Powerplay Powerplay and what I think needs to be done.

1: Open Only
2: Once a system reaches the fortification trigger, no more garrison supplies can be delivered to that system until the next PP cycle.
3: When pledged, player gets locked into that PP character for one month. No defection possible, and leaving cost 100 million credits.

It's easy to spot the 'grind for merits' in action. All of the systems close to the PP HQ get fortified way beyond the trigger on the first day of a new cycle.
Systems further away are often not fortified to 100% several days after the new cycle.
 
There's been a lot of discussion around the matter and trust me: we can even do better. Do you know we even had an official proposal by a Developer (well, a former Developer right now...)?
Too bad we apparently lost it (!!!) during the migration to these new forums...
 
Id like to see real time updates, or update ticks every 25 mins. The faster the flips the more people will see progress. I dunno maybe judge the flip based off the population size or what other assets might be in them. Let people see it as it updates. Bigger systems will require quite a bit of effort. Smaller systems could be more strategic and fought over more often.

They have a pretty decent system with the graphs, Id like to see more things happening on the powerplay map instead of giant colored blobs. Read the map and you'll know where to go and what moves to make.

More visuals and more information sooner than weekly outcomes.
 
Arguments against open only power play and why this will never, NEVER!!!, go into play. You cut 1/3 of your player base out of the loop for end game because PS4 players can not participate in xbox/windows universe. Besides, brute force pew pew never going to solve this problem. AI upgrades to create lasting penalties.
 
Arguments against open only power play and why this will never, NEVER!!!, go into play. You cut 1/3 of your player base out of the loop for end game because PS4 players can not participate in xbox/windows universe. Besides, brute force pew pew never going to solve this problem. AI upgrades to create lasting penalties.

'Brute force pew' pew as you put it would add danger to hauling / engaging in combat expansions. Since Powerplay is 100% player driven it would add a fine pinch of spice to routine activities. But, we will have to see what FD do- they have acknowledged Powerplay is a concern (mainly by player lobbying and not by volition) so now we wait for the small updates. Sandros old proposal fits exactly inside their scope.
 
FD is never going to tell 1/3 of their potential customers, "Hey, you can play but not in the end game." Very bad business model and customer service there. Not to mention, there are people that just do not want to pvp. People who insist on inflicting "The Game" as they see it on others who simply want to role play explorers or space traders need to get a grip. People don't play games that are not fun and being forced to play some way that you do not want to play is the easiest way to make a game not fun. i.e. if you were told you had to insert a large pike into your anus, before you went into open and were able to engage a player character, you'd probably never do it.

Put lasting penalties to being a 5th columnist. For instance, if you are an Empire and go rogue or defect to Fed. Ok, but you can not trade inside empire space for 30 days. You are kos to a.i. patrols and you are announced, in open, to the system so empire players know you are a target for revenge. You can not return to the empire for 30 days either. Once your time ban is up, you will be required to rank up again, starting at the lowest rank and costing 4 times rates to skill over a normal new player joining the faction. i.e. if 1 ship kill would give you rank, now it will be 4.

Want to abuse the system by over stocking a planet, aka going above 100% fort values. Ok, but at a set percent above the 100% mark, 10% imo, you get a negative hit. This hit reduces your faction and power player status. Go into the negative, you are booted from the power player support and marked as rogue to the faction.

You slow down the turn over rate and 5th columnist will stop being a thing in game, with the exception of the few role players that think it would cool to fantasize about being some introvert radical that is going to be hung, drawn and quartered, and fed to the pigs.
 
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1: Open Only
2: Once a system reaches the fortification trigger, no more garrison supplies can be delivered to that system until the next PP cycle.
3: When pledged, player gets locked into that PP character for one month. No defection possible, and leaving cost 100 million credits.

It's easy to spot the 'grind for merits' in action. All of the systems close to the PP HQ get fortified way beyond the trigger on the first day of a new cycle.
Systems further away are often not fortified to 100% several days after the new cycle.

1) Sure, needs lots of solutions to technical issues though
2) Why? It'll penalise commanders looking for merits who for whatever reason couldn't participate before Fortification Plans are completed and will also encourage 5C activities as commanders seek merits from actions that damage the Power. If you are looking at Control Systems being left unfortified you arguably have too many and it is another indicate that the current system of economic turmoil needs replacing with one more akin to per-system turmoil.
3) I disagree as you should have the right to quit a game activity at any time. However, I do agree the consequences for defection should be more severe. Defectors could for instance be chased by ATR class assassins who could appear in any suitable instance without warning. You could Power brand the assassins with names, give the galaxy a bit of life.

