Warfare & Tactics

I'm also curious if there was any specific response on the subject of timer rollbacks. Seriously, its the most supported change in the FW community. Tell me someone brought it up.

If there is one fact in eve, its that pve'ers will never win a pvp war, and that pvp'ers would never win a pve war. That is why timer rollbacks by themselves would not deter farmers, specially bots.

Make evasion pve harder on top of timer rollbacks, that will put a dent in farming bots.

Cloaky ships, stabbed ships, fine. But ships fitted with these should not be able to effect occupancy. Timers should not tick for stabbed or cloaky ships.

Fitting a cloak to some degree and fitting stabs absolutely is a statement of "I have no interest in FW or leaning how to PVP, im here simply to farm isk to the detriment of everyone else in FW".

I have no problem with people earning isk, but if that is your primary goal, go run high sec missions, or lvl 5's, incursions etc, non of which put pressure on where other players can dock.

it isn't really a pvp vs pve topic IMO. Its rather the fact that if you are after LP, running is more efficient then fighting. Thats a major flaw in the core design of plexing. Timer resets would make running or hiding inefficient, but you can and should still be able to run or hide if your really want.. its a sandbox after all.

Why are there timers in the first place? To force players to stay in space (its just the ultra short version of reinforcement timers), which ends up creating a conflict. Right now you can completely avoid the conflict while making progress.


FW has already semi broken pve content in form of missions (you can finish missions in SBs without NPC agro) you can farm all day long, so farmers would still have something to do even if CCP would fix plexing.

You may be right.

But the 15€ we pay each month aren't 'bugged', so if the only reason CCP isn't changing the timers is bugged code, it would be nice if they'd debug it.

It's an interesting idea to expand on. I know there are some niche cases where you bring a cloaked griffin alt into the site with you or you use a vexor with a single stab so you can warp off if you're being kited to death but that would certainly add options to the FW meta, especially since mobile depots and carrying around stabs in the cargo is beyond easy to do if it's required.

FYI: Wall of text incoming.

So I attended the FW Roundtable, and of course was rather involved in the discussions. Here's some points that I recall, and my impressions.

1. CCP intended FW to be a small gang and solo content magnet, which it has succeeded at in their eyes. They're fairly happy with where FW is in that regard, and recognize the differences between the warzones.

2. The attendees were almost universally PvP centric FW players. CCP recognizes the issues of farmers in the warzone and the mission imbalance. The cloak change and NPC respawns are intended to help with those issues.

3. NPCs will be on a random 90-300 second respawn timer, with no more than 1 per plex at a time. The NPCs are intended solely as a DPS check, nothing more, and this change is intended to force more combat oriented fits. We asked about buffing the rats, and CCP noted that was tricky since if they buff them too much the content won't be as accessible to new players - which they want to preserve.

4. Cloak radius is going to be implemented as an object radius increase, so that when you're within 30ish km of the button it's like you're at 0km, kind of like gates etc. They are aware of the "hover just outside of range" issue and will ensure there's a big enough buffer to force movement and such. This is the first iteration and they'll adjust in the future as needed. The change to release schedule means they'll have a lot more flexibility to do this.

5. Their resources to iterate on FW are limited, since there's so much going into rewriting core parts of EVE to allow for the future functionality they want to implement. In addition, they simply can't change some things due to the nature of those. To rebalance missions - and they want to include things like webbing towers etc - they'd have to put in massive efforts. Once the new content tools are authored, however, that becomes a far easier task that they'll likely tackle then. To give one example, mission rats aren't supposed to shoot their own faction - that's a bug. They spend 5 weeks trying to figure out what broke, and weren't able to find it. They are looking at these things, but other stuff requires more resources and attention.

6. They'll be looking to rebalance items in the LP stores - faction webs, etc - to make them more attractive, which should increase demand. In addition, someone raised the idea of faction Capital mods - and faction Capital ammo specifically was noted as something they might look to add to the LP store.

