The most fundamental problem with PP2.0: 'Why?'

[DemiserofD]

The biggest problem of Powerplay 2.0 is no different from the biggest problem of Powerplay 1.0; there is no reason to do it.

I'm pledged to Zemina Torval. I am pledged because I like to mine, and this gives me a reason to mine once credits are no longer sufficient motivator. But this, in turn, begs the question; WHY does this give me a reason to mine? What benefit is there in making my power bigger and other powers smaller? Why bother fighting at all?

This isn't like a shorter-term game of a first person shooter or moba. It isn't even a medium-term game of Risk or Age of Empires. This is a game that is played out for weeks, months, years. There is no 'winning'. Likewise, there is no losing. What is the point of expanding to control every possible system?

In my PP2.0 proposal I made a few years back, one of the key aspects of the game was that by claiming more systems, you could gain extra bonuses for your power and yourself. This gave an incentive to expand to as many systems as possible, and to fortify your existing systems to maximize their benefit. Everyone would always have something to work towards. Unfortunately, this system seems to completely lack anything like that, and, in fact, any reason to fight at all. Instead, the only real motivator is your personal rank, but as we've seen that predominately just encourages players to seek out the most efficient way to level up personally, ignoring their power altogether.

---

Perhaps a good starting point would be to make the progress of the power personal. Give participating players rewards for participating in the capture, defense, fortification, or undermining of a system, in merits, similar to the rewards for capturing a thargoid system.

For example, if a system is being undermined, you get an extra personal merit for every merit you contribute, up until the fortification matches the undermining. This encourages players to defend their power.

On the flipside, if you successfully undermine a system, 1x the number of merits needed to undermine it(before fortification) would be spread among the underminers according to their personal levels of effort. The same would go for fortification, though perhaps more moderately. If it takes 200k merits to fortify a system, and you did 20k worth, then on the system being fortified by another level, you might get a bonus 10k, a 50% bonus. That would encourage players to actively participate in their power's defense and offense.

That would at least make this process more personal and involved, encouraging players to play for the benefit of their power, not just for the benefit of themselves.

 

[WILLIAM BILL ADAMA]

• FDev heavily nerfed Risk and Benefits of joining to Power faction both. Sometimes I have confused whether I am in Power's territory or not in.
• Certain detailed bonus of some perks is totally unbalanced. (eg. ALD's bounty bonus can't increase Merits reward, but other Power's perks can. And no more AX bonds bonus too)
• And this is important, I think. There is lack of consistent 'Lore' to make playing and joining PP2.0 at this moment. (But I think this will be solved when FDev release more Galnet News and CG.)

 

[Coolgroove]

As a Elite Story Mode gameplay style enjoyer, for me fundamental problems with PP 2.0 are very different, yet still the same as they were with 1.0

Majority of players discuss quite a high level problems of "filling that bar" in one form or the other. While the main reason I would want to do PP is Role Play. RP is already fundamentally based on imagination, and what the game provides is used to fuel said imagination/pretending. But is has to make sense on a fundamental level, otherwise player needs to fill these fundamentals with excuses to make at least some sense and it never plays in a enjoyable way.

- Relations between Powers and between Powers and Superpowers don't make sense at all.

To illustrate it - a hypothetical example - imagine various Liberal and Republican powers in USA being able to kill each other members to have control of individual states. Members of different powers undermine, sabotage, destroy and kill, while if one is doing it in a states controlled by the power they get a bigger salary and a free healthcare when they are injured by members of another power. All of that happens with a complete disconnect from election/government system of the overarching Superpower (USA).

In any imaginable (and adequate) scenario - this kind of setup doesn't make sense, because with such interactions no Superpower would be able to stay Superpower or even exist at all. But there are two reasons why it kinda works in-game: 1. Developers decided to ignore it, 2. Game can spawn infinite number of resources/NPCs, so situation of all that being finite (especially trained human lives) is not a problem. None of these reasons are good for RP and so it breaks on a fundamental level cramping up all enjoyment.

