Player Features and Ideas Discussion

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Can I ask that we PLEASE don't make the same mistake that was made with Incarna. Removing the EWAR from plexes but not from missions is not going to fix the imbalance. Mission runners are part of this war (otherwise why would you advertise their mission by putting a beacon in local) so having the NPC's unchanged in them is still allowing one side to farm them (and therefor farm ISK) whilst the other cannot..... What sense is there in that?

I could happily link another kill showing just how crazy this has gotten, but I think we have all seen enough and no one seems to be disagreeing.

The ultimate goal of FW plexes is ship limited combat.

CCP should implement code that encourages ship limited combat with appropriately sized ships/gangs for a given plex size. For example, a T1 BC should be most efficient ship to solo a Tier 3 plex (for both attacker and defender).

NPCs should be "dps sinks" for opposing players with little else to do. Note that E-war and NPC dps will always be mitigated by "tankers" of one form or another.

Appropriate Sized Ships:
Killing all NPCs requirement in plex would encourage the attackers to bring appropriate amount of dps to a plex (especially if NPCs of both sides are designed to be "dps sinks"). This requirement would also make the plex more "realistic" as it is absurd and game breaking that the commander of an NPC force would surrender to some guy who orbits a button but does nothing else for 10/15/20 minutes.

Timer speed based on ship sizes in plex would also encourage appropriately sized ships to run a plex for both attacker and defender (this may be the only answer to afk-alt defensive plexers)

Encourage Combat rather than Bailing:
Timer to move to baseline feature if nobody is on timer (at perhaps an increased rate of 2x, or 5x) encourages plexers to stay and fight and to bring fighting ships to plexes.

Edit 1: LP rewards issues discussed here:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1464947#post1464947

Edit 2: Second part of the "balancing NPCs and you" part of FW - Balance the LP payouts of the plexes. Once we get the proper sized ships in the proper sized plexes we need to create LP payouts that are consistent with the effort involved in capping a plex. Right now the LP payout for a major unrestricted is similar to the payout for a L1 plex. This is contrary to everything else in Eve where LP payout is on an exponential schedule.

Assuming 64k LP/hour goal for unrestricted FW plex payouts (64k could potentially be 100k lp, whatever):

Non-stop payout schedule, assuming 20 million isk/10k LP (faction frig payout):
Unrestricted Plex: 64k LP/hour ----> 128 million isk/hour
Major plex: 32K LP/hour ----- 64 million isk/hour
Medium plex: 16k LP/hour -----> 32 million isk/hour
Minor plex: 8k LP/hour -----> 16 million isk/hour

Baseline Payout Example:

Now the sov level payout kicks in, and this is where it's make or break for farmers.

Sov Level [L1,L2,L3,L4,L5] for minors yields [4, 8, 16, 32, 64] million isk/hour respectively. 64 million isk is still over the top for a L1 anything (mission, plex, whatever), but it's within the realm of system control payouts. 4 million isk/hour for a L1 mission is still pretty damn good even at the Sov Level 1 payouts. So no noob in a T1 frig should complain about the payout schedule.

Hans, I'm just throwing out a suggestion that I think is feasible for FW plexing mechanics in the future. Spending significant time recoding NPC features nobody who wants to PVP is interested in (maybe people interested in PVE and farming care) may not be the best use of resources. I'm sure the devs will figure it out.

Well, removing all ewar from all NPCs is not the way to discourage speed tanking by week old farming alts, that's for sure.

Well, I have very little experience with it so I'm not exactly knowledgeable, but to hear some people in the CvG conflict tell, frigate alts ninjaing plexes are ubiquitous on both sides and make gaining and holding any significant progress difficult. This could be heresy or exaggeration or both, of course, but it would seem to me that simply giving every plex a few long range webbing towers would be a decent bandaid while CCP comes up with a better solution.

