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LvL 4 FW Mission Imbalance: Issue?

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Cearain
Plus 10 NV
#141 - 2014-06-10 03:41:56 UTC
Veskrashen wrote:
Cearain wrote:
I have no reason to think missions are not currently working as intended. The fact that they have changed them several times and had a major revamp of faction war yet did not make them more difficult to do in stealth bombers strongly suggests I am right. If I recall, Hans didn't like that you could do them in stealth bombers so I assume he brought it up.

Per CCP Fozzie during the FW Roundtable at FanFest, they don't like people running them in Stealth Bombers, and he would like to add things such as webbing towers to the missions to prevent it. Doing so is infeasible at the moment due to their content tools.

In short: your assumptions are completely wrong, and you should feel bad.



Thanks for the post at least you heard it from a dev.

Webbing towers huh? That should really make people want to pvp. After all who doesn't want to pvp when you are webbed by 4 or 5 webbing towers. Roll

Did he say what people should be doing missions in if not stealth bombers? Will he be happy if players are using navy ravens?

Make faction war occupancy pvp instead of pve https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=53815&#post53815
Veskrashen
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#142 - 2014-06-10 04:17:05 UTC
Cearain wrote:
Thanks for the post at least you heard it from a dev.

Webbing towers huh? That should really make people want to pvp. After all who doesn't want to pvp when you are webbed by 4 or 5 webbing towers. Roll

Did he say what people should be doing missions in if not stealth bombers? Will he be happy if players are using navy ravens?

It didn't get that specific. Just that they were aware of the balance issues across the factions, and weren't happy with the prevalence of things like bombers being used to make fuckloads of isk essentially risk free. The idea of webbing towers was one he brought up, audience members offered up fast webbing frigs as well. The idea of splitting the factions to prevent cross-plexing and awoxing was also mentioned to widespread approval. Pretty much everyone was in agreement that the missions were too easy and risk/reward was out of whack; consensus was for harder missions like Gallente have rather than making them all easier.

The long pole in the tent at the moment is content tools. Without those, existing missions aren't really going to be rebalanced. The plex fixes really only modify a few database entries - NPC rep amount and rep speed, beacon location and radius. Those are relatively easy to pull off and (as we've seen) have had a pretty major impact. CCP will be doing another balance pass for FW, but given that FW was the focus of so much dev time in 2012 we're not getting special priority until it's less of a heavy lift devtime wise.

We Gallente have a saying: "CCP created the Gallente Militia to train the Fighters..."
Veikitamo Gesakaarin
Doomheim
#143 - 2014-06-10 10:02:07 UTC
The real issue I have with easy to run in stealth bomber lvl4 FW missions is that the LP gained from them by mission running farmers massively devalues the LP gained from plexing. I can look at Jita prices for a lot of faction ships and see that FDU LP ships such as Comet, VNI, Navy Domi etc. tend to maintain consistent prices. Whereas everytime STPRO/TLF/24IC hit tier 3 or 4 and higher their LP store item prices drop rapidly due to all the mission farmers crashing their prices due to an oversupply with all the LP they can accumulate doing easy to run lvl4 FW missions.

Plex farmers with wcs/cloak frigs are annoying but at least you can force them out of a plex and deny them that LP from it, if not destroy them if you run mwd/dual scram fits especially now with the 30km cloak changes in plexes. You can't force a bomber out of a lvl4 mission and take that LP for yourself, which I suppose would be an interesting concept: Having a way for the opposing side to cause a mission failure for the farmer. I certainly wouldn't mind it if in FW missions where you have to kill the Commander or whatever, if opposing militia enters the site then you have a limited amount of time to force them out otherwise the Commander warps off, says thanks for saving him to the guy, and the mission is failed.

Kurilaivonen|Concern
Veshta Yoshida
PIE Inc.
Khimi Harar
#144 - 2014-06-10 10:57:05 UTC
Veskrashen wrote:
Per CCP Fozzie during the FW Roundtable at FanFest, they don't like people running them in Stealth Bombers, and he would like to add things such as webbing towers to the missions to prevent it. Doing so is infeasible at the moment due to their content tools.

