Powerplay A word on 5c, and the state of Powerplay

[Rubbernuke]

That admittedly I can't comment to. Largely as I am not a powerplay strategist in the slightest.
I'd need to audit the numbers and get a full explanation.

But what I can say is that i've crossed with the Fed Rando Brigade a few times.
When Witch Head had that big Thargoid surge a few months back, we actually had to pull back from Evangelis, as the rando crowd favouring fed was this huge wave, that put out way more inf than we really wanted to resist. Made sense of course, station rescue = easy rank up. Soon as that was over, retaking Evangelis was simplicity. Onoros was even easier, with the Imperial fleet holding literally retreating as soon as the Pegasus exited hyperspace. (No, I will never stop mentioning that, ever).

My experience, away from P.P. Tells me that the Feds have the numbers, and the lack of discipline to make this possible, even likely.
If your numbers tell you otherwise, that's not something I can comment on with any reasonable experience or knowledge.

One of the (er) 'advantages' of CC and Powerplay mechanics is that its very easy to spot randoms because after six years you get to know how they think (after seeing what randos do for trinkets- for example you only need 750 merits for them which is normally dropped at the closest control system or undermining). Also, its easy to see what people want to drop because they'll selectively fortify certain places (or everything) to disrupt and alter the turmoil order (which can be easily predicted via a spreadsheet). Preps are the same. When 5C does its thing its easy to see and estimate where it will go.

In short, because it relies on maths and stepwise consequences, its easy to see the ultimate intention.

So while I can agree the Feds have the numbers, they also are very well organised and get the word out- its not so far fetched either. For example when I was with Antal there was a rando prepping a crazy system which looked like 5C- I flew out, had a chat and he joined our group- now, most Powers act this way when they can, and with cross channel chat you can at least send messages to 'the others'. FUC have many contacts and allies, so I can't see a giant pool of eager but confused souls week in week out toiling away in isolation.

I fully expect some randoms to fortify after seeing the 'heyulp!' messages- however how and where (as well as when) people help out acts like a fingerprint. It can never point to the people doing the damage, but its very much a case of 'Cui bono'.

 

[StellarKnight]

Random CMDRs are not Level 5 with the power (aka. accumulated over 10k merits in one cycle). This makes getting a full t9/cutter load of fortifications both costing time (in-game timeout is significant when not on Level 5), many clicks and money. Not an exciting gameplay if you ask me. This is why they just do the 750 merits they need.

If you are that dedicated into earning that many merits than the chance of not joining the respective PowerPlay discord is very slim to say the least.

 

[Danieros]

When you need to throw accusations at full fortification - can't you see that points to a problem in the game, rather than the players you keep accusing? This will always be an issue until it's fixed, and there will always be finger-pointing when it happens.

The simple, single fix is to make turmoil go from lowest base income, rather than highest upkeep.

 

[QueensPawn]

Y'all seem to be conflating two different types of randoms. There are the module shoppers who only fortify groombridge to get their 750 merits and move on, and there are the solo players who genuinely support Hudson, but don't want to interact with anyone. They just want to log on, play some space game in peace, then log off for the day feeling like they made a difference. For that second group, seeing a system under threat is a big sign saying "please fortify me". We get the same thing in Aisling space. If we had been doing 5C, the lossmakers would've been first to be fortified, but they weren't. Fortification started from the core and moved outward, the way that randoms fortify when they're trying to be helpful. The weapon spheres, the things we wanted gone the most, were fortified last.

 

[Alysianne]

The last bit of your message is simply untrue. Especially on the first week of the attack, lossmaker systems were fortified very, very quickly.

Regardless, on the first week of the attack, Hudson's blanket fortification was completed by Monday - just over the halfway point of the Powerplay week. For context, organized Powerplay groups - with efficient forting techniques, well coordinated rank 5 CMDRs, and a large majority of the most dedicated players - would struggle to do better than that.
Out of the systems that randos never fortify, none were over-fortified that week or the weeks since. Whereas rando-fortified systems frequently go well over 100%, simply because most don't care or don't understand that forting over 100% is pointless.
Crappy lossmakers, including a far-off system with terrible triggers and whose closest station is a planetary 17,000ly away from the main star, were completed. Within the first half of the week.
And there was no blinking "your power needs your help!" message at that time. Hudson wasn't even in turmoil yet.
Randos accomplishing this is simply impossible.
Hudson has self-turmoiled (through the "Red Team" we mentioned earlier) several times, has suffered attacks over the years, several times, and never have randos reacted in this way.