Pretending that Powers work on a smaller scale, and it's only Players not Superpowers also doesn't work, as Pilots Federation members are just free agents, "one in a million" of other agents (NPCs) of any Power. So ofc ALD or Patreus or any other will use anything at their disposal (Superpower resources).

Powers need to have more options for relationships than just Hostile, they also need to have relations with Superpowers, otherwise it doesn't make sense how any Superpower has a power to exist, which in return makes no sense for any Power that was spawned withing a Superpower to have any power.

- There is NO counter-play to Powers

If any independent system doesn't want power to have any control over them - it's not possible. There is no mechanism to undermine a Power or break it's control.

I thought about to put another semi-hypothetical example here with Afghanistan and USA, but one politically charged example is already too much, so I'm going to skip it. This main point is already clear enough.

No only it limits an interesting game-play today, but I can only imagine how disappointed, sad or even mad I would be, when with upcoming Colonization feature - to put a huge amount of effort into making a new system, and then it could be taken by a Power with no counter-play to avoid that.

- PP, Crime and Punishment, Notoriety - all is a mess.

There are a lot of threads, posts and discussions about it, in all possible details. In short - yes, it's a mess, how systems interact with each other doesn't make sense, and on top of that it plays not fun really.

With all these combined - PP 2.0 is not fun for me, as I hoped it would be.

As PP plays right now - it's just a pretty wrap around a few bars of weekly chores to fill to get a shiny once enough are filled sometime in a future. I hoped (and still hope) it could be more than that - a system that connects various game-play systems and the whole game world together.

As it stands right now - it a good system to have a little bit of hand holding to introduce new players to various game mechanics. Beyond that - it disconnects more than it connects. Hopefully it's going to be iterated and improved sooner than 3.0, with Colonization feature maybe.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Whatever FD introduced as a feature in the game would guarantee that some player would suggest it is not what they wanted, and that it should be changed to meet what they consider it should be. It is the nature of some gamers, isn't it?

PP 2.0 is praised by some, despite the obvious bugs that were inevitable in its introduction. Naturally, it is loathed by others...

As PP is opt-in, surely, even with its current state, supporting a power is a concious choice?

Naturally, I had a look at PP 2.0 and decided it held as much interest for me as PP 1 did, none at all, but admit that FD have made much more effort to provide a reason to support the King, or any of the other peasants.

Nothing in the game will ever suit everyone (hence the long list of 'suggestions to make it a better game for me' here), I think most players just get on and do the bits that work for them and live with the bits that don't.

I'm equally sure, with PP 2.0 being less than 2 weeks old, that FD will 'balance' the play and rewards over the coming months, based on playtesting and feeback from those who are busy discovering the bugs and exploits. But radical change, this early in its cycle, really?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

What is the point of expanding to control every possible system?

Most of your Power rank bonuses only apply in your space, so there's an obvious advantage there, if not to controlling every system then at least controlling the ones which work well for your bonuses.

For me the question is slightly different: is there any particular reason at least in the medium term to attack other powers for territory rather than just expanding into the systems which were too CC-poor to matter in PP1? On that one I'm content to wait and see what happens - until the activity balancing is sorted out and the weirder exploits closed off, the balance of attack and defence remains to be seen.

If any independent system doesn't want power to have any control over them - it's not possible. There is no mechanism to undermine a Power or break it's control.

Any Power without its own Control system within 20/30 LY can be used to undermine the existing Power control without risking that Power itself capturing the system later.

I do think it would be more interesting at a strategic level if unpledged players undermined any system they passed through - but that then breaks the concept of Powerplay as an opt-in to higher levels of hostilities if every Power gets a reason to shoot at neutrals, so I can understand why Frontier didn't do that.

In any imaginable (and adequate) scenario - this kind of setup doesn't make sense, because with such interactions no Superpower would be able to stay Superpower or even exist at all.

To take an older historic example, the House of York and the House of Lancaster fought on several occasions for the loyalty of regional nobles and the control of the English Crown. Lots of people died in the process including the occasional monarch, but England as a country (and its treasury, legal system, etc.) carried on despite this extremely violent means of deciding the succession.

