Elite Dangerous | Powerplay 2.0 Update

[Sighman]

Soooooo............... what was the point of revamping Powerplay then? Day1 people used exploration and exobiology data, so you disabled that. Then people traded rares and now you've disabled that.

I don't want to come across as totally negative, but what did you & do you expect people to do?

I think it's pretty obvious it's subject to tweaks. Merit gains should be roughly even across different activities, otherwise the grinders will focus on one imbalanced thing after another.

Killing fighters at stronghold carriers will be next. People are already detailing precise methods to draw them out and farm them.

The problem is, we're not fighting thargoids, we're fighting other players. They will have to use the exact same methods, which means everyone is reduced to grinding the same thing because it's all about 'merits per hour' and not 'am I enjoying myself?'

 

[Rat Catcher]

It took me 3 days to decide that PP 2.0 held nothing of interest to how I wish to play.
Seeing some of the 'nerfs' happening, I'm really quite glad I found it boring.

 

[Decandently]

Escape pods will be getting nerfed because of instance relogging to respawn the pods at megaships, or the tourist beacons in anarchy systems letting you farm orcas/belugas for a lot of pods without any bounty/notoriety for doing so

FDev is so silly at times. They program NPC captains to stick around when their buddies are being blown up by Cmdrs for the escape pods. Maybe, instead of nerfing the merit payouts for escape pods, they should make the NPC captains avoid the tourist spot until it's safe again.

 

[Corobok]

don't see any problems with trading rare goods. It's the same part of the game as other activities, which can easily be attributed to the roleplay. Brought 100 bottles of Lavian brandy into the system in the "disputed" state? The entire cargo went to bribes for officials, and here we are strengthening the forces of our state with trade and smuggling. It takes time, but it is rewarded.
other PP 2.0 activities literally do not respect your time. Increase merit payments for other activities

 

[Kailoren]

Nerf is not the way... we all have seen what happened to mining.

Mining nerfed -> mining died.

Mining didn't get nerfed, the addition of price fluctuations based on station demand is what killed mining. It just wasn't profitable to sell any more. They even KNEW it was going to kill mining but pushed the nerf back a few months to allow people to mine painite to buy a fleet carrier when the update dropped

 

[AbslomRob]

Greetings Commanders,

We have identified an issue where certain actions are being excessively used for Powerplay gains.

In order to investigate and resolve this issue we are temporarily suspending Powerplay gains via the following methods:

• Rare Goods Trading
• Settlement Data Delivery
• Escape Pods

Once we have resolved this issue these options will be enabled again.

Thank you for your continued reports and feedback on Powerplay 2.0.

Has FDev reached out to the big PowerPlay communities to solicit their feedback on the various new mechanics? Some of these problems are laughably predictable to anyone who has played Powerplay for the past decade, and it's kinda insulting to have these new mechanics with such obvious exploits made, allowed to be used to disrupt the game, and then pulled with a "whoops, whodathunk?". You know who would have thunk? The people who play the game.

 

[Kailoren]

Soooooo............... what was the point of revamping Powerplay then? Day1 people used exploration and exobiology data, so you disabled that. Then people traded rares and now you've disabled that.

I don't want to come across as totally negative, but what did you & do you expect people to do?

Exploration/Exobiology was disabled because they announced how the PP 2.0 system would work MONTHS ago so people who had been out in the black for the last year or two just waited a couple of extra months before handing in billions of credits worth of data. How FDev never saw that coming is beyond me.

 

[Ezekil n Amai]

Escape pods will be getting nerfed because of instance relogging to respawn the pods at megaships, or the tourist beacons in anarchy systems letting you farm orcas/belugas for a lot of pods without any bounty/notoriety for doing so

No, it was nerfed because you can get escape pods from your own strongholds without any crimes. It may sound weird, but it look like "by design", because escape pods, stolen (i don't know how to call it, this action dont give you any crime at any system) from enemy strongholds with hatch-breaker limpet, dont give any merits for you (rescuing is not an activity for undermining). But if you steal them from your own stronghold and hand it right there, you will get merits. Like 22k+ per hour.

 

[CMDR Daiyus]

Yeah, not sure what we're actually meant to do with the system now. I was all geared up to do an hour in my lunch break, and the most prominent activity in the home system I'm trying to reinforce is salvage. I'm not hunting Belugas in anarchy systems or resetting megaships, I just want to drop into signal sources and scoop for a bit (I find it quite relaxing), but that won't help now. I'd bounty hunt, but there's no rings in this system, and hunting at Nav Beacons can be hit or miss. I'm not really in the mood to trade. I've got an exploration trip planned, but that's been reduced into the ground too from a PP perspective, and will take me away from the Bubble when I really want to be in it at the moment.

 

[galahad2069]

No, it was nerfed because you can get escape pods from your own strongholds without any crimes. It may sound weird, but it look like "by design", because escape pods, stolen (i don't know how to call it, this action dont give you any crime at any system) from enemy strongholds with hatch-breaker limpet, dont give any merits for you (rescuing is not an activity for undermining). But if you steal them from your own stronghold and hand it right there, you will get merits. Like 22k+ per hour.

