When looking at DV and ownership results, CHECK YOUR MISSIONS AND NEWS.
I can't stress this enough.
There are a LOAD of variables that come into play, like whether you're fighting an empire player/AI, a cartel player/AI, or the non-cartel "neutral" Orions. The latter (especially Met17_Patrol, which is generally offered in friendly space) may return a non-result. The indicator of whether the server considered the mission a win/loss is if the action is reported in news after the mission. If you see no mention of your hex immediately afterward, then it had no bearing on hex ownership/DV change. In addition, there are some missions (or have been in the past) that WILL NOT cause a change in hex DV no matter what. Rather than offer up old results, I'd like testing to reveal if that is still the case, and with which missions.
If possible, I'd like to get someone to create a web-based reporting tool for gathering mission DV result data, on both the stock and NW missions. Off the top of my head, we would need to include fields to enter data for the following variables, not necessarily in this order (feel free to add more if you can think of them):
1. Mission (real title)
2. Empire hex owner (incl. neutral)
3. Cartel hex owner (incl. neutral)
4. PvAI or PvP mission (PvP may include AIs)
5. Ships/races present (incl. all players and AIs, need multiple fields?)
6. Political tensions among each of the ships/races present (again need multiple fields?)
7. Empire hex DV at start of mission
8. Cartel hex DV at start of mission (this will be hard -- only time this could be reliable is if a new map were used, and AI-only missions were given a 0 DV change, and players tracked the progression of the hex results and found the cartel DV changing when it "should" -- essentially this is a valuable field, but one we can't trust results from)
9. Empire hex DV at end of mission
10. Cartel hex DV at end of mission (see 8)
11. Mission result (i.e., which AI killed/captured or which player or players are killed or disengage)
It would also be valuable to have the test server's full range of political settings listed on the website so people reporting data would not have to guess. Also, no bugged missions would be valid for reporting purposes, since they would have unknown effects on the outcome reports to the server (i.e., host left messages, failed drafts, etc.).
Another thing to consider is that political tensions are determined by percentages. So, a tension of 500 may seem neutral, but actually show up as enemy or ally depending on the percentage calculation. Also, slight allies or enemies may not work the same as more intense friends/enemimes do for mission drafting and results. I must ONCE AGAIN point out that a stable points system method for determining tensions would be far superior to what we have now for the purpose of being able to control/determine politics. So, a 500 setting would ALWAYS be considered fully neutral, and values to either side of that approaching 0 and 1000 would be gradually more friendly or hated. This way, there would be no need to try to finesse the percentage setting to return, say, 9 enemies, 7 allies, and 1 neutral (or however it would work to the full total of factions in the game).
Anyway, if someone could do a web-based tool for mission result reports, we could take tester signups and start gathering more data than just a few testers with limited time could.
Topic: SFC:OP 2.5.3.8 Patch now available and at SFCx.org!! (Read 7987 times)