Rival feudal duchies and their somewhat fuzzy and conflicting claims on territory due to intermarriage and inheritance is probably a far better analogy for what's going on in Powerplay than a modern democracy (or even a modern dictatorship).

 

[Rebel Yell]

Powerplay is just a layer for players' content, full stop.

FDEV created a broadly based layer for such type of content... as some of us have already agreed, the new framework offers some fixes where BGS failed.

Powers are now racing to grab territories, because the more territory the broader the part of the Galaxy where affiliates get the bonuses and the harder will be to inflict damage (i.e. to make 1% damage to a 600 systems power, one needs to cut 6 systems... for 1500 is 15 systems and so on). It's a very dynamic framework as systems might be gained or lost very quickly.

Then when most territories will be occupied, it may switch to be a more strategic feature of the game (as uMMing is effectively slower [excluding the data bug] than acquisition/reinforcement) and also engagement could be different (unless new features are introduced).

Last but not least: PvP is much more present than in previous version (of course also because there are more active players etc) and this is again players' content and it's where players should blaze their powerplay trail (as going in full Pve mode = hypocrisy).

 

[Coolgroove]

Any Power without its own Control system within 20/30 LY can be used to undermine the existing Power control without risking that Power itself capturing the system later.

I do think it would be more interesting at a strategic level if unpledged players undermined any system they passed through - but that then breaks the concept of Powerplay as an opt-in to higher levels of hostilities if every Power gets a reason to shoot at neutrals, so I can understand why Frontier didn't do that.

When you look at it from a point of view "Power vs Power" - yes, you are correct. From a broader point of view - the system is not really opt-in, at least on any political / home systems scale. If any commander or group of commanders wants to stay independent (because of their minor faction, or in upcoming Colonization, or whatever else) - they simply can't. The choices are: play the leftovers of others PP, or join a Power. There is no option to oppose a Power without aligning with another Power.

So, to opt-out from PP is to not play any part of the game that has any connection to "hey, it's our home", and that is quite a huge part.

To take an older historic example, the House of York and the House of Lancaster fought on several occasions for the loyalty of regional nobles and the control of the English Crown. Lots of people died in the process including the occasional monarch, but England as a country (and its treasury, legal system, etc.) carried on despite this extremely violent means of deciding the succession.

Rival feudal duchies and their somewhat fuzzy and conflicting claims on territory due to intermarriage and inheritance is probably a far better analogy for what's going on in Powerplay than a modern democracy (or even a modern dictatorship).

It doesn't really matter if it is older or modern examples. In any of them - different Powers can align themselves with other Powers, break those deals, etc. There are always more relationships than just "Hostile". And that is the point.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

There are always more relationships than just "Hostile"

Yes - the question is how to set up those relationships in a way that actually works in-game.

From a Power's point of view, any non-Hostile relationship is advantageous: that's another 1/12th of the players who can't undermine you (on average), a border you probably don't need to fortify as urgently, more territory you can personally pass through without hassle (not that there's much hassle right now...), and so on. So given any player-led way of setting up non-hostile relationships between Powers it's very predictable that most Powers would use it quite heavily to keep to - at most - one war at a time, and possibly an entire 12-way peace treaty depending on exactly what method was used to determine it.

On the other hand if Frontier were to declare that Kaine and Winters (both primarily Social ethos, similar bonuses) were engaging in some joint humanitarian project and therefore their Powers were temporarily at peace, there'd be a lot of disappointed players on both sides whose attacks were now on hold while their opponents can largely (re)fortify freely in preparation for the project ending (and sure, they could work around that by switching pledges to Delaine to do the undermining, but that's not a sensible requirement in a system intended to encourage sticking with a Power long-term)

 

[Coolgroove]

Yes - the question is how to set up those relationships in a way that actually works in-game.

I wasn't able to give it more than a 10 min, so it's a very rough outline.

Power Play actions could have one of the two main characteristics: Violent & Non-violent.

If players in a play-period (a default week for example) make many more Violent acts - then by the end of the period relationship status between those two Powers becomes Hostile. Hostile status gives bonuses to amount of merits (rewards) for further violent acts (since violence breeds violence) for both Powers involved. Everything else like it is right now.

