Powerplay Disincentivizing the 5th Column in PP

[persephonius]

Hello Commanders!

I quite like the simplicity of the "increase merits for unfortified systems" concept, personally. Definitely worth chewing over.

Regarding 5th columnists: we are investigating ways of allowing powers to shed systems: the trick is to enforce enough safety measures to prevent the process itself being sabotaged!

In general, we like the idea of a power being able to change it's powerbase over time; we think it could create more opportunity for powers fighting over systems.

Increasing merits for unfortified systems is an attempt to push players that don't care about PP to do something more worth while, this is a combination of spoon feeding and rail-roading effectiveness in fortification. It is a players choice whether they wish to be effective with their merits or not, and so I don't think there should be a mechanic that does this.

 

[Trafalgar Law]

Increasing merits for unfortified systems is an attempt to push players that don't care about PP to do something more worth while, this is a combination of spoon feeding and rail-roading effectiveness in fortification. It is a players choice whether they wish to be effective with their merits or not, and so I don't think there should be a mechanic that does this.

It will still be their choice. They will just have more incentive to travel more than one jump.

 

[Qubit]

And it will still be their choice. They will just have more incentive to travel more than one jump.

Yes, and it makes perfect sense. It is more effort to fortify systems that are further from the HQ, so the power rewards that extra effort with additional merits because it is in its interest to do so.

Another way to look at it is, the players should not need to read up much about how power play works, it should be intuitive. The intuitive thing to do is to provide bigger rewards for the most beneficial actions (i.e. positive reinforcement).

 

[FleetAdmiralJ]

Given that I think 5th columning is really only a problem in preparation (and expansion, though expansion won't be a problem if we fix it for preparations), I think people in groups 1 and 2 (benign and self-interested) are largely irrelevant. I think most of them are just over-fortifying or over-undermining other systems, and while they are useless merits as far as the power is concerned, it doesn't actually hurt anyone.

And people in those categories who might try to prepare systems that are close but low-value probably are only doing so because the 3rd group (malicious) put them there to begin with. A lot of otherwise benign people were preparing Wolf 412 for Mahon simply because it was at the top of the list and close. They likely wouldn't have done so if the malicious 5th columner hadn't put it there in the first place.

Some of my thoughts so far:

For starters the net income showed in-game should include the overheads for that cycle, that it doesn't right now it's outright misinformation from FDev to the player.

I completely agree with that. Before I came to reddit and learned how the costs actually worked, if I had seen an 8 or 15 CC system in the prep list that was close, I may have very well have done work there to "help" even though I was, in reality, doing the opposite of that. There may very well be grinders who don't wan to do anything that hurts, but the current information display misleads them into believing that a bad system is actually a good system.

I've had some ideas about having some sort of vetoing system, though that could itself perhaps be open to abuse. There have been some thoughts about essentially having the preparation nominations that people get at the start of the cycle be the ONLY thing that counts toward preparing systems, and nothing else. That way you can't 5th column because having a large ship and lots of money is irrelevant to what gets prepared. You get your certain number of votes and that's it.

Perhaps another alternative would be to have some sort of trigger values for preparation as well, where lower value systems have higher triggers. That way, if a power really WANTS to expand to a low-value system for whatever reason, they can still do it. But it'll be harder to do. I would classify this under the logic of "any rational leader would prefer high value systems over low value systems."

My idea for how this could work are:
- Initially the preparation should work similar to now, but without the nominations.
- Then at the end of the cycle the top ten systems are listed. You use the nominations to vote for the system(s) you would like to expand into. (So higher ranks get more votes)
- Then the at the end of that cycle the systems with the highest votes move into expansion. This continues down the list until the first system is reached that the power cannot afford to expand into.

So, in summary expansion takes three cycles: prepare, vote, expand.

That is a pretty interesting idea as well, though I'm not sure how much I like it taking 3 cycles to expand into a system. What about something like this: Days 1 - 6 are preparing and then Day 7 is for voting? I think that could work. Of course, the problem with that is what if there are certain people who aren't available on that day, I guess. But then again, voting just means getting on, voting and getting off, so as long as you have a few minutes at a computer with the game it shouldn't be an issue. That means 5th columners would have to fill the entire list to force a bad system (or the power would have to have a lot of CC thus likely expanding to a lot of systems).

 

[Apos]

It will still be their choice. They will just have more incentive to travel more than one jump.

Just like it's everyone's choice to join Arissa? Should make sure that it's everyone's choice to protect her too.

