Player Features and Ideas Discussion

How is letting t2 frigates into minors or t2 cruisers into mediums any worse than letting pirate ships into plexes of the appropriate size? Hopefully this means we'll see more t2 cruisers and battleships and fewer battlecruisers.

Also, the rookie plex idea is awesome. If people don't own T1 frigates, they could, I don't know, buy them. It's not like they're expensive. Or if the very notion of flying a t1 frigate offends you, just ignore the rookie plexes and grumble about scrubs ruining EVE.

I also like the idea of replacing FW missions with mini-arcs.

Anything which can be repeated or duplicated can be farmed, and will be if it is worth the effort. The only way to get around this is to constrict the supply in a way that is player independent. In order to reduce the number of FW mission farmers, you would either need to make it so there are a finite number of missions available at a given time (which will mostly hurt the people who won't camp the agents all day i.e. the actual pvpers), or make the entry and maintenance costs sufficiently high to discourage the majority of carebears.

You could, I suppose, make it so that FW missions don't give standings, cut the standings gain from plexes, and make standings degrade over time to baseline if not maintained with activity. But that sounds like a bigger pain to the pvper than the carebear. If missions were moderately better than Retribution-Tier 1 income, but were unaffected by tier and required alt-spam to abuse effectively, they'd work as a nice auxiliary source of income if your faction is getting its ass kicked without generating the absolutely insane income you get now at tier 5.

Actually we just don't want to fight logi/ecm gangs the new medium plexes 23/7. It's bad enough trying to take down a logi gang in a Tier 3 plex with battlecruisers. It will be near impossible to do in a medium plex.

I think the idea we'd had that would throttle back abuse was to make each one of the quest chains contains 'undesirable' missions as part of the arc, in order to continue. The arcs themselves could probably be largely strung together from the existing missions, plus a few new ones (or reskinned non FW missions).

By that, I mean requiring completion on missions that everyone currently skips, because they're a pain do solo. Basically put in missions for each arc that are generally farmer unfriendly, and then load most of the reward at the end of the arc, in the style of the Gurista or Angel arcs.

Hell, hinging an arc on a simple variation on Shades of Grey that featured a couple webbing towers would be enough to force folks into something besides an MSE, AB-fit bomber all the time.

Chuckling at the idea that a PVP fit will tank and destroy spawning waves of NPC's over an extended time.

Seriously head over to BC and check out PVP vs PVE fits, there is no comparison. Fighting rats is PVE work, it demands PVE fits and by reducing their DPS to "low" is not going to change that fact.

You want to force PVP into a PVE hat and coat ... guess what it aint gonna work. Lets get down to the nitty gritty here shall we? You effed up with the last update to FW. Lucky for CCP the goons couldn't keep a lid on the absurd loophole your "testing" failed to find [SERIOUSLY not one of your QA guys thought to check???] and CCP got to look all hardcore by flinging around enough mud to cover their own ineptitude.

What you couldn't do anything about was the afk farming of plexs. Why can people afk them, because they are PVE content. Why do they give such ridiculous rewards? Because otherwise Faction Warfare would have died a death by now. So now you want to make them a back up to PVP. Sorry that was a mouthful of coffee hitting the screen.

What you could do is admit that the plexing system is broken beyond repair, scrap it as PVE content and make it into small gang PVP. No seriously.

The whole omg what type of ship can I take into that plex idea is rotten. If people want frigate or destroyer PVP go join RvB or EVE Uni. So rather than the plethora of plexes we reduce it to three types.

Stage 1 requires 4 members of the opposite faction to capture. Stage 2 requires 8 members of the opposite faction to capture. Both are gated to accept all subcaps. Stage 3 require 20 members of the opposite faction to capture and is ungated. Plexs do NOT reward players with LP, instead an arbitary number of control points for that system are removed/added to the system control depending on the winner (using the tried and tested CCP method lets say 20/40 and 100). Each system requires an arbitrary number of control points to upgrade (again lets say 1000). Once the system control falls to the Vunerable status, offensive plexes cease to spawn and defensive plexes spawn. Each plex takes 20 minutes to capture.

