I say
might because the cause of shutdowns is only known in broad-strokes... Odyssey had the unfortunate impact of removing a bunch of BGS information sources (such as displaying state effects when completing a mission), as well as introducing a bunch of new unobservable metrics and mechanics, such as the mechanic where settlements can change ownership based on how many conflicts are won at it, regardless of who wins the conflict overall (the unobservable metric here being how many conflicts have players won at a particular settlement).
It's largely accepted that negative states cause base shutdowns. There would be no faulting the statement "Hitting a base and causing a negative state will cause it to shut down".... but it lacks some of the nuance. There's plenty of examples out there of:
- Bases in the shutdown condition with no negative state.
- Bases in the active condition with a negative state active.
Here's how I suspect it works through observations since Odyssey launched... I've never put out there because it's simply impossible to prove one way or another (and I suspect this is why others haven't either). Clearly, FD has metrics of significant occurrances at bases... demonstrated by the CZ mechanic.
We also know there's a bunch of hidden measures behind the scene that have existed in various forms... whether it's bucket sizes, station wealth, number of UA's delivered... and we also know states can affect these things globally; states can lift or reduce wealth levels, which have some poorly-understood effects.
So what I suspect happens is every base has a hidden metric, let's call it stability, and by default it tends towards, say, 50. Actions which support the base (and support the faction overall) have a positive effect and might increase this metric, say, up to 100. Meanwhile, negative actions have negative effects, and might lower this metric. Effects may look like:
- Removing the power core may cause a -2 to this
- Restoring power may cause +2
- Murder might be -0.1
- Theft might be -0.05
- Positive Missions might be +1
... meanwhile each tick it might progress +1 if it's less than 50, -1 if it's greater than 50. But any base that people aren't interacting with is probably going to be at 50.
There might also be a rule; if the base stability hits 25 or lower, it shuts down at the next tick.
Then, negative states.... a negative state might incur a global modifier against that, say, -25 to all stations which also shifts the default tendancy by that much. That makes it
touch 25 and, any station that doesn't have routine interaction gets shut down.... then when the state is resolved, they would come back up. But, if you'd been doing positive interactions with a base leading up to that, then the base wouldn't shut down (as the stability would be higher than 25).
Negative actions against a base leads to negative states... so it's easy to assume base shutdowns to coincide with negative states... but if the mechanic looks like I think it does above, it would explain:
- Why some bases don't shut down during negative states
- Why some bases shut down outside of negative states
- Why negative states generally cause base shutdowns, and
- Why resolving negative stats causes bases to come back online.
At the end of the day, you don't post any observations of any of this, just that "I was streaming while hitting up a base and made a comment about FD and whoa boy base is shut down, it must be a conspiracy against me!" where, if you digest what I've written above, there's a
huge amount you're not telling us and we're having to interpolate, most likely because you simply weren't paying attention to it.
That's fine, but in that case, you need to understand... the BGS is complicated, and it reacts to your actions. If you're smashing the same base over and over (your claim), in a system which on the whole is being smashed over and over (evidenced by the vast array of negative states across it which is much broader),
and you streamed it (people's propensity to be sheep and not seek to understand how things work, and just do
exactly what they see in a video)... well... do the math.
- System is in a bad state
- You're actively making it worse
- You're (directly, indirectly, doesn't matter) inviting further negative actions through your stream
... then chances are, base is going to shut down pretty quick.
