I still need time to digest all the proposed changes and formulate a response, but I would like to express my gratitude for the communication and for the evidence of ongoing support for PowerPlay and ideas to make it better for the community. Thank you.
Powerplay Collusion Piracy and More
- Thread starter Sandro Sammarco
- Start date
Hello Commanders!
Always good to get feedback (positive or negative) on stuff we chew over ourselves, it really does help us set our bearing as we go forwards (even if the journey might take a while and suffer stranger tides en route).
As is the norm, I will be running silent now, but feel free to continue, even if I don't make a reappearance here, I'll still be following the thread, ready to suck its marrow dry of all the juicy goodness.
Always good to get feedback (positive or negative) on stuff we chew over ourselves, it really does help us set our bearing as we go forwards (even if the journey might take a while and suffer stranger tides en route).
As is the norm, I will be running silent now, but feel free to continue, even if I don't make a reappearance here, I'll still be following the thread, ready to suck its marrow dry of all the juicy goodness.
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Just a thought, but how would the Open mode bonus work for something like fortifying? Hopefully you wouldn't be able to collect fortifications in open, deliver them in open, but travel between systems in group or solo. Would defeat the whole purpose if you could just land at the station and switch modes.
I remember this being a condition of the Titan X treasure hunt (and triple elite contest), but I assumed that was just a dev review of the winner's logs. Does the game have the ability to track whether the whole applicable powerplay activity was done in open, and not just the transactions?
I remember this being a condition of the Titan X treasure hunt (and triple elite contest), but I assumed that was just a dev review of the winner's logs. Does the game have the ability to track whether the whole applicable powerplay activity was done in open, and not just the transactions?
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Has any work on revamping the powerplay module rewards been done yet, conceptual or otherwise? Half of them are useless for ships larger than a Sidewinder, one of them reportedly doesn't even work (heat laser), while another (Guanoscrambler) is a major spit in the face of serious pirates. Hammers and Prismatics are decidedly way more useful than their regular counterparts.
My two cents:
While the difficulty to get rid of bad systems is a major part why 5th column tactics to push bad systems on prep lists are so damaging, a simple withdraw by vote mechanic could change the whole competitive part of PowerPlay to the worse. If factions can just easily rid themselves of bad systems, what would prevent a situation where all powers had good CC surpluses due to lack of bad systems? Each power with enough fortifiers could only be pushed into Turmoil by massive undermining snipe attacks, but to have to much CC at the end of a cycle (to prevent sniping) would not be a problem since bad new systems wouldn't stay in the power.
In principle this is a nice idea, I fear the problem lies in the lacking knowledge about PowerPlay many players not using external information sources have. If you look at the high amounts of grinder activity (i.e. fortification of systems like Groombridge 1618) the sheer number of those people can lead to popular vote choices that are actually very bad for a power. Many players don't even know about the existence of overhead costs and assume every system with bigger base income than upkeep costs is good, opening up opportunities for 5th column players to prepare systems that look good to uninformed players but are actually terrible. Additionally there can be expansion targets that are not profitable for a faction but valid strategic choices nonetheless, especially weaponized expansions that harm economies of rival powers by contesting systems (but have poor income and could be probably downvoted heavily therefore).
I think this would be great. Incentives for players to take higher risks by being in Open through increasing the effects of their efforts can only add to the game imo. Opposition of those efforts would also be more meaningful, right now there is not much sense in setting up a blockade for a system it just drives players in the other modes. The only problem could be possible imbalance effects, i.e. a power that fortifies by hauling from their HQ to their control systems would be much harder to oppose than one that fortifies the other way round (only one system to block).
While the difficulty to get rid of bad systems is a major part why 5th column tactics to push bad systems on prep lists are so damaging, a simple withdraw by vote mechanic could change the whole competitive part of PowerPlay to the worse. If factions can just easily rid themselves of bad systems, what would prevent a situation where all powers had good CC surpluses due to lack of bad systems? Each power with enough fortifiers could only be pushed into Turmoil by massive undermining snipe attacks, but to have to much CC at the end of a cycle (to prevent sniping) would not be a problem since bad new systems wouldn't stay in the power.
