Which is why I suggested combining the combat zones and the missions. As I see it there is no easy fix...
The fundamental problem with making Powerplay Open-Only.
- Thread starter DemiserofD
- Start date
True, its not easy at all given the scope for change is minimal.
This is the interesting part, because in some ways the whole of Powerplay is one CZ the size of the Powerplay areas with people running about. Its this free form nature which is appealing, and less abstract.
But there is always a cup of tea requiring the spoon....
Or split the universe to Open Only Power Play in one server(s), and the other has Open PvE server(s) without PP.
Then people can choose the PP "PvP server" or the status quo without PvP (which is a minority activity anyway).
....yes? That's kind of the whole point of making a suggestion. My viewpoint is no more valid than this, but also no less. It's just that; a viewpoint, valuable only so far as it seems to succeed at its goals, not by who says it. Besides which, even your suggestions have far more to them than just oopp. So even if you are relying on exclusively what the devs have said, your suggestions wouldn't be any more viable than mine.
That's not the point of the Tutorials. Kinda sad that I have to explain this, but the point of tutorials is to get people started. Which is one of the principal problems with powerplay and open atm. People go into Powerplay, have no idea what to do, and give up. People go into Open, get killed by a ganker, and give up.
Once people are already in powerplay and open, these features become simply conveniences. But...well, take Spansh for example. Great feature, but it would be much nicer if I could just use it directly ingame, rather than having to fiddle with the routing features that often don't work half as well.
Please, please tell me you at least grasp that Tutorials are an important feature in games? Please?
If not...I dunno, man. I'm honestly not sure where we could go from there. Tutorials have become ubiquitous exactly because they are so useful, and exist in almost 100% of all games nowadays. If you're going to reject basic game principles like that, then any further discussion is kinda moot. Can't draw water from a stone.
Just to make things clear, I was copying your own words back to you to show you how silly they were, so I find it kinda funny you're actively fighting yourself....
There is so much gameplay in an ingame bulletin board
I mean...yeah. Absolutely. There's very good reasons why, say, streamers have schedules posted and tweet about when they're going online, even when they say often when they're next going to stream. Having information available in easily accessible locations makes a huge difference in how successful something can be, whether that be a streamer or a store or a sporting contest or powerplay. Why do you think people irl go around putting up posters to announce things?
Because you can't rely on people coming to you for information. You have to go to them. That's a fundamental thing.
Not really. You've got plenty of powerplayers who already play fully in open, voluntarily. At the same time, even with oopp, you'd still have significant portions of the population that wouldn't be accessible, whether due to time zone differences, latency issues, playing on consoles, etc. Furthermore, it would require further changes to the function of powerplay to make things actually work, so you can't really act like you're only proposing what the devs have suggested, either.
So you already have much of what you want of players own volition, and even if you got oopp, it wouldn't fix the problems you specify.
Let's be pragmatic here. You're never going to get what you want, if only for technical reasons like different consoles and latency issues. You're already willing to suggest outside the realms of what devs have mentioned. Why not go all the way, forget oopp, and work on other solutions, ones that are not only possible, but might actually work?
This is what you said:
The nearest Powerplay has ever come to changes is in the form of open + uncapped UM + unified fort direction- from a dev, in that flash topic. And I'm not relying on anything other than that, and discussing within that scope.
And I'm talking about education throughout the game- because games can be hard, and to be honest a lot of the tutorials don't prepare you like someone can (which was the question). All, people have to do is ask in game, I know you think no-one helps, but they do- as an ex lead in a power its in your interests to build your group. And if people give up so easily, maybe this is not the game for them really?
Everything is nicer in game, but it diverts FD from actually sorting out the 'game' parts first. I'd rather have the FCs do interesting things.
Obviously turorials are important, but sometimes the ones in ED don't teach you things you need to know. I get annoyed that the Powerplay manual is not in the Pilots Manual because Powerplay is one of the most complicated features in Elite.
I don't really get what you think you have, because its always been my position in the game. BGS is firmly multi mode, Powerplay has to be complimentary and different to that to give it a role in game. Making Powerplay as the devs suggested would do that- two complimentary features rather than one strong one, and a weak overlapping sibling.
You can suggest to people they can choose between an in game forum or a shiny new gameplay feature, see what they say. But whats to stop a squadron just having a banner that guides people to discord, like now?
