PLEASE MAKE POWERPLAY IN "OPEN ONLY"

[Rubbernuke]

Nope.

Powerplay failed because of bad design. There is an extremely limited number of activities, while the base games has a terrific mix. The rules of the game encourages 5th column play to disrupt a Power over the actual undermining mechanism. And said mechanism includes a "once then done" immunity to undermining via fortification, as opposed to a contest. The design has limited appeal in the first place, combines it with rules almost guaranteed to ensure stagnation, and tops it off with making it easy for hostile players to disrupt a Power from within.

Powerplay failed for these reasons (some you correctly identify):

Early period:

Merit decay
Low rewards
Obscure rules
Bugs
Unrewarding gameplay
Bugs
Missing features
(Some low level) 5C

Late period:

Endemic 5C
Bugs
Lack of development
Defence far too easy / Consolidation blunting attacks to uselessness leading to:
Static bubble

Modes plays into that simp,y because its far too easy to fortify in modes where NPC opposition is hardly there. With no resistance that flow is predictable and 100% guaranteed. Open is not going to completely stop fortification, but it will disrupt some of it, and its that disruption thats desirable as it introduces an unpredictable element into a static model.

Compared to that, the "impact" of modes is negligible. Let's do the math, shall we? I'm kind of curious to see how that might shake out.

The issue of having Open only is to really give a reason for Powerplay to still remain in the game.It offers something new, that if popular would draw more people into it. More population equals more interaction.

We have to make some assumptions, of course, because Frontier isn't providing any hard data on the subject:

1. The PowerPlayer base reflects the overall Elite Dangerous player base.
2. The overall player base reflects the Steam player base.
3. The Steam player base represents about a quarter of the overall player base, with an even distribution between non-Steam PC players, XBox, and PS4 players.

From Steamspy, the average and median player plays about five hours over a two week period. That seems really low to me, but who am I to argue with actual data? Also from Steamspy, the sum of peak players over the last week is 39,746. From SteamCharts, the sum of concurrent players per hour over the last 24 hours at the time of this writing is 83,651, and the relationship between that sum and peak players that day is 15.5:1. This brings the total number of "hours played" on Steam, over the last seven days, to 617,964. Divide this by 2.5, and you get 247,000 "players" on Steam. Let's round that up to 250,000 just to make the math easier in the future. Double that, and you get 500,000 "players" on the PC.

Time for another assumption: the PowerPlayer-base represents about 10% of the overall player base. This means that there are 50,000 "players" each week involved in PowerPlay. Of those, roughly 20% are involved with shift work, and thus face no effective opposition when they play. This brings the total "players" that can potentially be your opposition down to 40,000. According to Inara, there are 709 control systems. Divide the "players" equally between these systems, and you get 56 "players" per system. Spread out those "players" evenly throughout the week (2.5 hours in a 168 hour period), and you get an effective player density, at any time, of...

0.8 "players" per system per hour. And this for everything: fortification, undermining, preparation, and expansion. If time spent on these activities are roughly equal, which is one last assumption, that means that there are 0.2 "players" fortifying (aka hauling) and 0.2 "players" undermining (aka "opposition") a system within any particular hour.

But wait, I'm not finished!

That fortifier isn't spending most of their time in that particular system! A good Commander can "speed trade" a T9 from station to station in about four minutes, only one of which would be spent in Supercruise at their destination. Add in an average of four jumps there, and four jumps back, at 45 seconds each, and you get about ten minutes per trip, or six trips per hour, during which there's only six minutes where they could potentially share an instance with an underminer... if said underminer spends all their time hanging around in Supercruise waiting for the fortifier to arrive, instead of, you know, undermining the system.

You make assumptions based on pure maths which is fine to a point, however:

Under the new system of inbound fortifying someone can hang out in the capital and see ships pass in. Take an average powers amount of systems (say, 70) each has a demand to fortify to say, 5000 merits. Thats 350000 merits if that power and system is not UMed past 100%. Thats 466 ish (70 x 5000 / 750 or the largest cargo available) possible encounters in the capital as a start. If dumpy cargo vessels are too slow then that number goes up to 1500 or so with smaller, faster ships.

