Powerplay Beating a dead horse: 5C activities in Power Play

[Rob Franklin]

During a discussion today, I happened upon an idea for helping solve 5C activities in PP. It's a three stage approach, however should be relatively easy to implement in game, which is all a dev can ever hope for IMHO, and may "solve" something else at the same time.

Step 1:
Remove Power Contact from Solo and Private play. This will force players to retrieve and deliver PP vouchers and items in Open play.

Step 2:
Put a 1hr timer on switching in and out of Open play. Solo and private can be switched between endlessly, so you can still play with all your friends, or by yourself in a closed universe, but if you want to PP, or PvP, you have to do it in open, and you're stuck there for an hour, or if you switch out of open, you're not allowed back for an hour. This would drastically reduce the ease of 5C forcing them to sit on their thumb like the rest of us to get to solo, or keep them in open.

Step 3:
Add a list of contributing players within your PP menu, under each system that is being prepped, expanded to, or fortified, so you can see who is doing what, just within your faction. If someone is prepping a system that would hurt the PP Faction, you can see who it is, and since they're stuck in open, you can go find them, and blow them up.

This does not completely disable 5C activities, which we shouldn't, because it happens, it should however be more difficult than it is, and this would do just that, make it both more time consuming, and more dangerous.

 

[Olivia Vespera]

I prefer a "bonus" to open play. Make a reduced value be the norm for private and single player and a "bonus" which is our current normal for open play.

Not a fan of step 2. There are plenty of non-powerplay reasons to switch between private and open play. This will ruin communities who use it for such.

I like step 3, although perhaps not for undermining. How about a top 5?

 

[drhay53]

1) not going to happen
2) not going to happen
3) not going to happen

 

[Floyd Bennett]

FD is already toying with the idea of a powerplay bonus for Open Play, where merits gained in Open have, for example, a 50% increased impact, but are not worth more merit gain to the player.

Of course, there would need to be some system where players could not switch into solo/private play for this to have any meaningful effect. Perhaps switching into solo/private causes that CMDR to lose all current merits acquired through Open, or automatically deprecates those merits to have no Open enhancement.

So they are already moving in the direction of steps 1 and 2.

As for step 3, this is a no-brainer. PP needs a light shined on it. The concept that galactic empires have no idea who is doing what signifies a disturbing lack of attention to properly filling out invoices, if nothing else.