The issues are this plus NPCs not making you think twice about doing something.
Otherwise its just like PP1 in that its mindless hauling coupled with mindless farming when it should be high value varied tasks.
Let's discuss RARES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And how it unbalances Powerplay.
- Thread starter Murky Dregs
- Start date
Otherwise its just like PP1 in that its mindless hauling coupled with mindless farming when it should be high value varied tasks.
People haul rares because it's an option. It's an option because Frontier a) chose it, b) nuked exploration as a source, b) disincentivised shooting things, for some reason, and c) put powerplay modules at the end of a very big pile of merits.
Of course people are going to select the shortest path. Why would they not? Frontier could have made multiple ways to make decent merits and lifted everything up to be a bit more consistent. They did not. Stuff doesn't always have to be nerfed; just bring the other options up to match it. Gives more people more options.
And so we have what we have. In a few weeks the vast bulk of merit farming will die down as people disengage with PowerPlay and your new issue and complaint will be that nobody can hold systems or affect change, because the vast majority of people have clocked off and are doing something else and there's not enough merits being generated.
Rares are not a cause, it's a symptom. The cause is Frontier's inability to properly value time invested in their game (at least the exploration thing has been the only knee-jerk reaction so far, I can only hope we will not see more).
Of course people are going to select the shortest path. Why would they not? Frontier could have made multiple ways to make decent merits and lifted everything up to be a bit more consistent. They did not. Stuff doesn't always have to be nerfed; just bring the other options up to match it. Gives more people more options.
And so we have what we have. In a few weeks the vast bulk of merit farming will die down as people disengage with PowerPlay and your new issue and complaint will be that nobody can hold systems or affect change, because the vast majority of people have clocked off and are doing something else and there's not enough merits being generated.
Rares are not a cause, it's a symptom. The cause is Frontier's inability to properly value time invested in their game (at least the exploration thing has been the only knee-jerk reaction so far, I can only hope we will not see more).
The easy way to present it is like one of those "if every the earth was made of sand and grain of sand was a computer that could try a million billion passwords per second then trying whatever number of combinations would take longer than the heat death of the universe to crack a password of surprisingly low length"
If you somehow got 1 merit per second you would still need ~9 days of constant playing to reach rank 100.
Most activities earn less than this. There's stuff on the high end where you can push maybe 2-2.5x that (PP CZs and stronghold farming). To be completely fair here it's probably on par with the Elite V grind, but by having gameplay rewards in the form of weapons locked behind it people feel more compelled to do it and that just feels bad. This was an opportunity to do better, especially since the ranks go on forever.
The particularly tricky thing with balancing is going to be for things (and rares are probably in this category but not the only thing) where there's a very efficient way to do it but most people aren't. And another thing is where multiple activities can be combined: you're not likely to get a decent merit rate just doing donation missions, but you can add donation missions to just about any other activity that involves visiting stations.
For example, escape pods are something like 30 merits/tonne (depending on ethos, system type, etc.). That's comparable, per tonne, to many rares.
- in a normal system, access to escape pods is fairly limited, and this gives a decently balanced rate of return
- in particular systems, you can get many hundreds of escape pods an hour
So do escape pods get balanced to the "normal" case (which makes them superpowered in certain systems) or to the extreme case (which makes them useless in most systems)? [1] Does the balance point assume the current limpet scooping problems continue or assume you're doing Powerplay in the middle of the night when the servers are quiet and you can get it done smoothly? Does the balance point assume you're just doing escape pods, or are you also getting merits from scans, Power kills, donation missions when you dock to turn in your cargo, etc? Are they balanced around someone with a super-optimised collector ship who has been practising for weeks, or someone who's fairly new to it and just has a single 1A collector controller in their Cobra III?
And it's good if Frontier don't over-tune it, so figuring out some new technique / optimisation / combination does give an advantage.
(As I've said elsewhere the bigger question is probably not the balance between individual activities, but how undermining collectively balances out versus fortification collectively - that needs to be kept somewhat level to avoid longer-term problems)
[1] EDIT: and does it actually matter that escape pods can be obtained differentially in different systems, since they're usable as both fortifying and undermining actions? On the other hand, a fortification-only action or an undermining-only action which is very strong in a few systems and mostly weak elsewhere has different implications. Is that a problem either, though?
For example, escape pods are something like 30 merits/tonne (depending on ethos, system type, etc.). That's comparable, per tonne, to many rares.
- in a normal system, access to escape pods is fairly limited, and this gives a decently balanced rate of return
- in particular systems, you can get many hundreds of escape pods an hour
So do escape pods get balanced to the "normal" case (which makes them superpowered in certain systems) or to the extreme case (which makes them useless in most systems)? [1] Does the balance point assume the current limpet scooping problems continue or assume you're doing Powerplay in the middle of the night when the servers are quiet and you can get it done smoothly? Does the balance point assume you're just doing escape pods, or are you also getting merits from scans, Power kills, donation missions when you dock to turn in your cargo, etc? Are they balanced around someone with a super-optimised collector ship who has been practising for weeks, or someone who's fairly new to it and just has a single 1A collector controller in their Cobra III?
