A mutual ability to blow eachother up is just as fair.
Powerplay proposal: split tasks to suit each mode, elaborates on Sandros last ideas
- Thread starter Rubbernuke
- Start date
Sure, I suppose. Only, why change one fair thing for another fair thing? Seems like a lot of wasted time and effort to achieve nothing. As well as sacrificing one of the cornerstones of the game.
Not to mention, the people who enjoy blowing other people up is a relatively small minority of all players, so you'll end up creating a game that is less enjoyable to the average player.
Result: No more fair, significantly less enjoyable on average. A net loss.
I'd much rather see a system that allows pvpers to enjoy themselves productively without excluding anyone else as a side effect. Ideally, you'd have a system that is as inclusive and welcoming as possible, such that players want to participate, and voluntarily do so, even if they die, but which doesn't negatively impact other aspects of the game.
So, what's that about stealing merits from powerplay ships? That not a thing anymore?
I know 5th Cing is a thing, so my point is that there are ways to exploit the system by joining the other side and behaving the opposite of what is expected in some way.
Its same with the BGS, if you really want to tank a faction's BGS there are ways to do it that the devs didn't intend (although they have fortunately stopped most of those).
Erm, i don't agree with your conclusion. If a system is both fortified and undermined then there is no negative effect. You get a null effect. If an enemy doesn't undermine then you're sorted.
Seems right to me.
It kind of pushes players to try and undermine as many systems as possible... but of course, they need to balance that against the undermining they might be facing as well as their own fortification and prep/expansion efforts.
Having said that, it does kind of demonstrate how PP is just one amazing grindball and why anyone would even want to participate in a never ending grind just blows my mind.
You can!! Through the process of fortifying and undermining.
They are the things that count are they not?
No, the dropped cargo is entirely useless. Except to disguise Reverb-cascade mines against the next shielded opponent they come across. Which is admittedly, both confusing & good quality salt.
Nobody is going to be so foolish as to say 'No'. But there are a lot of factors that serve t
What it means is that the cancelled system was required to be fortified to attain your target CC balance for that Powerplay cycle. That system was chosen to fortify because it represented the best value effort to CC ratio available. (we have spreadsheet gurus, and work as a team) That means that to get an equivalent CC result, you need instead to fortify another system, perhaps more than one, that are more effort for less result. That may be a dramatic difference in merits & effort required, & perhaps a 100ls trip to a planetary base or using an outpost, instead of a convenient Orbital station. All these negative effects can be avoided if you can disrupt the Underminers and drive them off to a system where they feel they can actually get some merits.
In a sense it is a grind in the same way that competing for a team in a league sport is a never ending grindball. Having said that, most Powerplayers agree that having a way to directly offset that grind by interrupting the activities of competing players, makes the grind far more palatable, and the whole experience far more engaging with feedback between tactics & strategy that create fascinating guessing-games & reduce the overall grind dramatically.
Otherwise, once committed to a conflict willingly or otherwise, your opponent sets the terms of the grind and there's nothing you can do except give up, or bulk-buy coffee, send apologies to your friends, family & colleagues & accept your dogs are going to get fat and grumpy, until the war cools-down.
Not many are going to be so foolish as to say 'No'. But there are a number of factors that serve to reduce the incentive to 5C, and in combination they likely drive it to near-extinction. Low-level situational-5C is an accommodatable part of a conflict between factions, IF the mechanics that enable it are suitably balanced.
TL;DR: Yes.
Background:
At the moment, in-game, every single element is inadvertently biased towards benefiting 5C. It is always far harder to oppose it, than to do it. Other forms of attack do require more prep, more manpower, more grind, are more uncertain to succeed, and have nothing like the lasting impact. 5C expansions are extremely difficult to undo, and if they are even possible, often require a wider community effort, with cooperation or at least taking advantage, from enemies, in order to shed them. It is fair to say that shedding bad systems requires a Power to ritually disembowel itself by self-underming & turmoiling itself. It has to do what it's enemies have always been trying to do. Shedding 5C systems, is more like ritually hanging-drawing & then quartering yourself, because those 5C systems are so far down the order of systems that will shed. Devising a strategy to achieve that, and fight your way out of the resultant mess.. You can see why 5C has far too much incentive at present.
