How much decay?

[Ian Doncaster]

Conveniently, it looks like the decay has been implemented by simply adding it on as a "start of week" undermining counter, so it's really easy to tell how much there has been.

The decay is at different rates for different system types.

1. Exploited systems lose 2/24th of their strength above 25% so the maximum loss is just over 20,000 CP
2. Fortified systems lose 4/24th of their strength above 25% so the maximum loss is just over 80,000 CP
3. Reinforced systems lose 5/24th of their strength above 25% (after the final cap to 2 million CP is applied) so the maximum loss is just over 150,000 CP

Initial EDDN scans have already picked up over 3 million CP of Decay Undermining, so this looks like it will be by far the largest cause of Undermining CP.

 

[Victor Tramez]

Yes, the maximum decay for a 100% system like Sirius is 156,250 CP, which drops to 84.4%. lt. Inara

I was afraid FDev would handle it this way. The goal is probably to unsettle us and thus fuel paranoia by mixing up the high decay with the few UM that are actually earned in most cases.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Though it might well have the opposite effect - with the current levels I'd expect something like 20-30 million CP of undermining to come from this cause. Normal undermining in a given week is 2-3 million (ignoring the six CG systems as an obvious special case). So you can probably assume that basically all the undermining you face is from decay and not need to worry about other players at all - especially since it stops at 25%, and doesn't proceed particularly quickly below 50%, so any system actually in danger of successful undermining, you'd still notice.

 

[Steven G]

FDev automatic undermining system.
No need to use exploits anymore.

 

[Purrfect]

I did the math. It's a linear line, but there are three separate lines, one for each of exploited, fortified, and strongholds.

• The equation for absolute CP loss for strongholds is new_inf = 1,000,000 * (-0.2087 * old_inf + 0.0527 ), where old_inf>25.0%
• The equation for absolute CP loss for fortifieds is new_inf = 650,000 * (-0.1707 * old_inf + 0.0425), where old_inf>25.0%
• The equation for absolute CP loss for exploiteds is new_inf = 350,000 * (-0833 * old_inf + 0.0207), where old_inf>25.0%
• The order of promotion operations is { promotion, decay }
• Update: when undermining, the order of demotions is { undermine, demotions, decay }, so if a system falls below fortified or stronghold, all solo supporting systems fall to unoccupied AND they take a decay hit, making recovery that much harder, especially for strongholds. This is a tremendous result for underminers. This happened to Patreus with the loss of four fortified systems in a chain, with an additional solo supporter lost on top of that.

Methodology

1. I visited ~ 40 systems just before the cycle ended. I obtained another 7 systems from another power (identity redacted for now). I deliberately chose backwater systems with less than 0.1% UM in Cycle 36, that had points across the control score spectrum. I only had time for 40 systems before the cycle ended. The other power had already obtained these values for their data.
2. I took the data from Inara.cz for the %, which I believe to the be the same as in the journal files
3. Once the game came back, I visited 47 systems and scanned them with tools into Inara.cz (you can see that update to replicate my effort).
4. I took the updated data from Inara.cz and entered it into the sheet.
5. I scatter plotted the data. It didn't look good for a single equation. I added a trendline, and then ticked the box to add an equation and to add the R value. This showed two things: 1) I needed to exclude data < 25% and that I needed three separate scatter plots. Once I did that, I had three perfectly straight lines, with R = 0.999.
6. I validated that the cycle 36 data obtained from the other power fits perfectly, so I am satisfied that the data from the other power is sound.

I plotted scatter plots for INF > 25% to find the curve, expecting a curve. It's a linear line. The equations are as above.

Excel source file here: https://1drv.ms/x/c/dd17ceffa52ddf7f/ETY3VTzelVBMjanKYAG-RXEB6tO93d-qtTptqPpLRIcZ2Q?e=bfiTU0

Analysis of order of operations

Before the cycle, we had no idea if it would be { decay, promotion } or { promotion, decay }, so I deliberately chose three to be promoted systems. The order is { promotion, decay }, but there's something funky going on because the newly promoted control points are lower than expected. I would expect a system that ended up at 102.8% would end up at 2.8% fortified, but didn't. It's probably because of 350,000 versus 650,000 versus 1,000,000, so the % is based upon the absolute CP once in the new scale.

