Deleted member 115407
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Per the title... saw a reference to it and would like to read about it, if anyone has a reference.
Powerplay What was the "Week 52 Debacle"?
Deleted member 115407
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Ah - thanks. That's far less scandalous than I thought it would be.
Ah well, it was paired with an NPC bug in powerplay combat zones witch made expansions for combat-powers an "auto-win" feature. This issue lastet for over 2 months and was followed with an interdiction difficulty increase witch rendered undermining into an impossible deed...
So basically powerplay was broken from July until November last year. Even more broken then usually I mean.
So basically powerplay was broken from July until November last year. Even more broken then usually I mean.
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The problem with how PP works is, it's not easy to "correct" the situation. You can't easily take back a system from another power for example.
The cycle tick was delayed by about two hours. In and of itself, this may seem like nothing, but when power A is trying to snipe power B into turmoil, this matters a lot.
From the Mahon perspective, we were in a prep race with Archon for one of the systems we lost during our massive turmoil (7 Zeta I think), and when 7 AM UTC rolled around, we thought "*well, it's one of those cycle ticks where the server doesn't go offline*". We'd noticed that Leesti had gotten undermined a few minutes before the expected tick (part of the snipe), but noticing it and being able to do anything about it in the few minutes left before the expected tick wasn't possible.
I think after five or ten minutes it became clear that the tick wasn't happening for whatever reason, and we now faced a dilemma - do we hope that the tick happens really quickly and that no one does more undermining in the mean time to push us into turmoil (as far as we could tell, we weren't in turmoil at a normal 7 AM tick), or should we prepare for a very long response time (possibly even multiple days) and start patching the holes.
It wasn't a long discussion - whatever we did it'd cause consternation. If we were turmoiled because of undermining after 7 AM, people would be complaining, and if we fortified after 7 AM, people would be complaining - so we went with the latter.
Winters ended up getting really angry with us (Mahon) for fortifying after the tick, because they were 100% convinced that we would have been turmoiled otherwise, and a large number of their people (including organizers) refused to believe otherwise regardless of the amount of data we threw at them. Even when one of their people noticed that someone on their side had dropped the ball on undermining one of our systems (I think it was Ao Kond), leaving it around 800 merits short), which meant that even with a proper 7 AM tick Mahon wouldn't have been turmoiled (the missing system would have turmoiled us), they still kept claiming that we cheated our way out of turmoil, to the point that (as far as I remember) the same Winters organizer who realized they failed to undermine one of our systems and thus wouldn't have turmoiled us anyway, later claimed that the only reason we weren't turmoiled was that we fortified after the tick.
A large group of Winters commanders then used this as an excuse to defect from Winters to focus on sabotaging other powers by running huge amounts of fortification and preparations for them (primarily ALD who basically autoexpands due to combat expansions), forcing them into deeper and deeper default deficits, culminating in ALD almost hitting -1,000 CC default, and essentially only stopping once they realised that FDev would be bringing in consolidation to curb this kind of sabotage. Once that happened, they then conducted a fairly large attack on ALD through regular undermining (I think - I didn't check for collusion piracy), forcing them into an unrecoverable turmoil cycle that made them shed close to thirty profitable systems.
Now, this is very much one commander's view of things, and I'm sure once people from Winters sees my post they'll post their side of the story, and I rather doubt it will paint Mahon in as neutral a light as I did, and they'll probably paint the actions of the Winters defectors in a very different light as well.
So - the week 52 debacle is more than just a tiny hiccup - it had rather profound consequences for PowerPlay.
Deleted member 115407
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Wow - great read. You're right, for dedicated players that is more than just a tiny hiccup!
After that there was a fix for a Delaine expansion where we couldn't earn merits. This caused the NPC'S to not retaliate in expansion zones. Players went afk with turrets set to fire to farm merits.
This bug was not fixed for several weeks, after which Delaine's starting CC had dropped from about 700 to 200. Having had pretty good defence against turmoil for a year, the careful husbandry of that CC was wasted. Delaine was then subject to a 5c attack that was made possible by a large number of Delaine players leaving powerplay following the bug and Frontier's tardiness at fixing it.
This is just Delaine's viewpoint and like Martin says, others will see otherwise. Other powers were also affected by this.
This bug was not fixed for several weeks, after which Delaine's starting CC had dropped from about 700 to 200. Having had pretty good defence against turmoil for a year, the careful husbandry of that CC was wasted. Delaine was then subject to a 5c attack that was made possible by a large number of Delaine players leaving powerplay following the bug and Frontier's tardiness at fixing it.