This is inevitably gonna be TL;DR but you better read it cause you did ask. xD
Rubbernuke's proposals are built around Sandro's Flash Topic from May 2018, so i'll start there..
"Vote to veto preparation
• Each player can vote to veto or support each preparation
• If a preparation ends the cycle with more veto votes than support votes it is removed from preparation
• Voting requires minimum, rolling time spent pledged and active for a power, somewhere into rank 2
Reasoning: these two changes in tandem are meant to make it easier to prevent bad systems from being prepared with minimal effort. Rather than use consolidation, which must be chosen blind in terms of both the final preparation for systems and the final resting place for the consolidation marker, here Commanders are voting on a fixed list and can choose precisely which systems they want to attempt to veto.
Profitability modifier applied to votes and preparation successes
• A system’s base profitability modifies preparation votes, withdraw votes and preparation successes
• Votes and successes for profitable systems are increased by a factor of 10
Reasoning: we think this modifier acts as another barrier against internal sabotage, forcing the saboteurs to work many more times harder to get the same effect as a Commander who has the power’s interests at heart.
Open only
• Powerplay contacts are only available to players in open
• Powerplay vouchers and commodities are destroyed if a player enters solo or private groups
Reasoning: We’ve saved the biggest change for last, as making Powerplay Open only goes way beyond the remit of a tweak. We’ve seen this topic discussed many times and we think it’s time we addressed it directly to get as much quality feedback as possible.
Powerplay is fundamentally about consensual player versus player conflict. We think that pretty much all of the systems and rules would benefit from being played out in Open only, as it would dramatically increase the chance of meeting other pledged players and being able to directly affect the outcomes of power struggles."
Source:
Frankly, depending on the details of the final implementation, I think those measures provide an elegant simple solution that would be sufficient regards 5C.
In Rubbernuke's (most recent) proposal (linked in the OP), the above "Vote to Veto prep" and "Open only" elements are modified, but do not reduce anti-5C measures at all. Overall it is a belt & braces, cast-iron Anti-5C list.
TL;DR : 5C got curb-stomped.
TL;DR : After curbstomp, 5C got a blood-eagle. (can't be too careful)
TL;DR : 5C carcass got burnt, sealed in a lead-lined box & dumped in a deep-sea trench.
(this is because the Solo/PG part of Powerplay is focused on the BGS of each Control System, providing all the haulage merits without which nothing can be hauled in Open, plus providing modifiers to make the activities in Open more effective.)
Cumulative result : Heavy Overkill.
The other aspect that tackles 5C from 'the other end' is buffing the standard means of attack. This serves to reduce the incentive to 5C passively, simply by making normal attacks more potent. These are again from the Flash Topic (source linked earlier)
"Guaranteed undermine if 100% more than fortification
• A control system that is undermined by 100% more than the fortification value will be undermined even if the fortification trigger has been successfully met
Reasoning: We feel that Powerplay rules tend towards stagnation and status quo, which is not something we intended. Despite all the effort in the world, a power that fortifies enough, against values set by the game rather than in opposition to attack, can remain safe. This change allows sheer force of effort (or numbers) to guarantee systems end up being undermined, making deficit more likely. And to stop this happening, a power must directly compete against its enemies.
Overhead removal and slight increase to distance cost modifier
• Overhead upkeep costs are removed making a system’s base profitability static
• Distance modifier to upkeep is increased to maintain some sense of expansion “gravity”
Reasoning: Overheads are a way to prevent rampant expansion of powers. However, the cost is very high, as they cause an unavoidable amount of uncertainty when calculating CC at the cycle change, as well as just being another level of complexity. We think it would be better to remove them, increase the distance modifier to upkeep a bit, and live with powers that can expand more, as with the other changes in this package we hope that the result will be much more direct attack and dynamism caused by powers fighting each other."
