New answers from Devs, I quit Powerplay

[lysan]

One of the problems I have with PP is the decade of the merits.

It's killing my fun, there are days I want to put a lot of time into my fraction, there are days I won't due to RL issues. The grind to get back is terrible terrible boring and the rewards are zero. Honestly I like the idea of PP, however it has some serious design flaws that reject the player instead of involving them more. Fetch this, go there, dump this and return.

I was playing GTA V the other day, online. What impress me is how they start the mission, you can select different methods, however I the end it's the same thing. Go there, get this, shoot some stuff up, drive like a maniac deliver stuff to location z.

We need some of this in elite. Mission need to wing up players to co-work towards the mission goal. Match players, one has a fighter, one has a freighter go get stuff and bring it back together.

And while we are at it, the mission brefing is dull, brown text nothing to get the mission hype up. C'mon FD we know this can be done better.

My 0.2 Cr on PP so far.

 

[Iskariot]

I do not think PowerPlay is completely bad.
PP is great at introducing a necessary expandable political layer to the ED universe that gives an identity to otherwise faceless star systems and perhaps even more importantly it gives a framework for direct and indirect player interaction. PP adds quite a bit of new dimensions to the game; it brings the Galaxy to life, it puts characters in context to the galaxy, it gives players who want that direction in what to do.
I believe this is important stuff and I would not want PP to go away.

But there are reasons that made me stop participating in PP:

- The merit decay system is very unpleasant, totally demotivating and disheartening.
- The merit decay system is very unpleasant, totally demotivating and disheartening.
- The merit decay system is very unpleasant, totally demotivating and disheartening.

Yes, the first three points are the same. That is because that is what ultimately broke my back and killed my resolve.

- PP needs to become a bit more personal. This could be done by something simple as a popup screen after you docked at a station in which you are addressed personally with your commander name and are asked to do special/secret missions for your PP master.
- There needs to be a better integration with the Bulletin Board so that we can also take on certain bulletin board missions for our PP masters. For example a mission to kill a bunch of pirates, or transport battle weapons, or free slaves etc. This should then earn us merits as well as credits.
- The previous point would also guarantee more variation in what you can do in PP. Because that is very much needed. There needs to be a broad range of things you can do to support a power.
- Merit earning needs to be better balanced. Killing hostile intruders in a home system should earn you much more merits. I think at least two thirds of killing hostiles in an enemy system.
- Each PP faction needs a more individual style of operations with some unique mechanisms. For example a pirate faction overtly ruling entire systems seems a bit out of character. (for example see here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=168164)

 

[xDreadnoughtx]

I do not think PowerPlay is completely bad.
PP is great at introducing a necessary expandable political layer to the ED universe that gives an identity to otherwise faceless star systems and perhaps even more importantly it gives a framework for direct and indirect player interaction. PP adds quite a bit of new dimensions to the game; it brings the Galaxy to life, it puts characters in context to the galaxy, it gives players who want that direction in what to do.
I believe this is important stuff and I would not want PP to go away.

But there are reasons that made me stop participating in PP:

- The merit decay system is very unpleasant, totally demotivating and disheartening.
- The merit decay system is very unpleasant, totally demotivating and disheartening.
- The merit decay system is very unpleasant, totally demotivating and disheartening.

Yes, the first three points are the same. That is because that is what ultimately broke my back and killed my resolve.

- PP needs to become a bit more personal. This could be done by something simple as a popup screen after you docked at a station in which you are addressed personally with your commander name to do special/secret missions for your PP master.
- There needs to be a better integration with the Bulletin Board so that we can also take on certain bulletin board missions for our PP masters. For example a mission to kill a bunch of pirates, or transport battle weapons, or free slaves etc. This should then earn us merits as well as credits.
- The previous point would also guarantee more variation in what you can do in PP. Because that is very much needed. There needs to be a broad range of things you can do to support a power.
- Merit earning needs to be better balanced. Killing hostile intruders in a home system should earn you much more merits. I think at least two thirds of killing hostiles in an enemy system.

Devs - a must read.

I'd like to add
- credits and merit rewards for combat tasks scaled to the level of the opposition.
- power comms and in game message boards.........
......
......
......

 

[Saipher]

Agreed. Special missions sound like a good alternative to all the grinding. I imagine missions to gather resources for your power or delivering secret documents in hostile space. There's much you could do with it.

 

[Snarfbuckle]

- PP needs to become a bit more personal. This could be done by something simple as a popup screen after you docked at a station in which you are addressed personally with your commander name to do special/secret missions for your PP master.
- There needs to be a better integration with the Bulletin Board so that we can also take on certain bulletin board missions for our PP masters. For example a mission to kill a bunch of pirates, or transport battle weapons, or free slaves etc. This should then earn us merits as well as credits.
- The previous point would also guarantee more variation in what you can do in PP. Because that is very much needed. There needs to be a broad range of things you can do to support a power.
- Merit earning needs to be better balanced. Killing hostile intruders in a home system should earn you much more merits. I think at least two thirds of killing hostiles in an enemy system.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=168164

Above is my idea on how Archon Delaine could be made unique, fun and have an actual impact while still being stuck in the merit system.

