Suggested Powerplay tweak

Powerplay, as far as I understand, is a system that encourages player interaction and competition, by grouping players to different powers with opposing agenda. However, in the current state, maybe there is some room for improvement in this system. It has potential in my opinion, but it will certainly require design effort. I’m here to provide my perspective and my way of thinking about this topic.

My purpose is to provide more goals for players and more options to engage powerplay, while suggesting possible treatments to some outstanding issues. The systems I purpose here are interconnected with each other, so I’ll have to express them in a concrete manner. There are certainly more ways to enhance powerplay other than the one I’ll be talking about, so let’s be creative.

I’ll start from the facts I see in power play. These facts are not necessary issues, but are something that could be tweaked, adjusted, or supported by other mechanism to expand the possibility they bring. After that I’ll express my opinion about them and propose some ideas. In the end I will try to address some issues about powerplay and PVP in general.

The following is my experience of power play in my point of view.

What I’ve seen:

  • Player interaction: The activity of every power is largely driven by voluntary players.
  • Power activity: Players can help their power by preparing, expanding and fortifying systems, gaining merits in the process.
  • Resource management: Powers have CC as a resource to manage.
  • Power interaction: Powers interact with each other mostly on territory conflict.
  • Player reward: Rating provide players salary and benefits as players continue to help the power. Players are somewhat encouraged to shift sides if they want to get power-specific modules of other power.

Before I start, I would like to suggest some mechanisms to support powerplay-specific gameplay.

Power signature (PS)
There is a togglable option in the ship function panel that allows players to choose whether to engage powerplay or not.

  • With this power signature turned on, players represent the power they aligned, so they can enjoy the full benefit and all consequence by supporting the power.

  • PVP actions done while both side has PS on will always be considered as legit powerplay interactions and power bounty will be issued in such case. This applies to PVE as well. As long as it is considered powerplay interaction, power cops will be sent in instead of normal cops, to allow players to choose between retreat or getting more power bounty by fighting power cops. But if the player conducts other crime in the process, normal crime rule will apply.

  • Ship destroyed in legit powerplay interaction will have their insurance cost partially covered by the power to encourage more active PvP gameplay. The percentage will be determined by player rating and power. For instance, the super-rich Sirius guy will always buy a new ship for you no matter the rating or ship type, because he can (compare to systems, no ship is too expensive). While the princess will cover all trading ship rebuy cost regardless the rating because she cares.

  • However, normal bounties won’t be claimed in powerplay interactions, only power bounties. Optionally, we can limit power bounties to only be collectable form ships with PS on, to separate the consequence of engaging powerplay form normal activities.

  • While PS on, traveling in a hostile system will become more dangerous as every hostile power cops will try to mess with you. PS can only be switched from inside a station of a control system controlled by aligned power, so players will have to think carefully before switching it.

  • Players will lose the ability to affect normal BGS, only PBGS (see below) when PS on. Reputation of all local factions will be capped at certain level according to controlling power, since the player are now a representative of their power (ex: capped at cordial in exploited systems of other power). Or we can simply reduce reputation gaining rate. This penalty is to avoid PS-on-all-day becoming an obliviously superior choice due to the benefits it provides. (adjustable)

The goal of PS is to allow more intensive power-related gameplay while to avoid interrupting other parts of the game. As long as PS is off, the player is left alone by all powers and no power cops will cause them trouble if they’re clean. Rating bonus and merits earning when PS off may be disabled or halved for balancing reasons.

Powerplay Background Simulation (PBGS)
The reason to add this and the detail of it will be discussed later. Now I’ll simply say it’s a system similar to BGS, but for powers instead of factions. Powers differ from factions in a way that they don’t have to deal with influences since they play at a bigger playfield, the galaxy. What PBGS will do is mostly about internal logistic and the grasp of their control systems. It is also a system to further the agenda of a power with their own resource to simulate the operation of a large-scale entity.

Power Mission (PM)
Missions provided by powers. Again, allow me to defer its discussion for clarity. If you find at this point that I’m making powers act more like factions, you are correct. I want to make organizations act in a similar way to create more consistency. Players can expect similar interactions like factions when dealing with powers. This kind of familiarity sometimes can improve the willingness of players to engage a new system. And in my opinion, it is reasonable in term of fiction. Powers have resources and manpower at their disposal for sure, but if they still appreciate the help of independent pilots, there must be something their regular agents can’t manage. They have to count on skillful independent pilots to do the trick, while leaving the rest of triviality to their own. Hence the justification of such a system.