If players in a play-period make many more Non-violent acts - then relationship status becomes Rivals. Rivals status gives bonuses to amount of merits (rewards) for Non-violent acts, so they are more lucrative than Violent ones. NPCs and the rest are no longer Hostile unless Hostile actions are taken.

There have to be thresholds, as there will always be at least one who goes against the group effort.

If players of both Powers didn't do any undermining against each other, but did against the same 3rd Power - status becomes Allied. No bonuses for any action between Allied Powers, but bonuses for all acts against any/all Powers that are Hostile to any of the Allied Powers.

That opens a way to connect Powers to Superpowers, for example:

If all Powers within one Superpower are in a Hostile state towards each other - Superpower ability to hold system weakens. Less security, less support for Minor Factions, more gameplay for BGS players, as it makes it easier to switch system allegiance or break for independence (or harder to keep...).

This also could require a change in a system to allow independent players and groups to oppose Powers and undermine. By doing so - Power may need to resort to Violent and/or Non-violent acts to restore it's hold on a system, or lose it. Power actions could lead to a worsening of relations with another Power, so Allied status is not forever.

Yeah, it is very rough, but it already illustrates that it is possible to connect it all together and make game-play in the bubble affect the state of things from different angles.

With many good ideas for Crime/Punishment/Notoriety rework - it could be fun and quite dynamic, it would make sense from a game world point of view, and it would broaden options for political game-play for Colonization.

So given any player-led way of setting up non-hostile relationships between Powers it's very predictable that most Powers would use it quite heavily to keep to - at most - one war at a time, and possibly an entire 12-way peace treaty depending on exactly what method was used to determine it.

If so many players are able to organize to have only one war at the time - that an effort, I don't see anything bad about it. That's the freedom to influence relationships.

In any case - that is also a reason to give independent players ability to oppose any Power - this way, actions of independent pilots and groups could lead to Alliances broken. Player groups supporting specific Powers could even hire / make deals with independent groups to weaken their Allied opponents in exchange for promise of their systems independence, etc.

On the other hand if Frontier were to declare that Kaine and Winters (both primarily Social ethos, similar bonuses) were engaging in some joint humanitarian project and therefore their Powers were temporarily at peace...

With a system where actions of players determine relationships between Powers - I don't think Frontier should be involved on that level. But if Frontier would be able to exploit outcomes of players actions for a quick CGs when some Powers become Allied (or other states) that would be very cool.

 

[DemiserofD]

Personally, I just think there needs to be something to distinguish powers in a Superpower with each other from powers not in a Superpower. It really makes very little sense that I as a Torval player can just blatantly murder Aisling followers, even when they've not done anything wrong. I should at least need to be sneaky about it. What's the point of having 'covert' as an option when you can just do anything you want out in the open?

There needs to be at least some concessions made to this point. I do admit, this is a world where docking infractions can result in death, so the bar can be really, really low, but there still needs to be a bar. Something like, you can't murder shared superpower forces near stations or around law enforcement, at least. You need to be covert. And a covert power would naturally have an advantage here.

Most of your Power rank bonuses only apply in your space, so there's an obvious advantage there, if not to controlling every system then at least controlling the ones which work well for your bonuses.

For me the question is slightly different: is there any particular reason at least in the medium term to attack other powers for territory rather than just expanding into the systems which were too CC-poor to matter in PP1? On that one I'm content to wait and see what happens - until the activity balancing is sorted out and the weirder exploits closed off, the balance of attack and defence remains to be seen.

Obvious but not necessarily straightforward. Most bounty hunting powers, for example, can easily find all the bounty hunting the want already. By contrast, mining powers only really need a bare handful of systems with both rings and consistent positive states, and once they have those systems, they'll basically stay in control by default due to the massive merit production those systems will create whenever they get the correct combination of states.

This really is the hardest part of game design, so I'm not really blaming Fdev, but I definitely think this aspect will need some iteration to get right. It's kinda like if, in Clue, you could choose to enter the same room as someone else and fight each other. This has no effect other than to waste both your turns.

