Powerplay What is power-play rank were just based on time spent playing the game?

[DemiserofD]

edit: oops, sorry about the title. What IF.

Recently I've been going down the power play Rabbit Hole again, and I've been rolling an idea over in my head. I figured I should probably get some other opinions on it before I go too deep.

My basic thought process is this; right now, it's fairly easy to 5C an enemy, because all you need is a character that has been on the roster for long enough, and an hour to get yourself up to maximum rank. Functionally speaking, rank has very little to do with your relative presence in the power. Neither does age. And yet, these two factors are used to determine your relative power.

So, what if you disconnected these two factors entirely? Rather than rewarding players with merits for hauling Commodities, reward players with merits automatically as they carry out activities of any sort. The idea being, simply by playing the game, they will gradually build influence for the power they have declared as their own.

This makes a degree of sense; if you see someone flying awesomely killing thargoids or pirates or something oh, and at the end they declare themselves to be aligned with Zachary Hudson, enlist today, you are naturally going to think of that faction in a more positive light.

This has the natural result of eliminating 9/10 of 5c players, because in order to be high ranking within the power, you would need to be playing on that character regularly.

Now obviously, this would only be a small fraction of the total fixes needed to prevent 5c entirely, but can anyone see any downsides to this?

 

[Rubbernuke]

I had an idea a bit like yours but combines it with a reputation value.

Correctly label good and bad moves, and give everything a value based on how good or bad it is

Base rank / power jobs (such as fortifying, prepping, expanding) on how many good / bad things you do

If you do loads of good things then you get full access- if you do a set amount of bad things you get automatically unpledged after one day. You'd have a time delay on this to prevent 5C just doing the minimum good to keep in.

As a bonus it means you don't need rank decay, its purely down to your good / bad ratio.

 

[DemiserofD]

I had an idea a bit like yours but combines it with a reputation value.

Correctly label good and bad moves, and give everything a value based on how good or bad it is

Base rank / power jobs (such as fortifying, prepping, expanding) on how many good / bad things you do

If you do loads of good things then you get full access- if you do a set amount of bad things you get automatically unpledged after one day. You'd have a time delay on this to prevent 5C just doing the minimum good to keep in.

As a bonus it means you don't need rank decay, its purely down to your good / bad ratio.

Sounds good, my only real quibble is that it would be difficult to correctly determine good or bad actions.

My thought was more that each power would have an ethos aligned activity, and an activity that is counter ethos. Aligned actions would give increased Merit, while counter aligned actions would give none.

Archon Delaine, for example, could have piracy and smuggling as the aligned actions, and standard trade as the counter aligned action.

Anyway, glad to know I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. If anyone can think of any overt problems with the idea, please let me know.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Sounds good, my only real quibble is that it would be difficult to correctly determine good or bad actions.

My thought was more that each power would have an ethos aligned activity, and an activity that is counter ethos. Aligned actions would give increased Merit, while counter aligned actions would give none.

Archon Delaine, for example, could have piracy and smuggling as the aligned actions, and standard trade as the counter aligned action.

Anyway, glad to know I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. If anyone can think of any overt problems with the idea, please let me know.

in my old idea I had +10 (full trust) down to -9 (no trust).

At 0 trust you can't pick up prep materials so cuts 5C off at the knees.

At full trust (10) everything is unlocked- so rather than 4 weeks you can gain access to things by being 'good'.

You be surprised at quantifying bad moves-

Over fortifying: for every 10 you deliver over the threshold (set at 120% of the trigger so its not too severe) you get 1 demerit

Preparing bad systems- for every -10 CC you gain 1 demerit (this however makes weaponized expansions very hard, but I hate them + this idea was with the uncapped UM so large empires are harder to hold)

Shooting your own side- each ship destroyed is 1 demerit

Collusion piracy - each 10 cargo lost = 1 demerit (so piracy can come back as that loophole is shut)

Expanding bad preps- every 100 merits = 1 demerit

...and so on. It means that 5C is priced in at a very low level, and that if they can't collect cargo at 0 trust can't do a lot of damage as at the tick if they are rock bottom they get ejected. But, if all you do is good moves, you will always be topped up and have the goodies without the tedium of rank decay.

You could tie in ethos actions into this chart too- in that certain activities reward better, or in combination at full trust enable them.