Ultimately, it all ensures that anything someone may be able to do to damage a Power from within, would almost always be time far better spent attacking it directly from without while pledged to an opposing Power. It puts 5C back in the realm of Psi-Ops; extravagant hi-risk efforts to cause confusion & doubt in the ranks of an enemy. But once it has played it's hand & surprise has passed it holds little ability to cause further damage itself. & that is the traditional role of 5C where it has appeared in conflicts historically.
So that's alright then.
People tend to puff-up the technical limitations to create an image of impossibility in order to rubbish the Open-Only idea.You're talking about Open Only (if I'm reading not too much into your words. since I didn't read in this thread, I'm probably out of context) and I agree that this would make Power Play much more appealing.
What I don't understand, though, is that if it really were that easy to add some spice to PP, no one seems to give a second thought to WHY the developers haven't realized this a long time ago. Very few seem to see the technical implications such a move would bring to the game, especially considering its 'brokered P2P network model' (as the elephant in the room, there are some other considerations as well).
You're still trying to make a sexy photo model out of a walrus and don't even realize what a nonsense that is. As if the whole problem can be reduced to just doing enough convincing and sometime in the next few years maybe... who knows... You can overdo it with the (read: meta-) grinding, you know
For one thing, you wouldnt have all those quotes in my previous post from the Lead Developer of ED (at the time of his post) , if it was so obviously impractical. Furthermore there are some neat little measures which would overcome router-fiddling, the Block function is probably the easiest fix since it requires simply reverting it to the way it always used to work! Im a bit sketchier on the Xbox/PS global block feature, but since these are simply block-lists fed into the ED instancing model, they could surely be modified to oblivion by Fdev for a specific Opt-In competitive feature such as Powerplay. It would certainly be a strong argument to take to the console developers, if such agreement was even required. I honestly dont know how fanatical they both are about 100% Global Block implementation in all cases. It seems some console games are on the Live services & arent compatible with the Block feature. (ED was one of them afterall, for a time)
The other important element regards PnP, is you do not need the same networking integrity to make ED's MMO competitive feature work well, as you do to make a 5v5 twitch-based shooter work similarly well. It doesnt matter if someone slips through a blockade on a haulage run due to networking issues. It doesnt matter if someone is undermining and doesnt instance first time with an opposing wing that's hunting them. They might earn a tiny fraction of the required merits to do damage, but then they'll have to reinstance again, and again, and they will get caught eventually & may lose all their progress when they do. And the ships they build & the way they go about the activity has to take that into account. & that is a significant part of the battle.
If they will never instance, or vanishingly rarely, thats where dummy-instancing requests come in, and players that have such poor network they can undercut the intended gameplay like that, shouldnt be able to do it. Its akin to cheating, and by allowing it, you enable router fiddling & actual cheating to be rife. So those few, regrettably must eventually be restricted to the Solo/PG-friendly aspects of Powerplay if they wish to continue, for the overall integrity of the game.
The problem with trying to add new systems specifically to counteract 5C is that you're ultimately just putting a bandaid on the more fundamental issue. Powerplay is designed in such a way that it's much easier to do damage from within than from outside. Trying to fix this with patches is akin to trying to finish a bottomless swimming pool with caulk and cellotape.
Here's the fundamental issue; in order for a game to have any meaning(to be strategic and tactical and interesting), you need to have the capacity to make bad choices. There need to be right moves and wrong moves, and there need to be times where you can make seemingly wrong moves that ultimately lead to even better right moves, or seemingly right moves you can bait your enemy into taking that ultimately lead to worse outcomes. To use a chess analogy, you need to be able to sacrifice a pawn to take a rook, or sacrifice a rook to take a queen.