In principle this is a nice idea, I fear the problem lies in the lacking knowledge about PowerPlay many players not using external information sources have. If you look at the high amounts of grinder activity (i.e. fortification of systems like Groombridge 1618) the sheer number of those people can lead to popular vote choices that are actually very bad for a power. Many players don't even know about the existence of overhead costs and assume every system with bigger base income than upkeep costs is good, opening up opportunities for 5th column players to prepare systems that look good to uninformed players but are actually terrible. Additionally there can be expansion targets that are not profitable for a faction but valid strategic choices nonetheless, especially weaponized expansions that harm economies of rival powers by contesting systems (but have poor income and could be probably downvoted heavily therefore).
Hello Commanders
And since I'm in the mood for pulling hand grenades, here's another thing to chew on: I'm currently rather taken by the concept of a success multiplier for Commanders in Open Play. this modifier would not improve personal gains from power play activities, but it would magnify the effectiveness of a power's actions (expand, oppose, fortify, undermine). And the effect would probably be significant.
I think this would be great. Incentives for players to take higher risks by being in Open through increasing the effects of their efforts can only add to the game imo. Opposition of those efforts would also be more meaningful, right now there is not much sense in setting up a blockade for a system it just drives players in the other modes. The only problem could be possible imbalance effects, i.e. a power that fortifies by hauling from their HQ to their control systems would be much harder to oppose than one that fortifies the other way round (only one system to block).
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Hello Commanders!
As has been noted, the concept of punitive measures against (what I now suspect is "handshake undermining"
We remove the ability to automatically fast track infinite allottments.
The more Powerplay commodities you deliver successfully, the more allotmentsyou can fast track.
If you lose Powerplay commodities, unintentionally or on purpose, you temporarily lose the ability to collect allotments, and this measure ends you have to build up your fast track combo from scratch.
This is perfect. It stops handshake undermining being overused and it doesn't hit us heavy haulers. I have to say I very much approve.
I really like the idea of this voting system but it would require some failsafe so 5th column coulfn't just drop all their votes at the last minute.
Maybe players would have certain amount of votes every day and if they don't use them during that time they lose them.
I think those are all solid ideas, Sandro Sammarco.
Giving more weight to the actions of players who play PP in open is fair.
It is great to get confirmation that PP gets some love, because I think there's great potential.
I genuinely couldn't care less about PP. To me it just seems like the grindiest thing in the game. Doing a repetitive action over and over in order to gain a bonus for doing another repetitive action. I realise that there are almost certainly players who don't see it the same way. And that's fine.
This bonus for playing in open sounds intriguing, though. I'll reserve judgement on it until we see the change to the security response and AI in 2.1.
I currently play 90% of my time in solo/PG, but a balance between combat and trade vessel interactions and an incentive would make me consider playing in open more.
This bonus for playing in open sounds intriguing, though. I'll reserve judgement on it until we see the change to the security response and AI in 2.1.
I currently play 90% of my time in solo/PG, but a balance between combat and trade vessel interactions and an incentive would make me consider playing in open more.
And since I'm in the mood for pulling hand grenades
I understand the reasoning behind this idea and I agree that commanders playing in open may have to deal with stronger opposition when engaging in PowerPlay than those in solo play and in some private groups - not all private groups are purely PvE like Mobius, mind you!
Even though applying a multiplier to any gains in Powerplay for people in "open" is IMO already a first step in disrupting the equality between all play modes commanders have enjoyed so far, I could still live with it if it serves it's purpose, since it would only be a quantitative instead of a qualitative disparity - players could still contribute to fortification and undermining in solo, just with less influence.