In short: your assumptions are completely wrong, and you should feel bad.

Sounds like a classic case of wanting to hammer a nail using a screw driver.

Q: What is the one thing bombers has problems doing?
A: Killing things smaller than a moon.

Include the escort cruisers/frigs in the "must kill to complete" list and bombers instantly become non-viable for most missions. No need to add silly webbing towers and what not.
NB: Can probably still be done in a bomber if a person is married to his cloak but the time/ammo expenditure will make earnings lower than lvl1's in high sec Big smile

By the by, that extra time means beacons are up for longer than 45-60s which will inevitably lead to more pew .. doubly so if the much asked for poison pills are added on top thus making fighting for ones missions a near must rather than allowing people to just move and pop another elsewhere.
Poison pill could be substituted by the automatic time-out that is already part of the mission system, just make it much shorter (as in 30 mins or so) counting from the time the missions is popped .. same effect as the pill, just using already existing mechanics so the we-lack-content-tools excuse should no longer be available Smile
Cearain
Plus 10 NV
#145 - 2014-06-10 13:18:13 UTC
Veshta Yoshida wrote:
Veskrashen wrote:
Per CCP Fozzie during the FW Roundtable at FanFest, they don't like people running them in Stealth Bombers, and he would like to add things such as webbing towers to the missions to prevent it. Doing so is infeasible at the moment due to their content tools.

In short: your assumptions are completely wrong, and you should feel bad.

Sounds like a classic case of wanting to hammer a nail using a screw driver.

Q: What is the one thing bombers has problems doing?
A: Killing things smaller than a moon.

Include the escort cruisers/frigs in the "must kill to complete" list and bombers instantly become non-viable for most missions. No need to add silly webbing towers and what not.
NB: Can probably still be done in a bomber if a person is married to his cloak but the time/ammo expenditure will make earnings lower than lvl1's in high sec Big smile

By the by, that extra time means beacons are up for longer than 45-60s which will inevitably lead to more pew .. doubly so if the much asked for poison pills are added on top thus making fighting for ones missions a near must rather than allowing people to just move and pop another elsewhere.
Poison pill could be substituted by the automatic time-out that is already part of the mission system, just make it much shorter (as in 30 mins or so) counting from the time the missions is popped .. same effect as the pill, just using already existing mechanics so the we-lack-content-tools excuse should no longer be available Smile



It's just difficult to know what they are trying to accomplish.

Do they think if people are forced to bring battleships they will pvp more? Sort of like XGs idea that missions should be a pvp pve mix?

Are they upset that they can be run solo and think missions should only be run by a large group that can lock down a system - like I imagine low sec incursions work? I think goons used to run them. Do people still do low sec incursions? If so who? I really don't know.

Its just not clear what they want to accomplish so its hard to say what they should do to accomplish it.

If they think risk/reward is off kilter then reducing the reward seems the easiest fix.

Vesk

I don't agree with you that fw missioning has the same risk as high sec. There are allot of things players can do if they want to gank fw mission runners. And anyway you can't (or at least you couldn't) run amarr mission in a solo sb. I used a drake or a myrm. I think I lost many more sbs than mission drakes or myrms. Get in the mission hit the mwd to get away from the warp in and you are just as safe just stay aligned. But that was before the new warp changes. Does the mwd cloak trick still work?

Make faction war occupancy pvp instead of pve https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=53815&#post53815
Veskrashen
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#146 - 2014-06-10 13:43:04 UTC
Re: forcing folks to kill more NPCs, especially smaller ones

It's not a bad idea, but you'd have to balance things out a good bit. Currently, there's literally dozens of NPCs in each mission. Forcing you to kill them all significantly increases your completion time, hence exposure in the mission itself, hence PvP risk. I feel the current times are about right (more or less) in terms of balancing exposure in the mission.