Eventually, players will only do this occasionally for giggles, and focus on actually winning the game. Which, in this case, means accumulating merits personally.

 

[Dragsham]

It's a clear as crystal to me. If powerplay 2.0 was open only then it would all make sense. Perhaps rebalancing needed yes for sure. But the nexus of powerplay being flawed, is its inability to reflect player/player group/wing, innovation.
It's just a slugfest of big groups vs big groups all in total anonymity.
They designed it to be downright in yer face combat tween cmdrs to hold the line.
Instancing being as it is it's doubtful open only powerplay would work as intended so I'm not saying it would. Im fact it probably wouldn't.
So much needs to change.
Long overdue.

 

[sfried]

It would be nice if there was a story/“quest” related activity that is separate from the usual “weeklies” activities set by each Power.

Please give us a thread to follow in the story outside of Galnet and just exploration! Power related story missions would make for a nice “break”.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

If players in a play-period (a default week for example) make many more Violent acts - then by the end of the period relationship status between those two Powers becomes Hostile. Hostile status gives bonuses to amount of merits (rewards) for further violent acts (since violence breeds violence) for both Powers involved. Everything else like it is right now.

If players in a play-period make many more Non-violent acts - then relationship status becomes Rivals. Rivals status gives bonuses to amount of merits (rewards) for Non-violent acts, so they are more lucrative than Violent ones. NPCs and the rest are no longer Hostile unless Hostile actions are taken.

If players of both Powers didn't do any undermining against each other, but did against the same 3rd Power - status becomes Allied. No bonuses for any action between Allied Powers, but bonuses for all acts against any/all Powers that are Hostile to any of the Allied Powers.

The catch here is that these are all self-reinforcing states: once they've happened for one week, all the incentives are set up for players to continue them indefinitely because breaking out of them requires doing more discouraged actions than encouraged ones.

A second catch is that because of the geography of the bubble, this is rapidly going to lead to "everyone Allies against the Federal Powers" because they're in the middle of the other ten. Antal and Kaine really aren't going to spend much time undermining each other because they're at opposite sides of the bubble, but automatically declaring them Allies on that basis and giving them bonuses against all their actual neighbours wouldn't really fit much

If so many players are able to organize to have only one war at the time - that an effort, I don't see anything bad about it. That's the freedom to influence relationships.

For me it's three things:
1) The pre-existing PP1 relationships, people's opinions of RP, player's general wish to avoid conflicts, etc. are likely to encourage this to form extremely permanent alliances on superpower lines, at which point why are we bothering to have multiple powers per superpower at all? (Plus the Empire with its four Powers gets an instant advantage).

2) It's the difference between players being able to decide what they do, and players being able to enforce that on everyone else supporting their power.

At the moment, if an Archer player wants to play up the "Federal politics" side of things and undermine Winters for shutting down the Proactive Detection Bureau, they can go right ahead. If other Archer players want to try to keep a unified front, stay out of Winters territory, and attack the Empire, they can also do that. The overall activity of the Power then gets decided by whether it has more "stop Winters" or "stop the Empire" players - and will probably be in aggregate primarily focused externally! - but both can still stay pledged and do their stuff.

If Archer and Winters declare peace (via whatever mechanism) then the "stop the Empire" players still have all the same fun as before (perhaps more, since they've got one less border to watch) but the "restart the PDB" players are suddenly out of a job because other players have declared they shouldn't be doing that and they now can't effectively undermine Winters.

We've just finally got away from PP1 where (of necessity, but still!) one big player group had to coordinate the entire Power and crack down harder on its "own" side doing the "wrong" thing than it did on actual opposed players ... any mechanism where players can vote (directly or via action) to set global Power policies just risks going straight back to that where the important thing for signing up to Patreus isn't "do you like Patreus RP ethos?" or "do you like free ammunition?" but "is the Largest Patreus Player Group one you're willing to follow?" (or even "is the United Imperial Command a group you're happy to follow?") That really doesn't work with how diverse player communities are in Elite Dangerous.

