Player Agency & Wasted time at the Interstellar initiative

[Stealthie]

OP → manipulates the BGS →harmless PVEr
FDev → wasted his time and effort → griefer

And people mocked at the face of the former. Lmfao. Quit double standard, people.

Personally, I'm just mocking somebody who apparently doesn't see the irony of whining about somebody else (FDev) screwing up his intentions in exactly the same way he was trying to screw up other people's intentions.

 

[whothe]

Interesting point of view.

Perhaps next time, Frontier should not reveal the entire storyline on this forum. Otherwise, if details are revealed, then these types of actions should be expected and accounted for (some legitimate in-game means to counter them put in place).

Sure, but if they're not going to announce things they will need to do a better job of it.

After what 2 months? of cancelling all CG's and hyping up the Initiative as this new great thing, people expect SOMETHING, they drop 2 more weeks of no content but a forum vote on us.
Looks like they released the timeline as an attempt to put out that forum fire.
Had they not released it though, people wouldn't have known about or been able to bring up the issues that the CG involving combat will have before the time it goes live. Has that even been acknolwedged or addressed yet?

Their entire premise around the Initiative was that players would be involved, and influence the direction of the narrative through their own actions. Where was the player oppostion? Not there clearly. I mean is anyone really surprised that someone tried to assert influence for the Imperial faction ahead of the CG?

All that shows me is that they either are not thinking through the scenarios they are putting forward very well, or they are just being insincere about player influence on the new initiative ( the illusion of? ). Or both.

 

[babelfisch]

Everyone participating in this CG will have wasted their time, not just because because it's a relog-fest, but because the tier requirements are copy-pasted from your average Trade CG, despite the method of gathering Guardian cargo being much, much slower than a commodity market. Tier 1 won't be reached unless Frontier do some more godmodding.

Only people who play video games without having fun are wasting their time.

 

[Captain Willard]

Only people who play video games without having fun are wasting their time.

LOL The only reason to play games is to waste or pass the time.
And so sorry rain, I don't relog. I enjoy the sentinel combat and collecting mats.
Am looking forward to the initiative.
Still LOL at the who tried to cause a lock down in another thread.
Such crying because they didn't get their way, and all the lame page length excuses.

 

[Ouberos]

Morning!

Seems an interesting mix of opinions have been posted. On one hand I am pleased that the majority seem to recognise that we were just playing the game ( Would like to point out I wasn't alone. ) and were playing within the rules.
Understandably not everyone will agree with our motives (Mine are that I'm a closet Imperial and I don't agree with meddling with long dead alien races. Nothing good will come of it. Also despair at FD's handling of the II & "plot" in general) but I appreciate that most people here have the sense to realise that what happened is generally considered bad for gameplay.

And on the other hand we have a couple of posters who seem quite disparaging about the whole thing because it served us right.

I don't understand that position. If this is the pattern of future events I would think that eventually you will discover your own efforts have been wasted.

 

[Viajero]

Amongst other things I like playing the BGS. Its a complicated beast and you can never make one move without stepping on someones toes. Somedays you are the good guy and some days you are the bad guy.

This week I have mostly been the bad guy. Ive killed a lot of Zende partnership NPC ships. Traders, Sys Auth, Elite Private Couriers (Literally broke my heart to sink those ones and not steal from them)

Im Notoriety 10, hostile to the Zende guys and Ive been dodging ATR and their magic lazors since Tuesday. Had to haul out and repair once when they nuked my shield gen, all the way out to an asteroid base in the Pencil Sector. Killing those faceless proc gen NPC was a grind, got to admit but I stuck at it because I was achieving the goal I set out to do. Security level was dropping like a rock and the day the Interstelllar Initiative went live Lockdown should have been pending.

This pleased me because I have a bit of an issue with the whole Alien / Human tech thing. Also lets face it, I was creating more gameplay than FD had last week. There would have been bounty hunting to do and Pirates to fend off. Services would have closed down just as thousands of players undocked from the Zende bus. Things were about to get interesting. There was a game to be played!

Only it turns out there is no such thing as Player Agency in a universe where players decide the direction of the story. Influences and security levels have been god modded and messed around with. My work is undone. My week wasted. See it turns out Im just one of those proc gen NPC too, and you know what?

This week, so are you.

Enjoy not taking the Initiative Cmdrs.

