BGS Since Ascendancy
- Thread starter Mersozz
- Start date
This other ( related? ) thread from another section might interest you--> https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/pp-2-0-has-sent-bgs-into-crisis.629816/ ... if you can sift thru all the typical forum flaming lol
Thanks, I was hoping there was some discussion on this.
Mostly the unusual results seem to be "systems with larger swings than normal" which could just be increased traffic, or maybe rare goods are really effective as a trade option and no-one ever noticed before, or something like that where Powerplay is significantly changing the distribution and incentives of the much larger number of non-BGS-playing CMDRs. Certainly I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary on my monitoring of Colonia (where recorded traffic was up a bit with Ascendancy, but not as much as in the bubble) and low-traffic systems in the bubble (Powerplay-controlled or otherwise) don't seem massively out of line either.
There do also seem to be the occasional issues with conflicts or systems getting "stuck" (and possibly therefore "catching up" once they unstick) though those seem a lot rarer. Still, that might have been what you saw. Or it might have just been an excessively-cached tick so you missed it going 3-1, there's the usual reports of that sort of thing.
Actual technical discussion about what's happening more widely is unfortunately in rather short supply - it's mainly complaints that "Frontier have broken the BGS" without being able to point to what, specifically, is responding differently to inputs to how it was last month.
There do also seem to be the occasional issues with conflicts or systems getting "stuck" (and possibly therefore "catching up" once they unstick) though those seem a lot rarer. Still, that might have been what you saw. Or it might have just been an excessively-cached tick so you missed it going 3-1, there's the usual reports of that sort of thing.
Actual technical discussion about what's happening more widely is unfortunately in rather short supply - it's mainly complaints that "Frontier have broken the BGS" without being able to point to what, specifically, is responding differently to inputs to how it was last month.
Thanks for the feedback, Ian. I imagine it will be days (probably weeks) before things settle down.
With colonization somewhere up the road, and the ongoing integration of PP2.0, I'm currently assessing where I should be focusing my time. As a squadron leader and PMF custodian ("janitor" would be a better term), and most recently PP2 operator, my current inclination is to just head out into the black and come back a few months from now, haha.
It sometimes depends on when and where you look for data. We've just been checking one system where the system map and the right-hand Status panel give the same position as the previous day and the Local News gives updated figures - 11 hours after the tick.
Certainly - though one example had apparently frozen for multiple days, which goes well beyond normal tick propagation issues.
"issues with conflicts or systems getting "stuck""
Our small player faction is stucked into an expansion Recovery state for 4(!) days now, is that normal?
And what can we do if its not?
We cant do any more planned expansions at the moment. This is awkward, because some of our neighbors and powers are asking us to cooperate.
The Buurian Protectorate - minor faction | Elite:Dangerous | INARA
The companion site for Elite:Dangerous with the game database, market data, trade routes, outfitting, engineers, blueprints, crafting, Thargoid war, squadrons, logbooks, galleries, galaxy information and much more...
inara.cz
Four is unusually long.
More significantly, the influence levels in the Chaiya system (which was the expansion source, I believe?) seem to have been completely stuck too, so if that system isn't being processed by the tick that's presumably why the Expansion state isn't clearing. "Stuck" individual systems like that do seem to have been happening a bit.
Maybe Frontier will notice and unstick it today now they're back in from the weekend, but that might be something worth putting in a support ticket?
More significantly, the influence levels in the Chaiya system (which was the expansion source, I believe?) seem to have been completely stuck too, so if that system isn't being processed by the tick that's presumably why the Expansion state isn't clearing. "Stuck" individual systems like that do seem to have been happening a bit.
Maybe Frontier will notice and unstick it today now they're back in from the weekend, but that might be something worth putting in a support ticket?
Things have been pointed out but due to the volume of players who treat BGS players as monsters who need to be locked away as "This way is the way it should be played/it shouldn't be played like that" rhetoric stifled any meaningful investigation.
Of the tests I have done with my own faction which is in a lot of ALD space we have observed that:
- A lot of tried mission types from mission boards do not yield any effect. We have tried data missions, normal trade (delivery/source and return), killing pirates, and just recently passenger missions, and none of them yielded any influence change. The systems stayed still.
