Doesn't it seem that Frontier is always steering the community in the direction they want CG results to go by offering much better rewards on one vs another or making one CG much easier? I seems that way to me.
It's all a matter of opinion and no-one except Frontier can say for certain, but I don't think they are.
The following simple rules explain the results of every single competitive CG [1] so far in the new storyline, and most of the ones I can remember from the last couple of years of the old one, too:
- if the superpowers are the same, Establishment beats Upstart
- if the superpowers are different, Independent or Federal beats Empire, and they all beat Alliance.
This applies whether or not there are any non-cash rewards, and whether or not the rewards are different for different sides.
It so happens that there's been a general agreement that where module rewards were offered, they also happened to match that pattern - with the possible exception of the recent medical CG where I don't think there was particular agreement that the Federal power generator was better than the Imperial shield generator (though both certainly beat the Alliance T-6)
But ... despite general agreement that the ECM is essentially useless (both because it's an ECM and because ECMs don't have any interesting mods anyway) ... Winters is still on course to get about 20 million data by the end of the week - more than both Sirius and Utopia got combined in the last broadly comparable Research CG.
It's very easy to say - when one half of the CG does much better than the other - that clearly that's the result Frontier wanted. But then, one half of the CG
always does much better than the other, even if the two are basically identical.
- This CG has different rewards (though both pretty niche modules) ... the last Fed vs Fed CG (Rochester) had identical rewards. The bonds ratio between winner and loser was 4:1 in the Rochester CG ... Winters is currently holding at 3:1 in this one, though might slip a bit further over the weekend. One CG in the old storyline when custom rewards weren't a thing ended up at 15:1 (fifteen!) solely on the basis of plot preferences for the two sides - everything else was absolutely the same.
- Going back a bit to the Bridging the Gap Interstellar Initiative, the competition at the end there was about a 5:2 ratio (Independent beat Empire, those are the rules). It was generally considered by AX experts that the Imperial faction was offering the far more useful module. They still lost in accordance with the rules above, which then led to complaints that players had picked the wrong side.
- You can quite easily pick up both rewards anyway with a fairly small effort for top 75%. It's not like the Muhdrid CG where you really had to commit to get both. As with all CGs, the majority of the actual contributions come from the top 25% of participants, who presumably aren't primarily motivated by getting the module or they'd have stopped a while back.
- If Frontier wanted a particular result, they didn't have to hold a CG at all. They could have had a completely different CG this week, and just had a news article about surveillance expanding further at the end of the week, and no-one would have known the difference. Or they could have just not put the Winters CG side in at all and just had it be about Hudson collecting data unopposed, and again no-one would have known. So why bother biasing the results, when they don't need to? (On this line, they also control the entire plot: if they want something to happen next, it's not going to be difficult to write it so that both results lead to that outcome a couple of weeks later)
- Given that Frontier have guessed fairly badly wrong in recent weeks how many people would participate in CGs and how much [2] (this CG has had to be significantly extended; the Delaine stations CG wasn't so finished after just two days; the tiers on the Muhdrid CG were set so high the NMLA failed to reach Tier 1 - an outcome so unexpected the Galnet article and the module distribution pretended it hadn't happened) ... what makes you think that they know which way the split will go?
- The forum opinion on what modules are "good" is not necessarily held more widely. Collector Limpets - which have no particularly useful engineering blueprints - were the third module to reach G5 in Colonia ... Fuel Scoops, which only have one blueprint and that one is actively harmful to apply in most cases, were 11th, ahead of heatsinks, power distributors, FSDs, and most of the weapons.
Broadly, I think Frontier pick modules which thematically suit the sides, and don't consider too much whether they're any good or not. Hence - on the non-competitive CG front - Sirius offering a double-engineered FSD ... and the Marlinist Colonies offering a double-engineered Point Defense.
[1] The Ackwada evacuation CG obeys these rules if you count Marlinists as the Independents they currently are, or if you count based on tier reached rather than participant headcount. It was sufficiently unusual as a CG that it could be the one exception, equally - if you count the Marlinists as being Imperial at the time, and count based on which side got more numeric hand-ins rather than which side "won".
The Ackwada CG was also - despite being "biased" all over the place in quantitative terms ... the tier targets were different, the tier patterns were different, the tier effects were different, the strategic landscapes were different - by
far the closest competitive CG ever in terms of percentage completion, at a 6:5 ratio. It's the only competitive CG ever where the eventual winner
wasn't obvious after the first four hours ... and really could still have gone either way up to the last couple of days.
So was Ackwada more or less biased than the average CG?
[2] To be clear, this is a
hard problem - I'm not saying Frontier should be getting this spot on every time, especially not on the less common CG types where there really isn't a lot of data. The Utopia-Sirius research CGs got 20M between them. On that basis, Frontier set these basically identical CGs to have 17 million targets ... pretty reasonable, it seems. The likely final combined total for both sides here is actually going to be well over 100M by the end of the week. It seems highly unlikely that this is mainly because people
really want a double-engineered ECM, or a KWS that draws more power than most ships' entire weapon arrays.
