General A suggestion for BGS factions

[Acecombatps2]

I'm relatively new to Elite: Dangerous, so I apologize if this is something that has already been suggested.

I really think it would help Elite become a better game if creating a BGS faction gave more of a connection to the original creator. Perhaps as a new career path. What would people think of a system where you fight for your BGS faction and take over enough planets to harvest enough "resources" to build a mothership or base? Perhaps a way to increase technology and availability of items in one of your stations? Once you have done that, maybe you could make money off of people trading at your station.

Another idea I had, was the ability to be the sole leader of a planet. Perhaps a text based minigame where you make decisions and those decisions affect how your planet operates. Even the ability to influence people to build a station on their planet would be cool.

I'm interested in the opinions of the community towards these ideas. Please don't hesitate to criticize or state how you feel. I apologize once again if this is a common idea, or exists already in the game.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It's been suggested before - the tricky thing is the scales involved - both scale in terms of size of group, and scale in terms of the galaxy.

Squadrons vary by ~100x in size and more than that in terms of activity. If the game is balanced so that a "top 100" player group can get a new station built somewhere in its faction's territory every few months, then a "top 10" player group can get one a week, but a "top 1000" player group would struggle to get one at all and it would take years if they did.

Allowing the BGS to create new stations (or improve station services) would probably need to be balanced by allowing it to destroy existing stations (or services) in the opposite conditions, which would be extremely difficult to balance: make it easy enough to lose a station that some unsupported NPC faction might do, now and then, and a deliberate attack could probably wipe out several stations a week. Balance it around making deliberate attempts to destroy a station difficult, and none will ever disappear.

There have been various hints along the way that allowing the BGS to make more persistent changes is something that they eventually want to do, but actually getting it to work is going to be a while.

(As far as direct connections between factions and players go, that would be a very large change and very difficult to get right given the number of factions - well supported ones, too - which may not necessarily have any identifiable group with a claim on it. I think it would need to - like the existing BGS - be a matter of doing the right actions to influence a faction in the desired direction)

Once you have done that, maybe you could make money off of people trading at your station.

The tricky thing with this is that most trade goods are profitable because of situations where NPCs buy them at ridiculous prices, but the sale price is fairly low. Undercutting the NPCs to get people to buy from you instead would make a very small amount of profit in most circumstances, and trade volumes generally aren't that high in most goods.

There are a few goods it'd be workable for, but only a few ... and everyone would do them and profit margins would be razor-thin.

And ultimately ... what would you do with the money you made? You can already get enough money to buy everything purchasable in a week, if you really want to make lots of money quickly. The obvious answer is then that you'd use it to buy more stations ... but then you run into the scale problem. There's 20,000ish inhabited systems near Sol, and a good quarter of them maybe see a few visitors a day if that. If several thousand players all start building their own networks of stations, there'll rapidly be far too many for the number of players, and none of the stations will actually see much traffic.

(This is a big scale problem already - the bubble is probably somewhere between 5x and 20x too large for the number of players in general, for almost all purposes ... except for the BGS where it's probably about right for the number of active BGS player groups)

 

[Just Paul]

I would be happy if the station news or right hand panel would show if and which sqdrn is/are supporting a faction. Makes it much easier to contact people or see who your neighbors are. It could be combined with a small extra inf boost for work done for "your" faction.

 

[Sapyx]

The core problem with most of the OP's ideas is this: PMFs are created by player groups, not individual players. So when you say "you fight" or "you could make money" or "you make the decisions", is that you-singular, or you-plural? How do you decide which members of the group get to do these things? If your faction is allegedly a Democracy or Co-operative, or even an Anarchy, it wouldn't make sense for there to be one all-powerful Supreme Autarch calling all the shots.

Then there's the matter of transfer of ownership. There's a small PMF within my sphere of influence that I occasionally support. It appears to be abandoned as it only ever moves when I push it. Do I get to take it over? How? Do I get to rename it, change its superpower allegiance or government type? Can I merge it with another like-minded group? (hint: FD have already said that they won't be doing that).

