I think this post from Sandro tells you how they view Powerplay - clearly they don't see it as some kind of team versus team in live ship to ship confrontation - not least because as we know the game simply can't support that.
It's basically allowing players to play the background sim - just a part of the game - nothing more.
Hello Commander Raist!
Don't worry, I'm not going to try to force you to like Powerplay. But I do have a few comments you might find interesting.
Firstly, and importantly, Elite will not "become" Powerplay. It kind of can't, really. It's an addition to the background simulation, nothing more or less. Now you don't have to believe me, but we are working on lots of other stuff as well, equally important, and covering different aspects of the game, including the "core" experience, if you will. Elite is still about the actions you take as the Commander of a space ship.
When I look at Powerplay, what I actually see, at its heart, is a part of the background simulation where AI is replaced with human Commanders. When you think about it in terms of its systems, that shouldn't be too much of an outlandish concept. And I hold that there's something pretty cool about this, for everyone, including Commanders who have nothing to do with Powerplay directly.
So yes, we want to work on the system to increase the fun factor, make the rewards for taking part more appropriate, but it's key to remember that this is only to keep interesting shifts in the backdrop for everyone.
I can understand the fear that Powerplay is all there is, simply because it's the most visible thing at the moment. That's because it's live, and because we feel it could benefit from changes (and this is why we're talking, right file:///C:\Users\Woolman\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image002.gif).
There's other stuff coming, and I reckon, in time, people are going to realise that Powerplay is just another facet, another way to play the game, but certainly not the only way, and certainly not the "best" way.
So, I could be wrong, but I think an amount of the flak that the system is getting is down to this mismatch in perception of how important Powerplay is. The truth is, as long as Powerplay's interesting enough for *some* folk, it's working. But that shouldn't mean we don't try to maximize the number of folk who like it, surely?
In conclusion, for those folk who dislike Powerplay: that's fine, but there's no need to dislike it purely on the grounds that it is Elite. It's not. It's a bit of Elite, like trading, minor factions, the crime system etc.
We have an ongoing dev cycle for the game, for which I'm eternally grateful to the powers that be for, because it means we get to carry on making things better and better in this game I love. And part of that cycle is this bit, where we get to collect feedback from the folk who play the game, which, traumatic though it can be - I also love!
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=169489&p=2592790&viewfull=1#post2592790
This needs to be stickied, or added to Page 1 of this thread...
