PP 2.0 Is a Time Wasting Crapshoot
- Thread starter Havoc4U
- Start date
I have to agree with op. i think it does work, though it may take some working out. PP2 feels like a clunky bolt on. The only rewards are weapons that most people ignored for years. Im hoping there is more to come on PP2 because at the moment i'm struggling to see what the point is. I cant understand what the payoff is for spending so much of my time doing activities that are just boring and repetitive.
To enjoy Powerplay at a casual level, it is best to think of it as an optional bonus system instead of a fundamental game system.
Why? Because outside of occasional friendly/hostile encounters with NPCs and bonuses/merits activating, it doesn't change your gameplay.
You find the niche that suits you (combat, mining, etc.) and sign on to the power that rewards it, and then you do the activity and get rewarded. At the base level, it never has to be more complicated than this.
But that's not why the serious PP gamers do it. The serious PP folks are half pilots and half strategy gamers, they are checking the maps and crunching numbers and are glued to analysis sites and get into serious arguments on Discord about where to expand or undermine. It's essentially a slow, deliberate, and very hands-on game of Risk.
If you're casual, dip in for the bennies and ignore the leaderboard. You can make cash super easy in Elite anyway. If you're hardcore, just remember to come up for air once in a while. PP is super addictive for the right interest niche and personality.
Or, you know, just turn your back on the vulgarities of human power struggles and go jaunt in the black or shoot 'goids. To paraphrase Alexis Kennedy: Frustrations grow around the walls of the sandbox. Savvy players know that the sandbox has no walls.
Why? Because outside of occasional friendly/hostile encounters with NPCs and bonuses/merits activating, it doesn't change your gameplay.
You find the niche that suits you (combat, mining, etc.) and sign on to the power that rewards it, and then you do the activity and get rewarded. At the base level, it never has to be more complicated than this.
But that's not why the serious PP gamers do it. The serious PP folks are half pilots and half strategy gamers, they are checking the maps and crunching numbers and are glued to analysis sites and get into serious arguments on Discord about where to expand or undermine. It's essentially a slow, deliberate, and very hands-on game of Risk.
If you're casual, dip in for the bennies and ignore the leaderboard. You can make cash super easy in Elite anyway. If you're hardcore, just remember to come up for air once in a while. PP is super addictive for the right interest niche and personality.
Or, you know, just turn your back on the vulgarities of human power struggles and go jaunt in the black or shoot 'goids. To paraphrase Alexis Kennedy: Frustrations grow around the walls of the sandbox. Savvy players know that the sandbox has no walls.
So much this
We're playing tactical chess on the galactic chessboard - and we're the unaffiliated "casuals". The really serious ones are in organized groups and they play at higher strategic level.Plus there are the lone geniuses, won't mention names here but it's pretty obvious who they are
Some people are just never happy.
I am not doing PP2 as yet and I didn’t bother with PP1, that was because power play didn’t interest me and I saw no point messing things up for those it did interest just to get the rewards out of greed.
I am unsure about PP2 the fact that you can join in while pretty much playing as normal appeals but I am still not all that interested in the powers and their interactions, plus I still don’t want to do it just for the rewards.
My opinion is if you think the point of PP is the rewards then it isn’t an activity you will enjoy just a chore to get over with so you can get paid.
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Absolutely adore Cultist Simulator! Nice reference.
Thats the point i was trying to make. There is no point grinding to get all those weapons, i'll leave leader boards to those that care for them.
I'd like to be able to engage with pp2 but as i enjoy most of the game without powerplay i'm struggling to find where i can fit. Elite is a very broad game with many activities that i do enjoy so why should i choose one that alignes with a particular power. PP1 was was pretty much ignored by most players untill they wanted a weapon or a particular bonus then it was a few hours of play to get what you wanted then leave it alone until next time, I dont want to use PP2 the same way. I also dont want to come back from the black after a few weeks and hand my data into a port that screws with the work that another player has spent that same few weeks setting up or hand my bounties in at a station then realise that only a few jumps away i could have helped my power gain control.
Maybe i'm wrong but there doesn't seem to be much to engage with unless you are a die hard strategist who wants to pore over data sets and plan weeks and months ahead. I thought the idea of PP2 was to make it more engaging for all players. I'm still dabbling with PP2 at the moment so maybe i'll change my mind as i discover more about it but at the moment it just seems like a very clunky add on that will be ignored by all but a few.
The big difference between PP1 and PP2 is that in PP2 it's absolutely okay if you aren't. In PP1 almost all possible moves were bad, so if you didn't follow the centralised spreadsheets and strategies you'd probably just hurt your own power. In PP2 all possible moves are good. Some might be better than others (or more urgent than others) but there's not really any such thing as a wasted move.
