Elite Dangerous - Powerplay 2.0 Merit Changes

[photomankc]

Please, for the love of freaking God, fix the trade 1T selling exploit! If your intention is to make small haulers relevant THEN YOU HAVE NOT. All you have done is made trade merits into a contest of who can stand the most tedious imaginable mechanic the longest. It is terrible.


ETA: Each time we start having fun with the push-pull of the overall mechanics of the activities something comes along that allows crapping out 20 and 30K per hour and just sucks the life out of everything.

 

[sacred aardvark]

Demand for Platinum in Wargis is pretty low at the moment, probably due to all the players supporting that system with mining. Inara puts it at 77 tonnes at the time of writing.

While I'm honestly not a trader at heart in this game, the merit reward may come from the sell price above galactic average (rather than absolute). In which case a saturated market isn't going to give much back in terms of merit reward (and may explain why you're getting zero on subsequent sells).

The sale price is well above the galactic average, it has come down ~25% from when I did my first run, and galactic average seems to have gone up 50%, but it's still at ~200% gal average at the time of writing, and was ~300% for the sales I've been making. Besides, if you look at the data I posted, the sale price was consistent as the merits suddenly tanked.

And I don't think chronic oversupply would explain why it would drop to zero after x sales, yet bounce back up all the way to basically full when you come back half an hour to an hour later.

Tifu's explanation fits the data, and is probably correct; especially as further tests showed the cut off to vary depending on how much I had in cargo and seems to be a percentage (further testing required to confirm but I'm not sure I have enough ducks to give to keep testing it). I'd guess they set the potential merit gain for your cargo on docking or something and it doesn't matter in what way you sell them since that's the max that you'll get, I might test if I can get some extra merits if I sell to the limit, and then take a spin around the station before selling the rest or selling the rest elsewhere... not really worth it for my cargo sizes, but could be relevant for someone with a decent sized ship.

Not appreciating undocumented changes or arbitrary hidden mechanics in games, but it is what it is, oh well.

 

[sacred aardvark]

Please, for the love of freaking God, fix the trade 1T selling exploit! If your intention is to make small haulers relevant THEN YOU HAVE NOT. All you have done is made trade merits into a contest of who can stand the most tedious imaginable mechanic the longest. It is terrible.


ETA: Each time we start having fun with the push-pull of the overall mechanics of the activities something comes along that allows crapping out 20 and 30K per hour and just sucks the life out of everything.

Based on the (very limited) testing I've been doing, big batch or small batch doesn't seem to actually matter (granted, I haven't tested down to 1t at a time for the whole cargo load). Big batch you get all the merits you can, small batch you seem to get "moar merits", but run into a brick wall and start getting 0 merits for your sales.

Maybe with big enough cargo and single sales, you might sidestep whatever that hidden merit stopping thing is... or maybe people just hadn't done it long enough to run into the dead end, before screaming fuego fuego from the apparent discrepancy. /shrug Though I might have missed any extensive testing someone has bound to have done on the subject, and I don't have the hundreds of tons of cargo yet to see myself, or frankly even to go through the 60-100t at one by one, so idk.

 

[photomankc]

That does not seem to fall in line with the spreadsheet guys that have been doing this. They have mapped it out to the minimum amount required to sell factoring in when its faster to just get another load and none are reporting that they hit any walls that stop merits.

I'll say that I don't have much personal experiance because I simply can not with that. It's far too painful for me to bother with but it's what others seem to live for.

 

[sacred aardvark]

That does not seem to fall in line with the spreadsheet guys that have been doing this. They have mapped it out to the minimum amount required to sell factoring in when its faster to just get another load and none are reporting that they hit any walls that stop merits.

Link pls, I'm not veteran enough to instantly know who/what/where to find "the spreadsgeet guys" and their data to see how it correlates with my experiences.

 

[photomankc]

I can't link it really. Its a power squadron discord. Given they are spending all day doing it to counter others doing it I suspect they are not running into it failing to produce merits.

 

[sacred aardvark]

I can't link it really. Its a power squadron discord. Given they are spending all day doing it to counter others doing it I suspect they are not running into it failing to produce merits.

Right, well, idk what to tell you. The fact that the merits suddenly stopped mid sale process for me is not up for dispute, that definitely happened. It has also been quite consistent and repeatable for me.