Now, if someone UMs that system past 100% you have to respond. That means someone has to fortify over and over and keep on fortifying and risking jumping in and out of a capital as someone attacks. Now, if this is happening attackers will know that defender is trying to keep solvent. Attackers can potentially keep fortification going indefinitely as long as they attack, forcing more and more players to swing the tide one way or the other.

Its the same for preparation wars. These can get to insane amounts with millions of merits- thats like 1340 trips that simply don't stop until you win or you run out of cash or time. You know exactly where your enemy will be. What if you could slow them down while your prep cargo ships (in the same system as well visiting the same stations) deliver to keep up? Do you see how objectives focus players and not space them apart?

What about expansions? These do not have a finite trigger to win either. Again you have ships coming in over and over fighting. Combat expansions have ships in melee, damaged ships leaving or dropping merits, haul expansions have haulers while others attack in the same system.

In reality Powers fight enemies, and not everyone at once, so distributing players evenly over the whole bubble is not representative. The new system focuses players into really three main areas: the capital, preparation systems and expansions. Powers also have teams and groups that do different things. Quite often they rotate or multitask.

In the end we simply don't know enough until its tried.

 

[Darkfyre99]

In the end we simply don't know enough until its tried.

On that, at least, we agree.

I'll give you a chance to respond to my ninja post before digging into yours.

 

[Rubbernuke]

I have to rush, mowing a lawn!

Here's the thing, though. What you said, that some powers play in Open, while others fort in Solo? This claim is made by every single Power I know about. Every single Power has some variation of: "Remember, honorable Imperials fly in Open. Only cowardly Federal scum fly in Solo." Granted, the Powers these days have shifted over to Discord, so I could be missing something, but I really doubt this attitude has changed any.

Only FD will truly ever know. However there have been some embarrassing slips where powers have suggested staying in solo when in public they say otherwise. If you check back in the Powerplay / gamestyles section you might find them. I'll have a look later.

So either PowerPlayers are less likely than the general player base, the majority of which plays in Open by a significant margin, or PowerPlayers are at least as likely to be flying in Open as the general player base, and the population you see in Open is as likely to be as good as it'll get. And if PowerPlay is truly more attractive to the PvP community than it is to the general player base, then you are expecting me to swallow the idea that PvPers, the group most likely to play in Open because its more fun that way, are all "hiding" in Solo because its more efficient that way, vs the idea that the overall PowerPlayer density is so low (see above), that unless an underminer spends all their time not undermining, it's pure blind luck that they'll encounter a fortifier.

Will that change if fortifying is changed inward, from control systems to the capital?

I explained this a bit in my last answer I posted.

Perhaps, but here's the paradox of PvP in Powerplay IMO: every ship attempting to blockade a capital system, is not undermining a control system. Every minute spent blockading is only worth a tenth of a fortifier's time, because the balance between fortification and undermining includes the fortifier's transit time as well. To achieve a rough parity with a player undermining a control system, a blockading player has to kill ten fortifiers, per minute, and they need to be successful every time. Each ship that slips the blockade effectively doubles the amount of effort required to undermine a system under Sandro's proposed changes.

In the end we don't know what effect it will have. It could be that forcing use of smaller ships that have less cargo makes fortifying slower while UM can catch up.

And ships will slip through. Because of how instancing works, roughly 20% of ships running the blockade will not have any effective opposition at all.

Some ships will get through due to networking, but each one still takes the chance that the next island instance they connect to will contain someone who wants to kill them. And we might even have an PP NPC doing its thing

The blockaders will have to guess, correctly, which port incoming fortifiers will be traveling to each time

Depending on the layout of the system. Some have long stretches, while others have several bases. Players might camp with LR lasers. Until you do it you don't know how it will shake out. Powers are very predictable in what they do. Plus, you might have people join who simply want to kill, which is great so you have effective opposition on tap.

to even have a hope of intercepting them before they can drop off their cargo, and most players won't make it easy for them by flying via the "Forum Recommended Technique" or AutoCruise. And while the blockaders are busy chasing one ship, others will slip through unopposed. And that assume that everyone plays fair, and doesn't use alt accounts as scouts and decoys.