3) Every other game system of this sort - Powerplay 1, the Political BGS, the Thargoid war - has shown that players are extremely loss-averse and risk-averse. Given the choice, a 12-way peace treaty where everyone just fortifies their own systems and expands to the big range of uncontested space that PP1 left vacant, and never starts a fight they aren't certain of winning ... is all very likely.

It would also be extremely boring compared with the 12-way brawl that's more likely to ensue if Powers can't declare peace on each other. One (opt-in) mechanism that's actually about and encourages conflict is a good variation on all the others.

It's just a slugfest of big groups vs big groups all in total anonymity.

Inevitably so. I've been quietly undermining a system over the last couple of weeks while testing my builds. I've probably put about 35k of undermining into it which is enough to flip it to unoccupied; in the same time its had about 5k of fortification. Based on those numbers and the single-figure daily traffic reports it's pretty obvious why I've never seen anyone else in the system.

With ~9000 systems in scope of Powerplay probably most of them are like that.

 

[Dragsham]

Obviously most of us cmdrs are self interested regarding bgs\PP. Or we answer to a group.
I too have pumped alot of stuff into one given system. To change its status. And come weds morning (I'm late back Thursday morning so weds morning it is hehe) I'll dump a huge amount of stuff into it. We're independent of the politics but we want that to change. Having a superpower locally would increase traffic/victims.
So yeah let's all do our thing. See how this pans out long term.
I'd like to see more incentive for bgs cmdrs to participate in PP2.0 but tbh it's just not so atm.

 

[seeplay]

Agree with many statements here. For me the biggest reason not to play PP 1.0 was it meaninglessness. You could push your power everywhere while you can but after all you will go back again. it's like an endless tug of war. And right now - same thing. If you take a look at any main power system there will be status "uncapturable". You cant fully destroy power in any way.

when i saw the news about PP 2.0 i believed that they will fix that issue. but it is what it is.
Just layer of gameplay which gives you some benefits if you play but do not have any sense in a bigger picture

to make PP more fun it should be
1) open play only (left solo but make impact 1\4)
2) power can fully loose and disappear for a while
3) it should be connected with mega powers and news - politics

but real PP should be
1) fully dynamic
2) every squadron could build Power
3) squadron could create alliances to support one created power
4) squadron can impact Power without joining the Power (for example resistance which do not want to see any power in their system)

this how Power Play should look like in my opinion

 

[aRJay]

You will have lost much support by mentioning play modes.

 

[Dragsham]

Op asked why. We all have our interpretation of why participants partake. Some for the intrigue, others because its in their interests locally.
But fundamentally the whole PP thing is geared to large groups playing off one another.
There lies the problem.
It's niche at best albeit unintentionally I think. And that's because they reversed the intent to make it open only. Which I'm convinced it was designed to be as.
And I'm as much entitled to my opinion as those who advocate pg/solo.
I care not what others think. They care not what l think.
And the world turns...

 

[Coolgroove]

The catch here is that these are all self-reinforcing states: once they've happened for one week, all the incentives are set up for players to continue them indefinitely because breaking out of them requires doing more discouraged actions than encouraged ones.

That is why I think merit bonuses for specific activities that depend on relations between Powers are important - as an extra incentive to do something.

Also, if properly connected with Superpowers and as a result with BGS - discouraged actions could happen naturally not only within Powers, but also from Independents.

A second catch is that because of the geography of the bubble, this is rapidly going to lead to "everyone Allies against the Federal Powers" because they're in the middle of the other ten. Antal and Kaine really aren't going to spend much time undermining each other because they're at opposite sides of the bubble, but automatically declaring them Allies on that basis and giving them bonuses against all their actual neighbours wouldn't really fit much

Yes, that is a current starting point. And it will change over time, and then again, and again.

As for Allies - there could be a criteria, that Allies can only happen if there are bordering systems (probably even specific minimum number).

1) The pre-existing PP1 relationships, people's opinions of RP, player's general wish to avoid conflicts, etc. are likely to encourage this to form extremely permanent alliances on superpower lines, at which point why are we bothering to have multiple powers per superpower at all? (Plus the Empire with its four Powers gets an instant advantage).