But this also opens the window to just make straight-up bad choices. If you want to just sacrifice your queen, you can. You can't have a game where you can only make good moves, and still have strategy.
And because Powerplay allows all players to have an equal say in what gets done, it means that it's always going to be easier to sneak into your enemy team and sacrifice their queen, than it would possibly be to try to take it by force or strategy.
And that's the fundamental problem with suggestions like the 'trust' one, above. It essentially puts a garotte on the tactical aspect of the game, forcing players to accumulate 'good' moves to allow them to make 'bad' ones. But who determines what is good and what is bad? You really can't; Even a computer can't tell whether the person making the move is secretly working towards an 18-move masterpiece or just shuffling the pieces around on the board randomly. Even with trust, you'll still have players accumulating it in pointless ways and spending it to do exponentially more damage.
Patching 5c is fundamentally impossible without sacrificing the very things that make a game fun in the first place.
The real, fundamental issue with Powerplay specifically, is that Powers have too many hands at the wheel. The vast majority of people who participate, the ones who are just there for the modules or some roleplaying, have no idea how the game is played, and so haul and prepare pretty much at random. This means they will almost always do more harm than good. And yet, inexplicably, they have just as much of a say as the players who spend all their time analyzing the current situation and making careful plans!
This is why I think the true solution isn't voting on what NOT to do, but instead voting on who gets to choose what TO do. An elected council of players who can choose targets for expansion, who can put markers on the map where players should fortify or undermine, who can even reward players for participation, possibly based on a budget given by the power itself.
This essentially removes the reason why 5c exists in the first place, while leaving the players who actually play the game completely unrestricted in how they play the game.
Here's the fundamental issue; in order for a game to have any meaning(to be strategic and tactical and interesting), you need to have the capacity to make bad choices. There need to be right moves and wrong moves, and there need to be times where you can make seemingly wrong moves that ultimately lead to even better right moves, or seemingly right moves you can bait your enemy into taking that ultimately lead to worse outcomes. To use a chess analogy, you need to be able to sacrifice a pawn to take a rook, or sacrifice a rook to take a queen.
But this also opens the window to just make straight-up bad choices. If you want to just sacrifice your queen, you can. You can't have a game where you can only make good moves, and still have strategy.
And because Powerplay allows all players to have an equal say in what gets done, it means that it's always going to be easier to sneak into your enemy team and sacrifice their queen, than it would possibly be to try to take it by force or strategy.
And that's the fundamental problem with suggestions like the 'trust' one, above. It essentially puts a garotte on the tactical aspect of the game, forcing players to accumulate 'good' moves to allow them to make 'bad' ones. But who determines what is good and what is bad? You really can't; Even a computer can't tell whether the person making the move is secretly working towards an 18-move masterpiece or just shuffling the pieces around on the board randomly. Even with trust, you'll still have players accumulating it in pointless ways and spending it to do exponentially more damage.
Patching 5c is fundamentally impossible without sacrificing the very things that make a game fun in the first place.
The real, fundamental issue with Powerplay specifically, is that Powers have too many hands at the wheel. The vast majority of people who participate, the ones who are just there for the modules or some roleplaying, have no idea how the game is played, and so haul and prepare pretty much at random. This means they will almost always do more harm than good. And yet, inexplicably, they have just as much of a say as the players who spend all their time analyzing the current situation and making careful plans!
This is why I think the true solution isn't voting on what NOT to do, but instead voting on who gets to choose what TO do. An elected council of players who can choose targets for expansion, who can put markers on the map where players should fortify or undermine, who can even reward players for participation, possibly based on a budget given by the power itself.
This essentially removes the reason why 5c exists in the first place, while leaving the players who actually play the game completely unrestricted in how they play the game.
We went over that earlier in this thread. It's not a way to defend your system because there is no victory outcome.
The status quo is surely a victory for someone, probably the defender.
