Elite Dangerous | Trailblazers Update 3 - Wednesday April 30

hutandrei

H
Moon Rabit said:
No fix to ?

Orbital Construction Site shoting down my ship during auto-dock (not wanted, neutral rep.)​

This is painful, when my imperial cutter geeting blown from time to time.
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yianniv said:
Same here. It's getting old fast. I hope it really gets fixed.
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It's there, in the list:
Phil W said:
Law and order around system colonisation ships and construction sites is now enforced by Brewer Corporation.
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mm3368

M
Ian Doncaster said:
You'd get fairly quick extra protection from Beyond Frontline Penalty once the actual frontlines started to split apart from each other. 35% penalty sounds big, but it's only about the same as you'd get from trying to undermine against Moderate BFP or High SSP. And a lot of the Fortified/Stronghold systems, especially those inherited from PP1, have High SSP or stronger, so in that respect it's just levelling things off.

There's certainly a big question about how to maintain a situation where Powers are incentivised to (successfully!) attack each other while keeping overall numbers of systems stable that this particular change (explicitly) doesn't address - and also how to handle the potential for a Power to be almost wiped out in a way that doesn't just lead to the "shell depth" stalemates of the Thargoid War. But the first step is to get the sides to attack each other at all a bit more.


Delaine's strike on Patreus was effective locally, certainly, congratulations to them for that - but many powers don't even have that sort of vulnerability any more (you couldn't attack LYR like that without a lot more effort), and it's only the 3rd or 4th time in half a year of Powerplay that collapsing a fortified bubble has happened at all despite its high on-paper effectiveness for undermining and the long-standing availability of this tactic.

Part of the problem of course:
- you don't actually gain anything from another Power being smaller (it's not as if there's a shortage of space to expand to)
- you still have to go through the effort of acquiring and reinforcing all those systems for yourself if you want them for yourself for some reason


The 'naive' figure would be about 7-10:1 if it doesn't change any behaviour, down from 10-15:1 now. So it'll definitely be interesting to see how much further down (if any) it shifts the ratio. There are still a lot of incentives to reinforce rather than undermine even with this cutback.

And more interesting to see what Frontier have coming up next, too...

...might actually be the most significant change here!
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There is NOTHING to congratulate in dropping 150000 control points of settlement data 1 hour before the tick of some people running around all week in circles like a headless chicken to collection settlement data. This sniping of totally unbalanced settlement data which can be stored by 1000 where you can't store anything else like this. Not everyone what do do this brainless running in circles to destroy month of work building systems up. If there is fight which it is suppose to be then it is OK to loose systems, but not with settlement data bombing before the tick. And if this is the intentions why should anybody EVER build up systems anymore, just destroy all strongholds and destroy powerplay, since there is no chance to defend it anyway especially now after the data bombers get a 40% boost on top.
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
@Phil W Could you kindly confirm this situation in the new system please?

1745696216137.png


Boo-Kamista Conduit Nexus orbits the moon of the main planet here. There is a Planetary Port on the Main planet's surface.
Will Boo-Kamista Conduit Nexus create a Strong or Weak Link with that Planetary Port?

(Basically asking if this is "nested" or not).
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
mm3368 said:
There is NOTHING to congratulate in dropping 150000 control points of settlement data 1 hour before the tick of some people running around all week in circles like a headless chicken to collection settlement data. This sniping of totally unbalanced settlement data which can be stored by 1000 where you can't store anything else like this. Not everyone what do do this brainless running in circles to destroy month of work building systems up. If there is fight which it is suppose to be then it is OK to loose systems, but not with settlement data bombing before the tick.
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I don't dispute that Powerplay activities (on all three types) need a far more significant rebalance, and that most of the available Undermining activities especially are absolutely terrible in effectiveness compared with data scans.

But ...
to destroy month of work building systems up.
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... this is the underlying problem. Ultimately people hate being undermined and losing their systems far more than they like being able to undermine other people's systems. Settlement sniping is a problem, because it allows effective (if, in practice, rare) undermining. It doesn't really matter what the effective undermining method is; as long as there is one there will be complaints that it's overpowered.

Stronghold SLF attacks were silly and settlement data port cloning was an actual exploit that should have seen more consequences for its abuse ... but they only got a huge amount of complaints because they were undermining methods. Wake scanning cloning is just as much an exploit and just as overpowered ... but since it's reinforcement only it's been almost total silence from the major Power communities about it for months. Who really cares if you can exploit-reinforce a system really quickly?