So ... for your examples
You essentially can't mess up other people's work this way - at least not on your team! Exploration is a reinforcement action, so you'll strengthen any system of your Power by handing data in there.
- if it's a system no-one else cares about, it probably needed a bit of reinforcement so why shouldn't you do it?
- if it's a system other people have already been reinforcing, you've just saved them a bit of time. There's not really such a thing as over-reinforcing a system (it's technically possible but you're not going to do it with a few weeks of exploration data)
You might potentially mess up someone from another team's plan to undermine that system and kick your Power out, of course - and if you don't want to do that then certainly Powerplay might not be for you, it is ultimately a competition - but you're not going to do anything to harm your own team.
Bounties don't do anything for Powerplay when handed in, so do that wherever is most convenient for you - instead, they do something when you obtain them. As with the exploration data, it doesn't really matter if anyone else on your side is working on the same system - either you've helped someone else on your team finish off that system faster, or you've put some effort into another system which might become important later.
And it's also okay if not everything you do helps your power very much. I've been doing some stuff about a hundred LY away from my Power's territory the last couple of days - trade, bounties, missions, etc. A little bit of it did get a few undermining merits on the systems I was in, but that wasn't why I was doing it. You can absolutely dip in and out - today you're going to reinforce this system of your power and undermine the nearby border systems of other powers ... tomorrow you're going to go off to bounty hunt in the Pleiades because you like the view and it's no big deal that it doesn't help your power.
For various reasons, I'm not in contact with any of the major player groups which support my Power. I've got my own plans - which certainly have to be smaller scale, because I can't do that much each week on my own - and can just put a little bit towards them each week. Or if I feel like doing something else, I can ignore them. So long as I accept that they might become obsolete at some point because if it takes me six months to do them the wider strategic situation might change too much - and that if a large group from another side notices, I'm probably not going to succeed and will need to pick a new target - I can just get on with that and not worry about what the big groups are doing.
Similarly, Powerplay is absolutely designed for - and in my opinion benefits strongly from - people just doing a bit of random stuff here and there: reinforce this system a bit, undermine that enemy one, put a few hundred merits into acquiring that one. It adds just a little bit of noise and movement into the wider galaxy so that it's not just the big organised groups spreadsheeting things out and agreeing to carve up the galaxy between them.
It's not that important - all activities help all powers, it's just that you can get a bonus if you're doing your power's favoured activities. But it's fine (and in many cases important!) to do activities where your power doesn't get that bonus, because they still generate points.
One of the nice things about Powerplay for me is that because so many things can count for points, actual multirole ships become valuable - you do a bit of cargo hauling, but you fly something defensible so that you can hit the pirates who come after you for bounties, then you recycle the profits from that into a donation mission before switching over to raid an Odyssey settlement for data and goods and kill a bunch of enemy power operatives who come after you for that, and at the end of it you've got some extra rewards and helped your Power's position in those systems.
I stayed well clear of Powerplay 1 for all the reasons you've given - and when Powerplay 2 was announced, expected to be doing largely the same to that too - but Frontier managed to surprise me and come up with a system which works really well for lone agents like me as well as big organised groups.
Hmmm... ok.
I'm little vexed with PP right now, because I've found my niche in being local SAR operative, not caring about the big picture, not maxing my output in any way (I'm at loyalty rank 10 right now, so I'm not racing anywhere), but just doing my own bit by roleplaying it, when FDev turned off merits for handing in escape pods for some reason. I can only guess there was some loophole people were using to grind too much merits, but right now I'm a little put off by not being able to earn anything by rescuing pixelpeople.
PP is another LAYER on top of everything else that you do anyway, if you don't like doing it just for flipping systems for your power, think of it instead as other activities that you can do as a side quest for stuff you are doing anyway, mining, trading, exploring, pew pew.
It's an additive not either or. Change the mindset.
Sure there are still some teething issues (but none that major).
Everything in any game is just a pastime. No real point to any of it.
It's an additive not either or. Change the mindset.
Sure there are still some teething issues (but none that major).
Everything in any game is just a pastime. No real point to any of it.
My neuropathy and arthritis agree...
...and most of us don't use spreadsheets btw. Personally, I go by gut feel. If it's a small patch of the Bubble that you like then, through the cycles, you get a feeling of which ones are important and which are the ones you can actually do something about.
Some PP battles are titanic, with merits in the six figures being thrown into one system in a single cycle from the get go. But many are small power struggles, just one or two commanders jousting for their side in a tiny patch of the galaxy. I like the latter because the game is more personal and sometimes, what you do in a single system manages to tip the balance your Power's way.