Countering isn't defending. Semantics aside, we should be able to defend our systems from undermining, not just somewhat repair the damage done.
If the status quo was a victory then why was the system a fortification target in the first place?
This is the thing, fortification by itself serves to boost your Power's economy for that week, which needs to exceed 500CC so you receive the maximum consolidation bonus. The consolidation bonus reduces fortification requirements (triggers) for all systems and increases undermining triggers.
Fortification thereby creates a feedback loop that makes it easier to sustain. So too undermining, in reverse.
It creates a sense of a campaign, as one side tries to wear-down the capacity to defend by making it progressively harder to keep fortification at a level that prevents Turmoil. (after which systems can be actually lost)
Does this sound incredibly grindy? Yes, it is.
It also means that in the cycles when you are not already under heavy attack, you can take a breather because you have built-up defensive reserves, and scouting, that ensure that a bare-minimum of fortification will keep your Consolidation bonus for the following cycle.
That bare-minimum fort, involves fortifying the most valuable and efficient systems.
If these start being undermined, you need to move down the list of fortification efficiency and haul more merits, to do less economic benefit. It increases your workload in an exponential way.
If, on the other hand you can disrupt, disuade, destroy the underminers, then you dont start down this exponential grind, but can keep the undermining to a 'random and light' personal-merits scale.
It makes a big difference, not just in itself but because momentum always plays a big part in Powerplay. The mechanics entrench that, but playergroups & human nature, incl. opportunism, play a big role too.
You can defend your self from an undermining attack through the process of fortification. These are the tools given to you by the designers of Power Play.
Undermining and fortification are the two side of the same coin that is the game of Power Play. As someone who has never taken part in it, I have not read anything to suggest that there is another Power Play specific mechanic available.
This is surly by design to provide a level playing field available to any and all Elite players should they wish to take part.
It seems to me that once you take control of somewhere the Power Play designers wanted to make you invest just as much energy maintain it as you did taking it in the first place.
In short, calling it "countering" or "defending" doesn't matter, fortification is the only process available to the players to keep control of somewhere.
Wow, you actually peeked my interest there for a minute, making Power Play sound like a grand game of strategy. Where you have to pivot your resources and apply them to the most efficient systems to ensure the best result for the effort available.
But then you held up "pew pew" as the strategy you want to pursue.
Despite all the things that are out of FDev's control (like time zones, the speed of light, etc), the things that are in FDev's control but unlikely to be changed (like network infrastructure, dedicated servers, etc), on top of which it has been stated many, many, many times (on these forums at least) that pursuing a "pew pew" strategy is the worst strategy to go for, as not only do you only prevent a small % of the merits getting through for your time spent, but you have actively not delivered any for your own side.
And all of that on top of taking away game features from other players.
What the devs have proposed in the past was tinkering within the box. That is the scale of change we have reason to anticipate could be available for Powerplay, & these ideas fit in with that. Thinking outside the box means a big revamp & relaunch, which was not on the table the last we heard. Besides which, these proposals seek to keep what is unique & engaging within Powerplay, build on it, and fix the frequently perverse mechanics which prevent that gameplay from developing properly. If there wasn't a germ of something great within Powerplay, those of us arguing for, wouldn't bother with threads like this.
The whole point of the 5C-specific changes is to redesign those mechanics so it is much harder to do damage from within, and easier to do damage from without. By tackling it from both angles in multiple ways, 5C is effectively designed-out.
It's important to appreciate the starting point we have, in order to understand the significance of the changes in the OP & indeed in Sandro's Flash Topic. It is also worth reflecting that despite every aspect involved being inadvertently skewed towards 5C benefit : The vast majority of players in Powerplay are playing legitimately & not resorting to exploiting 5C.