Conclusion

It's HORRIFIC for strongholds. So much wasted CP. You are welcome to make your own analysis, but I think mine will bear up. The order of operations is { promotion, decay }, so do the moonshot for key systems in a single cycle, or waste a LOT of CP.

 

[Purrfect]

Also this affects HQs! YAY. Decay in a system we cannot reinforce. Thank you to Rebel Yell for that info.

 

[Rebel Yell]

I did the math. It's a linear line, but there are three separate lines, one for each of exploited, fortified, and strongholds.

• The equation for absolute CP loss for strongholds is new_inf = 1,000,000 * (-0.2087 * old_inf + 0.0527 ), where old_inf>25.0%
• The equation for absolute CP loss for fortifieds is new_inf = 650,000 * (-0.1707 * old_inf + 0.0425), where old_inf>25.0%
• The equation for absolute CP loss for exploiteds is new_inf = 350,000 * (-0833 * old_inf + 0.0207), where old_inf>25.0%
• The order of operations is { promotion, decay }

Methodology

1. I visited ~ 40 systems just before the cycle ended. I obtained another 7 systems from another power (identity redacted for now). I deliberately chose backwater systems with less than 0.1% UM in Cycle 36, that had points across the control score spectrum. I only had time for 40 systems before the cycle ended. The other power had already obtained these values for their data.
2. I took the data from Inara.cz for the %, which I believe to the be the same as in the journal files
3. Once the game came back, I visited 47 systems and scanned them with tools into Inara.cz (you can see that update to replicate my effort).
4. I took the updated data from Inara.cz and entered it into the sheet.
5. I scatter plotted the data. It didn't look good for a single equation. I added a trendline, and then ticked the box to add an equation and to add the R value. This showed two things: 1) I needed to exclude data < 25% and that I needed three separate scatter plots. Once I did that, I had three perfectly straight lines, with R = 0.999.
6. I validated that the cycle 36 data obtained from the other power fits perfectly, so I am satisfied that the data from the other power is sound.

I plotted scatter plots for INF > 25% to find the curve, expecting a curve. It's a linear line. The equations are as above.

Excel source file here: https://1drv.ms/x/c/dd17ceffa52ddf7f/ETY3VTzelVBMjanKYAG-RXEB6tO93d-qtTptqPpLRIcZ2Q?e=bfiTU0

Analysis of order of operations

Before the cycle, we had no idea if it would be { decay, promotion } or { promotion, decay }, so I deliberately chose three to be promoted systems. The order is { promotion, decay }, but there's something funky going on because the newly promoted control points are lower than expected. I would expect a system that ended up at 102.8% would end up at 2.8% fortified, but didn't. It's probably because of 350,000 versus 650,000 versus 1,000,000, so the % is based upon the absolute CP once in the new scale.

Conclusion

It's HORRIFIC for strongholds. So much wasted CP. You are welcome to make your own analysis, but I think mine will bear up. The order of operations is { promotion, decay }, so do the moonshot for key systems in a single cycle, or waste a LOT of CP.

Yup, we arrived at same conclusions (we had a sample of systems).

Now the question is how this mixes up with the rest (undermining/snipes) because it could result in more devastating blows with very little effort.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Doing a rough calculation using those numbers, this looks like a total of 110 million Undermining CP from decay will have hit this week - greater than the total Undermining from all causes including the rolled-back exploits and the "undermine Duval" CG since the journal allowed reasonably accurate collection of this data at the end of March, and comparable to an entire year of normal undermining at post-data-disabling rates, or two weeks of normal reinforcement.

But if players had put in 110 million UCP, it might actually have changed a few system states, of course.

and then ticked the box to add an equation and to add the R value.

This is basically what I did (except that I only counted the differences above 25% to force the intercept to zero), but then given how close the slope terms are to round fractions with the same denominator (2/24, 4/24 and 5/24) I decided that the minor deviations were probably either from a few additional CMDR-based undermining merits existing in the data and throwing the slopes off "perfect", or from me being slightly wrong about where Fortified starts, rather than Frontier picking more arbitrary numbers than that.

Also this affects HQs! YAY. Decay in a system we cannot reinforce.

