Warfare & Tactics

This kind of thing is a real problem for CCP though.

Every single time it becoms apparent there has been cheating/exploiting/whatever in a bad way it becomes an issue of asking how far the corruption and rot of that cheating spreads to contaminate the rest of the game. 0.0 alliances were caught exploiting moon harvesters and bought titan fleets with the ill-gotten loot, that let them hold space and get more space and get more income. The people doing the exploit got banned, but the impacts of the exploit (sovereignty map and combat results) continued.

say tonight you lose a faction vindicator Maud to a group of drakes from a dodgy nullsec corp that has been punished for macro mining in the past - is it fair that you lost a ship to a bunch of exploiters knowing that those drakes might have been paid for by cheating? No its not fair, its annoying and its crap - but there is a point where the investigation needs to draw a line.

Now on this FW thing. I think we shouldn't polish the goons ego too much. The impact was probably they kept minmatar at tier 4 for a week or so and may have helped flip it to tier 5 on sat initially. It takes 6 million lp to bring minmatar systems from zero to five across the board and achieve tier 5. So their impact was a portion of 6million (how much is open to question, perhaps CCP sreegs might report on that at some point).

Goons did nothing to win the war for minmatar pre Inferno. They have done nothing to fight the war since inferno (in terms of system ownership and plexing) and the upgrades have no impact on defense either.

So it is purely the case that the matari faction have benefitted from potentially dodgy goon LP's to boost their store prices.

Now you could ask Sreegs to retroactively remove the boon from the tier 5 store cashout (basically revert everything that people did last saturday - though I know for a fact that some of us put our legit LP's into system upgrades to keep it at tier 5 and back to tier 5 when it dropped. But its messy.

You could also perhaps ask CCP to flatline the Minmtar upgrades right now as a corrective gesture (again its messy and definitely more ceremonial than targetted) Or ask CCP to put the Amarr ones to 5 as a potential "we're sorry gesture". But the problem is ... ordinary Minmatar players knew nothing of the Goon exploit going on. They played honestly and its quite unfair to damage their gameplay as a result of this nullsec manipuation of FW.

CCP were to blame ultimately for the gaps in the system that got gamed and exploited by the goons ... and though its always annoying to know that somebody else's cheating impacted your gameplay - sometimes you do just need to shrug and get over it.

Bottom line, I'm honestly not sure what ccp can do to set this right.

The vindicator line was kinda aimed at maud. Just before Inferno he chased me out of a plex in one :)

For the minimatar who claim that the goon intervention didn't help them and OMG WE HOLD 56 SYSTEMS BECAUSE WE ARE SOOOO GOOOOD, you don't think that the influx of plexing alts helped? I know that a HUGE number of amarr pilots even had plexing alts, working against their own side, because the rewards were too much to resist. Also, an IN slicer for plexing or PVP is very pricey for an Amarr pilot on LP, a SFI costs you less than a frigate for us. Do you think that this had NOTHING to do with your ability to control systems?
I have spent the past month plexing up systems, defensive plexing (for 0 reward) and PVPing to help the amarr side. It felt like CRAP to plex all day, yet still see you guys at tier 4 or 5 the next morning. It felt even worse to discover that there was a reason for this beyond the broken mechanics of the plexing system, the clearly unfair NPC balance, and the disorganization on the Amarr side. I went out to plex last night, then decided "screw it, it's not worth working against this stupid mechanic any more."
We don't need a system reset. However, I feel like every amarr pilot needs to petition EVERY LOST SHIP for the last month, since we lost them fighting against a broken mechanic that we had no chance of winning against.
If you Minimatar think that this whole thing was OK, and that the "whole thing will balance out in the end" SCREW YOU. You should be just as pissed as we are about a stupid game mechanic favoring one side. I was very excited by the changes, those first few days after the patch were AWESOME, getting fights, making ISK, and enjoying the prospect of a new warzone. Since then it has been a demoralizing slog through stupid plex after stupid plex, and the fact that we had no chance of ever making progress or bumping up a tier just proves how broken this system is.

That is bull.
1) Goons saw Minmitar had the most systems and could get them to Tier 4/5 the best
2) They gamed the system and as a side effect propped up the Minmitar with their gamed LP
3) The noob alts rolled into the Minmitar militia due to the stupid 0.0 faction standing change (instead of the 0.5 one) to get in on the action.
4) Those noob alts DID offensively plex to get in on the insance ISK collecting mechanics that was Minmitar militia

Now explain how this didn't effect us???

Yep, it allowed them the chance to shoot for tier 4/5 without any need for plexing whatsoever (the work had already been done by the Minmatar faction)



You can certainly say the tier 4 status was "propped up" with goon LP (I think thats a fair assumption at this point) but the warzone territorial control didn't really get impacted by this. They did nothing to take or defend systems.