That seems to be a bug tbh.
Why nerf the activity, why not fix the bug then?

BTW, rescue absolutely worked as undermining, that was how Grom lost VESPER-M4 the last week.

 

[yianniv]

That seems to be a bug tbh.
Why nerf the activity, why not fix the bug then?

Fixing bugs was never FDEv's strong side...

 

[Sumurai8]

Greetings Commanders,

We have identified an issue where certain actions are being excessively used for Powerplay gains.

In order to investigate and resolve this issue we are temporarily suspending Powerplay gains via the following methods:

• Rare Goods Trading
• Settlement Data Delivery
• Escape Pods

Once we have resolved this issue these options will be enabled again.

Thank you for your continued reports and feedback on Powerplay 2.0.

You did not need to disable levers to put in a revised rate of earning merits. The data port duplication exploit has been reported 1-2 weeks ago at this point, so you can't possibly claim that you didn't know about it until this cycle.

Right now you have basically hamstrung the ability of non-combat pilots/powers to meaningfully interact with powerplay at all. To do so in the middle of a powerplay cycle, a gamemode that is inherently competitive, is uncalled for. Now non-combat powers have no way to fight back against data port exploits being done earlier in the cycle. If you are going to hamstring certain powers for the foreseeable future, please just freeze powerplay in its entirety until you are able to balance things. The remaining levers for reinforcement are now either situational, on a slow timer, at a rate 1/10th of any other levers, or outright broken. Looking at you, Reboot Settlement missions.

Deeply disappointed. If you are going to rebalance powerplay, do so without just destroying the few things that are actually fun to do in Powerplay. At this rate you will destroy a gamemode that was well received in record time. I doubt even Colonisation will be able to get those players back.

 

[Rebel Yell]

Mining didn't get nerfed, the addition of price fluctuations based on station demand is what killed mining. It just wasn't profitable to sell any more. They even KNEW it was going to kill mining but pushed the nerf back a few months to allow people to mine painite to buy a fleet carrier when the update dropped

Aye, that's correct... Void Opals/LTDs had very high prices for a while (may be to high?) but it anyway required some time to dedicate to such activity (then I remember yields from overlapping hot spots were touched as well, if I am not wrong) and that also killed almost entirety PvP piracy (as a profitable activity).

Long story short: balance time/effort and weight it with the risk = reward.

I didn't do AX combat, but they did some rebalance on that too... all these unbalances resulted in abysmal credits for some players (who took the advantage of engaging the activities earlier), which shouldn't translate into any impact/fallout other than for their wallets (and this constrain was broken by carrier player-to-player transaction capability).

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

Why is everyone expecting a nerf ? Unless fixing an exploit is now considered nerfing. FDEV could just as well fix the exploits and buff the intended methods.

 

[houligan]

Why is everyone expecting a nerf ? Unless fixing an exploit is now considered nerfing. FDEV could just as well fix the exploits and buff the intended methods.

Because of the way FDev phrased the post
We have identified an issue where certain actions are being excessively used for Powerplay gains.
instead of
We have identified exploits where certain actions are being used for Powerplay gains.

 

[DarkStarSword]

Mining didn't get nerfed, the addition of price fluctuations based on station demand is what killed mining. It just wasn't profitable to sell any more. They even KNEW it was going to kill mining but pushed the nerf back a few months to allow people to mine painite to buy a fleet carrier when the update dropped

Dude, if that's all you can remember you need a history lesson - they made a bunch of changes all at once that all collectively killed mining. From memory this included:

• Stop sub-surface deposits respawning when travelling some distance and returning (this by itself would have been enough to kill the egg, the rest were unnecessary)
• Nerf the price of LTDs and other minerals from core mining (independent of the below)
• Nerf the effect of overlapping hotspots
• Reduce the sale price of core minerals if the player has 1/4 of the station's demand in their cargo hold
• Make station demand be shared between all players rather than per player

(P.S. No one tell Frontier that core mining is currently passable for earning merits)

 

[Ezekil n Amai]

BTW, rescue absolutely worked as undermining, that was how Grom lost VESPER-M4 the last week.

... Seems like frontiers stole my merits, i tried to do that twice it system where i got 72 per SLF :/

 

[galahad2069]

Why is everyone expecting a nerf ? Unless fixing an exploit is now considered nerfing. FDEV could just as well fix the exploits and buff the intended methods.

People are not expecting a nerf, they are experiencing it.

 

[PhoebiousZ]

Another frontier win. Well done, you proved once more that you don't know your own game and that "testing" is word missing from your dictionaries.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Why is everyone expecting a nerf ? Unless fixing an exploit is now considered nerfing. FDEV could just as well fix the exploits and buff the intended methods.

because, these days, fixing an exploit is somehow equal to nerfing. Because reasons.