Sol Powerplay Update

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
The Blue Fox said:
Not to be a buzz or anything, but I think similar thing is happening in the current CG system.
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No, that's pretty normal - reinforcement via generally "doing stuff" is pretty powerful (even in cases like this where the CG activity doesn't score directly), whereas undermining via generally "doing stuff" is very weak (and a lot of deliberate undermining actions are illegal so make doing the CG itself more difficult), so in almost all cases CG systems get strongly reinforced just through having a lot of players present in the system even though roughly 11/12ths of pledged players will undermine rather than reinforce.

A million points of reinforcement isn't anywhere near as unusual as a million points of undermining.

(If anything this system is unusually undermined - it has about 1/11th of all undermining taking place so far this week, but only about 1/17th of all reinforcement)
 

zimms

zimms
rootsrat said:
Great to see Frontier taking action so swiftly!
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For a bug fix or Frontier in general, yes. For a competitive MMO mechanic, a couple of weeks isn't that great. The damage has been done and is here to stay. Returning those systems is only part of the equation. The players of the affected Powers wasted all that time and merits trying to defend those systems. These merits could have been used to acquire or fortify other systems. Unfortunately there is no good solution to this, because of course Frontier can't just give those Powers some compensation merits because that would be unfair to other Powers again if they could just dump those merits uncontested (also, there's no one who has the authority to decide where those merits would go).

Botters might have lost some burner accounts, but their goal has been (partly) achieved. Ideally Frontier should have reacted earlier, especially when things look that obvious.
 

Shadowsnog

Shadowsnog
DjVortex said:
Balance is important. Elite Dangerous needs to be a perfectly balanced game with no exploits.
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id like to think that every game should aim for balance and no exploits ^^
though to be honest it is an utopian idea. kinda like communism or democracy :p

i just hope this wont be months of no data merits resulting in them being permanently disabled and powers changing their ethos :/
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
DjVortex said:
Balance is important. Elite Dangerous needs to be a perfectly balanced game with no exploits.
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Balance is a tricky thing, though.

It's really easy to balance everything by making it flat: presence of a CMDR in a system generates N merits an hour no matter what they do. But that's also incredibly dull - you'd think that there should be some room for skill in there, or creative combinations of activities that fall short of an exploit, or making use of local conditions.

Systems are also of course not the same. Mining is massively overpowered ... in the systems it's good for. You're not going to get anywhere mining in a system with no rings and one rocky asteroid belt. So while mining does probably need to be reined in a bit at the high end, it's already pretty useless in a lot of systems.

Megaship scanning, on the other hand, starts off unavailable in most systems and improves to marginally useful in some others - but has a massive difference between "one person doing it ten times" and "ten people doing it once" that's incredibly difficult to balance out.

It also depends what balance point Frontier actually want.
- if (as they've claimed) they want undermining to be somewhat balanced with reinforcement, then they need things to be incredibly well-balanced because people really hate having their systems undermined.
- if they want to keep the current situation where successful undermining in the face of opposition is essentially automatic evidence of exploits, then the exact balance isn't important at all, and if they just improve some of the other reinforcement methods to bring them a bit more in-line with mining everyone will be happy
 

JR250

J
I would propose these two points in order to reel in the uncontrolled Power feeding frenzy:

1. Daily cap of control score per player. You can knock yourself out with all you can eat merits so you don't necessarily need to stop after reaching your daily score quota.
2. The controlling minor faction causes a positive reinforcement factor for their pledged Power, and a negative factor for opposing Powers.

Further on #2 above, it doesn't make much sense that a Power can force themselves into a system owned by a Super Power representative. Perhaps I'm wrong but it seems to be Super Power > Power. An Imperial faction owned system should not be so easily "exploited" by an Alliance Power, for example. Sure, Power and BGS are "different" but in the end, a Powerplay aligned with an enemy Super Power has usurped all influence and profits from a system owned by their minor faction representative.

