The absolute best way of stopping people like you destroying the influence of a controlling faction is to make any and all BGS-altering gameplay restricted to open only. And stop all the instancing/blocking nonsense.
Then those who control that faction can stop you fairly. OR NOT, then you deserve to destroy them and your victory is well earned.
Having OP to the point of being grossly unfair NPCs to do the job of player groups is not right.
Players need to defend their faction, and they need to be able to do so on a fair basis. Not by cutters running goods or PP commodities in solo. Fair, open-only play.
Can imagine that all the amazing, organic play that will occur if there can be REAL, MEANINGFUL player control/ownership of factions and open-only BGS manipulation: alliances between groups, planned expansion, control of system security, building new facilities, real meaningful wars/elections/so on; so many amazing things. And difficult to balance. Which is why Colonia is such a great choice to experiment with things like that. We can do that without seriously mucking up the game while its balanced/made right.
One big hurdle to open-only BGS/real factions is lack of cross-platform play, soon to be a problem in that past(I hope) now that the last hurdles of Sony standing in the way are gone.
So I do understand where you are coming from, but think players need to defend their factions, not ATR. Much needs to change.
Gavin786
Eh, I wouldn't go that far - if nothing else, people would be able to take advantage of it in private/solo by being all "woohoo, I can run missions for all the
other factions in the systems my pet faction controls without worrying about messing up their influence!" and going crazy running the entire mission board in private to build mats/rep, then switch to open when they want to run BGS. Likewise, if a bunch of players want to put down sticks in a system and build up their PMF in some quiet little galactic suburb where virtually nobody else visits then all power to 'em, let 'em be. In a couple of systems I've been poking into lately, some days there's been literally nothing on the traffic report other than myself, whichever mode I'd done it in would be irrelevant as far as BGS goes.
The only time it ever comes up as an issue is when you get
serious amounts of grinding going on between one or more
opposed groups. I guess I'd be okay with applying some sort of weighting to BGS buckets in the event that a system has opposing actions carried out in open vs PG/solo, but I wouldn't like to be the one to come up with the algorithm to calculate it 'cause
oh boy would that be a tricky piece of maths. Not so much for resolving "positive and negative actions applied to the same faction" 'cause that'd just be a case of pairing off positive and negative PG/Solo transactions against each other where they cancel each other out, then apply a scaling factor to the remainder before dumping them in the appropriate bucket for the open transactions, but the most common situation is where there are competing transactions in the same direction for different factions and now you need to figure out how to weight
that.
If that was done, the open-versus-PG/Solo thing would be effecively moot and players in PG/Solo would still be able to affect the BGS and have their faction expand and so on and so forth, but the big bugbear of "that one guy in solo is killing authority ships" would end up scaled down to irrelevance
provided the system was being defended in open (and if it's not being defended, or you're defending it from your
own PG, then you've got no room to complain, have you?)
Personally I'd be in favour of ditching the ability of cmdrs to directly affect influence entirely, and derive daily influence swings from their sec/economy/happiness bars, along with more missions that do negative things to other factions within the same system as the mission-giver (seriously chief, you'll give me missions to flood some random neighbouring system with contraband and tank their security status, while doing nothing whatsoever to ask me to get the cops off your back in
your system, what gives?) which would make the thing I said above a lot easier to apply.