Now let’s get started. It’s long, so please bear with me.

What I thought about it:

Player interaction
I’ll have to be honest here. Player motivation in powerplay is varied. Although the nature of powerplay is about player interaction, the view form developers and that from players could be a different story. Players can choose to work for the power they align, or they can work for themselves (for PSM etc). I’ve seem too many over prepared/expanded/fortified/opposed systems around the galaxy. There’s nothing to be blamed, since players do this to earn merits. But to me it’s a bit weird to watch.

Speaking about earning merits, in terms of risk management, the single best and most steady way to earn merits is to avoid other opposing players and stay safe. Players are constantly evaluating the options they have and the risk it brings to achieve their goals. It is natural for them to choose the easiest path with minimal resistance when they have something that urgently needs to be done (ex: maintaining rating).

From my perspective, it is hard to expect a consistent gameplay experience generated solely by player action. I’m not saying there’s none, many cmdrs had fun by working together, and there are some very active player groups who are creating their own chapters (with the help of developers sometimes). What I want to express here is: developers have no direct control over player interaction. They only set up rules and mechanisms to generate experience. It is the player who decides what to do with the game system and how to interact with other players. Gaming experience will be largely inconsistent if the goals of players mismatch the expectation of developers.

This is a MMO game I understand. Player interaction is a big part of it, and I’m not going to eliminate it. I want to support it with more rules and mechanisms, and to provide more tools for devs to manage a steady gameplay experience. To accomplish this, a system that generates goal and guidelines for each player according to the dynamic situation can be helpful. I’ll explain how this Power Mission system work in the next section. With this system, powers can provide more thing to do to fully utilize the skill of their supporters.

It seems strange to me that such powerful people would solely depend on independent pilots to do their work. I understand that we want players to feel their action and opinion matters, but it breaks my immersion about this system. Why are their decisions and actions affected by independent pilots so much? They are powerful, as they’re being called a power. In my opinion, it is reasonable for them to have their own fleet and officers to act out their will (and reasonable to be somewhat more authoritative). Not just some wandering power cops hunting bounty around, but the real thing that can drive this power moving toward its goal. PBGS is the solution I came up for this topic, but I’ll defer its discussion until Resource Management for now.

As a player, I want to feel engaged in a large-scale power struggle, as a participant, instead of a decision maker. Of course, player action should still matter to encourage participation, but perhaps not to this extend. I want to be part of the power, not the power itself. For players who would like to have a say on decision making, there can still be some position in the power, like consultants, but it requires player’s dedication to the power to obtain.



Power activity
I’ve played some strategy games before, and I found that they all share some similarities. Similarity isn’t a bad thing, as it eases the learning curve to understand a new game if a player already had some experience in this genre. The system in powerplay is quite different from what I’ve seen, and it took me a while to get what is going on and how to participate it, especially about how expansion, undermining, and opposition work (because all I knew about territory conflict is fighting and building stuffs).

Every power has different way to prepare and expend, to suit different playestyle. But they all fortify/control in the same way. Why do I have to get power commodity from Kamadhenu to fortify for A Lavigny-Duval, when all I read about her control method is combat? This has confused me quite a while.

Anyway, that’s not the point. I was going to talk about PM and its detail.

But before we go on, I would like to express one of my feeling about Elite: Elite is very gentle in its way to throw game content at players, to the extent that if a player doesn’t choose to engage in a certain activity, or if he is ill-informed simply because he didn’t read gal-net, the forum, or wiki, no content of that activity will ever present. Players are required to collect information and to actively participate on their own to experience the full content of the game. I didn’t know anything about what guardian mission is and where to get them until I saw tech brokers need something I’ve never seen and did some research a bit.

This is the freedom of choose, and the chance to discover and research on player’s own. It is quite rare to see in modern games where many games come with full-fledged build-in hand-holding tutorial systems and UI guides all over the place telling you where to go and what to do. But sometimes, those aggressive assistance does help a player stay conscious, willing and stable. The taste of freedom is best when players are well informed about the possibility it brings. This passive stance in Elite may leave a player disoriented and lost their direction (sometimes motivation) in the vast universe if they don’t know what they’re doing. Players like to feel needed and cared. It wouldn’t hurt to actively provide more guidelines and goals for them to follow. After all, there are players who prefer receiving more than seeking. It would be a shame if they quit just because they didn’t find the content they want. I think throwing more stuffs at players’ face won’t cause them too much trouble.