Thats the great thing about having about one giant ED forum, One massive Reddit (plus eleven sub reddits that link to Discords) and helpful people. By all means if it does not divert time from actual game content introduce one- but I can guarantee you it won't get used as much as you think it will, at least in a Powerplay context because the best already exists in discord. As an example this forum was slow to introduce Powerplay sub forums for powers- by then Reddit had taken over, and then after that Discord. Only time will tell if Odyssey has features like you describe, since it has a focus on in person groups.
Which is why I see mode weighting as the most probable outcome. Do you even read what I write?
Network concerns aside (which I admit is always a concern, although FD are leaning hard on multiplayer in Odyssey so I expect updates- but saying that check out that Capo vid with large numbers of players al;; super smooth) that does not stop people. Only FD know how many console owners play ED without a pass, but from the people that play Powerplay I've known on console, its none. If it was a gigantic percentage I'd not say otherwise. In addition, all powers have console representation- condensing it all down to three Open versions rather than diluting it across nine.
And what I am talking about is only what the devs talked about- Open only, unified fort direction and uncapped UM. Its these three that change the feature most, and make players the missing NPCs and broaden the feature.
And timezones? So far its never been an issue. I have fond memories of Uk, US, Australian, Japanese, Norwegian, German, French all mixing as the cycles wars raged.
Even though I explained how it would? I can model out two distinct outcomes in my head what will happen based on what Sandro outlined, and the bits linked to open are not the most problematic. You take a look, and see if you can spot it too.
sigh
While I've been debating about the merits of Open Powerplay, I've posted alternatives over, and over and over. I've posted at least three of these over the last 10 pages:
The most realistic that fixes the NPC issue within the framework we have (which I've been saying is the most realistic compromise) https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/powerplay-mode-agnostic-version-ideas.556921/
Split tasks (that fixes 5C (open and solo/PG work towards a common goal but doing set tasks- https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...es-on-sandros-last-ideas.526335/#post-8079411
Megaship mechanic based PP: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/powerplay-v-2-using-squadron-megaship-mechanics.408451/
BGS expansion based: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...-mechanics-that-work-with-the-new-bgs.508604/
'Inverted' NPC Powerplay: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...werplay-where-teamplay-means-survival.524174/
And again- its not what we suggest its what FD are willing to do. And in that context open is the only real tool left, either drastically weighted or via open. Until the game lead gives us an idea of what they are willing to do I'll discuss what has been suggested- because from my own experiences it actually adds something to the feature, and the game as a whole.
And these are the proposals I can find- I have many, many more floating about, and out of all of them only one is considered Open only.
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Oh now I get it, it's about taking PP away from people who don't deserve it. Now it all makes sense!
Im frothing at the mouth as well o7, my misconception is different however; why oh why wont someone think of the children?
That's called appeal to authority; just because a dev said it doesn't make it any more or less valid than anything said by anyone else.
With that said, could you please link the referenced dev post? I'm curious to read what it actually says.
Terrible approach to game design. Your goal is to draw in the maximum possible number of players, if you willfully ignore all but the most devoted you'll quickly have a dead game mode.
Which is exactly what has happened.
The game design must encourage and welcome them in.
Fundamentals are far more important than anything 'fun'. If you never get people in the door in the first place, they'll never get to the 'fun' bits.
Absolutely nothing. But they should expect that, just like stickied posts at the top of subreddits, people aren't going to be willing to put in the effort to bother exiting/tabbing the game just to find out about something they, largely, don't care about. Another power that has a post called "HAUL MERITS TO NGALINN THIS WEEK" is going to win over the power that has a six month old post called "Check out our discord at discord/afaegvaegv !!!"
People only go to external resources if they care. It's the purpose of ingame resources to make them care.
Yes, and it still fails at the fundamental understanding of the purpose of modes. The only difference between the different modes is availability of other players. That is both the benefit and downside. If you want to encourage people to get into Open, encourage the benefits and mitigate the downsides.
And how much support have these suggestions garnered?
The fundamental flaw with all your suggestions is that you don't understand the fundamental flaws of powerplay, or at least have them twisted by your obsession with open play.
This leads to suggestions that are fundamentally flawed, because you're simultaneously trying to fix powerplay and change powerplay into something more to your liking.
Why not focus on trying to fix powerplay first, then try to change it?
