Elite Dangerous | Powerplay 2.0 Update

[Ian Doncaster]

I'll give UnderMining a test later today to see if I can get it to work.

Okay, wasn't able to test that yesterday - managed to get around to it today.

Flew to HR 5322 as a random system owned by another power with a Refinery-type economy.
Dropped into one of the belt clusters, found the core, rock, blew it up and mined 12t Serendibite
Sold it to the local market for 2.26 million (not a great price, but I wasn't picking the system to be optimal)
Got about 1200 merits for it

So mining to undermine a system seems to work fine for me.

 

[Udson]

hello! if it can help! for all those who were victim of the Fleet carrier bug! loading/unloading problems blocked! after uninstalling and reinstalling the game! everything is back to normal! the bug appeared after the 28/1/2024 update.

 

[Udson]

28/11/2024 update

 

[Nowski]

Okay, wasn't able to test that yesterday - managed to get around to it today.

Flew to HR 5322 as a random system owned by another power with a Refinery-type economy.
Dropped into one of the belt clusters, found the core, rock, blew it up and mined 12t Serendibite
Sold it to the local market for 2.26 million (not a great price, but I wasn't picking the system to be optimal)
Got about 1200 merits for it

So mining to undermine a system seems to work fine for me.

Could it be that local demand (or otherwise) for mined goods is a factor? I seem to remember reading that about trade at some point.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Could it be that local demand (or otherwise) for mined goods is a factor? I seem to remember reading that about trade at some point.

I haven't tried selling to a non-demand market, but even if it worked it'd be so slow to get credits and merits that you should probably just do something else in that system.

 

[St0rmFury]

Okay, wasn't able to test that yesterday - managed to get around to it today.

Flew to HR 5322 as a random system owned by another power with a Refinery-type economy.
Dropped into one of the belt clusters, found the core, rock, blew it up and mined 12t Serendibite
Sold it to the local market for 2.26 million (not a great price, but I wasn't picking the system to be optimal)
Got about 1200 merits for it

So mining to undermine a system seems to work fine for me.

Hmm, looks like you get less merits for mining for undermining (0.55 merits per 1K profit) rather than reinforcing (0.75 merits per 1K profit).

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Hmm, looks like you get less merits for mining for undermining (0.55 merits per 1K profit) rather than reinforcing (0.75 merits per 1K profit).

You can't say that as a general rule. In my mining efforts in different reinforcing systems, the merit rate fluctuated between 0.5 and 0.75, but I am unable to see a correlation to any of the obvious factors like demand or profit/t. I have sold the same mineral at 0.75 for a low profit at one station and for 0.5 at a different station with double the profit while being well below he bulk tax threshold both times. If there is a corellation, I fail to see it in the data I saved. There seem to be more factors at play, but I haven't found them. To quote the NPCs: I'm just a simple miner .

 

[St0rmFury]

Gotcha, more testing is required then.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

someone also suggested to me there was some kind of sales cap, meaning that after selling a certain amount of tonnage you stop getting merits, but my spreadsheet doesn't really support that either - I've sold 57t of Monazite for 0.68 merits/1000Cr in one system, and 110 (almost double) for 0.73 in another. Something doesn't add up, but I am not smart enough to see the system behind it.

 

[sacred aardvark]

someone also suggested to me there was some kind of sales cap, meaning that after selling a certain amount of tonnage you stop getting merits, but my spreadsheet doesn't really support that either - I've sold 57t of Monazite for 0.68 merits/1000Cr in one system, and 110 (almost double) for 0.73 in another. Something doesn't add up, but I am not smart enough to see the system behind it.

If we're talking about mining (i may have got people confused before vis-a-vis mining/trading so I'm doublechecking ), I ran into an issue with mining merits petering out for a particular cargo load.