In my experience factions do provide missions directly to players sometimes, but missions they provide are quite random and the timing is weird. I got an illegal massacre mission when I was mining. Besides from the fact that I haven’t done any illegal massacre mission before, I was just a peaceful unarmed miner (except the mining laser). What did they expect from me? Murdering cops with mining laser? Another time I got a delivery mission when I was bounty hunting in a ship with little cargo space. So little that the mission reward was tiny too. I wouldn’t mind conducting more million+ delivery mission in a Python, but those missions I received are just for the kids. These missions seem to be random for me, and are a little inconvenient to accept most of the time. I have only accepted a few courier missions when the destination happened to be my next stop.

It gives me a feel that, no matter how much we do, how many mission we completed for a faction, they don’t really care about us, and any stray shot will still get our a**** kicked by their space cops. There’s little sense of belonging after our hard work, only more missions to do with more money to earn, like being treated as a random mercenary looking for money only. Players can tell that factions don’t know or/and don’t care if their roles are bounty hunters, traders, miners, or pirates. The mission board are there for everybody and the type of missions are decided mostly by factions and RNG. No personal recognition can be gained in any way from a faction aside from the reputation. But factions are mission givers, I think they ought to know and care about players, their contributors, more.

The passive stance of delivering content brings another feel to me: we as pilots lack a greater purpose. Freedom is always the selling point of Elite, but to me, it seems my purpose is limited to mostly work for myself or in a smaller scale. Earning credits, improving reputation, engineering my ships… etc. I would appreciate there can be a bounty hunters’ guild or some sort to fight for a common goal, with both players and NPCs.

I go about bounty hunting and play in CZs quite often, because I enjoy flying alongside with a larger force and accomplish something together. But all these battles are for regional control of some factions. Personally, I would like my combat ships to have more places to bring their capability into full play, for instance CZs with Thargoids, so they can fight for defending the humanity as a race.

Speaking about war with Thargiods, fighting them indeed counts a greater purpose to me. However, larger Thargiod entities are very strong, to the extent that players are recommended to wing up to fight them. And fighting them only rewards players with credits and materials, which are all for personal gain of pilots. There’s few to be gained if one wants to contribute to this war. Because it’s hard to fight them and they can be ignored with no consequence, many CMDRs, unfortunately including me, choose to continue about their daily business and give up this chance to participate this greater purpose. It would be preferable to allow us to contribute by defending stations or to slow their advance by defeating Thargiod even outside of CGs, giving us a concrete feel that we are actually achieving something. I would love to have a common goal to strive for other than personal gain. Purpose rules my motivation here.

But I digressed (a lot). The thing I want to discuss here is an alternative way to earn merits and a system to provide players goals and guidelines to follow: Power Missions. I’ll also try to achieve a sense of belonging/recognition and to provide a purpose to follow with this system.

Power Missions(PM)

  • PM at its core is very similar as faction missions, but it is different in the reward it provides and how it is issued to players.

  • For a PM to be issued to players, players must choose a proficient at power contact inside a control system. Proficient could be combat (elimination, assassination, pirating), logistic (trading, courier, sourcing), espionage (scan, scavenging, smuggling), etc. Once a player choose one or more proficient, related PMs will be issued to them from time to time. The goal is to allow players to have some basic control over the type of PM they receive.

  • Players can only have one active PM at a time. If a player completes, fails or abandons a PM, they cannot accept more PM within a set timeframe like 15 min. They behave in a similar way to power commodity collection to avoid merits skyrocketing, but this process can also be speeded by spending credits.

  • Preparation, expansion and fortification will all be merged into PM system by allowing successful missions to contribute to the process. Standard methods can still be conducted if a player doesn’t like the content of PM they receive.

  • The reward of PMs will of course be merits, plus some credit for players’ work. PM will mostly be assign via mail, but a PM board also exists in control systems should players delete or miss the message. I was thinking PM board can have several missions available simultaneously but with less merits to encourage players follow the instruction they received.

