Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Maybe this suggestions been thrown out before, maybe not. If not, I'll just throw another idea onto the pile.

The Reasoning:
Currently, Fwar WZC stems not from the PVP aspect as much as the PVE aspect of orbiting buttons. CCP has stated that their intent is not to allow a low SP alt to solo tank major plexes in frigates for the types of payout they are receiving, nor to have as much of an impact of Fwar WZC. They have also stated that they intend for each of the plexes to provide unique opportunities to establish fleet fights based on different ship fleet doctrines and to offer tactical elements to the pilots within a system to use to their advantage/ to allow them to pick the best fight.

To that end, many things have been suggested, to combat different weaknesses (introducing warp scrambling bubbles, webs, the need to kill all the rats to receive LP, etc). Some of these ideas not only combat the underlying abusive issue, but also raise the bar of entry for legitimate brand new pilots to be able to earn a living in Faction Warfare or to be able to offer meaningful contributions to their parent militia. None of major ones offer a solution to the real issue though, and that's encouraging team play. As with most things in Eve, all CCP can do is provide the sandbox and try to control how the players will behave by reinforcing positive/intended behaviors and discouraging unwanted behaviors through mechanics.

Most would agree that they want to fight in plexes, that plexes, because of their impact on territorial control, should be something that is fought over. Presently, this is often not the case, unless the plex is located in a staging system, or a happenstance battle occurs because two forces of equal size and composition bump into one another. Because plexes encourage solo play presently (I can do it alone, if I do receive help[someone else in my militia is in plex, ]it hurts my bottom line[my perceived entitlement of LP payout is reduced by the number of pilots present], either polite pilots will leave the plex, or plexers will seek quiet places to plex where griefer alts will not disturb them/there is an abundance of plexes. How about we change that?

Obviously, the payouts for plexes are intended to be distributed to the fleet that helps capture the plex, this makes sense with the scaling of effort required/the amount of time required to capture the plex. The mechanics are already in place to support the even distribution of LP to associated pilots. We also know that presently many people have alts in Fwar solely to capitalize on one sides prevalent territorial control and the profitability that comes with t4-5 wzc, and that as an unintended consequence of this, it becomes easier for that faction to continue control of their respective warzone, their plex runners having achieved critical mass.

The Plan:
Leave everything about plexes exactly the way they are(mechanics, ability to solo tank in a frigate, and LP payout totals of the plexes by their currently convention), with the exception of a wider variance on the amount of impact the plex being completed has on the vulnerability of a system. Determine a value, Y, that the regular 15 minute plexes will have and for 10 minute minors, make that value .25Y and the 20 minute majors 4Y and the unrestricted plexes 5Y.

In addition, hard cap the individual pilot LP payout to 5k LP/plex completion. If there are more pilots, simply allow the distribution to occur as normal. With this payment scheme, you encourage pilots to be in groups, more groups should intrinsically lead to more fights. No longer will that extra person in a minor disrupt your payout, they're just getting LP too, that otherwise would go wasted, so why not bring friends plexing? Since we're both here, why don't I tank, and you shoot rats for tags, to increase our profitability? Oh, there's two of us, why don't we take on that thrasher? For regulars, you could have 3 pilots in the plex, all receiving maximum payout, majors 5, and unrestricted plexes could contain 6, while they all are still receiving maximum payout.

Now we're actually encouraging, through mechanics, the types of group activities that faction warfare advertises it's really about, without taking away from a pilot. Now we're fostering an environment where small gangs can fight other small gangs for control of a plex, instead of the "best solution" being a gunless frigate out on it's own doing the darn thing.

In addition, since you'll never get "rid" of the afk alt plexer that's only there to capitalize on the t4-5 cashout, you're limiting their impact on the overall war zone. If they are flying solo and min/maxing they will go after minor complexes. In 20 minutes time, they could have 10k LP by 2xMinors, or 5k LP by 1xMajor. Effectively, in this way, you've reduced their impact by about 1/16. However, if someone is running in a small gang, and completing majors, they have a much stronger impact on the warzone control, and since they're in a gang, are much more likely to stay and fight (especially if the button rolls back to static when no one is in the plex).

