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

[Intersection]

Back to productive topics though, I just had a thought that could be immensely helpful against 5C if implemented. A dedicated in-game message board built into the powerplay screen for pledges only. Organizers could use it to post orders in a place where randoms would be able to see them without having to join an external community, and if you have anyone posting contradictory orders in order to sow confusion would have to do so under their own CMDR name, so they couldn't flood the board to confuse the randoms without revealing their usernames, and flooding this message board with contradictory orders could be as frowned upon as 5C is now. This does nothing to stop intentional 5C, but it could do a lot to reduce unintentional fortification or preparation of the wrong systems and highlight where intentional 5C is in use, which would help greatly with both reducing false accusations and with people using randoms as cover for intentional 5C, effectively helping resolve the issue that spawned this thread regardless of who is correct in their accusations.

I agree, and I wish this could be taken a step further. Were Frontier willing to take a more active approach to Powerplay, I'd support integrating power leadership directly into in-game powerplay boards - it would, as you say, go a long way to discourage unintentional forts and preps, and make intentional 5c far more obvious to spot.

Sadly, this probably clashes with Frontier's hands-off philosophy for game design, if you can even call it that... Still, it's something I'd love to see implemented, in some form or another.

 

[Garek]

What you're completely ignoring is that there was no "HELP HUDSON" in the first week of mass fortifying... so I would like to know how you explain that? Cause this point would be a lot more plausible if those warnings were a thing the first week.

Anybody who brings up the right Powerplay tab is going to see that various systems are "under attack". AD's people have already said that they were baiting that response: that they were deliberately flagging undesirable systems as "under attack" with the hope that randos would go after that system. If a bunch of players or even a few big squadrons noticed that, and if they weren't reading that sluggish GDoc and didn't want to give you screenshots to join your Discord, they could easily have decided "screw it, the imps are attacking, let's just go haul and get some merits" without consulting you.

They start hauling to the "under attack" systems, then go after other ones as well because, heck, why wouldn't you? It's a war! And they don't read the "DON'T FORT HERE" chat messages because, well, they just might not be bothering to read localchat. They might not even be playing in Open.

Is that what happened? Who knows! But it's at least as plausible as these accusations that the anime princess seeded dozens and dozens of elite tier-one operators into Hudson's faction to haul forts.

 

[Garek]

Thinking about how this might be implemented, how would the game determine who can post on these boards? If the order of systems was system profitability, this is something the game can calculate to populate the board itself. Instead of a separate board, perhaps a simple change to the existing control system list. It could be ordered by the most to least profitable system still requiring fortification as guide for random players. As you say, this may help random players would not address intentional 5C. It does not fundamentally address the ability of any player to cause harm to the power they are pledged to, whether intentional or not. This would still remain a key point to be addressed.

As it stands, everyone has the potential to harm the power they are pledged to, for whatever reason. If you remove this ability, the reason behind it becomes irrelevant so you no longer need to distinguish between intentional 5C and random players. There have been suggestions of how to do this in this thread, although there may also be others. If the developer addresses this fundamental issue and removes the potential for pledges to damage their own power, that also removes the ability to harm another power through 5C. There would be no differences in interpretation or random players versus 5C or accusations, perceived, implied, false or otherwise.

As someone pointed out upthread, removing the ability to "harm your own faction" could also mean removing controlled turmoils.

But, yes, changing how the systems are displayed and how turmoils work would make a lot of sense. It'd also make sense to just make it so that there's no such thing as a poison-pill system in the first place, or at least so that you don't have the rings of trap systems around a power's core. As a political/economic simulation, Powerplay is ludicrous for that reason alone. If systems were more or less valuable from a power's perspective, but that no individual system was technically a "loser", then it wouldn't be this bizarre toxic stalemate where expansion just leaves you vulnerable to, well, what's going on right now.