This week is quite obvious that she can fortify if needed, why do her players need more incentive to do it? Everyone else understands its importance and does it. It's absolutely boring for everyone, that's the main problem.

Fortifying means spending more time playing another game in order to wait for quotas than playing Elite. Giving directions on how to do it efficiently won't change that.

Plus, no power really wants to have its farmers move to fortifying, because they want to be able to control their expansions. This would just make 5th collumning easier, since farmers would ensure that powers have their maximum reserves every cycle.

 

[Qubit]

That is a pretty interesting idea as well, though I'm not sure how much I like it taking 3 cycles to expand into a system. What about something like this: Days 1 - 6 are preparing and then Day 7 is for voting? I think that could work. Of course, the problem with that is what if there are certain people who aren't available on that day, I guess. But then again, voting just means getting on, voting and getting off, so as long as you have a few minutes at a computer with the game it shouldn't be an issue.

Yeah, the details could do with working out, but the deciding factor for expansion should be by a vote.
The other reason I proposed is there are minimal changes to the mechanics that are already implemented, so it should be easier for FD to implement. i.e. prepation is essentially the same, same as expansion. The biggest change will be to the UI to add a third tab for the voting stage, but the functionality for this already exists in one form or another for other pages. However, I cannot be sure of the impact for the first week when the cycle changes to three weeks (I suspect it will be faily minimal, it should just result in one week where no one expands)

That means 5th columners would have to fill the entire list to force a bad system (or the power would have to have a lot of CC thus likely expanding to a lot of systems).

This is also why I added an additional idea that there should be a vote for "Do not expand" as a way to get around times when all prepared systems are bad.



Without knowing the code, or internal workings it is difficult for us to know the feasibility of these changes. Being a developer myself I know that some things that sound like they should be fairly trivial can actually be extremely complicated, and vice versa. If these are not feasible I am sure we can come up with many more ideas.

It would be useful to get some feedback from Sandro to find out what he and his team think about these ideas.

 

[Qubit]

Just like it's everyone's choice to join Arissa? Should make sure that it's everyone's choice to protect her too.

This week is quite obvious that she can fortify if needed, why do her players need more incentive to do it? Everyone else understands its importance and does it. It's absolutely boring for everyone, that's the main problem.

Fortifying means spending more time playing another game in order to wait for quotas than playing Elite. Giving directions on how to do it efficiently won't change that.

Plus, no power really wants to have its farmers move to fortifying, because they want to be able to control their expansions. This would just make 5th collumning easier, since farmers would ensure that powers have their maximum reserves every cycle.

From what I have read, most of the ideas put forward will apply to all powers, not just Arissa. Granted, additional bonuses for fortifying based on distance will apply more to larger powers. However, if the extra merit will be for the commander, it will not generate more fortifcation material. The side effect of this will be those that are just looking to get their 10K merits will actually reach it earlier, and transport less fortification material overall, it will just be spread to systems further away.

It all comes down to balancing, but first the fundamental problems need to be fixed.

 

[fergal]

Regarding 5th columnists: we are investigating ways of allowing powers to shed systems: the trick is to enforce enough safety measures to prevent the process itself being sabotaged!

Hi Sandro,
The issue being raised here isn't that there is no way to shed unwanted systems (this is an issue though) but that players can join different powers to sabotage them without anyone in the power being able to kick them out.

Even if you kill them you lose 50 merits and are branded the traitor.

The smartest and best use of your time right now is to join a Power you want to attack and prep bad systems for them. There is no counter to this strategy and what I (and many others) would like to know is if this is considered an exploit and is something that will be changed or fixed in the future, or if its working as intended.

If its working as intended I'll defect to Aisling for 4 weeks, prep bad systems for them and get the ubershields then probably leave PP.

 

[Apos]

Hi Sandro,
The issue being raised here isn't that there is no way to shed unwanted systems (this is an issue though) but that players can join different powers to sabotage them without anyone in the power being able to kick them out.

Even if you kill them you lose 50 merits and are branded the traitor.

The smartest and best use of your time right now is to join a Power you want to attack and prep bad systems for them. There is no counter to this strategy and what I (and many others) would like to know is if this is considered an exploit and is something that will be changed or fixed in the future, or if its working as intended.

If its working as intended I'll defect to Aisling for 4 weeks, prep bad systems for them and get the ubershields then probably leave PP.

But...Arissa is losing systems and Aisling is in dire need of good systems.

Just get some popcorn ready instead! There's a lot of drama incoming in the Empire!

 

[fergal]

But...Arissa is losing systems and Aisling is in dire need of good systems.

Just get some popcorn ready instead! There's a lot of drama incoming in the Empire!

