With the Thargoid War well and truly underway in Elite: Dangerous, the vast majority of players are trying to help the war effort by battling back against the aliens or running rescue flights to help systems under attack. However, Frontier Developments put out a clarification on how war progress is measured each week, and it’s a bit disheartening to many.
The devs confirm that not filling progress towards reverting a system’s war state to 100% while it’s under attack before the weekly reset will wipe out all progress made by players; even if they get to 99%, it reverts to zero at the end of the week. The map UI provides the length of time in weeks a system will be in a war-specific state (Alert or Invasion) but the UI that displays attack state information and duration is not very clear – a fact that FDev hopes to address.
The revelation poured a lot of cold water on people’s motivation to engage with the war, especially considering that a player-run anti-xeno initiative reportedly marshaling its might to help one system saw progress to change its state reach only slightly more than 50% before the reset. Still many other responses appear to take it in stride, as players either reference existing BGS calculations, presume that more maelstroms means thinner numbers and easier victory, or try to rally players to a single location.
Others are suggesting ways to address the issue, and for its part FDev does note in a reply that adjustments are coming. “This is our first time simulating a real-time galactic war,” the reply clarifies.