It depends on the other side seeing if that method at that time is worth it. When it comes down to the wire with a huge co-ordinated strike even one ship can make a difference.

The other is that locally (i.e. non pledges) see a chance to disrupt a power they dislike and go all freedom fighter.

And all this assumes that traditional fortification will be much more effective than PowerPlay missions. If not, then we're right back to the player density problem.

When FD get back to us with them with more detail then we can think about them. Lets hope they do!

 

[Arry]

Thing is. I rather see a real Poll made by FRONTIER Not by some youtuber or a topic but a REAL POLL.

As someone said: "Send us all an email and let us have areal vote on the subject". Lets just hope that whatever side wins, gets clear majority, because if it is just a couple of percent either way, there will be a civil war.

That said: I truly believe that F.D. don't really want ot open this can of worms again. Plus: They have their plan for the game and we the players, don't really get to influence that plan; no matter how much we would like to.

 

[Arry]

So if I bought several copies of Elite I could skew the vote? If I won the lottery I could have Open Powerplay tomorrow

But the view on this forum and from Obsidian Ants forum in the same. I know you don't like it but you can see it for yourself.

Of course the other question is, how do you ask people? What would the question be since few people know or care about Powerplay in comparison to the games population. You would have people with genuine concerns mixed with slippery slopers who would vote the earth flat again against people who play the feature or those who are genuinely excited to have Powerplay change.

If they officially asked the question. (through emails, to accounts over a set age, is a possibility.) Then there should be two options, any more, as that would split the vote and affect the out come. Plus, there has to be a set majority, as I said above, a close vote, would be worse than no vote. Now if this means a number of votes, so be it.

As to those that have more than more than one 'active' game account, skewing the vote. I disagree. They play the accounts and have paid for them and so should have the right to vote, with those accounts. I did say, active accounts.

I have said before: F.D. kind of mucked this up from the beginning and personally I believe that taking it away from those that can play it today, is wrong.

There have however, been some very constructive ideas, put forward here, to try and meet somewhere in the middle. Yourself, being one of them.

 

[Arry]

Indeed.

But it could be a disaster for F.D. themselves.

 

[rootsrat]

[MOD HAT ON]

Please don't back-seat moderate and use the reporting system if you think a post is breaking forum rules.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Just discovered that you can +quote part of a post you select. Awesome

Only FD will truly ever know. However there have been some embarrassing slips where powers have suggested staying in solo when in public they say otherwise. If you check back in the Powerplay / gamestyles section you might find them. I'll have a look later.

I'll take your word for it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that was the case.

Powerplay failed for these reasons (some you correctly identify):

Early period:

Merit decay
Low rewards
Obscure rules
Bugs
Unrewarding gameplay
Bugs
Missing features
(Some low level) 5C

Late period:

Endemic 5C
Bugs
Lack of development
Defence far too easy / Consolidation blunting attacks to uselessness leading to:
Static bubble

I don't disagree with any of this, although some I consider rather inconsequential. When there's a massive hole ripped into your hull, the fact that the ice cube tray is empty isn't very important.

The issue of having Open only is to really give a reason for Powerplay to still remain in the game.It offers something new, that if popular would draw more people into it. More population equals more interaction.

Which is the crux of the debate. A change to an established feature that makes it less attractive won't draw in many more people, and will drive away those who are already playing. Gating Powerplay behind PvP is such a change, in my experience. There's a reason why developers of PvP/PvE hybrids do the opposite when trying to retain what's left of their playerbase.

Under the new system of inbound fortifying someone can hang out in the capital and see ships pass in. Take an average powers amount of systems (say, 70) each has a demand to fortify to say, 5000 merits. Thats 350000 merits if that power and system is not UMed past 100%. Thats 466 ish (70 x 5000 / 750 or the largest cargo available) possible encounters in the capital as a start. If dumpy cargo vessels are too slow then that number goes up to 1500 or so with smaller, faster ships.