There is always someone (most of the time even a group) who just wants to stir the pot. Since there will be no merit bonuses for activities that reinforce Allied status - those who want to avoid conflict would have to put more work into keeping it that way than those who want to disrupt it.

Creation and maintenance is always harder than destruction, so it makes sense.

2) It's the difference between players being able to decide what they do, and players being able to enforce that on everyone else supporting their power.

That's democracy. But in any case it is not that different from how it is now - only Frontier decides how politics go. So if it's a group of players by their actions moved something in a direction someone doesn't like, or Frontier - the result is the same. And yes, no matter the system, no matter the choices - there will always be someone who doesn't like it. The only way to avoid it is to do nothing and have no systems. Heh, and even then there will be someone.

But if players are to decide these things, by their actions - players who don't like it can reorganize and do what they want. If there are a lot of them - things change. At least with system like that - there is a chance for both game-play and outcomes.

At the moment, if an Archer player wants to play up the "Federal politics" side of things and undermine Winters for shutting down the Proactive Detection Bureau, they can go right ahead. If other Archer players want to try to keep a unified front, stay out of Winters territory, and attack the Empire, they can also do that. The overall activity of the Power then gets decided by whether it has more "stop Winters" or "stop the Empire" players - and will probably be in aggregate primarily focused externally! - but both can still stay pledged and do their stuff.

If Archer and Winters declare peace (via whatever mechanism) then the "stop the Empire" players still have all the same fun as before (perhaps more, since they've got one less border to watch) but the "restart the PDB" players are suddenly out of a job because other players have declared they shouldn't be doing that and they now can't effectively undermine Winters.

We've just finally got away from PP1 where (of necessity, but still!) one big player group had to coordinate the entire Power and crack down harder on its "own" side doing the "wrong" thing than it did on actual opposed players ... any mechanism where players can vote (directly or via action) to set global Power policies just risks going straight back to that where the important thing for signing up to Patreus isn't "do you like Patreus RP ethos?" or "do you like free ammunition?" but "is the Largest Patreus Player Group one you're willing to follow?" (or even "is the United Imperial Command a group you're happy to follow?") That really doesn't work with how diverse player communities are in Elite Dangerous.

Player groups come and go, form and change, band and scatter, etc. Mechanism for such politics would also influence how player groups are. Even groups with all members that want to do that one thing today might not be so united in the future.

All that ^ you wrote is a biggest part of emergent gameplay. Yes, sometimes goals won't align, sometime they will - in any case, that is where the need to come together, work on the same goal, do that one thing or sabotage it so one could go back to do what they want, etc. etc. - All of these things and situations are inevitable. And it is good, because it give more reasons to play than just "fill that bar".

Even for those who play only to fill that bar - nothing really changes, except from time to time there will be activities that allow to fill that bar a bit faster. RP/Goal/Politics driven players would create propaganda and various agitation materials to sway support for something, including even support from fill-that-bar-enjoyers.

These interactions, aligned or not goals... - all that will constantly change (even if not at a fast rate) - that is very good to keep that side of the game fresh and to make it less finite. Both PP 1 and current state of PP 2 - are finite game modes, because the main thing is them are "fill bar get rewards". By introducing mechanics for emergent and at least to some extent player-driven game-play - it's going to become much more, and the best thing - players are going to do it themselves and going to continue doing it.

3) Every other game system of this sort - Powerplay 1, the Political BGS, the Thargoid war - has shown that players are extremely loss-averse and risk-averse. Given the choice, a 12-way peace treaty where everyone just fortifies their own systems and expands to the big range of uncontested space that PP1 left vacant, and never starts a fight they aren't certain of winning ... is all very likely.

It would also be extremely boring compared with the 12-way brawl that's more likely to ensue if Powers can't declare peace on each other. One (opt-in) mechanism that's actually about and encourages conflict is a good variation on all the others.

Well, if "the galaxy at peace" is the will of the overwhelming majority of players, and all of them are willing to sacrifice game-play and bonus merits for that - then so be it, that what player base wants then.

But honestly - I don't think it's going to happen. There are many players and groups who are going to blow it up just for the sake of blowing it up if something like that happens.

