Powerplay PowerPlay and a basic example of how it's broken

[aspiringexpatriate]

Martin, this mind numbing manual breakdown of numbers was somewhat interesting, because I wound up having to pulp my memory of ALD's expansion history to figure out where shared income goes to which control system. (Usually, the earliest control system receives the income from overlap. Or in that sense, retains the income when a new control system overlaps.)

My calculations only showed ALD missing 296cc, but there was one system where I couldn't make the shared income overlap make sense. So it's possible that's where I'm missing 12cc. but now I've found the missing 12cc where I wasn't looking for it, thanks to the linked bug post from the issue tracker below.

I won't get into specifics, because every time ALD posts a specific bug that we've uncovered in a public forum, like with Arkhanist's post Miso and edvordo dug up, our Powerplay operations became significantly more difficult. I'm sure you'll remember the week everyone decided to 'protest FDev's bad PowerPlay code' by prepping Bragur, which should not have been available to prep. That Bragur bug cost us two weeks worth of effort, because when FDev decided to fix the bug... they didn't remove it from the Expansion list. Which meant we had to scrap all our [other] expansions that cycle to ensure we lost Bragur.

 

[aspiringexpatriate]

Going by the numbers, it looks like ALD never got back Command Capital back from when Hudson lost LPM 229, so the current expansion in LPM 229 shouldn't do anything but be frustrating. My fear is that should it be successful, whatever last minute manual forced calculation FDev runs will wind up taking more CC away from Vodyanes than exists in Vodyanes, and won't that be fun?

 

[Martin Schou]

Populations can also be changed as a result of a community goal reward or any other reason for Frontier to add or update assets in a system, and that may be enough to entirely change the economy of the system. In the Sothis case, I could find a mention of three stations being added in 3304 (4 years ago), which explains the jump from 100k to 420k. Then the Odyssey assets bumped it to it's current 440244. Population changes like this, I don't know why, can be seen as "noise" in the EDDB change history even months/years later.

If a system changes its population, it should be permanent and across all platforms, be it vanilla, Horizons or Odyssey, and across any and all clients that view them.

I don't even know how to dream up a scenario where you can have this level of inconsistency over this long a period. And it's not even limited to a single system.

 

[Oraki]

I was checking the issue tracker today and found someone else already having compiled the information for all powers regarding the Grom turmoil. This does not cover Odyssey adjustments or other missing CC bugs... but it is a start I guess.

Here is the issue report: https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/47330

I think they hit the nail on its head:

But when flawless gameplay again generates no reward, it generates disappointment. Unfortunately when requests to fix the 2020 instance of this bug were ignored it reinforced an impression the game was no longer supported, possessed credibility or integrity as the founding rules had broken, outcomes akin to roulette, deemed too unimportant to fix. It led to top players leaving the game, who'd played ED religiously since its 2014 release and 2015 PowerPlay inception.

That's it, isn't? It is really up to FDev to decide whether to continue to (not) support this element of their game or publicly announce that this game mode (PP) is no longer maintainable due to various reasons (other projects/games, odyssey, etc.). Half-, temporary fixes like done with the inflation bug time and time again won't fix this, because if those fixes are not deployed ASAP after occurring, those bugs and the following exploits because of them can temporarily give groups options that they shouldn't have at their disposal. If a CM, such as @sallymorganmoore reads this, please pass this on to the team behind E. There is also no shame in admitting defeat, admitting that they are unable to address the various issues and will discontinue parts of the game. Of course, obviously most of us want to see PP thrive but after literally years without much from FDev, many have lost hope. Honesty is important in this relationship between the players and the developers, at least be real with everyone playing this game.

Mind you, this isn't about new or revised aspects for PP, but merely fixing the bare necessities, the foundations this game mode is built on.

 

[aspiringexpatriate]

I don't know about you guys, but it looks like we got a fix to the existing bug.

We did not fix the missing income from Odyssey, but we finally got the fix that FDev said they applied in a previous patch's notes. It gained ALD 136cc from formerly contested systems that now have their total uncontested Base Income count.

Again, these are the in game Base Income numbers, which are still different than the in Odyssey Radius Income numbers.

As for how a game would have different numbers across different games? Well, Martin, I think we all know why, don't we? Population of the systems is for some reason only based upon the population of those assets in system which are procedurally generated for the game. So Horizons will have different numbers to Odyssey. And should we ever get Earthlike planets? Sweet lord some of these populations are going to absolutely explode.