- This would affect a lot of faction contests in these areas as elections will fail to resolve (thankfully not mine, and wars still seem to be unaffected), which has been reported by others.
This is only my experience in ALD space. We share other systems with DP, ZT and even LYR. Time permitting, I will try to get some more solid data and samples from other powers and independent systems. Or if any other powers have experienced something else it would be nice to know. I would be happy to throw everything into one post or document.
Regardless of what people think, I feel that the missions should always have the intended outcomes, whether people care on just the money/rep/materials or indeed the influence. If this was intentional on FDev's part then that would be borderline criminal.
Lastly, reading up about stuck states and expansions led me to follow one that I'm observing as I was playing 8D chess to let other systems fire off elsewhere so we got the one we wanted and the one in question has been waiting around now into its 9th day. The one obvious thing that stands out to me is it is a stronghold system with a carrier. I don't know if it was one of the originals that was temporarily not working as intended before being fixed, just like the old rescue ships being able to mess around in systems, however I think that is worth a look, and if it is not just limited to strongholds.
I strongly suspect this is not "missions don't work" as a problem - I had no problem getting data missions to work in my own tests, which were in Powerplay-affected systems just in case that mattered - but that something is preventing that system being processed entirely and you'd find that non-mission sources of influence also apparently did nothing.
This doesn't seem a common problem - most systems are moving influence each day, including those in Powerplay areas or even Strongholds - but seems to be a lot more than just "influence doesn't work" and more like "the entire BGS tick sequence doesn't happen in that system".
So that's how you get things like elections failing to resolve, or expansion states not taking the normal length of time: it fails somewhere in the state tick, so it never gets around to processing the influence tick at all, and then any test for "do bounties/missions/trade affect influence" will obviously fail to give a result.
Elections certainly seem to show up a lot in "things getting stuck" systems - but certainly not in every example, so it's possibly just that they're easy to notice when they do get stuck. Similarly I can find plenty of examples of Powerplay systems and even very active Powerplay systems where the influence is moving from day to day, for a variety of Powers.
There may well be no particular pattern to which ones are getting stuck (and for how long) beyond "that's the system the tick calculation happened to crash in" but having a list of times and dates where a system didn't move in any direction for a couple of days despite influence (of any sort) being put into it might well help Frontier find it.
Which powers did you test? It could be something as silly as one power in particular not validating anything that isn't a certain action. Or in the bigger picture, there is some order or priority in which actions are tallied and some systems are unaccounted for. This doesn't change the fact that the problem is there and it's a good place to start looking from. These could also be multiple issues, one looks like it stems from transactions and the other might have more to do with conflict and state resolutions at the time of the tick. I'm keen to investigate these in more detail.
Last edited:
The testing of missions was just with Kaine systems, but I would expect for any power to be able to find plenty of examples of systems which work normally, just because "the BGS is frozen everywhere" would have been far too noticeable. It's the examples of ones which don't that are the important bit.
Just sticking random power stronghold names for a variety of Powers (ALD, Duval, Grom, Mahon, Kaine) into EliteBGS history didn't give any that had got stuck in the last couple of weeks, though there's far too many to check all of them systematically.
The only one I'm aware of that is recently stuck is Chaiya from the conversation above - that one is neutral, though there has been some Mahon Acquisition activity going on there (and a tiny amount of Grom, too).
I also saw reports of LP 772-72 getting stuck a while back (again, Powerplay neutral, and this time with no-one even doing much Powerplay in the system) though after a couple of weeks that one seemed to get going again.
(Other people are also mentioning apparently stuck expansions that I can see, but they're not saying where from)
I don't think it's anything specifically to do with Powerplay in the sense that the Power state of the system matters - it's more likely some processing bug introduced while working on other things released at the same time.
We need facts, not maybes. We have identified a problem so it is a good place to start. It might be the tip of an iceberg or not a widespread issue but it still needs addressing. Is it limited to just ALD? Let's go find out. One thing to add is that I'm unpledged but others involved in these tests are pledged, being pledged or not did not seem to have any bearing on it, so it probably leans more to the transactional side of things.
