No FDev gave them early access to advertise it widely amongst people who follow such things to get those followers excited to play.
Feedback would be a secondary and advice almost certainly not asked for.
Elite Dangerous | Powerplay 2.0 Update
- Thread starter Paul_Crowther
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Feedback would be a secondary and advice almost certainly not asked for.
To be frank … and I’ve said this on another thread … the issue you have is that Power Play is two games pretending to be one.
On the one hand, you have the “unlock the modules” game which even at the rate that rares, for example, were giving would still take a “casual” player (maybe 5 hours a week) months to earn their first module - alongside whatever else they’re doing for, you know, fun?!
Then you have the “galactic influence” game which is long term, continuous and attracts organized groups who hunt down the most efficient mechanisms possible and then grind them out for tens of hours per week.
IMO, it is categorically impossible to balance one of those vs the other in any meaningful way using merit payouts alone.
My suggestion is to drastically reduce the ranks needed for the modules (first one at L10 and then a module every 5 levels after that to encourage staying with the same power) but limit the number of levels you can earn each week to 5.
That means 2 weeks for your first module and 1 a week thereafter. Which is still several months of play.
Then - for the long term folks - merits earned past the weekly level cap would still count towards the main PP objectives.
On the one hand, you have the “unlock the modules” game which even at the rate that rares, for example, were giving would still take a “casual” player (maybe 5 hours a week) months to earn their first module - alongside whatever else they’re doing for, you know, fun?!
Then you have the “galactic influence” game which is long term, continuous and attracts organized groups who hunt down the most efficient mechanisms possible and then grind them out for tens of hours per week.
IMO, it is categorically impossible to balance one of those vs the other in any meaningful way using merit payouts alone.
My suggestion is to drastically reduce the ranks needed for the modules (first one at L10 and then a module every 5 levels after that to encourage staying with the same power) but limit the number of levels you can earn each week to 5.
That means 2 weeks for your first module and 1 a week thereafter. Which is still several months of play.
Then - for the long term folks - merits earned past the weekly level cap would still count towards the main PP objectives.
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Selling stuff a unit at a time to gain something that selling in bulk didn’t sounds like exploiting the mechanic. It doesn’t feel like it is breaking the rules but…
Depends on who the ideal is for.Temporarily suspending merit gains on these activities while the devs are working on a solution is definitely the right thing to do.
But I gotta add, in a perfect world, this action should have been taken sooner.
But I'm not quite sure what these errors do ? There's plenty of money to go around. Increasing the strength of your power? So.
The only thing that some people may care about is the record table, but since the accumulation can be obtained by errors, the record table has no power. You can reset it to zero.
Hey there. PP coordinator of the largest hauling power in the game here. We did indeed haul things up to 200 ly away every single week for close to a decade in Powerplay 1. We do enjoy hauling things in large ships. While rares are not great due to low allocation, it is much better than wasting time hauling trade goods for double digit merits. The reason we, powerplay people, did not do so before is because it was not an option.
If it sounds anything, it's stupid game design.
So what's the plan, just nerf every remotely decent Powerplay activity until it takes years for players to get to rank 100? Really? Because if you guys are really that desperate to have players not play your game you can just shut off the servers and you'll even save money that way. I was excited for Powerplay 2 before it was released because it sounded like we were finally going to be rid of the tedious waiting game and mind-numbing power commodity grind, instead we're in a situation where even with a hundred times more effort than Powerplay 1 required progress is still massively slower. Ascendancy has been an unmitigated disaster in every way that matters.
And that's if anything even harder for them to balance the requirements of individuals versus the total effect of all players. 775k merits will - if piled into a single system over a few weeks - Acquire it, and Reinforce it to about half-way up Fortified ... and that's it.
Put that way, almost no individual has much chance to influence most systems: an above average player working at "top 25%" level can push through a new Acquisition given a couple of months, then take the rest of the year to get it to Fortified to launch new Acquisitions, by which point any strategic reason they might have had to do so will be irrelevant. It's all about the groups and mostly about the few big ones.
