That does make me wonder too as to what will make a system desirable? Will be interesting if you have alignment based on something like superpowers / indy or by happiness (so that any faction could work, as long as they are kept away from lockdown, say)
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There was a CG a while back where anyone could have easily made the credits to buy a carrier and then enough for 10 or 20 years worth of upkeep.
Thargoids are now giving out billions of credits worth of bonds in just a few hours of gameplay.
There’s grind in ED, sure, making credits is not one of them. Many people have enough credits stored on their carrier to last a couple more decades.
Yes, it’s a quality of life feature. I can take my ships and modules anywhere I want to go without having to waste time flying between stations picking up what I need.
You do you.
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It’s a quality of life feature mainly for anyone that has it, obviously. Even if you don’t have it you can make use of other players’ carriers from time to time, if you’re so inclined. If you don’t have one and never want to use anyone else’s it’s obviously not a good feature for you.
That’s not really a viable option. There’s far too many private carriers out there. Trying to find the handful that are open to all is an exercise in futility, and they rarely provide services or goods that aren’t available at stations. They’re simply not worth the effort.
Meanwhile, their very presence interferes with regular gameplay. It’s not for nothing that I compare them to housing spam in UO. Private structures in shared public game space is simply a fundamentally bad idea.
People that have them, love them, and they’re not going to give them up now. They’ll sooner make the C4 available to all and make it all open-only.
May be just local factions alignment/government providing some extra stuff... and a % extra to the various powerplay perks.
That would be a nice QOL fix though I often find the distances less than useful as all too often two bio markers or a bio and the ship marker align superimposing the distance numbers making them unreadable.
I disagree a little there, but for nothing to do with PMF support. The point of the BGS was to react and change to the actions of individual players, and make things somewhat dynamic. A good deal of the states are effective at that towards that end, providing variance without too much impact. Towards that end, I'd argue the whole point of the BGS is micro management and fine- grain changes.
By contrast, Powerplay should be the hook into Superpower- against- superpower (and intra- superpower) conflict, and apply gross changes to the environment. It should be ineffective to expect too much control (although a level of control should still be achievable) at a factional level, because a gross change at the powerplay level could severely change things, irrelevant of which faction is in control.
As an example, Mahons(?) food production/ consumption changes when in power were barely noticable, and i can't think of any guide or strategy that seeks out or exploits that.
But if Mahon had drastic changes to fresh food prices to create market conditions comparable to a 30k/t profit gold run (which is ubiquitous) and banned certain other products... suddenly the impact is more drastic and significant.
That's just a light example, but i think other considerations are relevant... for example... maybe a "war" power- level state breaks out between Winters and Aisling. At that point, maybe any systems where Imperial and federal factions exist in a contested domain (or even not) they go into a "power war" state, as a separate non- influence locked war which resolves the same as normal wars, but constantly refreshes, and normal bgs wars can still occur with other factions.
Tldr you don't "fix" the bgs being "too foreground" by reducing what it does... you make it background by introducing more chaos (through things like powerplay) and make it uncontrollable, though understandable.
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I have to admit that I'm more than a little bemused at how you came to the conclusion that I want to take carriers away from players, based on anything that I've written on this thread.
In case you missed it, I find private carriers in public game space to be a nuisance at best. Their mere presence has a detrimental effect on ordinary gameplay. At worst, they've strangled any possibility for carriers to form the foundation of a player-augmented economy. This is exactly the same problem Ultima Online had 30 years ago.
Most MMOs learned that valuable lesson, and keeps private housing (the equivalent of carriers) in another dimension away from public game space. Private carriers should've been instanced away from the rest of the game, visible only to the owner, or their squadron if it's set to squadron only. But no, Frontier just had to refuse to learn from the mistakes of others.
The carrier options can be viewed in the planetary map so you will never need to go to a carrier that isn't suitable for you if present. However, I do agree that more could be done to make them a more worthwhile option for other players. My suggestion is to turn commodities/materials/data into a fully fledged crafting tree where a carrier owner could manufacture bespoke items for other players, including ships/modules/suits/weapons etc. even engineered stuff.
They're easily filtered in the left panel and the planetary map now has them grouped to show more than one around a system body.
Unfortunately, they're not so readily filtered out from
- in game market tools, which are functionally broken by them; and
- the FSS, such that you can't readily distinguish between carriers and human signal sources.
But that's getting pretty OT.
Because demanded certain things from carriers and that was the only way to satisfy the various requirements? It's not a fact of FDEV refusing to learn, it's the players that refuse to learn, just like they keep demanding ED be more like EvE or SC or any other game that would destroy the current model in favour of one they prefer. It's the players you should be blaming, not FDEV!
I'm not sure about the market tools being broken but I will look into it rather than straying further OT, as you say.
