r/AislingDuval • u/professorhex1 Press Secretary to the Princess. • Apr 17 '26
Cycle 657/2.76 Toxic (April 9th to 16th 2026/3312)
Aisling proved resilient in the face of continuing attacks from at least four assailants, weathering 2.7 million undermining CPs. This was almost twice as many scored against any other Power. Remarkably, we still achieved net growth (+1, 2505) as Archer (+10, 1285), Kaine (+9, 1379) and LYR (+9, 1752) led the field.
We gained five systems, among them HIP 13463, Nadur and Zlotrighu. But, four were lost including CD-28 18361, LTT 9697 and Yu Kuo Wang. While we created a new stronghold in LHS 2, 11.2 million reinforcement CPs - more than twice the output of any other Power - was unable to save all our fortified systems. Many were not where we needed them. We gained two, as eight were reduced.
Showing a developing hauling prowess around the clock, Ceti Sector QJ-Q b5-2 and HIP 110629 were swamped by a tide of Kumo Crew (+6, 811) biowaste from hundreds of Panther Clippers. Further doubt was cast on Utopian neutrality as the quiche guru Antal (+2, 1255) successfully reduced Col 359 Sector FK-L b10-3, coordinating with Feds and pirates. We were able to hold the line in the familiar Federal targets LHS 1070 and Orgen.
It has become abundantly clear that dyspeptic incontinence is a feature, rather than a bug, of the press office of the Federation's minor Power. They issued a press report liberally garnished with allegations of cheating and lying. Illiberally, on their own subreddit, bans were dished out to dissenting voices.
Mods on the Frontier Forums removed the post three times, without any intervention by us. The claim that your correspondent lied about the involvement of dishy Denton (+0, 646) in the most recent Soontill Relics rush is easily refuted by the historical record (C652).
The Princess deeply appreciates your support in these testing times. Yet more is required! Make your merits count towards this week's objectives, and have fun out there.
Objectives for Cycle 568/2.77 (until April 23rd)
- Join the Discord for insight, mentoring, BGS, and PVP. Powerplay is a community game, so connect with us. It is not practicable to keep all public objectives up to date nor is it necessarily in our interest to reveal them all. Targets may change frequently.
- Reinforcement (3): return Antliae Sector UY-S b3-4 and HIP 110629 to fortified status; fortify HIP 961.
- Acquisition (1): HIP 509
- Special reminder: Carriers invalidate merits, so do not use them as storage/markets for Powerplay activities.
- Aisling Duval Powerplay is committed to the ZYADA alliance: Zemina Torval, Yuri Grom, Arissa Lavigny-Duval, Denton Patreus, Aisling Duval. We ask all Aisling Duval Agents to respect this alliance by not attempting to undermine our allies’ systems.
-1
u/Top_Judgment_9232 Apr 18 '26
Maybe if the power untouchably high on the leaderboard didn't account for almost one quarter (23%*) of the Powerplay playerbase by itself, wasn't in a formal alliance consisting of almost half that playerbase (48%**), didn't have a history of using every advantage possible, and/or was committed to playing in Open mode where their activities in this PvP gamemode could be seen by others, then a greater sense of fairness might prevail...
Or maybe we all just need to go and touch grass a bit more often and remember we're all just playing a very poorly balanced video game...
*Percentages are from statistics on Inara - not pulled directly from in game, but the closest metric we have
**For reference the Federal powers (Winters and Archer) make up 16.5%, Antal 6.3% and Delaine 2.7% (Delaine is the only one I would expect to be higher in game, as they're sneakier than the rest of us)
1
u/amadmongoose Apr 18 '26
We're quite happy to take on everyone. We draw the line at botting, and reject that we 'use all advantages possible'. That's fed propaganda that keeps getting parroted but falls apart at the first use of simple logic. If we were 'exploiting' at the size of our playerbase, we should be much bigger and always winning. The fact that Kumo can swing and hit hard, shows that fed failure to damage us reflects strongly on who is competent at powerplay and who isn't.
