Powerplay Oh no, its another "this is whats wrong with PP" posts

[fergal]

As the title alludes to, I loath these sort of posts, but Rubbernuke has a post here where he stated:

I would disagree with that statement, as on paper you could turmoil anyone, but without the backing of a larger power or alliance its impossible if your power is small.

Where he is saying smaller powers can't turmoil other powers (even the other smaller ones) which had me thinking on whats wrong with PP currently.

Stale Mechanics aside, the problem is easy to see on this chart, the orange line is currently below the blue line:

Above is a chart of the total fortification and undermining merits, from weeks 6-55, week 75 (I just grabbed one in the middle of the data I didn't have) and weeks 97-102.

Undermining is currently less than fortification, and has been since the week 52 "issues"

Fortification levels were around 2 million per week early in PP, then went up to 3 million, and are now back around the 2 million level. A drop of 1/3 from its peak isn't good news but it shows the more fortification orientated PP player is still playing.
Undermining levels hit over 7 million per week, but are now down to the 1 million mark.

The players who undermined have left PP, now the galaxy is full, and there are not enough players left to free up new space to fight over.

The same chart is below, with weeks 9, 19, 34 and 52 pointed at, 4 important weeks for undermining amount changes.

In week 9 the number of merits per ship kill for undermining was increased to 30 (I believe it was 15, but it might have been 10)
This doubling of undermining merits took a few weeks to catch on, but undermining went from around 1.5 million to 7 million.

In week 19 there was a change to the AI and undermining became more difficult, and numbers plummeted back down to under 4 million.
This recovered on its own, without any more changes to the merits earnt per kill, as players got used to the AI changes.

Undermining had its next peak in week 34, but began its slide down, as more and more players who undermine left PP.

And week 52, the engineers release week, which put the nail in the coffin for the remaining underminers, with the additional improvements to the AI, and the new, very fast police response.

Week 75 included a new 11th power, and numbers went up a bit from week 52, and week 97 continued this slightly upward trend, but its still far short of week 51 levels, and undermining amounts are still under fortification amounts.

Why do undermining amounts have to be above fortification amounts?
Right now, the average fortification trigger is 5351 merits, and the average undermining trigger is 18443 merits.

It takes nearly 3.5 times the number of merits to undermine than it does to fortify.

How fast can you earn merits fortifying?

Now most PP fortifiers have an Imperial Cutter that can haul 700 cargo, and the 2.3 patch just made a massive improvement to system loading times, so moving around the galaxy is much quicker.
10 mins is probably enough time to deliver a Cutter load, but lets say 15 mins.
Thats 700 merits every 15 mins, or 2800 merits per hour.
Less for a further away system.

So to compete with that an underminer would need 3.5 times this amount, which is close to 10000 merits per hour.

Maybe it takes 30 mins to deliver a fortification load and return back, thats still 5000 merits per hour the underminer needs to stay competitive.

The solution to this problem doesn't require any difficult coding changes, just some tweeking to one or more of the PP calculations.

Either:
1) Increase fortification triggers,
2) Decrease number of merits per fortification ton from 1 to a fraction of 1,
3) Decrease undermining triggers,
4) Increase merits earnt per undermining ship kill

I don't know why this still hasn't been addressed since the events of week 52 (a year ago now) but all it would take is a hot fix to update one of the formulas.

 

[Misaniovent]

The consolidation defense bonus needs to be adjusted, if not completely removed. That's the core problem. Not only has it made undermining triggers far higher than fortification triggers, it heavily incentivizes fortification of as many systems as possible so that powers can reach 500 CC and its 50% defense bonus. Powers running large deficits have to fortify so many systems in order to reach that goal that they are regularly covering almost every profitable control system they hold, counter-intuitively making them even harder to attack than powers running surpluses.

Even without the defense bonus, consolidation would still promote this, as the ability to halt expansion removes the need to carefully balance CC budgets weekly — there is no penalty for over-fortification. I do not believe that consolidation should be removed, however. I would like to see the defense bonus altered first, with a revisit a few cycles down the line.

The secondary problem is that undermining remains a bit unbalanced. I would like to see variable merit rewards based on ship type, with 30 merits standing as the baseline. I would also like to see undermining merits shared in multicrew. I anticipated that multicrew would be great for powerplay, but there's zero tie-in at all.

