Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Actually it's absolutely appropriate, you have no business in a military installation, and you sure as hell have no business shooting FW pod pilots in their own military installation. The use of standings by FW Plex NPCs should be removed entirely, it's not appropriate to the setting. It shouldn't matter how good your standings are, if you're not part of the appropriate militia you get shot.

There's increasing militia use of fiddled standings (sometimes at corp level) to make FW plex rats ignore pilots. The outcome is hostile militia pilots "capturing" a plex while the Empire military just sits there on it's ass. Though really, this too could be fixed by requiring the rats to be killed to cap the plex.

TBH i don't really care about the rats.

All i want is the point thing because its way to easy to farm plexes with no risk.

To give a new dimension to Eve, I think it would be excellent to create more interaction between PVP and PVE.

Players should have the possibility to create missions in the NPC Corporations. Agents could give these missions as they give level 1 to 4 mission now.

A character that have done missions for a corporation receive standings and Loyalty Points.

With these LP he can buy items.

But imagine that he could use it to create missions.
A level 1 mission cost 2000 LP and a Level 4 50000 LP for example.
The type of mission would depend of the corporation, but the player that create it should have lot of possibilities to customize it with NPC escort, type of ship expected etc...
All these missions should have a PVP aspect like going in 0,0, or low sec, or factional warfare aspect etc.

If the mission is a success the character could double his LP, but lose all if it is a fail. He could never do the mission himself.

We can also imagine NPC mission like courrier that could be created by trader player to avoid them the boring freighter trips. (with all the risk of an autopilot move of freight)

Loyalty Points could be use to create NPC Bounties... Imagine a player hunted bye the member of an NPC corporation...

I know so far a bulk of this thread has been about FW NPCs, but can regular NPCs at least be required to follow ship fitting rules? like seeing 9 turrets and cruise missiles and defender missiles coming off a Raven... if I can't fit 11 highs on any ship they shouldn't be able to either.

This problem filters all the way down to even the frigate NPCs, of which some have so many turret models enveloping their ships you can't single out exactly how many of each turret they actually have (I've got a great picture of a Minmatar faction Breacher, but can't find it at the moment).

1. Make some of the frigs web for the love of all thats holy. Being able to do major plexes in a frig with no guns is completely stupid and completely fucks up the Risk/rewards ratio

2. Make is harder to do the plexes without risk. Right now we have a ton of players using stabbed no gun t1 frigs that grind the plexes all day long with no risk what so ever. The risk/reward ratio is completely ****** up, you can get billions every week with a bloody 2 week old alt. I don't know what you should do about this, make the rats point, remove the accel gates or move the capture points closer to the warp in.. I don't know i'm not a dev but you need to do something

Doing FW should not be risk free.. It is a PVP activity, not a carebear grind. As it is you can do it without any risk with no effort what so ever.



FW is a PVP activity FFS..

Okay FW is totaly broken, everyone fears the minmatar farming armada and CCP does.... nothing.
First step it would be to end this farmfest and then looking at what can be done.
How long will this farmfest go on? How many months? That is totaly weird.
Give a fast fix that rats should be killed in plexes so that we have a fast problem fixing and after that we can improve more. But actually fw is completely broken, minnies making 1b per day and it cannot get worse.
FAST FIX NEEDED!

Ok, so I've spent quite a bit more time in FW than I had when I posted before,
and I believe people are correct in saying that completely removing the NPC's is not the answer.

I can't say what the final solution is, but there is something that is certain - if NPC's are to stay, they must all be equally tankable.
I am referring here to the number of missiles in caldari plexes that can't be speed tanked in the same way as gallente plexes.


Also, and perhaps most importantly - make it so that plexers have to kill the rats.
I am sick to death of chasing down caldari plexers only to find they have two warp core stabs on.
(I could not even count how many have warped out in flames with a scram on them.)