Also, one thing I've wondered is how traveling megaships affect population. Judging by the rest of what we see, my guess is it would change the population of systems often.

 

[Darth Ender]

I don't know about you guys, but it looks like we got a fix to the existing bug.

We did not fix the missing income from Odyssey, but we finally got the fix that FDev said they applied in a previous patch's notes. It gained ALD 136cc from formerly contested systems that now have their total uncontested Base Income count.

Again, these are the in game Base Income numbers, which are still different than the in Odyssey Radius Income numbers.

As for how a game would have different numbers across different games? Well, Martin, I think we all know why, don't we? Population of the systems is for some reason only based upon the population of those assets in system which are procedurally generated for the game. So Horizons will have different numbers to Odyssey. And should we ever get Earthlike planets? Sweet lord some of these populations are going to absolutely explode.

Also, one thing I've wondered is how traveling megaships affect population. Judging by the rest of what we see, my guess is it would change the population of systems often.

megaships are outside of the purview of the BGS from anything i've ever read about them. They do not impact system population because they are not treated as "stations" They're a different unit class.

Likewise, earthlikes would not impact the population noted, it would only be the stations on it that do.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Population changes like this, I don't know why, can be seen as "noise" in the EDDB change history even months/years later.

If a system changes its population, it should be permanent and across all platforms, be it vanilla, Horizons or Odyssey, and across any and all clients that view them.

This is a general case of bugs like https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/23376 or https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/2842 - which are Expired, of course, because there's no way something this obscure and unreproducible is getting ten confirmations (or indeed getting fixed even if it did)

Essentially, if <some rare event, who knows> happens the game is unable to load certain bits of the galaxy map data from the servers. In this case it falls back to a dataset (probably hardcoded in the client) which appears to be from (bizarrely) 2.2 Beta 1. Systems which have changed population (or other data) since that point therefore get the wrong figures; systems populated since then don't show up as inhabited on the map at all. (Though if you actually visit the system, everything is then fine)

This can cause - if you've got someone experiencing the bug and someone not both visiting a system changed since 3302 - the sort of bouncing of population data seen in the ROSS logs. And with Odyssey of course, pretty much everywhere has changed population since then. Out in Colonia I have a specific detector for this bug and ignore EDDN uploaders suffering from it: based on the size of the ignore list it looks like the prevalence is probably something like 0.1% to 1% of clients at any time (a full client restart will fix it - it's not the same people each time - I've only personally seen it happen to me once)

 

[Oraki]

I don't know about you guys, but it looks like we got a fix to the existing bug.

We did not fix the missing income from Odyssey, but we finally got the fix that FDev said they applied in a previous patch's notes. It gained ALD 136cc from formerly contested systems that now have their total uncontested Base Income count.

Again, these are the in game Base Income numbers, which are still different than the in Odyssey Radius Income numbers.

Yup, we got the news on Tuesday/Wednesday that something happened. Patty Team was celebrating and then ALD was happy as well. Then we saw winters and her returned 8CC from the Mahon Turmoil. Torval seems to be fine now too. Things are starting to make sense again, although it is still incredibly annoying that we have to constantly check when a system was expanded to calculate potential incomes out of game (ody vs hori).

But hey... baby steps. I am happy that we got at least a few fixes in

 

[Martin Schou]

With the newest recalculation I calculate 7 systems fewer on EDDB data than the game shows. Which is weird. But weirder than that is that I calculate a missing 886 CC in game based on the EDDB data. That's certainly an improvement from last cycle's 1,252 CC and 65 missing exploited systems. I calculate every power missing income, ranging between 14 CC too low (Zemina Torval) and 159 CC (Arissa Laviny-Duval).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zW09yQSL4mHTLb8kTCOEnSR_cf98HsiodfQsdQgq6ao/edit?usp=sharing

You can't edit it, but you can comment and copy if you want.

When counting systems, I categorize two types of systems into the NONE category in the sheet.
1) Systems that EDDB categorizes as non-PowerPlay systems. These are things like Shinrarta and such.
2) Systems with 0 CC income. These are all the prison systems we get dumped into when we respawn with a bounty.

This means that there may be such prison systems that EDDB data claims gives income and thus count as exploited systems

Now I "just" need to set up an AutoHotKey script to take 8,746 screenshots and name them properly, and about two hours of computer time running it.

If I want to file a thorough bug report, it needs to have all the evidence.