This is part of a series of proposals to improve PowerPlay in various ways. The goal is to make PowerPlay a more interesting, dynamic, and rewarding experience, without needing to scrap the whole thing and rebuild from the ground up - evolution rather than revolution. Each proposal is intended to be relatively straightforward to implement (though of course we have no special insight into the specifics of the Elite codebase), and most of them (except where mentioned) stand alone and do not need a lot of other changes to make them work.
Please limit discussions to the specific topic at hand - pros, cons, tweaks, etc. If you have alternative proposals, by all means make a separate topic! The parent thread for this series is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...out-incrementally-improving-powerplay.551571/ Although the authors are Winters/FLC commanders, these proposals have been made and discussed by pilots from many Powers.
Remove the salary for power ratings
Instead of being given up to 50MCr per cycle for rating 5, grant the commander the same amount in fast-track cargo by increasing the amount of free cargo they get every half hour. This removes the incentive for salary-grinders to deliver PowerPlay cargo “randomly” purely for the salary, while giving the same effective financial benefits to real active players.
Discussion:
There is a plague of "5th Column" (5C) players who pledge to a Power and then work against that Power's interests by preparing and expanding unsuitable systems. However, a significant number of these players are probably just doing PowerPlay for the up to 50M credits of salary each cycle, and are just hauling the free cargo to the nearest prep/fort system, without understanding that what they are doing is harmful to the Power. This has been exacerbated by unhelpful "how to" guides on YouTube ignorantly instructing them to do exactly this to earn the salary. In many cases this behaviour is damaging to the power and a real and constant problem, however the commanders are not malicious, merely ignorant.
By removing the financial incentive, and turning it into more PowerPlay cargo, the salary-grinders will be discouraged from this damaging activity, since it does not produce actual credits. However real involved informed active PowerPlay commanders will get the same benefits in the form of free extra cargo.
This proposal works most elegantly in combination with the proposal “Free PowerPlay cargo accumulates to a higher total” allowing the extra free cargo to be “stored” somewhere until requested.
Open question: this extra cargo does not help dedicated underminers, since they don’t want to deliver cargo. One solution is to award an extra credit bonus when turning in UM merits that scales up with current rating, to give them the same effective rating-related "income".
Please limit discussions to the specific topic at hand - pros, cons, tweaks, etc. If you have alternative proposals, by all means make a separate topic! The parent thread for this series is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...out-incrementally-improving-powerplay.551571/ Although the authors are Winters/FLC commanders, these proposals have been made and discussed by pilots from many Powers.
Remove the salary for power ratings
Instead of being given up to 50MCr per cycle for rating 5, grant the commander the same amount in fast-track cargo by increasing the amount of free cargo they get every half hour. This removes the incentive for salary-grinders to deliver PowerPlay cargo “randomly” purely for the salary, while giving the same effective financial benefits to real active players.
Discussion:
There is a plague of "5th Column" (5C) players who pledge to a Power and then work against that Power's interests by preparing and expanding unsuitable systems. However, a significant number of these players are probably just doing PowerPlay for the up to 50M credits of salary each cycle, and are just hauling the free cargo to the nearest prep/fort system, without understanding that what they are doing is harmful to the Power. This has been exacerbated by unhelpful "how to" guides on YouTube ignorantly instructing them to do exactly this to earn the salary. In many cases this behaviour is damaging to the power and a real and constant problem, however the commanders are not malicious, merely ignorant.
By removing the financial incentive, and turning it into more PowerPlay cargo, the salary-grinders will be discouraged from this damaging activity, since it does not produce actual credits. However real involved informed active PowerPlay commanders will get the same benefits in the form of free extra cargo.
This proposal works most elegantly in combination with the proposal “Free PowerPlay cargo accumulates to a higher total” allowing the extra free cargo to be “stored” somewhere until requested.
Open question: this extra cargo does not help dedicated underminers, since they don’t want to deliver cargo. One solution is to award an extra credit bonus when turning in UM merits that scales up with current rating, to give them the same effective rating-related "income".