From my testing, you get merits for some percentage of your tonnage of mined goods, so not a tonnage limit per se. My 70-ish tons of Plat stopped giving merits around 60-65-ish tons sold, while selling 8t of Gold from the same mining run stopped giving merits after 5-ish tons sold. (I can't remember the exact values off the top of my head)

So from my testing, it's not a tonnage limit in that you can't sell more than x-tons, it's a tonnage limit in that you get credits for y% of your total tonnage of the materia, whatever that tonnage is. E.g. Extrapolating from my limited data, if you sold about 140t of Plat in smaller batches, you'd stop getting merits around 130t or whatever. Maybe. Possibly. Or not... idfk. x)

I also cba to test if I could sell small batches until they stop giving merits, take the "spare" mats, do a loop around the station, and come back to sell the rest for merits... Mostly because I felt that whatever merits I'd gain from that wouldn't actually improve my merits/h over quickly selling everything and going off for another full load.

I was only doing my thing in one system and station, so I can't really comment on the variability of merits depending on system. But as a guess, possibly demand related? Or which type of reinforcing (exploit/fortify/etc) the system is in affecting it?

 

[DemiserofD]

I ranked up 12 times today.

Twelve times. I didn't even play all that much; maybe a couple hours? Frankly, I've got so many care packages I've got no idea which ones are which at this point. I'm completely overloaded on materials, to the point they've lost all value.

I get it; the old levels were pretty low. You had to actually try to rank up, and a lot of players didn't feel like doing it. But honestly, I think the new levels are worse. Yeah, a lot of people would never have even gotten started. But now, people will grind for 20 hours to get to rank 100 and then quit. Is that really any better?

BOTH are missing the PURPOSE of these rewards; they're to make you want to play powerplay! You're not supposed to be playing powerplay just for the rewards! You're supposed to be playing powerplay FOR powerplay!

---

Hours of Play	Old Merits	Current Merits	New Merits
10	10% of Bonuses	40% of bonuses + First Module	50% of bonuses
20	20%	80% of bonuses + All Modules	60% of bonuses + First Module
30	30%	100% of bonuses	70% + Second and Third Module
40	40% + First Module	Nothing	75% + Fourth Module
50	50% + Modules 2+3	Nothing	80% + Fifth Module80
60	60% + Modules 4+5	Nothing	85% + Sixth Module
70	70% + Modules 6+7	Nothing	90% + Seventh Module
80	80% + Modules 8+9	Nothing	95% + Eighth Module
90	90%	Nothing	100% + Ninth Module

THIS is what I want.

In the first ten hours, you get half your maximum bonuses. The next ten, you get your first module unlock - the one that corresponds to your power.

After that? You slowly unlock the rest, feeling like you're a member of your Power, like you've actually earned something, WITHOUT feeling like you're getting bombarded with endless care packages, WITHOUT feeling like you have no reason to play and progress.

 

[sacred aardvark]

I ranked up 12 times today.

Twelve times. I didn't even play all that much; maybe a couple hours?

Cool. So since, "in a couple hours", you got almost as many ranks as I've got in total so far during PP2.0, could you elaborate on the details of your activity so I can replicate it. Thaaanks.

 

[DemiserofD]

Cool. So since, "in a couple hours", you got almost as many ranks as I've got in total so far during PP2.0, could you elaborate on the details of your activity so I can replicate it. Thaaanks.

Play efficiently.

For example, find a Pirate Attack system, and kit out a ship to rapidly kill the anacondas inside. They give upwards of 500 merits per kill, or something like 30000 merits per hour.

Or infiltrate a Tourism Settlement for data and powerplay commodities. You can do a run in about 5 minutes, and it earns you 6000 merits per run. That's 72000 merits per hour.

Or do core mining. 200 merits per ton, 100 tons per hour, that's 20000 merits per hour.

Seriously, you can do it with anything.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Hmm, looks like you get less merits for mining for undermining (0.55 merits per 1K profit) rather than reinforcing (0.75 merits per 1K profit).

HR 5322 has a "Moderate" System Strength Penalty, so that makes sense if it's the same rate per profit in "Standard" SSP Undermining and in Reinforcement

I get it; the old levels were pretty low. You had to actually try to rank up, and a lot of players didn't feel like doing it. But honestly, I think the new levels are worse. Yeah, a lot of people would never have even gotten started. But now, people will grind for 20 hours to get to rank 100 and then quit. Is that really any better?

The number of people who are doing that "grind for 20 hours then quit" is basically irrelevant as a percentage of total powerplayers, though. Frontier's never going to make those people do anything else (just change whether the number is 2, 20 or 200) and it's not worth trying. Just let them quit and everyone else can get on with it.