If I can take it over just by working it harder than the previous owner, what's to stop some bully-boy mega-player-group from waltzing in and taking over a small but still-active player group by sheer numbers? And since there is no practical difference in operations between a PMF and an NPC minor faction, why couldn't the same takeover practices be implemented for NPC minor factions?

On the subject of BGS-inspired colonization, it does seem to have been something FD originally planned to implement, and lots of people want it. I think the main problem here is controlling galactic growth, and the movement of population.

Right now, galactic growth is way too slow, because all colonization efforts are entirely hand-coded by FD. But if they made it a BGS possibility, then people will find out what that possibility is, and they will push their factions towards it. Suddenly, the pendulum will swing the other way and human colonization would rapidly spread out of control.

Then there's the issue of population control. To get your newly-founded colony world to flourish, you need to move people there. Logically, the populations of planets should go up and down due to the natural cycles of local events. Up when things are stable and prosperous, down when things like wars, plague and famine strike. But once population becomes a BGS variable, it becomes weaponized. "Population bombs" would become a thing. Just like making stations destructible would quickly obliterate most stations in the galaxy.

 

[metatheurgist]

That would be a great idea for a game that was not Elite Dangerous, since command and control was never the concept of ED.

 

[Acecombatps2]

I appreciate everyone's replies. Thank you! I have just often wondered how things like these could be implemented for the players who have run out of things to do.

 

[Hydrino]

It's been suggested before - the tricky thing is the scales involved - both scale in terms of size of group, and scale in terms of the galaxy.

Squadrons vary by ~100x in size and more than that in terms of activity. If the game is balanced so that a "top 100" player group can get a new station built somewhere in its faction's territory every few months, then a "top 10" player group can get one a week, but a "top 1000" player group would struggle to get one at all and it would take years if they did.

Allowing the BGS to create new stations (or improve station services) would probably need to be balanced by allowing it to destroy existing stations (or services) in the opposite conditions, which would be extremely difficult to balance: make it easy enough to lose a station that some unsupported NPC faction might do, now and then, and a deliberate attack could probably wipe out several stations a week. Balance it around making deliberate attempts to destroy a station difficult, and none will ever disappear.

There have been various hints along the way that allowing the BGS to make more persistent changes is something that they eventually want to do, but actually getting it to work is going to be a while.

(As far as direct connections between factions and players go, that would be a very large change and very difficult to get right given the number of factions - well supported ones, too - which may not necessarily have any identifiable group with a claim on it. I think it would need to - like the existing BGS - be a matter of doing the right actions to influence a faction in the desired direction)


The tricky thing with this is that most trade goods are profitable because of situations where NPCs buy them at ridiculous prices, but the sale price is fairly low. Undercutting the NPCs to get people to buy from you instead would make a very small amount of profit in most circumstances, and trade volumes generally aren't that high in most goods.

There are a few goods it'd be workable for, but only a few ... and everyone would do them and profit margins would be razor-thin.

And ultimately ... what would you do with the money you made? You can already get enough money to buy everything purchasable in a week, if you really want to make lots of money quickly. The obvious answer is then that you'd use it to buy more stations ... but then you run into the scale problem. There's 20,000ish inhabited systems near Sol, and a good quarter of them maybe see a few visitors a day if that. If several thousand players all start building their own networks of stations, there'll rapidly be far too many for the number of players, and none of the stations will actually see much traffic.

(This is a big scale problem already - the bubble is probably somewhere between 5x and 20x too large for the number of players in general, for almost all purposes ... except for the BGS where it's probably about right for the number of active BGS player groups)

selling goods from a station is already in game in Fleet Carriers. No reason that couldn't be expanded gradually to player owned outposts (smaller than Fleet Carriers).

