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Mischaracterising things that people can go back and reread isn't a good look, especially when you draw the mods into it.
The Open v Solo v Groups thread
- Thread starter Ozric
- Start date
I already clarified that you'd misread and you just repeated it for some reason here. But let's move on.
I can handle losing, that's not the issue. If however, you're left with a result and no way to evaluate whether or not it reflects merit, you shrug and carry on. That can actually be true whether you won or lost. Weaknesses in a feature affect everyone using it, and absent proper fixes, just like with so much else, it falls to the players to step in, in this case to set some standards and provide some assurance.
Well, saying botting has occurred is not a controversial statement, it's known I think. But in some situations it's not even required. In those, AFKing is sufficient to accumulate transactions to obtain a highly unbalanced outcome (unless you're suggesting everyone should AFK to make up the difference). There are videos of AFKing on YouTube - I don't think FDev have a negative stance on it as such, except if hacks were employed (though we know those exist).
You're presenting it too black and white but it seems you're getting towards getting the picture. Powerplay lacks a greater popularity partly due to such concerns.
No-one said that.
It's not about the rules - you gave a descriptions of two play styles. One sounded relatively dull, the other quite interesting. Go back and reread.
It adds contextual depth to the game, which can otherwise for some be rather dry. Minor faction BGS is mechanically more diverse but thematically not entirely satisfying. Powerplay has different and more group-oriented mechanics, and a "vs." dynamic that you can't get elsewhere in the game (while also co-opting BGS by having dependencies on it). It's all just ones and zeroes in the end though.
I didn't mischaracterize anything, and no, I didn't "draw the mods in it", they can do their job on their own. I took issue with two statements made in this thread, one being factually questionable, the other being derogatory, and I expressed that. Without naming and shaming, or "drawing the mods into it".
PP is just never ending churn, have you ever seen a power completely wiped out?
I truly think it is not even possible within current mechanics....
There are statements by the Devs to the effect that PP was supposed to be a straight up PvP feature.
We periodically see PvP proponents calling for incentives for playing in open or participating in PvP. In this context the modules could be seen as such an incentive, though there were a substantial number of complaints (sometimes by those calling for PvP incentives) regarding 'module shoppers' IIRC.
There have also been calls to strip the modules from PP and pass them to Tech Brokers.
Apparently Fdev just decided to leave the whole thing to go it's own way.
Curiously, we get only 1 merit for each enemy players' kaboom vs. 30 merits/NPC kaboom: they also never implemented features to encourage rewards for PvP (i.e. like transferring all/part of the merits held by the destroyed player to his/her executioner... or increasing the merits earned depending on powerplay ranks... etc). Not considering the bugs/exploits suffered by the whole framework at inception, the flawed CC accounts and unclear in game explanation of certain features, the twisted mechanics between PP and BGS, and to finish, the super harsh merit decay vs. rewards which totally discourages casual players to be more involved into powerplay activities.
All that makes us (and other hardcore PPs) looking like fools!
Yes, because NPC does not trade "friend kills"
. There are 2 mutual exclusive things: 1. it is hard to find player, so reward should be bigger. 2. players will trade-fight, so reward must be minimal. (2) breaks the game. So they pick solution to counter it. Blame the players I played LA2 where they pick option (1). Instead doing stuff for 3-4 months you could trade-kill finish it in 2 days. Game is broken by such. Servers last for a month or two.
Exactly what happened in ESO, over inflated rewards for PvP where PvE is also an option always leads to abuse.
O7
Whilst i agree decay is a pain in the it does discourage faction hopping.
Lets be fair though when i get back to the bubble it only takes me an evening to grind from 0 Rank to enough merits for Rank 5 the following cycle.
In an ideal world rank decay shouldn't be a thing if you are continuously pledged.
O7
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Frontier learned early that players can't always be trusted as at least some will collude to earn rewards set at a level as they were designed to be contested without actually engaging in the contest - which is why the claimable portion of a player's bounty is low.
I know, my observation comes exactly from that... powerplayers remain pledged week after week, but have little incentive thereafter given that the decay becomes punitive as soon as they look at some different activities (not saying about exploration, but CGs or other stuff which keeps them away from the PP areas... or even other grindy stuff like BGS maintenance) and they've to keep grinding. Not considering that PPs may be in the need of other sources of income (unless other players in the group provide to, i.e. with wing missions) to cover their live (buy forts) and opportunity (other stuff payouts) costs.
I am sure that a wayout can be found for limiting faction hopping.
That's true, but let's think that a portion of merits held are transferred from player X (destroyed) to player Y, net net there's a "destruction" of game resources as the player X did invest time to get the merits and player Y would have earned more merits by investing the same X's time. It just offers a better reward than the solely capped PP bounty (if not paid off) and adds a "dynamic" of "war loot" between opponents.
Fully understand the ideas of gaining merits with PvP but that would drive more folks to Solo and defeat the object.
A wing camping a system like Polevnic could gain a vast amount of merits for little effort (combat ships vs lone hauler), nobody in their right mind would touch Open.
O7
The PvP concept of PP isn't well advertised and I didn't know about it till after I'd got my Cytoscramblers. Not sure if I found out before or after getting my Pacifiers but Drew put it best. Signing up to a power adds a clear flag to your Cmdr indicating that you are ready to attack (and be attacked by) Cmdrs signed to opposing powers; you are painting a target on yourself.
The only real options (within Powerplays way of doing things) are to make transportation open only (even with its limitations- so solo / pg generate what open transports), make open worth more (so its a gamble), make merits / cargo vanish on mode switch / logging during combat (so its a 'loss' if you capitulate). In the end PvP is more about adding some form of limiting factor* absent due to NPCs. If its not, Powerplay remains trucking busy work.
Its also about teamwork too- in that Powers support each others pledges. Additionally you won't get a blockade behavior as you think you would for most of the cycle- the only time it will get hectic is at the last days and / or if you are doing actual Powerplay activity that requires the home system (which would need unifying to out or inbound for everyone)...that or you have an active Power / blocs such as ZYADA or FUC.
*If Powerplay went BGS like this could be flipped on its head by making all fort / prep cargo a mission cargo, you could then price in danger via more aggressive / engineered NPCs. You could then have missions that require players to work together (like wing missions promised), and not need PvP to generate threat.
I wouldn't actually say players "can't be trusted". We bought this game and we play it how we like. FD make the rules, we look at the rules and think, "How can I get what I want as fast as I want it within these rules?" One might say we can be trusted to do that!
It's the same in the world of work. HR make rules for e.g. flexitime; we engineers "navigate" them. When they complained that we weren't doing timekeeping how they wanted, we replied, "Come off it, we're engineers; we take a rule set and get what we want out of it, and we're good at it; that's why you employed us (the rule-set then being the laws of physics).
So back on topic, yes, kill-collusion will happen when there's advantage in it. But in a game designed for humans to play, there's no point complaining about human nature. FD have instead wisely set the rewards so that they don't encourage the unintended behaviour.
Agree with what you are saying but from my point of view i enjoy PP, more importantly the fortification side of things which i can also add trade routes into, i have no intention of doing PvP in Elite so anything that forced me into that playstyle would prevent me from taking part.
As we have discussed before im sure there are plenty of folks that think along my line of thought, as are those who may join if more PvP was involved.
There are always those who want Elite to go further down the PvP route, that's fine, but there are also many who would have loved (like me) an Open PVE without having to join a different server.
We are lucky in that we have modes we can chose from, i wouldn't like to see any of the games content locked behind Open PvP, we had CQC for that and frankly, it failed.
O7