I'd have to put the close defeat down to some sort of opposition then.
How did the last tick go, did it go as expected or did the same happen?
Word on the street is that winning CZs gives more reward than otger actions such as handing in the bonds from that CZ, although I've not done controlled tests on it myself.
Also I know you don't think it's useful, but the BGS discord does have some good information from tests people are running etc
Worked out exactly as you'd expect... CZs and bonds represented as normal, and that's slotted in the last piece of the puzzle.
Day 1: I never had 100% confidence here... said that in the OP, just all indicators suggested an issue. Reason this day was always in doubt was that it crossed the update, and potentially multiple ticks. I did fail some missions before the update, and there are indicators of activity for the opposition for that day (+econ/+sec) as mentioned in the OP.
On the surface, this seems reasonable as it looks like there was economic and security support for the other faction
The only viable traffic was a T6... the other two were both large ships in an outpost-only system. The possibility being that they did some combat in the Annie, then went, grabbed a T6, handed in the bonds and did some missions. Considering I know the volume of missions I did was high (which'll be apparent after this), I was surprised that such a low volume of casual traffic could've resulted in a loss that day, though it is possible.
Day 2: Have worked out the problem here and why there was zero activity.
These posts. Two reliable BGS vets saying the tick is at 1200UTC seemed fair. Thing is, it's not, and day 3 and 4 have verified this for me that the tick is still at the usual time (sometime while I'm asleep between 1500 and 2200 UTC). This made me attribute that activity to the wrong day (being Day 3), which got concealed by the mission-only activity that day. That's why there was zero reported activity.
Day 3&4: Worked out as expected.
Now, I want to bury the hatchet when head isn't full of pus and medical steroids like it was over the weekend.
I did try to call myself out over it, but that didn't seem to work... and I just had a short-wick for all the
suck-eggs points you were trying to call me out on.
I won't learn anything from BGS discord not because I think I'm some BGS-god... I just don't play by the same rules, and you might pick that up from the thing I've not given at all through this, that you've asked for repeatedly: Numbers. Numbers numbers numbers.
I'm reminded of when I came to the forums way back when proclaiming the UA's emitted morse. Every sound engineer and his dog was quick to shoot it down because "They'd put it through morse audio decoders with no success".. "Morse has been ruled out" and blah blah blah. But I was right, and I was right because I know morse... it was like asking a chinese native speaker when presented chinese text, to prove it's chinese, but reading the chinese for some reason "wasn't proof". Alternately, people do addition on a day to day basis... but I doubt most people would be able to prove that
addition is commutative. That doesn't mean they're wrong to use commutativity though.
I play to my strengths, and "crunching numbers" isn't my strength. Probability mechanics and behavioural pattern analysis is, as well as having a strong long-term memory. You definitely won't be getting my resume to back that claim. I used to dump numbers... but now we're as large as we are, and the change in BGS mechanics, it's ineffective and of little for us given our size to do this, other than telling us what we already know.
So instead, I deal in patterns of behaviour and probabilities, analysing the trends in activity in systems of interest, rather than the raw figures. This means I'll never have "proof", and there's always a small chance I could be wrong. But the tradeoff is I get to the probable conclusion quicker, in a way I won't be able to prove. That gives our small group much more expedience. Eventually, the number-crunchers catch up and verify those theories much more effectively than I could, or seek validation of their crunching, to which I'm always ready to weigh in with what I know, given a bound of guarantee.
The whole point of this thread was a significant confluence of events suggesting a reasonable probability that there was an issue with the BGS. Rather than nut it out over the next 4-5 days, which is now done, I just tried to short-circuit the logic by asking for anyone else in a conflict to verify if they'd had issues or not. Someone reporting no issue would've:
- validated that something went wrong on day 1, like I suspected in the OP, and
- caused me to second-guess the results of day 2 sooner.
Nothing like that came up, but instead we just got hooked on whether I actually knew what I was talking about. Again, I did suspect Day 1 was flawed, but there was only a low chance of that... and in that case I was happy to "use addition", but not willing to "prove it's commutativity" to go back to that analogy, thus my
out-of-line post because I just CBF'ed that day. Instead, we just got hooked on that, and here we are.
So, no, I don't think I won't learn anything from the BGS because I think I'm some BGS-god, but because the methodologies I use are entirely different for the most part, particularly around proof, and that's a double-edged sword I take. This means I disagree with some sentiments out there
despite the numbers being presented.... aka I'm convinced the UA emits morse, despite morse-detection tools saying it doesn't[1].
A missing piece of the puzzle is probably why the current faction is so high... that's because I put them there myself... see my response to Phisto below.
So, yeah, there's how I play the BGS out in the open, warts and all. If that's not good enough,
shrug. Can it make me come across as arrogant and condescending too? Maybe, but that doesn't worry me... I tend not to play games to make friends.
I don't suppose we could get the name of the system and faction, could we? It would be interesting to see if anyone would have a reason to oppose you once the war started.
Nope
Reason being, not that I use it for this, but it's an undiscovered rank-farmer's paradise due to yet-another-bgs-outlier condition, meaning despite a host of available systems for missions to target, Assassination, Illegal Black Box Salvage and Massacre missions all target the same system, which is why it's been such an easy flip. It used to be a neighbouring system sending it's missions here, but a patch seemed to change that, and almost "flip" the relationship. Months ago, my efforts to conquer that neighbour pushed the current controlling faction to where it is now... now I'm able to flip it to my faction to make the target and source mutually beneficial. You can see that result in this other system graph, which I haven't run a single mission out of:
I know the main players in the area, three or four powers poke it, but we've all got a mutual understanding... they know what's mine to take, and what's theirs, and they know it's a losing battle if they poke my faction's things, and we back each other in that sense.
But revealing the location would potentially trash that system. It's not some edge-world system.
[1] coincidentally, I'm totally tone-deaf to the octal emitted by probes and links. Coz I never learned to communicate in octal