Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There appears to be a central, and in my opinion unfortunate, tenet to warfare in eve, that the reward for successful pvp is the ability to pve high end content. This model encourages a "farm or fight" choice between ship fittings, which leads to a lot of cat and mouse play when a farmer and a fighter meet up. In my opinion, this is a shame, because i the farmer didn't have to be fit for farming, this could be a good fight that just did not happen.

When I started on my pvp career in early 2009, I looked at my options. I saw nullsec and the "fight or lose it" mentality, the "big fights then you lock down the system for carebearing" and it did not appeal to me. I probably would have quit eve right then except factional warfare provided something more like arena combat: Plexes that meant you couldn't get attacked by larger ships in a frigate, no system control or worries about losing access to gear, and an environment of pure pvp that meant anyone that joined a militia was there because they wanted to pvp (there were a handful of hardcore plexers that only cared about system occupancy and not fights, but you soon figured out who they were and if you saw them in local you just moved on) .

Then, the buff to FW missions came and it was a shame. There was great ISK to be made (and I took full advantage of it) but then the FW scene started to change. No longer did seeing an orange in local mean that you found someone who wanted to fight: The percentage of oranges that were just playing the mouse and making ISK increased: not just due to characters purely joining FW to farm (which seemed like the majority of them after a while), but otherwise pvp oriented characters that were in farming mode. Pvp in FW had taken a turn for the worse.

On the face of it, plexes and missions both look similar. You get a beacon in local, which allows size restricted ships in. Problem was, the latter was pve focused (lots of npc fire, a downside), required pve fits (more potential fights lost), and there was no way to take control of a mission from the enemy that was running it. If an enemy chased you away from a mission, you went to another one of the 15 that you had queued up and came back in an hour when they were bored.

The future talk of plexing so that you can farm missions for greater profit is terrible. It is just further instilling the cat and mouse, fight or farm mentality. Add in station lockouts and this fw is no longer a game, but a job like nullsec. Thing is, we already have nullsec, people who want to interact with eve that way can do so.

What we need is a casual pvp mode that facilitates chaos so that those people who just want to play casually (one hour a few nights a week, and maybe a weekend day) can do so without getting caught up in the power struggle that comes with an organized fight to control the farming game. We need a place where even if your entire side is full of failure and are losing, you can still go out there and do something without being disadvantaged by people you don't care about.

And finally, the means to achieve this: for without that, this is a post of just pining for a utopia.

1) Remove FW missions from the game completely. ALTERNATIVELY, make FW missions like plexes, no rats, and the other side can take your mission from you for a reward if they chase you out. That means you need to go somewhere with the intent to fight *other players*, and there is NO advantage to merely fitting for pve. Allow only one fw mission to be picked up at one time, so that if you get chased out, there is a slight time penalty where you need to travel back to an agent to get another mission, so that pure farmers can't just pick up 15 missions and probably run 2-3.

2) Give LP directly for plexes. The difficult part here is how much LP to give a person vs a fleet when the plex is captured. This is a difficult question, with a lot of potential answers, but this is a reward question which you've considered already in depth with incursions.

3) Remove all rats, everywhere. No Exceptions. Every time two solo people meet in a plex, and one has to warp away because they are jammed/taking too much damage from rats etc before the pvp fight even starts is a TRAGEDY. You have just denied two people enjoyment in a game. Everytime there are rats you start fitting for pve (active reppers, ranged dps) and the chances of a pvp conflict decrease.

4) Capturing a system? Any reward for capturing a system should be a carrot only. You should not disadvantage the opposing force, because that means you will get less fights from them. Disadvantaging the opposing force makes sense from a "fight them farm" perspective, but I am advocating a break from that mentality in factional warfare.

Finally, I would like to emphasize the importance of efficiently making ISK in such a way that exposes you to *real* pvp, not just "I'm a mouse that got caught" pvp. When fights happen, ships get lost. That's fine, but when you need to skulk away, get out of your pvp fit ship and hide to make your ISK people, both sides lose pvp and that makes the game boring.

A chatgris post that encourages pvp...I'm ok with that.
+1

The tags we receive aren't electrum, etc. All NPC's in FW missions and FW dungeons are of the opposing faction, not pirates, so we get things like "Imperial Navy General" tags and such. They are used up in the LP store when you exchange them for Faction modules, mainly.

This is, of course, assuming you actually take the time to clear out all the NPC's and gather all the loot. This is not a requirement to complete most missions and isn't a requirement in the plexes either, you can just tank the NPC's and run down the timer of no one comes after you, but killing the NPC's and collecting tags is at least a way to pass the time and squeeze a bit more isk out of the effort while waiting for the enemy to come fight you.

The same as Mission then, Isignia's not pirate dog tags. Thanks and so much for that theory.

Chatgris gets to the crux of the matter.

I hope ccp considers this post. Or they will lose allot of subscribers who won't embrace the "full on nerdcore" nullsec lifestyle but still enjoy the challenges and excitement of eve pvp.

But more importantly they will lose the potential new subscribers who aren't interested in the cat and mouse pvp that seems to exist everywhere in eve.

Make fw a mechanic that produces frequent quality small scale pvp fights and eve will grow.

A good, thought out post, definitely has some interesting points.

I suppose that I might hypothetically totally agree with you maybe, heh.