Some PP battles are titanic, with merits in the six figures being thrown into one system in a single cycle from the get go. But many are small power struggles, just one or two commanders jousting for their side in a tiny patch of the galaxy. I like the latter because the game is more personal and sometimes, what you do in a single system manages to tip the balance your Power's way.
Same, I have single-handedly flipped a couple of systems now, and because they are small systems it seems to be mainly me keeping them from falling again as I try to strengthen them... all while just doing things I do anyway as my space knitting, like trucking and some surface on foot missions
That's a good point; however, say you like a bit of bounty farming, so you sign up with ALD. You max up to rank 100 to get the 100% bonus, and by that time, you're bored of it and want to do say a bit of mining, but there is no decent mining in her space, and if you want to get any bonuses for it, you have to change powers and go back to start. Also, it's a bit out of balance, when you can make nearly 40k merits per hour mining in some areas with some powers, but you can only make 15k an hour bounty farming with ALD or the Hudson replacement guy.
And this is one of the reasons I find PP 2 addicting. Lone, dedicated agents can pop up and alter the playing board in a matter of hours, throwing those spreadsheets into disarray and triggering high-level strategy meetings. The sheer entropy of it is glorious, because it's seldom predictable.
I will agree that the balance currently isn't very good, and FDev really needs to put some work in on it. The disabled merit systems and asymmetric earning potential of the powers are annoying flaws, but not game breakers (no pun intended). I suspect, or at least hope, that FDev is currently compiling data on the early stages of PP2 and will use it to do a rebalance.
I think the ALD miner example is a bit off - she's got like 800 systems right now. If a few of those don't have pristine reserves, I'd be shocked. Also, in-system mining earns merits for every power, AFAIK. Just some benefit more than others.
I’m quite pleased to read so many Cmdrs are taking a similar approach to me and just doing their own thing for their own reasons (maybe one of those being enjoyment.)
I ended up leaving my first pledge and going with ALD purely because I enjoy being in that area of the Bubble (even I’m not quite sure why.) I’ve no great interest in her or her ethos/values. Now I’m just doing much the same as I did prior to PP 2.0 but on a slightly grander scale. I used to enjoy trying to flip and rejig the entire faction make up of systems whilst, trying, to understand the BGS. This is, very different, but has that same feel of being able to affect the Galaxy I’m in whilst doing things I enjoy - only now there are more activities to enjoy. As Ian pointed out, they link together so well now that, for me, they even fit a role playing approach very well, as does the fact multi role ships are hugely beneficial.
Currently I’ve got my eye on a system, far far away,* and I aim to acquire it and eventually get it to fortified status - if I’ve identified it well I should be able to do that without too much interference (but probably little help.) However, to do this I will need to join in with the efforts in other systems to bridge the gap a bit. I’m really enjoying it and hoping bugs and balancing issues are addressed before too many turn away from PP 2.0.
*Its really not that far away, just enough to be safe from the clutches of other powers…at least for now.
I ended up leaving my first pledge and going with ALD purely because I enjoy being in that area of the Bubble (even I’m not quite sure why.) I’ve no great interest in her or her ethos/values. Now I’m just doing much the same as I did prior to PP 2.0 but on a slightly grander scale. I used to enjoy trying to flip and rejig the entire faction make up of systems whilst, trying, to understand the BGS. This is, very different, but has that same feel of being able to affect the Galaxy I’m in whilst doing things I enjoy - only now there are more activities to enjoy. As Ian pointed out, they link together so well now that, for me, they even fit a role playing approach very well, as does the fact multi role ships are hugely beneficial.
Currently I’ve got my eye on a system, far far away,* and I aim to acquire it and eventually get it to fortified status - if I’ve identified it well I should be able to do that without too much interference (but probably little help.) However, to do this I will need to join in with the efforts in other systems to bridge the gap a bit. I’m really enjoying it and hoping bugs and balancing issues are addressed before too many turn away from PP 2.0.
*Its really not that far away, just enough to be safe from the clutches of other powers…at least for now.
Might as well join a power for the bonus pay for for your preferred gameplay and the reduced rebuys are nice.
The background merits earned by players just doing their normal gameplay bounty hunting/handing in data/mining/chasing 40%+profit will have a large affect over a 6 month to a year period.
I tend to see the unoccupied and exploited systems as the playthings of the single/wing players and the fortified and strongholds are for the more organised players.
The background merits earned by players just doing their normal gameplay bounty hunting/handing in data/mining/chasing 40%+profit will have a large affect over a 6 month to a year period.
I tend to see the unoccupied and exploited systems as the playthings of the single/wing players and the fortified and strongholds are for the more organised players.