I wish the Thargoids would turn up and eradicate this Power Play nonsense.

[DuQuesne]

I'm playing Elite : Dangerous because I loved Frontier : Elite 2 and really wanted to recapture the experience.

In Frontier, I had a cause. I was dedicated to the Empire (so miss my old courier...) And it provided an excellent focus to my 'play it your way' style. From photo missions to smuggling slaves into federation space, it stopped the grind feeling like a grind.

20 years later, something was missing. The first time I got to allied status with a minor faction, getting the friendly greeting when docking was a great touch. 5 minutes later, I realised I should abandon my new best friends and never return, because the best way to achieve my personal objective (ranking with the Empire) was to keep randomly picking different minor factions to 'level up' with. Goodbye immersion.

Enter Power Play. Pick your Power, stick with them, reap the rewards. Just what I wanted. Thank you Frontier. At least for the 30 second it takes to realise it's totally disconnected from everything else. Is it relevant to my power if I choose to trade in their exploited systems? Why are there so many civil wars happening in controlled systems, but participating in them has zero effect on Power Play? Why are there no Power Play bulletin board missions?

I can only assume that all this is still to come, but that assumption is probably just because I can't even contemplate the alternative.

 

[metatheurgist]

Is it relevant to my power if I choose to trade in their exploited systems? Why are there so many civil wars happening in controlled systems, but participating in them has zero effect on Power Play? Why are there no Power Play bulletin board missions?

This is one of the things that puzzles me about PP. They already have mechanisms in place for factions duking it out in a system and taking power, why add a completely new and disconnected merit, fortify, undermine, CC system? Why not just give each faction in the system a chance to be a representative of a power? Then I could support my power by supporting the factions. A power controls a system if it controls the ruling faction. The benefits of supporting a power could flow through to the factions - Do I want the 20% bonus to bounties by cashing them into one faction? Or do I not do that because I don't support that power? Powers spread by causing expansion states, or maybe you can turn factions to specific powers by doing certain missions? More complex interactions arising naturally from the manipulation of the existing game rules rather than adding another artificial structure layered on top. <shrug>

 

[deathmagnet]

Politics is boring in real life, so why inject it into a game?

FD, what have you guys been smoking? ;-)

I wonder where the idea that the majority of your player-base are interested in political struggles came from?
Was there a questionnaire? Were the users polled?

Is this "making the game we want to play" something that is restricted to FD employees, or is it also open to the players?

If it was open to the players to chose the next major expansion, where is the evidence that this was it?

What I sense is a fairly split community with <50% enjoying Power Play or with any appetite for it.

Why make Power Play such a time-sink/High Effort/low reward add-on?

A good Inter-species war with the Thargoids is something everyone can get behind....politics??? ..... not so much I think.

Maybe I've missed the point of Power Play completely, but it is certainly not a "system" within ED that I want to participate in, it leaves me colder than a week-old corpse in a freezer.
Thank goodness for other modes of play!

I shall keep reading the newsletters in the hope of signs of change in direction.

Just my opinion (I am entitled to it), but I wonder how many others think the emperors new clothes are a bit of a joke?

+1 rep just for the title of the thread. Didn't need or bother to read further.

 

[Dbrn47]

I wish the Thargoids would show up and eradicate all these threads, except for one, where everyone can share their gripes. We can call it the "Definitive PP Hate Thread" and everyone can do all their PP hating there. Maybe FD can even design some "I hate PP" T-shirts for all you folks as well. Of course, then you might just be mistaken for a feminist.

 

[n13L5]

Politics is boring in real life, so why inject it into a game?

Why make Power Play such a time-sink/High Effort/low reward add-on?

A good Inter-species war with the Thargoids is something everyone can get behind....politics??? ..... not so much I think.

- Yes, Politics is all the more boring as its just a puppet theater for the mainstream media to sell copy and keep us occupied with nonsense, so the majority of people misses what's really going down.

- The FD dev team apparently have not heard of any other concepts of game play yet. Maybe someone in the know can kindly send them some relevant links?

- Its a good point. Aliens. But that would have been real work to do, require serious programming and asset production... just like any of the tangible functionality from the original design documents, even the 'smaller' stuff.


Introducing non-entities to the game that consist of nothing more than a few pictures are a lot easier on the wallet. That's more like producing a website. No need for sleeping bags in the office on sundays etc...

 

[Retu81]

Oh, so it's not meant to be enjoyed by anyone but the devs, and the tiny number of devs shouldn't care about their massive amount of consumers. Maybe they don't have to worry now, but come time for their first paid expansion, they may be shocked to see how few people are still interested.

It might come as a shock, but back in the day, game developers did exactly that. They made a game they wanted to make. That game either sold or it was a flop. After gaming industry grew in size and became a multi-billion dollar industry and all kinds of investors got their hands on it, game developers were forced to bend over backwards to produce games that catered the lowest common denominator. We see that today as hundreds of clones of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft etc.

I personally find it refreshing to see a gaming company be able to do their own thing. If Elite succeeds or fails, at least it does it with its own merits, not because they tried to be something which was already done hundreds of times before.

 

[dayrth]

Powerplay is optional. If you don't like it, don't play it...

 

[Ian Phillips]

A piece of advice if you wish to start a thread discussing something.
Do not accuse the Devs of drug taking in your second sentence.

Closed.