I have suggested elsewhere that the FSS should be able to filter Carrier, the other part of the suggestion was to let a carrier owner flip from being listed/unlisted which would only make them discoverable in the FSS so I wouldn't want them to not show at all.
Somewhat tangential, I'm sure Carriers play a part in Power Play, no?
That's one thing I have always wanted, I don't care if carriers are visible to all, I want in unlisted carrier, I mean we have 400b star systems, just how do the tracking tools manage to find my carrier? If I don't want people to know where it is, they shouldn't know unless the actually drop into the same system.
What would be best if doable is that by default carriers were only visible if you had access to them depending on the docking permissions selected.
Actually I am not sure about this now, would it actually be a good idea to allow people to have a stealth base that you could only detect by bumping in to it?
They’re also always visible in Supercruise. They’re particularly annoying when you’re trying to select USSs or other space ships in cockpit en route to your destination.
I'd take that as well, preferably in addition to my suggestion.
They wouldn't be that undetectable, but it would take some recon to figure out if it became necessary, which probably would only be worthwhile if there was a way to make a Fleet Carrier retreat.
I think Rebel Yell is talking about how frustrating it is dealing with PMFs who either appear (or used to) out of the blue with unsuitable gov types, unwilling to compromise and cause issues. It was because of a PMF that I quit PP for a while because trying to sort them out left me screaming at the monitor.
If Powerplay can tie into some other hook other than gov type then all the better, because it removes most friction points- that could mean superpower alignment (Fed, Imp, Alliance and Indy blocks perhaps), security / happiness levels (happy content people perhaps driving down fort costs and lockdown making them higher), perhaps economic type too.
Certainly tying superpower alignment would also help out (and give context) to superpowers themselves since right now there is little reason for them- so that powers become the driving force inside them.
Yeah... so I can totally get how the current impact factions-in-control can have on PP... fundamentally, I'm someone who loves supporting a faction through the BGS and think FD introducing PMFs was a bad idea... even before PP, I remember thinking the whole thing of PMF submissions was unsustainable, abusable and ill-conceived. But it is what it is, and thankfully submissions are closed now.
See, this is where I'm going to jump on my old bandwagon of "FD need to desperately flesh out antagonistic game opportunities"
Like I alluded to... the power in control needs to create gross changes to the play environment which are still meaningful and, most importantly, balanced.
Power activities need to look and feel like normal activities (not merit porting), but deal with gross-scale issues; if you're doing power activities in contested systems, they reflect that... but also influence what's going on with factions... Patreus might offer activities to go out and support Imperial factions in a war state which has impact on both those factions and the power.
But at a factional level, it significantly changes the interactions occurring within the system. Assume a particular power aligned with a superpower controls a region.
- Aligned faction activities are lawful, so, you go bounty hunting, you trade to exploit the market conditions provided by the power for good rewards;
- Anti-aligned faction activities are unlawful, so, you fight authorities[1], smuggle weapons and such for comparably good rewards.
- Independent faction activities are maybe a mix?[2]
But these only have factional level impact. So essentially:
- Activities supporting a power affect the power and local factions; and
- Activities supporting a local faction only affect the local faction
Then casual Joe players unaligned with any power have a choice to make... they were happily running a good set of Imperial trade runs in a region, but now a Federal power has establish influence in the region. Does this Joe then;
- Pivot to supporting the federation's lawful trade opportunities and maintain their current activities, taking a minor hit while they work their federal rep up? or
- Pivot to smuggling or combat in support of the Empire, activities they don't usually do.
Either way, that affects the factions in the region only, but creates that background sim "moulding" that FD wanted it to be. Meanwhile, from a power perspective, a power has can have success in a region regardless;
- A Power-region containing Superpower-aligned factions are supported to benefit the Power; and
- Antagonistic non-aligned factions are kept in check by agents of the Power... so any impact of those factions is kept in check allowing the opposed Power to continue to prosper.
Exactly. Pre-PP, FD incorrectly assumed that players would care about the Superpower, not the individual factions. FD's failing was that they didn't actually flesh out what supporting a superpower looked like (in fact, there's nothing; it's just support-by-proxy through supporting factions). By making superpowers meaningful in an activity sense, Powers become the driver for how that superpowers influence the galaxy, and factions are simply the "lived experience" for players.
[1] Although i highlight it, this is where fleshing out antagonistic game opportunities is needed. At present that just gets you bounties and notoriety.
[2] How Independent factions play in is awkward... as are Anarchies. There's a tropey view that Empire and Federation hate each other, and Alliance/Indies are neutral to them, meanwhile Indies and Alliance hate each other, and Empire/Federation are conversely neutral to them. Workable, but i hate it.
Exactly, you explained the "issue" batter than me... not considering the times that we (independend/criminal cartel) have had to side with some PMFs having a totally different ethos (i.e. bounty hunters) or belonging to other superpowers for allegiance because they had a favourable government... something I really do not like within the current framework.