The type of PM will be affected by ethos of the power. The pirate king basically pirates all day while the war-loving president will do a lot of combat missions and focus on supplying his fleet with military commodities. But in general all types of mission will present for every power since they all have an empire to manage. In times of turmoil, PMs will focus mostly on containing the turmoil. PMs will also be connected to PBGS by aligning with the will of power, their agenda (see Resource Management).

The reason I said PM is here to bring belongingness, is that it is meant to mimic the feel that players are needed by the power and the power give them mission according to their skill. The type of PM will be decided by one more factor, probably the most important one: it considers recent record of players (to match the activity they are focusing lately), the ships they have, the location of their ships and flight time of each ship (to utilize the maximin capability they can perform while to avoid causing too much trouble), and overall past record (to avoid asking a legal pilot to conduct crime and to have a better grasp about what this pilot likes to do).

So, there will be some scenario like “We studied you. We think this mission is best for you…” or “Due to your recent performance in <insert an activity here>, the boss wants you to help us by…” - (some anonymous power contact). Think it as some sorts of management strategy to make sure employees are doing what they good at. Believe me, players love their action being noticed and praised.

If Power Signature is implemented, PMs will only be issued to players when PS on. And if the power requires players to come back while they turn PS off, a simple recruitment message will be sent to tell them to go to nearest control system and activate PS. All PMs must be done while PS activated. If PS is turned off while a PM is active, the PM is considered abandoned.

Although I think if players often get PMs they don’t want to do they will argue, my point here is clear: players are hired by the power, and the power decides what they want players to do. If players don’t like the type of PMs they receive, they can go to a control system to search for a new one. After that if they’re still not satisfied, perhaps they should consider switching to a different power with ethos they like.

There could be ranks on each proficient to give players a sense of progression, and higher the rank, more rewarding and challenging PM will be. It can even provide a procedurally generated storyline for players to follow by linking every mission together and allow players to progress with more personal experience. In my opinion procedurally generated content can help a lot in a massive open world game like Elite.



Resource management
Powers have CC, command capital, to control and expend systems. CC is a resource with solely one place to use and one source. At first glimpse I felt a little bit confused by the name. I assume it represents large scale credit flow that is for the riches only, but the word command implies it can be used to push bureaucracy moving… some sorts of abstract executive power maybe? And since that Sirius guy doesn’t have infinite amount of CC so it probably isn’t about money. Anyway, let’s take CC as a combined resource with goods and influence for operating a star system.

To add more variety in strategy layer of resource management, and to simulate the operation of such gigantic organizations spanning across dozens of light years, I would like to suggest a new background simulation system: Powerplay Background Simulation(PBGS)

Powerplay Background Simulation(PBGS)

  • PBGS is a system like BGS, but since powers don’t need influence, they have Economy instead to represent their overall productivity and financial wellness. Powers also have another resource called “Fleet Strength” to represent the military force at their disposal.

  • Economy can be affected in several ways: gaining trading profit in control or exploited systems (with PS on), completing logistic PMs, spending CC to enhance system economy temporally, or suffering from sabotage. If new systems are acquired, the value of economy will recalculate to reflect the change.

  • Powers with good economy will boost their CC output over time, in return allowing them to have more CC to spend. Small powers are more likely to change in economy like how BGS work on smaller population systems. This characteristic can be utilized to help small powers keep up with larger ones by improving internal logistics.

  • Fleet Strength goes up automatically at a rate decided by number of controlled systems, economy, ethos and power state (turmoil, war, etc). It can also come from spending CC in systems to support infrastructures and finance ship production. Players can contribute to fleet strength indirectly by supporting economic, or directly by completing PMs and doing bounty hunting (to free up some work from power cops).

  • Fleet strength will be capped at a threshold decided by number of controlled systems. However, to avoid bigger powers always win the war by sheer number of their fleet, a front line system can only hold a certain amount of fleet strength. If one power lost more fleets relative to the other one, they are considered inferior in performance no matter how much reserve fleet they have. Larger fleet strength simply means this power can endure the war longer.

  • PBGS has another important duty: to decide the Agenda of powers. Powers will decide where to prepare/expand/fortify, whether to enhance internal logistic, or which power they want to befriend/mess with. All of these will be done on their own in PBGS. According to their agenda, related PMs will be issued to players more often and more merits can be earned by following the agenda.