Re: Cerain:

My impression of what they're trying to accomplish seems to be removing the incentive / ability to use FW as a low risk, low investment LP machine. The plexing changes forced folks to use bigger boats and significantly impacted AFK plexing income. Forcing folks to fly bigger / more expensive / higher skill ships to complete missions would have a similar impact on the mission LP farmers - make it harder to multibox, increase risk of loss, increase required investment.

At least that's my take on it.

Personally, I feel you're wrong on mission risk Cerain - I feel you're at a lower risk of losing a mission bomber to NPCs than you are a low skill BS to an empire L4. Those at least have web/scram rats and the like, which all but one FW mission lack.

We Gallente have a saying: "CCP created the Gallente Militia to train the Fighters..."
Rinai Vero
Blades of Liberty
#147 - 2014-06-11 01:24:39 UTC
Lots of good discussion so far. +1 for balancing FW missions in the direction of being as difficult for all factions as Gallente missions currently are.

My main gripe about FW missions is that NPC aggro mechanics directly discourage players hunting each other. I'm aware of the "standings tank" issue, but the current fix for that is inelegant to say the least. It doesn't make any sense for the NPCs to defend hostile faction players who are killing them. I've had to bail repeatedly from targets I've had tackled and under my guns in missions. Nothing is more frustrating than having that player simply ignore me while the NPCs do their work for them, blithely continuing to launch torpedoes at the NPC Battleship.
Zarnak Wulf
Task Force 641
Empyrean Edict
#148 - 2014-06-11 02:10:48 UTC
Low sec PVE is very difficult to get right. If you make it too hard so that only a BS can do it ala high sec then it is going to get ignored. A perfect example of this is low sec Incursions. I know no one who does them. People log on, see the Incursion, and groan. The last Incursion in my sector of low sec I spent playing XCom.

Similarly if it's too easy it will have the hell abused out of it. Keep any changes simple. Cut rat ewar. Change objectives to kill all the things and not just one ship. Cut the number of rats and spawns. Get rid of anything that entails 'shoot x structure for 10 minutes.' I need to be able to run missions in something resembling a PvP boat. It needs to put an emphasis on speed. And the rewards need to be high enough to compensate the occasional loss of my ship.

Lastly the tags are a mess. Many faction items will never see the light of day as the sheer number of tags needed for them makes them a nonstarter compared to deadspace items.
Cearain
Plus 10 NV
#149 - 2014-06-11 02:49:30 UTC  |  Edited by: Cearain
Zarnak Wulf wrote:


Lastly the tags are a mess. Many faction items will never see the light of day as the sheer number of tags needed for them makes them a nonstarter compared to deadspace items.




I was sort of hoping some good tags would drop from the plex rats we need to shoot. Amarr has some decent tags in one of the plexes. It would be nice if we occassionally got a good tag in some of the other plexes. Caldari have no good tags at all. I'm not sure what drops for gallente or minmatar.

Make faction war occupancy pvp instead of pve https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=53815&#post53815
Veskrashen
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#150 - 2014-06-11 03:10:09 UTC
Cearain wrote:
Zarnak Wulf wrote:
Lastly the tags are a mess. Many faction items will never see the light of day as the sheer number of tags needed for them makes them a nonstarter compared to deadspace items.

I was sort of hoping some good tags would drop from the plex rats we need to shoot. Amarr has some decent tags in one of the plexes. It would be nice if we occassionally got a good tag in some of the other plexes. Caldari have no good tags at all. I'm not sure what drops for gallente or minmatar.

Tag value really depends on the turnins they're associated with, more than anything. Caldari Navy Captain Is and IIs were pretty worthless until Kronos, when the FN Drone Navis came out for example.