This is what I'd think would be the perfect fix to plexes:

• All NPCs should be heavily nerfed (heavily decrease the numbers).
• The amount of NPCs should depend on how many systems that faction has (I.E. Current Amarr would have more NPCs than Minmatar since Amarr have fewer systems).
• Defencive plexing time should be around four times shorter.
• Defencive plexing should give a small LP reward.
• Defencive plexing should cause the plex to close instead of increasing the timer (not exactly sure how this works now).
• NO E-WAR OF ANY KIND!
• Balance NPCs so minor plexes are easier to do in a frigate than majors (should still be easy to speed-tank majors in a frigate).

This would hopefully encourage more people to do defencive plexing, which would force the offencive plexers to fight for their plexes instead of warping off to a safespot and going AFK. It would also encourage the offencive plexers to fight for their plexes, since NPCs would either have been killed or would just be a small bother. It would also encourage offencive plexers to do the smaller plexes because it would allow them to more easily deal with the NPCs and defencive plexers.
Hopefully, it would make it impossible to farm plexes in an eight day old Vigil.

There are allot of good ideas here.

XGallentius is right the npcs should really be a dps sink. Chatgris is right they shouldn't interfere with pvp. And pretty much everyone is agrees speedtanking plexes is a problem. I think the following changes - mostly proposed by others - would work well:

1) must kill all rats

2) the rats will orbit the button and not leave that orbit range and only agro when the timer is running. If the timer stops they stop aggroing. This will do 3 things:
A) it will mean if a war target warps in the person running the plex can go outside the timer range and fight without worring about rat damage.
B) It will prevent one ship from comming in collecting the aggro orbiting outside range while a small long range destroyer just shoots the rats inside the orbit range
C) If it is a newer player having problems with the rats they can shoot the rats outside the orbit button. This of course means it will take longer for them to run the plex. But gives them an option.

3) Have the rats use small weapon systems. Having battleships shoot torpedoes is just asking players to speedtank the plexes in a small ship. Instead of torpedoes the rats should use light missiles/assault and rockets. Battleships will just fit more of them and have more damage mods. They should also use smaller guns that can track. The rats might also get a speed boost. This will mean that a) the overall dps will go down,(allowing more pvp fits to be used in plexes) but also b)the rats will hit smaller ships almost as hard as bigger ships - which means people will use the bigger ships. Perhaps some of the ships will stay in orbits throughout the range instead of chasing us if that will mean it is harder to kite them inide the orbit range.

4) Possibly increase the tank on the npcs. I'm not sure how necessary this is but its something ccp can tweak if necessary.

This isn't a very good solution - it allows a dominating entity (such as Minmatar) to focus their efforts along a very small front, and the defender will be unable to open new fronts by ninja plexing in the rear. Don't get me wrong - I don't think ninja plexing should be IMPOSSIBLE but I think that it should require a group or at least a commitment of a larger, more capable ship, rather than a day old alt in an afterburning frigate.

No, the eWar band-aid is sorely needed .. your mission, should you choose to accept it .. is to make sure CCP starts planning/scheming the "real" fix ASAP so they can not only make it fit in with FW (non-FarmVille™ version) but also use it to foster a proper PvP environment .. will require a lot of thought I think, not to mention a potentially heavy workload dependent on solution chosen.

Ideally we'd have the anti-farm band-aid in the form of "Kill Everything!" in conjunction with the eWar band-aid, but that is two FW items in between expansions which is probably one more than is allowed by CCP corporate policy, labour laws or some such

I'll give you a couple examples of how plex EWAR discourages pvp.

A couple of days ago, I decided to take my slicer and blitz a Caldari thrasher and merlin sitting inside a fully spawned major with the hopes of burning one down before the rats burn through my tank. As the merlin enters armor, I get jammed and the merlin bails and I have to warp out as the dps starts to pile on. I try again, this time going for the thrasher, and the same thing happens after I get off my first couple of volleys.

At least on the gallente side, any engagement in a medium or major plex usually takes into account losing at least 1 ship to jamming rats, if not more if the plex is spawned more. Which means you have to either bring additional people to compensate (which often means the targets warp off), or you don't engage (senselessly losing ships). This also severely limits your options for going in with an undermanned group where every ship counts.