Lugh Event a failure - Taking over systems doesnt work

[beelbeebub]

Yadda-yadda! Always the same broken record... How does it help right now with the product you purchased? Last time Ive looked up it was a release - not a beta test!

Although i suspect nothing said will alter your outlook....
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I agree that as a launch, ED is a little thin on MP and there are clearly some bugs. However, this needs to be looked at in the context of the difficulty of launching a MP internet game. Inevitably there will be glitches with systems and conditions you haven't been able to test. If a certain condition occurs 0.1% of the time that can still equate to hundreds of people. So far FD have patched 3 times in 4 days and don't show any signs of slowing down.
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The days of "ship and forget" are, for better or worse, gone. The down side is that this will exacerbate the tendency for games to get pushed out slightly earlier than would be the case a decade ago, but the upside is that bug fixes and upgrades can keep coming long after release and the devs can react to how the players are actually playing the game. Maybe this does mean that the lines between beta and gold are blurred but it probably leads to better games in the end.
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Of course, this is the "glass half full" view. Some may have a "glass half empty" view.

 

[talshiarr]

Frankly, I'd be disappointed if it only took 3 days action by a few dozen players to overthrow a system government.

Well it has been a couple of weeks, and a lot more than a few dozen. Ship traffic in Lugh is well over 1,000 a day, for a while it was nearly 2,000. If that kind of concentrated effort is barely able to get it to civil war status fleetingly, you don't have to worry about it happening routinely anywhere.

There is more to be learned here! Just last night I am still seeing the 'CIVIL WAR CRITICAL' message come & go for Crimson State. The best & brightest of us are still honing our approach to achieving a state of war in system.

Where is this message at? I've never seen it.

 

[CMDR_Irishbros]

The revolution of Lugh appears to be over.

After doing progress for half a week, on the weekend, with the goal in sight, it all came to a screeching halt.

Here is what I learned:
Nothing

1. Triggering a big enough influence change to start an election or a civil war does not seem to implemented.
2. The influence system is neither documented nor is it in any way obvious what works and what doesnt.
- we dont know how trading works on influence
- we dont know to what extent missions change influence. We have seen so many little blue influence arrows in the last weeks, we could fill a small town with traffic signs. But we werent able to push the Crimson State Group above 50%.
- we have no idea whether or not bounty hunting or killing enemy faction's ships has any effect on influence
- we dont know whether influence is dependent on the stations (as in: you have to take over the biggest station because there are the most people). This does not seem to be the case.
- we dont know how and to what extent FD pulled the strings in the background, reducing the amount of influence gained from missions and other activities
- we dont know whether there were concerted efforts by players to stop the Crimson Revolution from happening. Talking to other players in Open appeared to show way more of CSG supporters than Federation supporters.

You can look at this thread for the results of the last 2 weeks. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=71699&page=54

So we dont know anything more about influence than 1.5 weeks ago. The background simulation does not appear to be fully working. We can move around the percentages a bit, and there is a response in the tone of the missions. But there isnt a trigger of election or civil war events. It appears that it all needs to be done by hand by the developers.

This is a very disappointing outcome. Nevertheless I'd like to thank all the people that were missioning like crazy over the last week. Personally, i cannot pretend anymore to know what to do and how to do it, when I dont.

If anyone has different insights about influencing systems and achieved results, I'd rellay like to hear them.

TL;DR: The background simulation doesnt work. Players cannot take over systems or trigger a civil war or election event as of now.

Would be nice to see some stats from FD about missions bounty, hunting etc then you could come to a better conclusion as to how your efforts affected it all.

Great effort kudos to you.

 

[TargetLost]

I too tried to change or at least move the influence of a fraction in 2 or 3 system. In 4 days I could move 0! There were no changes in the influnce at all. Ok I flay a Cobra but nevertheleess after 4 days supporting one fraction (with missions etc) )I had expected a 1 % move of ANY of the fraction in the systems ..but simple nothing. That's very dissapointing and frustrating.
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The only thing I could influence seems the aperance of ships of a Nav point in an anarchy system. If I only fire on the Ships of Fractions That I don't support then in a short time I see only ships sppearing of the Fraction I support. But other than that no effect.

 

[Harmoniser]

Just so newer players & others who haven't noticed our fight before know the truth~

The fight for a free & independent Lugh is FAR from over!

There are two active & enormous threads where you can keep a closer eye on the daily struggle.

A day to day discussion in this thread (in the GROUPS section):
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=71699

The original thread where orfeboy ignited the revolution, still quite active:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=71327


There is more to be learned here! Just last night I am still seeing the 'CIVIL WAR CRITICAL' message come & go for Crimson State. The best & brightest of us are still honing our approach to achieving a state of war in system.

I thing these types of things neeed to somehow appear on galnet. Most users will miss this. Even if its say on a news ticker or galnet "Cival war critical in x!

 

[Tuts]

Where is this message at? I've never seen it.

You access the right-hand panel in your ship. It shows faction info both for the "Big 3" and for the smaller in-system factions - so you need to be in the Lugh system to see those. I forget exactly how you do the next bit (I'm at work atm) but you select the local factions you're interested in & it shows a screen with each local faction's influence as both a % and as a bar graph. From there you can click on an individual faction's name & you get a brief description of them, as well as a display of any special status they are in. Quite often I see the "CIVIL WAR CRITICAL" flash on Crimson State's info screen, but it never seems to last.

