Hope FDev didn't expect this CG competition to be close

[ArcherS]

I never said this was going to affect CC, etc. What I'm saying is this looks bad, and the Hudson player base can't stop it. By looking bad, players may choose not to join Hudson. After getting jerked around by FDev like this, players may leave Hudson. That's how it affects PP. If FDev thinks Hudson is too big, they should at least tell us that. And if "Hudson is too big" really is the issue, instead of discouraging people from joining Hudson, maybe encourage people to join other powers.

And actually, the original topic of this was just the hope that FDev wasn't surprised by the lopsided outcome. They know the number of active players for each power and the number of players not aligned. Then it's just a simple question of which powers would probably want to see Hudson hurt, even if only in a PR sense. Total the players for the powers in the two for/against pools. If Hudson was starting out with a player pool that was 20% the size of the player pool they were fighting against, FDev should've just called it the Kobayashi Maru CG.

 

[Vengal]

So, the community goal that's got you so up in arms had participation rates of 4870 (Winters) || 7166 (Hudson). All up, 12,000 Players.
This one has participation rates of 2887 (Separatists / Winters) || 700 (Hudson). 3,600 Players. Less than 1/3

The Ts'ao Tach one had 5,100 Players. And it was equally lopsided.
The last freight delivery one (10th June) got 9,700 Players.

Your thesis about their being huge buy-in from other factions on this, or the last Hudson one, simply does not hold true. (The last Hudson one simply had engagement on a par with the average freight delivery one).

My question is: Where is everybody?

 

[ArcherS]

Please don't say I'm "so up in arms". It sounds like you're accusing me of being hysterical, but I'm pretty sure you don't really mean that. All I'm doing is pointing out an issue, one that I think no power or player group should have to deal with (without having some mechanism to vote on it).

Maybe not having a nice reward this week has caused (significantly) fewer people to participate? The April CG may have picked up many late entrants due to the obscene number of credits being handed out, so on that one I think you're comparing apples and oranges. You may have a point on the Ts'ao Tach CG, as the Fed side won there. (That was supporting the Federation and Core Dynamics, not Hudson, but I'm not sure that invalidates your point. Players may have wanted to support the Fed, or they may have worried about losing ships from Core Dynamics.) I'm not sure what you mean by the freight delivery CG on June 10, as there was no CG on June 10.

The problem is, to prove or disprove my conjecture would require actual numbers that only FDev has, regarding the demographics of who has participated in these CGs. The chance of FDev releasing those numbers is about the same as Hudson coming back to win this CG. For now, I only find it interesting that there are 2 Fed powers and 9 other powers. A 1:4 ratio. Feds control 125 systems, and non-Feds control 580. Another 1:4 ratio. What's the participant ratio in this goal? 1:4. I do know that some folks played both sides in the April CG, again due to the obscene amounts of credits, so I don't know how much to read into that ratio. Ts'ao Tach was 4:1, in favor of the Feds/Core Dynamics.

 

[zimms]

It's okay for your side to "lose" sometimes. Maybe you do really want Hudson and the PDB to continue unchecked, but I think you're in the minority, as is being shown here.

I guess it just feels a little bit unfair. The Federation loses 10 systems, just like that (and the factions are present in even more than that).

What consequences were there for the Alliance or Empire in their recent story lines? E.g. the Empire also lost a CG, did that really threaten them or help the NMLA?

The Federation has been getting the short end of the stick for a long time. They get all the lore weaknesses (surrounded on all sides by hostile forces) but none of the lore strength (apparently strongest forces - absolutely no use in Frontier's story telling).

Yes, I think the past has shown that they had the biggest player base, but I assume this was mostly due to casual players. Guess who is most likely to have jumped ship now, given the state of Odyssey. I think I've also heard that a lot of US players liked so support the Federation, a lot of them playing on XBOX. They don't even have access to Odyssey right now, which offers the fastest way to collect Combat Bonds.

It's no surprise the Federation has "lost" by far the most systems since launch. Most player factions are independent as well and people like to pick systems in the center of the bubble. At first Frontier even made independent player factions the owners/controllers of Federation systems without them having to do any work whatsoever. Stuff like Turning the Wheel isn't exactly helping them either.

Add PP and Elite's lore has mostly become one big farce. System ownership is one huge mosaic and there's hardly any feeling of Alliance/Empire/Federation space. The fact that we all have 70ly jump range ships now also contributed to that.

 

[Jmanis]

Conflict CGs are never close, because of their flawed nature.

 

[AtomicJuggler]

No, I'm not saying all the non-Fed players came together to screw over Hudson. I'm saying a lot of players fought for Hudson because it had the (significantly) better reward (e.g., maehara's quote above) and some players may have done it because the surveillance stuff looks really bad and might bite Hudson down the line. Even if the Hudson supporters wanted to fight the surveillance, there wouldn't have been a chance of winning.

Now there's the new CG. There's no reward favoring one side or the other. There's 700 players on the Hudson side, and 2800 on the Azaladshu side. Azaladshu has seven times the contributions as Hudson. That suggests that more people want to see Hudson hurt. (Yes, "suggests", not "proves".) That seven-to-one contribution ratio was there after less than a day and hasn't changed since.

Not everybody is here to 'hurt' Hudson.

I am in AZALADSHU for the duration of the CG and I am not here to hurt Hudson or any power, because I usually don't care about powers, I only care about factions that I support (mostly independent, but some federal or imperial as well).

If the situation was reversed (Hudson against the surveillance for example) I would have fought for Hudson...
That said, I mainly do it for fun, and massacre missions (way more profitable than the 20 millions that I will be rewarded at the end of the CG)

 

[AtomicJuggler]

Conflict CGs are never close, because of their flawed nature.

Like most wars in the real world...

 

[GroG79]

Remember everybody helping Hudson introducing mass surveillance?

Well it seems everyone has changed their minds....

 

[zimms]

Remember everybody helping Hudson introducing mass surveillance?

Well it seems everyone has changed their minds....

People were helping him out of spite because they wanted to damage the Federation.

 

[ArcherS]

Not everybody is here to 'hurt' Hudson.

I am in AZALADSHU for the duration of the CG and I am not here to hurt Hudson or any power, because I usually don't care about powers, I only care about factions that I support (mostly independent, but some federal or imperial as well).

If the situation was reversed (Hudson against the surveillance for example) I would have fought for Hudson...
That said, I mainly do it for fun, and massacre missions (way more profitable than the 20 millions that I will be rewarded at the end of the CG)

Where did I say "everybody is here to 'hurt' Hudson"? All I said was, in general, significantly more players want to hurt Hudson than support it. That means, for any CG that will have a negative impact (either PP directly or just PR) on Hudson, the players who would want to support Hudson are starting out at a significant deficit. It sounds like this happens to other powers as well, but it shouldn't.

 

[forbiddenlake]

People were helping him out of spite because they wanted to damage the Federation.

No I wasn't. I don't care about superpowers/powerplay.

 

[Episparh]

Hudson won the surveillance CG only because of reward given. Now all pilots who do not side with Hudson are doing the right thing.

 

[ArcherS]

Hudson won the surveillance CG only because of reward given. Now all pilots who do not side with Hudson are doing the right thing.

Yes, many (most? almost all?) initially supported Hudson then because of the KWS. Many more piled on once FDev added more tiers, pushing the credit rewards into the billions.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

"Did Frontier expect the CG to be close?" almost certainly has the answer "no" - it's incredibly rare, regardless of the sides involved, for competitive CGs to be closer than 3:1. 7:1 is slightly wider than normal but not by much.

They may not have had any particular opinions on which way it wasn't going to be close, though.



As regards "Powerplay", bear in mind that the Federation has lost precisely two competitive CGs ever - this one, and (more narrowly) the Nova Imperium one. Its relative performance in competitive CGs hasn't been at all related to how well Hudson/Winters have been doing in Powerplay at the time. The vast majority of players and CG participants are independent of that struggle (though generally inclined, all else equal, to support the Federation over the Empire - a fact which lead to regular claims of anti-Imperial bias a few months back)



On the wider question, while players can have some influence over the direction of the plot collectively, the/a powerplay community doesn't own the Power (if they did, we'd just be pushing these complaints to "Patreus supporters joined our power to 5C the surveillance support vote" anyway) and all ten original powers were made very clear up-front to be deeply dodgy individuals supportable only as the least of ten evils if that.