 

[Rubbernuke]

+1 virtual rep fergal!

The other option is that the inhabited bubble expands slowly each year, so powers have more space to spend CC on, become bigger and thus more vulnerable.

I think consolidation goes the wrong way- maybe it should carry a minor penalty because without collapse being present it has no downsides. It should be a risk either way- expand and fail / get bigger or consolidate /stall and hope no-one gets you.

 

[fergal]

I agree with both of you that consolidation is part of the problem, making it reduce the undermining triggers instead of increase them would be good, but it would also promote expansions in the middle of no where that powers don't want, just to avoid a negative adjustment to their triggers.

But as shown in the graph, the problem started after week 34, 52 causes a major crash, but the orange line was already getting close to going under the blue.

The decrease in undermining has been offset with sniping being the rule not the exception, which I think is a problem in itself.

In the earlier days of PP, before everyone had an anaconda/cutter, and bags of Cr, you would see undermining pop up, then had to try to counter it with fortifications.

This made the map useful, "oh that system has the red crosshair on it, lets fortify it" is something the average player could do.
You could see the fortification and undermining tick up on the Control tab for each system in the PP view.

Now there is just a mysterious result after cycle tick, "oh looks like we got sniped last week"

The best part of all of Delaines expansions is the hour before cycle tick, when everyone from both sides starts dumping their merits in, and you get to see the bars go up, but they are delayed so you don't really know who wins until later.
Seeing the competing results is interesting, but with sniping you don't get this all week.

And obviously sniping (holding your merits all week until the very end, for anyone new and fumbling in the PP subforum) is even more difficult than normal undermining.

You have to be confident you wont die (and lose all the merits) which is fine in most circumstances, but it makes PvP much riskier, and you really can't go to Community Goals (and forget all the suicide winder Cr money exploits).
And you also need to be able to log in before cycle tick.

If you can't stay alive all week, and log in at the end, you can't undermine to help your power in the current meta.

You can still earn merits for yourself, but there will be no result.

Even worse, you could partially undermine a system which the merits are already done for in a snipe. This isn't just a waste of resources, it can make the power getting sniped fortify that system, thus negating the attack.

Put all this together with the better AI and quicker police response, its just too hard for the average player, whos not coordinating on one of the discords

I find it ironic that fortification, which most players didn't used to do, because its boring and costs Cr, is more popular than undermining, which costs 0 Cr and involves blowing up ships.

Above is the same chart again, I've highlighted the levels of fortification and undermining that made FDev buff undermining in week 9, and the current levels now, which you can clearly see are worse than when they were last buffed.

 

[Arkadi]

I am not sure if the sniping is really the problem. I think it would suffice if defending was made a bit harder or offensive a bit easyer.

At the moment powerplay favours defense a lot:

1) consoldidation defensive bonus
2) most powers can and have reduced theire fortification triggers by playing the powerplay BGS (installing favorable goverments)
3) Fortification is super easy once on rank 5 and fasttracking or with macro-(ab)use

If Frontier would decide to reduce defensivness by changing on of those parameters I think powerplay would become more dynamic again becouse offensive moves could matter again. Since expanding is not an option for most powers, powerplay dynamic depends on infightin more now then in the early times.

I think sniping adds a tactic to powerplay and taking it away would not make the game any better. More, it would just take away another option in the struggle.

The more otpions and viable tactics there are in powerplay the better. I'd like to have a way to decrease undermining triggers of hostile powerply systems by BGS too. This would give another layer of BGS integration for powerplay. It would make sense that generating civil-unrest in a system also would lower undermining triggers. That would make perfect sense - or any similar mechanic that would help offensive moves would be good. If Frontier would finally think about adding powerplay-missions this would be great way to balance offense and defense by generating missions of the according type, so more of the not organized (and maybe also unpledged) player-base would get involved, once critical fortification or undermining triggers are reached.

 

[withnail]

I agree Fergus. Just looking at it on a merits/hour basis, undermining is much less efficient then fortification.

They should really be on par.

 

[Rubbernuke]

I think the answer is to add all these suggestions- BGS to lower defences, alter PP NPC merits, expand the bubble for more space, add turmoil, remove consolidation bonus (or reduce it). They would make the game far deeper and strategic.