The trouble is, right now you probably have as much backing as you'll ever get, because people at least recognize there's something wrong, if not actually how to fix it. Once powerplay becomes even nominally fun, then a huge portion of any of your support will go away, because once something is entertaining and has a reason to exist, the only people who will support changing it anymore are the people who think about it exactly the way you do, which is a fairly limited number. Nobody has too many people who think just like them, after all.
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Well its closer to what might become reality than what we say, isn't it? We can say what we like but in the end only the devs can make that choice.
Actually says?
what are you trying to insinuate?Bear in mind this was on the old forum, where some things have been lost in the transition.
And to keep them, you need some form of challenge that draws on what they know, otherwise its just the same uneventful chunk of nothing, over and over. At some point flying your ship should actually count for something in game, and not be pushing trollies.
But if its not fun, why should people care about it? Your other thread is 90% people after modules.
And how would having an in game board change that? Who is going to moderate it? Will FD be liable for its content? Will it have Discord level features? What happens with server problems?
If there is nothing to care about in game, whats the point?
Then you are ignorant of the problems and the eventual outcomes of those problems. Its ironic and unsurprising the best mode for real time teamplay that blends ship skill, teamwork, co-ordination and strategy is the one that has the most difficulty since other players are in it, while two other modes offer no other hostile players but instead uses incredibly weak NPCs that allow easy traversal through space.
You want benefits, they are quite apparent in what they are- I just listed them, they fill the void where NPCs should be- you know, the flying parts in a spaceship game in a feature about rival groups.
As much as anyone elses. Which is your favourite? Do you like anything in them?
Really? What flaws are they? And in which suggestions are the flaws? I understand how Powerplay works and know the various stages its been through- its flaws today are not the flaws of yesteryear. People used to hate merit decay and the cost of things. Now with hyper inflated returns it comes down to the actual tedium of doing the job for peanuts, as well as issues with 5C.
And what is Powerplay to you?
? You can;t do both, its not how FD work. Think minimal changes for maximum impact.
Whatever FD decide to do, I'm happy they are actually doing it. If its more fun, then great, its a win.
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Actually says?
Well, you tried to imply that it was Devs who brought it up first, which was actively incorrect. The devs themselves say, in the first post, "We’ve seen this topic discussed many times and we think it’s time we addressed it directly to get as much quality feedback as possible. "
"We've seen this topic discussed many times"
Translation; They are only talking about it because players keep bringing it up.
Not necessarily. For example, players already do missions and wing missions, but it's difficult to find other players to do them with. If you added wing matchmaking for missions, you'd still need to go to places with lots of players to join (or find players to join) those missions in the first place, and pre-made meeting places like Power Headquarters would be an excellent place to do that.
The players wouldn't be there specifically for the Power itself, but they would be there, supporting the factions under the power's control. This would become even easier if the dev suggestion for power-based missions: "Missions for factions in a system that share a power’s superpower award a number of Powerplay successes when completed" were added. At that point you're in open, supporting the local Power, with no further incentive needed other than increased rewards and teamwork from wing missions.
All you need from that point is a point to the game(powerplay, that is), and players are already 9/10ths of the way to being a part of the faction and in open.
No different from any other chat ingame.
I think they have some decent ideas, but they're almost all solutions to peripheral problems, not to the real issues.
Right now? I don't think it's much of anything. It's a pretty overlay on the galaxy that, ultimately, serves little actual purpose, and has no real motivation for players to join, or even to exist. The main sources of conflict and drives for cooperation are almost entirely seated in the imaginations of the players, not in the mechanics of the 'game'(if you can even call it that).
I think that, if Powerplay is ever to become a real, meaningful aspect of the game, it needs to be changed into a game in the first place. Right now, it's basically a bunch of people with paintball guns shooting each other randomly, except nothing happens when you shoot someone and they just shoot you back, so once the initial enjoyment of having a paintball gun fades, you're just left with a blob of people continually shooting each other for no reason or purpose. Most people have long since gone home, but a few last players still stand there, mindless pouring paintballs into each other, having long since forgotten why they're there in the first place.
In desperation, these players petition again and again for the sidewalks nearby their game to become accessible, so they can shoot passersby too, not realizing that all that will happen is pedestrians not walking there anymore, with the side effect of even less people joining their decrepit 'game'.
It's stale, and stagnant, not because of the mechanics that make defense impenetrable, but because an unchanging playing field, a disconnect from the universe, and a lack of real benefits for participating, leaves no reason to expand.
