COMPLETED CG Rockforth Fertiliser Disposal Initiative (Trade)

[Deleted member 192138]

This CG was one a relatively small group could have caused to fail, though - if they'd thought quickly when it started and worked really quickly.

It would have cost maybe a billion credits per station - and often rather less than that - to buy up and discard on the pad the entire stock of fertiliser at the few selling stations. It would have been rather difficult for it to succeed after that. Once done they'd probably have had to keep going to make sure the stocks didn't recover too much, of course.

Obviously that didn't happen, but it was I think just about possible in the time available.

Considering we don't know the content of a CG until it's live, by the time people have heard about what the CG is, how it functions, formulated a plan to counteract it and coordinated enough CMDRs to participate to make it happen within a reasonable time frame - that window for stopping it from reaching Tier 1 has probably already closed. The other option is that people just not do CGs, but as long as Tier 1 is an absurdly low barrier to entry people will flock to do the minimum necessary for entry so that they can get whatever reward is given out at the bottom or second rung. Then FDev will continue to push out Galnet articles patting themselves on the back for the number of "independent CMDRs" they've achieved minimal levels of engagement with that given week.

 

[madbilly]

And why does Diaguandri have more than the 15% Sirius discount?

Well, I just checked and it doesn't have a bigger discount for me.... are there other things that influence discounts?

 

[madbilly]

Hmmm, so where can I get this 20% discount on cargo racks? It was only the 15% at KP Tauri.

And as far as I can work out the discount does stack at Diaguandri... I'm getting quite confused. Maybe it just doesn't stack at Mahon systems.

 

[Speedcuffs]

And as far as I can work out the discount does stack at Diaguandri... I'm getting quite confused. Maybe it just doesn't stack at Mahon systems.

And Elite discount maybe?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Considering we don't know the content of a CG until it's live, by the time people have heard about what the CG is, how it functions, formulated a plan to counteract it and coordinated enough CMDRs to participate to make it happen within a reasonable time frame - that window for stopping it from reaching Tier 1 has probably already closed. The other option is that people just not do CGs, but as long as Tier 1 is an absurdly low barrier to entry people will flock to do the minimum necessary for entry so that they can get whatever reward is given out at the bottom or second rung. Then FDev will continue to push out Galnet articles patting themselves on the back for the number of "independent CMDRs" they've achieved minimal levels of engagement with that given week.

It would have required moving extremely quickly, yes. It wouldn't have been at all easy, though it could have been accomplised by a much smaller number of pilots than are actually participating in the CG.

But ... shouldn't it be difficult to do? There are so far 3,843 [1] commanders trying (to a greater or lesser extent) to make the CG succeed. Can the "failure would be more interesting" side scrape together even 38 (100:1 odds) to work in an organised fashion? Even with 384 commanders (10:1 odds) a superior level of organisation, highly creative tactics, and rapid reaction to events would and should be required to get some wins. (384 commanders could certainly have got this one)

Making Tier 1 targets higher would allow CGs to fail through people not showing up (just as they can now, in theory) but wouldn't necessarily make them any easier or interesting to actually oppose, or make the result itself more exciting.

The other thing is ... all targets are relative. Weekly distinct player numbers for Elite Dangerous are in the hundreds of thousands, and no matter what activity you pick only a relatively small percentage take part [2]. CG targets are set so that the normal participant levels (2-4000) have a chance of reaching the top tier, but it's not guaranteed. Station repairs, on the other hand, have targets smaller than the average trade CG's Tier 1 ... and some stations have been awaiting repairs for over a year now. So does that mean that Tier 1 for trade CGs is too high and could easily fail? (Or does it mean - as is more commonly claimed on the forums - that the station repair targets are too high?)

[1] Not the best CG turnout, but still larger than all but one player-organised event.
[2] Distant Worlds 2 took several thousand people away from the bubble for weeks ... and had a barely noticeable effect on in-bubble player activity levels.

 

[Old Duck]

I was able to get a T9 and those expensive size 8 cargo racks thanks to this CG. I'm still poor, so this is a big deal for me!

 

[madbilly]

And Elite discount maybe?

Maybe, but I don't have it so can't confirm.

I was able to get a T9 and those expensive size 8 cargo racks thanks to this CG. I'm still poor, so this is a big deal for me!

Me too! I got my T9, T7 and a new T6 plus stocked up on cargo racks for any ship I might need to outfit.

And I can confirm that prices for me were the same in both Diaguandri and KP Tauri for ships and cargo racks.

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

Looks like the CG has slowed down a lot. Up to tier 5 was quick, now tier 6 takes ages.

 

[jason 55]

Looks like the CG has slowed down a lot. Up to tier 5 was quick, now tier 6 takes ages.