While I agree that we'll see less unshielded Type-9s, I really don't see quite such a drastic increase. Using your numbers, I think the number of trips would be between 600-900, depending upon ship availability. And that, of course, assumes that the opposition would be successful enough at blockading that fortifiers actually feel the need to fly blockade runners. Given this game's networking architecture, I'm extremely skeptical that such a blockade can be done "economically," especially given how unsuccessful such an approach has been in other games I've played, that had a more traditional client/server architecture.

Now, if someone UMs that system past 100% you have to respond. That means someone has to fortify over and over and keep on fortifying and risking jumping in and out of a capital as someone attacks. Now, if this is happening attackers will know that defender is trying to keep solvent. Attackers can potentially keep fortification going indefinitely as long as they attack, forcing more and more players to swing the tide one way or the other.

But if all the underminers are busy trying to stop all the fortifiers, who, exactly, is doing the undermining?

 

[Rubbernuke]

You can prefix a lot of my answers with "you won't know until is tried"

Which is the crux of the debate. A change to an established feature that makes it less attractive won't draw in many more people, and will drive away those who are already playing. Gating Powerplay behind PvP is such a change, in my experience. There's a reason why developers of PvP/PvE hybrids do the opposite when trying to retain what's left of their playerbase.

The thing is we can't know for sure about how many players would come in or leave. You might find combat oriented Squadrons with unpledged coming in as mercs or pledging themselves because now they have a reason to.

While I agree that we'll see less unshielded Type-9s, I really don't see quite such a drastic increase. Using your numbers, I think the number of trips would be between 600-900, depending upon ship availability. And that, of course, assumes that the opposition would be successful enough at blockading that fortifiers actually feel the need to fly blockade runners. Given this game's networking architecture, I'm extremely skeptical that such a blockade can be done "economically," especially given how unsuccessful such an approach has been in other games I've played, that had a more traditional client/server architecture.

You'd have to ask the experts at how fast they can cripple a ship and destroy it- but an all frag Anaconda can shred cargo layout ships in seconds, while minelayer Cobras can strip a Cutters shields in a few hits. Just by that it means fortifiers might or will have to sacrifice internal slots away from cargo, slowing progress. There is a whole nasty toolkit of Grom bombs, phasing, ion disrupter, drag munitions etc. That does not even take into account PP / thruster sniping from conventional LR lasers.

In my small ship calculations I used a fully laden Clipper and used its speed for evasion, which would come at the expense of robustness with weapons like phasing. With an LR phase weapon you would have a very narrow window of escape from a high DPS ship.

In conclusion if you are interdicted by professionals you can expect a lot of trouble, which would require much more defensive outfitting sacrificing space.

But if all the underminers are busy trying to stop all the fortifiers, who, exactly, is doing the undermining?

How do you know extra people will try the 'new' Powerplay All those combat squadrons floating about its right up their street.

Its a tool to slow fortification directly, something extra to direct UM. Tactically it would be employed during a blanket UM where powers are forced into top to bottom fortifying, making the capital a potential killzone. As the cycle goes on you might see one or two systems being mega undermined, which would focus attackers into fewer and fewer systems (so then you have 2 or so UM sites which feed hunters in the capital picking off transports. In turn you would then have more defenders intercepting, and fortifiers leaving the stations.

 

[Myrm]

When there's a massive hole ripped into your hull, the fact that the ice cube tray is empty isn't very important.

Meh!! It doesn’t matter what happens to your ship, so long as you know where your towel is you’ll be fine.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

You can prefix a lot of my answers with "you won't know until is tried"

So, i see you posted in the "I Was Ganked By A Thargoid Cyclops And I Think I Have A Date."

I must say, I admire your willingness to try interspecies relationships

 

[EUS]

Just discovered that you can +quote part of a post you select. Awesome

Cool, it does work, nice!

 

[Bashy81]

So, i see you posted in the "I Was Ganked By A Thargoid Cyclops And I Think I Have A Date."

I must say, I admire your willingness to try interspecies relationships

He probably just nipped off to sneep a thargoid for a bit of light relief after this thread..

 

[Darkfyre99]

You can prefix a lot of my answers with "you won't know until is tried"



The thing is we can't know for sure about how many players would come in or leave. You might find combat oriented Squadrons with unpledged coming in as mercs or pledging themselves because now they have a reason to.