7. Regarding FW income in general, they specifically noted that aside from mission imbalance they were pretty happy with FW income - primarily because they view FW space as the riskiest at the moment, and feel the rewards are roughly in line. They are concerned with the ease of getting and keeping high standings, the freeloader problem, and cross faction plexing issues. They asked about whether folks would be interested in some kind of standings decay over time due to inactivity, possibly linked to iHUB donations or PvP, which attendees were receptive to depending on implementation. In response to their question about separating allied factions - i.e. Gallente and Minmatar - attendees were unanimous in their support for breaking them up. As CCP has some lore opportunity to implement that, and it'd fix a lot of cross-faction awox and plexing issues, expect to see them look into this more seriously.

8. One other issue that was brought up was how security status was given higher priority in the overview than militia, and how this causes issues with new players or players unaware of the problem who haven't fixed their overview. The suggestion was made to put militia higher by default, which CCP noted and said was something that should be relatively easy to implement.

9. Regarding timers, they were aware of the assymetric time commitment and the defensive vs. offensive disparity. Balancing all those things is very tricky however. Regarding defensive plexing, they commented that making rewards proportional to system contested level was necessary to balance farmers and make plexing in unfitted boats an unattractive proposal. One suggestion was made to have defensive plexing add LP to the iHUB like oplexing takes it, and CCP commented that generally they didn't want to do that as it'd be too easy to push up tier that way - but with the proportional LP reward with contested level, that might be doable and that they'd look into it.

10. Regarding PvP LP, CCP stated that there was a cap on how much they could give out due to exploitability, but they'd look into smoothing the rewards across tiers so that PvP in general was rewarded at a higher level on average than currently.

11. Some raised the idea of an incursion style LP payout, wherein LP are only rewarded when an iHub is flipped. CCP commented that this could overly reward attack over defense, leading to system pong, which they didn't want. We raised the idea of partial LP being withheld until the iHUB was flipped, which CCP agreed to go into.

In short, I think that CCP is fully aware of most of our concerns, and intends to further iterate on FW in the future. At the moment though, the grunt work of having to totally redo huge portions of the EVE codebase in order to allow for future functionality is taking up the vast majority of available resources. Module tiericide, content authoring tools, the new Mordu's Legion ships, the industry changes, and the ore anomaly changes all offer opportunities to significantly improve FW and low sec in general, and with two low sec CSM - including one specifically FW focused - I think we're set up well for the next year. Their new release schedule means we won't have to wait a year for more balance changes.

Brighten up gents, the future is shiny.

It's a terrible idea and I very much doubt that CCP will take anything so unbalanced into consideration. It is basically a free pass for defenders to never have to run down a plex counter again. Any change to timers needs to be on the basis of first past the post dual timers. Rollbacks will be far worse than what we have at the moment, introducing a massive imbalance to address an insignificant problem.

Holy crap i almost forgot about some plex exploits. im really glad that most are gone now.

Low sec, and particularly FW low sec, is far more dangerous than operating in sov null these days. Some things are out of whack - stabbed plexers, bombers in L4 missions - but in general I feel CCP has it right with that opinion. Noone in FW lowsec would ever consider AFK ratting in a carrier or Ishtar, for example.

And what's wrong with that? Why would the defender need to sit 19 minutes in a novice for no LP after the "attacker" has been driven off? What purpose does this serve, is it compelling and exciting gameplay?

Note that timer rollback does not mean the plex despawns, it just means that both parties start at 0 when the opponent has been booted out. To deny the offenders the plex, defenders still need to cap it. It also works both ways.

Basically the only effect of rollbacks is that a combat player can drive out farming alts from plexes, and it actually affects the farming profitability- while not reducing the LP income of legit FW players, sounds ideal tbfh.

As what comes to the topic, these are an improvement, but increasing rats is not a good solution.

So I suggest a structure "Military Complex Defence Unit" to replace the rats: easy to tweak it's shield/armor recharge rate and HP, and also to remove it's influence on PVP by making it only do damage when it's being shot.

In other words: to start the timer, you have to destroy a structure that tanks X hp/s, and only defends itself passively, i.e. does not shoot unless shot. It should act like gate guns with infinite tracking and flat dps, only shoot members of opposing militia when shot by member of opposing militia (does not react to friendly fire).

Ideally these structures should have much more tank than current rats, time spent shooting and tanking it could be compensated by shortening all plex timers if necessary.