Making it so that the rats must be killed, would prevent speed tanking in stabbed plexing ships with no thought to combat effectiveness, thus reducing the feesability for using warp core stabs.

(Also, couldn't you make it so that warp core stabs stop you from being able to target anything? )

Its how you win this war - you know destroy your enemies will!!!! Look how many people fear them so much they can only think to join them.

QFT. I fully support balancing NPC's should they remain in the plexing system, the feedback has been spot on about balancing tankability and DPS levels, but Bad Messenger is spot on here.

In the end, whether you have NPC's dictating ship types or not, this does not address the core issue of incentivizing two players fighting to the death over that plex to begin with. We can hold guns to people's heads and force them to fly whatever ship we want using the NPC AI, or we can give players enough of a reason to stand their ground and not run away all the time. Personally I think the latter of the two is more important.

How can we incentivize PvP in the plexes over constantly running away? Lots of ways. We can give players more visibilty, making plexers easier to locate and engage, so hiding your activity is much more difficult. We can address the fact that defensive plexing is an unpaid boring chore, effectively rendering half of all plexes undesirable as an activity to participate in. We can shorten the distance between the warp-in and the capture point, increasing the risk players take on and making that risk a PvP risk rather than a PvE risk. We can have timer progress slowly roll back when plexes are unoccupied, making it so players that bounce all the time whenever someone comes after them end up neither profiting nor contributing to the warzone.

Yes, this is a thread focused on the NPC balance itself, but Bad Messenger makes an outstanding point that even if you had no NPC's regulating fits at all, if the motivation is there to complete the plex (either offensively or defensively) and there is little reward in running away constantly, players will bring the fit they need to win against the PvP threat anyways.

Well, there is theory, and there's practice. I'll shelve theory for a second, and I'll even shelve suggesting a solution for one moment. Let's simply talk about some problems that are emerging on the server.

The bottom line is that defensive plexing in its current form is nearly 100% undesirable. The profit is purely in offensive plexing, which means that for the dominant militia, there's more incentive in allowing the enemy to plex your system without resistance, so you can turn around and profit on the takeback. The winning militia is farming the underdog however you slice it, and to resist this advantage we have the nearly absurd situation of militias stopping at the point of taking space because it hands more money to the enemy.

The problem you fear is already taking place - pilots stay docked when the enemy comes to plex their system because its more profitable to plex once you've lost your space and are taking it back. Refusing to put up resistance to offensive plexing efforts is by definition an enormous missed PvP opportunity. As I said at the CSM summit, this leads to deep frustration for FC's that want just want to fight a straight-up war, because pilots would rather sit in station, let the enemy take a system (or even help them bust the bunker) just so they can profit later, or in a diferent system. This is the opposite of encouraging conflict, its encouraging players to ignore each other for financial gain.

The whole mess of militias enrolling plexing alts to break the bunker busting "hostage" situation where vulnerable systems refuse to get flipped, the mess of pilots refusing to defend their space except in edge cases where you have an alliance with their ships stashed there, the mess of it being more profitable to ignore an attacker so you can attack yourself (and even there, efficiency encourages you to evade PvP offensively as well), none of this is providing the incentive for a militia to want to own all the systems, and to fight their best in every plex, and to chase off every attacker.

You may not see LP for defensive plexing as the solution Cearain, and that's fine, you're not alone in this opinion. But I think most players who have been active in Faction Warfare the last few months realize that the current incentive program is not doing a great job of encourage direct conflict over each and every individual plex, but rather fosters a trade mentality where you avoid conflict both offensively and defensively to chase the maximum profit in the system. This is unhealthy for FW.

Don't get wrong, we don't want a system where the winning militia can farm their own territory for LP endlessly through defensive plexing. I'm certainly not advocating that, we already have missions that work in this fashion and don't need to exacerbate the problem. But at the same time, I don't want to miss the opportunity to fix some major conflict driver issues because we're blindly attached to the idea of only giving half the war effort a reward of some kind.