0.) THE PITCH, or "POWERPLAY IS A TRASH FIRE"
Instead of a half-baked Baby's First Master of Orion, replace Powerplay with a persistent reward track, weekly player rankings, and a faction-specific bulletin board that players can access anywhere.
1.) SPHERES OF INFLUENCE, or "TERRITORY CONTROL SHMERRITORY CONTROL"
The territory control minigame in Powerplay makes for a cute visualization but is otherwise a complete joke. Control/exploitation radii are meaningless beyond determining where ships spawn, and do not mesh with the existing minor faction mechanics. Favored government types appear to have been chosen at random, and exploitation effects for most Powers don't seem to work anyway. Those that work do so in a way that seems unintended.
Expansion is also meaningless because the only choice every cycle is whether players pick good systems or bad systems to expand to, which does nothing to engage legit pledges and everything to encourage ~5th columnists~ who can easily prep bad systems. The focus on expansion also means that, unless players deliberately abstain from prepping systems, every Power is in a permanent cycle of expansion and turmoil. You might think the word 'turmoil' implies some kind of conflict, but you would be mistaken, because nine times out of ten it's just the result of overexpansion for lack of anything else to do.
Lastly, the fact that players can run Powers into the ground with (often deliberate) bad decisions reduces the presence of the Powers themselves to pretty pictures and nothing more. What does Pranav Antal think of the boneheaded expansion decisions of his pledges (and "pledges")? Apparently nothing, because he's a JPEG and some canned quotes who has no input on how his own Power operates. This is incredibly stupid.
PROPOSAL:
- Get rid of control systems, give every Power an HQ system and a sphere of influence based on its rank - the #1 Power has the largest SOI, while the Power in last place has the smallest. Power NPCs spawn within their corresponding SOI and nowhere else. They will still pursue and interdict opposing pledges, but they'll do so in places that actually make sense.
- Within a Power's SOI, minor factions with a government type that actually matches the Power's ethos will offer missions to help the Power on their local bulletin boards. Conversely, minor factions with government types opposed to the Power will offer missions to hinder it. These missions are visible to all players, pledged or no. See POWER MISSIONS.
- Powers do NOT apply special blanket effects within their SOIs, because they're not governments, they're people. Even heads of state like Eddie Mahon or President Zachary "Secretly Robert Patrick" Hudson should not apply effects, because they already dictate policy in the governments they lead. We'll discuss pledge perks later, see REWARDS.
2.) POWER MISSIONS, or "OH RIGHT BULLETIN BOARDS EXIST"
Yeah, remember these things? I can't even write a screed about how they're broken under Powerplay because Powerplay has zero overlap with them. Considering that they're currently the best way for players to find things to do, let's change that.
PROPOSAL:
- Once pledged, opening the Powerplay menu brings up a bulletin board for your Power containing a wide spread of mission types - some familiar, some unique to Powerplay. Depending on the type, completing a mission will either help your Power or hinder another.
- Successful missions return three currencies: Command Capital, Favor, and cold hard Credits. Missions generated inside your Power's SOI will add to its CC total, while missions generated in other SOIs will apply a CC deficit to the opposing Power in the form of Sabotage; see REWARDS and SCORING.
- Killing opposing NPCs or players does NOT return CC, only Favor, proportional to the enemy's combat rank. Shooting down unescorted Haulers on the other side of the bubble does not help your Power achieve its goals.
- Successful missions are turned in through the Powerplay menu while docked at any station. On the turn-in screen, a slider allows you to split your reward between credits and Favor. If you need the cash, you can sacrifice a bit of Favor (or all of it, if you're hard up), but if you're already flush you can work pro bono for extra Favor.
- Failing a mission deducts half of the maximum Favor it would have awarded, so be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. If you complete a mission but die before you can turn it in, you won't lose Favor, but the CC return is lost.
- Power missions taken from local bulletin boards operate in much the same way, but only return CC and credits; you don't gain Favor on account of being a subcontractor in this case. Pledges can take local missions, but these are primarily intended for non-pledged players.
3.) REWARDS, or "I CARRIED OUT DENIABLE OPS FOR SENATOR PATREUS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT"
Current Powerplay rewards are trash. Most of them don't actually work, and the ones that do are still poorly implemented. Faction modules are worthless, save for two - the Imperial Hammer and the Prismatic Shields - because they're just better versions of existing modules; other modules try to get cute and do something special, and thus fail in every practical use case. A mining laser that doesn't work past 500 meters? Gosh, thanks grandma. Dumpster the lot of it and let's go back to the drawing board.
PROPOSAL:
- Strip out the entire merit system, replace with two systems that track progress: a persistent reward track based on Favor, and weekly player ranking based on CC. Favor earned during a cycle persists, CC earned during a cycle resets at the end.
- When you pledge to a Power, you immediately gain the bottom tier reward - 5% off weapons outfitting, 5% bonus to bounty turn-ins, whatever - and as you gain Favor you pass rank thresholds that award improved bonuses. Bonuses apply within your Power's SOI, which represents the range at which they can pull strings to help their pledges.
- Losing Favor can and will result in losing ranks, alllll the way back down to zero if you're careless. Always remember to check yourself before you wreck yourself.
- At a sufficiently high rank, you gain access to your Power's ship decal. Nobody wants a module that is at best situational, but EVERYONE loves decals. If modules are a must, they should be available at a much lower rank than the decal, because they are - again - complete trash.
- At the end of every cycle, the top ten CC contributors are named and awarded an additional boon that lasts until the next cycle.
4.) SCORING, or "HERE LIES COMMANDER JAMESON, HE NEVER SCORED"
The current system for ranking and scoring Powers is a big pile of arcane nonsense only decipherable by lunatics and warlocks. All of the stated rules are demonstrably wrong, there are additional invisible rules that players are not aware of, and it is thus impossible to tell whether unexpected numbers are the result of bugs, secret rules, incorrect rules, or because they're all completely made up. This is unacceptable.
PROPOSAL:
- Every cycle, each Power's score is calculated based on two numbers: Command Capital and Sabotage. Command Capital is the total amount of CC generated by players completing Power missions, both from the Powerplay bulletin board and from local bulletin boards. Sabotage is the total number of negative CC generated by opposing players completing Power missions, also from both sources.
- Command Capital - Sabotage = Weekly Score. Powers are ranked in descending order of their final score; those left with a score below zero are in Turmoil and thus candidates for collapse if they don't pull out of the red next cycle.
- That's it. It's that simple.
5.) CONCLUSION, or "OKAY REALTALK NOW"
As it currently stands, Powerplay is the albatross around the neck of Elite. Even if you've figured out how to make it work for you, or how to work around it to accomplish a goal, you have to recognize on some level that it is completely alien to the rest of the game. Powerplay was pitched as "a new way to interact with the galaxy," but in practice it's a thin soap bubble of broken mechanics stretched over a woefully neglected core game.
