I think it right to post it here as well.
Our elected "Sky Marshal" Cmdr. Persephonius:
"Greetings Commanders;
This post will be my last public statement as the voice of our main organised powerplay group, now known as the Federal Liberal Command. The target audience are those that wish to proceed in powerplay for the Federation unperturbed by both the recent and historical events that have plagued powerplay and (perhaps not clearly understood elite dangerous as well). It is clear that Frontier will not entertain community suggestion (and I will elaborate our frustrations which have led to this opinion of ours), and so it is unrealistic to target anyone but those in the Federation (and possibly over eager third parties whose time in powerplay proper is very recent and so cannot understand our point of view regardless of their time spent physically in powerplay); and by doing so I hope to elaborate the current state of affairs in the hope that at least the decisions made by the FLC will be understood. There is perhaps an overarching sense that we owe the wider powerplay playerbase beyond our organised group our continued support and time. Unapologetically we refute this feeling and reinforce that we owe nothing; but will extend an explanation of our decision for those that wish to continue so that they might understand why there may be a very rapid change for our power. I have much to say of the state and history of powerplay and elite dangerous and all of it has contributed to our current decision.
Before proceeding however, I should explain that my withdrawal from elite dangerous occurred basically as soon as the 2.1 patch went live and several days before the issues appeared at the cycle 53 tick. It however appears that my reasoning for withdrawal is almost identical to those that wished to withdraw post cycle 53, however a further degree of disappointing development of elite dangerous needed to be experienced for those to have felt similar concerns to effect a similar decision as I had made. I have therefore had a reduced contribution in the overall discussion that has led to several decisions over the last week and only applied some guidance here and there; but mainly my involvement was to encompass the general opinions as best I could for clarity’s sake. There is some divergence in choice as to what individual commanders will now do. There are those like me who have withdrawn from elite dangerous entirely. Others have unpledged to look for activities in elite dangerous beyond powerplay. Some however remain pledged just to maintain a certain rank but with no real concern of the in game occurrences in powerplay with the hope that eventually powerplay will receive some needed improvements.
Through all this; with the discussion that has occurred privately on the FLC and approaching this with much thought about my own experience in elite dangerous; the reasoning behind our decisions are quite complex. It is not actually all about what occurred at the cycle 53 tick, but the cycle 53 tick and the apparent poor management evident that resulted in the tick did accelerate this decision. In fact; we knew that we were already on the path to this decision and over the last 15 to 20 weeks, our main fight has been to extrapolate meaning and motivations for staving of this decision for as long as we could, but the motivation to do this was removed at the cycle 53 tick.
Ok, so why did we decide to abandon powerplay (and for some of us elite dangerous)? To explain this; I need to elaborate what I believe the main development path of elite dangerous as a whole is targetting, and why the mode of gaming we applied to powerplay just does not fit in the scope of the game. When I began elite dangerous, doing anything with a friend was difficult and in fact the ability to form a group was non existant. I understood this as the initial phase of the game and was in awe of the potential that elite dangerous displayed of what could be eventually implemented. I now look back and realise that the original feeling of playing elite dangerous: a lone commander in the expanse of the milky way where the chances of happening on another commander somewhere was exceedingly low; was perhaps that desired effect of the game itself and drove the developmental path. I distinctively remember various threads on the main forums early on regarding the circumstances of co-operative game play and even the potential of Guilds. To me, I actually believed this was to be the natural path of what the game would take on. I was surprised at the large percentage of commanders replying on the forums that were adamant of the opinion that guilds were a bad idea and that player interaction was an unnecessary or superfluous addition (has there been a forum post anywhere near as hotly debated as the open vs solo threads?). I also remember a comment from a community manager to frontier (I looked hard for these comments when preparing this post, but it appears that the history on the forums does not go back this far; well at least I could not find these old posts) reinforcing the idea about the sense that elite dangerous was to simulate the feeling of a lone commander in the expanse of space and that guilds did not fit, but that they were not ruling anything out. This ‘idea’ (of the initial simulation of the experience of a lone commander in space) is of a massive consequence to the way elite dangerous developed I believe, and I will elaborate on this later below.