Well thats probably something you can lay at the foot of your own faction for doing as much as anything. Reality is the Minmatar *could* go for tier 4 on release day because they had won the war prior to inferno. If the goons hadn't pushed it to 4 then rest assured the Minmatar would have done so anyway (in actual fact just how big a factor the goon boosting was we'll likely never know for sure unless ccp want to inform us - but the tier 4 is relatively easy to get at a couple of million LP total. Given that many Matari pilots had 1m + lp at patch time its not difficult for them to get together and hit 4 when they want to cash out.



I think these "noob alts" are just random bottom-feeders really, as likely to have come from the Amarr as anywhere else. They joined what they perceived to be the winning side and leeched off of anyone in the TLF who had invested points in the system upgrades. Its just the way the system was designed by ccp.

Impossible situation is impossible.

Time will regulate.

Yadda yadda.

This whole thing has been a Cluster F***. A reset at this point would cause more problems because 'he said she said'. CCP is screwed. Hands tied. We are left with turd sandwich.

There are simply too many factors at play for there to be a simple fix. The most immediate needs are for NPC balance, an end to plex bugging, and the death of plex speed tanking. These changes will benefit all factions across the board.

As for the rest... What does it all mean? OH GOD!

I also like this post...

+1 to you good sir!

faction warfare is simply not fun for us amarr at the minute, Ive been out the game since... christmas eve 2010 o.0
reactivated last week, first thing I notice is I am in huola and cant do anything cause its now minmatar o.0 annoying, but like meh whatever, so carried on, now all I see is hardly any amarr and **** tons of minnies everywhere, we can't make any isk in fw atm unless I do the whole make alt, join minnies approach which tbh, I feel is cheating, pvping is actually a joke atm, you take a 10 man gang out, and get blobbed by a 30-40 man gang.

so yeah not fun for me, its made me consider leaving fw, but tbh I don't want to leave my corp mates, 2-3 of them I've flown with for a few years in different corps so don't wanna ditch em do to bad times.

I have what I consider a balancing solution, that may well seem like complete garbage, but at the same time seems simple - and note I dont think a reset should be done.
Now I havent read the fw updates since 2010 so this may well be already how its supposed to work but:

lets say there are... 50 systems (I dont know how many there are in fw it doesnt matter for this idea)

so 25 amarr 25 minmatar
from what I have heard it takes about a day to cap a system atm which is fine, so lets say minmatar cap an amarr system, so now its 24 amarr 26 minnies, a simple solution for me would simply be to make it take longer for the minnies to capture another system but then take less time for amarr to capture a system back (be it the systm they lost or a different one) make the difference 6 hours on each side, so instead of a day it would then take the amarr 18 hours and the minnies 30 hours to cap, lets say the minnies cap another system so 23 amarr, 27 minnie, again you reduce the time for amarr to recap, and increase the minnies time to cap another.
note tho it doesn't have to be like 6 hour increments cause you would have a situation where you could cap a system in an hour or something dumb which would be pretty crap, could be like an hour increase/decrease or even 30 minutes, point would be for it to get to a point where capping another system could take a week if you have a huge advantage



Wouldnt this help keep a balance of systems for each side, rather than the situation we have now ? As a losing side could quickly reclaim lost ground whereas the winning sides... I dunno supply lines are stretched so to speak (for you roleplayers) making it harder to extend further.

Glancing through the thread Ive seen a lot of arguing about the goons, I dunno what they've done nor care, its beyond our control so theres no sense in wasting time arguing or bitching about them, what we need to do is sort this out to make it fun for everyone again, the only other option I see is to reduce the isk rewards from fw missions for everyone so the noobs in the minnie militia who are isk farming simply leave, but that ruins it for us legit players

A reset is a bad idea, simply because you'd suddenly have a **** load of legit minnie pilots with tons of assets then stuck in stations they cant land on, which is then pretty sucky, adjusting the mechanics to make it work balanced and fun is a better way to go I feel.

When you have been in FW a few years you see the "Wheel of FW turn". Sides become dominant, sides become weaker....then a few months down the line something occurs (normally a power shift when a major corp leaves the dominnant or a major corp joins the weaker).

It happens time and time again on all sides. However, Inferno brought massive changes to this and the wheel has hit bumpy ground. It will in time settle back down. Whether or not it's been buckled by half arsed implementation and poorly thought out consequences has yet to be seen.

The Minmitar have the upper hand at the moment and more than likely they are enjoying their time on the wheel. Good for them

However. Having the same abilities across the board for FW rats would balance it out and in time the Amarr/Minmitar front would balance out naturally during the war. No need for a reset.

Sali

U amarr love to dream