A fair point, but at the same time its up to them to agree with it and take it further. FD are not in the habit of dropping bombshells without reason.
I can't argue that would be a bad thing, its just not how Power groups use tools, most will log onto Discord, see who is in game (everyone is linked via friends or squadrons) and go to each other, or the preplanned area discussed in discord. In solo or PG aside from chatting, there is no real need for much more than that.
This aspect is what I elaborated on (since the proposal was quite woolly) with the solo / PG and open split. NPCs work best at mission scales, and its these missions that generate fortification materials that are moved in open against other pilots. Both sides are co-dependent on each other, but they both get focussed gameplay- solo PG gets missions that can be power specific, lore based and it keeps the issue of modes out of things, because each mode has a role that does not overlap.
Then really the only difference is the ability to indicate you want something over distance.
This is fair, to a point. Powerplay was supposed to be Game of Thrones in space, where powers fought to survive at the expense of other powers. Conflict is driven between player groups, but the same can be said for the BGS PMFs- they have even less impact on the galaxy. Your last point~
is what open + mega UM + unified fort direction is about- its making those repetitive tasks complex via player interaction- an interaction far beyond what NPCs can do. At no point can an enemy rush your capital and upend your day, forcing you to radically change how you approach keeping your power solvent.
This is relevant too, because the above three elements make that more meaningful tactically. If you stop half of fortification, thats a problem for a power that needs that fortification to generate CC to overcome a CC deficit. The shooting then has a purpose- I don't care if its people or NPCs that do it, but it has to be there to make that action of moving a tactically important cargo meaningful and interesting.
And thats fine. At one level Powerplay is about that, about being a rival and going after those who are not on your side.
And this is why I think a weighted approach is probably the way to go- its far simpler to implement, and ties to risk and reward. Solo and PG still contribute, and that NPCs in those modes can remain as they are (so less work for FD, which makes it more likely to happen).
Its a load of nested issues:
its stagnant because there is no decent system worth fighting over any longer
its stagnant because attack is too hard, meaning powers turmoil less, meaning less territory to fight over
nothing changes because there are no more good moves to take when powers need to eat each other
collapse would have made a sink or swim feature, without it the reason to expand is lessened
Powerplay is disconnected because its overtly competitive (which is unique in ED), but it does have an impact re bonuses / penalties imposed. Its just they are so slight no-one notices, and because ssytems hardly ever drop its permanent (why open and its freedom fighter mechanic with non pledged would work, creating a reason to care, since you can fight back)
consoldiation made attack much harder. Powers use it week in, week out, making UM totals huge.
Powerplay is slow. Powerplay phases are weeks in length- week to prep, week to expand, two weeks to drop systems. When doing this week in, week out people rightly wonder what fills the time- without NPCs or players harrying you its nothing, hence its boring at a macro level and interesting at a higher level n overview.
The galactic standing: without collapse its useless other than feeding into the 1/2/3 bonuses eeach power has, which are largely pointless in our credit inflated age. Its still a mystery how it works, when a simplified version with in game consequences would make position more relevant. But in the end its ignored because Powers have historical rivalries- Feds hate Imps, Imps hate Feds and Archon and so on carried by player group lore.
In the beginning merit decay and the 30 minute allocation were the main issues, whereas now with endless money its not a problem to buy your way. The mechanics are well understood (bar one or two areas) so the main bugbear is the actual flying part really.
5C and weaponised expansions have largely replaced conventional attacks, so energy spent is more about countering pointless moves when it should be about a straight up battle.
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I think that the most fundamental issue has more to do with why should players play the game, not necessarily how they play the game. Yeah, Powerplay has plenty of issues as-is, but to most players those issues aren't even an issue because they're not going to bother in the first place.
Look at that thread(plus I made a reddit poll too); like 90% of players just sign up to get the modules and get out. That's because those modules are the only real benefit they care about. Even the rank 5 bonuses require absolutely no actual investment in the Power's success; you just haul to a completely random location with absolutely no thought at all, and bam! You get your relatively trivial bonus.
Even my suggestion about Wing Matchmaking, for example; that would get players actively supporting a power! It would get them into Open! But(for the most part), even if they're actively in open, and actively supporting the power, it's just happening more or less by accident; they still have no reason to actually care.