A further component I believe is that there is a large percentage of vocal forum goers that are dedicated to the lore and history of Elite games. The previous games were of a single player nature. It may be that the majority of player feedback early on was dominated by this subset of players. Players that had waited for Elite Dangerous having played the previous elite titles and comprising of Elite’s most hardcore fans I believe are of a highly niche group; but they would have been the first backers and most likely the most significant backers. There is a social-economic reasoning for this too. Players from the old games would be in a different stage of their lives and so they would have greater economic means to support Elite Dangerous during the Kickstarter program than the new wave of younger gamers. Elite Dangerous was also developed at a critical time as well where a decent online space simulation game (with the Exception of EvE) was virtually non-existant. Frontier I think (smartly) got in on this market early and we now see a whole wave of online space simulation games coming soon. However I believe that Frontier did have a vision of what they wanted Elite Dangerous to be, and they have not compromised this (not one bit) and ignoring potential markets, particularly the dedicated MMO gamers now moving beyond titles such as WoW. Normally, I would fully respect an uncompromising attitude from a game developer; but at some point along the way comments started appearing that elite dangerous would support community interaction.
For players such as myself, I live on player dominated interaction in an MMO. I want a player driven market, I want my activities in game to have consequences of the actions that other players experience. Basically I approached Elite Dangerous from an MMO background with this strange idea that elite dangerous had the potential to be a really good MMO. Ultimately though; it now appears that Elite Dangerous was indeed just Elite 4 with a shared universe; and that was that. This also seems to be exactly what the dedicated Elite fans wanted, and this is fine. Unfortunately I was lured by the comments here and there that community components were being introduced. The first patch; 1.1 community goals as an example. There was nothing in this patch that catered to a community, it just allowed for the wider playerbase to have a say in an event. But community goals were undertaken in the main by individual commanders. It seemed that Frontier had a highly divergent idea of what a gaming community was, being the entire playerbase. I was looking for updates that would cater for communities to develop and engage eachother in game, not just as the mass sum of individual player contribution. I actually took a month off from elite dangerous at around this time with some disappointment, however 1.2 wings and eventually 1.3 powerplay lured me right back in!
I believed that updates 1.2 and 1.3 were the beginning of Elite Dangerous progressing to a fully fledged MMO. However, it seemed that the original vision or ‘idea’ of what elite dangerous actually was dominated the design process of powerplay too. The original version of powerplay did not actually cater for co-operation at all. For example the tier 5 bonus was initially only going to be rewarded to the top 10 or the top 10% of the power. Powerplay was to be an individual participant competing against every other commander as indistinguishable entities, afterall they were just experiencing elite dangerous as a lone commander in the expanse of space as well.
I believe that Frontier envisioned that powerplay what progress in a sort of entropic entropy where individual commanders would participate in a random walk fashion. They ‘fixed’ any concern for consequence between powers by ensuring that powers could not grow beyond a certain limit, the original overhead formula ensured this. I do not accept the argument that Frontier did not mean for the original overhead to stop a powers growth, as seeing the projection of the overhead formula is a trivial operation. I think the original idea that players would participate in powerplay as indistinguishable and alone would mean that there would be no concern about a stagnant growth, and it would be accepted that powers would grow to this size as a representation of the desired range of control allotted to them in the lore. Then there are the issues regarding player activities being seen as indistinguishable, whether they expand a profitable system, prepare a loss maker, undermine another power or blatantly sabotage their own power; they get their salary just the same; no consequence. This is just a random walk after all. I do not think frontier anticipated the level of co-operation that began when powerplay was launched and were at a loss to cater for it; simply because elite dangerous was not designed with this in mind. And of course the fact that defection has zero consequence and copmmanders and collect powerplay modules at will reinforces the idea that you are just a Pilot’s Federation commanders wandering about where loyalty is of no consequence. The idea of what elite dangerous is, and the way the powerplay communities attempted to play powerplay are mutually exclusive, maybe now the foundations of our frustations can be understood?
