't been a problem, so really, not much will change, other than offering these groups better ways of communicating with each other and with new recruits.
You need a compelling, 5C proof feature first otherwise you wind up with the situation we have now. Lack of popularity is not caused by lack of communication tools, its caused by a poor underlying game feature.
Maybe those Powerplay balances and eventual 'proper look' Arthur always teases might actually do that and bring new people in- in an ideal world we should have both (your idea and better Powerplay) but we both know FD does not work like that. Powerplay can't wait for change, your idea can if its a choice between the two.
What you continue to fail to realize is, they have no reason to improve a feature that nobody uses. Fixing 5c makes a better feature for the tiny portion of the playerbase that uses it, but most people don't. That means it's very low on the priority list, just like bugged megaship cargo hatches. Fixing powerplay won't suddenly draw in a bunch of new players, because most of those players are still in solo and not on Discord, meaning they don't give a crap.
To repeat this point, just to make sure I'm absolutely clear; so long as Powerplay remains a tiny niche only used by a fraction of the playerbase, there is zero reason to waste any significant amount of effort on it. It's nothing but a waste of time and effort.
But powerplay's gameplay mechanics don't need ANY changes for the powers themselves to function perfectly well as a social hub. Adding a few features like improved social aspects and mission sharing help far more than just powerplay, and players can utilize these social aspects without giving any sort of crap about 'winning' at powerplay.
Crucially, these players would be in the powers ONLY for the social aspects. They would be doing missions together and playing with their friends. The majority of them would not care whatsoever about hauling merits or whatever, because...why would they? It's boring as heck.
But by getting players in the door, getting them playing and socializing with others in their club, you bring them, at least tangentially, into the powerplay system. The more players you have even tangentially related to powerplay, the more likely it becomes for Fdev to consider it an efficient use of resources to fix the gameplay aspects, and the more likely you are to get what you want.
But what you must accept is that the gameplay aspects of powerplay are more or less irrelevant, not only to most players, but also to Fdev. And until you create the impetus to change that, powerplay is incredibly unlikely to see any changes.
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And you fail to realise (as I pointed out in my OP) ED is not set up the way you think it is. ED is heavily decentralized and assumes people won't talk to each other. Powerplay was designed like this, all missions are designed around small low level groups and opportunistic communication.
...which is why I suggested this entire concept in the first place.
The reason Open isn't used by many people is for the exact reasons you lay out. These are not perks, these are critical design flaws that hold it back from being what it could be.
Changing them is the best way of helping Open become a more thriving and vibrant community.