Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Splinter Topic(?): Elite Dangerous PowerPlay 2.0 Information
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Other thread is happily moving in the direction of discussing zergs and this is only slightly related. Basically I'm assuming that all those times Vaknar asks for people's perspectives and examples of games they play happens because devs are busy dev-ing and getting summaries from players is good. Here's a video. It's actually 'slow' and even a dev could 'half watch' it. But I have 3 main points as someone who has played this game for a longish time, here's my primary takes on the video, with some descriptions of main changes after.
1) This is a re-sell of how it already works for the most part with some simplifications. It's a large scale application of all the principles they already use for everything else.
2) The video basically reminds me that adding even the relatively slight complexity of PowerPlay 1.0 causes people to disengage, I'd bet it's because PowerPlay itself is too 'large' whereas sector style control is easier to 'see'.
3) The video presenters consistently attempt to re-sell like this, to tell people that it's easier, this is probably moreso just 'reselling it to people who tuned out because of the complexity' and counting on the fact that those people actually knew so little about it that they can change minimal things and they will think it is new...
Main Real Changes
Following from the above, this isn't to say that they didn't change anything, the presenters discuss a lot of simplifications which are largely related to visibility. Before, for example, a star system would be the Control system and you would only usually know that it if you lived nearby or carefully checked a map. Now, you could recognize it more easily just by wandering in (the Stronghold Carrier new PoI will appear in the side Nav Bar).
Stronghold Carrier
The Stronghold Carrier experience itself is one that is abundantly available throughout the game now, but that experience is dynamic in those places. When certain of our systems are in Boom status, certain battleground PoIs open, but people need to be informed if they don't live there, whereas I expect this new way of handling PowerPlay to be a lot of 'hey everyone here's a spot you can come and fight!' and probably will almost never go away. This is really likely to just be a simplification for soldier-mentality people who just want to be deployed to a place to fight, and ofc, when they're undecided about who to allow to command them, 'go to one and figure out which side they like'. The current population of the game doesn't have a good way to communicate this to passing players. More on that in a bit.
Map Dynamics
Previously, the mini spheres of influence were about working out the best hubs, the central point of a valuable area, and then working to support governments in the area which matched the Power. Now, it's moving closer to the FFXI Campaign/Ashes Node systems, where it's a progression, the node-like structure is being reduced to simplify it, but, again, note that this is functionally how anyone interested in the Simulation played before in 'sector' based content. This is a resell to people who weren't interested enough before to know that it's primarily a resell. The map changes reflect this. The previous map was intended to create an understanding of small scale stuff and then hit a point where players wouldn't know why a specific action was important or not important, and they got to vote on it. Players had a lot of control, but the price of that was invested time into understanding. This worked well at the 'beginning of the server' before there was a lot of established territory, so players could have more visible influence that wasn't just maintaining the status quo. But where the game is now, you would have to study the politics of the whole map just to know where to focus your time, or be told by someone who did.
Actual Play Dynamics
The reason this resell and shakeup is probably required is simply that we've hit the point where everyone knows nothing will change, and PowerPlay is a lot more effort to disrupt than Sectors, in much the same way that bringing down a Metropolis is hard, but if that Metropolis is very dedicated to defending its borders, bringing down even its Vassals might be hard.
By changing and simplifying it so that players don't need to be as engaged and can just have the game itself (rather than other players) tell them where to point their multicannons, the chances of some players doing it enough, getting to see an effect, and then some of them becoming invested enough to learn something and feel good, would take us back to what PowerPlay 1.0 was like in the early days before all the territory started to be more established and the big PowerPlay groups became coordinated enough to hold that position politically (skirmishes and stuff do still occur now, but it's harder for players to notice because those groups don't have an ingame way to address more direct information to people supporting the same Power).
Basically this segment doesn't really go into Actual Play Dynamics changes because they're largely (not entirely) superficial resell changes. And the few that aren't, really don't change the actual way people play the game, it's just casting a bigger net. The equivalent of Ashes changing something as specific as changing whether or not a certain Node Policy Option is decided by the Mayor, or voted on directly. Moving more stuff to the Mayor would mean that less people need to understand the policies or the reasons behind them, but more Mayoral mandates means more conflict.
Reward Dynamics
Bigger change. Previously, you would have the equivalent of Node Atrophy but for yourself, you had to keep doing things to maintain your rewards/salary, how much your vote meant, etc.