Its not a case of drama, or the Empire finally getting undermined, its needing to use a mechanic like this to compete with others using it.

The best use of everyone's time isn't to help your power, but to defect and harm another power. The game becomes backwards, all the while making a mockery of the 10 NPCs running each power.
If they have risen to be the 10 most powerful people in the galaxy, how can they not see whats going on to sabotage them?

 

[VerneAsimov]

It's been a few days already and the only changes you have replied to are the ones which will make Arissa (or any other power with her populace in the future in that regard) impossible to harm.

This is self-evident. It feels like they will never admit it but all they truly care about is ALD and occasionally they'll pander to small powers to make them feel good; you said high population factions but Aisling Duval is feeling a bit left out from this. For example, when Aisling complained about a battery of bugs over the course of a month we got one sentence responses saying they'll look into it. They never did look into it. When ALD complains about a functional system that could use some changing, the Lead Designer is posting like crazy in the thread. It shows Frontier: you want ALD to succeed. Just say it and get it over with.

Now that my daily ALD rant is out of the way, let's talk incentivizing players to fortify correctly without herding them. Think about this: people farm close systems to gain merits. Limit merits when a system no longer benefits from fortification. When a system reaches its trigger, none of the merits going in to it thereafter are useful. There is literally zero benefit to fortifying above the cap. When a system reaches its trigger, simply reduce the number of merits a person gains from it (like 25% or 50% effectiveness), make it give zero benefits, or turn off fortifying period. If that isn't good enough, maybe that's why you're Lead Designer and I'm not.

Second, back to ALD or anyone who has a combat expansion methodology: it's too overpowered. One kill could take like 2 minutes and gain 30 merits whereas everyone else has to spend at least the equivalent of 18 minutes or 300,000 CR to gain the same amount of expansion. Arissa had literally one million expansion in one of her systems. That is 33,334 kills or... one million merits, the equivalent of 10 billion credits.

Third, look into bugs more consistently. If you say you'll fix one bug in one particular way, continuously do so. You can't flip-flop. It makes you look like you're favoring a certain powers. If you have to change your stance, it helps if you don't do every other instance of said bug.

Fourth, the point of the thread: sniping sucks. No one can do anything about it. It's a cool little tactic but there should be a way to lessen the impact or attempt to prevent it before the cycle ticks. There are actually a lot of aspects of PowerPlay that can't be countered.

And finally, while we're on Powerplay: what is up faction HQs having ridiculous amounts of NPCs? You jump in, get interdicted. You get interdicted while getting interdicted. You get interdicted 1.01 Mm from the station. You get interdicted inside stations. I bet someone has been interdicted while offline and docked at some point! I think the fix to NPC interdictions may help, thank god.

 

[Martin Schou]

I've said it before and I'll say it again - you don't need massively complicated mechanics or mechanic changes to cope with 5th column prep sabotage.

All you need to do is change the amount of preparation goods you get every week to be exactly what you get in nominations. Once you do that, prep sabotage becomes extremely difficult to do, because any organized group can easily muster enough rank 5 players to out prep the sabotage systems.

I seriously do not understand why people are jumping to introduce needlessly complicated mechanics, new voting systems, vetoing, counter vetoing etc. For that matter, I don't understand why on Earth it's something that I've come up with rather than something the developers have come up with on their own - I mean, it's probably the simplest fix of all.

 

[Sandro Sammarco]

Hello Commander Martin Schou!

I like the concept of limiting preparation based on rating.

It makes rating more important, which is always a good thing in my book, as well as potentially making it harder for saboteurs (they'd actually have to do some good by fortifying and undermining to increase their rating to be able to hurt the power).

I'm also attracted to the concept that preparation becomes finite; another incentive to work together if you really want the power to do well.

I do have a concern though.

Such a system would be particularly painful to powers with small supporter bases with regards to preparation competition, which tend to be smaller powers, though this isn't always the case.

If a system was desired by two powers, one with lots of supporters and one with few, this system would essentially limit the effectiveness of "putting the time in" which is currently available to small user base powers. The large user base power could offset this limit by simply sending more folk to prepare.

It's somewhat of a corner case, but it would be interesting to hear what you folk think on this issue.

 

[Apos]

Hello Commander Martin Schou!

I like the concept of limiting preparation based on rating.

It makes rating more important, which is always a good thing in my book, as well as potentially making it harder for saboteurs (they'd actually have to do some good by fortifying and undermining to increase their rating to be able to hurt the power).

I'm also attracted to the concept that preparation becomes finite; another incentive to work together if you really want the power to do well.