Forcing organisation structures upon Powers via some 'Council' system, takes away from the structures these playergroups have evolved for themselves, that tend to suit the Powers they represent. In Utopia, a slogan we've co-opted for our playergroup is "No Gods No Masters". Everyone can have a say, equally & it is the quality of the ideas & how they capture people's attention that determines whether they 'fly' or not. Who the person is who first voices the idea, is not a factor.
Removing loss-maker systems (which I assume you are talking about here) does not remove the ability to make bad choices, it simply removes the ability to make individually catastrophic choices. To relate to your analogy: there are no bad moves in chess. They only become so in the context of all the other pieces in play. So it would be in Powerplay if you remove loss-makers.
What that does is allow more strategic choices to be made with Weaponised Expansions (since they are not so punitive on the Power that carries them out) it also disencentivises 5C, because they would need to do far more to achieve similar damage to one single loss-maker expansion which they can do now. In isolation, this change doesn't do away with 5C, it simply makes it much less appealing. In consort with the other changes however, it would make someone looking at setting out on a 5C-path balk, at the amount of beneficial acts they would have to take, to have the possibility of a chance to interfere with strategy at a later date. It would put 5C firmly in the scope of spying, and double-agent sabotage. This is part & parcel of MMO team gameplay, as well as a part of RL conflicts throughout the ages.
It legitimises that niche style of treachery-play, by balancing it correctly so it is not so overpowered.
Rubbernuke gave plenty of detail about how you determine what are good & bad actions an individual player can take, and how the system would determine these in order to distribute 'trust'. There are absolutely beneficial actions within the system he outlines. These actions can even be monitored by playergroups to assess their effectiveness, because all the actions are recorded in-game for all to see. So if people are throwing their efforts away in inefficient ways, then these 'bad actors' can be helped, if inadvertent, or insulated from critical roles, if deliberate. and if they are having to do it all in Open, they can be directly identified
It is worth remembering, that under Rubbernuke's Trust mechanic, over-fortification results in a negative effect on Trust (so you couldnt throw merits away that way & maintain Vote influence)
Not so. Completely eliminating all possibility of 5C is perhaps impossible, but that is not necessary nor desirable. It just needs to be put in it's proper place so it is not overwhelmingly overpowered.
Module shoppers are rarely around long enough to gain even one vote, let alone the 5 votes of a long-term pledge. Roleplayers can be a pain, but they tend to pick up more knowledge along the way than module shoppers because they may stick-around longer, and since they are Roleplaying, tend not to be random. They often are not strategic and favour more symbolic gestures, but they are best brought into the fold where possible so a common-ground can be found & we can all work together to mutual benefit.
IMO, this gives an elite clique too much power. One of the strengths of current Powerplay is the lack of core control of either who is a member of the Power, and what anyone actually does. It requires inspiring players to follow a course, instead of enforcing or bribing anyone to participate. There are other ways, many of which i've outlined in detail in recent posts, which would deal very well with, and even overkill 5C. You do not need to create a bigger monster to deal with it.
I'm glad that came across, Powerplay is a game of grand-strategy ; where you may be involved from the nitty-gritty in the trenches, up to management of large territories, and beyond to strategic theory, planning & diplomacy.
Pew-Pew as you call it, is a perfectly valid part of a strategy, in a conflict against any Power that has significant groups that play in Open. Even just the presence of a hostile will make them pause & slow-down their progress. They are more likely to run a defensive fit and carry less cargo as a result. They dont know how long youre there for or when you or others may return. A hostile wing can effectively blockade & prevent almost any cargo hauled for hours at a time. Ofc, free access to resort to Solo/PG makes a mockery of all that. Which is why we're here discussing it, afterall.
Do we really need another Solo/PG grind ? We already have plenty of those without Powerplay too. For any game feature to be updated, or redesigned, some players will always be left behind. That's a natural part of taking part in a game that is under ongoing development. Powerplay has a chance to be that more competitive Open-PvE gamestyle that so many have called for, in one form or another. By providing these players with a valid place for that style of gameplay, it might actually shut them up, and give you and us a common-response when people come on the forums crying for Open-Only BGS. Go join Powerplay, its got what you want. It's a more compelling & appealing point than arguing: "you bought the wrong game". Which doesn't do the community any favours at all.