Now, they're reselling. So 'nothing goes down!', to appease people who don't like atrophy. And I can say this with certainty because they mention then that after you reach the top level, your contributions go into a separate system which occasionally rewards you when you put in effort. But you already got rewards for maintaining like that, and they admit they don't know what those rewards will be yet. It's just making things sound nicer for people who had pain points before. It is removing one (the Atrophy), presumably because atrophy is something people might prefer to experience through PoIs rather than their own character, but that encompasses nearly all of the changes.
That said, they're probably going to do as they say in the video and 'give you stuff to prevent you from having to devote time to other things'. This is slightly bad, probably, but I'll let you know at some point. You'd think that they are sure to make it good, but this is the same company that made weekly forced progress resets in a war against terrifying hostile aliens that literally destroyed space stations that we needed to reclaim.
There was no mention of whether or not changing power will reset your rank/rewards, or if you can do what you do with the other systems and just run around doing everyone with no real loyalty. In the current version, switching will lose all progress and you will be hunted for a day or two. So... switch as you're about to log out on Sunday night, basically.
Fluff
People love Leaderboards. Also, you can currently do all of this from single player mode. i.e. you could log in, run missions and rank up just by pure time grind with no way for other players to prevent you personally from doing your stuff. I'm not sure who this is supposed to appeal to, but I'm pretty sure the leaders of my chosen Power are going to use it primarily for manipulation. Let people fight over the top of the internal Leaderboard to spur them to more action, encourage rivalry, etc, all the while the people who actually decide what should be done, make no such effort, and just point prestige-hungry people at whatever they want done. I can't complain, this is effective, I'm sure Intrepid knows how this works.
Concerns
Obviously I don't like resells. I know why they're required, but I feel as if it encourages Community Managers and front facing people to act as if Devs are doing a lot of design-addition work, when they're probably doing a lot of 'cutting down', figuring out how to lower the barrier of entry. I can't blame them, I know what it's like to spend literally months working on just figuring out how to cut out one pain point properly without breaking a system, but every now and again you do need to grab everyone's attention and pretend you have a new construction after you've taken enough blocks out of your Jenga tower.
Aside from that, this doesn't sound like a thing that their server infrastructure or existing playerbase will actually successfully support. I've previously mentioned the ability to play in group instances, which would mean that there is a possibility here to not just play solo, but to make a subgroup for just your allies, and attack enemy facilities unopposed because those enemies cannot interact with you.
But on the other hand, removing that option completely means a blockade fleet can sit in space and obliterate anyone who shows up. There are various reasons why this doesn't work, but I have long suspected there is some underlying tech that helps with this for Conflict Zones, I just can't be sure even now.
The issue is, ED doesn't really do well enough on the server front for even an open instance of a Blockade Fleet vs a huge Assault Group to actually... work. And when huge battles are decided moreso by 'whose client disconnects' than Tactics or strategy, a new painpoint arises.
Expect to see a lot of complaints, because this simplification is likely to result in a lot of overbloated battles, by throwing a mass of people who were naturally uninterested before, into one combat PoI. Hopefully they will mostly be on foot playing an FPS, which it handles better.
Conclusion
I'd say there's at best a 12% chance that this will be a good change that improves the overall game for more than 3 months, and maybe a 26% chance that it will be well received by anyone currently paying attention to any of these systems, but that makes sense, as it is not for them. 50-50 odds that the community at large will see it for what it is, which is perfect from the perspective of getting people talking about it. Nothing like a good 50-50 split on an issue with vague definitions to keep the conversation going.
As a member of a group whose interactions with PowerPlay are complex but not particularly related to the Power I support as directly, I can say that this doesn't affect me. I am not in the target audience of this change, because I understand PowerPlay, it influences nearly every decision I make/advise on, but I don't engage directly with the support of the Power that often.
Depending on how one change is implemented, that might shift, but it won't be because I have renewed interest in PowerPlay, it will simply be that the game will now 'force' our interactions with the system, and maybe a few of our star systems will go from 'not really influenced by PowerPlay because they aren't valuable enough' to 'automatically included just because we are doing what we normally do'.
1) This is a re-sell of how it already works for the most part with some simplifications. It's a large scale application of all the principles they already use for everything else.
2) The video basically reminds me that adding even the relatively slight complexity of PowerPlay 1.0 causes people to disengage, I'd bet it's because PowerPlay itself is too 'large' whereas sector style control is easier to 'see'.