Because powerplay was designed in this ‘random walk’ fashion, I believe frontier did not feel it too important that the mechanics of powerplay and the in game display of information should have too much clarity. In all honesty, the main fight of all power play communities has been to overcome the original design of powerplay in order that we could actually facilitate community co-operation. What we achieved from our communities was so disjoint from the game itself that our real enjoyment actually occurred outside of the game. When players say that without the powerplay communities, powerplay itself would be bat boring; they are not joking! When the issue of 5c became (finally) apparent to Frontier as a problem that the design allowed for players to exploit, the first ‘ideas’ suggested by Sandro were more along the lines of addressing the individual experience rather than implementing community focussed solutions to solve the problem. The idea to fix this was to make it hard for a player to prepare a bad system. Well, this is exactly what you expect from a developer with no concern about community interaction. The idea would be to make it hard for the indistinguishable actions of players to do a particular thing. This suggestion was where I began to lose hope about the development of elite dangerous. Above all else, communities would be set aside for the original vision of elite dangerous to prevail. Community focused solutions would be to implement consequences for defections, or display the merits delivered by a commander at a system to those in the same power to see who is responsible. This encourages community driven consequences where players in the power can see who is responsible for what and take action, such as establishing contact with the commander in question. This could go further and allow the wider community in the power to declare some a spy and their salary becomes forfeit, and all powerplay controlled stations of that power will shoot that commander. But instead the idea was to rail road what an individual commander can do with no concern with the affect it has on the community, for example this would also have a negative impact on gaining a weaponised expansion.
A further problem I would like to elaborate; that I believe is in action is Frontier’s opinion as to what the playerbase thinks about powerplay may be inaccurate. There are a lot of negative comments from commanders that powerplay is a waste of time etc etc. I believe that Frontier had branched slightly from their original idea for elite dangerous and attempted (to a degree) to cater to the powerplay communities after 1.3 was launched. I think they may have an opinion that everyone believes that powerplay is for large scale community co-operation and that it is unpopular and so implementing co-ordinative gameplay is of a low priority.
I would like to present a simple analogy as to why I think this has caused a lot of the problems:
Lets say that Frontier developed the first railway in Australia between Sydney and Paramatta. Commuters loved the new transport mechanism and gladly supported the rail company frontier and used the railway as a mechanism to not only travel between Sydney and Paramatta, but as a connecting transport method to other locations. Frontier saw that everyone that used the railway obviously travelled between Sydeny and Paramatta, and draw a conclusion that this was the most popular destinations; Sydney being the capital afterall. Frontier was then content with their railway believing it satisfied the need of commuters. After some time, some questions were being raised as to whether or not the rail system would be extended. Frontier replied, everyone that uses this rail way does so to travel between Sydeny and Paramatta, other destinations therefore appear to be not a frequent stop-over and hence there is little need for further rail lines. The commuters angered at this response began withdrawing support from Frontier. Frontier then concluded it must me that the train itself was not too popular, maybe passengers didn’t like sitting together; we will work on other things instead.
This is absurd logic, but I also present this as the absurd logic that Frontier has regarding Powerplay. If I am right, and powerplay was originally designed with the random walk style of gameplay, it becomes difficult for communities to really sink their teeth into it. But it seems that communities themselves are the most enthusiastic about powerplay. Seeing all the negative comments about the place from commanders seeing powerplay as a waste of time being the majority; has Frontier then assumed that their original ‘idea’ is what he community wants and so place community driven aspects in elite dangerous on a low priority as only communities really play powerplay? Well, perhaps commanders have stated they believe powerplay is a waste of time because it was designed in this random walk fashion and individual commanders were railroaded in a sense to play it that way. Only those that really put the effort in established a community basis. If Powerplay was designed with communities in mind; I believe it would be a lot more popular. I believe we are seeing conclusions made about powerplay that the conculsions themselves were railroaded by the design and so poor logic has been applied. On top of all this, where the organisational aspect of powerplay is not catered for, powerplay itself has been managed poorly with results such as cycle 53 (and many others) become possible. Overall this is why we have withdrawn from powerplay as a community, as it appears there is no place for a community to participate.
