Greetings Commanders,
A new update has been released for Elite Dangerous featuring Powerplay improvements.
Features of Note
New Community Goal type. Future Community goals may require Commanders to destroy specific power-aligned ships within Power Conflict Zones, these will take place across multiple systems and may help to shape the galaxy.
Further changes have been made to Powerplay, in order to encourage more aggressive play and create more vulnerability and therefore fluidity in Power territory.
Control Scores will now decay on each weekly turn.
Decay will not affect, or take a system to, below 25% of the current system state.
For example, a system at 100% Stronghold would decay over time, until settling at 25% of the purple Stronghold status bar.
Therefore, Systems cannot change their state via decay alone.
The actual amount systems decay is non linear and is dependent on the current control score of the system.
Systems closer to the maximum score threshold of their current state will decay more each week than those closer to the 25% decay limit.
Merits gained for reinforcing a system will now operate on a sliding scale, in addition to the recently introduced flat defensive multiplier.
Depending on how much undermining effort a system has been subjected to in the past 24 hours, merits gained for reinforcement actions will adjust in a range between -20% and +30%.
For example, reinforcing a system which has not been undermined at all in the past 24 hours would result in -20% merits gained.
Merit gain bonuses have been adjusted as follows:
Offensive activity - undermining another power's system: +15% (up from +5%)
Offensive activity - acquiring an unoccupied system: 0% (down from +5%)
Defensive activity - unchanged
Fixes
Fix for Power Conflict Zones not starting due to missing faction information.
Colonisation - Fixed additional causes of systems not displaying flags for initial port locations and not being claimable via System Colonisation.
Fixed additional causes of console accounts failing to transfer from Legacy to Live.
Please note that system score and merit gain from the on-foot transfer power data activity remains disabled at this time. The team is actively working on a general solution to prevent future exploitation of mechanics such as this to the state of Powerplay. Once implemented, the intent remains to re-enable this activity.