The only reasonable conclusion here is 5C. There is no shred of doubt that Hudson was 5C'ed, and especially on the first week of the turmoil. Whether these 5C'ers are players from the Empire or not, whether they are just lone wolf trolly saboteurs, is a whole other discussion. Let us at least agree on the basics: that Hudson is being targeted by 5C.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Y'all seem to be conflating two different types of randoms. There are the module shoppers who only fortify groombridge to get their 750 merits and move on, and there are the solo players who genuinely support Hudson, but don't want to interact with anyone. They just want to log on, play some space game in peace, then log off for the day feeling like they made a difference. For that second group, seeing a system under threat is a big sign saying "please fortify me". We get the same thing in Aisling space. If we had been doing 5C, the lossmakers would've been first to be fortified, but they weren't. Fortification started from the core and moved outward, the way that randoms fortify when they're trying to be helpful. The weapon spheres, the things we wanted gone the most, were fortified last.

In my experience those lone wolves are quite rare, its why its so unusual outside the group for things to be done in volume for no reason.

Admittedly I've only ever been in smaller powers, but in my time there I've known about two- and of those one started prepping on his own for RP (who I convinced to join the group) and the other was someone who would fortify one system like clockwork each week for RP reasons as well. Many people (who I've come across years later chatting about it) tried and simply bounced off as alone they are like "where do I start?" (and normally gravitate to a group or just give up altogether) not willing to waste the hundreds of millions each week randomly.

In short nothing will change until PP changes- this will only get worse since 5C always have deep pockets to either purchase stupid amounts of prep, AFK turretboat in PG and be able to fast track fortification. Hopefully any new system will drop CC altogether and make all expansions 'good' to actually get opponents to counter each other 'the right way'.

 

[Fezix93]

I also want to reiterate that it's not just Hudson being hit by the dedicated forting 5C, and that Winters has been CC Controlled for the past several weeks without opportunity for a scrap because of the same hyper-accurate 5C Forting, all without being in Turmoil to prompt panicky Forting by randos. Historically, when Winters isn't in Turmoil, she never gets Forted to the degree we are seeing (unless we are the ones doing it), even when a system is partially or completely Undermined. Naturally, some systems that get the 'under threat' message do get forted if the message appears early enough in the cycle, and it usually takes several days for the randos to Fort that system. But it is always messy and slow and doesn't even always get completed in time for cycle tick, unlike the huge numbers (100s of thousands of merits) of rapidly dropped merits (sometimes a matter of hours) without over or under forting (inconsistent with the record of randos) without opportunity for a scrap, cycle after cycle with no mistakes by the 'randos', all in a Power that isn't even in Turmoil.

Yes, there's going to be well meaning randos, and yes, some systems are going to get Forted/UMed when the under threat message pops up, but not on the scale of hundreds of thousands of merits week after week.

 

[Intersection]

Y'all seem to be conflating two different types of randoms. There are the module shoppers who only fortify groombridge to get their 750 merits and move on, and there are the solo players who genuinely support Hudson, but don't want to interact with anyone. They just want to log on, play some space game in peace, then log off for the day feeling like they made a difference. For that second group, seeing a system under threat is a big sign saying "please fortify me". We get the same thing in Aisling space. If we had been doing 5C, the lossmakers would've been first to be fortified, but they weren't. Fortification started from the core and moved outward, the way that randoms fortify when they're trying to be helpful. The weapon spheres, the things we wanted gone the most, were fortified last.

That is incorrect - our lossmakers were, in fact, disproportionately targeted by 5c. It's one of the reasons why we're confident 5c was involved: given a choice between similarly distant systems with similar station arrangements, our supposed "randoms" would invariably beeline for lossmakers. This behavior was somewhat hidden from your perspective, as our profitables were being fortified by our own pilots; but in following weeks, we dialed back our own fortification, in order to observe what systems our 5c prioritized: again, we witnessed an unsettling (and rather obvious) knack for picking lossmakers, even with far more convienient profitables available to fortify.

You mentioned the fort patterns of our randoms: let's talk about that. Well-meaning random commanders are slow, disorganized, and unfocused. Typical patterns involve small, irregular merit drops sprinkled around systems close to Nanomam. During these past few cycles, lossmakers were fortified in focused bursts of activity, often at speeds unattainable by a single pilot. These lossmakers included systems incredibly inconvenient to fortify, some of which had seen no fortification in literal years.

Something else I'd like to add - there exists a limit to how many concerned haulers can suddenly spring out of the blue, as commanders who do not maintain powerplay rank are faced with an excruciatingly slow fort experience (as anyone who's fortified with 10 merit allocations can testify). The overfortification of the usual targets for our randoms - Groombridge, LHS 2088 - remained consistent while Hudson was under attack, indicating that many CMDRs that regularly fortified Hudson to preserve rank were not, in fact, distracted by systems "under threat".

I respectfully suggest we all brush up on our info when talking about this matter - it could go a long way to keep this thread on track.

 

[Novarek]

The Fed are plagued by random activity, pretty much every non-Fed PMF which had a war conflict with a Fed NPC faction, even in an isolated system, will get random Fed comming in swarm.

