As I am certain many players who don't care, nor follow, the Powerplay sphere. They would just look up who's the highest ranking power of the two in game and then support them by default. Assuming they will be the winner.
If that's the distinguisher, Grom (4th) would have been expected to at least get the early lead over Winters (11th) in the CG just before this one - which was, again, quantitatively completely equal.
Instead they were outnumbered 2:1 in the early hours and never improved on that position.
Players not following Powerplay at all, but who want to ensure they back the winning side, have the much easier approach of "wait a day before signing up" (possibly because they only play weekends anyway) to see who's going to win, rather than trying to dig through the Powerplay interface they have no interest in to figure out which Power is in the lead there.
The questions then are, if Frontier had known in advance that Mahon was going to be 3:1 supported over Kaine in the early hours of the CG (and I doubt their knowledge is that precise, though "Mahon wins" is a reasonable guess from the days before Kaine was a Power at all)
- should they have tried to rebalance that by adding quantitative advantages to the Kaine side?
- if so, what sort?
There was a long period of me not playing, so I've a question: is there history to why CG design is so safe? In particular, it's the same reward for each side. Everything we're saying would go out the window in an instant if different sides offered different modules. I'm assuming, though, that they're hesitant to create too much FOMO – to upset players who want both, who want everything.
I think there's two aspects to this.
1) Previous CGs did sometimes have different modules for each side, on occasion. But also in previous CGs you weren't prevented from signing up to both sides at once, so people who wanted both modules just needed to do top 75% for both sides, or similar (which is easier than getting top 50% for a single side).
2) The
slightest hint of quantitative differences in CG setup gets Frontier accused of manipulating players to make sure one side wins [1]. I've seen Frontier get accused of bias because the timing of the BGS tick relative to the CG start and end times was felt to advantage one side over another. When the CG is between two Powerplay sides and therefore has a chance to affect the underlying Powerplay competition as well, it's even less likely that Frontier will want to be seen as taking sides [2].
But I don't see how adding different rewards to each side would solve the problem of one side or another getting a runaway lead ... unless Frontier were willing to add
additional rewards to the losing side after a few days, of course? Now that would be controversial!
[1] I personally think this is obviously rubbish in the majority of cases (there is
one CG out of the last ten years where I think Frontier did lean on the rewards to obtain a particular result, though probably didn't actually
need to). Frontier doesn't have to put the second side in
at all if they want no possibility of them winning (and has done this on several occasions!), and given their inability to consistently and accurately estimate how much hauling will take place for non-competitive CGs the idea that they're capable of plotting out the results of CGs and aggregate player behaviour that far in advance in a competitive scenario is highly implausible. Taking this CG pair as an example, there's no evidence that it matters in the slightest to the wider storyline who wins (the victories of Archer over Patreus and Winters over Grom had no wider effect whatsoever and likely won't be mentioned again either). But it's a widespread perception and I can understand Frontier not wanting to be bothered with it.
[2] Which is a pity, because two of the closest CGs in terms of which side actually won - where the winner really wasn't clear until several days in - were ones with a distinctly asymmetric setup. One of them didn't even have the two sides using the same
type of CG!