  • PBGS automatically advances agenda related progress on daily update to simulate powers using their own resource to achieve their goal. The rate of progression, called Power Force(PF) for now, can be determined by CC income, fleet strength, or economic, etc. PF will always be a little slower than player actions in average to avoid creating an unbeatable computer empire and to avoid obliterating player effort.

  • PF will be dynamically adjusted according to the situation. It only works in full effect when there’s few player actions. To ensure no effort is wasted, powers with many active players will have PF decreased but have fleet strength or economy increased to compensate. We can say something like “Thanks to efforts of our independent pilots, we can save a lot of our forces and focus more on internal affair in this cycle.” to justify this mechanism. It would be essential for larger powers to utilize every chance to increase economy since it will be so hard for it to move an inch due to the size of its territory.

  • In short, PBGS will only automatically assist a power when it deems necessary.

PBGS will take over a lot of control over the direction a power goes. I think current vote model will also have to be changed accordingly. Thresholds for preparation/expansion/fortification may also need to be adjusted.

If we want more PVP scenarios, we can generate opposing agendas, like fortifying and undermining the same system, and make destroying opposing player ship worth more merits. Combined with reduced rebuy cost with PS on, perhaps PVP can be more attractive this way.

One of the goal of PBGS is to make powerplay rely less on player participation and to allow powers act on their own. This is not to undermine the efforts of players nor to make the game plays itself. It is to allow the game asking less about player participation and providing players more room to choose what they want to experience. It is also a system trying to make sure players in a smaller power won’t feel abandoned of isolated. They will have a whole power on their back so just keep fighting on.



Power interaction
Powers care a lot about territory, and perhaps it is the only thing they care. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I’ve seen in the current system, the interaction between powers is limited to opposing expansion and undermining control systems, which all require player action. Powers on their own have no ability to interact with each other. Personally, I think there can be more ways to interact with other power, since people with such power and resource can come up with many ways to maintain their control.

I wished there can be a common language between the power to solve issues (or to create more). It’s a large political stage after all. There has to be a common way to properly and socially interact between powers other than fighting. Hence, I want to suggest some concepts about diplomatic into powerplay.


  • Diplomatic Action
Powers can form trading deals, non-aggression treaty, or military alliance (not to be confused with the Alliance in upper case) via diplomatic actions. And they can also declare hostility to other powers to open up more aggressive military actions.​


  • Military Conflict
Powers can seize control of a system by military force. The strength of its military force will be determined by fleet strength. In times of war, CC upkeep will greatly increase for nearby control systems, and if one side enters turmoil state by negative income it loses the war immediately. Fleet strength of both sides will dwindle over time, and once a side has its fleet strength depleted or reached a certain relatively low threshold, the power is considered lost the war


This is a delicate issue: war between powers. Of course, no power will be annihilated in anyway. I personally would like to limit conflict to contested systems only. Powers can initiate small scale boarder skirmish to gain control of contested systems. This will create conflict zone in the process, and the result should be decided by PBGS and player effort.​


  • Trading Route
Powers with trading deals will open up new activity to gain merits: gaining trading profit in systems of other power with an active trading deal. Gaining trading profit will help economic so it is a mutually beneficial activity. PS must be on to gain merits by this action if this mechanic is present.​


  • Espionage/Sabotage
It is the contrast of trading route in a way that it hurts the affected power. It can be done in many ways. One way is similar to UA bombing and requires players to smuggle illicit goods to support local pirate band in a hostile system. This, in return, hurts local economic.


Another way is to pirate military intelligence and send them back to control system for merits. This action will decrease fleet strength of the pirated power because their military maneuver is floating around black markets. Again, if PS is implemented, the whole process must be done with PS on, or it will simply be considered as normal crime and no merits can be earned.


The goal here is to create more dramas *epic drums*. More stuffs happening produce more discussion and more tension, allowing players to have anticipation about the future development of the galaxy. Will the emperor declare war on the shadow president due to exacerbating boarder fiction? Or will the seemingly stable trading contract bring a military alliance between the president of Alliance and Utopia movement? Time will tell…

How this diplomacy system work depends on the situation. I was wondering if devs should have full control over this or allow a system like PBGS to do the work. I think I’ll leave the decision to you if you are ever going to do this. However, if we are going to leave the decision to power themselves instead of the manual dev force, I suggest we either allow players to influence the outcome concretely without RNG involved, by completing diplomatic missions for instance, or we disallow player contribution and let the system play itself out with set rules and some RNG. RNG isn’t a bad thing at all, but when it comes to labor and fruits, preferably there’s little about it.