Regardless of the storyline there are only so many trade runs a person can stomach in one session.

 

[CMDR Serra]

It would have required moving extremely quickly, yes. It wouldn't have been at all easy, though it could have been accomplised by a much smaller number of pilots than are actually participating in the CG.

But ... shouldn't it be difficult to do? There are so far 3,843 [1] commanders trying (to a greater or lesser extent) to make the CG succeed. Can the "failure would be more interesting" side scrape together even 38 (100:1 odds) to work in an organised fashion? Even with 384 commanders (10:1 odds) a superior level of organisation, highly creative tactics, and rapid reaction to events would and should be required to get some wins. (384 commanders could certainly have got this one)

Making Tier 1 targets higher would allow CGs to fail through people not showing up (just as they can now, in theory) but wouldn't necessarily make them any easier or interesting to actually oppose, or make the result itself more exciting.

The other thing is ... all targets are relative. Weekly distinct player numbers for Elite Dangerous are in the hundreds of thousands, and no matter what activity you pick only a relatively small percentage take part [2]. CG targets are set so that the normal participant levels (2-4000) have a chance of reaching the top tier, but it's not guaranteed. Station repairs, on the other hand, have targets smaller than the average trade CG's Tier 1 ... and some stations have been awaiting repairs for over a year now. So does that mean that Tier 1 for trade CGs is too high and could easily fail? (Or does it mean - as is more commonly claimed on the forums - that the station repair targets are too high?)

[1] Not the best CG turnout, but still larger than all but one player-organised event.
[2] Distant Worlds 2 took several thousand people away from the bubble for weeks ... and had a barely noticeable effect on in-bubble player activity levels.

Interesting stuff. Thanks Ian.

The million dollar question is: how likely is it that there'll be an easily opposable CG next time around and could we:
a) decide we want to oppose it and
b) have enough resources to oppose successfully
in time to make a difference?

Generally these things happen during the UK working day, so rapid opposition may be difficult before it reaches T1.

 

[Deleted member 192138]

But ... shouldn't it be difficult to do? There are so far 3,843 [1] commanders trying (to a greater or lesser extent) to make the CG succeed. Can the "failure would be more interesting" side scrape together even 38 (100:1 odds) to work in an organised fashion? Even with 384 commanders (10:1 odds) a superior level of organisation, highly creative tactics, and rapid reaction to events would and should be required to get some wins. (384 commanders could certainly have got this one)

I'm not saying it should be easy to prevent a CG from going through by concerted "us versus them" effort. I'm saying the use of CGs as a narrative development to drive player activity is meaningless because failure is made next to impossible. Which is to say that the framing of CGs and IIs encourages the idea that player activity has an impact on how the narrative is played out but this is functionally false, because FDev make it so that their narrative goes ahead anyway. Even with the first II - the narrative choices that players could impact on was 1) meaningless ferry from system A or system B? and 2) useless module A or useless module B? So why the facade and song and dance and backpatting about completing another hard to fail task? Elite: Predictable Outcome.

The reason that station repairs don't get much pace is because they're thankless repetitive tasks without much if any financial return on the work done. So it's a labour of love and duty for people that enjoy space trucking left to a Discord to coordinate and no negative to ignore, unless you happen to be based out of an effected system.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Yes... but that's sort of my point.

If the CG success/failure was made a numbers game between "people who want success" and "people who want failure", then success wins basically every time, no surprises ever. Maybe a couple of competing A-or-B successes might end up close enough to be interesting, though even then most don't when it's been tried before - they're generally walkovers for one side or the other, and obvious by three hours in which way it's going to go. (At which point there's a strong "join the winning team" incentive for mercenaries)

Conversely if the CG success/failure is set to be "collectively achieve target X, or not" then whether X is "foregone conclusion success", "tense finish" or "foregone conclusion failure" depends extremely strongly on how many people actually show up. If CGs were participated in like station repairs ... they'd basically all fail. If station repairs were participated in like CGs ... they'd basically all be done within a month. Yes, there are many good reasons why CGs are currently more popular than station repairs, but that's not important for this. The point is that "tense finish" is really difficult to calibrate precisely. This CG is getting about 4000 participants. The recent player-submitted mining CG got about 800. That's a 5x difference in participants, between CGs just a few weeks apart. If Frontier guess too high, at the start of the week, how many participants there'll be, then a 5x difference makes a "tense finish" into an "auto-fail", no question. Conversely if they guess too low, then a 5x difference makes a "tense finish" into a success after 24 hours or so. This is even more so on any novel sort of CG that isn't just a "farm this RES" or "do this obvious A-B trade with plenty of stock" where Frontier has minimal data on how many players will actually go for it.