BGS ideas you have are great, even though you are arguing against them. Every player should be able to own an Outpost sized orbiting and ground settlement/ home base as FDev spoke about as long-term goals in the Kickstarter / first year of development. Really, what would it matter to most players if 20,000 players they will never see all have an outpost, and larger more active groups have bigger assets? For every "evil" group in a game this large there will be "good" ones. Also, the Powers could always be a hammer waiting to be invoked by the devs with a military invasion and their own Power Play shenanigans against a too vile player faction.

BGS and Cobra definitely need to be expanded to allow rapid destruction and creation of current fixed assets, and to have that visual like early video showing Orbis under construction. The galaxy needs to be more dynamic and faction wars and political takeovers should have consequences that are more visual and clear. Also it would be fun to be able to attack and destroy big assets (the instanced nature of the game makes this more problematic than just having BGS/ politics affect them though).

 

[Ian Doncaster]

selling goods from a station is already in game in Fleet Carriers. No reason that couldn't be expanded gradually to player owned outposts (smaller than Fleet Carriers).

Yes. But you have to get those goods onto the Fleet Carrier somehow, either by mining them or buying them from an NPC station.

The Fleet Carrier is a convenience, not an economic entity.

BGS ideas you have are great, even though you are arguing against them. Every player should be able to own an Outpost sized orbiting and ground settlement/ home base as FDev spoke about as long-term goals in the Kickstarter / first year of development. Really, what would it matter to most players if 20,000 players they will never see all have an outpost, and larger more active groups have bigger assets?

Leaving aside that there's quite a vocal group of players right now complaining about "too many fleet carriers", it really depends what the purpose of these outposts is.

If it's to just be somewhere to personally call home, that's great, sure, no problem, if people want "a Fleet Carrier but you can't move it" Frontier should look into providing that.

If people want a big economy ... well, clearly not everyone can have their own outpost, because someone needs to be doing the trading between the outposts to support them. We can't all be the corporate barons and none of us the workers, but good luck finding someone to volunteer to be the worker.

For every "evil" group in a game this large there will be "good" ones. Also, the Powers could always be a hammer waiting to be invoked by the devs with a military invasion and their own Power Play shenanigans against a too vile player faction.

Frontier, rightly, don't take sides in BGS disputes. They might rebalance approaches if they're too effective, but they're not going to themselves attack a group just because other players disapprove.

BGS and Cobra definitely need to be expanded to allow rapid destruction and creation of current fixed assets, and to have that visual like early video showing Orbis under construction. The galaxy needs to be more dynamic and faction wars and political takeovers should have consequences that are more visual and clear. Also it would be fun to be able to attack and destroy big assets (the instanced nature of the game makes this more problematic than just having BGS/ politics affect them though).

The problem is, as always, testing.

A conventional Beta doesn't allow for decent BGS testing - certainly not of balance. So I'd expect them to be extremely cautious about rolling out this sort of thing.

(As indeed they were with the Thargoid skirmishes)

 

[Hydrino]

Yes. But you have to get those goods onto the Fleet Carrier somehow, either by mining them or buying them from an NPC station.

The Fleet Carrier is a convenience, not an economic entity.

Leaving aside that there's quite a vocal group of players right now complaining about "too many fleet carriers", it really depends what the purpose of these outposts is.

If it's to just be somewhere to personally call home, that's great, sure, no problem, if people want "a Fleet Carrier but you can't move it" Frontier should look into providing that.

If people want a big economy ... well, clearly not everyone can have their own outpost, because someone needs to be doing the trading between the outposts to support them. We can't all be the corporate barons and none of us the workers, but good luck finding someone to volunteer to be the worker.

Frontier, rightly, don't take sides in BGS disputes. They might rebalance approaches if they're too effective, but they're not going to themselves attack a group just because other players disapprove.

The problem is, as always, testing.

A conventional Beta doesn't allow for decent BGS testing - certainly not of balance. So I'd expect them to be extremely cautious about rolling out this sort of thing.

