Powerplay 2.0 decay is very bad for solo players

I'm playing Elite Dangerous since release in 2014, I have over 5k hours in and did pretty much everything in the game.

My focus over the years has been on PP and primarly on BGS.

In PP 1.0, BGS was very well linked into powerplay mechanics and it had a very meaningful effect to improve triggers. I don't wanna go into details on how the system worked, but you had a purpose in playing BGS, making certain factions in powers, making 2nd faction as blockers, expand the factions with the right government type into the system you wanted, etc.

Also, you could very well manage the BGS aspect of powerplay alone, to some degree at least. You could not manage ALL the systems alone, but you could manage like 10-20 systems by yourself.

I've always played with a coordinated group, but each of us had a set of assignments that could be completed alone. So it was kinda a coordinated group of solo players. And that's what I liked in this game most, that you could play solo or with a group and your actions would still be meaningful.

With Powerplay 2.0 this was completely destroyed. Playing BGS for PP is basically reduced to trigger some faction states and that's it. There's no real faction management, expansion, wars, nothing, all of that is gone, and that was what I was playing for 5k hours.

I love this game, so I tried to find new ways to enjoy my time in the galaxy.

Colonisation brought new hope for me, sure the solo hauling gets boring very quickly, but it gave me new hopes for going back to play some BGS.

Well, this wasn't the case, Colonisation further undermined BGS gameplay, because if you had to actually make a faction expand before, now you can just claim a new system and boom, your faction is in control already, there's no management whatsoever, there are no contested systems, since everyone can claim literally billions of new systems, why would you fight over a specific one?

I did not give up tho, I still love this game and wanted to make it work.

So there are two new systems, PP 2.0 and Colonisation, how can I play them in a way that scratches that faction management itch that I like so much?

I can colonise new systems, and then expand my PP faction to my colonies. That's it, sounds very cool, I can make colonies, play the BGS to some degree to trigger states favourable to make acquisition and reinforcement more efficient. I could still play BGS to shift assets within the system. I would still need to balance the influence to prevent my faction to expand, for example if I hauled for my faction to acquire a the system, the faction in control of that system would get a constant boost of influence, so I could play the BGS to balance that out.

Everything sounded perfect on paper, sure, for a solo player this is a lot of work, but it's not impossible, I don't need to conquer the galaxy in one week, I can play at my own pace and eventually get something done, or can I?

This is when I found out that PP 2.0 has a decay system. Well you cannot play at your own pace, if you're a solo player you need to put in at least 100k control points per week to see a steady progress, otherwise you're fighting against the decay and if you do less than a certain amount, all your work will be completely useless.

That was a bummer, I did find out a new way to play the game, but the game is actively pushing against me and why?

Decay was implemented to make PP 2.0 more dynamic, people are not engaging with it the way Frontier imagined, there are no conflicts, but why there would be conflicts if you can colonise an infinite amount of systems and expand there? Exactly, there's no point.

Decay was implemented to make undermining system more easy, otherwise all systems would ended up being fortified or stonghold overtime.

But my question is, did it work? Did decay actually had any effect on making PP 2.0 more dynamic or is it there just to prevent solo players from actually playing the game?

Because I just feel like this game nowadays is just saying to me "No you cannot play, whatever you do is gonna be useless, go do something else", and that's exactly what I've done, am I the only one in this situation?

There will be people saying: "it's a content made for player groups and if you play solo it's normal that you're gonna have a hard time" and I say: "yes, of course I'm gonna have a harder time but I still want a possibility, beacuse it was there before, I enjoyed this game so much exactly because it allowed me to play the way I wanted and now it won't allow me anymore".

I don't know how people feel about this decay mechanic. I heard some ideas that could actually make more sense, that is make system decay only if they were not actively worked in the previous week. That makes so much more sense, and would give solo players a chance to build our little empire in our corner of the galaxy.