It's actually quite logical to be open only.
Powerplay How is Powerplay not open only yet?
About 500-600 commanders per cycle follow the directions of a Powerplay Group to do either Powerplay or Powerplay related BGS. As for the total overall including randos who are not members of a Powerplay Group only FDev knows.
CMDR Justinian Octavius
dev don t care about this stuff.
Screenshots forge is more important, im sorry.
Screenshots forge is more important, im sorry.
![[VR] Bulbulunufus](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/261/261245.jpg?1671230473){kind=avatar}
It's very interesting the difference in response this topic gets in the area of the forum where the committed PPers hang out, as opposed to the general forum where people with little or no interest or experience in doing it live.
OOPP is all about creating ONE grindless activity with somehow added skill floor for participants, current power play gameplay is not diffrent from rest of the game, it's very easy that FDev to say they dont like to block game for solo/pg modes while real reasons is that they are just lazy and not care about PvP in this game at all. Childs, seniors and casual gamers are target audiance with others being ignored.
If you join a squadron that has a PMF it should force open only as well, and if you're not in open mode missions should have a 75% influence penalty. If you're going to hide you should have to work at least four times as hard.
Repetita iuvant.
I can get behind this, but I'm mostly just worried about powerplay.
What about pledge = open only?
That would be great.What about pledge = open only?
Powerplay is PvP, but it's asynchronous PvP which does not require two humans to ever meet in order to function. Just like every other feature of the game.
NPCs aren't, and can't be, a threat to any ship with any level of engineering unless the design changes to place ships in realspace where NPCs can actually meet them. A T9 can beat any NPC interdiction and that can't be changed without making the minigame physically impossible.
And that, ultimately, is the first big powerplay change that's needed. Take merit drop points away from stations and put them into sizable realspace locations where bulk traders have to do something to defend themselves, even against NPCs.
The second is to change that stupid UI for picking up merits. I swear that's probably the single biggest reason most players quit PP after they've done their module shopping.
NPCs not being able to interdict T9s comes to difficulty on NPCs being too lenient in general, and never properly scaled up to be a threat to engineered ships.
PP as an endgame activity needs to get to the point that a T9 should expect to get interdicted by PP NPCs, the same way a T9 can't really escape player interdictions since basically any other ship (except a T10) handles better in supercruise. At that point, no matter the mode, a T9 will have to be at least outfitted to survive encounters.
As for the UI I fully agree. Odyssey will be coming out and if it's like the alpha, we're still going to be spending almost a whole minute wrestling against the UI just to fill up the ship.
No engineering can change the way a ship behaves in supercruise, this is nothing to do with engineering. If it's not physically possible to escape an NPC interdiction in a trading ship, then the interdiction minigame would not be fit for purpose (it is a false indicator of possibility) and it would feel like the NPC was cheating (because it is a computer not bound by having to make physical inputs). That's why the bar for NPC interdictions has been set at a threshold such that it is possible to be consistently successful in a T9. There's no other way to do it which isn't player-hostile game design.
And almost no ship can escape player interdictions properly because the minigame doesn't work well enough in an opposed format, you can be considerably more agile in sc than the opponent and consistently in the blue zone and still be losing because the other guy is winning on his screen and it favours the attacker (latency probably also sticks its oar in). That's why "submit and high wake" is the way to evade no matter what you fly.
Powerplay needs to get to a point where the inability of a T9 to be interdicted by NPCs no longer matters because the interactions with them are moved out of supercruise and into realspace where they can be spawned in such a way that the player has to do something about them (fight them, have enough beef to bully through, go dark and try to sneak in, whatever). This would, as a bonus, give players looking to intercept haulers a defined area of realspace to also look in, and make sensors vs. stealth relevant in any part of the game at all if it was also large enough.
I talk about engineering because of the actual difficulty of NPC ships in normal space. A 10k effective shield cutter isn't going to be threatened by any other ship unless they all abuse reverb cascade or the ATR/station insta shield disabling "cheat" guns. It's not a slow ship either when boosting at 500 speed, so any run A -> B blockage scenarios in normal space isn't going to do much since NPCs don't boost in pursuit of ships anyway (yet another NPC handicapped behavior that I don't think should happen in an endgame activity).
For interdictions, NPCs aren't going to have issue of latency so if anything, it's going to be very consistent if a T9 can't escape them but smaller ships are still able to evade it and that makes for a nice difficulty selection. Haul more, get interdicted. Haul less, avoid interdictions.
Most of ED gameplay is supercruise waiting and it's really a very unique thing in ED, so if you just ignore it because of wonky SC minigames instead of fixing them or making the time spent in it more interesting, might aswell as get rid of it. This is what I don't get about all these suggestions that keep the SC void the same but look to increase times even more by adding stuff after the SC rather than during it.
Powerplay isn't an "endgame" activity though. It's something a player can sign up to on day one and continue doing throughout their playtime in Elite. There is no "endgame" in Elite, it's all the same game.
Also, if players have built themselves 10k effective shields they've dropped at least some cargo space, they aren't hauling merits in a naked Type 9 any more, cutting the efficiency that privage currently makes easy. Isn't that one of the underlying points of the idea? Reducing the efficicency of hauling.
Yes, but the problem is that it should. It's a hollow form of what it should be where players fight over terretory but don't also can't defend.
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You should be able to defend your systems directly. That is a fact.