You don't fix 5C by punishing people or hurling accusations or reordering systems in the UI, because 5C is a consequence of the basic economic structure of Powerplay. You change the economics.

 

[Rubbernuke]

You're conflating two things, one trivially obvious and one contentious.

What's trivially obvious: you're getting mass fortification. That's not in doubt. It's obvious to anybody who clicks on Hudson's control tab. Randos are getting the "HELP HUDSON" and are trying to help Hudson. They aren't reading your GDoc, because of course they aren't going to read a GDoc, it's a GDoc.

What's contentious: that mass fortification is due to 5C. You're claiming it is, but you obviously would claim that it is. Why wouldn't you? It's to your benefit, and relieves you of all those uncomfortable questions as to why AD keeps getting so many questionable preps of worthless systems. I mean, let's face it: it ain't LYR behind that one.

These aren't the same thing. If you were just talking about the former, then this thread would be fine, and even useful, though FDev seems to be fine with 5C. If you'd framed it that way, you might have even built up some trust, and possibly convinced AD's people to relent. But you didn't. You decided to double down and double down on the accusations. So here we are, in a thread that should have been locked three pages ago.

Archon Delaine had mass fortifying as well that made things worse in a similar way - and done outside of its supporting groups (i.e. systems that were never fortified suddenly being conveyor belt forted at the right moment). Whats new(ish) is that only combative Powers get these style combo attacks- (turmoil + fortifying) rather than front on battering (like Mahon had a few times but never followed up on, or Antal- two that spring to mind).

Like I said much earlier in this thread, since Powerplay works in such a stepwise way (and is one giant chain of maths) such action (mass / specific fortifying) can be used to deepen a turmoil and make things much worse when done at the right time. The problem is (just like weaponised expansions) its all two sides of the same coin, it just comes down to who does it and when that makes it intentional or 5C.

Is that what happened? Who knows! But it's at least as plausible as these accusations that the anime princess seeded dozens and dozens of elite tier-one operators into Hudson's faction to haul forts.

While randos do exist so has 5C- and 5C are far more dedicated and focused. For example all Powers have had to spend crazy amounts of money to force down daft preps- so saying people pledging to work on the inside is less plausible is naive given Powerplays history.

 

[Rubbernuke]

As someone pointed out upthread, removing the ability to "harm your own faction" could also mean removing controlled turmoils.

But, yes, changing how the systems are displayed and how turmoils work would make a lot of sense. It'd also make sense to just make it so that there's no such thing as a poison-pill system in the first place, or at least so that you don't have the rings of trap systems around a power's core. As a political/economic simulation, Powerplay is ludicrous for that reason alone.

The only solution is to remove the concept of CC entirely- that is, make all moves (in this case new systems) positive and that none can have negative consequences. For example if PP was like BGS expansion 5C would vanish, because a new expansion would be just an expansion and not have a varying price tag someone could game.

 

[Garek]

I agree, and I wish this could be taken a step further. Were Frontier willing to take a more active approach to Powerplay, I'd support integrating power leadership directly into in-game powerplay boards - it would, as you say, go a long way to discourage unintentional forts and preps, and make intentional 5c far more obvious to spot.

Sadly, this probably clashes with Frontier's hands-off philosophy for game design, if you can even call it that... Still, it's something I'd love to see implemented, in some form or another.

They aren't going to do this because they aren't going to blindly accept that a Discord moderator is the de-facto leader of a massive in-game faction. They'd have to create an in-game leadership structure, and there's no guarantee you'd be at the head of it.

 

[Garek]

Archon Delaine had mass fortifying as well that made things worse in a similar way - and done outside of its supporting groups (i.e. systems that were never fortified suddenly being conveyor belt forted at the right moment). Whats new(ish) is that only combative Powers get these style combo attacks- (turmoil + fortifying) rather than front on battering (like Mahon had a few times but never followed up on, or Antal- two that spring to mind).