Player reward

I would like to say: the best reward is fun. If players had fun, they won’t care much about physical gaining. But this is just too abstractive for design and implement. Anyway, the main benefit to engage powerplay now is rating benefits and power specific modules (PSM). Both are exclusive, the bonus and the ability to buy PSM.

This is my point of view. I believe there already are many discussions about the exclusive nature of PSM, so I will be short. Personally, for RP reasons, I would prefer all PSMs can be granted in any power with reasonable penalty, therefore I can fulfill my loyalty to my power. Efforts like completing missions must be done before players get them. PSM can only be provided in limited numbers per mission with a much higher price, and all power cops of the owner power will shoot on sight if they scan their PSM on you. Alternatively, there can be power brokers selling PSMs for absurdly high prices or even for merits.

When it comes to maintaining rating, I personally consider merits are too fast to degrade. I understand the intention is to bring active gameplay, but the speed it degrades brings pressure to me. Merit is nearly not a reward but an obligation to fulfill. Like I mentioned earlier, when a player is under pressure, they will be unwilling to take risk. That is, they will choice the safest and most steady way to earn merits. Sometimes it is by avoiding PVP completely. I was hoping merits can act in a similar way like reputation: it is hard to improve, but also degrades in a slow matter. If a player wants to achieve a higher rating, effort is still required. But if a player wants to rest a bit and have some fun about other activities, they won’t feel the pressure on maintaining it. If PBGS of something like that is implemented, even with less active players because of easier maintained rating, powerplay can still continue to play out.

Anyway, I’ll leave those subjects there. The purpose of this article is to create more reward than to adjust current ones to suit everyone. More generously players are treated, happier they will become and less arguments there will be (hopefully).


  • With PS function mentioned earlier, players can choose to have more intense powerplay experience with their free will, and rebuy cost will be reduced for legit powerplay interaction.

  • With PM, players can earn not only merits but also credits and materials by completing these missions, and all these missions help the power in their own way, like improving economy or fleet strength. Whether for PMs to have impact on regular BGS can still be discussed. For now, they affect PBGS only.

  • With PBGS, smaller powers will have a chance to fight back if their economy is strong. Even if there are few active players supporting it, the power will still manage to complete its agenda on its own. While powers with many supporters can focus on internal logistic more.


To give players more reason to earn merits and more reward for aligning with a power, I have a another idea: Power Wing, the NPC wing mate bundled with powerplay.

Power Wing

  • To support the affair of independent pilots, powers will send their fleets to assist players in their mission.

  • PW will only be granted on rating 3 or higher and after 4 weeks aligned with the power. Each rating higher than 3 will provide more options for ship type and loadout. (If PSM is granted to all power, PW will be the compensation.)

  • Only one PW can present at a time, and they will only follow when PS on.

  • They will not conduct any crime nor follow players outside of the bubble. They will not go to Pleiades nebula unless a power has set foot there. They will also refuse to follow players with too high notoriety because of the risk (adjustable).

  • While they can be used to assist in completing normal mission, some penalty when PS on is there to compensate.

  • One the goal of PW is trying to level the playing field of PVP by providing backups if players are attacked. PWs will only attack other players if they’re attacked first or the target player is wanted (either in normal or power bounty).


PWs require a hefty merit cost to hire. Players will have to do a lot of favor for the power on order to be granted one vessel, as PWs are not some cheap disposable merc. Their cost will be reflected on their performance. They have high survival rate and good combat performance. Even a trade ship can hold on their own in a small pirate raid. Their contract length is one cycle, if one is destroyed before cycle ends, a new PW with the same loadout will be provided after a certain cooldown period with no further cost (adjustable). Preferably they can be compatible with wing mission system, but that’s about AI so let’s skip it for now.

I will leave this topic here. The ultimate goal is to make players engage powerplay not because they have something they want by playing it, but because they think playing powerplay brings more option and challenge to them, or simply because they think it is fun.


Supplement: Troubleshooting

I’ve read some general issues about powerplay and PVP, some of them minor, while a few of them balance breaking. I’ll pick two of them, AFK farming in CZ and combat logging, to discuss in this article, hoping to provide possible solutions to said issues.