The control zone for all of these is 40km, opposing faction ships reset the capture timer if they enter the zone. If there is no member of the opposing faction in system at the time of capture then the point value is 1/4'ed.

So there you have it, a rough idea I know but it does more to promote small gang pvp and involvement as a group than everything CCP has done in the past year. Does it mean that plexing itself brings the player no reward, well yes it does but this is war [insert war face]. This is PVP content, the reward is the fight itself, so buckle up soldier and go win us a system.

Whats that? You want to make isk while fighting the Caldari/Amarr/Minmatar/Froggies (please delete as appropriate). Then go run missions or Incursions. War should not be about making money!!!!


Just for CCP ... you see thats where you failed FW. You bribed people into trying it, and rather than getting the core concept that it is PVP everyone saw the ridiculous earning potential and got on the wagon. The current mess you are dealing with is your OWN fault. Stop trying to bribe people into doing it, make it a true war scenario, get the isk out of FW and let it stand on its own two feet. If it fails after that then you KNOW it was a waste of time.

Would be cool to have a link to get there faster from here.

First off, nobody said anything about waves and waves of NPC's - they are scrapping existing plex content, and re-engineering the *few* NPC's you'll see to be completed using PvP fits. So this PvP or PvE dichotomy you're so fearful of doesnt apply in this case. They are customizing the content to be run by all our PvP ships. I use the term "content" loosely - essentially we are getting NPC proxies for individual player ships warping into the plex. You either kill the enemy player, or kill the rat that warps in, and can use the same ship for both.

You also apparently missed the 4 years where Faction Warfare pilots begged for rewards for plexing so that they didn't have to run missions anymore, and could plex for PvP and earn LP along the way. In trying to thwart CCP's "effing up" of FW, you're also rejecting one of the community's top feature requests.

What CCP did was admit that the plexing system was broken beyond repair, is scrapping it as PVE "content" and is in the process of making it into small gang PVP. Yes seriously.

Calm down and stop wasting good coffee sputtering it all over the screen.

Thank you for the reply, I would like to qualify a little.

As far as all the Dev comments that I have read, the line they are drawing is one of scaled rat sizes and more better AI. It is also mentioned that they will chain upwards in difficulty/size as you kill each "wave" [qualifier - I use wave to mean spawn cycle not number of npc's]. No confirmation has been given of the number of spawns nor of their sizes. If they are aiming towards being easy to kill with PVP fitted ships of appropriate size then what is their point apart from blocking capture?

My second point strikes right at the heart of why FW is broken. As I read it CCP has a vision for FW to be nullsec sov war lite edition. When you go out and PVP in a nullsec war you dont get paid to do it. Admittedly depending on the quality of your alliance/coalition you may get improved ship reimbursements etc (hey now there is an idea ... increase insurance payouts or have a "bonus" payout from the faction). If you want to make isk you have to carebear when things are quiet. In FW we have the exact opposite, you get paid regardless. It is clear bribery. The fact the the current state of FW is the fault of both the "community" [qualified - at my last count of pilots actually involved in PVP kills below the 1000 mark] and CCP for caving to them. Strategic objectives should not reward the pilot directly, but indirectly through system control mechanisms and system boni. You want to make isk, then fine go carebear on missions. HTFU and welcome to Nullsec Lite, none of the flavour and none of the rewards.

The fact is all CCP are doing is a spit and polish, they are not actually under the hood. FW as it stands is the bastardised remnants of 4 years of caving to the "community" and inept idealism. From the original failed launch, through the dry spells, the t Faction battleship fiasco up to the current day, it is just broken. If CCP can fix Crimewatch they sure as hell can fix FW or just put the damn thing down and redeploy the wasted resources to systems that need them more.

Just for the record, yes I do have alts in different faction militia at the moment circle camping for LP. I understand fully what a massive ISK faucet FW is and I am glad to see CCP finally dealing with it.

A general Q: if npcs switch targets, do they maintain a lock to the last target?

LOL...what?

A typical brawler Drake can easily run a major outpost and even an open major provided you kill the original spawn from range before triggering timer. Hell, I used to run MEDIUMS with a Hookbill because I was too lazy to reship, back when the NPCs had EWAR.

Unarmed Incursus aren't PVP ships.