Like I said much earlier in this thread, since Powerplay works in such a stepwise way (and is one giant chain of maths) such action (mass / specific fortifying) can be used to deepen a turmoil and make things much worse when done at the right time. The problem is (just like weaponised expansions) its all two sides of the same coin, it just comes down to who does it and when that makes it intentional or 5C.


While randos do exist so has 5C- and 5C are far more dedicated and focused. For example all Powers have had to spend crazy amounts of money to force down daft preps- so saying people pledging to work on the inside is less plausible is naive given Powerplays history.

Saying "5C exists" doesn't mean that any particular incident is due to 5C. This is "reds under every bed" logic.

The question isn't whether 5C exists. The question is whether this particular accusation has any weight. You have to consider that maybe the anime space princess doesn't have an army of bloodthirsty Spetsnatz operators logging in en masse to haul hundreds of loads over the space of, like, a day and a half.

 

[Intersection]

To be clear, this has been discussed ad nauseam in this thread already.

We've gone into great detail as to why we're confident Hudson's blanket fifth-column fortification was not carried out by randoms alone. I suggest looking through my previous replies if you'd like to read through that discussion; I don't think it serves much purpose for me to repeat myself when the premise is the same.

For now, I'd rather steer this discussion towards a more open-ended discussion on 5c and Powerplay.

 

[Alysianne]

What we have kept explaining since the beginning is that fort-baiting has never been a viable strategy, since randos are, by definition, random. Their responses are erratic, because they aren't coordinated. They don't fort efficiently, because they don't know or don't care that forting over 100% serves no purpose. Their forting patterns are scattered, and typically they struggle to finish a handful of systems, because most are not rank 5 (takes a huge amount of effort to be), and hauling PP cargo at lower ranks is gruelingly slow.
This is why openly declaring a large scale UM op like the one zyada launched since day 1 makes no strategic sense. Should a couple system be left unforted by the end of the week, it would have flopped. Catastrophically.
But no systems were left unforted. Because the forting was methodic, coordinated, fast and efficient. This forting was undoubtedly the work of 5C.
Now this doesn't mean that AD leadership was seeding members inside the Federation. It doesn't mean they were setting up fort targets for all their members to see and participate in. I fully expect that a crushing majority of players who participated in Hudson's turmoil were legitimately undermining, went to great lengths to do so, and did not for one second wish 5C upon us. Kudos to all of you for that, it's an impressive effort.
It's very likely that this blanket fort is the result of independent troll saboteurs who are for some obscure reason very dedicated to destroying Hudson. People that every Power has to deal with. People like those who pledged AD to likely bot-prep that one terrible system for 200k merits every week, soft locking her into voting Cons every week.
None of us are saying that you guys are responsible for our 5C.
But the fact remains that the only reason for this operation's success is large scale 5C. And that the agreement in Powerplay is that when this amount of 5C is involved, you back down. Like when ALD was 5C'ed by rogue Fed commanders all those years ago, which OP mentioned. Like when a 5C prep manages to go to expansion for any Power, and anyone with resources to spare tells their players to go help oppose it. This is a pretty regular thing, and we've done this on multiple occasions for Imp and Indie Powers alike.
This is why OP shared his disappointment. Because if we drop these agreements, we let Powerplay spiral out of control again. We don't want a game where 90% of your effort is directed to salvaging the remains of an uncontrollable self-destruction from the inside.
This is the problem we have with the past four weeks of Powerplay. It seems to us that Imperial decision making has seen large scale 5C and thought "Great! Let's take advantage of it."

 

[Alysianne]

Aha, i just saw Intersection's latest post. Although my point still stands: to clarify that we aren't accusing you of 5C.
But yes, we've been going around in circles for the past few days now. I believe all we had to say has already been said multiple times in this thread. Let's move on indeed

 

[Sir.Tj]

I'd say that this thread has pretty much come to a dead end and it's probably a good idea to end it here now.

Thanks.