We Gallente have a saying: "CCP created the Gallente Militia to train the Fighters..."
Feodor Romanov
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#151 - 2014-06-11 09:51:10 UTC
The 4 lvl FW missions is the main reason why cal mil is still exist. Your suggestion to "balance" it will ruin caldari militia.
Veshta Yoshida
PIE Inc.
Khimi Harar
#152 - 2014-06-11 09:52:23 UTC
Veskrashen wrote:
Re: forcing folks to kill more NPCs, especially smaller ones

It's not a bad idea, but you'd have to balance things out a good bit. Currently, there's literally dozens of NPCs in each mission. Forcing you to kill them all significantly increases your completion time, hence exposure in the mission itself, hence PvP risk. I feel the current times are about right (more or less) in terms of balancing exposure in the mission....

Let me spin a yarn and then add some more stray thoughts:

The few weeks I ran missions for Amarr back in the day, I did it in a PvP fit dual-prop-rep Sacrilege and except for the handful of missions where I had to travel a bazillion miles to target, my completion times were roughly bomber time + 50% or there about .. that is a whopping 90-120s per mission (measured at gate activation). That included killing the elite cruisers accompanying the BS target which had to be done to control incoming dps, burst tanks really are sub-par against sustained damage Big smile
That same Sacrilege later proved itself against a swarm of lighter ships (I however failed .. damn weapon burn-outs!) in what I still consider my best and most fun fight ever.

As for current times being "about right";
Plexing LP yields has been accepted as being too high relative to risk/time involved resulting in consequent "NERF!", then how can 5+ times that yield with equal or lower risk ever be considered right?
Missions yields ~10k+ LP (was 20k+ once upon a time) and takes 1-2 minutes .. to get that kind of payout from plexes you have to spend 10-20 minutes. We could double, triple or MOAR! the time missions take to complete and still come out ahead as missions not only give LP but more often than not spawn in friendly (ie. enemy can't dock) systems due to the way system occupancy favours flipping the entire warzone to maximize that infernal tier and is thus generally safer to engage in than O-plexing (which is where the plexing LP is).

In short: Forcing the destruction of smaller rats as well as the BS rat not only helps to equalize income (adding time and requiring appropriate ship) potential twixt the various FW activities, but the hit to farmability will lower the number of run missions -> individual mission payout increases -> viable revenue stream for PvP'ers (remove missions from tier modifier and that viability goes interstellar).

NOTE: I do not advocate cleaning the rooms, quite the contrary. Mission target BS almost all have an elite escort consisting of 1-2 frigates and 1-3 cruisers (if I remember correctly) .. those are the ones I want added to the kill list, can even change them vanilla rats and still achieve the goal of making bombers mostly obsolete.
Veskrashen
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#153 - 2014-06-11 10:56:44 UTC
Veshta Yoshida wrote:
In short: Forcing the destruction of smaller rats as well as the BS rat not only helps to equalize income (adding time and requiring appropriate ship) potential twixt the various FW activities, but the hit to farmability will lower the number of run missions -> individual mission payout increases -> viable revenue stream for PvP'ers (remove missions from tier modifier and that viability goes interstellar).

NOTE: I do not advocate cleaning the rooms, quite the contrary. Mission target BS almost all have an elite escort consisting of 1-2 frigates and 1-3 cruisers (if I remember correctly) .. those are the ones I want added to the kill list, can even change them vanilla rats and still achieve the goal of making bombers mostly obsolete.

See, this would be a lot more reasonable IMO - Kill a BS plus a few smaller ships, and we're good. Adding things like small fast webbing ships to current missions would have the same impact IMO - you'd have to either kill them off or be able to tank the room while webbed. I absolutely agree that forcing folks to kill a wider variety of sig sizes would help things.

Veshta Yoshida wrote:
As for current times being "about right";
Plexing LP yields has been accepted as being too high relative to risk/time involved resulting in consequent "NERF!", then how can 5+ times that yield with equal or lower risk ever be considered right?
Missions yields ~10k+ LP (was 20k+ once upon a time) and takes 1-2 minutes .. to get that kind of payout from plexes you have to spend 10-20 minutes. We could double, triple or MOAR! the time missions take to complete and still come out ahead as missions not only give LP but more often than not spawn in friendly (ie. enemy can't dock) systems due to the way system occupancy favours flipping the entire warzone to maximize that infernal tier and is thus generally safer to engage in than O-plexing (which is where the plexing LP is).