From that point I would honestly be not surprised AT ALL that when the little red alert message send to all players pledged to Hudson once Hudson turnmoil started, those same random Fed played a major role in the messed up fort.

 

[BaconofDeath]

The Fed are plagued by random activity, pretty much every non-Fed PMF which had a war conflict with a Fed NPC faction, even in an isolated system, will get random Fed comming in swarm.

From that point I would honestly be not surprised AT ALL that when the little red alert message send to all players pledged to Hudson once Hudson turnmoil started, those same random Fed played a major role in the messed up fort.

The surge of random targeted fortifications also occurred on the cycle Hudson was being undermined for the first time. During that week, there would have been no "Your Power needs your help" messages, nor a red exclamation mark on the power standings.

As has been said in this thread, there are so many other red flags that point to Hudson being hit by organized 5C at the moment. Systems that haven't been touched in months by any random being fortified, systems being fortified to exactly 100%, systems with the only hauling settlement being a planetary 17k ls out being fortified by randoms (never heard of any randos doing that), loss makers having extremely fast rates of fortification (indicating more than one person is doing it), etc. I am probably missing some points by the way in that.

With all of that, as someone who was in Fed leadership for years and was tasked with watching merit hauling, there is no way that randos did this.

 

[QueensPawn]

Part of how I know how randoms like this think is because I was one for a few weeks before I joined ADC. I joined to ask why we weren't expanding because I was frustrated that we were remaining so static. Because I didn't understand the concept of lossmakers and that claiming territory isn't always better. Nor did I understand the concept of 5C preps. My plan was to ask my stupid question and then leave. Once I realized what was going on, I stayed and learned more. Based on the way our fortification around Cubeo is done, my choice to join is a rarity. Had I stayed pledged without communication, I very likely would have eventually stopped hauling so much and gone dormant until big events happened. Big events like a massive undermining effort and turmoil. These are exactly the kind of events that bring randoms out of the woodwork.

And for the record, saying that people who don't engage with other players are rare because you've only met two is a silly argument, rubbernuke. Of course you've only met a handful, they want to play the game singleplayer. When noobs get ganked, and this game has a serious ganking problem, that's how you get randoms that don't interact. I still avoid PvP like the plague, but at least now I've had some instruction on evasion techniques, enough to feel comfortable playing in open. But for the longest time I absolutely refused to leave the private group I had with my friends because it's just not fun trying to defend yourself against an enemy that attacks for no reason other than sport, never loses at the interdiction mini-game, and has shields that you can't even hope to break while their weapons cut through your shields in seconds, which is what I thought elite PvP was after my first few experiences (before I was able to unlock the engineers and figure out that no, they weren't using hacks).

 

[Novarek]

And for the record, saying that people who don't engage with other players are rare because you've only met two is a silly argument, rubbernuke. Of course you've only met a handful, they want to play the game singleplayer. When noobs get ganked, and this game has a serious ganking problem, that's how you get randoms that don't interact. I still avoid PvP like the plague, but at least now I've had some instruction on evasion techniques, enough to feel comfortable playing in open. But for the longest time I absolutely refused to leave the private group I had with my friends because it's just not fun trying to defend yourself against an enemy that attacks for no reason other than sport, never loses at the interdiction mini-game, and has shields that you can't even hope to break while their weapons cut through your shields in seconds, which is what I thought elite PvP was after my first few experiences (before I was able to unlock the engineers and figure out that no, they weren't using hacks).

Fed random playing in open is more common than you think, I talk from personal experience but in like 90% of war conflict we have with Fed, we systematically spot low ranked and often with no squadron, random player taking the Fed side, almost exclusively spoted in ground CZ.

We are always forced to allocate more ressource than usual when we have a war conflict with the Fed, because we know we gonna get no matter what random opposition there, fortunately 80% of our conflict with the Fed are election, random never come for those, usualy an easy win.

 

[Rubbernuke]

And for the record, saying that people who don't engage with other players are rare because you've only met two is a silly argument, rubbernuke. Of course you've only met a handful, they want to play the game singleplayer.

The examples I talked about were two complete events which illustrated the noticeable detrimental effect they had but where I could verify what was going on-so the non 5C reasons became apparent and 5C discounted. They are rare because of the amounts they shifted (which were a lot) compared to the very low trickles normally seen.

If you look back at my comment which was 'silly' I also talk about single player randoms who were in solo who later I managed to (by chance on Discords / Reddits) chat to where the subject would come up- "oh, I tried Powerplay ages ago". All of them rapidly became demotivated because it was for the reasons I list - "where do I start?" "how much?" "I have to click 140 times to load my ship? Nah" type stuff.