Why it happens... I have no real idea and best I can do it speculate and make wild guesses. Especially if the spreadsheet guys' experience is different. Could be I'm doing something different to what they're doing. Could be demand related like Charybdis suggested, despite the prices not being affected as drastically; so where I vs they are doing it could matter. Could be pledged power dependent for all I know. Could just be a weird bug.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Please, for the love of freaking God, fix the trade 1T selling exploit! If your intention is to make small haulers relevant THEN YOU HAVE NOT. All you have done is made trade merits into a contest of who can stand the most tedious imaginable mechanic the longest. It is terrible.


ETA: Each time we start having fun with the push-pull of the overall mechanics of the activities something comes along that allows crapping out 20 and 30K per hour and just sucks the life out of everything.

That does not seem to fall in line with the spreadsheet guys that have been doing this. They have mapped it out to the minimum amount required to sell factoring in when its faster to just get another load and none are reporting that they hit any walls that stop merits.

I'll say that I don't have much personal experiance because I simply can not with that. It's far too painful for me to bother with but it's what others seem to live for.

I'm pretty sure that the "exploit" was quietly nerfed a few days ago. Not that it was all that effective to begin with, based on my own testing of simply diversifying my cargo hold, doing donation missions, or other ways of earning merits using a cargo hold.

But the next opportunity I have to play, I'll do another test of the "one ton" method "for science."

 

[photomankc]

Same... I don't know what to tell you either. They are making about 200ish merits per minute doing it and have been using it to combat other merit bombs so it has to be working because the numbers are changing each hour. It's just an absolutely horrible method to use though.

 

[Darkfyre99]

200 merits/minute is about 12,000 merits/hour, which isn't that much faster than what I seem to be earning simply by playing what I consider "normally": running donation missions, carrying diversified high margin cargo, scanning ships in Supercruise, dropping into Power Wreckage USSs along my flight path, and allowing wanna-be pirates to "catch" me so I can kill them. I seem to be earning about 8000 to 10,000 merits/hour, and I'm still working on developing my "theatre of operations" and making the occasional mistake (I had to double back, because I sold the wrong commodity at a stop.) And this is in a 240 ton capacity Python.

My earning rate will probably go up once I've gotten much more familiar with this territory, and Frontier allows us to turn in escape pods for merits again.

 

[sacred aardvark]

Same... I don't know what to tell you either. They are making about 200ish merits per minute doing it and have been using it to combat other merit bombs so it has to be working because the numbers are changing each hour. It's just an absolutely horrible method to use though.

Righto, I was making... checks notes about 8-8.5k an hour when running into the wall selling plat, that's... um... picks up calculator 140 merits per minute. Having stopped ignoring everything not plat and also picking up other valuables I'm around 12-13k per hour, or around that same 200 per minute of the spreadsheet guys; since a smaller portion of my cargo is filled with non-merit plat.

It's a weird one.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

200 merits/minute is about 12,000 merits/hour

The thing which needs clarifying here is whether that's personal merits or system merits.

As a personal merits rate, that's 3k system merits per hour, which if escape pods still worked for the non-exploit uses I'd be getting routinely and having a lot more fun doing so.

As a system merits rate (so equivalent to 48,000 personal merits per hour) that's pretty excessive compared with everything else.

 

[sacred aardvark]

The thing which needs clarifying here is whether that's personal merits or system merits.

As a personal merits rate, that's 3k system merits per hour, which if escape pods still worked for the non-exploit uses I'd be getting routinely and having a lot more fun doing so.

As a system merits rate (so equivalent to 48,000 personal merits per hour) that's pretty excessive compared with everything else.

I can confirm my numbers at least are personal merits. I wouldn't even know where to look for system merits (I mean I could certainly take an educated guess if I cared), and I'm only participating in PP for personal gain.

(I already regret my LYR pledge, since my intents have been in flux (I'd planned to just putter off to Colonia and explore the black, but delayed to wait for PP2, and now been thinking about looking at AX stuff since I got my HOTAS and might stay in the bubble for a bit longer) and a different pledge would probably be better at this point, but I'm not resetting my rank progress )

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I wouldn't even know where to look for system merits

For this sort of comparison, just ignore any bonus payout from weekly tasks, and divide the remainder by four.
(Not always exactly right but good enough)

 

[BL1P]

Those missions still exist, but are really hard to find, take advantage if you find a single one..