3) The video presenters consistently attempt to re-sell like this, to tell people that it's easier, this is probably moreso just 'reselling it to people who tuned out because of the complexity' and counting on the fact that those people actually knew so little about it that they can change minimal things and they will think it is new...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZgiIfs4os4Main Real Changes
Following from the above, this isn't to say that they didn't change anything, the presenters discuss a lot of simplifications which are largely related to visibility. Before, for example, a star system would be the Control system and you would only usually know that it if you lived nearby or carefully checked a map. Now, you could recognize it more easily just by wandering in (the Stronghold Carrier new PoI will appear in the side Nav Bar).
Stronghold Carrier
The Stronghold Carrier experience itself is one that is abundantly available throughout the game now, but that experience is dynamic in those places. When certain of our systems are in Boom status, certain battleground PoIs open, but people need to be informed if they don't live there, whereas I expect this new way of handling PowerPlay to be a lot of 'hey everyone here's a spot you can come and fight!' and probably will almost never go away. This is really likely to just be a simplification for soldier-mentality people who just want to be deployed to a place to fight, and ofc, when they're undecided about who to allow to command them, 'go to one and figure out which side they like'. The current population of the game doesn't have a good way to communicate this to passing players. More on that in a bit.
Map Dynamics
Previously, the mini spheres of influence were about working out the best hubs, the central point of a valuable area, and then working to support governments in the area which matched the Power. Now, it's moving closer to the FFXI Campaign/Ashes Node systems, where it's a progression, the node-like structure is being reduced to simplify it, but, again, note that this is functionally how anyone interested in the Simulation played before in 'sector' based content. This is a resell to people who weren't interested enough before to know that it's primarily a resell. The map changes reflect this. The previous map was intended to create an understanding of small scale stuff and then hit a point where players wouldn't know why a specific action was important or not important, and they got to vote on it. Players had a lot of control, but the price of that was invested time into understanding. This worked well at the 'beginning of the server' before there was a lot of established territory, so players could have more visible influence that wasn't just maintaining the status quo. But where the game is now, you would have to study the politics of the whole map just to know where to focus your time, or be told by someone who did.
Actual Play Dynamics
The reason this resell and shakeup is probably required is simply that we've hit the point where everyone knows nothing will change, and PowerPlay is a lot more effort to disrupt than Sectors, in much the same way that bringing down a Metropolis is hard, but if that Metropolis is very dedicated to defending its borders, bringing down even its Vassals might be hard.
By changing and simplifying it so that players don't need to be as engaged and can just have the game itself (rather than other players) tell them where to point their multicannons, the chances of some players doing it enough, getting to see an effect, and then some of them becoming invested enough to learn something and feel good, would take us back to what PowerPlay 1.0 was like in the early days before all the territory started to be more established and the big PowerPlay groups became coordinated enough to hold that position politically (skirmishes and stuff do still occur now, but it's harder for players to notice because those groups don't have an ingame way to address more direct information to people supporting the same Power).
Basically this segment doesn't really go into Actual Play Dynamics changes because they're largely (not entirely) superficial resell changes. And the few that aren't, really don't change the actual way people play the game, it's just casting a bigger net. The equivalent of Ashes changing something as specific as changing whether or not a certain Node Policy Option is decided by the Mayor, or voted on directly. Moving more stuff to the Mayor would mean that less people need to understand the policies or the reasons behind them, but more Mayoral mandates means more conflict.
Reward Dynamics
Bigger change. Previously, you would have the equivalent of Node Atrophy but for yourself, you had to keep doing things to maintain your rewards/salary, how much your vote meant, etc.
Now, they're reselling. So 'nothing goes down!', to appease people who don't like atrophy. And I can say this with certainty because they mention then that after you reach the top level, your contributions go into a separate system which occasionally rewards you when you put in effort. But you already got rewards for maintaining like that, and they admit they don't know what those rewards will be yet. It's just making things sound nicer for people who had pain points before. It is removing one (the Atrophy), presumably because atrophy is something people might prefer to experience through PoIs rather than their own character, but that encompasses nearly all of the changes.
That said, they're probably going to do as they say in the video and 'give you stuff to prevent you from having to devote time to other things'. This is slightly bad, probably, but I'll let you know at some point. You'd think that they are sure to make it good, but this is the same company that made weekly forced progress resets in a war against terrifying hostile aliens that literally destroyed space stations that we needed to reclaim.
There was no mention of whether or not changing power will reset your rank/rewards, or if you can do what you do with the other systems and just run around doing everyone with no real loyalty. In the current version, switching will lose all progress and you will be hunted for a day or two. So... switch as you're about to log out on Sunday night, basically.