Perse."
Our elected "Sky Marshal" Cmdr. Persephonius:
"Greetings Commanders;
This post will be my last public statement as the voice of our main organised powerplay group, now known as the Federal Liberal Command. The target audience are those that wish to proceed in powerplay for the Federation unperturbed by both the recent and historical events that have plagued powerplay and (perhaps not clearly understood elite dangerous as well). It is clear that Frontier will not entertain community suggestion (and I will elaborate our frustrations which have led to this opinion of ours), and so it is unrealistic to target anyone but those in the Federation (and possibly over eager third parties whose time in powerplay proper is very recent and so cannot understand our point of view regardless of their time spent physically in powerplay); and by doing so I hope to elaborate the current state of affairs in the hope that at least the decisions made by the FLC will be understood. There is perhaps an overarching sense that we owe the wider powerplay playerbase beyond our organised group our continued support and time. Unapologetically we refute this feeling and reinforce that we owe nothing; but will extend an explanation of our decision for those that wish to continue so that they might understand why there may be a very rapid change for our power. I have much to say of the state and history of powerplay and elite dangerous and all of it has contributed to our current decision.
Before proceeding however, I should explain that my withdrawal from elite dangerous occurred basically as soon as the 2.1 patch went live and several days before the issues appeared at the cycle 53 tick. It however appears that my reasoning for withdrawal is almost identical to those that wished to withdraw post cycle 53, however a further degree of disappointing development of elite dangerous needed to be experienced for those to have felt similar concerns to effect a similar decision as I had made. I have therefore had a reduced contribution in the overall discussion that has led to several decisions over the last week and only applied some guidance here and there; but mainly my involvement was to encompass the general opinions as best I could for clarity’s sake. There is some divergence in choice as to what individual commanders will now do. There are those like me who have withdrawn from elite dangerous entirely. Others have unpledged to look for activities in elite dangerous beyond powerplay. Some however remain pledged just to maintain a certain rank but with no real concern of the in game occurrences in powerplay with the hope that eventually powerplay will receive some needed improvements.
Through all this; with the discussion that has occurred privately on the FLC and approaching this with much thought about my own experience in elite dangerous; the reasoning behind our decisions are quite complex. It is not actually all about what occurred at the cycle 53 tick, but the cycle 53 tick and the apparent poor management evident that resulted in the tick did accelerate this decision. In fact; we knew that we were already on the path to this decision and over the last 15 to 20 weeks, our main fight has been to extrapolate meaning and motivations for staving of this decision for as long as we could, but the motivation to do this was removed at the cycle 53 tick.
Ok, so why did we decide to abandon powerplay (and for some of us elite dangerous)? To explain this; I need to elaborate what I believe the main development path of elite dangerous as a whole is targetting, and why the mode of gaming we applied to powerplay just does not fit in the scope of the game. When I began elite dangerous, doing anything with a friend was difficult and in fact the ability to form a group was non existant. I understood this as the initial phase of the game and was in awe of the potential that elite dangerous displayed of what could be eventually implemented. I now look back and realise that the original feeling of playing elite dangerous: a lone commander in the expanse of the milky way where the chances of happening on another commander somewhere was exceedingly low; was perhaps that desired effect of the game itself and drove the developmental path. I distinctively remember various threads on the main forums early on regarding the circumstances of co-operative game play and even the potential of Guilds. To me, I actually believed this was to be the natural path of what the game would take on. I was surprised at the large percentage of commanders replying on the forums that were adamant of the opinion that guilds were a bad idea and that player interaction was an unnecessary or superfluous addition (has there been a forum post anywhere near as hotly debated as the open vs solo threads?). I also remember a comment from a community manager to frontier (I looked hard for these comments when preparing this post, but it appears that the history on the forums does not go back this far; well at least I could not find these old posts) reinforcing the idea about the sense that elite dangerous was to simulate the feeling of a lone commander in the expanse of space and that guilds did not fit, but that they were not ruling anything out. This ‘idea’ (of the initial simulation of the experience of a lone commander in space) is of a massive consequence to the way elite dangerous developed I believe, and I will elaborate on this later below.