 

[fergal]

I filled in some more of the "blanks"

The trend of undermining being under fortification levels is still clear to see after cycle 52. There was one large spike up in undermining in cycle 90 where Winters was hit with over 1 million merits, which pushed up the undermining from around 1 million to over 2 million for that week, but it still didn't go above the fortification amounts.

Most of the spikes up are when a power is in turmoil. This certainly looks to motivate more undermining, when there could actually be a result from all the effort. Most of the spikes of increased undermining also have a spike up for fortification as the power in turmoil tries to fortify out of it.

 

[d8veh]

I think you need to look at the bigger picture too. Before week 50, a lot of players used powerplay to get bonuses for rapid progression. Those casual players just wanted a quick and safe way to get enough merits to get those bonuses, so they used fortification. After week 50, most of the normal money-making processes were completely nerfed, which made the bonuses useless, so people left PP and made their money running lucrative missions. That left behind the more serious PP players, who understand the different ways to make merits and are more likely to wing-up and go undermining. After 2.3 most of those lucrative missions were nerfed, so some players are looking again at using PP to boost their eanings rate, though new ways of getting high earnings from missions are still being discovered. I'd love to know what proportion of players has visted Quince during the last month.

Basically, players don't do PP to role-play, they do it for the rewards. They'll use the most efficient method to get those rewards.

Also, a lot of players are looking at the weapon rewards now to get a competitive edge in PvP and to survive better in PvE, which might account for the recent increase. They weren't necessary before week 50. Since then there's been a gradual realisation of their importance.

 

[Quantrix]

Put all this together with the better AI and quicker police response, its just too hard for the average player, whos not coordinating on one of the discords

As a Solo player without access to engineers, I confirm that.

 

[Rubbernuke]

As a Solo player without access to engineers, I confirm that.

Not to go off topic, but if you pick your targets correctly you will never get caught by the pigs unless you go for high sec or use a weak ship that is not built for rapid killing.

Anarchy = no response (in most cases)

Low sec = sec response 5 minutes (approx)

Medium sec = sec response 2 minutes (approx)

High sec = sec response 30 seconds (approx)

High sec + lockdown = sec response < 10 seconds (approx)

Lockdowns tend to make security spawn more fun things like Corvettes too.

More often than not you will have to sit and wait to get a security response.

This assumes you smack a civilian ship. If you target security directly response is faster once the interdicted party has been nullified.

 

[fergal]

ALD gets a security bonus so I think all or nearly all of her systems are high security, Hudson also gets a security bonus for his Federal Control systems, and most of them are High security. I''m not sure about the Antal bonus, I think it just doubles or quadruples the bounties, but doesn't actually change the security levels, so the increased security response was a massive buff to ALD and Hudson, and also for any power with High Security systems, which are normally in high population systems, so Mahon and Winters also probably have many of them.

Archon Delaine also has the "bonus" of halving his security, so there are no high security systems in his space, so hes much easier to undermine than any other power.

According to EDDB:

 

[Rubbernuke]

From that perspective it is a great advantage. Its especially telling on your graph that Antal and Archon live in the armpit of the galaxy going by system quality.

 

[fergal]

From that perspective it is a great advantage. Its especially telling on your graph that Antal and Archon live in the armpit of the galaxy going by system quality.

Some light reading, and excellent analysis here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteWinte..._play_population_cc_and_spatial_distribution/

 

[Rubbernuke]

Wow, an excellent link to an excellent analysis!

 

[Misaniovent]

increased security response was a massive buff to ALD and Hudson

This was very significant after 2.1 dropped, less so in 2.2.0.3. I wouldn't say it's a significant consideration anymore.

 

[SHEPR0N]

This was very significant after 2.1 dropped, less so in 2.2.0.3. I wouldn't say it's a significant consideration anymore.

Imo right now there is really not much difference in undermining low and medium sec systems instead of anarchies (except the bounties you rack up I guess, could be some casuel players try to avoid those). In high sec systems one can still get cop interference, especially for people that are not peak efficient. I wouldn't be crushed if cops stayed out of PP alltogether though, well or at least when it comes to PP PVE crimes.