You'd have to ask the experts at how fast they can cripple a ship and destroy it- but an all frag Anaconda can shred cargo layout ships in seconds, while minelayer Cobras can strip a Cutters shields in a few hits. Just by that it means fortifiers might or will have to sacrifice internal slots away from cargo, slowing progress. There is a whole nasty toolkit of Grom bombs, phasing, ion disrupter, drag munitions etc. That does not even take into account PP / thruster sniping from conventional LR lasers.

In my small ship calculations I used a fully laden Clipper and used its speed for evasion, which would come at the expense of robustness with weapons like phasing. With an LR phase weapon you would have a very narrow window of escape from a high DPS ship.

In conclusion if you are interdicted by professionals you can expect a lot of trouble, which would require much more defensive outfitting sacrificing space.



How do you know extra people will try the 'new' Powerplay All those combat squadrons floating about its right up their street.

Its a tool to slow fortification directly, something extra to direct UM. Tactically it would be employed during a blanket UM where powers are forced into top to bottom fortifying, making the capital a potential killzone. As the cycle goes on you might see one or two systems being mega undermined, which would focus attackers into fewer and fewer systems (so then you have 2 or so UM sites which feed hunters in the capital picking off transports. In turn you would then have more defenders intercepting, and fortifiers leaving the stations.

I do have to admit that you paint quite the picture, and I can understand why you would be so passionate about it. Too bad it depends upon this game's networking architecture... and placing an existing feature behind a PvP gate, of course.

 

[WorldsGreatestForumDad]

Nope.

Powerplay failed because of bad design. There is an extremely limited number of activities, while the base games has a terrific mix. The rules of the game encourages 5th column play to disrupt a Power over the actual undermining mechanism. And said mechanism includes a "once then done" immunity to undermining via fortification, as opposed to a contest. The design has limited appeal in the first place, combines it with rules almost guaranteed to ensure stagnation, and tops it off with making it easy for hostile players to disrupt a Power from within.

Compared to that, the "impact" of modes is negligible. Let's do the math, shall we? I'm kind of curious to see how that might shake out.

We have to make some assumptions, of course, because Frontier isn't providing any hard data on the subject:

1. The PowerPlayer base reflects the overall Elite Dangerous player base.
2. The overall player base reflects the Steam player base.
3. The Steam player base represents about a quarter of the overall player base, with an even distribution between non-Steam PC players, XBox, and PS4 players.

From Steamspy, the average and median player plays about five hours over a two week period. That seems really low to me, but who am I to argue with actual data? Also from Steamspy, the sum of peak players over the last week is 39,746. From SteamCharts, the sum of concurrent players per hour over the last 24 hours at the time of this writing is 83,651, and the relationship between that sum and peak players that day is 15.5:1. This brings the total number of "hours played" on Steam, over the last seven days, to 617,964. Divide this by 2.5, and you get 247,000 "players" on Steam. Let's round that up to 250,000 just to make the math easier in the future. Double that, and you get 500,000 "players" on the PC.

Time for another assumption: the PowerPlayer-base represents about 10% of the overall player base. This means that there are 50,000 "players" each week involved in PowerPlay. Of those, roughly 20% are involved with shift work, and thus face no effective opposition when they play. This brings the total "players" that can potentially be your opposition down to 40,000. According to Inara, there are 709 control systems. Divide the "players" equally between these systems, and you get 56 "players" per system. Spread out those "players" evenly throughout the week (2.5 hours in a 168 hour period), and you get an effective player density, at any time, of...

0.8 "players" per system per hour. And this for everything: fortification, undermining, preparation, and expansion. If time spent on these activities are roughly equal, which is one last assumption, that means that there are 0.2 "players" fortifying (aka hauling) and 0.2 "players" undermining (aka "opposition") a system within any particular hour.

But wait, I'm not finished!

That fortifier isn't spending most of their time in that particular system! A good Commander can "speed trade" a T9 from station to station in about four minutes, only one of which would be spent in Supercruise at their destination. Add in an average of four jumps there, and four jumps back, at 45 seconds each, and you get about ten minutes per trip, or six trips per hour, during which there's only six minutes where they could potentially share an instance with an underminer... if said underminer spends all their time hanging around in Supercruise waiting for the fortifier to arrive, instead of, you know, undermining the system.