That's one reason I quite like your idea of giving different powers more combat powers, like your idea for piracy on npcs for Delaine, or whatever. It gives players a reason to pledge, at the very least. But it still doesn't solve the fundamental issue, that they've still got no reason to care or engage at all. "Oh, my power won this week, neat." is pretty much no different from "Oh, my power lost this week, oh well."
This ties together with your highlighted issues with stagnancy; I believe the trouble is that the universe is stagnant, which itself leads to the Powers being stagnant. Yeah, Powers lack a lot of tools to actually move resources around strategically(the ability to dump unwanted systems alone would make a huge difference in this regard), but without anything new to work towards you're inevitably going to reach a point of stasis, just like right now. Slant things towards offense instead of defense and you'll cap out at minimum possible sizes rather than maximum possible sizes, but the stagnancy will remain the same.
It's like a game of Risk right at the end. All the pieces have been placed, all the countries claimed and battle lines drawn, all that's left is for the random back and forth before some player draws the right cards to win outright after a few hours. Only the mechanics of Powerplay make outright victory an impossibility. So instead you just stand there, glaring at each other, occasionally fighting pointless fights that never go anywhere.
If you truly want fluid and engaging gameplay, what you need is an evolving galaxy for players to play around. One way to do this would be to tie the relative value of systems to the player activity going on within that system. This creates nodes of high value that powers would fight over, and would lead to powers evolving and changing as a direct result of changes that take place in the game. For example, controlling Borann back when LTDs were going could have been an enormously useful 'piece' on the 'board', but once LTDs got nerfed, it suddenly fell back to being relatively worthless.
At the same time, you need players to have a reason to want their Power to have more control over the galaxy. Right now, the only real benefit to having more territory is the top 3 bonus, but for a power like Torval or Delaine, why bother even trying? They're not even on the same playing field, and it would be MONTHS before they're even potentially in striking range of that bonus.
So there need to be concrete benefits to specifically pledged members of the faction to expanding the influence of their Power to new places, or most people simply won't care. They'll get their modules and get out.
And that to me, is why it needs to offer something radically different to the rest of the game- otherwise it will never have a reason to exist. Its probably what guided FDs thinking with what they explored.
And this is why they need to be sidelined, and a proper reason to do the rest. But (IMO at least) that reason can't be a repeat of what other features do, otherwise you simply cannabalise your own game, pitting one feature against another.
Its what happens when they are in that wing that matters- Open is about random interaction, Open Powerplay is taking that random interaction and adding player driven (and set) open ended goals to that.
I can level the same argument at the BGS and PMFs- why do it when its inflating balloons because you can. I expect this is a symptom of Powerplays initial design, in that a Power was not meant to be guided by groups at all, that it was supposed to be driven by the average of a mass of individuals working for themselves- that a power would do 'the right thing' automatically via averages and not via singular leadership. Its why the meat and potatoes has to offer new things- it can't be too much CG, it can;t be missions (since the BGS does that too). Ideally a rewrite would bring new things in, but I can;t see that happening- hence why open is the last and ultimate choice. It also rounds out the games features- 1:1 CQC, BGS for multimode, PP for group v group PvP (or variation thereof).
Smaller powers are advantageous, mainly because it keeps moves available to fight over- at least then FD won't have to worry about having to reset things, or deal with issues relating to that.
Again, this is no different to the BGS where you can never wipe out a PMF or faction, just beat them down. In Powerplay the problem is once you are beaten down you can't retaliate because your opponent has gone behind the defensive barrier. If all powers were more exposed it would be easier to strike back.
Yes and no- its a great idea many people over the years have suggested (in that lore based systems are worth more) but at the same time without an ability to take them you can't. They would need to be evenly distributed because profit is based on distance, and that not every power is sat in a good place (Antal and Archon are in the end of nowhere, with very few profitables, and could never take something in Aislings territory because its too far). You'd have to rewrite Powerplay (I'd not argue
) to do that, because it breaks how the current system works. This is a fair point, and really where the power leaders ethos and values come in- not to mention superpower allegiance. Many powers are driven by revenge, and getting back at each other. The ultimate victory or loss is not that important (well- almost
) but its the reason and journey for doing it they play for.I don't think much else can be done about that, other than updating some ranks and bonuses- some are really good, and reason to expand on their own. I mean, if you wanted a galaxy free of rules, expand Archon because at R5 all bounties and fines are forgiven instantly. If you like lower ship prices expand LYR.