(As indeed they were with the Thargoid skirmishes)

Yes.
Maybe.
Yes/yes.
No one has to trade with an outpost. They are smaller than fleet carriers (not stations, outposts). Surely if a FC is much larger than a one landing pad outpost then a player could afford an orbital outpost as a home base. Whether FD want to try to implement that is another question, and could "break the game" as outposts would need to be persistent and if every player had one or more it could be a million in Sol for example. So it's not an easy thing, but I didn't say it was.

Frontier don't have to take sides in BGS 'dispute', but they always reserve the right to do whatever they want in the game.

Testing is indeed an issue in all software development. Users will find very creative ways to break stuff that coders never dream about; "you made what combination of keystrokes while unplugging a USB stick and loading a DVD?"

 

[Ian Doncaster]

No one has to trade with an outpost. They are smaller than fleet carriers (not stations, outposts). Surely if a FC is much larger than a one landing pad outpost then a player could afford an orbital outpost as a home base. Whether FD want to try to implement that is another question, and could "break the game" as outposts would need to be persistent and if every player had one or more it could be a million in Sol for example. So it's not an easy thing, but I didn't say it was.

It's not so much "breaking the game" as actually giving the outposts a reason to exist and for players to want to buy them, given that, as you say, a FC is bigger and you can move it.

What's the actual point of owning one going to be?

Testing is indeed an issue in all software development. Users will find very creative ways to break stuff that coders never dream about; "you made what combination of keystrokes while unplugging a USB stick and loading a DVD?"

Sure. But in the case of BGS testing the tests that can be practically run in a Beta are exceptionally limited, because:
- the timescale of the Beta is far too short given that some BGS states play out over the course of a month
- no-one is taking it fully seriously in terms of the amount of effort/system put in, because it doesn't actually count
- the background traffic level is completely absent

"You pressed two keys, one after the other?" or "You pressed the ; key rather than a letter?" or "You spelt a word?"

Obscure 1-in-a-million cases aren't the big deal - they can be fixed after the event because even in live they'll probably only show up once a year and most of those won't be noticed. The problem is that it's not possible to test most of the 1-in-10 cases in a realistic way either, which will have hundreds of instances a day.

(Which is how, for example, most of the 3.3 release's BGS bugs were completely missed in Beta despite being obvious within days of it going live)

 

[Hydrino]

It's not so much "breaking the game" as actually giving the outposts a reason to exist and for players to want to buy them, given that, as you say, a FC is bigger and you can move it.

What's the actual point of owning one going to be?


Sure. But in the case of BGS testing the tests that can be practically run in a Beta are exceptionally limited, because:

• the timescale of the Beta is far too short given that some BGS states play out over the course of a month
• no-one is taking it fully seriously in terms of the amount of effort/system put in, because it doesn't actually count
• the background traffic level is completely absent

"You pressed two keys, one after the other?" or "You pressed the ; key rather than a letter?" or "You spelt a word?"

Obscure 1-in-a-million cases aren't the big deal - they can be fixed after the event because even in live they'll probably only show up once a year and most of those won't be noticed. The problem is that it's not possible to test most of the 1-in-10 cases in a realistic way either, which will have hundreds of instances a day.

(Which is how, for example, most of the 3.3 release's BGS bugs were completely missed in Beta despite being obvious within days of it going live)

Agreed.
owning an Outpost would just be a 'home base', like DB mentioned early days, somewhere to put up certificates, specimens, trophies, and look at them, invite friends into, store items inventory. Base building and building in general are a h u g e thing in gaming these days. FD needs to unlock some of that in ED. Dual Universe is going to be very interesting in this regard.

For me, I would really like to see FD more clearly link the BGS top to bottom of all play loops and make it apparent in GalNet and Newsfeeds more than today. What I mean is Power Play is disconnected and needs to be part of it, along with pushing a few PP ideas down to Minor Factions like pledging and the Galactic Map view including minor factions and Orrey view of system having the political view as well and being more BGS interface. Not easy I'm sure, but it would to me make PP something everyone participated in and bring some of the cool stuff from that which is probably very underutilised, into more gamer's play.

[edit; that's a bit of a wordy, run-on sentence type reply, but hopefully the idea gets across.]