That wouldn't change the fact your effort gets wiped as if it was nothing. That is unnecessary and cannot do anything but demoralise people.
Given what I unnderstand...then it seems the best/quickest way to repell the attacks is to not participate in the war narrative untill time goes by and the threasholds lower to the point that a attack in a system can be repelled. Stop fighting and rescuing then the threasholds to make progress will fall faster to more doable levels. Is that correct?
Or it means that we get multiple chances to evaluate our strategies and to save a system. The systems could also have been all lost tomorrow instead of us getting another chance.. It will all depend on how it's balanced and what narrative Frontier wants to tell. Personally I've had a lot of fun building new ships to carry out refuges and popping thargs! I've also harvested quite a lot of G5 mats which I need after engineering new ships.
Not that I want to be white knighting but just writing everything off without even seeing where it all goes seems premature to me.
I am not doing that, I am saying that wiping out efforts as if they never existed is a silly and unnecessary thing to do. We have no problem with things taking a while, but not by artificially negating anything but 100% in the process. We have barely touched 2 systems affected by 1 maelstrom with the other 2 untouched so it wasn't like we were going to change anything fast. Deleting effort as if it hadn't been made is the dumb part.
If you do end up needing to rebalance the numbers (Seeing as the current CG makes me think our ability to defend systems will increase dramatically), Narratively you could easily say that the goids are starting to spread themselves thin or are focusing more resources on defending controlled systems. If we manage to move in and push them back then we destroyed their infrastructure and that's why it doesn't get harder to push forwards the less systems they have (At least until the maelstrom)
Either way while the numbers are definitely crazy right now, I'm really curious to see how and where this goes!
Either way while the numbers are definitely crazy right now, I'm really curious to see how and where this goes!
Reasonable conclusion to make imo, do less work & the targets will be lowered until Fdev gets the result they want for their story.
If you enjoy it do it, if you think you are contributing to the greater good you're being railroaded.
So nothing we did this week counts at all.
Well that's a great start...
Well that's a great start...
Do you know that our efforts are being wiped out?
Maybe there is some hidden mechanic where we are wearing down the occupiers and next week will be slightly easier?
Like I said, I think it's far to premature to judge what is happening and to throw the toys out of the pram. Let's have fun and fight the good fight and then see where that takes us and what we can discover about the new game play. Looks like we have the CG nearly done, hopefully next week a lot of people can buy better ax weapons.
These are all valid points. But without any information on how this system actually works, it's all supposition and frankly wishful thinking. The system is in place. It is coded. And we get a clarification about one aspect a week after. Nothing about the weighting of combat, rescue and delivery missions. Does every Tharg kill count, or just every kill after a CZ has sucessfully finished (which they cant as of now)?
Even if the situation would be frozen right now, with 50+ systems inavded, and we manage to the take one back every single week, that's over a year to just isolate the mealstroms. Since this is evidently not frozen but escalating quickly, this can't be the end of the narrative. If thats all there is to it, then yes, congrats, you killed your live game.
Is there more to it, mechanics that will be introduced to have a fightin chance? Reasonable to assume. But to demotivate and simply negate the efforts of the players early on seems like an oversight the size of a Thargoid mothership.
I've thought about that actually and that's a different, less urgent, problem; Assuming we picked the worst possible system to focus on and did an awful balance of combat/cargo runs/passengers - where's the feedback from the game for that?
With progress moving so slowly it's extremely hard to figure out what works and what doesn't and why - you can't even check station traffic in the invaded systems to gauge traffic. The game tells you what you should do on the galaxy/system map, but since there's no visible signs of progress it's easy to assume it's lying to you. Which it might be unintentionally if certain things are bugged - we have no real way of knowing.
In a good challenging game there's usually a moment right before/after you die where you regret your decision and know what you did wrong. This is not really the case here.
If there's more depth to defending systems then obfuscating it like this makes it less interesting. The payoff of learning to fight the goids better through narrative over time isn't really there since we're being told/given things instead of given the tools to figure it out and test the theories ourselves.
And there doesn't need to be some complicated system to be fun, fighting goids is fun, I assume the trade/passenger stuff is still chill and fun for others too. The previous thargoid invasions and CGs worked fine without the reset mechanic.
It's worth noting that, last I heard it's still going to take nearly 20 years to consume the bubble, so it feels quick, but it's not that quick.
It's possible but there's no indication of that. The way it has been stated is if the progress bar is not all the way across it gets reset. The point is that nullifying player effort is a silly and unnecessarily demoralising move that is only being done to add an extra level of artificial difficulty, when there are plenty of other ways to do it without dropping a massive downer on your playerbase.
Also all very good points!
I think part of the fun of the game has always been to figure out how it works. Sometimes by reading wiki, forum, watching youtube, etc, and in other instances when it's all new figuring out how does it actually all work. Sure I agree that we ought to have better tools in game and that it can seem demoralizing that being twice as many commanders in game this week than last month and still not even making a dent in the problem while concentrating on one single system.
Maybe they are indeed killing the game in a rather elegant fashion, on the other hand it could also be that we are in the beginning of a fun ride and have a lot of stuff to consider and to figure out how it actually works.
I don't want to argue that today's clarification is either good nor bad, just that let's get the game on and see where it takes us.
I'm not sure I want that. I want the players to make a difference, not have NPCs win or lose it.
Using absolutes doesn't help here - I'm willing to bet it'll affect things people care about (PMF home systems, engineers) in a more timely manner.
These are places people would like to mount massive efforts lasting longer than a week to protect even just to delay the inevitable. The player agency to do anything meaningful here isn't felt at all.
I am going to copy the words of cmdr DemiserofD from Reddit, as he phrased it clearer than I could (and given the upvotes clearly many agree):
To be honest I'm personally more petrified that our actions in HIP 23716 didn't have a better result! A record amount of commanders and we didn't make a dent! How many systems will be occupied in a month or two! It really does look completely bleak and hopeless..
Rewording "weeks" to "attempts" would feel clearer. Each week is an attempt, and that progress would be reset for the next attempt.
But losing progress not because the invasion succeeded, but because of an arbitrary weekly reset timer feels... unfair, very demoralizing. The community suddenly went from knowing we might beat an invasion next week, to going back to square zero.
But losing progress not because the invasion succeeded, but because of an arbitrary weekly reset timer feels... unfair, very demoralizing. The community suddenly went from knowing we might beat an invasion next week, to going back to square zero.
I cant claim to know anything about these calculations, but have no reason to doubt them outright, given the size of this galaxy. But my point was, since we saw the highest numbers of conurrent players since OD's launch, whats the motivation for a newly found community to keep fighting, if all we achieve gets reset. And if it doesnt count for about 20 years, why bother anyway?
I loved this new system, dont get me wrong. But in a couple of hours its back to square one. In all of the systems, not just the focus one. Highly frustrating. And we learned to accept a degree of frustration in this game.
The problem is not the amount of the threshold, it's the loss of progress at the end of the week. That is just upsetting. Even with a lower, or insanely low, threshold... there will still be a feeling that "If I don't make 100%, my efforts are wasted.". There is no way that will ever feel good.