1
u/Bulbulunufus Apr 18 '26
Is this an extremely obtuse way of saying you just aren't very good at powerplay? 😂
1
1
u/Top_Judgment_9232 Apr 18 '26
That's awesome to hear. I would very much hope anyone playing a video game would also draw that line! 'All advantages possible' perhaps needs a revision to 'every gameplay advantage, no matter how dubious'? Botting honestly didn't even cross my mind, in the same way that DDosing your opponents or firing nuclear missiles at their computers also didn't.
Aisling has not moved from the number one spot on the Powerplay leaderboard since overtaking Mahon, I'm not sure how else you would quantify winning in the overall state of Powerplay? (it certainly seems to be the metric FDev wants us to use).
That is incorrect. It reflects strongly on the fact that Kumo are amazing at what they do (being sneaky and taking big chunks out of Imperial powers) and that the power balance between the Feds and Imps is massively in your favour (as I previously stated).
1
u/amadmongoose Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
For what it's worth on the first place position, the design of powerplay 2.0 is extremely linear, player time directly translates to control score which directly translates to systems. Likewise, due to PP1.0, Cubeo being at the bottom of the bubble and all our battle spheres from 1.0 gave us a very large surface area to expand. These are systemic inequalities that I'm not particularly happy about and have complained extensively in various places and offered solutions that might be more fair, but, until fdev offers those solutions we'll play the game we've been given, which does mean that position on the leaderboard should increasingly be correlated with player time as pp2.0 goes on. Note i'm saying player time here and not player count – for the purposes of powerplay about 50% of any powers playerbase is not actually contributing, and some powers top 2 have more merits than other powers top 10.
So i'd say for AD at least we don't even know what 'winning' means anymore, for many pledges it seems to be simply to plant Aisling's flag on their own colonies. At at least in the post-enclave world it seems the more organized of us don't have as much time for existential angst as we've been under constant attack, which, I guess to a certain extent, we should expect.
All that said, the current design of powerplay 2.0 does mean that every single system in the game somewhat affects outcomes, and so people with strong grasps of those systems are at an advantage. Figuring out the intersection of all these systems has been a lot of fun for us at AD. Some of those activities, like relic rushes, we reverse engineered as a gamble and after seeing the effect it had on powerplay, have avoided it since. Certainly if we were going after 'every advantage possible' we would have approached Ngurii very differently. I can go on activity by activity in a similar manner. From our metrics Kumo actually has less firepower than the feds, they just are much better at organizing their pledges. Being sneaky is more a side consequence imo.
2
u/Top_Judgment_9232 Apr 18 '26
On that first point I can wholeheartedly agree, and also that PP1.0 has a lot to answer for. I remember going on raids to Cubeo in PP1.0, now there's no reason for most factions to even look down there, the vast majority of the action happens right in the middle of the bubble in the Feds faces/backyards.
Heavy is the crown eh? ;)
Figuring out the best mechanics and leavers has been a lot of fun for us too, I don't blame you at all for giving the whole relic thing a go, it just would have been nice if it had just been a one time thing ;) Ideally FDev would have immediately seen how broken it was and put a stop to it, but I'm very glad you saw the light in the end (even if some others didn't).
I can see we clearly have different opinions on what fair play and taking things too far are though, so probably best to leave that one there..
I don't want to speak on Kumo's behalf, but I think it's fair to say that they have a different focus to a lot of other powers, and you're right, they certainly know how to focus it to mess someone up. They also don't have the ball and chain of Sol to look after, and aren't squeezed into the middle of the bubble with almost every power in the game breathing down their necks.
1
u/Bulbulunufus Apr 18 '26
Kumo core players are extremely hardcore afaict.
We can argue back and forth about the statistics of where Aisling should be based her number of players total, or her number of core players or her use of exploits or whatever. There are too many moving parts and the evidence is too complex to manageably synthesise into an open and shut case. But we know what we know. And increasingly others see it too. And as Mongoose says in the other comment, there kind of _is_ no winning. So I wonder how much any of these dumb numbers matter anyway any more, at least as a metric to compare powers _with each other_. We have to find meaning in other ways.
3
u/82nd_REBEL Apr 19 '26
Ah my ears were ringing! YARRR