A further component I believe is that there is a large percentage of vocal forum goers that are dedicated to the lore and history of Elite games. The previous games were of a single player nature. It may be that the majority of player feedback early on was dominated by this subset of players. Players that had waited for Elite Dangerous having played the previous elite titles and comprising of Elite’s most hardcore fans I believe are of a highly niche group; but they would have been the first backers and most likely the most significant backers. There is a social-economic reasoning for this too. Players from the old games would be in a different stage of their lives and so they would have greater economic means to support Elite Dangerous during the Kickstarter program than the new wave of younger gamers. Elite Dangerous was also developed at a critical time as well where a decent online space simulation game (with the Exception of EvE) was virtually non-existant. Frontier I think (smartly) got in on this market early and we now see a whole wave of online space simulation games coming soon. However I believe that Frontier did have a vision of what they wanted Elite Dangerous to be, and they have not compromised this (not one bit) and ignoring potential markets, particularly the dedicated MMO gamers now moving beyond titles such as WoW. Normally, I would fully respect an uncompromising attitude from a game developer; but at some point along the way comments started appearing that elite dangerous would support community interaction.
For players such as myself, I live on player dominated interaction in an MMO. I want a player driven market, I want my activities in game to have consequences of the actions that other players experience. Basically I approached Elite Dangerous from an MMO background with this strange idea that elite dangerous had the potential to be a really good MMO. Ultimately though; it now appears that Elite Dangerous was indeed just Elite 4 with a shared universe; and that was that. This also seems to be exactly what the dedicated Elite fans wanted, and this is fine. Unfortunately I was lured by the comments here and there that community components were being introduced. The first patch; 1.1 community goals as an example. There was nothing in this patch that catered to a community, it just allowed for the wider playerbase to have a say in an event. But community goals were undertaken in the main by individual commanders. It seemed that Frontier had a highly divergent idea of what a gaming community was, being the entire playerbase. I was looking for updates that would cater for communities to develop and engage eachother in game, not just as the mass sum of individual player contribution. I actually took a month off from elite dangerous at around this time with some disappointment, however 1.2 wings and eventually 1.3 powerplay lured me right back in!
I believed that updates 1.2 and 1.3 were the beginning of Elite Dangerous progressing to a fully fledged MMO. However, it seemed that the original vision or ‘idea’ of what elite dangerous actually was dominated the design process of powerplay too. The original version of powerplay did not actually cater for co-operation at all. For example the tier 5 bonus was initially only going to be rewarded to the top 10 or the top 10% of the power. Powerplay was to be an individual participant competing against every other commander as indistinguishable entities, afterall they were just experiencing elite dangerous as a lone commander in the expanse of space as well.
I believe that Frontier envisioned that powerplay what progress in a sort of entropic entropy where individual commanders would participate in a random walk fashion. They ‘fixed’ any concern for consequence between powers by ensuring that powers could not grow beyond a certain limit, the original overhead formula ensured this. I do not accept the argument that Frontier did not mean for the original overhead to stop a powers growth, as seeing the projection of the overhead formula is a trivial operation. I think the original idea that players would participate in powerplay as indistinguishable and alone would mean that there would be no concern about a stagnant growth, and it would be accepted that powers would grow to this size as a representation of the desired range of control allotted to them in the lore. Then there are the issues regarding player activities being seen as indistinguishable, whether they expand a profitable system, prepare a loss maker, undermine another power or blatantly sabotage their own power; they get their salary just the same; no consequence. This is just a random walk after all. I do not think frontier anticipated the level of co-operation that began when powerplay was launched and were at a loss to cater for it; simply because elite dangerous was not designed with this in mind. And of course the fact that defection has zero consequence and copmmanders and collect powerplay modules at will reinforces the idea that you are just a Pilot’s Federation commanders wandering about where loyalty is of no consequence. The idea of what elite dangerous is, and the way the powerplay communities attempted to play powerplay are mutually exclusive, maybe now the foundations of our frustations can be understood?