Randoms don't stay random for long in Powerplay if they want to continue- its in the psychology. Some do remain true randos but RP PMFs often quickly give up, and the rest wind up on the discords (going by what I see these days) because without co-ordination they get frustrated. How do I know? Because what people pledge to do in game happens and little else beyond it (fortification wise, UM snipe wise too- some systems see extra effort but not many).

And this has held true for the groups I've been in- it may be different for Aisling since that power has always had a fractured playerbase with competing groups (or did early on prior to the IHC where they'd fight each other / flame each other to comedic effect).

In fact, the only times in six years where crazy preps / fortifications / expansions were happening was nearly exclusively 5C in the end, with very little overlap (with some exceptions). The only times where there was an overlap is / was lazy commanders expanding to close systems which also were horrific 5C magnets years later. The rest never map with anything- generally RP is the cause (like trying to get an LYR expansion for the ship discount) but behaviour wise its incredibly fishy when UM, turmoil and fortification all happen in lockstep. Close in fortification would be a close second (for trinkets) but it rarely (if at all) spills into systems with medium surface bases / distant stations because its tedious- hence why nearly every time they are fortified for a reason.

 

[QueensPawn]

Not saying that randoms don't play in open. There are plenty that do, but also plenty that don't. There are a lot of ways to play the game and a lot of people playing it.

 

[CMDR Foursyth]

Every power has complained about organised 5C at some point, and signed multiple pledges not to do 5C. The data and history is very clear - it affects everyone. Folks arguing that 5C is "just randos" are trying to sell something, or trying to start arguments to get the thread shut down. Please stop - it's very tedious.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Not saying that randoms don't play in open. There are plenty that do, but also plenty that don't. There are a lot of ways to play the game and a lot of people playing it.

Powers know how randoms work, regardless of mode, just as they know what their own players do as well as other powers patterns of forting /UM. Its how snipes can be done, because everyone can see when someone is slacking and see through the 'noise'.

One of the 'gifts' of Powerplay is seeing the raw data in the UI where you can map effort to what people achieve.

 

[QueensPawn]

Every power has complained about organised 5C at some point, and signed multiple pledges not to do 5C. The data and history is very clear - it affects everyone. Folks arguing that 5C is "just randos" are trying to sell something, or trying to start arguments to get the thread shut down. Please stop - it's very tedious.

What I'm arguing is that this specific case doesn't look like 5C. And I know for a fact that if it is 5C, it isn't us, which is what you're insinuating is the case. I absolutely agree that 5C is a thing that happens to everyone, albeit to some powers more than others. Just because it does happen doesn't mean it's always happening though. Not every accusation is correct just because the accusation was made. If they were, y'all would be the game's biggest monsters.

 

[Morbad]

Not referring to specific cases, like the one being discussed here, but would "open-only" powerplay help to prevent 5C happening?

Yes, Open Only would definitely help against 5C. It would allow us to know who they are, and more importantly, blow them up

There is no way to enforce Open only in the game's current model, at least in any way that makes Open distinct from Solo.

Peers can be unilaterally rejected with both out-of-game (firewall) and in-game tools (block), even in Open. The former is probably technically against the game's ToS, but is largely undetectable and thus unenforceable. The latter is fully sanctioned by Frontier.

What should we as players do while Frontier refuses to address these game-breaking issues?

Stop giving them your money.

Powerplay was supposed to work via majority voting for the best choice and work on the assumption people wanted the best. What happened instead was rivals sabotaging others from the inside because its stupidly effective compared to actually attacking normally.

The voting mechanisms always seemed absurd to me.

part of the discussion is that 5C should break the ToS.

Even if it should, unenforceable rules may as well not be rules at all.

 

[Mo Mo]

That is incorrect - our lossmakers were, in fact, disproportionately targeted by 5c. It's one of the reasons why we're confident 5c was involved:

A few months ago, ALD made an attempt to turmoil Hudson. They were not successful, but we have noted that the moment your Power came under attack, people, either your own or randoms, made a serious effort to fortify your systems; in the end, you were fully fortified in a relatively short period of time. So the image you are trying to project - that you have good control of your forts and anything else would be enemy 5c action - is simply nonsense.

FYI, I personally undermined Nganeru last cycle, and handed in BEFORE the system was fully fortified (because at that point the state of that system no longer matters), no doubt you'll add this to your list of "evidence" of 5c activity.

All you have been doing is mud-slinging, keep throwing wild accusations and speculations and hope something might stick.

@MOD, isn't 10 pages of mainly Fed propaganda and social engineering enough already?

 

[Mo Mo]

part of the discussion is that 5C should break the ToS

Unfortunately, a member of FDev staff once said that "5c is an acceptable part of game play", or words to that effect. So I doubt FDev would be interested in fixing the "problem".

The OP knows this, and the aim of starting this thread is to play the victim, gain sympathy etc. It has nothing to do with "stopping 5c and make the game world a better place".