Every change which Frontier makes which makes Undermining more balanced with Reinforcement at the aggregate level will be really heavily criticised. But if the ultimate long-term balance of undermining and reinforcement isn't close to 1:1 - and it's currently nowhere near - then Powerplay has failed as a competitive feature. It'll be a long and uncertain route to get there. A lot of things will need rebalancing or possibly completely rewriting. It's probably completely impossible in practice. I am incredibly surprised that Frontier has chosen to try at all when they could have just taken the easy route out.
 

JR250

J
Won't the 35% reduction in reinforcement (positive) activities apply to settlement data as well? To @mm3368's point, settlement data, and the fact that you can store it and then snipe with it, seems unbalanced. You can't do that with Power commodities, for example.

Again, balancing undermining v reinforcement actions should take into consideration that certain things like mining are hugely unbalanced now. if you apply a 35% reduction across the board, and not cut these, they will remained unbalanced vs everything else.
 

DemiserofD

D
The core problem with attacking is...why? Attacking someone almost always takes way more effort than just taking one of the countless new systems available, and doesn't even directly help you with the only real point of powerplay, which is to get your power higher on the list.
 

Mordred115

Mordred115
Ian Doncaster said:
This change alone is far too small to do that. The smallest Power still has 127 million control points worth of strength (87 million of which are in Fortified or Stronghold systems)
Total weekly undermining across all 12 powers is just 3-4 million CP a week - and that couldn't all be piled onto the weakest power without getting heavy Beyond Frontline Penalties - so even if this change were to encourage all undermining-active players for all 11 other Powers to strike down Torval (unlikely!), it'd take them over half a year to do it even with the new 5% bonus.

It's something which Frontier will need to consider as they introduce more incentives to attack, certainly.
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Isn't 98% of Torval's Territory covered by a 0% beyond frontline penalty. Also currently this week we have had almost 500k undermining already... Our reinforcement can only barely keep up as is... With a 35% reduction we will be completely overwhelmed even if we had our entire player base dedicated to only reinforcing.
 

Neestar

Neestar
Neilski said:
You may be unaware (it's a long thread!) that Ozric had already cast suspicion on the GPSS stuff, two weeks before that:
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i am aware but i don't care. ( i'll leave my reason to myself ;) )
Regardless, actual FDevelopers don't appear to want to let us know any of the behind-the-code details & data, so it's all moot & speculation anyway.
As long as the issue is fixed on wednesday , i'll be happy and i'm sure others who fly space COMBAT will be plenty happy enough too. 🙏
 

mm3368

M
Rebel Yell said:
I have more to complain about space combat for undermining...

- NPC spawns (dropping in SC, at the nav beacon or in the POIs) is just too random and totally unpredictable. More over, NPCs behave like lobotomized lemmings and, with the exception of some POIs like the Powerplay Convoys etc where wings of Anacondas can appear, the rest is not challenging and not funny.

- Ground undermining activities have to be replaced by Powerplay Settlements where it is possible to collect data but also to accomplich other specific types of missions / activities (even combat related). As of now, given the borked C&P, anarchy settlements are the main source of ground undermining merits... as these represent the real weak link in the current framework.

- C&P is borked for undermining (and not only)... ALL POWERPLAY GROUPS have complained about how it has been implemented as it generates frustrating situations, where players can't dock at their starports and so on (see also above the linkage to ground settlements). That also has bad effect on reinforcements... so another reason why we do need powerplay specific settlements/ground POIs.

- Powerplay Conflict Zones... these suffer of issues of instancing (NA players have to use VPNs), appearing and disappearing using different game modes -> FIX THESE FOR CONTESTED ACQUISITIONS.

I have many other points to discuss, but these are the most relevant ones given the incoming changes.
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The spawning of NPCs is also a problem in Acquisition systems when you have a task of killing 10 and you only find 1 in a hour, the spawn rate at mega ships and installations is also not reliable sometimes you wait 20 minutes and the only thing which shows up than is security because your bounty is too high
 

mm3368

M
Ian Doncaster said:
Remember that undermining faces the System Strength Penalty and Beyond Frontline Penalty for a system, which can be up to a 60% combined penalty (and very easily 35% or more) - so this only makes undermining easier than reinforcement, all else equal, for a Standard:Standard system.

On top of that, there's still "not all else is equal".