I agree with you about the state resolution, this seems to have spawned on its own from the update and is more indiscriminate by nature and it leads me to believe that it is a separate issue and I do feel for those who are in the middle of the hypothetical Venn diagram.
I wouldn't want to rule out it being the same issue just yet.
If you're in a system with no wars, elections, local expansions or other obviously time-limited states ... and the state resolution stage of the tick fails in such a way that the influence tick never happens: that would look just like "whatever you did for influence that tick did nothing", but you'd have very little way to pick that up for certain without some very close inspection of economy sliders and similar.
You'd need to do something else in the system which did have an effect (bounty hunting or trade, rather than trying more mission types, would probably be clearer) or have some sort of state progression which obviously worked normally (trickier since most of the states with fixed lengths also have some sort of influence effect, but war/election scores changing while the influence outside the conflict stayed static would do) to be able to rule that out.
That could be done as a single-day test: large number of the missions under test for one faction, tiny bounty hand-in for a different faction
- if missions work, the first faction moves up a lot (and maybe the second faction moves down a little less than normal, but that doesn't matter)
- if missions don't work because influence is frozen, neither faction moves
- if that mission type specifically or missions generally are broken, then the bounty hand-in still moves influence around a little bit and confirms that the tick happened at all.
https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/69655 seems like a possibility for the problem - if expansion source systems specifically are the ones getting stuck in some way, that would explain why it doesn't affect everywhere (and with hyper-expanded factions, can't affect most of their systems because the first one to hit the threshold jams and then the rest can't)
EDIT: Bug now confirmed and votable if you want to. Looking into more detail at expansion weirdness, it seems to have started back in late September / early October, before the Ascendancy update - just not been particularly noticed until a lot of factions got unwanted expansions from other causes. So maybe it's not actually Ascendancy-related
On the bright side, it does look like it has been differently weird since late November, so maybe they're trying to get a fix together.
EDIT: Bug now confirmed and votable if you want to. Looking into more detail at expansion weirdness, it seems to have started back in late September / early October, before the Ascendancy update - just not been particularly noticed until a lot of factions got unwanted expansions from other causes. So maybe it's not actually Ascendancy-related
On the bright side, it does look like it has been differently weird since late November, so maybe they're trying to get a fix together.
Last edited:
That's one issue, I'm glad it is getting attention.
As for the other one we're talking about, I went off to do some more investigating.
I put some bounties in our home system where pax missions did nothing and sure enough it responded. I took another system with low traffic this time in LYR space, put in a considerable amount of influence (edit: missions under the transportation category) for the controlling faction, and a paltry sum of bounties (~150k) for the second faction. The second faction went up 0.7%.
I don't know what to say at this point, I run a faction that's in over 100 systems and control over 80, I'd like to think I have some idea on what I'm doing and that I'm not totally crazy. Is it just certain powers? Or some other variable? Do I reinstall the entire game?
As for the other one we're talking about, I went off to do some more investigating.
I put some bounties in our home system where pax missions did nothing and sure enough it responded. I took another system with low traffic this time in LYR space, put in a considerable amount of influence (edit: missions under the transportation category) for the controlling faction, and a paltry sum of bounties (~150k) for the second faction. The second faction went up 0.7%.
I don't know what to say at this point, I run a faction that's in over 100 systems and control over 80, I'd like to think I have some idea on what I'm doing and that I'm not totally crazy. Is it just certain powers? Or some other variable? Do I reinstall the entire game?
It's certainly weird, since missions worked 4/4 for me in tests. (Using data courier and credit donation types)
What Powerplay level was the LYR system? All my tests were in ones which were just Exploited, so maybe it only breaks at stronger Powerplay levels? I can probably find some quiet Fortified ones to re-test Kaine with if that might be it.
All of my mission tests were on secondary factions. "Missions don't work for the (system|station) owner" would be an odd condition but one I couldn't rule out from what I tried.
Both systems I tested (1x ALD and 1x LYR) are exploited. The only other thing to try is I tell you which systems I've been working and see if you can replicate the same problem.