I do have a concern though.

Such a system would could be particularly painful to powers with small supporter bases with regards to preparation competition, which tend to be smaller powers, though this isn't always the case.

If a system was desired by two powers, one with lots of supporters and one with few, this system would essentially limit the effectiveness of "putting the time in" which is currently available to small user base powers. The large user base power could offset this limit by simply sending more folk to prepare.

It's somewhat of a corner case, but it would be interesting to hear what you folk think on this issue.

This could be solved by adding an extra week in the expansion procedure, but only if more than 2 powers vote for the same system.

Week 1: Voting happens

Week 2: If 2 powers or more have voted for the same system, this goes to a "contention" week, which will be similar to how preparations work at present, but only for that system. This way, the powers will still have a race for systems if multiple of them have tried to claim them.

Week 3: Expansion/Opposition phase normally occurs. If a system was nominated by only 1 power, this phase is reached by week 2.

 

[Marra Morgan]

Hi Sandro,

It makes rating more important, which is always a good thing in my book, as well as potentially making it harder for saboteurs (they'd actually have to do some good by fortifying and undermining to increase their rating to be able to hurt the power).

It's a good thing in my book too, but Rating can be easily increased by over-fortifying and over-undermining, which doesn't really do your power any good. If you were to take another look at reducing merits for over-doing those things, then tying Prep to Rating could well work.

I'm also attracted to the concept that preparation becomes finite; another incentive to work together if you really want the power to do well.

Being in one of the smaller powers, I like this. Smaller powers appear to be tighter, close-knit and better organised, which offsets your concern below but doesn't entirely mitigate it.

Such a system would could be particularly painful to powers with small supporter bases with regards to preparation competition, which tend to be smaller powers, though this isn't always the case.

If a system was desired by two powers, one with lots of supporters and one with few, this system would essentially limit the effectiveness of "putting the time in" which is currently available to small user base powers. The large user base power could offset this limit by simply sending more folk to prepare.

The powers with larger player bases already have this advantage as currently Preparation doesn't have an upper-limit; they can organise their players to swamp a system with Prep goods to ensure they get it. I'm happy that you find it a concern and that you're thinking of the smaller powers, though

With finite Prep materials being available based on Rating, I think that there should be quite a jump between Ratings 3 and 4. I'd think that the majority of players who are just chasing the modules will just put in the minimum to attain Rating 3 on their fourth week, but players who are more committed to their power are more likely to be Ratings 4-5 - give these players more say in their power's Prep.

And thanks for communicating with us!

 

[Martin Schou]

Hello Commander Martin Schou!

I like the concept of limiting preparation based on rating.

It makes rating more important, which is always a good thing in my book, as well as potentially making it harder for saboteurs (they'd actually have to do some good by fortifying and undermining to increase their rating to be able to hurt the power).

I'm also attracted to the concept that preparation becomes finite; another incentive to work together if you really want the power to do well.

I do have a concern though.

Such a system would could be particularly painful to powers with small supporter bases with regards to preparation competition, which tend to be smaller powers, though this isn't always the case.

If a system was desired by two powers, one with lots of supporters and one with few, this system would essentially limit the effectiveness of "putting the time in" which is currently available to small user base powers. The large user base power could offset this limit by simply sending more folk to prepare.

It's somewhat of a corner case, but it would be interesting to hear what you folk think on this issue.

This is no different than how the current system works. A prep war between, say, ALD and Torval would be won by ALD, simply because they have more players. It doesn't hurt that ALD also has richer players, who can therefore afford to push more preps into the prep war. The corner case doesn't really change - it mostly becomes a question about who has the most organized players rather than who has the most players. This can become an advantage for slightly smaller powers with more organization (not vs ALD - they're simply too big), but Torval vs Mahon could be a very interesting race, because both probably have the same amount of organized players, whereas currently Mahon could probably win that simply by raw numbers.

 

[CMDR_Baldr]

This could be solved by adding an extra week in the expansion procedure, but only if more than 2 powers vote for the same system.

Week 1: Voting happens

Week 2: If 2 powers or more have voted for the same system, this goes to a "contention" week, which will be similar to how preparations work at present, but only for that system. This way, the powers will still have a race for systems if multiple of them have tried to claim them.

Week 3: Expansion/Opposition phase normally occurs. If a system was nominated by only 1 power, this phase is reached by week 2.

^^This is a great idea!

 

[FleetAdmiralJ]

Hello Commander Martin Schou!

I like the concept of limiting preparation based on rating.