Im off to raise a ticket and get my bounty scrubbed. Might ask for some credits in compensation too.

07

Well done, and yes, if true I agree it is a shame.

 

[Viajero]

The main problem I see with "player agency" against CGs is, that there is simply no functioning gameplay loops to allow this in a way that is not extremely one sided.
The way lockdown and CGs work is simply not compatible. Without "god modding" the CGs would simply not work, allowing very few players to dictate the gameplay for a lot of players.

One option would be to always implement two opposing CGs or to increase the CG if a lockdown happens or any other method that allows the opposing players to have a somewhat balanced way to achieve their goals.

As is it is now, allowing lockdowns to happen at CG systems is simply a broken gameplay mechanic that should be fixed in someway - until then, god modding is the only way for FDev to deal with that.

Well, with this level of God mode intervention it should have been realtively straight forward to also have FDEV conceive at least a minimum viable scenario decision tree, based on binary actions (success/failure) at every step. And then simply follow it based on the outcome at every step as per player agency. Sadly it does not seem to have been the case here.

Something similar (or even more refined) to what happened during the old Wars for Lugh, probably one of the most successful CG based events ever in the history of Elite (with all its faults).

Pretty sure many members of the community well versed in BGS would even volunteer to help FDEV to set it up.

 

[babelfisch]

LOL The only reason to play games is to waste or pass the time.

I get your point but wasting or passing time are terms that don't exist in my approach to life. It would be just another way of saying that I want to die sooner.
I could sit on a bench for hours and watch the birds and trees. If I see that as wasting time it's failing to live, but if I enjoy it or use the time for self reflection it's a win. For me the same philosophy applies to games.

 

[Ouberos]

Well, with this level of God mode intervention it should have been realtively straight forward to also have FDEV conceive at least a minimum viable scenario development tree, based on binary actions (success/failure) at every step. And then simply follow it based on the outcome at every step as per player agency. Sadly it does not seem to have been the case here.

Something similar (or even more refined) to what happen during the old Wars for Lugh, probably one of the most successful CG based events ever in the history of Elite (with all its faults).

Pretty sure many members of the community well versed in BGS would even volunteer to help FDEV to set it up.

I've brought up the War for Lugh on several Discords prior to this event and expressed hope that the Interstellar (lose the) initiative would be based along similar lines. I was even more encouraged that there was going to be a piracy element and that it was likely there would be hidden triggers and who knew what consequences of player action.

Sadly it seems that if players deliver a result other than what is plotted then there will be a "correction"

Ergo, don't even bother playing.

 

[Viajero]

I've brought up the War for Lugh on several Discords prior to this event and expressed hope that the Interstellar (lose the) initiative would be based along similar lines. I was even more encouraged that there was going to be a piracy element and that it was likely there would be hidden triggers and who knew what consequences of player action.

Sadly it seems that if players deliver a result other than what is plotted then there will be a "correction"

Ergo, don't even bother playing.

Indeed. The War for Lugh was far from being free from issues, it was early days in the life of CG and all, but nevertheless it managed to capture the attention of a significant part of the community and content creators at the time. Player agency, while not perfect, was quite tactil and close to the gameplay.

 

[Northpin]

I don't have the full grasp over BGS, but was it really here a case of god-modding against a potential lockdown or was it to counter the bugs that apparently came with the Zende ferries (sudden drops of inf that culminated with 0% influence for Zende)? Genuine question here.

Also, as i said, i was handing out a lot of bounties for Zende - not as a BGS manipulation, but simply because in Convoy USS with threat higher than zero there were wanted pirates (up to 2 anacondas and a python) that were dropping nice materials. And most certainly i wasn't the only one handing out bounties to Zende.
Wouldn't these actions be a counter to Ouberos actions?

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

This pleased me because I have a bit of an issue with the whole Alien / Human tech thing. Also lets face it, I was creating more gameplay than FD had last week. There would have been bounty hunting to do and Pirates to fend off. Services would have closed down just as thousands of players undocked from the Zende bus. Things were about to get interesting. There was a game to be played!

Preemptively developing bits of the game that result from a story they want to tell is a necessity. That means that yes, unfortunately, there are only a few viable outcomes they are prepared to deliver on.

I understand both points of view. The outcome here is that the BGS is useless. If it is godmodded to tell a story than it should simply be removed from the game at all because it may interfere with any higher plot and any player effort would be completely wasted for a "higher good".