1) As you note

... it's still going to be the case that reinforcement activities are generally intrinsically easier, safer, more suited to applying your Power's rank bonuses to, and generally more possible to do "while existing" in your own Power's space, rather than undermining that will take a specific effort and plan. Giving a slight relative boost to the baseline score for undermining probably won't go anywhere near far enough to compensate for that, but it's a step in the right direction.

So far the ratio of reinforcement to undermining, galaxy-wide, has been between 10:1 and 15:1. This is not going to change that to anywhere near even.

2) There's still no strategic incentive to Undermine.
- you don't directly benefit in any way from another Power being smaller
- you only very lightly benefit from your own Power being bigger (unless you support Delaine, or your Power is below 100 systems for a trade-focused power or down to its HQ only for a combat-focused one)
- there are thousands of Acquisition targets available to each Power to gain territory without contest (whereas gaining territory via Undermining involves first Undermining the target, then Acquiring the system yourself, all against likely opposition from the other side)

3) There's still the player tendency to focus on defence first rather than offence and be very risk-averse and loss-averse. So there's a strong chance that many player groups will respond to this by saying "we have to do even more reinforcement in case we get attacked" and therefore spending about a third less time undermining - which the 5% boost won't compensate for at all.
(See also: there are various worries about undermining now becoming overpowered; reinforcement has been obviously and clearly overpowered for months without any complaints at all. The "undermining data snipe" gets a lot more worry than the outright exploits possible for reinforcing systems)

Ultimately, though...

Powerplay is supposed to be the game's Competitive Feature™. It's not supposed to be about 12 Powers peacefully expanding their own influence on a first-come first-served basis, it's supposed to be about the 12 most ambitious and powerful politicians in the galaxy struggling for supremacy.

So for that to work it needs to encourage players to attack the positions of other Powers. That shouldn't be seen as a negative thing - people can still approach that competition sportingly and with good humour - but it's a feature about competition rather than cooperation. (Colonisation seems to be providing plenty of scope for cooperation, peaceful building up, etc. though the "first come first served" aspect is of course causing some contention)

It's going to take a lot more changes than this to make Powerplay into an actual competition and 12-way brawl, which Frontier know. And there's certainly as you say more balancing and debugging work to be done to get features more even in terms of merit generation per time. But having sold Powerplay as the competitive feature they need to try to get that competition moving on a big picture level.


This change alone is far too small to do that. The smallest Power still has 127 million control points worth of strength (87 million of which are in Fortified or Stronghold systems)
Total weekly undermining across all 12 powers is just 3-4 million CP a week - and that couldn't all be piled onto the weakest power without getting heavy Beyond Frontline Penalties - so even if this change were to encourage all undermining-active players for all 11 other Powers to strike down Torval (unlikely!), it'd take them over half a year to do it even with the new 5% bonus.

It's something which Frontier will need to consider as they introduce more incentives to attack, certainly.
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In my opinion, they just need to get rid of the settlement data drops, they blocked exploration data for the same reason. Because than if you grind on systems you see your progress and it will not be wiped out before the tick by a data drop, as the opposite site react to the undermining and it is a real fight till the tick. As I said if I grind all day 10k of control points is almost max but if you get passed by 100k why even bother, especially because the bounty on you rises higher and higher and if you kill some clean targets, it takes several hours that you can do other game play since you get chased by bounty hunters. And you have to run all the time, since if you kill one even after he shoots you first you have to wait even longer. If the thread if getting 150000 control points in settlement data dropped on your home system you can split up your activity to undermine the surrounding systems, but with how it is right now you don't want to risk that months if work is just wiped out.
 
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mm3368

M
JR250 said:
Much appreciate everyone's comment, yours in particular, Ian.

I have thousands of hours taking positive actions in BGS and I really like that. My "undermining" consists of working harder towards the faction I want to help. Even in Powerplay, I've managed to not do much of illegal activities but instead work on positive actions to improve my Power's standing. With all of that the same, my efforts to reinforce systems will be cut by 35%. I would be much better off going to my neighbor's system and setting it on fire. That'll get me merits, and also fines, bounties, dropping my reputation with the BGS faction, and possibly affecting their system influence. I'm not doing that.

This all helps, thank you. I'll wait for FDev to one day fix the Power reward packages so I can take my money and mats out and make it easier to quit Powerplay altogether.
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Yes I think the person who came up with this 35% cut never invented the several months of work to build a system up to fortify
 
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