Talk about doing math in all the wrong places. HAHA good lord.

 

[Velixar]

I know someone pointed out Xbox can have multiple accounts. Thank you for the info. Maybe my son and my self don't have to share an account.

 

[Myrm]

Talk about doing math in all the wrong places. HAHA good lord.

There are also a lot of assumptions.

 

[Myrm]

KK, so this is my second Thursday since starting the PowerPlay thing. I got to Rating 3, which obviously means I had at least 750 merits, but because of the merits decay thing I immediately lost at least 240 merits in one foul swoop. I am now down to 509 merits. Wow, if PowerPlay is not vary popular among players I now see why. I understand some merit decay but why so high? As I understand it you lose 50% of the previous week’s earnings each week? On top of that it’s 50% of each of the previous weeks before that? It adds up to a lot of merit decay each week.

I can see that to get Prismatic shields it’s probably better to pledge, then do nothing in the way of earning merits for the first 3 weeks. Then in the fourth week go all out to earn 750 merits. Otherwise it’s just wasted effort to try to maintain 750 credits each week from week one. I think I’ll try that plan on my PS account, and keep this XB one going each week (target of 750 merits each week) for the 4 weeks and see which is the better method.

 

[WorldsGreatestForumDad]

KK, so this is my second Thursday since starting the PowerPlay thing. I got to Rating 3, which obviously means I had at least 750 merits, but because of the merits decay thing I immediately lost at least 240 merits in one foul swoop. I am now down to 509 merits. Wow, if PowerPlay is not vary popualr among players I now see why. I understand some merit decay but why so high? As I understand it you lose 50% of the previous week’s earnings each week? On top of that it’s 25% of the week before that? It adds up to a lot of merit decay each week.

I can see that to get Prismatic shields it’s probably better to pledge, then do nothing in the way of earning credits for the first 3 weeks. Then in the fourth week go all out to earn 750 merits. Otherwise it’s just wasted effort to try to maintain 750 credits each week from week one. I think I’ll try that plan on my PS account, and keep this XB one going each week (target of 750 merits each week) for the 4 weeks and see which is the better method.

They want you to stay active for the rewards.

But the way rewards were tiered. You got the special object first. Everyone just ended up module hopping instead of understanding what powerplay was supposed to be.
No one knows until they do something I supposed, hindsite is 2020 sort of thing.

But I hope we still have something like that. Staying active is not that hard, just the rewards were backwards in my opinion. Not restricted enough to keep people interested in their choice. Hope to see powerplay specific ships in the future. If I were doing it, those ships would be disposable. Maybe a preset ship, or you get to keep the modules but the ship explodes, you have to buy another one and put the modules back on it. Pretty good credit sink and gives a little oomph for staying with each power while they have something unique.

Problem was the real reward people wanted was up front. Besides that merry go round and no one to fight when it mattered. People just saw it as a grind. It could be pretty awesome though. Its not far off from being awesome.

I think thats what gets some of us vets the most.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

KK, so this is my second Thursday since starting the PowerPlay thing. I got to Rating 3, which obviously means I had at least 750 merits, but because of the merits decay thing I immediately lost at least 240 merits in one foul swoop. I am now down to 509 merits. Wow, if PowerPlay is not vary popular among players I now see why. I understand some merit decay but why so high? As I understand it you lose 50% of the previous week’s earnings each week? On top of that it’s 25% of the week before that? It adds up to a lot of merit decay each week.

I can see that to get Prismatic shields it’s probably better to pledge, then do nothing in the way of earning merits for the first 3 weeks. Then in the fourth week go all out to earn 750 merits. Otherwise it’s just wasted effort to try to maintain 750 credits each week from week one. I think I’ll try that plan on my PS account, and keep this XB one going each week (target of 750 merits each week) for the 4 weeks and see which is the better method.

Merit decay is a problem for some.

To my mind, instead of decay, there might be some option to trade merits for bonuses rather than getting the bonuses automatically and suffering the decay... although i can easily imagine that could lead to some exploits. I'm sure better minds than mine could think of something though.