A couple things here -

1. When talking about times being about right, I was talking about time in the mission pocket itself and the resultant PvP exposure. Spending 2-5 minutes (depending on whether you're killing 1 BS, 6 Industrials, or a structure...) fully exposed to anyone in the system who cares to drop by seems pretty reasonable.

2. Total times when calculating reward / time need to include everything from mission pickup, running the mission, and completing it. Even when you're running multiple missions, a set of 13-15 can take anywhere from 2-3 hours to complete depending on warzone terrain and ship type. So we need to be looking at that total time rather than just time in the mission when balancing things out IMO. For instance, in GalMil space I can pick up and run 11 missions in about 2-2.5 hours, for about 225k LP/hour at Tier 3. Running 15 missions in the same amount of time would be a 35% increase in LP/hour, which is part of why Minnie missions are so popular.

3. I don't believe the LP/hour from plexing was the reason for the plexing nerf in Kronos. If you're bringing an appropriately sized ship into the plex, with a PvP fit, the additional rat spawns add a negligible amount of time to completion IMO - maybe 20% or so at the most. The changes most heavily impact using stabbed or cloaky alts to farm them AFK - so the changes generally force more time at keyboard, and more appropriate - PvP, higher risk of loss - fittings. If that's the direction CCP takes with mission changes I'll be a happy man.

Of course, I don't think that much of this will happen until the content tools get updated, since it'll require a huge amount of devtime without them. Given Crius is right around the corner and with the industry changes having been pushed back, I'm thinking winter at the earliest and most likely 2015.

But hey - the Kronos changes have already changed the game for FW, so I'm content to wait for a while.

We Gallente have a saying: "CCP created the Gallente Militia to train the Fighters..."
Estella Osoka
Cranky Bitches Who PMS
#154 - 2014-06-11 16:08:15 UTC
Note: If you add webbing towers or webbing frigates, it will negate the feasibility of doing it in a Assault Frig and possibly a cloaky T3. Additionally, Gallente and Amarr missions will still be harder due to the EWAR.
Veskrashen
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#155 - 2014-06-11 16:30:49 UTC
Estella Osoka wrote:
Note: If you add webbing towers or webbing frigates, it will negate the feasibility of doing it in a Assault Frig and possibly a cloaky T3. Additionally, Gallente and Amarr missions will still be harder due to the EWAR.

EWAR balance is something that will have to be addressed one way or the other, regardless of the addition of webbing frigates. I'm not terribly keen on the idea of AFs being able to solo L4s anyway, so losing that potential scenario doesn't concern me too much. Opinions vary, of course.

Dead Men Tell No Tales already has web/point frigates, which haven't proved to be much of a problem for T3s yet. Most of the fime I just face-tank the entire mission anyway in my Proteus; dual-rep cloaky Proteus can face-tank about 1100DPS so IMO missions can be done in survivable ships that can run around the warzone at an acceptable level of risk.

We Gallente have a saying: "CCP created the Gallente Militia to train the Fighters..."
Baron' Soontir Fel
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#156 - 2014-06-11 17:28:03 UTC
Feodor Romanov wrote:
The 4 lvl FW missions is the main reason why cal mil is still exist. Your suggestion to "balance" it will ruin caldari militia.


Ruin Caldari farmers maybe.
The actual Caldari militia will still remain.


There's a pretty good reason why Caldari has always had a huge number advantage over the rest of the militias in pure numbers, and it wasn't pvp'ers.
Feodor Romanov
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#157 - 2014-06-12 12:58:40 UTC
Baron' Soontir Fel wrote:
Feodor Romanov wrote:
The 4 lvl FW missions is the main reason why cal mil is still exist. Your suggestion to "balance" it will ruin caldari militia.