 

[Mikey2305]

So im a humble trader making a nice living for the feds out at thiin... So why should i join you guys in your fight for a free and independent Lugh? Whats in it for me? Persuade me and i might come over to help... But money is my prime motivation so dont try to impress me with all that idealistic nonsense...

 

[Korenwolf]

So, is Lugh still on the cards or is the action moving somewhere else?

 

[clemdha]

I can't be 100% certain but it feels like that 1% positive you get after a mission is 1% of the 1% influence... If that makes sense, in other words, 100 missions might move the overall influence up 1%

The problem is, that you don't know how many missions are completed by other players that may negate all the work you do

so it would 1/10.000 ... not much !

and i was pretty much alone in that system . That is why i chose it and don't display the name. But of course there is the npc influence...

 

[MadDogMurdock]

Well it has been a couple of weeks, and a lot more than a few dozen. Ship traffic in Lugh is well over 1,000 a day, for a while it was nearly 2,000. If that kind of concentrated effort is barely able to get it to civil war status fleetingly, you don't have to worry about it happening routinely anywhere.



Where is this message at? I've never seen it.

Is the traffic number, unique visits per day or the sum of all visits, is it players only, etc.?

 

[DanTheMan]

Thanks for the info. See, now I have to ask. Michael, in all the time we were testing the game over the last few months, why the heck didn't you guys ask us to test things like this?
The players tried at release, it failed, you've fixed stuff now so civil war should be triggerable now. Great! But, this could have been a great thing to test during beta or gamma if you guys had turned on the simulation and just asked for some participation. I know you'd have gotten a very enthusiastic response, especially given the size of the "bubble" or "sausage" we were all playing in at the time so travel time wouldn't have been an issue for the testers, and maybe you could have gotten some of these bugs squashed.

Like I kept saying about Beta-Testing....The complete lack of any plan or structure for testing of plan vs. actual and the discussion of same in the open forum between the testers and the devs this was always a lot of wasted effort.
I am a professinal software tester, but hey WTH do I know? ;-)

 

[Von Elsner]

Ok so what is actually happening am I wasting my time now in Lugh?

 

[talshiarr]

According to Michael B., no, we're not wasting our time. There was a glitch, and we are doing things right, so I'll try a few more days and see if anything changes. If there's nothing by the end of the weekend, sorry, I'll have to move on.

Is the traffic number, unique visits per day or the sum of all visits, is it players only, etc.?

I don't know if it's unique commanders counted once per day, but it is definitely players only.

 

[Von Elsner]

According to Michael B., no, we're not wasting our time. There was a glitch, and we are doing things right, so I'll try a few more days and see if anything changes. If there's nothing by the end of the weekend, sorry, I'll have to move on.



I don't know if it's unique commanders counted once per day, but it is definitely players only.

Well ok then. Do you have any idea how many CMDRS are involved?

 

[Chrypt]

Have you tried blockading the trading ports and pirating all Fed ships?

 

[Elementical]

This is a link to the design plan for the background simulation. We can only guess if it has all been implemented as described and it will require testing and monitoring of data by the dev team to know if things are working as intended.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6305

The civil war entry is interesting:

"Civil war – this state indicates internal civil war without an external named entity (note that civil war with named entities is simply a war)

• Has a negative effect on Standard of Living, Security and Wealth"

This implies that CSG is in a state of civil war with itself. From a quick skim through the document I don't see any mention of how the individual system factions interact with the main factions (Empire, Federation and Alliance). I only see one reference to it and that's at the start of "Part 2" of the document under "Faction Support". I also see no reference to how factions within a system interact with each other and what the "influence" of a faction truely means.

It seems factions need wealth to generate missions. No wealth means no missions, which leads to government collapse, which leads to developer action to apply a new form of government.

I haven't done many missions but from what I've seen it seems we can influence the various states in a system with them (e.g. Economic Boom, Economic Bust, Famine, Outbreak, Unrest and so on). People who have done alot of missions can enlighten me on the various effects if they like

Looking at things from an overall perspective it seems the developers want us (the players) to be able to effect the galaxy, but not alter it rapidly. Realistically it would take more than a few thousand people to make an entire system of millions to revolt after 2 or 3 weeks of intervention. These systems have been around for possibly hundreds of years. The major governments would probably consider it a minor inconvenience. Assuming that the devs have the monitor tools in place and that the background simulation and all of it's effects are working correctly they can take action to add events based on the players actions.

It might take months before the devs decide a system is ready for a revolt but my guess is that the use of social media like these forums to gain support for "liberation attempts" can help guide the dev team in what galactic events the community wants added to the game. They've already mentioned the activities in Lugh in a newsletter.

My guess is it will simply take time. I just realised how long this post was. I began with the intention of simply linking the original design document but I began to ramble on

 

[Von Elsner]

LFE up to 49%...

 

[Exard3k]

Will Lugh join the Alliance once your campaign has been successful?

 

[Morbius]

I was probably part of the problem tbh. I came to Lugh in my upgraded Freagle to aid the cause, but ended up doing a lot of bounty hunting and trading to get myself into a Viper that can handle some combat. I will be returning to just Crimson missions and I will continue to, as I have been doing, challenging every player I see in the system. Those that do not fight for the cause will be interdicted and forced to drop any and all cargo (to prevent trading/non-csg missions), or face destruction.

 

[NeoOhm]

Its easy to say that you have a game with advanced game functions - thill ppl starts to test them and can't really find any advanced systems...