With the recent increase in merits from combat, it's more easily achievable too. The initial grind to 10,000 is, well, a bit grindy.. but after the first week, less so
Im with Aisling, is combat recommended. If so do NPC's count?
Power Play Rank 5 Is it worth it?
- Thread starter cwstad
- Start date
Im with Aisling, is combat recommended. If so do NPC's count?
You can't argue with Math. Anyone who got Rank 5 merits in three days spent 80-100 million credits to do so. The math doesn't work otherwise. Once you are rank 5, you need 5k merits a week to maintain rank 5. Which is either a 50 million credit cost or having 50 hours of availability to get your free 100 merits an hour. I was rank 5 for 5 weeks, so I'm speaking from a position of experience. Not guessing or theory crafting.
Agreed and and to that point I'm speaking as a trader. I make 5-6 million an hour trading so that's about 10 hours for 50 million. Same amount of time played in power play gets me only 1000 merits for free. Which is short of the 5500ish a week you need to keep rank 5. The trade bonuses don't make up for the difference.
I recently started re-participating in PP.
The grinding is not that problematic for me. I am mostly active in combat zones, and combat is great fun.
The merit decay mechanic is really brutal though.
It is so depressing to me to put all that effort and time in and then see my merits get annihilated like it means nothing.
I got back from zero to rank 4 in relatively short time, and this time I really want to get to rank 5, but I can already feel the demotivating merit decay erode my resolve.
There is no real difficulty in getting to rank 5, the way the system is set up is just so eroding and negative that it wants to eat up all your time and it leaves you feeling empty.
I am speaking for myself of course, but it is difficult to imagine that players really enjoy the way it works now.
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I'm still surprised it goes so far as to halve your merits. Taking a quarter/third for the first week and then maybe half for the second would be a small tweak that would make a hell of a lot of difference to player motivation in PP.
I think it would be fair if merit decay only started when you did not earn a reasonable amount of merits at all in a week.
That would feel reasonable, logical and fair.
The current system though feels like you are getting punished for your effort.
Also they should at least double the number of ranks.
People like climbing ranks and with more ranks they could close the enormous gap between rank 4 and 5 too.
That is really necessary, because the abyss between 4 and 5 is absurd in my view.
If FD created more steps with a more gradual but interesting rise in salary then climbing the ranks would become much more natural and fun, instead of leaving you with a bad taste in your mouth after half your merits have evaporated for inexplicable reasons.
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I'd be content if superfluous merits (i.e. the balance over and above the rank threshold reached that week) could be banked instead of immediately decaying. That way, people could sneak up on rank 5 gradually, by banking a few merits every week.
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I agree. The risk of losing all the merits you're carrying on death is enough, removing them on cycle reset is a bit much.
I'm sure more people would actually do PP related things if this was the case, as many people like to flick from one thing to another and not be completely devoted to one aspect of the game.
That said, it should be very difficult to reach Rank 5; you are reaching the highest position one can hold within a power.
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But not by playing 2 hours a day I bet.
No, It took around 5hrs each night. It wasn't an easy task by any measure. 2hrs a day you could still easily do it in a week. I can make 1000 merits an hour undermining.
Hrmm, I don't think the decay is too bad now that merits are easier to obtain. If you want to effectively undermine a system the merits are going to build up quite quickly. After the first two weeks, you'll be able to spend say 2hrs a week to maintain the ranking if that's all you want to participate in PP for.
Frankly, if all you're doing is grinding merits for the rank then you're totally missing the point of powerplay.
I spent maybe 500k on re-arming while undermining in the space of 10hrs. I could do the same thing spread over a week rather than two days and it'd cost me just the same and I would get to the same point.
Also to maintain rank 5, takes substantially less effort than it does to achieve it initially.
Last week I made 10,000 merits. This will I will have to make 5000 merits, next week 2500 merits and so on. I will make more than that though, because I have set objectives to complete during the cycle, merits are just a bonus.
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By my extremely scientific* calculation the average combat player should be able to keep rank 5 with about 5 hours of semi-casual grind per week.
*guesstimate
Kinda starts depending on how fast you can kill the enemy. My Python kills Haulers before my FSD even cools down most of the time.
That isn't how it works. This week you will have 5000 merits from last week and will indeed need to make 5000 merits more. Next week however you will only have a 2500 merit contribution from the previous week and a 2500 merit contribution from the week before that - so you will need to make 5000 merits again.
I completely agree with that view.
I do not mind needing time to reach a certain rank.
But the mere fact that my earned merits are destroyed so quickly makes the whole process a far too negative experience.
I feel pressured to devote all my time to powerplay to keep up with the punishing and demotivating decay instead of being able to play Elite in a more relaxed and dynamic manner.
It also causes me to completely disregard what the Power needs. I only do what earns me the most merits in the shortest period of time...
And I am not the only one. That much is obvious when I look at the statistics.
I wonder what the thinking is behind this design. Don't they want pp to be attractive over a longer period of time?
FD's current approach might work better if they introduced a much larger variety of merit earning tasks.
For example if I could earn merits by doing bounty hunting missions in a certain control or expansion system, or if I could haul cargo (like battle weapons, personal weapons, medicine) to certain systems.
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If it took you 5hrs to reach 750 merits, not need to re-evaluate your methods. That's 45mins work.
Ah yeah, I know that. I expressed my thoughts in a really weird way. I was trying to express the way the decay worked rather than what I needed to contribute. But I got mixed up halfway and blurted rubbish. It is still a long term game, I will put in another 5000 merits this week and maintain my rank, lose 5000 at the end of the week and regain them.
As I said before, 5000 merits is not exactly difficult with the new merit allocation scheme. 1000 merits in an hour or two is not difficult with the right load out.
It depends on what you're doing. In certain power activities, you can earn 10 merits per kill in an area of infinitely respawning baddies. I've averaged 1,000/hour like this.
I agree. I do believe that the merit decay needs to change.
I would also like to see more ranks, so that it takes more time to get to the highest rank, even though the merits don't evaporate as fast anymore.