Regarding Open Only, as far as I know all the official Powerplay groups have discussed this & agree with it, so I'm not sure who this third of the player base is that want to continue playing in PG because if they exist they aren't making themselves heard in the groups that actually play the game 24/7.

CMDR Justinian Octavius
 
Regarding Open Only, as far as I know all the official Powerplay groups have discussed this & agree with it, so I'm not sure who this third of the player base is that want to continue playing in PG because if they exist they aren't making themselves heard in the groups that actually play the game 24/7.


Until Sony changes their cross platform corporate policies, any game that has cross platform capabilities but also has sony as a platform, will have a portion of it's member base blocked from being able to participate with other platform players. Of course you don't hear from these guys. There is nothing FD can do about Sony corporate policy. Sony grabs the money anytime they can. Their own consoles don't even support each other. You can't take a ps3 or 2 disc and play it in a ps4. PS5 looks to be doing away with discs altogether meaning people are going to have to purchase digital copies of ps4 games to play them on the new box.
 
Until Sony changes their cross platform corporate policies, any game that has cross platform capabilities but also has sony as a platform, will have a portion of it's member base blocked from being able to participate with other platform players. Of course you don't hear from these guys. There is nothing FD can do about Sony corporate policy. Sony grabs the money anytime they can. Their own consoles don't even support each other. You can't take a ps3 or 2 disc and play it in a ps4. PS5 looks to be doing away with discs altogether meaning people are going to have to purchase digital copies of ps4 games to play them on the new box.

Sony has already changed it's cross platform policy & the issue has been discussed by Powerplay leaders. Segregation of the community by platform is a separate issue to Open Only however.

CMDR Justinian Octavius
 
Sony has already changed it's cross platform policy & the issue has been discussed by Powerplay leaders. Segregation of the community by platform is a separate issue to Open Only however.

CMDR Justinian Octavius

I see a post by Kotaku, a sony subsidiary, about cross play being implemented but still having a lot of limiters thrown in. It still means that you, on an xbox or pc, can do jack about me, the ps4 5th columnist, in open, as an example, i'm not a 5ther. Because you will never see me. We are in two different universes. Cross play is handled in end results by FD, aka fortification tallies, system defense numbers, etc.

Which goes into the other side of why pew pew happy people can't do jack about people abusing the game mechanics. Even if forced into open, will you have the people to cover all the possible situations, all of the time. No. Proper A.I. Response is the only way to resolve this. If I were a power player head of state, and some idiot was burning my purse to work against me, I'd have them exiled, at least. And good luck ever getting back into my faction while I am alive. The A.I. of the power players just lets the crap roll on without doing anything about it.

P.S. Only fortnite and rocket league have crossplay atm.

Link to a more correct, less money driven article concerning sony and cross play.

 
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Question: you can't play GTA online, for example, if you don't pay that subscription thing to Sony right? But I only hear people blaming Sony for that, not Rockstar Games, so don't blame Frontier Developments in the future if they are gonna move Powerplay to Open Only (for example) or add some kind of MMORPG-like Open Only feature, instead reconsider that next time you're gonna buy a console maybe. I don't say "you've been dumb to buy a console! Masterrace!", I'm only pointing out how this kind of criticism should be done against Sony (or Microsoft too) for making their players pay for playing online. Nothing more, nothing less.

But I read by what you are writing that you're a bit confused about what 5C is, technically. And just in case: if you purposely pledge to a Power you are not really playing for and deliberately play against it, like preparing bad systems or fortifying those too and you do that not in your version of Open Play, then you are 5Cing that Power because you can't be spotted by anyone, not by other platform's players, but by the ones of your very own game environment.

But concerning 5C I do not believe that Open Only would solve a lot, I think that the main problem is the game being flawed intrinsically, Open Only is just an extra to give Open Players something to play with avoiding all the grind-like gameplay that will stay as it is in the BGS for example. Open Only Powerplay is something that would give PvP a purpose, playing together, trying different tactics to have a result.

So yeah: people that do not want to pay the monthly fee to play online with consoles will be cut out. Is it fair? No it's not. Is it FDev's fault? No it's not. Will your gamestyle be damaged anyhow? Yes, but only concerning Powerplay. There's plenty more people asking for an Open Only-MMORPG-like mechanic since day 1 basically, shouldn't they be listened to?
 