Interesting. Decay at 5/24 a week is roughly 90% decay every ten weeks, so should get to the point where the decay amounts are below 1 CP/week after about a year.

 

[Danieros]

Truly the end of uncoordinated or small groups reinforce gameplay by having such steep requirements, I expected figures around 1% which would be small enough to allow for people to still reinforce without needing top 10 activity but over 100s of systems would still be an enormous ripple. So one week of decay was far more undermining than the entirety of PP2 so far.

We are closer and closer to PP1 where it stalemated with everyone just fighting to stay alive against the system mechanics instead of enemy player effort.

 

[Rebel Yell]

Truly the end of uncoordinated or small groups reinforce gameplay by having such steep requirements, I expected figures around 1% which would be small enough to allow for people to still reinforce without needing top 10 activity but over 100s of systems would still be an enormous ripple. So one week of decay was far more undermining than the entirety of PP2 so far.

We are closer and closer to PP1 where it stalemated with everyone just fighting to stay alive against the system mechanics instead of enemy player effort.

Sad but true... we're back at massive grinding and micromanagement overhaul.

 

[Novarek]

This will pretty much forces power to be very selective on the system to upgrade and focus fire on it until it upgrade and require even more coodination.
But yeah the decay is way too brutal, and the fact that power HQ are also concerned let me think that again FDev went way too fast with this decay idea, I'm not against the idea of a decay system but I would have let it only for systems which have received a too small ammount of CP during the cycle and with no decay at all if a system have received a given number of CP (to define) during the cycle.

 

[Rubbernuke]

FD really should just make non PP murder the turbo UM option and leave it at that. The whole point of PP2 was to make a system that is player driven and not beholden to crazy maths.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Here's the effect of decay on trying to promote an Exploited System to Fortified, assuming a constant rate of progress and no CMDR-led undermining because who'd do that.

As with all these sorts of mechanisms, there are some big threshold effects.

If you can put in 100kCP a week or more, it doesn't matter - you might lose some CPs to decay, but they don't actually slow down when you hit the threshold into Fortified at all.

At 50kCP a week, it starts to matter a bit. You'd complete the system in seven weeks now, but it takes 10 with decay (11 if you have any real undermining whatsoever) - not too big a deal really.

But below 50kCP a week the pain rapidly ramps up.
30kCP a week would have taken 11 weeks before, now it takes about 35.
25kCP a week (barely lower) would have taken 14 weeks before, but now it stalls out and never gets there.

So this just encourages consolidation and coordination of reinforcement. If you have four groups reinforcing at 25kCP a week separately, they all fail. If they agree to cooperate and reinforce a single system at 100kCP a week, they fortify all four systems in not much longer than the original pre-decay 14 weeks. Centralise!

So my guess here is that we're going to see almost no change in the actual number of promoted systems a week despite all this paper loss of strength to decay as they're mostly already being done by groups that can apply 100kCP or higher a week. Smaller groups are strategically just moved to Acquisition-only, though - they can't do much to reinforce systems, and 25% Exploited is still strong enough to take multiple weeks of a 50kCP/week group's time to drop so will probably get spotted by someone bigger and stopped.

(And none of this will affect that casual players not primarily trying to achieve strategic aims but just in it for the rewards or just hanging around doing stuff while pledged are still best off reinforcing a system even if they can't outpace decay in it...)

 

[sakata_baba]

i expected "basic unit for powerplay" to be around 200k cp per cycle with 1/2 of that being the entry point. that appeared to be the number f-dev tuned for with their activity manipulation in the past 6 months.

they had other options to push for wing/squadron play in advance of vanguards. just sayin'...

 

[Shurimal]

Extremely discouraging... So much about decentralizing Powerplay and "Blaze your own trail!"

At around 70% Exploited I lost 2/3 of my last week 18k CP progress to this "automatic undermining". Technically I could grind out 50k points weekly, but to do that for several weeks without a pause just to repeat the grind on a second "bridge" system before I can start acquiring the system I actually want...

The golden age of Lone Wolf (in my case... Cat?) agents is over.

 

[Novarek]

Extremely discouraging... So much about decentralizing Powerplay and "Blaze your own trail!"

At around 70% Exploited I lost 2/3 of my last week 18k CP progress to this "automatic undermining". Technically I could grind out 50k points weekly, but to do that for several weeks without a pause just to repeat the grind on a second "bridge" system before I can start acquiring the system I actually want...

