Which is (again) not what I'm talking about. Its prominent actions regardless of mode being recorded so that others might know who did them.
Expose more info about solo/pg player actions in station info
- Thread starter Disemboweled Ego
- Start date
Which is (again) not what I'm talking about. Its prominent actions regardless of mode being recorded so that others might know who did them.
Well if you affect my game, whats so unfair about me knowing about who did that?
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
The fact that the game is not as free with information on players actions as some would like does not make it any more likely to change.
Where have I talked about this here? Right now I'm talking about the exposure of information on player actions, not restricting modes.
Anyway, OT:
How is it that powers like Hudson, Winters, a number of Imps (I'm told) and Delaine (especially) all haul in open, and that playing in Open is the only credible way to influence that action, since no NPC ever has done the same to a hauler in solo?
Solo in Powerplay sidesteps credible opposition entirely. How many Powerplay NPCs have blown up your G5 Cutter? I can confidently say: none.
Powerplay is the only feature in ED that explicitly implies organised conflicts. I think you can see the failure.
You'd be surprised at how Open changes Powerplay too. Its a team game.
Anyway, I'll stop OT now.
And thats why we are here debating a 'what if'.
Dont stop your points are valid
All im saying is that for Fdev to put time and effort into PP and the BGS there has to be a large amount of folks interested in it and actively participating.
Force people into Open and you will lose a lot of support whether i agree with you or not.
There's plenty of ways to oppose PP without PvP
O7
Well...theres not really.There's plenty of ways to oppose PP without PvP
O7
You gather merits in UM / CZ or carry cargo to defined areas. Between you doing that and you landing intact there is only other roving players and enemy NPCs. Since merits are individual and not subject to aggregation like the BGS, if you are stopped directly via these forces your power suffers if you have a lot. Since all powers are not running identical strategies some powers can attack at different times.
Its made worse by having fortification stop at 100% nullifying UM efforts, and other 'out of cockpit' ways like consolidation. So while hauling is harder in Open, it still has this caveat (which becomes OP in solo because the NPCs fly panda police cars).
The other way is the boring way, where you UM / fortify / deliver blindly without really being able to weaken the enemy who is attacking you, since its never made explicitly clear unless you see rival players. I mean, if you don't know who is attacking, how can you UM back? What you are suggesting is simply fortify blindly. Its here where better info across modes would help, because currently they can be gamed and never show useful things- along with a UM breakdown by rival power / commander (say, top 10).
In fact the only other way (because its impossible to ever know who is doing what) is 5C, which thrives on anonymity.
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PP is way more complex than unlocking a fort trigger and then watching every power shrinking into a 100 ly bubble (less if those bubbles are unfavorable/neutral PMF governments) because unlocked triggers would be very unreasonable to maintain against last night UM wings you can't respond to unless you 1000% overfort against something that may or may not happen.
You can expand a system to hurt another power's income. The only problem right now is that the turmoil order does not favor towards dropping low income spheres, so most of the time it just weakens you more than it weakens your opponent power.
On the BGS side I do not understand this thread. You already get information on what your opposition has done every day, when the BGS ticks and you see the influence changes. Though I understand that ever since conflicts were changed into influence locks it has become hard to gauge enemy effort, which I do agree could have at least some vague way of knowing by how hard you win/lost a day. But to make it mode-exclusive is frankly ridiculous.
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![[Diplomacy] Carnegie](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/123/123809.jpg?1553527149){kind=avatar}
If you don't want people affecting your game secretly, maybe don't play an MMO(ish)
Slightly off-topic maybe, but in my opinion there's no way Elite is an MMO. There's nothing "massive" about the number of players you can instance with simultaneously. If FD have described it as an MMO in the past, they simply misrepresented it.
What we have here is a very good single-player game with a 1:1 galaxy and great ships, a shared BGS and some optional multi-player features.
What we have here is a very good single-player game with a 1:1 galaxy and great ships, a shared BGS and some optional multi-player features.
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I remembered an idea I though of ages ago. I mentioned the idea earlier of hiring NPC diplomats/assassins to go after CMDRs that may working against your interests. That implies knowing which CMDR to send them to contact. Except I remembered it doesn't necessarily. Instead all that intelligence could be masked. You initiate the mission (like a donation mission in effect) having been told in the description "a CMDR has been identified working consistently against us/for other faction X". The NPC then makes the contact and reveals your CMDR name to that CMDR, who has the option to make contact. If you don't hear back then that maybe tells you something (though may deter a random CMDR). If you do then it's a form of asynchronous in-game comms.
You could of course cut out the middleman and create an asynchronous comms system. You can broadcast a message (lets say using dropdowns so that fewer expletives get spammed). This reveals your CMDR name with a message "please contact if you are running missions in this system" etc. in someone's in-box when they land at the station. The NPC idea just has more flavour
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You could of course cut out the middleman and create an asynchronous comms system. You can broadcast a message (lets say using dropdowns so that fewer expletives get spammed). This reveals your CMDR name with a message "please contact if you are running missions in this system" etc. in someone's in-box when they land at the station. The NPC idea just has more flavour
.So basically another form of harassment then?I remembered an idea I though of ages ago. I mentioned the idea earlier of hiring NPC diplomats/assassins to go after CMDRs that may working against your interests. That implies knowing which CMDR to send them to contact. Except I remembered it doesn't necessarily. Instead all that intelligence could be masked. You initiate the mission (like a donation mission in effect) having been told in the description "a CMDR has been identified working consistently against us/for other faction X". The NPC then makes the contact and reveals your CMDR name to that CMDR, who has the option to make contact. If you don't hear back then that maybe tells you something (though may deter a random CMDR). If you do then it's a form of asynchronous in-game comms.