Conclusion:
So basically, provide options, and control behavior through reinforcement/reward changes, and further enforce the "group" playstyle the large complexes were supposed to encourage, without forcing an individual to accomplish the goals in any set way. Also, make it so that if someone is participating in Fwar activities for profit, their impact on the warzone control is limited. If they are after conquering a system (a more PVP related activity), they can accelerate the process while exposing themselves to more risk by the ship restrictions on the major plexes (or completely unrestricted, where they are sitting ducks). Then, there's also a balance, where if they want to PVE a bit, but still have an impact, they can pursue regular plexes.

TL:DR: Encourage more gang PVP, diminish farmer alt impact, have fun.

If there is any one player that knows stuff about plexes, it's Sehanine.
I approve these ideas.

Effectively, you're adding the incursion payout logic to FW, yes (wherein you're expected to bring a fleet F of size N, and if F!=N, then the payouts are reduced (either because the LP is wasted, or split amongst too many pilots).

I'm 100% behind the 5000 LP limit per player. But having thought about this some more, I have seen a flaw in the different effect part of the plan.

A couple of weeks ago the Minmatar were hard pressed in Auga. A large Amarr fleet were pressing hard, however a significant portion of the Amarr were in HACs, Recons and T3 Cruisers and were reluctant to ship down. Possibly because it involved flying a couple of jumps to reship.

They were taking the Major plexes without a fight. But a much smaller Minmatar force was engaging them in the minor and medium plexes. We won some, we lost some, great fights were had and ultimately Minmatar held Auga. This was only made possible because a significant portion of the Amarr fleet excluded themselves from entering the medium and smaller plexes. If your proposal goes ahead, the side with the larger force, could simple blob the Majors and ignore the rest, thus leading to no fights.

So whilst I agree that the larger plex should make a bigger contribution, I think you have gone too far. Perhaps figures in the area of 0.6% (minor), 0.8 (medium), 1.0% (major), 1.2% (major unrestricted) would be a better balance.

Was supposed to be a question (curse you punctuation) ... as I'm not very familiar with FW...

... though makes sense with your clarifications, and that other people have posted too. I like it.

I don't really care too much about this one way or another. I am not sure how this change will make plexing more or less of a pvp activity.

There is a sort of balance in plexes currently. Smaller plexes contest/decontest a system more per minute. Bigger plexes pay more lp per minute and offer tags that have a good value. So the smaller plexes are better for flipping systems bigger are better for isk.

In either case much more pvp happens in the smaller plexes because the rats aren't so obnoxious.

Since I do allot of pvp in plexes I sort of like the idea that smaller plexes are an option to add to contesting a system.



Actually I wish all the plexes were worth more. Before inferno hit we were getting allot of plex fights because each plex was worth 3.5%. Inferno reduced that to the .7% we see now. IMO that is a big reason why everyone is like HO HUM when they see someone plexing.

They reduced the vp from a plex to 20% becasue of the station lockouts. I say get rid of station lockouts and have systems flip faster. Make every plex important.




Statistically this is not so - at least fights other than ganks. Once your group excedes the firepower of say a battlecruiser your chances of finding a comparable gang to fight decreases. You can get more ganks and collect more killmails as your group increases because you can all whore it. But as your group grows the chances of finding a fleet that is both something you would engage and something they would engage becomes much lower.

I am not a big fan of incursions artificial pay scale. I think payments should be made based on what is done not based on how many people it took.


Would people docked in the fleet get they pay or just those who are on the button?

I do think this would lead to more people running missions. I'm not sure that would encourage pvp.

