Assembly Hall

Arbitrary restrictions are bad for you, better solution:

1. Make friendly NPC's actually friendly (someone broke something )
2. Introduce poison pills in all missions .. example is Fox Hunt where an item has to be collected, opponent can force a 'mission:failed' by getting it (or make some cash selling it to mission whore ).
3. Only spawn in hostile space.

The pills alone would make the bomber obsolete within a month as they have no hope in hell of killing the most common mission hunters (frigs) .. if he can't kill the predator the mission is effectively forfeited, he takes standings hit and will eventually be booted.
Number three is there "just because" .. makes no sense for missions to go to friendly space, at least not when it is the same missions as on can get to hostile ditto. Alternative is to create a new set of missions more appropriate for friendly space, such as "build this", "mine there" or "salvage that".

Speaking from experience, no. I can count the number of times anyone - pirate or opposing FW pilot - has followed me into or otherwise harassed me on a mission on one hand, and I've run at least a few hundred of them. The beacons are up there for everyone to see, but they're almost invariably ignored - the structure of the mission deadspace means that by the time you do get to them, the preferred ships (bombers as noted or fast cruisers) are well away from the beacon, and any half-awake mission runner sees you coming on scan anyway.


200k LP per hour is a low end estimate. They're way the heck better than anything you get from plexes and despite the nerfs from retribution, a total income of "a few to several hundred million an hour depending on what you buy from the LP store" remains the norm to someone dedicated to farming them. Plex may have been what were highly publicized during the farming era, because they were still quite profitable and could be done even more trivially, but missions were where the real money was at, and still are.


Now, rewards THAT high are probably an issue but I don't have a problem with them being lucrative in general. It's lowsec and is notionally a warzone, after all. But the risk:reward is way off, and a large part of that is the missions themselves. Almost all of them are warp in and kill one thing (or several things in the case of the hauler destruction missions). There are item recovery missions, but few people actually accept those - they take longer. The end result is that your exposure, the time spent hanging out in the deadspace, is very low; you're typically in and out of the system in five minutes, tops. Plus, the structure of the mission deadspace is conducive to safety as well. Like the old plexes, the actual target of the mission is 50-80km away from the warp-in point. That gives you plenty of space to move away from the beacon and react to any potential attackers, even if you're not spamming d-scan to see them coming.


Bombers only exacerbate the risk:reward factor, since they can move about the warzone with near impunity thanks to their cloak. The places you can die in one are a) get horribly unlucky on a gate and get decloaked, b) get horribly unlucky on the warp gate to the mission and c) get horribly unlucky with someone following you through the warpgate right after you warp in. And given that, as I mentioned before, my experience is for most people to simply ignore the missions, b and c are unlikely.

Still, the solution is not to overtly target bombers with the nerf. While they're most people's preferred ships because of the aforementioned safety, a stealth fit Tengu or any fast cruiser with an improved cloak to evade gatecamps (and frankly the cloak is optional) can do them almost as fast and with almost as little danger. So we need to look elsewhere.

First: Change the mission layout. Do what was done with the plexes and move the warpin closer to the objective. Doesn't do anything about people mashing dscan, of course, but that can't be helped.

Second: Require players to kill everything to complete the mission instead of just the objective, and then use that as a dial to balance how long it takes to complete the mission. In their current form I'd say they have way too many NPCs in them, but that's easy to change. This is where the nerf to bombers comes in especially, since bombers will have a lot more trouble killing frigates than a more suitable ship would.

Those two combined will up the risk by obliging players to use easier to catch ships and spending a little more time in mission, and lower the reward by making it take a little longer.

Easy solution, kill the stealth bombers! Problem solved.