The golden age of Lone Wolf (in my case... Cat?) agents is over.

That my main concern actually, the decay will discourage random PP players, with there usefulness limited to acquisition.
If FDev wanted PP2 to become like PP1, with only the most invested PP player doing powerplay (and not by playing but by literraly grinding, again like in PP1), congratz they might be on a good step

 

[Martind Forlon]

In short ... do up to 25% and either ask for support or forget about it . I really very strongly dislike this new decay mechanics. There is no way I grind reinforcement, for me it's straight and absolute game killer.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

i expected "basic unit for powerplay" to be around 200k cp per cycle with 1/2 of that being the entry point. that appeared to be the number f-dev tuned for with their activity manipulation in the past 6 months.

200kCP would be a single top 10 player (and probably top 5 in smaller powers), about 8 "top 10%" players, or probably a group of about 25 players spread across the activity levels.

That's certainly a basic unit which encourages not much to happen in any particular week - though I can understand Frontier not wanting to take the brakes off and rebalance around 20kCP as the base unit until they've either fixed Undermining or decided it's unfixable and abolished it.

Extremely discouraging... So much about decentralizing Powerplay and "Blaze your own trail!"

If it's a short-term patch (and this being Frontier, I mean "months rather than years" by short-term) to attempt to avoid too much more ending up as Fortified or maxed Strongholds before they can bring in some better but more complex fixes for Undermining ... I don't like it but it's understandable that they want to try something.

(Halving the CP value of reinforcement actions would have been considerably more effective against large groups and not quite as discouraging to small ones, though)

But it can't be a long-term solution, unless the long-term solution is going to be "convert Powerplay into a fully-cooperative mechanism where your pledge is essentially a 'select your character class' option to pick some bonuses"

 

[Martind Forlon]

If it's a short-term patch (and this being Frontier, I mean "months rather than years" by short-term) to attempt to avoid too much more ending up as Fortified or maxed Strongholds before they can bring in some better but more complex fixes for Undermining ... I don't like it but it's understandable that they want to try something.

That would be much better understandable and potentially acceptable when discutted (at least in very basic way) before from the clear sky drops on players undiscutted decision - mechanics which make numerous player's gaming hours of wasted effort. I see complete lack of positiveness in such actions.

Aaaand ... little bit of irony right here about how "strong" the decay really is ... ...

Spoiler: ...

 

[Victor Tramez]

FDev simply has a knack for doing everything wrong it can to achieve what it wants. Unless the goal is to increasingly alienate the otherwise very patient ED PP players. At first, we only hated the 35% penalty, which at least allowed us to extrapolate the merits to the actual CP. Now we also have a direct deduction from the merits, which makes it impossible for most players to receive anything other than a fantasy amount of merit that no longer aligns with their CP. Then there's the decay, which tells us in even more empathetic, blunt terms that FDev isn't happy with how we're playing the game.

Does the fault lie with us, the players, because we don't want to understand how FDev wants us to play the game, or does it lie with FDev because they apparently don't understand where they should actually apply the lever?

Those who suffer the most from the decay will likely be the smaller powers that don't have many large groups and who can easily turn a fortified system into a SH within a single cycle. Also left behind are the solo players who simply want to create something for their power but are discouraged to find that the waves of decay barely let them leave the shore.

Perhaps FDev should realize that it would be better to rework the undermining options, if that's where the problem lies, instead of using ole methods to hammer the masses of players who just want to make reinforcements.

A game that increasingly punishes players for playing the game. You don't see that very often.

Although, personally, I can see a use for the decay. It could be used for powers that exceed a certain size. A decay that affects all systems within a certain distance of the headquarters. As a kind of balance, so that the smaller powers can catch up with the larger ones, who would then be significantly affected by this decay.

The fact that the undermining in the game isn't working as intended isn't the only problem with the current PP. It's also the extreme overweighting of the player base on two of the imperial powers, which is becoming more and more apparent with each successive cycle. And sooner or later, we'll need a mechanism that balances the larger and smaller powers.

The current CG also clearly demonstrates this with the number of participants. The imperial overweighting allows any tension to escape from the newly created power CGs right from the start.