Your idea in the other thread, though - withholding the option to fortify a system by destroying enemy power ships from everyone who prefers to play in solo - is like opening the Pandora's Box since you create a precedent at which people could point when requesting to further increase the gap of mechanics that are available solely in specific game modes:
To completely bar the functionality of fortifying a system via destroying enemy power ships from solo play by limiting it to player ships would go down a dark path I would not want to follow.
What he means is that you can still haul to fortify but you can also destroy enemy CMDRs.
Collusion piracy has pros and cons - however even if it was only used by powers to shed their bad systems and nothing else, it is an inherently unfair mechanic. Why? Because it's not available to all powers. Mahon doesn't share his major allegiance with any other power, and as such is incapable of using it or having it used against him.
My view of collusion piracy is that it should be removed. Not just because it's unfair, but also because it's a money making scheme.
Two friendly commanders can use it to generate 60 million credits out of thin air on week one and 78 million credits out of thin air on subsequent weeks.
The ability to pirate the powers with whom you share a major allegiance should still be in place, but I don't think player piracy should be a 5:1 reward. The 5:1 reward is what makes it a money making scheme, and the 5:1 reward is what makes it so easy to sabotage/shed these systems. Giving restricted access to a highly advantageous mechanic is simply not fair.
If player piracy should work, then it should at most be a 1:1 reward scheme. 5:1 is fine for NPC piracy, however, I also think that one should be boosted. When undermining merits received a boost from 15 to 30 merits per kill, the piracy mechanic did not receive a boost. As such, NPC piracy should be similarly boosted to a 10:1 reward.
I don't like this idea for several reasons.
First of all, in all likelihood the people who are doing the hauling are going to be outnumbered quite severely in a majority of powers, and the people doing the hauling are the ones who have the best feeling for which systems aren't worth keeping. For example, the combat pilots might look at a system that is 180 LY away and has the nearest station at 110,000 light seconds and think "oh, that's a great system" and go fight to expand it, and every single pilot that does fortification is going to be cursing at the combat pilots for doing it.
Secondly, we're not the power. What we want and what Edmund Mahon or Arissa Lavigny-Duval wants is not the same thing. And it neglects the most important thing - it might not be what the system in question wants. If the Ku Klux Klan wants to endorse Donald Trump for president, Donald Trump doesn't get to say no. He can condemn and disavow them all he wants, but it's their endorsement to give, no matter how much it might hurt his chances to get elected.
Unless PowerPlay is about war (and I've not seen anything in GalNet suggesting that Edmund Mahon has declared war against the Federation, Empire, Pranav Antal, Archon Delaine and Li Yong-Rui) the idea that a power can simply choose to withdraw a group of systems' support for them is nonsense. If it is about war, then yes - the powers can plan strategic easily, but until those wars have been declared, this makes absolutely no sense to me.
There are additional issues with this as well. The weaponized expansions would quickly become a problem. The organized groups in PowerPlay fully understand why it's a bad idea to remove themselves from these areas (whether they're the target or the aggressor), but when you have huge player bases where the majority don't care beyond getting merits, there's suddenly every chance that the systems being shed are the wrong ones.
Before you start pushing this untested change to mechanics onto an already extremely fragile PowerPlay community, might I suggest you try it elsewhere first? PowerPlay doesn't generate money for the majority of the people who would be affected by this (the people hauling goods).
Additionally, this will penalize the powers that do transport expand much more significantly than those who do combat expansions. In other words, forcing players into open (which this will do to a large extent), will penalize half of the powers in PowerPlay (Aisling Duval, Edmund Mahon, Felicia Winters, Li Yong-rui and Zemina Torval) while the combat powers get to do all of their expansions the usual way. Keep in mind that combat expansion pilots are only risking the rebuy of a PvE combat ship, whereas the transport expansion pilots are risking the rebuy of their trade ships AND the merits that they can have spent a minor fortune purchasing.