I like this. I think it will also greatly reduce the amount of people in FW simply for the lp payouts you get at T4/5. Though still possible this is restricting the amount of lp you get per plex. As of now a single pilot in a fast ship with reps can afk plex a major and leave with 40k lp. in just 25 majors they're at 1mil lp. enough for a nice cash out. This jumps it to 200. Say they only do minors that's roughly above 33 hours and 30minutes for 1mil. that's up from 10 hours 30 minutes ish doing only majors.

From a person that really doesn't like afk plexers this is would be a nice change.

This just diminishes the effectiveness of farming instead of making it unviable, which would be much better.

Just 3 things:
1) reseting plex capture rates to 0 as soon as no one is on it
2) giving some reward for sucessfully making someone leave a plex
3) making it mandatory to bring guns to a plex (either for shooting the rats or a structure)

would go a long way to **** with farmers.
Then do something to make T1/T2 less horrible and do something about the vulnerable-system-stacking and it's much better than it currently is.

I found this bit confusing - did you mean:

"The WZC LP factor should be applied to the amount of LP earned, instead of the cost in the LP store."

?

If so, +1 from all my alts.

EDIT: Further thoughts:

This would give the roleplayers a way to "feel" that victory of pushing the other side's you-know-what in; a great amount of LP for all that hard work in the last bit to get to T5 (because, :fights: would happen more on the ihubs - you'll want to KEEP that ability to hit T4+).

(potential:)

cons:

• some rich dudes will get really really rich.
• some items will get flooded with supply and might well over-take the demand to the point of crash

pros:

• lots and lots of poor dudes will get really rich.
• fights will be required if anyone wants to keep getting rich
• market crashes mean stability afterwards - not necessarily cheaper, but fairer in price
• alt-plexing becomes a pain in the arse to maintain
• afk-plexing becomes pointless for the :effort:

Here's some math to titillate the brain, and to demonstrate why AFK plexing is such an issue. For a side that can hit t5 at least once a month, this is how things break down. This is just baseline math, and doesn't include things like, plexing while under a higher tier of warzone control than 1, running majors/minors instead of regulars, the occasional stronghold (major would increase LP income by 30k LP/hr, minor would decrease LP income by 15k LP/hr).

17500 /plex/ 15 minutes 70,000 LP/hr

+5 Implant is 17k LP/ 17,000,000 ISK Sells for 85,000,000 ISK or 68,000,000 ISK profit

5 hours a day / 7 days a week

2,450,000 LP/week 144 +5 Implants -> 9,792,000,000 Profit

9,800,000 LP/month 576 +5 Implants -> 39,168,000,000 Profit

These numbers are just using +5 Implants, which aren't the most profitable items in any of the stores in LP/ISK (usually that's something like datacores or ammo). That math would break down like so:

63 LP / 63,000 ISK / 5 datacores

Monthly = 777,777 Datacores
Cost to acquire -> 9,799,990,200
@ 80,000/core -> 62,222,160,000
-> 52,422,169,800 ISK Profit/month


Now, I don't include this as my baseline profitability consideration because if one purchase of datacores takes 1 second, it would take 43.20 hours to cash out. It's improbable that a side would maintain t5 status for that long to allow cashout, but, several datacores go for more than 80,000 ISK/per (though with someone dropping nearly 800k cores on the market every month, that might change).


Keep in mind, all of this ISK can be made on a toon that has less than 3 weeks of skill training, flies a m4 t1 fitted ship costing less than 5m ISK.

This is why we have so many alt/afk/plex farmers, and as more and more become aware of the profitability, that number will only increase, which is why CCP should account for that, and hard cap individual pilot payouts, and decrease the effect these plex farmers have on territorial warzone control.

These same numbers are still fairly true for a person running lvl4 faction missions (might even be a little low compared to the person shotgun blitzing them), but while still incredibly profitable; it requires a more skilled toon, and doesn't impact territorial disputes. Granted, this isn't taking into account travel between plexes, periods where there is still competition for plexes, or an inability to locate a plex (due to all of the >other< plexbots).


Have fun.