Ruin Caldari farmers maybe.
The actual Caldari militia will still remain.


There's a pretty good reason why Caldari has always had a huge number advantage over the rest of the militias in pure numbers, and it wasn't pvp'ers.


Every PVPer farms ISKs. Most of new PVPers do not want to learn caldari ships for pvp and for PVE they want to learn mostly drones. that is hard work to make them join calmil. The main motivation to join calmil for now is more easy money. They can spend less time in PVE and have more free time for PVP.
So if FW gal/cal missions will have equal or near equal difficulty, some new pvpers will quit and many will not join calmil in the future. The result of such changes will be less farmers and pvpers in calmil and more of them in other militias.
I don't now about other alliances but such changes will definitely hit OMG's recruitment.
Estella Osoka
Cranky Bitches Who PMS
#158 - 2014-06-12 18:46:34 UTC
Veskrashen wrote:
Estella Osoka wrote:
Note: If you add webbing towers or webbing frigates, it will negate the feasibility of doing it in a Assault Frig and possibly a cloaky T3. Additionally, Gallente and Amarr missions will still be harder due to the EWAR.

EWAR balance is something that will have to be addressed one way or the other, regardless of the addition of webbing frigates. I'm not terribly keen on the idea of AFs being able to solo L4s anyway, so losing that potential scenario doesn't concern me too much. Opinions vary, of course.

Dead Men Tell No Tales already has web/point frigates, which haven't proved to be much of a problem for T3s yet. Most of the fime I just face-tank the entire mission anyway in my Proteus; dual-rep cloaky Proteus can face-tank about 1100DPS so IMO missions can be done in survivable ships that can run around the warzone at an acceptable level of risk.


Assault Frigates can solo some L4 missions in highsec. So keeping with that theme, an AF should be able to do it in FW L4 missions. I don't like the webbing tower idea, I think webbing frigates would be preferable. Webbing towers could be easily primaried by a SB and killed in 2 volleys. An assualt frigate would have a hard time with webbing towers, but could deal with the webbing frigates. That would make it balanced in my opinion, as it would give AFs a chance in doing FW L4s, but kill off the solo bomber runs.
Crosi Wesdo
War and Order
#159 - 2014-06-12 18:58:27 UTC  |  Edited by: Crosi Wesdo
Feodor Romanov wrote:
Baron' Soontir Fel wrote:
Feodor Romanov wrote:
The 4 lvl FW missions is the main reason why cal mil is still exist. Your suggestion to "balance" it will ruin caldari militia.


Ruin Caldari farmers maybe.
The actual Caldari militia will still remain.


There's a pretty good reason why Caldari has always had a huge number advantage over the rest of the militias in pure numbers, and it wasn't pvp'ers.


Every PVPer farms ISKs. Most of new PVPers do not want to learn caldari ships for pvp and for PVE they want to learn mostly drones. that is hard work to make them join calmil. The main motivation to join calmil for now is more easy money. They can spend less time in PVE and have more free time for PVP.
So if FW gal/cal missions will have equal or near equal difficulty, some new pvpers will quit and many will not join calmil in the future. The result of such changes will be less farmers and pvpers in calmil and more of them in other militias.
I don't now about other alliances but such changes will definitely hit OMG's recruitment.


Well since your alliance is home to corps like VK, space devils and conoco, which in my experience are almost completely focussed on farming in stabbed cloaky frigates and make up about half of OMG's numbers, i can imagine these changes are a problem.

EDIT: just checked OMG, looks like those corps have already left. Interestingly those corps used to make up aroumd 3/4 of OMG's numbers lol
exiik Shardani
Imperial Spacedrill and Logistics
#160 - 2014-06-12 21:39:17 UTC
cut all ewar from FW missions and all will be balanced then you have more time to balance FW LP shop, prices in LP shop (mainly FU tags)...


anyway when you lowering incomes from FW then many ppl (include PvP players) leave FW. it is similar like Kronos changes, there is much less fights at medium plexes :-( ...

sry for my English :-(