Warfare & Tactics

I mean what do you consider a blob? I mean they can easly put a cap that says ok after 20 pilots thats the peak of the LP gain.....


If im in 5 frigs, and you come in with 15.. was I blobbed?


If I have 20 frigs, and you come in with 35 frigs was I blobbed?


Blob is like good and evil, its a relative term, and its almost like nukes, people are only afraid of them, if they are not the one doing it. I have never once seen a gallente force go "you know what.. they only have 15 people in that novice, lets only bring 15 people."


EVERYONE is ALWAYS going to bring as many people as they can, and whining about blobs just means you should go to high sec and war dec people. Its less blobby there.


Further more, I think its comical that QCats, takes the time to complain about blob warfare... like wtf.

Ummm? No?


I mean you may be right about the spawn mechanics because I havent timed them my self... but we already have tested the system capture status for the various plex sides, and they are not all created equal

Unless they changed something the only difference you see is due to rounding. Chatgris is right.

I am pretty sure that all of them give 0.6% each, but due to rounding it'll be about 2% for all three. (I think it's really like 0.66% or something).

I'll look closer tonight when I do my usual alt deplexing.

If I remember right, I think they all used to be either .6 or .7 depending on rounding.



I used to think this too. But really ccp has been very very good since crucible.

They had already planned on doing a timer rollback in retribution but it didn't quite make the cut. I think it came up in the roundtable so I think this will happen. How soon will depends on several things which I do not know.

CCP also indicated that they are receptive to delivering better intel tools to faction war players. Maybe like a channel in which players can readilly see where plexes are currently being captured, maybe some other type of ui intel tool to let us know where plexes are being captured. Obviously this would help prevent people from hiding and plexing and lead to more fights in plexes.

However what they said was interesting. They said they liked it so much that perhaps it shouldn't just be limited to faction war, and it should apply to other areas of space. So it's quite possible they will develop this interface while working on some other mechanic like null sec, and add it to faction war as a bonus.

So the rollbacks might happen even if they don't put significant resources into fw. And the intel tool might happen as a spin off to their putting significant resources into other areas of space. If these 2 things happen plexing can indeed be a pvp game.

I would add to andre's point that by spreading pilots out, instead of encouraging them into one large group you will get more fights. Its hard to find an gang willing to engage your 60 pilot fleet with all sorts of logistics and ewar. However its pretty easy to get fights if you fly around solo or in a group of 2-8.

Its the least common denominator.

I wasn't in the fight you recently gave a shout out to Gallente for fighting. But I noticed Deen wispa said you guys suddenly stopped. When I read that, I immediately assumed you guys did not have the firepower to meet their gang so had to call it quits. That happens allot because its rare that both sides can throw everything they can at the other and they both just happen to have enough to have a reasonable fight. All too often when you have larger numbers of players one side ends up being much more powerful, and both sides know it. Result - no fight.

If you divide those 60 pvpers on each side into small gangs and solo pilots spread out in the war zone you will have allot more people deciding "yeah we can fight that."

Yeah I might be a little out dated on my null sec experience. I haven't been in 0.0 since 2009.

You can take systems by spreading out. You just cannot take defended systems that way. Again, the system as it is encourages you to bring the minimum number of pilots required to "win". If you bring too many, you will win the battle for that particular system but lose the war as the enemy can take multiple systems while you take a single system. There is no need to have a game mechanic to encourage people to form a larger gang. If a larger gang is needed to achieve a goal, it will be done but the system itself should push to minimize the size of that gang.

Awoxing is a problem, but it is not a LP/plex problem. It is a special needs pvper problem who like to abuse game mechanics to get easy kills. CCP needs to fix the problem by giving massive standing loss to those that attack friendly militia (and allied militia) and close all the standing loopholes such as bouncing PC corps every 6 days so your standing is never counted or being in a 3 man corp with 2 +10 chars and 1 -10 awoxing char. Maybe some sort of blacklist for characters that received multiple standings. The truth is I have no idea about the best way to fix it.

I personally only "awox" minnies when I feel threatened, such as a "friendly" approaching my kiter in their brawler. If its a Gallente, I run since I know I will suffer if I shoot first but they don't care if they do because of the loopholes.

Farming isn't really a problem, the problem is there isn't really a way to fight the farmers as you cannot undo their damage without spending between 1x and 2x the man hours of button spinning. Again, this isn't a problem of the plex itself or the LP, but rather the NPC rats and timer implementation. I actually prefer the "hold the plex for 1-2 minutes" and the plex is returned to a neutral timer and all the time the other side spun the button is undone. This lets the "loser" who had to run have a very small window to come back and save their progress and also minimizes the time the "winner" has to sit there to undo the damage.

Dear Gallente,


Please stop defending Nis, Nenn, Eha, and your other strong holds with numbers greater then 2-5, according to lots of your fellow pilots, this is not what FW is about. Stop breaking the rules. You are bad people, and now shall be punished!

timer resets

To my mind, one of the biggest problems with FW right now is that two of the factions have effectively 'won' their wars. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that Amarr and Caldari no longer pose a serious threat to their opponents' operations. Last night's fight in Innia/Eha illustrates my point. In a RL war whose goal was not utter genocide this would be a sensible time to discuss terms of surrender. Of course, nobody wants that. We are in FW for the tension and the pew pew. I'm sure most of us would like to see the advantage swing back and forth a bit more freely.

I've been trying to give some thought to how to add a bit of global instability to FW. My take on the problem starts from the observation that we currently inhabit a bi-polar (rather than multi-polar) FW system. Here then are two suggestions:

(1) As has been suggested in the parallel thread, let's drop the artificial 'alliance' between Gallente and Minmatar on the one hand and Caldari and Amarr on the other. Free up the four factions to fight, win and lose independently. At the moment massive advantage on the one side can't help but to spill over into the parallel warzone.

As a nice side-benefit, this would also eliminate at least half (or more) of the awoxing problem.

(A more radical version of this idea would see a temporary alliance between Gallente and Amarr (the believers in the benevolence of their respective states) vs. the Caldari/Minmatar ('live free or die' libertarians and anarchists). A few months of this sort of thing would help rebalance the territories, I think.)

(2) In the long-term, we could complicate the global picture by splitting each of the current militias into several factions. Rather than Amarr, one might fight for Khanid, Amatar or Amarr. Rather than Caldari one might fight for one of the famous mega-corporations. Matar have their tribes. Gallente have the Intaki, etc. It would add to the game to give each of these militia factions different flavours and personalities. In fact, they are already in the back-story. Perhaps bonus them slightly differently too?

In any case, I can imagine a variety of ways whereby the splinter factions would compete with each other in terms of defensive control of systems yet cooperate against a common enemy. Done right, this would prevent massive advantage from accruing to one side.

tl; dr: let's complicate the political picture so that FW territorial control remains dynamic.