Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Which size plexes are you tanking in a PVE fit frigate?
And what is the difference between your PVP and PVE fits?

I'm struggling to see why (for example) a pvp fitted rifter couldn't kill the npc's in an amarr minor plex.
(I have no direct experience of other faction npc's).

How about requiring more pilots to be able to capture larger plexes?
Say, minimum of 1 player to cap a minor. 2 for a medium and 3 for a major.

Also, shooting npc's, while not perfect, is a better option than shooting inanimate objects.

Sleepers and so forth, are advanced form of NPC farming.... Sometimes ppl just needs ISK, and too lazy, too bored or otherwise unimaginative to get other income quickly. Live it as it is. Want to have more advanced AI ? Sure, add more dungeons, improve end game NPC areas, such as WH space... add content. Live this basic simple source of income, there u can take a ship, know that to expect, farm some isk to buy ur next PvP cane.... Leave Empire mission NPC as is.

Ofcourse I meant that there is no need to plex a system anymore. No more plexes at all.
Capturing Systems should not be done by spinning buttons at all.

So current corporations who have manpower to CTA for such pre-set operations would dictate every event in FW zone? And how convinient that your own corporation and their brosefs in Wolfsbrigade just happen to be such corporations.

So tell me, are you completely ignorant or shamelessly pushing your own agenda for making low-sec exactly like null-sec? If the latter is the case, why arent you going to null-sec already?

Absolutely. This is something that CCP is aware of, and something I very much want to fix as soon as possible. I don't know that a full NPC rebalance is going to happen earlier than winter expansion, but this is certainly the goal to shoot for. All races should have an equal challenge when running plexes and missions.

Once again, the ewar removal was only a temporary fix, it is by no means intended to be the end-all solution to fixing plex imbalances.

Pretty sure the main reason for the Mimes losing Tier 4 so fast is that they no longer get the LP dumps from the LP-for-Kills exploit perpetrated by certain individuals with null affiliations

Mr. Har, just how much of a difference has the removal of TP's made .. how "low" can one go shipwise for offensive plexes?

Can't wait to see/hear what the plan is to sort the mess that is the system upgrades/WZC mechanics to make FW more than ninja'ing as many offensive plexes as possible with no incentive to defend whatsoever .. but is sister thread so ..

Yup, though its important to remember that mandating PvE for plex seizure is just that, a band-aid solution that many have asked for if they have to wait for the rebalance.

It's looking like even that fix itself is unlikely before winter, so i suggest the conversation zero in back on Ytterbium's original post, rather than us fixating too much on forced-PVE solutions that ultimately head away from the direction of making Sovereignty more PvP-based.

Assuming we get fewer, smarter, easy-to-kill-in-our-PvP-ship rats that still can effectively hamper the non-combat alt-farming activity, there's no reason to layer the forced-PvE solution on top of that, if the new rat system works well.

What I want everyone asking themselves is this - if I could flush the inside of the plex out and replace it with anything in the world, what do I want inside? NPC's ? No NPC's ? Incursion-style rats that you HAVE to kill, turning FW sov into a race to complete mini-incursions? Or simply a dash of incurion AI into some new custom NPC's that don't FORCE PvE, but still cut out the alt-farming?

I just hate to see us limit ourselves by focusing too much on the must-kill-all-rats issue, when that was only one quick fix and there's other more elegant solutions that push FW sovereignty towards PvP, not PvE.

The "Holy Grail" solution would a sov system that doesnt require PvE (or button orbiting) at all - and is heavily PvP centric. But to achieve that there needs to be more brainstorming (don't just rely on CCP to come up with that for you), or more contemplation and consensus with regards existing ideas.


TL,DR: Instead of waiting for the better idea to be developed, WE should be developing the better idea *right now* instead of settling for yet another band-aid. Winter is a golden window to get some major work done on plexes, lets not let it go to waste!

If we can't come up with something better to pitch to CCP, we'll be left with an upgraded PvE-based Sov system, plain and simple. If thats what everyone wants, great, they've said they can beef up the PvE aspect. But if thats NOT what you all envision for the feature, we gotta pull together and nail down the alternative now, or forever hold our peace.

One of the ideas I brought up with CCP at the CSM summit was moving "dockblocking" to a system upgrade feature, rather than an automatic effect. This would enable underdog attackers to get ships into a contested system to assist with reships during a siege. It would also give people a tangible reason to invest in upgrades, rather than for the novelty of half-price clones.

Lucky for the anti-dockblocking crowd, CCP was really receptive to the idea, I think its a very achievable fix as long as the community is still interested in it by the time CCP begins work on the Winter Expansion.

Hans

Good job keeping focus. As you know I would prefer no npcs at all as per my signature.

But if we must have npcs then post number 73 in this thread is what I would like to see:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1463058#post1463058

I guess I still get the feeling that posting here is like throwing a bottle with a message in it in the sea. No one from csm or ccp ever seems to indicate which of the hundreds of ideas they are looking at more seriously or why they are tending to reject others.

So these threads end up as lots of random posts that few players follow up on because it would take forever.

It would be nice for some input on the ideas I posted, and on ?sigma pi's? idea of having the counter to start to count back to zero if you leave a plex after and enemy lands on grid. (or on grid of the accel gate)

I can say that just making it so that you can't speed tank plexes will not make faction war a pvp game. I think ccp needs to look at how to do that directly (like timer count downs following warp offs and notification systesms) and start working toward changes in that direction. If they aren't looking in that direction please redirect their gaze.

The reason you haven't heard much is because of the schedule and timeline, like I've been trying to explain. Those of us on the CSM are knee-deep wrapping up the summit minutes, CCP just finished their June release and is beginning their summer vacation. Work won't begin in earnest again for several more weeks, and teams are being reshuffled a bit to get some fresh faces onto the project. That's why I've tried to keep people talking, and not just saying "what's the point??" because the longer you do that, the longer we use up valuable discussion time that could be used to reach some consensus as to what to tell CCP once they're actually ready to begin the next phase of the project.

I personally like your proposal for better notifications for enemies entering plexes, and I also like SigmaPi's idea of the plex resetting when you leave, to encourage people to stick it out and fight over it instead of fleeing constantly. But in the end, me liking an idea isn't enough, I don't just take any old idea that I like to CCP - it needs to be something solidly supported by the community first. If there's no community discussion of an issue, I'm not going to just "boosh" it to CCP over everyone's heads, its just not how I've chosen to operate.

In general - I don't think there's much purpose sitting around worrying about whether CCP likes an idea or not. They were pretty receptive to ideas at the summit - as usual the challenge is more in obtaining as close to community consensus as is ever possible, that's really the bottleneck in the process right now. CCP's not really stonewalled any popular community requests yet, unless you count not changing things at the last minute before they had a chance to see any of the inferno changes in action.