I came back to play a bit, I found the missions easily enough. what was a little harder was finding the Donations in quantitity.
For the missions it seems you want an Extraction system with Extraction Station. For the donations it seems like Refnery system and Refinery station.
I was collecting (stealing) Palladium, Gold and Silver and then Donating the same.
I was buying and reselling to myself at the lowest posible ammount. Dont know if that makes a diffrence towards the profit scale for merits but did it anyway ??
Well thats whats been working for me anyway.

Donations seem too few and far between for it to be worth the time though.

 

[photomankc]

200 merits/minute is about 12,000 merits/hour, which isn't that much faster than what I seem to be earning simply by playing what I consider "normally": running donation missions, carrying diversified high margin cargo, scanning ships in Supercruise, dropping into Power Wreckage USSs along my flight path, and allowing wanna-be pirates to "catch" me so I can kill them. I seem to be earning about 8000 to 10,000 merits/hour, and I'm still working on developing my "theatre of operations" and making the occasional mistake (I had to double back, because I sold the wrong commodity at a stop.) And this is in a 240 ton capacity Python.

My earning rate will probably go up once I've gotten much more familiar with this territory, and Frontier allows us to turn in escape pods for merits again.

I don't care that they earn that rate of personal merit gain really.

Your diversified approach is not really useful when it needs to be applied to one system to combat a method that is generating at that rate there. So if someone is using a farming method, your opposition must be as fast as theirs or you can't overcome it. In some systems that's not horribly hard to do but in others the options for undermining/fortifying may be completely unbalanced and there is simply no reasonable counter to one or the other. That rate of return has not been my experiance to date in doing all the other assorted play. I'm in the top 10% so I'm not exactly bad at it but I'm not pulling 10K an hour at all.

I'm also very sceptical that the bombs are anything other than what the bombers are chuckling about, specifically that they are using the 1T method. When you see 20-30K control points per hour for 5 hours I'm doubting very hard that this is just diversified play at settlements and pulling power ships and easy going trade. The specifics of how they achieve it or exactly how many are involved are opaque to me but the system traffic is something like 13 in the last 24 hours. So it's not some vast army of randoms just playing the game dumping 170K in 6 hours. So seems as though a wing or two are just PG hauling from external carriers to the station. That's control points too because that's all we can see from the outside.

 

[photomankc]

The thing which needs clarifying here is whether that's personal merits or system merits.

As a personal merits rate, that's 3k system merits per hour, which if escape pods still worked for the non-exploit uses I'd be getting routinely and having a lot more fun doing so.

As a system merits rate (so equivalent to 48,000 personal merits per hour) that's pretty excessive compared with everything else.

I'm not sure but thinking that is merits. Too hard to guage points like that. I assume a wing or two is operating and dumping using the small batch method. The issue is that there just is no combat for the other side. They run a macro with 4 people, we have to try and scrape the entire group into all the other local activities that don't provide anything like 200 merits per minute.

 

[Shadowsnog]

Based on the (very limited) testing I've been doing, big batch or small batch doesn't seem to actually matter

improve your testing before you make claims

 

[sacred aardvark]

improve your testing before you make claims

Get into specifics or don't bother replying. You see a problem with the data or testing, state it plainly.
Better yet, post your own well researched and tested data, it could certainly be useful to everyone to have more data from varied sources readily available.

My statement did have a big disclaimer (very limited data) and an additional qualifier (seem to) regarding the veracity of the information. I am making no definite claims about anything on the subject, apart from what I'd personally experienced.

 

[Shadowsnog]

Get into specifics or don't bother replying. You see a problem with the data or testing, state it plainly.
Better yet, post your own well researched and tested data, it could certainly be useful to everyone to have more data from varied sources readily available.

My statement did have a big disclaimer (very limited data) and an additional qualifier (seem to) regarding the veracity of the information. I am making no definite claims about anything on the subject, apart from what I'd personally experienced.

claim: selling for 1t at a time is used as an exploit to maximize profits
you: thats not true according to my tests ( i did not test selling 1t at a time)
me: improve your testing before making claims
as a matter of a fact, selling 1t at a time gives times more merits that selling bulk.

if you being inaccurate offends you then dont bother posting inaccurate claims.