Yes thank you, I've been playing Powerplay since it launched. Do you understand what the purpose of the Fortify mechanic is? If you successfully fortify a system, you don't pay upkeep in the following cycle. For a large power such as Hudson this is CRITICAL to be able to maintain growth. Costs have to be cut.
Players can undermine fortification attempts by reaching a trigger. Whatever the activity is, whether it's intercepting cargo or destroying ships, if they meet the trigger then the fortification attempt is cancelled.
Therefore a power can be slowly strangled by preventing its systems from being fortified. And what is the power's response to such a scenario? You would expect that they can band together and clear out or destroy ships that are trying to undermine their fortification attempts. But they can't do so if the undermining players are in Solo or Private.
Looking at it from the other side, if you Undermine a system, reach the trigger and the system owner doesn't reach the Fortify trigger to cancel both, that should throw the system into Turmoil. But how can that ever happen when all the owning Power has to do is play in solo/private and fortify the system, with NO RISK whatsoever that enemy CMDRs will try to interrupt them?
I'm not speculating that playing in private modes to avoid pvp interdictions *may* happen, we see it broadcasted all over this forum and others that it does indeed happen and there are some rather large player groups playing this way on purpose.
Are you following now?
Powerplay is built on flawed game systems, including but not limited to p2p.
Ask yourself this - why oh why is there not even a basic, power-specific chat that all pledges can use? I can think of a few reasons without much effort - let's see, 1. there's apparently no global chat server, so any kind of broadcast chat is only ever going to be limited to those in your instance; 2. Even if there was a power level chat, the likelihood that anyone responding to a call to arms would meet up in the same instance is probably less than 50/50; 3. What would be the purpose of using chat to coordinate the activities when a huge part of the playerbase isn't even in Open play? In other words, why use chat to coordinate activity in a system ("hey, let's patrol X system and prevent Duval from preparing it!") when it's just as likely that the enemies will be in solo/private?
The answer is, there's no power-chat because there's no reliable way to coordinate players, and that's largely because of the p2p game design.
If you look at my post history you will see some criticism but also very supportive commentary on this game, but these kind of issues have been foreseen. It's frustrating that something with so much potential is only going to be a shell of what it could have been, but now the game is out and core mechanics are established and it's unlikely to change. I would be thrilled if I was wrong about that but I've seen no signs that I might be.
PS Blockades have been part of this game from the beginning - just look at post from player groups that were blockading systems like Lave - if you're talking about blockading as an actual thing imposed by the game itself, by an NPC faction for example, then yes I agree that there are no such things as blockades. But I'm talking about blockades as a player response to powerplay activities because in a couple of scenarios it appears to be the only recourse for a Power, but is impossible to execute due to game design.