In a similar way this also penalizes the powers that have inbound fortifications over those with outbound fortifications, as the ones with inbound fortifications have a huge bottle neck that can be camped in order to massively disrupt fortification efforts (the HQ). While you can camp the HQ of the outbound powers, this is not nearly as effective, as the returning fortifiers aren't at risk of losing the merits they fast tracked.
I can't speak for anyone else, but my Cutter has a rebuy cost of 8.5 million credits and once you throw in another 8 million credits worth of merits that are at risk on every fortification run that goes back to Gateway, I do feel that this is quite unfair. A Winters pilot in an identical Cutter will lose only 8.5 million credits by being killed upon returning to Rhea, and will have earned 792 merits in the process. I've lost 15.5 million credits and earned 0 merits.
Outbound fortification: Hudson, Winters, ALD, Aisling, Patreus, Li Yong-Rui.
Inbound fortification: Torval, Antal, Archon Delaine, Mahon
In other words, this change will penalize the 40% of the powers that have inbound fortification more than the 60% that have outbound fortification. Outbound fortifications already has a massive advantage (they can't really waste fortification merits), and this will simply tilt the scale even more in their favour.
Before you push this idea onto PowerPlay, I suggest you try it in a couple of different money making schemes.
Change bounty hunting and combat bonds, such that bonds and bounties gathered in private and solo are worth fewer credits than those earned in open. I'm sure that'll go down swimmingly.
Change the CGs such that the participants in open get bonuses over the ones doing it in private and solo and see what the fallout will be.
Additionally - here are a couple of questions that need to be answered as well.
How do you determine what the success multiplier will be? If I do 99% of my route in open and then jump into private/solo just before dropping off stuff, what does that count as? What if I do 99% of it in private and then jump into open?
At least with bounties and combat bonds that is extremely easy to answer, because the kill will happen in one of the two modes, whereas transportation can happen across a number of different modes for a variety of reasons.
And let's be honest here - trading, mining and CG participation in open is a LOT more dangerous than doing PowerPlay in open. If there is going to be a schism between rewards for open and private, they need to be done across all parts of the game. And it really needs to be tested on something that is a lot less fragile than PowerPlay. PowerPlay already has a large number of bugs, ranging from comical to game breaking and an inability to follow its own rules - let's not subject it to something that's going to result in an even larger amount of bug reports. Not to mention the confusion that will ensue - people are already confused about how payouts work, now throw in how they weren't getting the right number of merits for their actions either because they didn't know any better or because the game made a mistake, and PowerPlay just becomes even more problematic than it already is.
I do appreciate that you're trying to make PowerPlay more interesting and engrossing, but for the love of Braven, please make sure that the changes aren't going to result in an even more unbalanced playing field.
Now then - onto something slightly different.
You said that you will have time to work on PowerPlay this season. Great. I will advocate that some of the resources you allocate to this, goes to this. Having a dedicated community manager for PowerPlay, who we can interact with far more reliably than Zac, Brett and Ed (they're good people, but they're also interacting with everyone), and preferably someone who understands the ins and outs of PowerPlay mechanics would be a great help in shaping what happens with and to PowerPlay in the future. Personally I'd love to have that job (I think - depends on the pay), but what's far more important is that something like that is put in place.
Additionally I strongly believe that what PowerPlay needs more than immediate changes to its mechanics, is an overhaul to fix the bugs that it has (for example, currently it is impossible to trust that the game is telling the truth, as was seen a few cycles ago when almost all powers failed to get preparation systems turned into expansion targets, because they couldn't afford them). As long as PowerPlay is in this kind of, frankly, shoddy and untrustworthy state, it should not be subjected to any kind of changes to its mechanics.
Kind regards
CMDR Vectron
Alliance Office of Statistics, Gateway
Pledged to Edmund Mahon
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Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
And since I'm in the mood for pulling hand grenades
My thinking for this? At the moment, any way I slice it, I can't come to any conclusion other than Commanders in Open Play have a tougher time than those in Private Groups or Solo. So the playing field is basically uneven as it stands and in this case, maybe change could make things better.