Having powerplay as open only is:
  • The only solution to botting
  • The best solution to 5c
  • The only way it will ever be interesting (actual PvP territory wars that aren't reduced to grind wars by default)
  • Giving PvPers something to do other than ganking at high-traffic systems (Eravate, Deciat, Shinrarta Dezhra), this would reduce seal clubbing by a fair % and turn less new players away from the game
It was always billed as an elective PvP system by Frontier.. let it be what it was intended to be. Just because it was hijacked by Private mode PvE groups doesn't mean it should stay that way. PvE players have every other area of the main game, yet can't give up this one area to PvP? It's an entitled and short-sighted perspective.

Edit: also make powerplay weapons/modules available from tech brokers so players don't have to module shop.
 
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I totally agree with Lateralus, even if I'd like to see Powerplay changed accordingly to make it more fun. Like: goodbye overhead, higher upkeeps (as stated in Sammarco's proposal) and competitive triggers for control systems too in a +/-100% system, possibly single-system turmoils to make real wars and assaults possible.

Of course everything should be done with different game mechanics, with Powerplay missions/scenarios, different activities and, again, better and community-driven rewards (like: the higher your CCs at the end of the cycle, the better the rewards).

Open Only should be a condicio sine quid non because Powerplay should be the end-game MMORPG like competitive game mechanic to keep old time players which are bored with the grindy gameplay imposed by the open/pvt/solo coexistence, but it shouldn't just be about PvP encounters to the death, first of all to avoid exploits (the very moment you give too much value to a PvP kill, I bet my left ball that somebody will try to exploit that letting other people kill them purposely), and most importantly to have different kind of PvP interactions.

Running away SHOULD BE FUN.
 
Powerplay was and should be a feature driven by hate, anger and revenge- as it was pitched it was supposed to be ruthless power games where you could be as vindictive as you wanted. However, as time has gone on all its interesting features (like PvP piracy) have been shut off devolving it into one gigantic weekly CG where efficiency matters making Solo and PG ideal (since your routine is almost uninterrupted).

In reality, Powerplay should be designed so that stability is very hard to achieve- especially as you get bigger. Changes made early on (overhead curve tweaking) means that after 55 systems you have a flat CC cost making large powers easier. This should be changed back so the higher you go the greater the cost, and that with Sandros ultra undermining make big empires easier to attack and destabilise.
 
Most importantly, a new and fair Powerplay game mechanic would be perfect for more Powers too, competitive triggers would make possible for new Powers to have their way in the already occupied Galaxy, not relaying on 5C tatics as it happens now. We've got 11 Powers now? Well, we could have much more, even Superpower-aligned ones (I still can't understand the reason why the Alliance has only one Power, for example).
 
If no big reset was coming the first step would be for FD to put back the linear (but ever rising) overhead. Large powers would turmoil and shed creating space for Powerplay to actually get going again.
 
Well in my vision of a fair and truly open Powerplay there would be no need for it, because snipes would be the first thing I'd shed. We'd need updates and warning to where our Power is attacked right now, to go there and repel the aggressors. You know that I think too much about how Powerplay should be "technically" and instancing would be a great problem of course. Probably the only way that all of this mess could really work would replacing the pure-p2p technology Elite has right now with a hybrid one... just for the Powerplay dedicated game mode. But that's really impossible to have, sadly. ^^'
 
My opinion- Burn it down, start again.

How about a system where power play had it's own mission board which requires cooperation between other players? Maybe stick the wing missions here so the normal mission board isn't clogged up with the things.

Secondly, add large rewards for handing in merits coming from player kills (adjust fort. and undermine limits accordingly). That way, everyone can engage in powerplay, but players who are involved in PvP have a greater impact on the faction's growth/decline.

This would be open to abuse from 5C, so maybe too many deaths could result in further contribution being frozen out for that cycle. This would also incentivise escaping from a fight you couldn't win, certainly if you'd already been killed a couple of times.
 
Secondly, add large rewards for handing in merits coming from player kills (adjust fort. and undermine limits accordingly). That way, everyone can engage in powerplay, but players who are involved in PvP have a greater impact on the faction's growth/decline.

As I said before, even if this would make sense, the result would be of people exploiting this to have an advantage for their very own Power, a new kind of even more harmful 5C. Every relevant action should be dealt against NPCs, the human factor would be to basically make those actions impossible (or fighting against the sabeuteurs to make them possible). This way we'd have different roles and purposes. Considering this I've always proposed a Community Goal-style reward system, with Command Capitals as the value to calculate the single reward for all the CMDRs, this way all the CMDRs will be incentivized to help and to do that well, because their rewards will be higher accordingly.
 
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