As a new player who just tried PP for the first time with Denton Patreus, it seems like PowerPlay is fairly dead. Game design problems with PowerPlay seem related to the following things.
Huge jump between level 4 and level 5 in both effort to get there and rewards, but the decay is so fast that you're essentially a slave to PowerPlay on a weekly basis... and since Fortifying seems like the thing most people do, and preparation and expansion is more limited... you've got to be within striking distance of the power Capital every week. This means if you decide to head off and do anything else, anywhere else, you're probably going to have to rush back if you want to keep your PP status from diminishing to nothing. On top of that... the expense and time required to get up to that 50,000,000 reward is extremely more than the effort required to mine 40 tons of Void Opals and sell them at a top station. With Guardian stuff and with Engineering, it's clearly better than NOT having those things... like a Guardian FSD booster is something you can't get anywhere else to add to your range. Engineering boosts are invaluable. But none of the Power items are much more than a side-grade and not worth grinding to get. Other than bragging rights, why do Power Play at all? Even if you achieve a good status, go anywhere else for a change of pace and you'll return to the beginning of the grind process all over again... what if you had to re-start Engineer upgrades or Federal Rank upgrades every time you flew on a month long discovery mission to Sag A?
I'm going to stick it out for a month to see if adding APAs to my Vulture is neato, but so far... meh? To spend 100,000 credits every time I want to fast track an order of 10 something, then make the same trip of garrison fortification parts back and forth 20 times?
Suggestions:
1 - Have certain resource rich systems, perhaps available only in Open, as things that the powers are competing over... there'd be better rewards for mining there, or trading there, or doing combat zone there... but you'd have to do it in open, and the factions would be battling it out. Possibly 3-4 factions per spot so that if one faction gets too strong the others can gang up. This would offer a real incentive to risk playing in Open, and it'd give the gankers somewhere to be that is encouraged to be... make it MORE painful to gank a Sidewinder rookie flying out of Eranin, and make it MORE rewarding to gank people in an Open-Only Power Play zone. Who wouldn't be gravitated to the place where the rewards are better? I'd maybe risk mining in OPEN or delivering propaganda in OPEN if the rewards were twice as good or so. This'd bring more people back into OPEN.
2 - Have other faction rewards, like decals, or modules that are worth getting. What about a module that offers improved handling, acceleration, and deceleration in SuperCruise? What about a module that alerts you to the presence of other players in the system? What about improved mines or something for ships who just want to escape? (like a mine that affects FSD systems) Each faction's decal could be earned. Perhaps after X weeks at the top rank of a faction you earn a ship paint job.
3 - Have the decay of merits be slower, so that people can change the way they play the game if they get bored, and still come back to Powerplay? Or an option to FREEZE your Powerplay income but also FREEZE or greatly reduce the rate that merits decay, so you can take a break from PP and still come back to it without grinding up from 10 allocation again.
On that note... this game does a lot right, and I get that it started off more shallow than it is now, so the developers tended to lean heavily on repetition in the game design... but as the game has expanded, why not reduce the amount of grind?
Is there a game designer at Frontier (or most of you) who really just hates the people who buy your game, so you want to punish them?
The game is truly a marvelous thing on many levels, so the criticism people have offered comes out of respect and love and high expectations... not out of disrespect. Please consider reducing the amount of grind required to get anywhere in this game.
Huge jump between level 4 and level 5 in both effort to get there and rewards, but the decay is so fast that you're essentially a slave to PowerPlay on a weekly basis... and since Fortifying seems like the thing most people do, and preparation and expansion is more limited... you've got to be within striking distance of the power Capital every week. This means if you decide to head off and do anything else, anywhere else, you're probably going to have to rush back if you want to keep your PP status from diminishing to nothing. On top of that... the expense and time required to get up to that 50,000,000 reward is extremely more than the effort required to mine 40 tons of Void Opals and sell them at a top station. With Guardian stuff and with Engineering, it's clearly better than NOT having those things... like a Guardian FSD booster is something you can't get anywhere else to add to your range. Engineering boosts are invaluable. But none of the Power items are much more than a side-grade and not worth grinding to get. Other than bragging rights, why do Power Play at all? Even if you achieve a good status, go anywhere else for a change of pace and you'll return to the beginning of the grind process all over again... what if you had to re-start Engineer upgrades or Federal Rank upgrades every time you flew on a month long discovery mission to Sag A?
I'm going to stick it out for a month to see if adding APAs to my Vulture is neato, but so far... meh? To spend 100,000 credits every time I want to fast track an order of 10 something, then make the same trip of garrison fortification parts back and forth 20 times?
Suggestions:
1 - Have certain resource rich systems, perhaps available only in Open, as things that the powers are competing over... there'd be better rewards for mining there, or trading there, or doing combat zone there... but you'd have to do it in open, and the factions would be battling it out. Possibly 3-4 factions per spot so that if one faction gets too strong the others can gang up. This would offer a real incentive to risk playing in Open, and it'd give the gankers somewhere to be that is encouraged to be... make it MORE painful to gank a Sidewinder rookie flying out of Eranin, and make it MORE rewarding to gank people in an Open-Only Power Play zone. Who wouldn't be gravitated to the place where the rewards are better? I'd maybe risk mining in OPEN or delivering propaganda in OPEN if the rewards were twice as good or so. This'd bring more people back into OPEN.
2 - Have other faction rewards, like decals, or modules that are worth getting. What about a module that offers improved handling, acceleration, and deceleration in SuperCruise? What about a module that alerts you to the presence of other players in the system? What about improved mines or something for ships who just want to escape? (like a mine that affects FSD systems) Each faction's decal could be earned. Perhaps after X weeks at the top rank of a faction you earn a ship paint job.
3 - Have the decay of merits be slower, so that people can change the way they play the game if they get bored, and still come back to Powerplay? Or an option to FREEZE your Powerplay income but also FREEZE or greatly reduce the rate that merits decay, so you can take a break from PP and still come back to it without grinding up from 10 allocation again.
On that note... this game does a lot right, and I get that it started off more shallow than it is now, so the developers tended to lean heavily on repetition in the game design... but as the game has expanded, why not reduce the amount of grind?
Is there a game designer at Frontier (or most of you) who really just hates the people who buy your game, so you want to punish them?
The game is truly a marvelous thing on many levels, so the criticism people have offered comes out of respect and love and high expectations... not out of disrespect. Please consider reducing the amount of grind required to get anywhere in this game.