I ignored PP up until a couple months ago, partly because I didn't see any exploration/non-combat oriented factions, and partly because I didn't like the idea of being automatically at war with every one else.
But I took another look, Li Yong-Rui at least seemed to be somewhat exploration friendly, and you could rank up without combat. I also found out you're really only at war with the other factions, and not stations/planets, even if they are in "enemy" territory.
I also thought I knew how merit retention worked, (which turned out to be wrong), thinking that getting a rank was hard, maintaining it was a lot easier. I thought your total merits were halved going 4 weeks back, rather than your earned merits. Which would mean getting to rank 5 would be hard, but once there, you only needed to earn 700 or so merits per week to maintain it (which would also be a great incentive for not leaving power play).
For the first couple of weeks, I really tried to help my faction, but it turns out PP is too structured (for me), and it is keeping me from doing other things I want to do. It took me several weeks to figure out the merit retention didn't work like I thought it did (I assumed since I didn't have a merit history yet, I was just working through several division by zeros).
So, now I'm at the point where its mid-Tuesday, and I haven't earned one single merit yet this week. I'd really like to remain in for a few more weeks to pad out the bank account, but I really really struggled (motivationally speaking) last week getting back up to 1500, and I don't think I can do it again. Also, with the new AI I'm not interested in having any kind of a target painted on me anymore (I'm an explorer not a fighter, though I used to be able to defend myself while having a ship equipped for non-combat roles). I don't want to buy my merits, and I suspect combat might be a faster method to earning merits, but, not my thing.
I agree with prior posts, a real explorer based faction should offer heat-resistant shields/hull, or larger fuel tanks, or faster scanners, or some such. and ranked up bonuses (+25% for rank 2, +50% for rank 3... or something like that). Not sure how to make that fit with the other faction's bonuses fairly (though the other factions could probably use similar adjustments I imagine). In fact, maybe just get rid of any bonus payment, and just allow exploration to earn merits (and then you just draw your normal PP salary): 1 merit per lev-2 scan, 2-merits per level-3? (not sure how that would factor into the struggle with other factions, but I leave that as an exercise for some PP2.0 designer). And then you could do extended trips because you'd automatically make up any merit deficit upon return (and over the next several weeks as that lump-sum merit dump gradually decays, assuming you were gone long enough to fall to level-1 in the meantime).
So, I currently have much more hope for The Engineers (which PP has also more or less kept me from investigating), in providing useful upgrades, while being more free-form and on my own schedule, and also having hopefully a minimum of busy-work (which is what PP feels like to me). As someone who always preferred the resource-gathering, economy-building, explore-the-map, aspects of RTS games more than the battle/army part, I'm really rather excited by the engineer part of The Engineers, at least from what I've seen of it so far.