But ... in aggregate the total change in system counts in the first two weeks implies a minimum of 150M merits of productive fortification in excess of undermining (and discounting unproductive merits entirely) each week, which is still equivalent to about 5% of the total merit strength of the existing Powerplay systems. As a global progress rate, a 5% weekly change (more, again, since this is only the net change) seems pretty reasonable.
They should strip out all the PP ranks that give care packages. They're obviously just there to slow down progression.
This would be a good balance, yeah. Frontload the module rewards to get people invested and reward returning to the activity week after week and give players who don't really care about playing Powerplay hardcore the opportunity to check out after they've got what they came for and just get an occasional drip feed of smaller rewards while the invested players still get a regular stream of both rewards and incentives to keep contributing.
I think what a lot of people are missing is that FDev had no idea how many would be doing task xyz. Now they are able to track the data through merit rewards they are balancing the merits. I'm by no means suggesting that is good design for release, but it is how an alpha test would run. Add into that the various bugs/exploits/oversights and you have PP2.0 on Live.
Edit: Typos
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The galaxy map does allow you to filter power play by activity amount in the current cycle. It's fairly easy for an individual to see where the effort is being applied and go there to help, without joining a group.
Out advice whilst given was not sought out.
I've seen lots of comments across multiple threads and would clarify this as follows:
As partners we were given a final version 5 days before release to hype PP to the community and to give everyone a chance to see more and ask questions that couldn't be covered in Frontier Unlocked timescales.
We were not consulted prior to this version, in fact we discussed amongst ourselves if we were actually getting a version this time around.
It became apparent that there were issues which we fed back and resulted in a delay and some changes.
However once the amazing community all got it's hands on it further issues became apparent.
I personally would love to see Frontier bring back a beta server for testing by the community but I'm guessing the cost cutting across the games industry as a whole would suggest that a full beta server might be too costly just to have sitting there for most of the time.
Please remember that, as ED Partners, for most of us we have full time jobs and family commitments.
We are not testers but (hopefully) entertainers.
Sorry for the long post but I felt some clarity was needed here.
o7
So, tell me. How exactly was this supposed to be better than PPv1?
Exploration and Exobio were the most lucrative methods for a while, so I went on a two-week expedition into the black. I heard that merits were being suspended for explo and exobio, and figured that maybe there was an exploit that was causing dupe issues or some such. I came back to the bubble about 4 days after those merits were re-enabled, with 800 Mcr worth of merits from Explo (+50 Mcr FD Bonus), and 400 Mcr worth of merits from Exobio (+524 Mcr FD Bonus) from that 4 day span. That netted 160 merits from Exobio, and just under 10k merits from Explo. I expected to be beyond rank 10 from that much data, but nope, just rank 4.
Players will generally migrate to whatever is the most lucrative. You nerfed Explo and Exobio into the ground, so people moved to bounty hunting/S&R and Rare Goods. The Settlement Data Delivery was had an exploit that needed patched, but I am fairly certain that it would not have been used so much if Exploration had not been nerfed as aggressively as it has been. Now you are nerfing Rare Goods and Escape Pods, which are the current two most lucrative methods.
Mined goods only work if mined in the same system? Why? Why does mining elsewhere not count as mining?
The thing you need to understand is that gating things behind a grind will only entertain for so long. The best way to gain merits will be the ones that are most used. And instead of fixing the cause and making other game loops more lucrative, you have decided to whack-a-mole the symptoms and nerf the new meta and then whatever becomes the meta after that, and so on.
Is the point of this to force PvP as the only acceptable method? Is the point of this to fix your server issues by pushing away players just like you did in 2021?
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Why do you think we have 3 Elites in the main game ? Combat, Research and Trade.
Your not wrong. They need to move systems (their hackable route)
The issue is moreso when working a system you get the same job for the same megaship and now fail the mission due to the issue.
A full server certainly, but creating a limited instance of the galaxy with only a few dozen volunteer beta testers would not be costly, and could likely be run on the existing servers, and would generate more revenue in the long run - people don't like to buy buggy/unbalanced games.
Edit: It does not even need to be the full galaxy, as long as it contains the same basic elements found in various systems.
You can't rescan though. Thats by design, unfortunately it carries over when the mission is completed.
(Megaship needs to move systems to reset, bi-weekly I believe)
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