If the possibility of failure encourages greater participation by making it more exciting or whatever ... that will basically instantly remove the actual possibility of failure, unless Frontier rapidly adapt the tiers for the next one to make it even harder. Conversely if the possibility of failure keeps turning into actuality, and people keep not getting paid, and therefore give up on showing up to start with ... either Frontier have to drop the targets to make them easier, or accept that CGs will basically never succeed.

Even if they manage to keep it in the "tense" zone ... average participation on a trade CG is going to be in the 2000-4000 range, so whether it succeeds doesn't much depend on your personal efforts but on how many other people show up ... which you also can't influence very much: even the big organised player groups aren't that big. So it's still from an individual perspective pretty arbitrary - that being the case, why not give people a win?

 

[CMDR Serra]

Narratively then - in order to inject some spice into the II/CG model - we should try very hard to make one fail.

Can anyone predict how the story would develop if something failed?

If we didn't defend the stations in II2?
Or protect Palin?
What would have happened if we didn't ship in food for II3?
Or ship out the fertiliser?

I'd say if we can think of a way to do it, without mindless ganking, why not try? Bonus points for coming up with an in-game reason to do so.

 

[Speedcuffs]

Narratively then - in order to inject some spice into the II/CG model - we should try very hard to make one fail.

Can anyone predict how the story would develop if something failed?

If we didn't defend the stations in II2?
Or protect Palin?
What would have happened if we didn't ship in food for II3?
Or ship out the fertiliser?

I'd say if we can think of a way to do it, without mindless ganking, why not try? Bonus points for coming up with an in-game reason to do so.

Right.
Let's break the next bit.
Not sarcasm, let's break it.

 

[Berpol]

Is there any station where the supply for fertilizer did go down?
I ferried over a dozen loads from Diso and Reorte each but the supply does not decrease.

 

[Deleted member 192138]

Right.
Let's break the next bit.
Not sarcasm, let's break it.

I would love to, to see what happens. But then we're back to - how do we coordinate enough people with an adequate response at sufficient speed to actually stick a spanner in the works to see what happens - before the vast majority of people that don't share our curiosity or we simply aren't coordinated with go to follow the normative pattern that CG mechanics set them on from the outset, of simply completing it to take things forward.

 

[Edelgard von Rhein]

CGs were from the outset intended to provide player choice but for the reasons pointed out above, they have only rarely failed, except for competing CGs. To provide for a binary yes/no they need a 'fail condition' that will immediately cause the CG to end in failure if met, just as reaching the highest tier causes it to end immediately in success. The relative ease of both the success and failure would need to be very carefully judged but it is probably no harder than judging the tier structure at present.

Fail conditions could be BGS related, e.g. triggering a war state, failing to remove a famine state in a certain time, or flipping control of a system to a certain party/allegiance. They could also relate to other goals. I wonder if it is possible to calculate tonnage of cargo lost to pirates - World War 2 thinking: starve a target faction out by destroying ships carrying cargo to them, or stealing their cargo.

As for preventing CGs succeeding at present, since UA bombing has been removed only a lockdown state that shuts the markets can throw the proverbial spanner in the works, that I can think of. I don't know if it could be done in time to prevent a CG reaching tier 1 as the tier 1 boundary is often so low it could be reached before the tick takes place, no matter the effort put in to create a lockdown.

 

[GraphiteGB]

Right.
Let's break the next bit.
Not sarcasm, let's break it.

Conflict/defence bonds CG next then as those wanted try to leave known bubble space and use there cannon fodder to slow down persuit ships..

 

[CMDR Serra]

...
As for preventing CGs succeeding at present, since UA bombing has been removed only a lockdown state that shuts the markets can throw the proverbial spanner in the works, that I can think of. I don't know if it could be done in time to prevent a CG reaching tier 1 as the tier 1 boundary is often so low it could be reached before the tick takes place, no matter the effort put in to create a lockdown.

Yeah - I think we just missed the chance we had at blocking a CG. I doubt there'll be another "Pick up single commodity from A, B or C and deliver to D" CG next.

The problem with lockdown is - as you say - it'd take time to do so chances are you'd reach tier 1 before lockdown took effect or (given players would likely try to counteract the negative state via BH) it would probably be over before the CG was done so tier 1 would still be achievable after the lockdown ended.

 

[Factabulous]

Yeah - I think we just missed the chance we had at blocking a CG. I doubt there'll be another "Pick up single commodity from A, B or C and deliver to D" CG next.

In theory you could try and deplete all the CG requirements for, say, 200 Ly around the CG system - that would put off most people (though the WH repairs show that some are difficult to deter ). I guess that's why they always have one of the demands be something like grain which is cheap and has near infinite supply - the chances of depleting all grain within a reasonable radius is ... not great.