BGS on the paper was a good idea. It turned out to be a complex monster and it's slowing down the game development (too much time spent to improve it or fix it, they could've done something more interesting like more SRV gameplay or atmospheric landing or legs....).

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I remember when me and a few other people UA-bombed Jacques. You know what FD did?
They didn't god-hand what was going on. They leaned into it.

Yes. Going back a bit further, they did clear a Lockdown on a CG station way back - I can't remember exactly when, one of the early CGs out in the Pleiades perhaps? - in response to major complaints on the forums that it shouldn't be possible to lock down a CG and the faction running it should "do something". The backlash to them doing so outweighed the complaints they'd been getting about it being possible in the first place, and they admitted that they'd called it wrong.

I very much doubt they've changed their mind on that decision - especially since the "Be aware that faction-state changes and other disruptive events can negatively impact markets and station services, and could prevent the initiative from running smoothly." disclaimer (written as a response to that original event) is still stuck to the bottom of the CG text.

A later interesting thing to see will be what happens with the likely conflict as CG activity pushes Zende through an intersection with Segnen, probably on today's tick.

Because of the way the BGS works, a single system cannot have just one faction in it, otherwise they will enter a state of permanent expansion. That's just a hard limit of the BGS.

It's not strictly forbidden, though. There are potential (tricky) ways that players could create one in certain parts of the galaxy, and Frontier have deliberately created one on rare occasions where permanent expansion was the desired outcome.

Always worth a try, though. AEDC spent two and a half years expanding a faction across 70 light years to have a crack at putting an Alliance faction into Sol.
We got an expansion that should have gone in, but Frontier god-modded it out.

That's an explanation of events which implies a different order of how they happened - Frontier had set the Sol, Achenar, Alioth and Shinrarta systems to be locked against BGS activity long before you got close to Sol. If it had been possible to expand to Sol, nearer factions would have filled it up to 7 long before you got close. I'm not quite sure how you managed to aim for the system for 2.5 years - an incredibly impressive journey showing great BGS skill - and not notice at any point during that time there was something odd about it.

Sticking the difficulty increase on expansion to permit systems in I'm certainly willing to accept was a direct result of you taking Ross 128 - but they waited until after you'd done it to make that change.

The bounty hunting CG would have to start before the other CG. Making it a two week CG for a one week trade CG or FDev would have to stop using the "galaxy Thursday".
And then players would complain about railroading the CGs and giving CGs a fixed result

Not in the post-3.3 BGS - the security slider is now dynamic enough that a simultaneous bounty CG should be sufficient to either clear a Lockdown before it starts or at least limit the duration to 1 day.

CGs aren't tied to the server reset - they've introduced mid-cycle ones on occasion - and there weren't significant complaints about the existence of BH CGs before. So they could bring in the BH CG a day earlier - though in the normal case where the CG location isn't known weeks in advance, there's probably no benefit to doing so.

 

[Moriarte]

I understand both points of view. The outcome here is that the BGS is useless. If it is godmodded to tell a story than it should simply be removed from the game at all because it may interfere with any higher plot and any player effort would be completely wasted for a "higher good".

BGS on the paper was a good idea. It turned out to be a complex monster and it's slowing down the game development (too much time spent to improve it or fix it, they could've done something more interesting like more SRV gameplay or atmospheric landing or legs....).

BGS is an attempt to create a mixture of curated and free-for-all environments. Imagine the magnitude of crysis to be if a small army of 5th grade Napoleons set off to break something irreversibly and on a large scale.. At least FD’s dictatorial stance sometimes enables them to contain cryses before they erupt, so they don’t have to take their precious heads and hands away from further development for Too long to deal with the next Ouroboris.

Now that I’ve seen, over the years, what “amazing” content cam be created by alternatively gifted individuals, pretty sure the game would be lying on the floor, broken in pieces, for weeks, if some people had their maximalist way of absolute freedom. Nothing would make them happier too, watching the world burn and devs delaying the new content update.

 

[Konan]

That's not fair.... The only reason for CGs is so I have lots people gathered in one place to shoot at, LOL. CGs should be Open-only! There is no "solo" in "community", after all

There is no solo in community.....best quote ive read in a long time.

