PP merits decay - nope, I don't get it.

[Snarfbuckle]

Some people still say 50mil wage is a reward, it isnt.
You need 5666 merits each weak to maintain rank 5, thats 56.66mil if you fast track. So if you dont fasttrack all you barely cover the cost with wages.Its not a reward at all.Its grind without rewards.

What exactly do you get as rank 5? nothing.

Yup, and yes, we CAN get it faster by hunting the 15 merit per kill target but that hardly helps PP - that's a focus on earning merits.

Ranks should never have been about rewards per week OR modules.

It should just have been a carrot to be with a faction and their bonuses the faction can give.

How much would we care about maintaining rank and merits if we earned no money on ranks and had no decay but merely had a RANK that we could progress slowly with an no grind. No NEED to reach a rank and no NEED to keep a rank except for a minor reward in missions and such.

Hell, that way I could "grind" for a rank 4 during six months and gain a few percentage bonuses on mission rewards instead.

 

[OldSalt]

And all of this plus the other peculiarities of power play are why after some consideration and research I decided not to touch it with somebody else's mucky stick. I really think FD need to put their hands up on this one and accept that it just did not work out as hoped (and then do something about it).

 

[Snarfbuckle]

And all of this plus the other peculiarities of power play are why after some consideration and research I decided not to touch it with somebody else's mucky stick. I really think FD need to put their hands up on this one and accept that this just did not work out ass hoped (and then do something about it).

Yup, only in it for a select few modules that for some bizarre reason has not been reverse engineered or stolen by any other private enterprise or opposing faction.

Or for that matter, a good Pack Launcher missile is NOT sold on the open market by a TRADE FOCUSED faction.

Really Li Yong-Rui? You have a product a lot of people want that you could sell for a stupid amount of money and you hold it back?

It's the first Iphone of missile launchers and you refuse to sell it on the market - are you ?

 

[specialsymbol]

Almost certainly it is fixed. TargetLost in another thread pointed out the key thing in all this, namely that the game is using a shift register (which I described in non-technical terms as a set of poker chip piles) rather than running the calculation from scratch every week.

We all understand that merits older than three weeks don't carry over. The server could track every player's earned merits for every week, resulting in an ever-increasing storage requirement in their database. It could, when calculating players' merit decay each week, start at cycle 1 for every player and apply the formula to each week found. That would mean that each week the calculations would take longer and longer for no gain, because only the previous three weeks carry over.

So instead the most likely explanation is that the game keeps a pool of four numbers for each player. Each week it discards the oldest number, shifts the other three along and inserts that week's new earned value in the empty space. Even if a particular player participated in Powerplay every week from the beginning and the game ran for years and years, this method ensures the server only ever has to deal with four numbers so it's much more efficient.

They fixed the bug whereby not all the pools were being halved. Now they are but because last week's figures carried over too high it looks like the wrong formula is being applied. The algorithm just halves what's given to it. Last week the numbers were wrong so this week they're wrong. Garbage in garbage out.

Using this idea I updated my shonky Javascript merit calculator to use a shift register and its results match the number of total merits I actually earned and carried over (which I recorded in a spreadsheet each week) for every week including this week's surprising results. Add dummy entries for two more weeks and it shows the formula stabilising, too.

Hey, that's a great tool!

It finally sheds some light on this.

So that means: to maintain rank 5 you eventually have to earn 5333 merits per week.
Sometimes one more, sometimes one less.

This is totally ridiculous. And again it only favours those hunting down traders (underminers).
Disappointing.

 

[Comrade Napoleon]

I understand why Ponzi schemes work now after reading this thread...
hehe
Its not power play, its Ponzi Play

cheers Cmdr's

 

[Ginrikuzuma]

Yeah the math is acting funny.

About 3-4 days ago I grinded PP so iw ould have made about 1.5k merits this week. I ended up with a total of about 2.5k due to merits from other days but on that specific day I had grabbed 1.5k.

Yesterday my merits not only decayed but I had 1.3k (instead of 1.5k) and I was still a rating of 2 instead of 4 (requirement of 1.5k.....) so I only received 50k credits.


Today I log on I have 900 merits and I'm Rank 4. What the #!@$

 

[ChaosCloud]

Welp, with this I can leave PP finally behind me I guess.

I only joined in for the shields, got these now, I am not overwhelmed but I'll keep them for now as power capacity allows.

Anyways I was about to do my weekly grind to get back to my 2000 merits which I kept as a buffer so I could pass out on a week and still stay r4 for the 5mil bonus credits, but when I checked how many I needed to make this time I noticed that I lost more merits than I collected in the last 2 weeks together which were just as much as needed to keep them at 2k.

I wonder what addictive MMO measures will be added next, daily mission farming before you get to take a shot at the weekly Power Pharming?


Honestly though, if they even remotely want that people go for PP for the polical struggle and the powers themself then they need to remove the decay, remove the equipment and add something else and worthwhile instead, and especially remove the "salary" because that will short term make most people try to go for PP for r5, realize how insane that is, and then not touch PP ever again anymore (atleast I can imagine that it goes like that sometimes).

 

[Snarfbuckle]

Honestly though, if they even remotely want that people go for PP for the polical struggle and the powers themself then they need to remove the decay, remove the equipment and add something else and worthwhile instead, and especially remove the "salary" because that will short term make most people try to go for PP for r5, realize how insane that is, and then not touch PP ever again anymore (atleast I can imagine that it goes like that sometimes).

Yup.

Even better would be to flesh out faction duties so that we do something worthwile for each factions. Give them PERSONALITY and DIFFERENT goals.

Archon Delaine - Fluid HQ due to Nomadic pirate band and ONLY take over Anarchy systems for "Tortuga" pirate ports.

Li Hong-Rui - Rewards exploration with merits depending on range from HQ and numbers of planets found

Edmund Mahon - Reward merits for trade missions with bonus with deliveries towards non-aligned systems

Denton Patreus - Military hardliner, rewards merits for combat zone kills - double rewards if in enemy systems

Let them be DIFFERENT because this stupid merit is so bare bones its stupid.

I honestly think they ran out of time and made a CCP move and gave us the 10% unfinished idea with some perks and called it a deal.

 

[truecut]

The big problem here is that most players will never reach level 5. And without this perspective there's no reason to join PP. IMO the correct way would be a math model where everybody would reach level 5, some quicker than others cause they play more time/week. In a game where your ship can be destroyed at any moment, 50 mill is not so much.

 

[Snarfbuckle]

The big problem here is that most players will never reach level 5. And without this perspective there's no reason to join PP. IMO the correct way would be a math model where everybody would reach level 5, some quicker than others cause they play more time/week. In a game where your ship can be destroyed at any moment, 50 mill is not so much.

Money as a weekly reward should never had been in it.

Too many carrots for short grinding and too ittle actual powerplay CONTENT.

 

[specialsymbol]

The big problem here is that most players will never reach level 5. And without this perspective there's no reason to join PP. IMO the correct way would be a math model where everybody would reach level 5, some quicker than others cause they play more time/week. In a game where your ship can be destroyed at any moment, 50 mill is not so much.

If you're willing to burn 50 Mill you can reach Rank 5 in a week (not easily, as it involves an awful lot of clicking).
The thing is, why would you want to?
Money? It's a loss. You'll lose initially 50 Mill and you'll lose at least 3 Mill each week after week 2 (which is even).
Anything else? Rank 5 doesn't give you more than Rank 4.

 

[KaizoMK]

Yea, losing well over half my merits this term was staggering. I can't believe it was intended...