And it's good if Frontier don't over-tune it, so figuring out some new technique / optimisation / combination does give an advantage.
(As I've said elsewhere the bigger question is probably not the balance between individual activities, but how undermining collectively balances out versus fortification collectively - that needs to be kept somewhat level to avoid longer-term problems)
[1] EDIT: and does it actually matter that escape pods can be obtained differentially in different systems, since they're usable as both fortifying and undermining actions? On the other hand, a fortification-only action or an undermining-only action which is very strong in a few systems and mostly weak elsewhere has different implications. Is that a problem either, though?
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i also am in agreement with this. if rares were nerfed to the level of everything else, nothing would be worth doing! the grind for people to get the modules they want (the only reason a lot of players are interested at all) would be so horrific it could even put people off altogether
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this rares situation is just like the sampling of scouts.
it feels disrespectful to my time and effort. it feels like im doing something wrong when doing anything other than hauling trinkets.
it makes me want to play the game less.
it feels disrespectful to my time and effort. it feels like im doing something wrong when doing anything other than hauling trinkets.
it makes me want to play the game less.
This will be even more of an issue if frontline systems are all Fortified or Stronghold status due to Rares making it so easy to upgrade them. Undermining efforts simply cannot compete.
This only gives good merits if you're pledged to few particular powers btw
Don't the anti-stronghold FC actions come up as "local activities" (i.e. preferred, recommended) for all* powers? (scrolling down in the PP galaxy map infopanel, I mean)
Which powers and what's the difference in merits?
*"all" == I probably stopped looking after the first 7 or 8 powers had them, mea culpa.
not that the stronghold farm imo shouldnt be looked at as well, but we all understand how diametrically different these two activities are in terms of effort, equipment and skill requirements, right?
Yuri Grom here, 39 merits per fighter destroyed.
That's kind of the point I was making.
Surprising.. Do you also get less for exploding FC objects like data transmitters, capacitors?
Do you still see this stuff
- Destroy carrier objects
- Kill power ships around carrier
- Shutdown carrier defences
- Disable carrier defences
- Disable carrier generators
- Hack carrier datalinks
- Hack carrier cargo bays
in the local activities list?
Anyhow, at ~half-rate I guess it's still in the 10k/hr bracket then?
I will have to check, honestly only went there to kill the fighters as that is non-bounty activity.
So here's what's in "local activities" if I align to Grom and check at LYR stronghold Ancermoten:
A couple of other factors look as though they could affect rewards also:
So ideally testing would take place in systems with similar penalty levels. I won't have a chance to do it this week but will look out for any evidence what the score is on this.
Is the problem with rare trading going to go away once all the powers turn the systems with rare goods in to strongholds and make it more dangerous for other powers to collect them when the powerplay npc attack them.
Rare goods may turn into strategic assets for the powers and if a rival power can get past the npc power ships they’ve earned the bucket of merits they get.
Rare goods may turn into strategic assets for the powers and if a rival power can get past the npc power ships they’ve earned the bucket of merits they get.
I doubt it. Leesti already is and its rares are pretty popular for use, Strongholds aren't that much more dangerous than normal systems for the most part. Frontier would have to turn up the interdiction power of Stronghold NPCs massively to stop people making quick sun->station supercruises (or FC<->station which can be even shorter) - which would then have the probably unwanted consequence of making Strongholds pretty difficult to do any undermining action in other than "kill your latest interdictors".
The tricky thing there is that unless you have an incredibly geographically-dispersed power, you can't really use your own rares that effectively. If you can make it work, putting your own rares systems into Lockdown (and at least, not Boom) to stop other Powers coming through in the first place might be helpful.
They could just increase the level/engineering of the NPC ships that are outside the stations rather than the ships flying around the system. It should only affect mining and flood the market undermining. (They would still be usefull(ish) for exploited and fortified systems).
Rares could be a reason to expand your power to get the full effect of rare trading. Powerplay could do with more reasons to have a big empire. It would also make the systems with rare goods a prize worth fighting for maybe.
It may also balance the risk/reward for rares.
They'd have to increase it a lot, though.
- if you do get shot down on your way into the station while trying to pick up rares, you're Clean and from mid ranks you have rebuy from Power attacks covered, so you respawn inside the station anyway, no real loss (a lot of the time you can probably get into the mailslot before the instance has properly woken up anyway)
- on the way out, pick a hyperspace target in front of the mailslot, boost out past them and escape: they'd need to be extremely effective to stop that (given that it's not that hard to escape from actual players trying the same thing, and a rares transport doesn't need super-high cargo capacity so can fit some defences)
An effective station instance blockade would also prevent or make far harder hacking of adverts, donation missions, and handing in your Power's Undermining commodity, which is getting to be a pretty big proportion of the actions available.
That leaves available salvage/kills in signal sources (somewhat effective, but not great in most systems), the various Odyssey settlement actions (not possible in every system), and Stronghold Carrier attacks (would be a bit weird for the Power to be defending that less strongly than the actual stations, also not available in every Stronghold)