I tend to get around the "top 10%" mark of my power. Sometimes just above it, usually a little below it.
I just unlocked my first Powerplay weapon yesterday after four and a half weeks (so I guess pretty close to when I'd have got it in PP1...)

The vast majority of people playing Powerplay are going slower than me (often considerably so) and clearly not in it to get the rewards as fast as possible. At least some of the people above me are "career" Powerplayers who need those hundreds of thousands of merits because that's what it takes to move a system progress bar, and the personal rewards are nice but irrelevant. If there's a few grinders here and there going to exactly rank 100 and then barely touching it again ... well, who cares, everyone else seems to be having fun with it.

 

[St0rmFury]

HR 5322 has a "Moderate" System Strength Penalty, so that makes sense if it's the same rate per profit in "Standard" SSP Undermining and in Reinforcement

If it helps your data gathering, I was mining in an undermining system with very high strength penalty and only got 0.35 merits per 1K profit.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

If it helps your data gathering, I was mining in an undermining system with very high strength penalty and only got 0.35 merits per 1K profit.

That sounds about right (assuming that's the System Strength Penalty and the Beyond Frontline Penalty was still Standard)

 

[St0rmFury]

That sounds about right (assuming that's the System Strength Penalty and the Beyond Frontline Penalty was still Standard)

Oh right, what's beyond frontline penalty?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Increases as you get further from your own territory - so for me in Kaine, nearby enemy systems are Standard, but Antal's over on the other side of the bubble are High or Very High.)

 

[Darrack]

Increases as you get further from your own territory - so for me in Kaine, nearby enemy systems are Standard, but Antal's over on the other side of the bubble are High or Very High.)

I was trying to get my head around this one, how do the penalty's effect activities, say handing in mining goods?
Does standard mean you get a better price than High? There are so many different system states/industry's i found it hard to get an actual value nailed down and couldn't find anywhere that actually explained it.
Then there are instances like 32C Piscium where the system strength is High yet beyond front line is standard?
To me this doesn't make sense

O7

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I was trying to get my head around this one, how do the penalty's effect activities, say handing in mining goods?
Does standard mean you get a better price than High? There are so many different system states/industry's i found it hard to get an actual value nailed down and couldn't find anywhere that actually explained it.
Then there are instances like 32C Piscium where the system strength is High yet beyond front line is standard?

So as far as I can tell:
- System Strength Penalty is an intrinsic property of the system (higher population tends to be stronger, but that's not the only factor and I haven't studied what the others are)
- Beyond Frontline Penalty is an entirely separate property based on where the system is relative to your Power's Control systems (so different Powers will see different BFPs for the same system - I see 32C Piscium as having a BFP of "Very High" because it is a really long way from Kaine's space ... whereas attackers from Delaine are likely to also see it as Standard)
- both of them, if over Standard, reduce the amount of merits you get for the same Undermining action (and they stack). Some example values with an easy-to-replicate task.

System Strength Penalty	Beyond Frontline Penalty	Merits for 1M credit donation mission (no ethos bonus, as an Undermining action)
High​	Standard​	72​
Moderate​	Standard​	72​
Standard​	Standard​	96​
Standard​	Standard​	96​
Standard​	Standard​	96​
Standard​	Moderate​	64​
Standard​	High​	56​
Very High​	High​	40​

- this affects both personal merits and contribution to the Control score when Undermining
- they do not affect Reinforcement at all (and the BFP is always Standard for all of your own systems anyway).


Now as far as mining specifically goes, none of this will in any way affect the credit price you get for your mined goods. That is determined by (in rough order of importance) the station economy (you want one which actually wants to buy the cargo!), the state of the station controlling faction, and the demand level for each mined good, just as is for non-Powerplay mining [1]. What it will affect is the credit-to-merits conversion rate ... so a sale price of 500k/tonne when Undermining Very High + High will probably get you fewer merits than a sale price of 250k/tonne when Undermining Standard+Standard.


[1] https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/effects has all the data I've been able to get on what BGS states do to commodity prices. Multiple BGS states at once multiply the effects together. For mining, any combination of Boom/Investment, Civil Liberty and Pirate Attack/Public Holiday is good for most of the expensive stuff.