Power Play - "Fast Tracking" price ridiculously high, other rants.

[Torrix]

Devs:

Whether or not I'm alone in this, I don't know. But I doubt it. The cost of expediting i.e. "Fast Tracking" the wait time to get supplies to help our own faction with fortifying and what not, is ludicrous.

First, our faction should be shoe-horning supplies into our holds as fast as they can and paying US for how long their union guys are taking to do the loading.
Second, unless a player is already rich, this is guaranteeing that players who are NOT rich, like me, are not going to want to pay to fast track anything, and therefore are not going to want to even f'ing participate in Power Play.
Third, seriously, do any of you even play your own game? How much time do you actually think it takes to gain 10,000 merits in a week? To get there, we have to quit our jobs/go on vacation/not be involved with our families/do nothing but Power Play to get merits - to reach this ridiculous number of merits. Yeah, that 50m credits is a great carrot, but the amount of time it would take to get there is an even bigger stick. I don't like the stick approach.

Yes, I'm pretty new to Elite Dangerous, I have less than two months in. I don't have multiple ships (I have 2) and none of them are the high-end ships, I don't know a secret handshake type trade route that will make me a fortune (tried the rares thing, cool for a short time but not workable in the long run), so I've admittedly still got a long way to go.

Power Play is supposed to engage us and make us want to play more, but from all that I've heard the Power Play reward weapons/equipment sucks, and we have to bust our butts AND spend our money in order to go nowhere fast in Power Play unless we give up the rest of our lives to do it? Really?

With the absolute stupid costs for the better ships and the fact that there are exactly 3 of them (I don't count a purely trade ship) you'd think you'd be thinking of ways to make Power Play fun and not another hideous grindfest/money sink, making us more ships to fly, and coming up with at least a way to move around our own ships and the space stations. Instead, you're making paint jobs for ships that we can't even see the outside of. Great use of resources there guys.

Finally, despite all I just ranted about, I love this game the way an abused wife loves her wife-beater abusive husband. I can't help myself, I have such high hopes for this game because it's core is great. However, this post says I want to see some very big improvements if I'm going to stay and pay anymore real money for anything, let alone keep pouring time into a game that is hell bent on breaking me down.

 

[Cmdr Eran Mintor]

No. It takes a lot of effort to undermine/oppose expansions and control systems already. You don't need to make it even easier for the offense to take and hold systems. Right now it takes me hours to get the same amount of merits undermining/opposing compared to what would take someone less than half an hour of time but a considerable amount of Cr to do. If you want to spend your Cr to gain victory that's fine; it's a tradeoff for my time.

 

[Torrix]

No. It takes a lot of effort to undermine/oppose expansions and control systems already. You don't need to make it even easier for the offense to take and hold systems. Right now it takes me hours to get the same amount of merits undermining/opposing compared to what would take someone less than half an hour of time but a considerable amount of Cr to do. If you want to spend your Cr to gain victory that's fine; it's a tradeoff for my time.

Yep, it's a tradeoff for your time, and you must not place a very high value on your time if you can wait 3 hours to fill up your hold with supplies to fortify a system for just ONE run, and with that amount of time, you get what, a maximum of 2 runs in a night if you actually have a job and a very patient spouse? Guess what, those two runs won't get you even in the ballpark to get anywhere near 10,000 merits in a week.

I'm saying that the difficulty in reaching a meaningful "merit rank" with a faction is ridiculously difficult to do, with the lower rank rewards being nearly worthless. Anything less than Rank 4 *is* worthless considering that the Rank 3 Four Week weapon/equipment rewards having the reputation of universally sucking and being overpriced (don't know, haven't gotten that far yet) and the bonus pay for a week is only worthwhile at Rank 4 or 5.

Power Play should truly reward the player for participating, not add another way to grind hopelessly for minimal reward/gain.

 

[Cmdr Eran Mintor]

If you're grinding for merits and you don't have a lot of money I suggest undermining. If you're grinding for merits and you don't have a lot of time, then you need money. If you have neither, don't grind for merits; do something else.

I don't think you understood my previous post. I'm saying it takes me a lot of time to undermine-much more time than it takes someone to expand or prepare a system for the same value; I'm not delivering anything for prep/expansions, I am killing NPC's for my merits (15 per kill in supercruise).

Reaching rank 4 is actually quite easy to obtain if you do a little bit a day. If you want top rank then expect to spend a lot of time or money to do so (you will actually make back all the money you spent and then some if you reach rank 5). Don't expect to be handed Rank 5 for spending little time or money, it's meant to be there for those who contribute a lot, not those who spend half an hour a week delivering free merits to a system 30ly away. It sounds to me like you just want free money for little effort.

As for the weapons sucking, yes a lot of them do. If you're in it for the rewards, join a power with a decent weapon, there are a few.

P.S. I do value my time which is why I strongly dislike PP. It is a grindfest. Did someone tell you otherwise?

 

[Torrix]

I do undermine, it's almost all I do now for the exact reason of no way in heck I'm spending 250,000 cr to speed up being able to get 25 more tons of supplies. Rank 4 is easy *if* you have a good amount of time during a week to do it, but if you have anything resembling a life, it's very difficult. Rank 5? Phhht, I don't even know how to calculate the time that would take 15 merits per kill considering that sometimes you're waiting 5 minutes for ONE ship to spawn that'll even give merits. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm not saying I'm some sort of Top Gun pilot, etc. And no, I don't want free money for little effort. I'm no libtard democrat

What I want is something more compelling than this horrid grind. I want to have a reason to log in to the game and be excited about it, not dread it as if it's another form of work to slog through. I want a character that can walk around and walk right up to an NPC and get a mission to save a world or help conquer it. Right now, since the new-ness of the game has worn completely off, the only thing of interest is to sit and try to do the math and calculate how long it will take me to earn enough merits to earn enough money to get into a Python or Fer de Lance. I'd rather be thinking of how to fight the war, raid a space station or a planet, take over a system without it resorting to 'counting merits', etc. As my signature says, I want to get into a knife fight in a strip joint on a backwater platform with some drunk npc, and somehow THAT gets me a quest to smuggle something somewhere for a ton of credits. Yeah, seems like that isn't likely to happen before my grandson has his own grandson.

EDIT: While I don't say anyone should like one space game over another because we definitely don't have enough good ones, my guess is Frontier has until exactly the release date of Star Citizen to make this game more than the overall grind that it is.