Warfare & Tactics

People would still be compensated for pushing sov. That compensation will just be similar for similar activities. If the system upgrades were interesting enough to hold a system by itself this really wouldn't be an issue. There would be a purpose to having a little fiefdom. As there was a huge thread full of suggestions for system upgrades and CCP didn't act on a single one I don't see the purpose of wasting more time on it.

FW is a closed ended system. If it were open ended we would have seen the temporary cyno jammers come into play. Remember those? They only would have worked for an hour. The concept would have been to throw one up to bash a moon POS. Throw one up again when it comes out of reinforcement. Low sec moons would be a lot more annoying for nullbears to hold onto. I wonder what happened there, hmm?

As it is a closed end system the market has to serve to balance the sides imho. A 6-1 + profit margin doesn't do that.

More like kill the alt system, amirite?

LP from 1 lvl4 mission = what? 4 plexes? About 1 hour of orbiting buttons?

Run a mission, pew for the rest of the night knowing that merlin in the plex actually wants for fight and isn't a stabbed farmer.

And, my stuff is in 2 stations that will never flip? How many people in Arzad & Sahtogas said that?

Lost a lengthy post but basically the point was that I can generate maybe 25k LP per hour of plexing while runnning minnie missions solo in a hound will net closer to 200k LP/hour. The best Amarr can do in the market is maybe 1750 isk/LP while even in a depressed minnie market they can get 750 isk/LP. This is true even after months of Amarr in T1 and minnie in T4/5. So a 2-2.5x better market return for Amarr and 8x better rate of LP generation for minnie.

That is a broken system and the market is not regulating itself. Of course there needs to be rewards for the winning side but in an MMO where the goal is a lasting game world, the losing side has to have an attainable path to victory or they will quit FW, join the winning side or just not log in.

That is why Zarnak's idea and others in this thread make sense. Like it or not, there has to be some type of levelling of the playing field for the long term health of FW.

A good fight is its own reward. If you're in FW for the pvp, which most of us "CLAIM" we are, then you like being at Tier 1 more because the fights land on your doorstep 23/7 AND you can still make enough isk to keep your hangar full of pvp ships.

I think the real complaint is that one side has very little chance of "winning", and no change of rules will alter that. Only players can do that.

Removing tiers remove any incentive/reward/reasons to capture systems. Worse, it makes more convenient to NOT capture systems so to have more plex avaiable. Basically rewards for loosing the WZC game.

Again, plexes are resources and the purpose is to prompt people to compete for these resources.
Actually the loosing side earn less LP from these resources but:

1. The loosing side LP are more evaluable due to market self-regulating
2. The loosing side resources avaiablity is far higher and easy

All aspects have to be considerated.

There is a difference between sovereignty and the mechanics for gaining sovereignty. As it is right now you get very little for actually holding a system. Docking rights. Bragging rights. When was the last time a corpmate logged on and complained about missing science slots?

Putting the benefits in the nuts and bolts of taking sov is a horrible game mechanic because it is so farm centric. It rewards circling a button rather then actually owning a system. If you want the winner to have a boon - which I'm not opposed to at all - it needs to be on the back end.

You can't have a FW mechanic that purely benefits owning a system, either, at least not militia-wide. At least with the current system, farm-centric as it is, only people who contribute to owning a system receive benefits. Can you imagine how people would flood to the winning side if they got benefits just from existing in that faction?

A better way to deal with it is to just make it really, really easy to interrupt plexes. If someone comes into a plex you are running and runs you out, you should lose all progress on the plex and the attacker should potentially get a bonus determined by how much of the cap he reversed.

Also, LP rewards as a whole should probably just be brought down, so it's not so good as a pure income source. And the differences between high and low tiers should be compressed, a lot.

Tier system removal doesn't cut it. Can be part of a solution, but not the real problem (hint: over-incentivization).

FW is for all intents and purposes dead, a carcass being slowly picked clean by people from "outside" whose only interest is easy access to cheap faction gear.

Want real verifiable data to support that claim?

Remember what this forum contained prior to the Infernal patch? .. it was full of chest beating, EGO bashing, faction propaganda and glorious battle reports .. now you have "how do I run plexes with 5 day character", silly threads with no relation to FW (WTF is that!!! ), "how many stabs should I use" and "which faction is best for money" (and infinite variations thereof).

Killboard entries may have increased post Infernal but overall quality has decreased manyfold, or there would be at least one thread in recent history with a battle report of sorts .. you read that right, there is not even ONE thread these days .. my guess is that the horn one has to toot after killing the umpteenth stabbed farmer is too small to allow passage of atmospheric molecules so we never hear them.

My take (some of it at least):
LP has no place in the conquering phase of a war, illogical in the extreme yet that is what plexing LP amounts to. Move it to missions, mining, rats in general and what not and use system upgrades augment intake.
- People will not fight for something today that they can get for free tomorrow (ie. contested status) so the entire premise that plex-LP was based was voided from the start (caution was utterly ignored pre-patch by the way).

Missions should not ever be able to 'go to' an already occupied system, if they do then payouts should be 2-3 levels below mission level (ex. Lvl4 => Lvl1-2 payout).
- Self evident, both balance and strategic logic wise.
- If above is done then missions could add to VP pool as if a plex of equal size (balanced out by last entry).

Should not be possible to completely halt plex rat spawns, by all means remove the last "Big'un" spawn if ludicrous killing speed (as opposed to current leisurely stroll) is brought to bear on the first wave.
- Whole idea with my FW plex specific rats that was co-opted by CCP was to force the issue of 'appropriate ships' by giving them a knob to tweak that didn't break stuff elsewhere .. not to make them into overweight rent-a-cops armed with empty water pistols.

All the stuff that is not doing as expected by the delusional minds at CCP should be revised or removed.
- