Responding to these now (up to page 3) before the list gets too long and keeps me up all night replying.
I don't think anyone is arguing that, it's just that right now the goal of BGS play is seemingly getting your system controlling as many things as possible, when having to manage your expansion to prevent negative effects from being overstretched would lead to more thought out gameplay, especially if you tried starting a war whilst your empire was already overstretched, for example.
The only end game from the current system is large factions that control everything who manage everything with agreements. Everything goes stagnant.
This didn't use to happen. In earlier iterations of the BGS, there was a hierarchy of states with some states cancelling others. Expansion used to be
at the bottom of the list, meaning it was cancelled by basically
every other state. At the same time, states were faction-wide, meaning that boom in one system would cancel a pending expansion from another. This meant that expansion was a
slow process that took
really careful management from the players backing a faction. Moving away from that system led directly to the current
shower of surfeit of expansions we see today.
The way they were implemented was / is a joke. "Dear David, may I please have my own PMF called (insert ridiculous name). Oh and please can you place it in a high pop traffic hub where I can inflict maximum lulz....oh yes and please never remove it even if I only play for a week and never return."
What game does that? You don't have to earn it, there seem to be zero restrictions and they are permanent. Given the hours it takes to do anything in ED, engineer a single module to grade 5 (from scratch, as an example), or back in the day earn enough to buy an Anaconda, but if you want to add a PMF, all you need is a nicely worded email to FD. What??
The very least they should have done was insert these PMFs into low pop systems on the fringes of the bubble. But no.
I do understand for the minority that actively support their own PMF it must be a hoot spreading the 'lulz' all over the bubble. For me, it's a real annoyance and dare I say it 'immersion breaking'.
I actively work against PMFs any chance I get although I know most of the time it's an exercise in futility, however if I can cause trouble in one of their system wars, I will.
I'm sure the group that took over the systems I called home are a nice bunch, but honestly it now seems like every other system is controlled by a PMF...
It only worked like that for a brief time. There are now guidelines for insertion. You should also remember that most of the PMFs inserted into 'your' space have no idea you even exist.
We'd all love a univese with us at the centre, but most children learn, sooner or later, that the world doesn't revolve around them.
The scales involved are like you and me saying we could take over Africa in a couple of years.
You could, if you had the resources while no one in the region else had even
organised a society at the time. Colonisation took so long because while there was a clear differential in weapons technology, there wasn't
really such a huge gap in organisational and logistical technology - messages still needed humans to take them from A to B. Imagine a previously unknown continent being discovered when your society already had GPS and a standing army in the hundreds of millions. That's how it was in the first couple of years after the game released, players started backing factions and working out the mechanisms of the BGS.
The overextension being the key thing. Can't do that here.
It used to definitely be a thing. I'd like to see again the days of the Diamond Frogs (no relation to the Diamond Dogs) whining on the forums because they made an agricultural world their home. The spice definitely flowed, and the concomitant perma-boom was glorious.
No expansions for the D-holes.
That wasn't my introduction to player-named minor factions, that occurred near my home system with a PMF which fit well into the setting, but what I described most certainly left a bad taste in my mouth. Thank goodness Frontier stopped giving new PMFs control of the system they'd be added to soon afterwards.
It should never have happened in the first place.
Despite all that, I don't
hate the idea of PMFs. I just hate how badly
executed they've been to date. In my opinion their benefits are far outweighed by their costs. The benefits are that
some PMFs enrich the sparse background details generated by the Stellar Forge. The costs, however, are many:
- Many PMFs jarringly conflict with the (admittedly limited) worldbuilding that Frontier has done over nearly 40 years of this franchise. Some feature nonsensical superpower/goverment combinations. Others just have ridiculous names, include descriptions of events that shouldn't be possible in this setting, or are obvious rip-offs of other sci-fi franchises.
- Many more seem to primarily exist solely for meta-gaming reasons, primarily in regards to Powerplay.
- Way too many player groups believe because they named the faction, they have exclusive rights to it, and frequently the system they inserted it into.