AFK Farming
I consider AFK farming using turret boat wings in CZ quite an issue, especially for powerplay-related activity. It makes combat-related activity irrelevant as there’s no way for players to counter and the progress will just skyrocket. But to be honest, turret boat wings are by no means an illegal setup, and they are proven so effective to the extent that pilots can go to sleep in battle. To win a war human can come up with many new tricks indeed. If we are going to address this, we have to think in the shoes of their enemy: how to deal with them? The simplest way is to avoid them by making the CZ exhaust after a certain period or over a certain casualty count, but this will not solve the problem. An army that can’t defeat their enemy but run from it serves no purpose to the country/faction/power.

So, what can we do about them? If we are facing extreme setups, we can extreme back. Barrage of dispersal field cannon, long-ranged feedback cascade rail snipping, massing reverberating cascade torpedoes, raining phasing sequence laser storm, etc. War is defined by human, where tactics exists there will always be counters. Not a problem for cmdrs I think, but for NPCs, what they need is a situational awareness in CZs. NPCs need the ability to identify battle situation and adjust accordingly, sending counters or retreat if necessary. They will have to act like how a fleet commander reacts to the ever-changing combat flow in real life.

An example of how to accomplish this:

  • Player performance in CZ, such as kill count, time of stay, and damage received, is registered.
    • If players outperform NPCs too much, the opposing faction will initial an emergency deployment. They should identify if player ships can be classified as an exploitive setup from a few predefined architypes, and if it can, execute its respecting counter measure.
      • In the case of turret boats, perhaps we should ask CMDRs about their counter measure and teach NPCs how to use it. For instance, when using long ranged phasing sequence laser boats, NPCs should stay as far away as possible to maximize their range advantage.
      • More builds and their counters can be registered should they appear in the future.
    • Other conditions to execute a counter can be set, like staying for too long or suspecting the presence of a bot.
      • In case of a bot, we must vary the tactic of NPCs in CZ to confuse the bot enough to make using a bot less than a viable choice. Simply retreating, changing the position of battle constantly/randomly, or calling in ATR level destroyers may help.

In short, CZs, or all NPCs in general, have to become smarter. Ships are evolving, so are wars. NPCs will have to keep up the pace by learning new tricks to counter over-powered setups. They must behave like self-preservating human instead of suicidal robots to avoid further exploit.


Combat Logging
About combat loggers, who I heard are ruining PVP experience, I won’t blame them too much. It is the natural for a living creature to avoid punishment. I was considering quitting the game for several times when my conda is exploding. I didn’t because I’m willing to accept the experience of failure and gain from it. The lesson I learned is don’t use coda for combat before you have 500m+ to outfit it. (Yes, I brought a conda immediately when I get merely 150m+ in my account and tried to use it to mine a res. I broke it twice and it cost me two ships to rebuy it because I have no money left in my account. A horrible idea. I sold it eventually for a fully outfitted dropship)

But I digressed (again). I think it would be better to disable the ability to exploit the system instead of punishing players after they do. I was thinking if we can make player ships stay where they are if they logged out improperly in PvP combat.

  • To avoid wrongfully punishing CTD in combat, ships disconnected improperly in combat will stay and become invincible for a short period of time to allow the disconnected player log back.
  • Once the player reconnected, the battle will resume normally.
  • If the player is still disconnected after the time passed, the invincibility will be gone and it will be open season for the opponent. Disconnected player will come back with rebuy screen if their ship is destroyed during their absence.
  • When unconnected, the remaining ship will be unmanned and act like mothership without a pilot when the player is driving a SLF.
  • If the opponent decides to leave without destroying the unmanned ship, the unmanned ship will disappear like regular disconnection once all human player leave the instance.
  • Improper disconnection in situations other than pvp combat is unaffected. This method will only apply if there are other human players in the same instance.

Using this method, the chance to escape consequence by logging out should be non-existent, although I don’t know if the network model of Elite allows such method.

To solve a problem is to eliminate its cause, as I always believed.


The End
To be honest, I had little to none experience on PVP myself. I mostly learn PVP related information in the forum. I try to discuss PVP and related suggestion with my limited understanding, but I’m in no way a professional on this topic. If I said anything wired, please notify. And if there’s any other problem regarding powerplay I didn’t cover, or you have other solutions, please notify too. You are welcome to express your opinion and provide constructive suggestions.

That’s all of it. Thank for reading!
 
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