This is just Delaine's viewpoint and like Martin says, others will see otherwise. Other powers were also affected by this.
This bit actually points something out that I forgot to mention - Cycle 52 happened just after Engineers dropped, and as is typical, PowerPlay bugs get ignored for ages, because PowerPlay bugs apparently do not affect many people. The problem with this kind of argument is that the longer it takes to get those bugs fixed, the fewer people end up playing PowerPlay. It also conveniently ignores that a PowerPlay bug can easily end up affecting 100% of a player's time, if the only thing they do in game is play PowerPlay. Like Withnail's expansion example. Combat expansions (as far as I recall) ended up in a situation where the defending NPCs never engaged, at which point all combat expansions ended up auto-expanding, because if you tried fighting against the expansion, you'd get ganked by an ENTIRE combat zone worth of NPCs at once. Combine that with a mix of sabotage and ignorant pledges pushing bad systems, and you pretty end up with what happened to Archon - completely abandoned by the base that had managed to keep him alive.
PowerPlay is subjected to a constant death by millions of paper cuts, and it's being ignored by the developers because instead of gritting their teeth and taking the pain, players are understandibly sidestepping the paper and doing other things instead, and FDev then argues that there isn't enough players to warrant the resources.
And it's a crying shame - the only thing that currently has a proper reason to work together in groups with or against other players is PowerPlay. Everything else is or can be done solo or in one v one, but it gets ignored to the detriment of everything it touches.
I would honestly like to know what fraction of players use PowerPlay for more than just money and items. If it's a tiny fraction and works out to less than, say, a thousand players, then FDev shouldn't ignore it - they should prepare to scrap it entirely. Maybe the threat of losing 15% ship and module discounts in Li Yong-Rui space, huge trade profits on slaves in Torval -> Archon space and the bounty hunting bonuses in ALD and Hudson space would make players realise that they are in fact using PowerPlay on a regular basis, and that they don't really want it to go away.
Perspectice of a player who is pretty much a comeback newbie : I wish there was more available lore about powerplay in-game. When you pick your faction there's almost nothing to read about who you would be with. I understand some people don'T care but I'm sure a bunch would. Of course introduction videos would be cooler and I think it would be possible for FD to do that on a reasonable budget without having to spend thousands and thousands on CGI. Same thing for the superpowers (fed, imp and alliance.) There isn't much said at all in-game if you look for information. Right now, the only interesting thing going on there is that you get in-game rewards but.. to be honest that's something I really don't care about (Because otherwise I wouldn't have picked Edmund Mahon who.. gives me discount on agriculture supplies when I'm interested in combat.. lol.
I'd suggest something like an in-game encyclopedia that could be updated and expanded over time and made available to players. Besides you can read it if you want in idle times while flying to distant destinations.
I don't think I'm the only one who likes stories in games.
I'd suggest something like an in-game encyclopedia that could be updated and expanded over time and made available to players. Besides you can read it if you want in idle times while flying to distant destinations.
I don't think I'm the only one who likes stories in games.
This is another problem. I understand why FDev doesn't want players to write on behalf of established lore characters, but when FDev themselves apparently doesn't want to write on their behalf either, things start being really weird. We're approaching a hundred weeks of PowerPlay, and the only mentions of stuff that happens in PowerPlay has been user submitted summaries of the previous cycle - that's just not good enough. How can you have a summary of something like the massive snipe that turmoiled Mahon and leave out comments from Mahon's office and the Powers that were involved? It'd be like seeing a news article with the headline "*700 people left dead in terror attack*", and then it's just a summary of who died how.
I wonder anything would be added by being able to see the history of a power in graphs of merits and standings, names of gained and lost systems, top 10 merit grinders, things like that.
The change to undermining was a massive problem that came with the Engineers update.
The police response was changed to be much faster, so undermining in general much much more difficult.
This made the undermining merits collapse, which in turn meant fortifying to counter undermining didn't need to happen either.
ALD and Hudson also make some or all of their systems high security, so undermining them was even more difficult with the faster police responses, but Archon Delaine makes his systems all Low Security, which meant he was now far easier to undermine than any other power.
I don't think this was a part of FDevs nefarious plan to nerf the Delaine power and buff ALD, it was just another untested outcome of a game play change.
Add this to broken expansions mentioned above, and you have a perfect storm of multiple broken features hitting at the same time.
This is the total merit chart I posted from back then:
And my comment from week 55 which was the last time I participated in PP
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/268572-Cycle-55-Charts/
All that information is available, all you need to do is collate it and present it
The police response was changed to be much faster, so undermining in general much much more difficult.