 

[Northpin]

oh, but there is.
don't tell me you live in a neighborhood where everyone is doing their private business in open be it sleeping, showering and the rest of activities that should not be mentioned here

 

[Tobias Saffron]

When the Fuel Rat Mischief almost lost Wollheim Vision in Fuelum, all the BGS experts said that it would be impossible to swing the war in the 2 days remaining. Did fdev also get involved here with a favoured player group?

 

[Rainbro]

When the Fuel Rat Mischief almost lost Wollheim Vision in Fuelum, all the BGS experts said that it would be impossible to swing the war in the 2 days remaining. Did fdev also get involved here with a favoured player group?

Unlike here, there's no evidence that the Fuelum conflict had any Frontier intervention. The community managed an extraordinary feat in winning that war, given that they only had two ticks to do it. But that is an entirely different situation to this.

 

[DNA-Decay]

That's an explanation of events which implies a different order of how they happened - Frontier had set the Sol, Achenar, Alioth and Shinrarta systems to be locked against BGS activity long before you got close to Sol. If it had been possible to expand to Sol, nearer factions would have filled it up to 7 long before you got close. I'm not quite sure how you managed to aim for the system for 2.5 years - an incredibly impressive journey showing great BGS skill - and not notice at any point during that time there was something odd about it.

Firstly Re: locking capitols. Alioth yes, but Gateway is the home system of a PMF.

Secondly Re:Sol
It started out as a joke - "Let's get an Alliance faction into Sol" and stayed that way for a long time, but there was a constant push south.
When it became viable we did a push through four or five expansion including the Ross 128 liberation that ultimately became as close as we could get.

We didn't have our eyes closed about the PowerPlay capitol systems being locked out of inbound PMF expansion.
Hutton Truckers and EDF and uh - one other had expansions that should have gone in long before we got there. We knew.

But the caveat was that the faction we were pushing was not officially acknowledged as a PMF. We had asked - but Frontier said "Only one official in-game faction per group". So we were effectively pushing an NPC faction.

And there HAD been one NPC faction expansion into Sol.

That was back in the days of that mechanic that they modified into "invasion". If your expansion would go into a full system and the lowest faction was below 2.5% then you would go in, but that <2.5% faction would get sucked out into the system from whence the invasion happened. One of the early Sol expansions triggered that mechanic and an external faction was sucked in. I believe it got kicked out by the retreat mechanism eventually.

It was a weird mechanic, but we used it a bunch of times.


Anyways it was worth a shot. And we did get to kick in the doors of that awful Fed Prison System Ross 128!
But even there Frontier would not let player agency "force" them to make meaningful lore change.
The questions I ask in this video are relevant to this debate now.

Which is:
Should Frontier allow real Player Agency?
Should change wrought on the BGS be able to affect lore?
Should we be able to take the game in fresh directions without Frontier spoon feeding us?

 

[Marra Morgan]

Amongst other things I like playing the BGS. Its a complicated beast and you can never make one move without stepping on someones toes. Somedays you are the good guy and some days you are the bad guy.

This week I have mostly been the bad guy. Ive killed a lot of Zende partnership NPC ships. Traders, Sys Auth, Elite Private Couriers (Literally broke my heart to sink those ones and not steal from them)

Im Notoriety 10, hostile to the Zende guys and Ive been dodging ATR and their magic lazors since Tuesday. Had to haul out and repair once when they nuked my shield gen, all the way out to an asteroid base in the Pencil Sector. Killing those faceless proc gen NPC was a grind, got to admit but I stuck at it because I was achieving the goal I set out to do. Security level was dropping like a rock and the day the Interstelllar Initiative went live Lockdown should have been pending.

This pleased me because I have a bit of an issue with the whole Alien / Human tech thing. Also lets face it, I was creating more gameplay than FD had last week. There would have been bounty hunting to do and Pirates to fend off. Services would have closed down just as thousands of players undocked from the Zende bus. Things were about to get interesting. There was a game to be played!

Only it turns out there is no such thing as Player Agency in a universe where players decide the direction of the story. Influences and security levels have been god modded and messed around with. My work is undone. My week wasted. See it turns out Im just one of those proc gen NPC too, and you know what?

This week, so are you.

Enjoy not taking the Initiative Cmdrs.

Im off to raise a ticket and get my bounty scrubbed. Might ask for some credits in compensation too.

07

Unlucky Oub
This is indeed very disappointing, along with some other things that I'll make a separate thread about.