- Making sure PMF names weren't just crap should have been in there since the beginning. There are rules in place now, but not at first. I'd still like to see FD trawl through PMFs, attempt to contact them, and remove/rename those that are seemingly inactive. Stellar Forge didn't create the minor facitons, btw.
- This is fine by me. If Powerplay encourages people to play the BGS, that should be allowed, in my opinion. It's the lifeblood of the game for me - without the BGS, you just have a less customisable Robocraft in a sandbox.
- Those guys inevitably burn out when the universe (and three commies in spaceships) refuse to bend to their whims. I disagree with goemon's post above about the difficulty of resistance. It's not that difficult, especially when there is a knowledge differential, but as in any other thing numbers matter. With Elite: Dangerous, however, patience matters more. See my first sentence.
More importantly, because there's no in-game mechanism to create a new player-named minor faction, nor remove them from the game if they're no longer supported, they're an example of continuing Frontier Favoritism: the game company getting to decide who succeeds and who fails. I firmly believe that in a wide open sandbox like Elite Dangerous is, Frontier should not be favoring large groups over small, and small groups over individuals. I also think it's a bad idea to favor early adopters over late comers, or vice versa. Changes to a game's setting on behalf of players should be done through gameplay, not a game developer's fiat.
Don't get me wrong, I
like the lore appropriate PMFs I've stumbled upon, and I'd hate to see them vanish in a puff of smoke just to "clean up the bubble." But I think including them in the first place, especially solely through Frontier Fiat, was a bad to begin with.
Sturgeon's Law is clearly in effect when it comes to PMFs, and averting it would be even greater example of favoritism than what we have currently, not to mention would require far too many resources that could be used to improve the game for
all players, not just a handful of them.
I'd like to see extinct PMFs removed from the game too. If it could be rooted in a wider "extinction" mechanic that included 1.0 minor factions too, that would be worth exploring, but I fear that it would lead to stagnation - some systems would be incapable of changing government.
Technically I could resist, in theory, and do just as you say, but it would force me to engage in a form of gameplay (hard-core BGS manipulation) that I find grindy and unfulfilling. I actually used to belong to a PMF for a little while, so I know how it goes. We're talking about people who work the BGS 24x7 with spreadsheets and equations and hierarchy and lots and lots of 'foot soldiers". There's no real way to combat that without becoming that. No thanks!
It would be nice if a system's home factions had a "home court advantage" when facing occupiers and colonizers from far away. But even then, I don't think it would stop these determined megafactions. So for now I'd settle for a way to completely hide other player's fleet carriers from all menus and maps, then at least my little system might still
feel like a private getaway rather than a crowded tourist trap.
Oh, it would also be nice if BGS influence (at least the kind that can flip system ownership) was Open-only, because
then I could "fight back" (literally) in a way I'd find more enjoyable
This is just naive.
If you aren't prepared to commit, you aren't prepared to resist. If you want to
compete in any game, it's going to get grindy, be it in ensuring actions-per-minute (actions-per-hour is more appropriate in Elite), ensuring you're doing your maximum damage-per-second and kills-per-minute in FPS game, or practising a track in racing games until it becomes second nature.
Asking for home court advantage is just admitting that you don't really care
enough to grind. That's fine. I came to the same conclusion with Elite a couple of years ago and my life has been much better for it. I won't misrepresent it though.
I have no problem with the concept of BGS manipulation. I did it for years myself on behalf of ALD, and I
still base my decisions in game primarily on how it'll impact the BGS, since I roleplay as an independent Imperial agent. But for every
player-named faction that fits the setting of the the world of Elite, such as the
Corbago Corsairs, we get multiple factions like:
Granted, there are quite a bit of homages to classic science fiction in this game, but IMO there's a fine line between the developer doing that, and allowing
players to have much more blatant, and
permanent, impact on the game the way PMFs do. And meta-gaming makes my teeth itch.
There are now rules in place about PMF names. I think one of them is "the name musn't be crap."