We need to make the faction mechanics for each faction unique.

 

[Mephane]

I play a lot of strategy games, have done since I was ten and became chess champion for South East London. I learned poker at 13, almost 30 years ago. Now I teach it. Studied The Art of War and other associated texts at 15. I've broken the world record for games like medieval total war and shogun total war series countless times. I've table top gamed, live role played, studied at degree level in political philosophy and practice and on and on (it's my thing...).

Jernau Morat Gurgeh, is that you?

On topic: What killed powerplay for me, quite directly, is the entire merit system, in particular the decay, but also the very fact it exists as a visible, gamey thing. Where the game tries to present all the little things in an immersive way - you don't get to see reputation numbers, your progress towards the next naval rank is hidden, and (at least until 1.3) combat/trade/exploration rating progress was hidden, too (it is still only percentages and no "need to deliver precisely this much to advance" meters), because all of these numbers are, in the end, technical details of the fact that this is a video game, not an actual, real universe. But it was protrayed as if that were not the case, and it seemed FD made a lot of effort to keep up that level of immersion.

Powerplay, on the under hand, has an all-too-typical MMO-style yet-another-currency. I only realized this recently when I joined the Skyforge Open Beta; it is a rather grindy F2P themepark MMO, and as it is somewhat expected in this type of game, it has a lot of arbitrary currencies you need to collect in order to upgrade this and progress that, where the actual currency is absolutely meaningless and the means of acquisition do not make sense whatsoever, it is all a thinly disguised justification to hop onto one of the themepark rides again and again.

It absolutely doesn't fit at all into the tone of ED to have exactly that type of currency here; to make matters worse - even the F2P grinders almost never dare to make a currency decay over time (Warframe does it, but there it is one specific currency of very limited use, of which you are supposed to gather just a handful right before you plan to spend it anyway, and not stockpile the things).

A background metric for PP participation and how much you support your power is of course needed if you want to assign personal rewards (for the record: I believe it would have been better without any personal rewards whatsoever, and only to have those people participate who are in it to further the power they believe in), and when the designers then are so dead set on the decay, yes you need to expose those numbers to the players. It would indeed have been worse if merits were just a hidden metric that also decays, with no way to gauge whether you keep up with or surpass the decay, or not. But the fact that the decay mechanic alone makes it necessary to display the metric, should have been a warning sign to the designers that this system does not fit into this game.

 

[Iskariot]

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=168164

Above is my idea on how Archon Delaine could be made unique, fun and have an actual impact while still being stuck in the merit system.

We need to make the faction mechanics for each faction unique.

Yes I agree.
If each character had truly unique characteristics and mechanisms this would not just enhance the powerplay meta game, but also have a great influence on general role playing and immersion.

I love those ideas in the other thread.

 

[Brucolac]

I like the idea of Powerplay, and the game needed Tier 2(?) NPCs - although I thought that there would be many more of those level of NPCs.

The user interface and the map for PP are fine, although when I was active in PP it was notable that the information given to the players generally lagged some way behind the situation "on the ground".

The module rewards in general are, IMO, not worth the effort to obtain nor the time it took to develop them. Anything you fit to your ship should have a purpose since it replaces a module (or adds weight or power consumption). If something does not serve a purpose it should be purely cosmetic, like decals or paint jobs.

The real problem with PP though is simply the underlying mechanisms are terrible. They manage to take something simple and make it seem complicated, and yet even the simple things were ill thought out. It was like they were developed without paying any attention to the way people were playing, unless someone actually believed people wanted more of ferrying goods from one station to another ad infinitum. There was an opportunity to breathe more life into the ED galaxy, and instead we got more types of commodity for "trading".

 

[Commander Pickle]

Ehhh, in a game where systems and concepts are complicated and learning curves are high, I don't mind have a clear numeric goal in terms of merits. What I can't stand is the imbalanced way they're awarded

 

[tomalus]

I quit powerplay because :

1. ATROCIOUS MERIT DECAY,it was bad when you needed 3666 per week to maintain rank 5, but with 5600 its ATROCIOUS.

2.Tedious repetitive delivery of power comodity from point A to point B even when fast tracking
3.Useless rank bonuses and modules for pledgers (ARISSA LAVIGNY DUVAL ONLY EXCEPTION)
4. Almost all non terrible bonuses are usable by everyone not just pledgers.

I manned up and accepted numbers 2,3 and 4 for weeks, but number 1 simply broke my nolifer back.

The devs and forum managers are discussing boring math,who cares about math,where is gameplay?

Forget this mess, put a quick band aid for your CC math on PP, and spend time to bring stuff like 1.3. brought
new ships, collector drones (mining boost),fuel tanks,improved bb missions ,tougher ai,docking computer improvements...

Powerplay derailed into grind without rewards. I can do everything faster better and more profitable without pledging except bounty hunting for ALD.

Remove power commodity cooldowns, reduce merit decay to minimum, remove wages if you must. I simply cant force myself to
play powerplay at currnet mechanics.