Last edited:
Then play that game then and stop bleeting on about a different game you can't play.
By all means carry on doing that, but understand that strategy is inefficient / completely ineffective at best because of the very foundations Elite is built upon. Foundations that are, in all likelihood, never, ever going to be touched by FDev again because it make no financial sense.
Power Play is what it is. Designed on top of the BGS, which its self was designed within the limitations of the network structure which forms part of Elites foundations.
Bad form, bad PR for FDev, and no chance because of things like network structure and universal issues like time zones and the speed of light.
Shutting up a vocal group of players (and not a particularly large section of the total player base) is not a good starting point for development.
I don't think you bought the wrong game. I would however argue that you didn't buy the game you think you bought.
So how about letting the few that did actually buy the game they thought they were buying, and the majority that have accepted the game they didn't realise they were buying, carry on enjoying Elite for what it is within its limitations, and realise you are asking for the moon on a stick.
The devs in the past specifically mentioned they were only shining a spotlight on things players had repeatedly mentioned. Saying we need to stick in the box, when the box is player-made in the first place, doesn't make any sense. We have the power to create a new, better box.
Are you familiar with game design? Because you cannot 'design out' something that is essentially the very first natural result of a system. BEST case, you end up with an awful and convoluted system that still has plenty of exploits.
The only way to truly fix these problems is from the ground up.
There is no difference between the two. Who defines catastrophic? There is no loss condition in this game, so everything is ultimately player-defined. Maybe two powers want to team up to take on a third, with one side accepting significant losses to take down the third faction, with the promise from the second faction to help them get it back later. Nope, can't do that anymore.
You're trying to predict good and bad decisions, when good and bad decisions are completely determined by the flow of the game. It's impossible.
If a system has absolutely beneficial actions, those actions should not exist. Having them exist only reduces the complexity and tactical value of the game.
Of course, those actions pretty much can't exist, anyway, because there's always opportunity cost. You can almost always choose a better option, and 5C players would be very good at picking the worst 'good' option.
It gives them exactly as much power as the participants give them. That's the beauty of democracy. If someone else wants power, they can talk to the members of the power and run themselves.
If you've got a problem with it, it's a problem with representative democracy, and as most civilized nations have discovered, while it may have its issues, it's still the best possible solution.
haha. I do. Its pretty broken, it can be so much better. Hence, the bleating.
Ive seen how it well it works against my faction. The network foundations are not the obstacle you think they are.
Yes, Powerplay is what it is. And the Devs still haven't confirmed what, if anything, they're planning to do about it.
Continuing to develop the game like they always promised to do, is not bad form. Going by the flood of encouragement in the Open-Only Flash Topics, any bad PR would be unrepresentative loud mouths with an axe to grind, who from the experience of said Flash Topic would be quickly drowned-out & then go on a long quiet sabbatical from the issue.
Timezones are a playergroup organisational issue, which we've had a handle-on for years. Its not an obstacle to the game happening, its a part of the game.
I dont know what youve got against the speed of light. I often wing with an Aussie, who's got a terrible connection because he lives in the Outback, beyond the reach of fibre. Its not ideal, but I still wing with him because it is still fit for purpose. I also fly with mixed groups of Americans & Europeans & other regions and the instancing is capable of handling it all. If Powerplay instancing was tweaked so it all prioritised like Wing instancing, it'd be even better. It works well enough for the job as it is.
I'm impressed by the speed of light and how much better the PnP hybrid system seems to manage it than direct-server networked games i've played in the past. & ED has a big advantage in that, not being a one-shot-kill kindve game. And Powerplay has a further advantage in that the kill, isnt everything. Even within ED, Pure PvP is more demanding of networking than Powerplay is.