In addition, because it is Frontier that controls the fundamental lore of Powers and characters - they can set a stopgaps / limits for specific Powers that can never Ally with each other, or based on Lore bonuses for a Power could exist only if it has at least one on specific states (for example Archon must have at least one Rival/Hostile Power, and similar character appropriate conditions for other powers).

Inevitably so. I've been quietly undermining a system over the last couple of weeks while testing my builds. I've probably put about 35k of undermining into it which is enough to flip it to unoccupied; in the same time its had about 5k of fortification. Based on those numbers and the single-figure daily traffic reports it's pretty obvious why I've never seen anyone else in the system.

With ~9000 systems in scope of Powerplay probably most of them are like that.

Situation like this is one of the reasons for Merit bonuses for activities based on Power state and status with other Powers.

States and statuses could change what Power needs - with that, different activities could have their time in the light. Yes, that time in the light won't be forever, but it's going to change from time to time - and it is already better than what we have now, where your described situation probably won't ever change.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

To illustrate it - a hypothetical example - imagine various Liberal and Republican powers in USA being able to kill each other members to have control of individual states. Members of different powers undermine, sabotage, destroy and kill, while if one is doing it in a states controlled by the power they get a bigger salary and a free healthcare when they are injured by members of another power. All of that happens with a complete disconnect from election/government system of the overarching Superpower (USA).

I think it's a mistake to conceive of any of the ED Superpowers as being anything close to a 1-to-1 correspondence with current-day superpowers. As far as I'm aware, minor factions within the same Superpower have always been able to expand into other systems and go to war with each other, or at least they have for as long as the BGS has been in more or less its current form. This would be like if the town of Wibaux in Montana were to cross the state border with North Dakota to occupy the city of Beach. Things like that don't happen in the USA, or indeed in most countries.

So I think it's long been the case that polities above the star system/minor faction level are a heck of a lot more fragmented than what can be found on our one planet in the first quarter of the 21st century. I reckon this setup broadly makes sense, given that political territory in ED is not all sharing one contiguous planetary surface, but is instead scattered across orbiting space stations, planets, and moons separated by light years, yet also trivially traversed within scant minutes at the low end and a few days at the high end.

Given the scale and disposition ED's geopolitics, I don't think it's a stretch to suppose that between the vast nebulosity of the Superpowers and the churning mess of the minor factions, there would exist another layer in the political strata. FDev have chosen to literally characterise this, creating figureheads on which players can choose to hang their hats. Now maybe in a "real" interstellar civilisation such a geopolitical stratum wouldn't turn out that way, but since we don't have any working examples of real interstellar civilisations to work off of, I think FDev can be forgiven for exercising artistic licence in the service of delivering an entertaining mechanic in their video game.

 

[Coolgroove]

This would be like if the town of Wibaux in Montana were to cross the state border with North Dakota to occupy the city of Beach. Things like that don't happen in the USA, or indeed in most countries.

In modern time - yes. In older times - happened quite frequently. In any case - it is not about s specific country or a time period.

I think it's a mistake to conceive of any of the ED Superpowers as being anything close to a 1-to-1 correspondence with current-day superpowers.

As I've said in one of the previous replies - it doesn't matter if it is new or old - it is not about 1-to-1 correspondence. These were just hypothetical examples to illustrate that there are more than one way (Hostile) to build a relationships between entities/powers. Both USA and old England examples, or any other from any part of history - are absolutely of the same value - all of them show how much more interesting and much more filled with possibilities political landscape is when it's more than just Hostile, and when that are connections between Powers, Superpowers and factions, with mechanisms for interactions.

Don't get me wrong, but all these and other points were already debated with Ian Doncaster in previous replies.

With it being 2.0 I hoped it would connect everything on a setting / game world mechanics level, to not only make the whole thing make sense ( without the need for excuses that me, Ian, you in you post and many other do to make sense of it ), but also to create game-play for players to influence galactic landscape (as in a rough idea example in my previous replies). But instead, it is just as disconnected as PP 1.0 and the only way it connects with the rest of the game is by the way it disrupts with its disconnection.