In other words, have your BGS minor faction control a system if you want your Power to have an easier time expanding and exploiting it. And not that it matters much but it is bizarre to arrive to an Alliance Power controlled system and be greeted by the station's "Welcome to Federation space". You mean, the 10km of space around the station?
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
JR250 said:
1. Daily cap of control score per player. You can knock yourself out with all you can eat merits so you don't necessarily need to stop after reaching your daily score quota.
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It'd be a good way to sell alts to the more dedicated Powerplay CMDRs but otherwise irrelevant, unless the cap was set so low that they might as well just freeze the Powerplay map as it is.

JR250 said:
2. The controlling minor faction causes a positive reinforcement factor for their pledged Power, and a negative factor for opposing Powers.
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They had this in the original Powerplay, with the result that the organised Power player groups ended up being large and influential BGS players as well, to the great annoyance of BGS players who didn't care about Powerplay but were nowhere near large enough. It was very deliberately removed for Powerplay 2 and I can't see Frontier putting it back.

It's also really unevenly distributed in terms of which Powers it helps or hinders (massively pro-Independent, anti-Alliance). In terms of current BGS control:
- Alliance: ~3000 systems
- Empire: ~12000 systems
- Federation: ~9000 systems
- Independent: ~44000 systems

The interaction between superpowers, powers and minor factions is not coherent and probably can't be made coherent without abolishing one of those three layers entirely, at least as an in-game presence (given the choice, I'd go for "superpowers" as the one to get rid of, since they barely did anything in-game to start with and half of that was downplayed or taken out by later changes).
 

Ned Flandalorian

N
gbjbaanb said:
This one will be valid - there are a couple thousand players each fighting for the empire (and the missile rewards) and handing in their CG bounties - all in this single system.
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The CG isn't for bounties, it's for combat bonds which don't contribute towards powerplay. But the presence of the empire supporters doing other random things (e.g. scanning ships) would be.
 

JR250

J
Ian Doncaster said:
It'd be a good way to sell alts to the more dedicated Powerplay CMDRs but otherwise irrelevant, unless the cap was set so low that they might as well just freeze the Powerplay map as it is.
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That doesn't already happen? :) And yes, I shouldn't be able to make >1M merits in a week like it regularly happens today - even outside the recent exploit used by some.

Ian Doncaster said:
They had this in the original Powerplay, with the result that the organised Power player groups ended up being large and influential BGS players as well, to the great annoyance of BGS players who didn't care about Powerplay but were nowhere near large enough.
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Oh this definitely already happens. It is precisely the large, and newly organized Power groups that are wrecking havoc on all things BGS. They don't just want your system for their Power, they want to kick you out because you represent their enemy Power. Whereas we could manage the 1:1 conflicts with BGS factions, it is now a constant recruiting of the rest of your Powerplay members to fight them back.

But, I believe that's what we were going for: an EVE Online-type environment where there are only very large groups, and always fighting each other. Let's see what Vanguards bring that is different. 07
 

gbjbaanb

gbjbaanb
Ned Flandalorian said:
The CG isn't for bounties, it's for combat bonds which don't contribute towards powerplay. But the presence of the empire supporters doing other random things (e.g. scanning ships) would be.
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I thought bounty hunting bonds, even in combat zones, counted towards merits for some PP powers. One being Arissa in reinforcement systems.

Combat: all combat-related activities, i.e. bounty hunting, combat zone and Powerplay ship hunting.
 

CrazyEyes99

C
Phil W said:
Greetings commanders,

We have been closely monitoring the Powerplay situation in Sol and a number of other affected systems. We are aware of a recent increase in undermining scores impacting the powerplay status of those systems, and have taken action to address the situation.

To prevent further impact, we have temporarily disabled system score and merit gain from the on foot transfer power data activity until a permanent fix is in place. On the next Thursday maintenance (19th June), we will return the systems to their appropriate state. Please note that the galaxy map panel for the affected systems will also return to normal at this time.
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So what got reverted? Checking Fong Wang, V886 Centauri, Nuenets, etc... and it doesn't appear anything was done.
 
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