Powerplay Some Pie Charts Displaying a Snapshot of Cycle 42 Preparation Attempts

Lance 'Spacecat' D.

Lance 'Spacecat' D.
I've been here since week one. I can tell you that when the Aisling playerbase was bigger and less organized, the highest 'grinder' problem we've had was around 30k tons. And that included a small amount of 5Cing, actually. These days we've less players (I think, maybe) but they're generally better informed.
Also, the 5C came to our reddit to taunt us.
See that screen with 36k merits earned this week? That's on the 17th of march. Aka 36k merits in a single day of this PP turn.
So no, it's not merit grinders, move away from that thought entirely please everyone. Those troublemakers deserve all the merit, pun intended.


I applaud Cori's most thoughtful comment:
Cori said:
It seems this week's prep war is yet more evidence that something needs to be done, and quickly, before the genuine players lose heart.

We've had Sandro's thoughts on what he politely called "collusion piracy" and the rest of us call griefing, and they have promise - what's needed now is urgency.

Any company running a more usual MMO where such a significant griefing of the genuine players was occurring would release a hot fix for it in a couple of days, merely for the sake of placating their player base and maintaining the integrity of the game. That sort of response is needed here, even if it's only some sort of temporary fix until a permanent solution is designed.

Personally I think it should either be made impossible to prepare a system that won't show a real profit, or players should be penalised for doing so. I might even suggest removing the ability to pay for fast tracking preparation materials completely for the moment.
Click to expand...

We can argue for solutions. (My view would be 'diminishing returns' rather than outright cancellation of fast-tracking) But I'm agreeing with everything else. 'What's needed now is urgency' and 'maintaining the integrity of the game'. Thank you Cori.
 

CMDR Atmora

C
I am not saying that the 5C is not large or significant, simply that to say it is all 5C is a foolish assumption. You do make a good point about how the numbers seem larger than other powers, however if you consider the number of fortification merits that were dumped in to Guathiti or any of their expansions (before they began their active scrap campaign and lost a large number of players due to falling in galactic standing) there was massive over fortification and many thousands more merits every cycle put in to these expansions regardless of if they were good or not. It has been a similar story at one point or another with many of the powers. Now this is not to say that whoever is performing these 5C actions does not have a large balance (remembering that it is not necessary to use external cheats in order to get sufficient funds, a few Robigo Runs each cycle added on to presumably a rating 5 salary would be more than enough).

The way to beat the 5C is to get ahead of them, get the grinders working on targets that the organized community wants and through cooperation with allies in order to target specific systems for merit bombing and controlled turmoil. Accusations about who is doing it, who benefits, why or how they are doing it does not help. They are using In-Game Mechanics as they exist currently, wishing that the mechanics were different is fine, but until they are changed, the Aisling organized community needs to find a way to use these same mechanics to beat the Fifth Column at their own game.
 

Arklar

Arklar
Have a couple of graphs to go with your pie charts. The one on the left is ALD, the one on the right is Aisling. A prize to anyone that can spot the Chnumar prep. sabotage attempt ;)
pubchart
pubchart

The 'Inverse Prep' line is just Total Prep flipped upside down, so that it shows when work isn't going into Preparations. For Aisling there's a lovely corrolation between Effective Fortification and time freed up from Preparations in the first coupel of months, indicating that the people who Prep. were also mostly the people who Fortified effectively. The line that shows wasted fortification shows a very small corrolation, but since all fortification results in small amounts of waste you would expect that to follow the Effective Fortification graph. Since the new year it seems the Fort. wasters have become a little more involved in Aisling prep, but there's still a better corrolation with Effective Fortifiers. For ALD, it's a bit more even.

What the graph on the right clearly doesn't show is anything to account for the ~350,000 Prep merits that were thrown into Chnumar the second cycle in Feb. It's the largest Prep total for any power in released data, the largest jump in transport merits for any power, and was followed by the largest drop in transport merits for any power. Somehow that was managed without any sign of it affecting the rest of the work done by Aisling that week.

You can draw your own conclusions.
 
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