You could of course cut out the middleman and create an asynchronous comms system. You can broadcast a message (lets say using dropdowns so that fewer expletives get spammed). This reveals your CMDR name with a message "please contact if you are running missions in this system" etc. in someone's in-box when they land at the station. The NPC idea just has more flavour
er no thanks
O7
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Why not just use system chat?I remembered an idea I though of ages ago. I mentioned the idea earlier of hiring NPC diplomats/assassins to go after CMDRs that may working against your interests. That implies knowing which CMDR to send them to contact. Except I remembered it doesn't necessarily. Instead all that intelligence could be masked. You initiate the mission (like a donation mission in effect) having been told in the description "a CMDR has been identified working consistently against us/for other faction X". The NPC then makes the contact and reveals your CMDR name to that CMDR, who has the option to make contact. If you don't hear back then that maybe tells you something (though may deter a random CMDR). If you do then it's a form of asynchronous in-game comms.
You could of course cut out the middleman and create an asynchronous comms system. You can broadcast a message (lets say using dropdowns so that fewer expletives get spammed). This reveals your CMDR name with a message "please contact if you are running missions in this system" etc. in someone's in-box when they land at the station. The NPC idea just has more flavour
And my question here is, how do you intend to provide payback in a way that isn't already facilitated by the game (to which this suggestion is excess to)?
I'm going to ramble on a lot away from your actual comment here, so 90% of this is actually not in reply to your comment... but if your target is the supported faction, you can see that already; daily tick represents the changes to the BGS, so go forth and provide "payback" in a way that undoes whatever changes you didn't like.
If your target is an individual or group of players, as most seem to want here, you're out of luck, as that simply doesn't work the way you think it will.
Firstly, instancing, secondly, no cross-platform, thirdly, solo/PG. Even if you luck out and happen upon the person causing you grievance, killing them doesn't change much, and in fact, there's a high chance, particularly if you're a defender, that it works against you, rather than for you... plus all the time invested in trying to hunt down an individual player... you could've done a range of way more effective actions to push the BGS in the direction you want anyway. Remember; the intent of the BGS was for players to interact indirectly, via interactions with the NPC factions. Not directly player-to-player.
This video, while tipping 6 years old now, is still relevant and has only been reinforced by FD over years. It makes the claim that the BGS is all about indirect activities, and they actually call out that it's not about players pulling out the lasers and shooting each other. But let's unpick this, and then you'll come to understand why players are against anything moving towards this end.
As soon as FD makes a change which supports an overall direction or design philosophy, they need to approach that as a wholistic, functional aspect of the game. To just do small things like this is wasted effort trying to boil the ocean.
Take a look at Powerplay. It's original implementation was meant to be much more closely coupled to the BGS, with factions rising and falling from Power status. This route was abandoned, and for pretty obvious reasons.
Powerplay was meant to be a balanced, group-vs-group, strategic game activity, allowing players to interact directly for or against a group's collective goals.
The BGS is almost completely opposed to this, as the BGS:
- Is fundamentally unbalanced (in so many ways)
- Is not group-vs-group, instead representing the actions of anyone regardless of allegience
- Prefers indirect interaction between players
Many BGS players, myself included, were excited about Powerplay, because it seemed like that aspect of the BGS was being uplifted into that group-vs-group activity, and indeed, with the original intent of Powerplay, that's how it seemed pitched. But FD backed away from that, very clearly delineating Powerplay as that group-vs-group activity on it's own, and leaving Factions the "flavoured backdrop" that we play against.
And that's the clincher here.
Suggestions like this lean in to the "directed player-vs-player" component... which is Powerplay. Suggestions like those of @Rubbernuke I won't fundamentally disagree with, because it's approaching it from a wholistic, functional approach. Players approach suggestions of the OP as isolated cases... but people push back against it because, as far as anyone knows, FD's position is still that BGS = background flavour, Powerplay = group vs group. To make a "small" suggestion better suited to Powerplay, which affects the BGS, is either:
- A waste of time, because for obvious reasons it's not something the BGS needs; or
- A broader suggestion to fundamentally shift a core aspect of the whole game, which many players have built their playstyle around.
You can then of course, suggest that "Well, maybe the entire core concept of the game should shift"... which as a theoretical idea, sure, I can't disagree with that. But in practical terms, have fun with that.... you'd have better luck suggesting Call of Duty should be rewritten to be more like Mario Kart.
Well people have said a lot about mode choice not mattering in BGS because it's asynchronous (or words to that effect). Contacting people that you can't instance with in a different time zone (i.e. when you are in bed) using sys chat might be a tough ask? Also, it's directed - your message is getting to someone you really want to contact, not bothering everyone in system. It's a smidge like you're asking why I use email instead of walking outside with a loudhailer.
Is there any form of communication that you don't consider harrassment?
Nvm, deleted. Can't be bothered.
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The question is, is there a form of communication that can't be misused in such a way as to be harassment?