Powerplay 2 balance: murder rewards far too low (committing crimes task)

Tifu

Tifu
Zalia said:
783k for max rank.

It's absolutely unbalanced. You can get 8k merits for a full Cutter of agronomic treatments, but for 8k I would need hours of bounty hunting.
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FD is following the PP1 pattern of spending credits to deliver PP goods to earn merits. I used to deliver propaganda material for Aisling but only the first few tons were free. You had to spend credits to deliver more.

The higher you rank up, the greater the weekly allowance but it was never enough to avoid spending your own credits to rank up faster. Consequently, you spent your PP downtime doing non-PP stuff to keep ahead.

In many ways, the PP 2.0 system is better but they do have to rebalance the rewards from the looks of it .
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
Nowski said:
Well previously here:


And I tend to agree, especially high value or newsworthy NPCs - can you slaughter wedding parties btw? - but against that there's an IRL designation for such activity and I wouldn't blame FDEV for not wanting explicit player RP as .. that. Maybe I'm too cognizant of earlier moral panics over gaming, but still..
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You can blow up anything. And in a game where prisoners are branded and turned into marked slaves, starve entire planets or worse, its small fry. And in any case, its just numbers and effort in game- you have powers that expect trouble and the locals who don't.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
Rebel Yell said:
That's all super crap matey... murders no more.
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Its a bit crap, and has been going on for a long time in the BGS in a similar way.

And testing some more in game it is the case that regular security will attack if power ships were the victims. I'm not against this, as it a) adds more to the NPC difficulty wrinkles and b) they can be targets too but if you want criminality you are going to have to reward it properly.
 

Ceres_O7

Ceres_O7
Do we have data on the merit values for activities in different states and with/without the preferred activity bonus?

Because "Power Kills" or "Commit Crimes" is only a preferred activity for certain powers, and only in certain system states/goals

For example, undermining ANY Archon Delaine system will have power kills and commit crimes as "local activities" and so should have a merit bonus.

Is there any existing spreadsheet floating around with some of the science on merit values? I'm working on a reference for all of the preferred activity lists at the moment, so I'm wondering if anybody else has done something similar
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
Ceres_O7 said:
Do we have data on the merit values for activities in different states and with/without the preferred activity bonus?

Because "Power Kills" or "Commit Crimes" is only a preferred activity for certain powers, and only in certain system states/goals

For example, undermining ANY Archon Delaine system will have power kills and commit crimes as "local activities" and so should have a merit bonus.

Is there any existing spreadsheet floating around with some of the science on merit values? I'm working on a reference for all of the preferred activity lists at the moment, so I'm wondering if anybody else has done something similar
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We don't, but from the scant info we do have from comparing Kaine to Delaine its not much (7 v 11 merits).
 

CMDR Astraea Astralis

CMDR Astraea Astralis
This week, one of my missions are "Commit crimes to gain bounties in Alpha Centauri" and aside from being hell of a system to get missions in, yeah, a 446 376 bounty seems a bit hard to attain with how little credits you actually get in bounties, even if you have a whole week to do it.
Or is this a skill issue? Look, I'm not the best criminal in the galaxy, I pledged to Felicia Winters for crying out loud.

Either way, add the low merits payout to these actions, and it's just not an appealing task. 240 merits for completing the task.. "but at what cost".

Now for the credits at least, I do understand the team maybe wants to at least slightly dissuade commanders from farming bounties by having two accounts, get big bounties on one, collect the bounty on another, or doing this with a friend.

(Also unrelated, why does Felicia Winters want me to do this?! Then also at the same time rescue escape pods in that same system? I want to talk to HR.)
 
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Mecrutio

Mecrutio
As far as a spreadsheet goes, no. But I will mirror what the OP stated. I had a weekly assignment to "commit crimes". Had to do it on opposing powers. Only 2 crimes gain merits, murder and scanning a stronghold carriers cargo bay. (30cr for the scan) So murder it was. In ship to ship murder, PP ship murder merits is based on their skill. (master, dangerous, elite and so on) The highest I got was 128 merits. Of course a bounty went with that and bounties cap out on PP ships at 7500cr. Civilian murder was the same merit scale vs. skill but the bounties caped out at 7.3mil credits each. To top all that, the score recorded to end the task was a made up number not referenced by merits or bounties gained. 5400 points was the best being counted against 432,000 points to end the task. I averaged it out to about 80 kills and 7hrs game time to complete. (I was rank 8 at the time.) On foot kills was worse. 1 merit per kill working up to 23 if that kill was within 4 seconds of the last. Unknown amount of points counting to the task as I quickly learned this was going to take forever.
 

Mrc_NorthEast

Mrc_NorthEast
Just for comparison one ton of most rares is from 35-55 merits, one ton. Just for buying and hauling it from pt a to pt b. So yeah murders and power play pledged npc kills merits need to be buffed unless pp2.0 should be compared to bingo or shuffleboard vs one criminal cartel competing another vying for dominance in a galaxy that will kill your for station loitering after a few minutes. No need to tone down rares, buff any power play kills or power play pledged kills roughly up to the same level per hour.
 
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