EDIT: The war for Fuelum is over! Well done everyone, our ratty friends prevailed.
- Thread starter Aashenfox
- Start date
Well, basically we protect the system by doing exactly what you did.
Only much, much better.
Oh and I should add... "Thank you for providing the gameplay and the mystery. Always fun to have surprises. We should do this again sometime..."
It may have been interesting to witness the events following the war if the fuel rats had lost.
They would have lost their system to a BGS faction that doesn't have long term player support. Whoever was behind the attack had clearly chosen to attack the rats rather than pledge support for another minor faction in the same system.
The result would have been that support for the rats would have continued from the wider community and through sheer numbers and understanding of the BGS gameplay, the rats would have regained their system. It just would have taken a tick or three.
Meanwhile you can imagine that support against the rats would probably have waned.
The rats may have lost the short term battle, but in reality this was never a war the rats were going to lose in the medium to long term.
This highlights one of the interesting human factors in the whole episode. Its always harder to win a war against a people that are fighting for their HOME. They have something worth fighting FOR.
One of the tactics in a BGS conflict between two minor factions is to not only defend your own BGS position but to attack the BGS position of the other team. This works with player factions because the players have a roleplaying/immersive connection to the entity they are supporting.
In this instance there is no emotional connection between the group of players and the faction they were supporting to prove a point (badly). In effect they are just a bunch of mercenaries throwing their weight behind a political organisation for convenience.
I am excited to see how the introduction of squadrons in 3.3 may change this. My understanding from the material we have seen so far is that squadrons can be aligned directly to a BGS Minor faction, so there is a direct connection from your roleplay/immersion commitments to a faction and your effects on that faction.
This wont stop an attack like we saw against the rats. (I presume that regardless of your squadron membership, undertaking missions, turning in explo data and bods etc will continue to affect the BGS in the way it currently does, even if you do them for a faction that is not the one your squadron is associated with. It will also be easy I suspect for players to quit their squadron, move to a different system play the BGS for a different faction and then rejoin ther squadron at alater date - kind of like black ops/insurgency). So while squadrons wont stop attacks like we saw on the rats (and nor should it), it WILL make for more engaging roleplay/immersion between factions with long term player support.
All in all it looks like the BGS worked marvelously well! Long may it continue to do so.
As an aside my understanding of the decision to make BGS transaction driven rather than value driven was to try and create a mechanic where everyone involved had an influence on the BGS. Specifically not to create a system where a new playeris unable to have an effect.
If the system is value driven the an elite player in a meta ship might earn tens of millions in combat bonds and affect the BGS state, but a newer player might only make 100 thousand. This would mean new players being put off joining BGS related activities as their contribution would be minimal. You can imagine the comments of salty veterans ... "go git gud then come back and join in when you can do something useful."
It's a gameplay decision which has probably been taken for honest reasons to be inclusive, but has lead to some manipulation of the gameplay rules that don't match with common sense or roleplaying ideals. Some kind of middle ground where there is a weighting between transaction numbers and value would be a logical compromise? I'd be pleased if this was in 3.3 but if FDev are being tight lipped then we shall have to see from the beta if there is any noticeable difference in INF and states based on transactions. At least now we have feedback to show the state changes so it should be easier to test and understand...
They would have lost their system to a BGS faction that doesn't have long term player support. Whoever was behind the attack had clearly chosen to attack the rats rather than pledge support for another minor faction in the same system.
The result would have been that support for the rats would have continued from the wider community and through sheer numbers and understanding of the BGS gameplay, the rats would have regained their system. It just would have taken a tick or three.
Meanwhile you can imagine that support against the rats would probably have waned.
The rats may have lost the short term battle, but in reality this was never a war the rats were going to lose in the medium to long term.
This highlights one of the interesting human factors in the whole episode. Its always harder to win a war against a people that are fighting for their HOME. They have something worth fighting FOR.
One of the tactics in a BGS conflict between two minor factions is to not only defend your own BGS position but to attack the BGS position of the other team. This works with player factions because the players have a roleplaying/immersive connection to the entity they are supporting.
In this instance there is no emotional connection between the group of players and the faction they were supporting to prove a point (badly). In effect they are just a bunch of mercenaries throwing their weight behind a political organisation for convenience.
I am excited to see how the introduction of squadrons in 3.3 may change this. My understanding from the material we have seen so far is that squadrons can be aligned directly to a BGS Minor faction, so there is a direct connection from your roleplay/immersion commitments to a faction and your effects on that faction.
This wont stop an attack like we saw against the rats. (I presume that regardless of your squadron membership, undertaking missions, turning in explo data and bods etc will continue to affect the BGS in the way it currently does, even if you do them for a faction that is not the one your squadron is associated with. It will also be easy I suspect for players to quit their squadron, move to a different system play the BGS for a different faction and then rejoin ther squadron at alater date - kind of like black ops/insurgency). So while squadrons wont stop attacks like we saw on the rats (and nor should it), it WILL make for more engaging roleplay/immersion between factions with long term player support.
All in all it looks like the BGS worked marvelously well! Long may it continue to do so.
As an aside my understanding of the decision to make BGS transaction driven rather than value driven was to try and create a mechanic where everyone involved had an influence on the BGS. Specifically not to create a system where a new playeris unable to have an effect.
If the system is value driven the an elite player in a meta ship might earn tens of millions in combat bonds and affect the BGS state, but a newer player might only make 100 thousand. This would mean new players being put off joining BGS related activities as their contribution would be minimal. You can imagine the comments of salty veterans ... "go git gud then come back and join in when you can do something useful."
It's a gameplay decision which has probably been taken for honest reasons to be inclusive, but has lead to some manipulation of the gameplay rules that don't match with common sense or roleplaying ideals. Some kind of middle ground where there is a weighting between transaction numbers and value would be a logical compromise? I'd be pleased if this was in 3.3 but if FDev are being tight lipped then we shall have to see from the beta if there is any noticeable difference in INF and states based on transactions. At least now we have feedback to show the state changes so it should be easier to test and understand...
Artie has this data compression algorithm on the INARA data.
It shows this week’s data at high resolution, but historical data is averaged somehow.
So yeah you’re right - recent data is dynamic and volatile, but the data from the start of October has a suspicious linear fall off.
Now the linearity could easily be due to the data compression averaging a set of wiggly losses.
But JTrinity talks about linearity of influence loss / gain being demonstrated in systems where specific known bot accounts were working.
The real problem in Fuelum is that no-one is recording traffic data to match against influence data.
Frontier don’t keep logs either.
So ultimately if you let it go by without catching it, you can guess or talk till you’re blue in the face, but you’ve got no evidence. So it almost doesn’t matter if it “actually” was or wasn’t bots - you can’t know.
It certainly is within the capability of a group to push TFRM down, especially without opposition. It doesn’t need to be bots here.
But what you can do:
When you see suspicious activity - tell me.
15 Cutters in a low traffic system? Count rising at 3 or 4 an hour?
A hundred Cutters?
Just PM me.
Monitoring Cutter and Python traffic is almost the only thing I’m doing in-game these days.
But I have to agree with Phisto - this looks like folks not automata.
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