Because powerplay was designed in this ‘random walk’ fashion, I believe frontier did not feel it too important that the mechanics of powerplay and the in game display of information should have too much clarity. In all honesty, the main fight of all power play communities has been to overcome the original design of powerplay in order that we could actually facilitate community co-operation. What we achieved from our communities was so disjoint from the game itself that our real enjoyment actually occurred outside of the game. When players say that without the powerplay communities, powerplay itself would be bat boring; they are not joking! When the issue of 5c became (finally) apparent to Frontier as a problem that the design allowed for players to exploit, the first ‘ideas’ suggested by Sandro were more along the lines of addressing the individual experience rather than implementing community focussed solutions to solve the problem. The idea to fix this was to make it hard for a player to prepare a bad system. Well, this is exactly what you expect from a developer with no concern about community interaction. The idea would be to make it hard for the indistinguishable actions of players to do a particular thing. This suggestion was where I began to lose hope about the development of elite dangerous. Above all else, communities would be set aside for the original vision of elite dangerous to prevail. Community focused solutions would be to implement consequences for defections, or display the merits delivered by a commander at a system to those in the same power to see who is responsible. This encourages community driven consequences where players in the power can see who is responsible for what and take action, such as establishing contact with the commander in question. This could go further and allow the wider community in the power to declare some a spy and their salary becomes forfeit, and all powerplay controlled stations of that power will shoot that commander. But instead the idea was to rail road what an individual commander can do with no concern with the affect it has on the community, for example this would also have a negative impact on gaining a weaponised expansion.
A further problem I would like to elaborate; that I believe is in action is Frontier’s opinion as to what the playerbase thinks about powerplay may be inaccurate. There are a lot of negative comments from commanders that powerplay is a waste of time etc etc. I believe that Frontier had branched slightly from their original idea for elite dangerous and attempted (to a degree) to cater to the powerplay communities after 1.3 was launched. I think they may have an opinion that everyone believes that powerplay is for large scale community co-operation and that it is unpopular and so implementing co-ordinative gameplay is of a low priority.
I would like to present a simple analogy as to why I think this has caused a lot of the problems:
Lets say that Frontier developed the first railway in Australia between Sydney and Paramatta. Commuters loved the new transport mechanism and gladly supported the rail company frontier and used the railway as a mechanism to not only travel between Sydney and Paramatta, but as a connecting transport method to other locations. Frontier saw that everyone that used the railway obviously travelled between Sydeny and Paramatta, and draw a conclusion that this was the most popular destinations; Sydney being the capital afterall. Frontier was then content with their railway believing it satisfied the need of commuters. After some time, some questions were being raised as to whether or not the rail system would be extended. Frontier replied, everyone that uses this rail way does so to travel between Sydeny and Paramatta, other destinations therefore appear to be not a frequent stop-over and hence there is little need for further rail lines. The commuters angered at this response began withdrawing support from Frontier. Frontier then concluded it must me that the train itself was not too popular, maybe passengers didn’t like sitting together; we will work on other things instead.
This is absurd logic, but I also present this as the absurd logic that Frontier has regarding Powerplay. If I am right, and powerplay was originally designed with the random walk style of gameplay, it becomes difficult for communities to really sink their teeth into it. But it seems that communities themselves are the most enthusiastic about powerplay. Seeing all the negative comments about the place from commanders seeing powerplay as a waste of time being the majority; has Frontier then assumed that their original ‘idea’ is what he community wants and so place community driven aspects in elite dangerous on a low priority as only communities really play powerplay? Well, perhaps commanders have stated they believe powerplay is a waste of time because it was designed in this random walk fashion and individual commanders were railroaded in a sense to play it that way. Only those that really put the effort in established a community basis. If Powerplay was designed with communities in mind; I believe it would be a lot more popular. I believe we are seeing conclusions made about powerplay that the conculsions themselves were railroaded by the design and so poor logic has been applied. On top of all this, where the organisational aspect of powerplay is not catered for, powerplay itself has been managed poorly with results such as cycle 53 (and many others) become possible. Overall this is why we have withdrawn from powerplay as a community, as it appears there is no place for a community to participate.
Perse."
Last edited:
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