But look on the bright side - the Empire have failed to win all but one competitive CG they've ever been involved in, are regularly portrayed in the plot as even more authoritarian than the Federation, and they still have supporters in Powerplay, so Hudson will probably be fine there long-term too. You take one loss and suddenly it's the end of the world? I doubt it.

 

[ArcherS]

.... You take one loss and suddenly it's the end of the world? I doubt it.

Uh, where am I acting like this is the end of the world? All I'm saying is that I don't like this, and I doubt others like when this happens to their powers. It is annoying enough that I'm somewhat considering leaving powerplay (which I suspect neither FDev nor other PPers want), but that's a far cry from "end of the world". I hadn't known the powers were meant to be dodgy, so maybe FDev isn't up front enough about that. I joined PP a year ago and only started doing CGs maybe 6 months ago, so getting the insight of the 8+ years of experience of someone like you is useful. At a minimum, I plan to stop partaking in policy-related CGs that should really be decided internally to the power, because it really does feel like a 5C action. (Or I'll make sure to support both sides equally: easy for hauling CGs, harder for combat CGs without an equally equipped alt.)

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Uh, where am I acting like this is the end of the world?

Sorry, I could have been clearer with the wording there - wasn't meant to refer to you specifically. What I meant was that story arcs putting the Federation or the Empire or whoever in a bad light come up pretty regularly - because they're all a bit dodgy - and it doesn't really affect their long term support. People support the Empire because they want an authoritarian slave-trading dictatorship with shiny aesthetics (in game, that is!).

I hadn't known the powers were meant to be dodgy, so maybe FDev isn't up front enough about that.

Some of them are more obvious about it than others - Delaine's a criminal mastermind, Antal leads a creepy cult - and some of them are less obvious: LYR is everyone's friendly neighbourhood arms dealer, very slick PR, definitely the worst of the lot.

The relative lack of Galnet news between 2016 and mid-2020, and the lack of focus on the Powerplay leaders during most of that time, I agree has led to their less savoury aspects being mostly forgotten - now they're getting the airtime their prominence deserves, both their good and bad aspects are more visible.

I plan to stop partaking in policy-related CGs that should really be decided internally to the power

I think the key is the distinction between the Power and the figurehead individual of the same name. [1]

Hudson in terms of the storyline is - like most of the other main characters - a pretty flawed individual. Not every decision he makes is going to have good consequences.

That doesn't really affect the success or otherwise of the associated Power. Several of the current plot-important individuals don't even have an associated Power (and probably won't get one without major rewrites of what Powerplay is) ... while Torval gets to be a Power based on her importance in the 2015 plotlines despite having largely drifted out of relevance since ... and interesting as Antal is, he doesn't appear much in the recent stories either because they're not a good fit for him.



The other thing to add ... sure, the Hudson/Winters CG has led to more Federal surveillance, which has led to a few Federal systems seceding. That doesn't mean that the outcome for the Federation of Winters winning would have been a good one - it might have been worse!


[1] The uneasy link between Hudson-as-major-plot-figure and Hudson-as-Power causes various problems for both the plot and for Powerplay - I've commented elsewhere theat it would probably be better if the Powerplay figures were slightly less senior "up-and-coming" figures - Cabinet members, junior Senators - whose success and failure didn't have to relate quite so strongly to the plot.

 

[Jmanis]

[1] The uneasy link between Hudson-as-major-plot-figure and Hudson-as-Power causes various problems for both the plot and for Powerplay - I've commented elsewhere theat it would probably be better if the Powerplay figures were slightly less senior "up-and-coming" figures - Cabinet members, junior Senators - whose success and failure didn't have to relate quite so strongly to the plot.

Like, I dunno, the faction reps, like what was meant to happen with Powerplay?

 

[Vekt Ey'doom]

Yes... but this is FDev deciding this, not the players. Hudson players didn't have a choice about the CG a few weeks ago that enacted new "surveillance", which is the excuse FDev is using for splitting off more Hudson minor factions. The reward for supporting Hudson was significantly better than the reward for supporting Winters, which means that 2 powers (including Hudson) would support Winters and 9 would support Hudson. The Hudson player base can't compete against those odds. I doubt any single or two powers could.

Hahaha, superior KWS go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr