Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I think what would be interesting for Low Sec specifically, as the first accesible PVP area, is more landmarks that are actually useful with some reward in there to promote player interaction - which may turn to fighting or may turn to cooperation. (Probably fighting in EVE).

The reason is to create a more varied environments to experience EVE.

I have always seen "acceleration gates" as a simple yet clumsy and awkward mechanic to restrict access to a location. Major issue being 1 access point to 1 location always causes a "camping" issue SOMEWHERE.

Should there be a reward? Yes, I think so. does it have to be farmable? No, I don't think so. I don't think you need to change the static plexes as they were completely either.

Here's what I think EVE needs :
1. More "Static" Places for perceived interaction than just : Planets, Moons, Stations, Stargates, Hidden Exploration Sites, Incursions, FW Plexes.

2. Locations which promote a healthy PVP opportunity for those not wanting a Battleship/BC engagement to happen against their will (To some degree).

3. A few more interesting places to "Easily" explore.


Here's how I think you can do it :

I don't know if you can technically create these dungeons, but let me tell you what I see...

1. Take the FW Plex "Beacon Popping on Overview" idea and make some specific anomalies that are easy to find with onboard scanner that pop up on overview.
(This has never been done before :: but Ideally and optionally, these plexes would actually have 2 beacons that represent 2 separate accel gate entrances into the site so they're harder to camp by one party.)

2. Inside the plexes, there would be some reward/NPCs that are easy to take down and give some small consistent reward the longer you are in there. Perhaps you have to kill x NPC for 45 minutes until you get some spawn pop or something that gives you some drop. I know that CCP Greyscale was talking about adding Security Status Tags that increase sec status. Maybe combine that idea with these beacons to create a unique drop that can be exclusively very valuable to PVP players from the onset.

3. As players can easily find these places and run around with light ships, they will try and steal the sites from other players who have already done a good amount of the work to get to the reward.

PROs :
- Less easily campable by the same experienced players
- More dynamic locations
- Creates a risk-reward scenario
- Creates more easy exploration/beacons that are visible to your eyeballs when you enter a system, getting noobs interested in them (and probably dying horribly, but at least they tried)
- Doesn't create a "Farming" experience. More of an exploration one.

CONs :
- Difficult balancing reward for people who are looking for PVP
- By adding time to the roaming and exploring aspect for these sites are they going to be condusive to PVP? Or do they really need to be static sites to keep the easy to find PVP interest they currently have?

Maybe when some players find a site they will spread the word about the site since it's there for so long, and others will come hunting for the ones in the site. Making an information network based around these lite exploration locations for people to come fight in them? Especially if Sec Status Tags are the central focal point of this, I think you have a very succesful reward scenario.

Just a few thoughts.

Well, of course not every fight starts because players are hunting bears in the plex. But I highly doubt they would ever have become the pvp hotspots they did if it weren't for those initial bears trying to farm it which lures in the pirates. I'm trying to make the point that I don't think a PVP arena with no isk reward inside to lure the carebears and thus the pirates and thus the anti-pirates will ever come close to replacing what the 2/10's were.

And it wasn't just bears trying to farm those plexes. A number of pirates/pvpers roamed across regions to farm the loot from the 2/10's and hopefully find a fight in one of them as a bonus.

EVE PVP needs consensual and non-consensual parties. It needs hunters and prey. It needs greed for isk and greed for carebear killmails to motivate pilots to take risks. Without these things it just becomes a series of stalemates or boring 1v1's. I'm extremely disappointed that this was the best idea that came out of the CSM + Dev meeting.

Sorry Fozzie, but I don't think acceleration gates are interesting enough "terrain" on their own to drive interest in complexes. Now they certainly serve their purpose in limiting the size of a fight (which is great) but I still think that some semblance of a reward must stay intact for these to attract activity to them.

When our corp was farming the plex in Lulm, one of the big appeals was that you could make isk while baiting out a PvP fight. There was a payment for your time that made it worthwhile to visit and hang out even if no one else came along to fight you. Essentially, we used these plexes like FW plexes before FW plexes had their rewards added (which unsurprisingly started being run much more frequently.)

Strip away the reward, and you're forcing players to choose between PvP and isk-making - which is a step away from the direction you've headed between the FW payout system and the addition of bountyies. Simply put, I don't see these being compelling enough "content" on their own if we're talking gated arenas without some reward to bait players into running them.

Bloodpetal beat me to it - sec status improvement tags would be an EXCELLENT reward to replace the typical exploration content. If CCP is seriously going to follow through with the plans mentioned last FanFest (which you should, absolutely!) you'd be adding new content anyways, this is a fantastic opportunity to solve a few problems with a single mechanism.

I'd love to see a plex that spawns as frequently as necessary to generate sec status tags (Lets say you were thinking of having the sec status tags drop from an NPC in a belt, this could just as easily drop from an NPC in a plex) and that was easily discoverable using the -system scanner-, not the probing system. Once opened, the plexes could stay on public overview system-wide and become that conflict driver the old plexes used to serve as.

Thus we'd have a system that adds new content, creates a new profession (killing pirate NPC's to collect security tags for the marketplace) and replaces the old DED 1 and 2 plexes in terms of providing a wonderful pew chokepoint.

There's obviously lots of possibilities here, but this one is my personal favorite, but however you slice this I think rewards simply -must- play into this. Career PvPers deserve to make some bacon while they pew, and since we're limited on direct rewards due to farming issues the least we can do is provide content that pays on top of providing a place to find a fight.

....Keep in mind that plexes with zero rewards are what drove us nuts for many years in Faction Warfare. They weren't a good place to find fights, and I directly blame the lack of reward. Everything we've seen in Inferno and Retribution confirms this.

In other words, your blanket fix for the farmable statics problem nuked an integral part of the small scale lowsec PvP scene and you stand by it. I am sorely disappointed. Why not return the complexes, with their DED loot and change the gate mechanics involved so that keys are not required? No camping problem (people will nuke the campers), same watering hole effect. Perfection ensues.

Of course, nuke the highsec ones out of existence, but just returning the beacons with deadspace without loot means that the whole watering hole concept is thrown out of the window. It is not arenas that we want, it is actual, meaningful places to fight over, to pirate at, and to call each names around.

This change makes EVE worse, not better, and makes lowsec worse, not better. And honestly, aside of some crazies living in lowsec, it is a pretty much dead zone outside of FW areas, and not everyone wants to participate in FW. There was a way (and is a way) to fix the farming problem without affecting the existence of lowsec static complexes, and the fix has been staring at you in the face for a very long time (fix key spawn mechanics, as people have asked over and over and over for years).

Sorry if I sound bitter, but honestly, you're severely reducing my will to play EVE by this change and by the fact you're not willing to revert it to the better.

TL;DR:
Hans is right, rewards are needed to keep people around these places and draw new people in. Otherwise the draw of these locations aside of the few people who are in it purely for the fights is pretty much nothing. And the draw is needed to grow the "next generation" of lowsec pirates, PvPers and anti-pirates.

I think the rewards for these plexes are just fine, making up to 60mil on a single lucky run. Serpentis blaster and 3 dead space mods! I Don't agree that hidden sites someone takes the effort to scan out, and gimp their ship in the process to probe, should become easily avail. As an overview pop for anyone to see. Neither do I agree about the tags, as most of the issue here with common pilots, is that we get aggressed at these locations by pies that bring their sec status down to have the advantage of gate guns. My sec hits have ALL come from pies being in FW specific objectives that had nothing to do with them. Providing a kill spot, together with the opportunity for a free sec tag from someone's loot, will only make this a pie hang out, not at all working as intended, while benefitting those that abiluse the security mechanic most.

Is there any particular reason it has to be either/or? If you're going to introduce terrain, you might as well vary it.

For instance, what if one class of site is a CONCORD, or even DED, outpost, and it's the most likely to drop security status tags? To get through it, your security status has to take a pummeling. This would give -10s and other people who don't care about being flashy an income stream, and incentive to compete for it. Other sites could drop them as well, as incidental loot, but where else would you go for security status tags than CONCORD itself?

I think you misunderstood what I meant about terrain. I was simply saying that an acceleration gate itself is not enticing "terrain". The appeal in these plexes isn't just that you can shrug off cruisers and duel, its that you can shrug off cruisers and kill things and grab lucrative loots and maybe get some PvP along the way. Or that you can shrug off cruisers and pursue other frigates into the plex. But simply shrugging off larger sized ships was never the -primary- appeal in and of itself, certainly not enough to sustain regular traffic to such a complex.

Whatever these end up becoming, just as Bloodpetal said, they need to be distinctly different than FW plexes and not simply constitute rehashed content*. Lowsec has been robbed one conflict driver to the next, this is simply the latest in a chain of decisions that were made that had an adverse affect on the pirate culture without consideration of the fact there WAS a pirate culture in the first place. (Removal of agent quality was another big hit to piracy). CCP needs to develop lowsec with a sense of purpose and excitement that isn't just "that place where FW takes place."

And lets be careful about the tags-for-sec status issue and not overly confuse the two. First off, if CCP were to add tags for sec status, my guess is that you'd gain these the same way you raise your sec status now - by killing pirate rats. You're gaining favor with CONCORD by taking care of bad guys for them. Anyways, I don't want to get stuck on this idea of tags-as-plex rewards, that may not end up being the best place for them (if CCP commits to doing these at all, again, I hope they do) and there's certainly other types of rewards that could be used instead. Let's keep our minds open.


*That being said, I'd LOVE to see more ways to earn pirate faction LP in lowsec and for there to be more interesting and accessible pirate faction LP rewards and cashout places in lowsec, This conceptually just makes sense and I know a lot of players are thirsty for more meaningful ways to play on behalf of the pirate NPCS in EVE.....so there could be some intriguing possibilities here as well if we're not TOO scared of borrowing a little from FW plexes.

just add an accel gate which drops you to a deadspace area at a random point within 100km or something. And add a rat which has a chance to drop repair paste.

this alone makes it 100% better as FW plexes after the plex layout change

i forgot to add that frig sized deadspace mods are now very expensive again. If you don't bring the statics back you might want to consider to review the drop tables. A single mid-grade mod should not cost as much as the rest of the ship. This might work for T3s but i don't think it works for frigs.

That would be me. I farmed the living heck out of the static site in Oicx, and so did all of my corp mates. This site lead to nearly zero pvp. Sorry for ruining the fun for everybody else.