Fluff
People love Leaderboards. Also, you can currently do all of this from single player mode. i.e. you could log in, run missions and rank up just by pure time grind with no way for other players to prevent you personally from doing your stuff. I'm not sure who this is supposed to appeal to, but I'm pretty sure the leaders of my chosen Power are going to use it primarily for manipulation. Let people fight over the top of the internal Leaderboard to spur them to more action, encourage rivalry, etc, all the while the people who actually decide what should be done, make no such effort, and just point prestige-hungry people at whatever they want done. I can't complain, this is effective, I'm sure Intrepid knows how this works.
Concerns
Obviously I don't like resells. I know why they're required, but I feel as if it encourages Community Managers and front facing people to act as if Devs are doing a lot of design-addition work, when they're probably doing a lot of 'cutting down', figuring out how to lower the barrier of entry. I can't blame them, I know what it's like to spend literally months working on just figuring out how to cut out one pain point properly without breaking a system, but every now and again you do need to grab everyone's attention and pretend you have a new construction after you've taken enough blocks out of your Jenga tower.
Aside from that, this doesn't sound like a thing that their server infrastructure or existing playerbase will actually successfully support. I've previously mentioned the ability to play in group instances, which would mean that there is a possibility here to not just play solo, but to make a subgroup for just your allies, and attack enemy facilities unopposed because those enemies cannot interact with you.
But on the other hand, removing that option completely means a blockade fleet can sit in space and obliterate anyone who shows up. There are various reasons why this doesn't work, but I have long suspected there is some underlying tech that helps with this for Conflict Zones, I just can't be sure even now.
The issue is, ED doesn't really do well enough on the server front for even an open instance of a Blockade Fleet vs a huge Assault Group to actually... work. And when huge battles are decided moreso by 'whose client disconnects' than Tactics or strategy, a new painpoint arises.
Expect to see a lot of complaints, because this simplification is likely to result in a lot of overbloated battles, by throwing a mass of people who were naturally uninterested before, into one combat PoI. Hopefully they will mostly be on foot playing an FPS, which it handles better.
Conclusion
I'd say there's at best a 12% chance that this will be a good change that improves the overall game for more than 3 months, and maybe a 26% chance that it will be well received by anyone currently paying attention to any of these systems, but that makes sense, as it is not for them. 50-50 odds that the community at large will see it for what it is, which is perfect from the perspective of getting people talking about it. Nothing like a good 50-50 split on an issue with vague definitions to keep the conversation going.
As a member of a group whose interactions with PowerPlay are complex but not particularly related to the Power I support as directly, I can say that this doesn't affect me. I am not in the target audience of this change, because I understand PowerPlay, it influences nearly every decision I make/advise on, but I don't engage directly with the support of the Power that often.
Depending on how one change is implemented, that might shift, but it won't be because I have renewed interest in PowerPlay, it will simply be that the game will now 'force' our interactions with the system, and maybe a few of our star systems will go from 'not really influenced by PowerPlay because they aren't valuable enough' to 'automatically included just because we are doing what we normally do'.
♪ One Gummy Fish, two Gummy Fish, Red Gummy Fish, Blue Gummy Fish ♪
2
Comments
I liked the video too.
I think a Metropolises will last long time because they require significant resources to siege them. But can also fall fast if defenses cannot be built up.
Now while Metros can be maintained as you say by being dedicated to defend borders, we have to be aware that these are not the top of the trophic chain. They just provide the ZoI for high lvl PvE, crafting benches and infrastructure. They are exploited by the castles which can be very unstable regarding who holds the power, being forced every weekend to prepare for a potential monthly siege.
And these metropolis citizens with their vassals, who pay taxes to them are also supposed to defend the caravans transporting those taxes:
The guild must develop those nodes to enhance the defenses of the castle.[3] It will be possible, but very difficult for a single guild to fully develop these nodes. They will likely need assistance from the broader community.[31]
And they will defend these caravans because those castles are supposed to pay back by providing "buffs and benefits to the citizens of that region"
So I think players in AoC will have to involve themselves actively and they'll decide every weekend if they help those caravans or destroy them. Or as Plato said "The price of apathy is to be ruled by evil men."
How do you think people will feel when a Metropolises falls?
Players who involve themselves into the caravan system, storing commodities everywhere, will have an advantage of increased selling price for those originating in the destroyed nodes.
The new Metropolis which takes it's place will bring new PvE content too.
I think the fall of a metropolis will be a sign that more players welcome a change and they'll convince the others that change is good.