This made the undermining merits collapse, which in turn meant fortifying to counter undermining didn't need to happen either.
ALD and Hudson also make some or all of their systems high security, so undermining them was even more difficult with the faster police responses, but Archon Delaine makes his systems all Low Security, which meant he was now far easier to undermine than any other power.
I don't think this was a part of FDevs nefarious plan to nerf the Delaine power and buff ALD, it was just another untested outcome of a game play change.
Add this to broken expansions mentioned above, and you have a perfect storm of multiple broken features hitting at the same time.
This is the total merit chart I posted from back then:
And my comment from week 55 which was the last time I participated in PP
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/268572-Cycle-55-Charts/
All that information is available, all you need to do is collate it and present it
Wow.
It's sad what I hear about the state of powerplay.
It seems like it could be a great system, but just doesn't seem to get the attention it needs.
It's sad what I hear about the state of powerplay.
It seems like it could be a great system, but just doesn't seem to get the attention it needs.
This would suck, it really would. But I'll be damned if I wouldn't welcome it.
As you say later, Power Play doesn't even feel connected to the game anymore, but just tacked on distraction that takes up our play time and credits. Thankfully, because a few Powers still encourage Open Play operations, you still get some great PvP that can turn an entire team's efforts around. I am not one of those who demand Open Play only, but as far as I can tell, the only time players actively enjoy Power Play is when direct PvP or team PvP by proxy scores a victory for their side. But it is still so very rare.
I've said this before, but I would embrace FDev/GalNet/Pilots' Federation calling a time out, and re-evaluating how Command Capital is calculated, and then re-introducing Power Play as an entirely new game where it's obviously not Galactic Risk and can be better tied with the Lore of the galaxy.
Back to the original topic question: what Martin and Withnail say pretty much holds true. What they left out was that every active expansion during Cycle 52 was aborted. None of them succeeded, even if they should have. They were just wiped away. Preparation continued, with the same numbers from the previous cycle, ruining a few very trying prep wars. After Cycle 52, it felt like a dozen or more of Winters players gave up on the meta-game. Their leader effectively sabotaged a developer chat with power play leaders by streaming it to their entire group, so they could release a scathing review of it before any of the other power play leaders could decide on the best course of action to inform our player bases. And, yes, Combat Expansions were flat out guaranteed to always succeed due to a bug that was left unaddressed for months. The bug report was full of video evidence from multiple CMDRs and QA people asking us if it was repeatable and what the bug actually was again.
It was a bad time.
ALD continued to expand, because, well, we didn't have any other choice. Since Winters was down on manpower and leadership, we continued to undermine them and strip systems from them. I believe that Winters never lost a system until after Cycle 52. They did have a nice standing surplus of CC, while many other Powers that were as heavily attacked started from a standing deficit position. When it became clear that their power was only a couple dozen CMDRs, we all realised how well they punched above their weight-class. After about four weeks of ALD constantly expanding, and most of these expansions hurting Winters, some of those who quit PP re-joined, but with ALD, and they spent around 1.4 billion credits every single week for about five months sabotaging ALD's preparations and expansions, increasing our standing deficit to over -800cc. When FDev made it clear that consolidation was coming down the pipe, two or three weeks of massive undermining stripped our furthest systems from ALD, but we were hard pressed to force the close to HQ sabotage systems into turmoil.
It didn't help that we had our own morale defeat over the past five months and could barely find the CMDRs needed to avert total and complete disaster. Fifth column activities are bad because they abuse and exploit the poorly balanced mechanics, but they're worse because they make loyal CMDRs' actions feel utterly pointless.
After the sabotage and the undermining, consolidation came out, more players arrived, while Winters was still without a united playerbase. Many CMDRs pledged not to benefit from ALD's lost systems due to sabotage, while others capitalised on the sabotage, which was the practice during the first year of Power Play, so there's no real recriminations there. The arguments and lack of trust about the fifth column sabotage virtually destroyed much of the good fun many players got from participating in Power Play, especially as sabotage avoided the direct confrontation that appealed to so many combat pilots.
The main thing I like to point out, from and ALD perspective. From the pre-Cycle 52 situation to the Cycle 94 situation? After 28 billion credits were spent sabotaging ALD? One pre-52 ALD system is now Winters, two are Aisling, half of one is Torval, and ALD was able to remove many Control Systems that contested our allies from the board and re-establish them as profitable systems for all parties. So it was a bad half year, but things are looking up, and now is a good time to re-join Power Play, even if it's still neglected by FDev and not as fun as it could be. We're still trying to keep it enjoyable for everyone.
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