It makes rating more important, which is always a good thing in my book, as well as potentially making it harder for saboteurs (they'd actually have to do some good by fortifying and undermining to increase their rating to be able to hurt the power).

Maybe. Maybe not. A smart saboteur will just fortify a system that doesn't need it, either because it's not getting undermined or because it's already hit it's fortification trigger, or they'll undermine a power that serves the purpose of helping their original power, but not necessarily the power they are currently pledged to, but I get your point.

I'm also attracted to the concept that preparation becomes finite; another incentive to work together if you really want the power to do well.

I think this is perhaps the biggest issue. A wing of well-funded level 5 moles in anacondas can pretty much wreck a preparation list, especially if a power is expanding to a lot of systems. It shouldn't be so easy for so few to determine what happens.

I do have a concern though.

Such a system would be particularly painful to powers with small supporter bases with regards to preparation competition, which tend to be smaller powers, though this isn't always the case.

If a system was desired by two powers, one with lots of supporters and one with few, this system would essentially limit the effectiveness of "putting the time in" which is currently available to small user base powers. The large user base power could offset this limit by simply sending more folk to prepare.

It's somewhat of a corner case, but it would be interesting to hear what you folk think on this issue.

True, I hadn't thought of the fact that two powers could compete for the same preparation system and if were based on straight up vote numbers, then yes, that would favor the larger powers. I suppose a couple ideas to counter this would be:

1) If it becomes a mix of the current system, with a vote afterward (whether that's another week added to the process for voting or whether it's voting on the last day or couple of days), then that first part where it works like how it does now could determine who gets that system in their voting list.

2) Each power has a preparation trigger based on the total number of users in their power. That would require a more unified and coordinated effort to prepare systems, and may actually favor smaller powers a tad as I get the sense that a larger proportion of those powers are organized as compared to some of the larger factions.

Just a couple of ideas anyway.

Edit:

This could be solved by adding an extra week in the expansion procedure, but only if more than 2 powers vote for the same system.

Week 1: Voting happens

Week 2: If 2 powers or more have voted for the same system, this goes to a "contention" week, which will be similar to how preparations work at present, but only for that system. This way, the powers will still have a race for systems if multiple of them have tried to claim them.

Week 3: Expansion/Opposition phase normally occurs. If a system was nominated by only 1 power, this phase is reached by week 2.

I like this idea as well.

 

[Trader38]

<snip>

If a system was desired by two powers, one with lots of supporters and one with few, this system would essentially limit the effectiveness of "putting the time in" which is currently available to small user base powers. The large user base power could offset this limit by simply sending more folk to prepare.

It's somewhat of a corner case, but it would be interesting to hear what you folk think on this issue.

Not sure i understand the need for a smaller power to be able to compete in a prep war against a larger power ?
Surely it makes sense that a large power would win thus making strategic prep/expansion necessary. If the smaller power wishes to grow then it should be expanding away from a larger power until it reaches sufficient size to effectively compete.

The OP is not about re-writing the whole powerplay formula, it's about the unfairness (almost game breaking) activities of 5C causing prep/expansion of bad systems without any mechanic to stop/counter that activity and, if enough bad systems are forced onto a power to place it in turmoil the power will lose it's good systems and retain the bad ones. Even changing that small detail to make it so a power 'sheds' enough bad systems to recover it's deficit would be a solution, not to the 5C problem, but at least there would then be a mechanic to get rid of the bad systems.

As i mentioned in the other thread, 5C is about defecting from the power you support to a power you wish to harm, being able to retain 50% of your merits on defection is rediculous as you earned those merits by supporting your power, you should lose all merits when defecting.
I quote my other post:

Rating is the result of acting on behalf of your power, keeping 50% when defecting is rediculous. Defecting Empire to Empire or Federation to Federation i could understand but realistically you should lose ALL merits when defecting. As it stands 5C can achieve 20k merits conducting their abhorent behavior then defect and still get 50Mcr to pay for their actions.
Reduce the merits to zero on defection and the weekly payout to 10Mcr or 15Mcr for rate 5 would make the actions of 5C more difficult to achieve and a lot less attractive.

Additionally, whilst for the Alliance you could understand having an impotent Prime Minister, any dictatorship power would see the dictator immediately veto any prep/expansion into a bad system however such an in-game mechanic does not exist thus making 5C's actions potent and powerful against all factions.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Could it be possible to use votes to simply vote down a system? Add a second option on the prep screen and although imperfect, it would at least give a way to change things.

Or limit voting to your allocation of merits. Once they are gone, no more voting, so deep pockets are meaningless.