Spoiler: if you keep repeating yourself that
- your idea is good
- mine is negative feedback
it's not gonna change the fact that your idea of elections instead of wars in tiny systems doesn't make sense. And about anarchy factions going war: well, it's usually how criminals take over by... well... taking over; and it's not gonna change the fact that I've been probably one of the few constructive users in here, you can check my posts if you like, did you know there's a whole section about proposing new stuff or game mechanics? Well, I do.
Again: the problem is not conflicts (when they are not bugged of course) or Expansions themselves. The problem is that with this new system we've gotmany problems that were pointed out during the beta period for example. Being a constructive guy, and wanting to show off a little bit and most importantly show you how things are done, I'll be more specific.
- If factions do not control anything they shouldn't go conflict
This is easy to understand: first of all a conflict is a state specifically designed to change the control of a single facility; second, with the new BGS influences are locked during a conflict (which is good), so if too many factions are locked in many different conflicts, the others will be relatively "frozen", especially in systems with an uneven number of factions, and right now influence is what makes factions expand.
- Expansions shouldn't be linked to a single system's influence
Expansions used to be locked by conflicts, or canceled too, right now they are basically unstoppable and most importantly they do not drain influence from the system they occur anymore. Solution? They should be linked to economy and security states (which are basically the happiness), if the faction is going well globally then an expansion will occur, this should stop factions with presence (but not control) in too many systems to have infinite expansions, occupying a place in all the systems around without reason.
- Balancement: no more transactional BGS and no more buff to the number of users involved
This is a little bit more complicated, I will bring as an example the Powerplay. In Powerplay a single CMDR has theoretically as much impact in fortifying and undermining as many other CMDRs doing the same. Example: if I do 10,000 merits and 10 other CMDRs do 1,000 merits each, our impact is the same, this does not happen in the BGS, because if I do 100 missions and 10 CMDRs do 10 missions each, their impact is much higher, same goes for any other activity related to BGS. In Powerplay you HAVE to cooperate with other CMDRs because to be really effective you MUST do many merits, so the solution I propose for BGS it to make every action less effective but make the actions themselves matter, not the number of CMDRs doing those. I would reduce of 1/10 the impact of players' actions over a system, you are alone and do a little? You basically have no effect, you have to do more, but at least you can play in a fair ground with all the people that own multiple accounts and play less.
- Make the control over facilities matter
I will be short about this: we've got a lot of new and cool installments, planetary stellements, ports etc, and we have sliders about economy and security, it would be awesome to have those sliders be different considering the facilities controled by a faction, basically it would be easier to stay in a good state if you control many stations, making the people of that faction happier and improving the chances to expand. Landable stations should give a small boost to economy, installments and planetary settlements should give a higher boost in security or economy depending on their cathegory (we've got comms or military installments, research installments, agriculture installments etc). This would make the very fact to risk your system to own as many facilities as possible a calculated risk because you seek an advantage.
- States should aim to neutrality, but very slow; positive actions to a faction affect negatively the others
Ok let's say that the current Security and Economy slider have 2000 points, where 0 is the neutral state, +1000 is the highest positive and -1000 the highest negative. Considering how the game is right now, the positive states are naturally driven towards positivity for every faction, because there's basically too few negative effects to counter-balance that and because CMDRs are, in the vast majority, inclined to do legal actions. So you will have just systems with factions in boom, investment, civil liberty etc. And this isn't right, especially to factions that have very low influence and support. So: let's say that I've got a system with 7 factions, and I do a economically positive action to any of them, let's say it's a +10 points for this faction, the other factions should suffer a small negative effect because of the competition, becuase that action "stole" a possible income to them, so it should be a -1 to the economy of every other faction. Notice: this should be a VERY SMALL negative effect.
But now you may be afraid that doing so all the factions would be stuck in negative effects right? Well I think that every daily tick any faction should slowly go towards neutrality: +/- 1 , because Investment/Boom should end at some point, same goes for Civil Liberty and negative effects too; of course if players keep doing things it's gonna be them to determine the destiniy of the factions of that system. This would create a much more dynamic system economically speaking.
As you can see I've got A LOT of ideas, and most of them I already proposed in the right sections of the forums. You know what the problem is? The problem is that in the last two years the dev team simply didn't show publicly any kind of interest about this kind of game mechanics AND the community behind these mechanics, we who organised communities, people doing actual stuff, trying to figure out what was wrong in what we were doing, trying to find workarounds when the game was behaving erratically, and then pointing out what was wrong in many and many bug reports and proposing solutions always in the forums, again and again and again.
Everthing for what? To make me tell that I do NEGATIVE feedback? Dude you are not even giving feedback, you just came out with a very strange idea out of the blue thinking that you found the Holy Grail to fix this mess.
Well, you did not, Percival, you're simply showing up how little you know the game mechanics you're trying to talk about and you're accusing people to be mean because they make you notice that you are simply wrong.
Fact is: we had to wait TWO MONTHS to have a feedback from the devs that they aknowledged the problem. TWO. MONTHS.
Fact is: right now the whole system how people contribute in both BGS and Powerplay are wrong BY DESIGN, because the developers keep ignoring that
- a great and disturbing part of their community abuse of bots
- a great and disturbing part of their community abuse of pvt/solo to HIDE those bots
- a great and disturbing part of their community KNOWS that to have more accounts is the best way to maximise their impact on the BGS and they abuse of that
THAT is a great problem. I've got nothing wrong with people that do not want to play open, but it's a fact that many groups abuse of that to win dirty. So what are we talking about? Bugs? Bad design choices? I can undesrtand bugs. I can understand mistakes. But this is something different: this is a precise choice to not take action against abusers and exploiters against the honest dumbasses that keep sticking with this game.
FDev must chose now what part of the Community they want to keep: the one with 4-5 instances opened at the same time letting the bots do all the tedious work, or the ones actively seeking for interaction between CMDRs, actively creating gameplay?
This whole thing must be thinked over, from scratch, we want a fair game, where the best, smartest or most numerous PEOPLE (not accounts: PEOPLE) shall prevail, that's the nature of a fair game, fair rules. We should just ask for THAT.
And you still think this is negative feedback. Yeah, right. I ask to make this game fair. More than that, I even propose how to do that.
I'm so negative.