The stats I ran a while back with missions sum things up well, to a point. I dont have them on hand, but IIRC it's something like, for every mission board generation in a typical region of space, you'll get the following missions:The root cause of both is likely the same:
- Powerplay has brought a lot of people back to the game
- Powerplay has caused those people to go to systems they might not otherwise go to
- people playing the game in a system makes its BGS more active, by design
For an Anarchy faction, more players = reduced influence, in general.
For a non-Anarchy controlling faction, more players = increased influence, in general.
(And for Powerplay specifically, it incentives a lot of varied actions but not in general the mission boards, which are the main way that non-controlling factions get influence in non-Anarchy systems)
Back then there was a very specific problem - scavenger-class on-foot enemies belonged to the local Anarchy faction, and so harmed its influence when they died in large numbers. That was fixed by reallocating them to the generic "Pirates" faction.
The wider problem for Anarchies is that the game since the original 1984 Elite has very strongly incentivised players to carry out legal over illegal actions, and that's not solvable by a little bit of rebalancing of how the BGS deals with those eventual outputs: that needs a complete rethink of what "legal" and "illegal" mean, what actions are incentivised and how, and so on.
(But also: I think Frontier's aim for "Elite Dangerous strategy games" has moved to more comprehensible and transparent ones - the Thargoid conflict, Powerplay - rather than trying to support as a balanced game the emergent BGS play that players put on top of the "systems aren't static" background effects layer. There hasn't been a BGS rebalance noted in Patch Notes since Odyssey Update 10, back at the start of 2022, so almost three years ago)
- At least two missions targeting each anarchy faction within a 20LY range
- A 1 in 20 chance of a mission targeting a random non-anarchy faction
- All other missions supporting non-anarchy factions.
So this is basically, for a typical random 100-mission board, there's
- ~20-30 missions which hurt the ~10 anarchies in range.
- ~5 missions which will randomly target one of the ~60-odd lawful factions in range; and
- ~70 missions supporting lawful factions.
Throw onto that the ongoing position that "Positive influence and states == Player Success", while "Negative influence and states == Player Failure"... anarchies which by-and-large cause negative influence and states are simply not incentivised.
It's why things like a criminal mission board which explicitly offers incentivised missions specifically targeting only lawful factions is needed, to allow the same magnitude of targeted effects that currently support lawful factions.
By-exception rules for Anarchies is, tbh, the wrong way to do it.