Very interesting - especially in the context of Dev comments that Powerplay has been introduced for all players, regardless of game mode and that "all game modes are valid and equal".
Choosing to provide extra reward (i.e. effectiveness of actions in Powerplay) to one of the three modes where there is a possibility (but no guarantee) that direct opposition will be encountered is to penalise the other two modes - so, those players who currently enjoy Powerplay in modes other than Open (for whatever reason - we all have the freedom to choose which game mode we play in on a session by session basis) will have to put themselves in the position of being possible targets of PvP in Open to achieve the best outcome from their efforts in future. This does seem to be the thin end of a rather large wedge - as seen by comments in this thread already seeking "Open bonuses" to be applied to other areas of the game.
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Nothing personal Martin but a lot of people in the powerplay community would probably prefer it if you didn't have that job... how about less self promotion and more discourse on Sandro's ideas please if that's okay?
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Paradox, schmeradox... Thanks for dropping a word in on this subject. I'm glad to hear there's active thinking on these issues of balancing the mechanics.
I know many CMDRs are going to cheer at this development, while others may rave. Personally, I'm fine with a multiplier which essentially separates a personal merit count from the server merit contribution by some degree.
While I agree that this is a good deterrent to handshake undermining, there is a potential issue with unintentionally losing the fortification supplies.
You're hoping to encourage more pilots to perform Power Play activities in Open. This means there will be more haulers than ever losing their full cargo of supplies, which can only further delay any fortification efforts. This should mean that fortifiers will get cooperative escort wings to help assist their Power, however, there has been little action on this front because there is absolutely zero reward for the escorts in the Power Play mechanics.
If you're going to separate personal merit counts from server merit contributions, can you not award an escort pilot 5% of the cargo ship's merit contribution to the escort's personal merit count? It's not a lot, but awarding a 450t TradeConda's fighter escort roughly 22 merits when they reach the destination might help encourage combat pilots to sign on for periodic fortification runs.
Thank you for your time and thoughts on the current Power Play situation.
As we've discussed many times before (and as Sandro, it seems, has become aware), the fact of the matter is that this idea of "parity" is a falsehood because it completely leaves out the possibility of destruction and disruption at the hands of other commanders.
You state that a "penalisation" of Solo and PG would make players "have" to go to Open to get the benefit of that: but seem to be perfectly content at the current situation where players "have" to play in Solo or Private Group in order to avoid the very real risk of other players with no counterbalance.
The solution of course, is to balance it so that the bonus would make the choice a close one, where the relative risk of Open has an added bonus to your power, in a way that encourages the type of multiplayer gameplay that Open is supposed to facilitate.
In our previous discussions this is where you dismiss the risk of Open as negligible: but we both know that that is simply untrue for Powerplay.
I, and many others on this forum have extensive and intensive experience of playing Open in contested expansions. You do not.
A slippery slope argument is fallacious and no reason to not implement changes, the devs are aware of what they're doing.
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I think this sounds fair, although you wouldn't want to make it too overpowered for Open players, otherwise Private/Solo players wouldn't bother to participate at all anymore if they felt their contributions weren't going to be worth the effort.
PS let's have more threads like this please, always good to see devs interacting with the playerbase like this. \o/
I'm not sure if you participate in Powerplay Robert, but players who do so in open are subject to significantly greater risks than those in private or solo. Powerplay is about player group competition and there is a lot of PvP involved.
I have no problem about people playing in groups or solo, but those people who do so must also recognise they are taking an easier option.
Sandro,
If we begin to play in open more often than not, you should reconsider how fortification packages are delivered, as those taking them back to their home capital will be at a considerable disadvantage. It needs to be a level playing field on this and I would love to know why you decided to have one power take widgets to a home capital and others take them away from their home capital.
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