Civil War - Progress and Player Daily Limit

[Karlossus]

Flipping systems requires combat in civil wars. I understand there is a daily player limit to how much you can influence the system.

1. It would be nice to know when your daily limit has been reached. There is currently no indication.
2. It would be helpful to see your session progress like PP progress when you hand in cargo or kill tokens. At the moment all you see is the faction percentage control. Even if this changes and you calculate what it was before, you don't know how much of this was yourself, or other players. And you don't know if it had any effect at all when the numbers don't change. Is this background simulation lag?

Anyway, it would be more satisfying to know what your contribution to "the cause" was. The NPC's are always shouting, "join us" etc. If the fight was so important, let us know how much we did beyond the credits. This might attract far more player interaction.

PS: If done in open mode, I think your actions should count a little more than in solo. I think there should be incentives for more players to go open. Note incentives! Not sticks.

 

[Dralamir]

Hear, hear!

 

[Athan]

How about mini-Community Goals for such wars? They wouldn't necessarily need announcing in the same way as the main CGs, but the mechanisms otherwise might save FD some work.

Arrive in system, check local Galnet, see there's a Civil War. Sign up on the bulletin board, now you can track the progress of both sides on Transactions. Bonus would be if this auto-selected a faction when you entered the Civil War zone, depending on whose BB CG Mission you accepted. Yes, I know, some people might want to take both and play both sides for some reason.

 

[goemon]

I'm unsure about your first suggestion. while on the one hand i would like to know, when your "daily limit" has been reached (in all bgs activities....), in the same moment it think that kind of "is it enough?" makes it less gamey...

the second suggestion - npc's reacting to your contribution - i would love that so much. to trigger a salut from system security if approaching back to station, a special welcome ("welcome back respected ally! get to the bar for a beer!"), all of this would be great....

 

[Karlossus]

Dear Goemon,

To clarify: I have been led to understand that there is a daily limit on how much influence you can have on any civil war, and that once reached you need to wait for the next day before your contribution counts again. I did not know that there are limits in other BGS aspects, but to keep this in scope, let's focus on the civil war.

Regarding your suggestion that my concern about whether "it is enough" would make this less gamey (I assume here you refer to immersion/realism), I respectfully disagree. If the goal is to increase immersion by making the game more realistic (or gamey if you wish) then remember that the limitation imposed on us is by the game mechanics itself. In my opinion there is no logical way to express a war contribution as having a limit. Real soldiers in real wars fight at any time of day or night, for as long as they fight, and it all counts. No one calls up the enemy and tells them, "Okay, you can stop now. Your daily killing quota has been reached, so any more of us you kill doesn't count." This sounds ridiculous because it is.

The problem here is that I have a life both in-game and in the real world, and I prefer to be efficient. My time is the most precious commodity because you can't buy it and you can never get it back. For this reason, and many players I've spoken to agree: if the game mechanics impose a limit, then it would be a courtesy for the game to tell me when I can stop a certain activity because continuing is simply a waste of time.

Regarding your understanding of my second suggestion, firstly, my meaning was really about the same thing as in point 1, just on a session level. However, your suggestion is very cool if it could be implemented (though not what I'm asking here). Having the AI interact with me on station is a great idea, and this reminds me of KOTOR. If you ever played that, you will know that your actions had an influence on your light or dark side, and this in turn had an effect on how other characters and the storyline interacted with you. This is a lot more work for FDev, but I have to say, KOTOR will always hold a special place for me because of that aspect of game play. I remember being totally engrossed by my character and it would be off-the-chart amazing if FDev did anything like that.

Thanks,
Karl

 

[CTCParadox]

How about mini-Community Goals for such wars? They wouldn't necessarily need announcing in the same way as the main CGs, but the mechanisms otherwise might save FD some work.

Arrive in system, check local Galnet, see there's a Civil War. Sign up on the bulletin board, now you can track the progress of both sides on Transactions. Bonus would be if this auto-selected a faction when you entered the Civil War zone, depending on whose BB CG Mission you accepted. Yes, I know, some people might want to take both and play both sides for some reason.

I think being forced to pick a side at least for the duration of the war is a good idea.
It will make players a bit more invested in the progress of their faction.
A little service ribbon for completing a war would be nice as well. Kind of like a CG you get a better ribbon depending how much you contributed.

For the daily limit of contributions how about this?
1. Missions contribute far more than just randomly splatting NPCs in CZ.
2. Missions eventually dry up thus you can see when you've done your bit for the day when the mission stop turning up. Perhaps a message from your faction contact saying they need you well rested or something would be nice.

CMDR CTCParadox