Okay.
Elite: Dangerous - space sandbox.
Was enjoying wandering off away from everything else and exploring, scanning and charting the gorgeous stellar bodies beyond our ken; not exciting, but a great past time to keep myself busy while I watched streams, chatted with friends in comms, caught up on netflix stuff, etc.
And to liven things up, Frontier Developments released the Power Play update, bringing in a factional metagame to allow players to help influence the control of inhabited systems and interactive stations, etc. - you do things to curry favour with one system for your chosen power-player, and if enough people do enough of these tasks (hunt down pirates/corrupt or oppressive law enforcement¹, ship in relief aid, bring in marketing materials, ferry envoys with treaties/trade agreements/etc. and so on) and the system shifts to being controlled by that power player and faction-specific benefits are applied (cheaper prices on weapons, or trade goods, etc.)
If another faction decides it wants to expand into 'your' faction's space, first it needs to eliminate your control of the system, and it becomes a 'fortfy/undermine' race to see who does more in time before the weekly(?) rollover and metamap update.
Also the more you do for the faction, the more "Merits" you accumulate - enough merits and you increase in rank and get more cash, better discounts, bigger allotment of 'faction materials requisitions'
(thus you can do more of those prepare/expand/undermine/fortify jobs), and after enough rank promotion, access to faction-unique ship gear.
And - one incentive to compete with other players to 'do more' - the higher the position of your faction with the others, the greater these effects
(warmongers give greater ammo discounts, traders give more commodities for use, etc.) - the top three get bonuses to their effects, so it's in your best interest to get your faction bigger and stronger than the others.
Now, it's slow going at the start: you get ten 'requisitions' every half-hour (even though you can probably put them to use in about five) so you've got plenty of time to read every possible screen and review all the listed data...
...which brings us to what happened to me.
Now you can leave a faction, erasing any merits you've earned, and you have to wait 0.5 days before you can join another faction.
...or you can
defect straight from your current faction into a new one. You skip the waiting period and you keep half of your earned merits and bring them over to your new faction. The catch is, the old faction will REALLY hate you and send out kill squads for a time
(based on how high in the ranks you'd climbed aka how big your betrayal was).
...so, while I was sitting in the capital station for my chosen faction, waiting for the requisition timer to run down so I could do another job and get myself closer to the 100 merits and rank 2 (at the weekly update), I was browsing through the details on some of the
other factions - who was slipping in the rankings, who was nearby with systems that might be undermined, who seemed to be expanding into my faction's controlled space, how close was the next-lower faction to passing mine, etc. etc.
And...at the bottom of details screen for one faction that I'd ALSO considered besides the one I was currently pledged to, there was that shiny 'defect' button...
And, because I was curious, I clicked on it to see what info might be listed on the effects
(Frontier Dev. has been quite helpful and thorough with 'are you sure?' dialogue windows that not just give you a chance for second thought - not to mention a safety net from misclicks - but also SPECIFIC details of what the action would change), and sure enough it told me that I'd bring over 40 merits (of the 80 I'd earned for my 'old' faction) and that my 'old faction' would hunt for me for
1 day (presumably due to my starter-rank with the faction).
Okay, cool - I clicked on cancel, and went through some more info...and then logged out and went to bed.
Well, today, after running errands and doing stuff, I sat down to the computer, fired up
Elite:Dangerous with the intent of finishing off that 'grind to 100 merits'...and loaded up sitting in a hangar of the faction's capital station like I left it...
...but my eye got drawn to a red 'hostile' indicator on my ship's hud.
Puzzling over that for a moment, I fired up the faction info screen, to see if the weekly cycle rollover had happened yet, since despite people repeatedly answering my enquiries about the timing of the metagame, I just couldn't keep the details in my head, and wondered if I had time to get the last twenty merits to get rank 2 before rollover.
...but on the faction overview screen, my eye was drawn to another brightly-coloured indicator; this one yellow-gold and was a star in the corner of the faction portrait that I'd pledged to.
It was
not the faction I was supposed to be in.
Quickly I checked the faction details windows, and realized what I'd done; when snooping on that faction defect dialogue window the night before, I'd mistakenly pressed 'defect' or 'accept' or whatever it was, and NOT the 'cancel' or 'backout' or 'oh wait I don't wanna do this after all' button I
thought I'd hit.
I'd defected from the old faction, lost half of my hard-earned merits, and put them with the other faction, and I was 'public enemy #1' with the old faction...for 24h.
...while sitting INSIDE THE CAPITAL STATION of that old faction.
How much was the deductible on my ship's insurance? And how was I going to get the OTHER ships I had hangared inside this same station?
Well, I could just leave the new faction; drop the REST of my merits, and start from scratch in a half a day...
I had the idea of 'why don't I just defect
back to the original faction? I'll lose ANOTHER twenty merits, but the people hosting me RIGHT NOW won't want to vape me anymore, and it IS a long way away from here to that other faction's space; the kill teams might not have much chance to catch up with me in the single day they've got to gun for me.'
...but the 'defect' button was greyed-out for the old faction; I guess they didn't trust me much after what I'd done (and with good reason).
So I decided, rather than wait a full day for the old faction to forget its grudge and then defect back, I could just leave the new faction peacefully, write off any old merits I had, wait out the twelve-hour cooldown before I could join a faction and then try to get back in with my old buddies.
And I was pleased to see when I clicked on 'leave power', that the "HOSTILE" indicator was gone from my ship's dashboard HUD - presumably that was enough to appease my aggrieved former masters.
So in the end, my rant is really about my OWN lack of diligence that allowed me to sloppily choose a wrong course of action and thus turn my activities in the game for the past couple of days into a waste of time.
Footnote - because it's me, after all: 1. Well, depending on the philosophical view of your chosen faction; a righteous firebrand that fights for justice would have you executing 'corrupt cops who abuse their power and subvert the will of our ruler', while an anarchic pirate lord would have you getting rid of meddlesome and oppressive lawmen who restrict the pirates' ability to sell whatever they wished and take whatever they wanted ;^)