Maybe the majority of them are balanced grownups?
Deep down they all want to dress up and go crazy.
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The Imperial powerplay base significantly outnumbers the Federal one, and the Alliance have kind of decided to go against the Feds as well. There's a lot of damage that can be done to the Feds elsewhere while they clear up this mess, so it feels like a simple penalty. If things still end up going against Archer in the core worlds (and with fewer players they are surely the underdog) then it's going to look like a pretty imbalanced move by FDev, particularly since as you say no equivalent thing can be done to any other of the other powers.
I know a lot of people who joined Archer because Archer controlled Sol. Different folks have different reasons for pledging.
The issue with losing Sol (and systems) is that actual effort was already put into those - Sol had been pushed to the top of the reinforcement bar, and many systems around it were player-induced fortified or stronghold systems. It sucks for everyone involved to have the merits they spent weeks earning invalidated by a scripted event.
I don't want Thargoids to wipe out Alioth or Achenar either - it'll just get more people to feel like their time was useless, and get more pilots to drop Powerplay.
2.0 finally got people to give it another try, I'd rather not see things go back to where they were after years of frustration with old PP.
This I can understand. It should be that if the Goids whack a powerplay system the power should have megaships established nearby for players to stockpile power INF ready to rebuild (so its a headstart but not an instant win).
I think this is a very reasonable recovery setup and wholeheartedly support this idea.
It's the requests to insta-rollback the system status to pre-Cocijo invasion (as if it never happened) that I strongly object to.
Why would that be a problem though? It's like PP was paused for these systems for the Thargoid war and resumed afterwards. It's the only option that doesn't penalize anybody.
Because you'd be putting up an artificial wall between PP and the Thargoid gameplay, like they were two unrelated & disconnected things. We already moved away from that ,in a way, when the Thargoids hit Jameson memorial and disrupted what was formerly a sacrosanct & inviolable place.
And now PP 2.0 will inevitably interact with colonization efforts and will one day intersect with the Thargoid sphere of influence as well. That's why we can't have artificial walls between them at all.
We haven't decided, the choice was imposed on us by the Feds themselves.
You see, if a power had used on you botting to undermine your sphere during PP 1 (which granted some ban within former Hudson staff), and then use in PP 2 the settlement data duplication glich to drop more than 1.2 millions undermining point to one of your stronghold (yes we have the name, we have the proof, it was an Archer player alone), the choice would be only natural under those condition.
So yes, praise the princess and I whish her a full and glorious success for the takeover of Sol.
To be clear, I wholly support FD sending in support now to facilitate the recovery of the Fed systems hit hard by Cocijo's incursion. Pretty sure the other Powers won't object since it'll be their turn one day. But no Groundhog Day scenarios please.
The same mechanism could still apply, and right now unless the Thargoids are again relegated to picking on fringe systems which most players don't care too much about (even if Nu Guang had its fervent defenders throughout the war and there is the obvious candidate of HIP 23716 as the first system to be won from an invasion, then subsequently always held), there is always going to be a 'Power' that feels it somewhere when Thargoids are hand-placed to pick on a system/cluster of systems by Frontier.
It definitely is a valid debate whether a Thargoid incursion (or even the mere threat of one, as Sol's alert status showed) should be an outright reset of the Powerplay activities in the affected system(s), as was made a case in another thread on this very subject, but it should also not be completely gate kept away from affecting it even if it's a hand-placed thing. And we all know that the next Thargoid attack will be hand-placed by Frontier because... well, I don't see any origin points for them unless the Titans suddenly start to Frankenstein themselves back together. Which I doubt will happen. I guess the spires might serve as starting points but then we're back to the issue of "Everything affected is fringe systems relatively unknown to players".
Given that neither Achenar or Alioth sphere look like a swiss cheese with hostile power in reach....
You may already have your answer.
I'm trying to understand your point here, are you saying because some Hudson/Archer players used an exploit that justifies the devs wiping all the other players progress? Since I'm pretty sure most don't participate in that sort of thing. I'm 100% against people using exploits or botting since it ruins the spirit of competition in the game.
I think people need to take a step back from all the roleplay and beefs between the factions involved in powerplay (which I will admit is part of the fun of it) and just objectively ask themselves, is this a fair thing for the devs to do? I get it's shaking things up and it's interesting to see how this all plays out, but I don't think it's a good thing to have this at the expense of any single player group, especially one of the smaller ones.
It could be said that the undermining penalties might need to be adjusted to make any sort of push into a fully fortified Sol bubble more competitive and possible in the future, and I think most Federal players would welcome that.
No, but I would gladly call it karma, I would have prefered a rollback (not just a ban) when Feds used botting to cause the gigantic Mahon turnmoil in PP 1, and when they used the data duplication glitch in PP 2 (them and every other power which used it), but FDev did not and haven't reverted the destruction they caused.
I would even says that in sense, the creation of Nakato Kaine herself is a creation of the Feds, her extreme hostility towards the Feds taking its root very deeply from the past issue produced by the Feds community, as much than it's the Feds, by there own action which largely contributed to reinforce the bound between the Imperial and Alliance PP community (and BGS wise as well actually).
So yeah, I call it karma, unduced by there own action, and at one point the random Feds player will have to ask to themselves why the vast majority of the other power dislike them...
I'm looking at the galactic map, and granted the way it displays system alignment is a little whacky at times, but I'm not really seeing anything that looks like there's a big swath of Alliance systems held by any Federation factions? Mahon is by far the biggest faction next to Aisling and not really looking like it's lost any territorial integrity, so I'm not really getting where the hostility is coming from tbh. Out of curiosity what systems were botted/exploited? Probably a little off the topic but I'm genuinely curious lol
But back to the point, FDEV need to maintain the integrity of the Powerplay system or it will go right back to no-one really interacting with it again besides getting the ship parts. Which would be a massive shame since PP2.0 does seem to be much more interactive than last time. The exploits should be closed off and anyone caught botting should get kicked, no matter what faction does it because fair is fair. And especially the Devs shouldn't be wiping out like 15 systems of one factions work, even if some can see it as karma from some squads shady actions. Since that hardly seems fair to punish the whole group of players off of a few people's actions.
Some might call it karma, but if you want to look at it that way, some would say that collective punishment is a war crime.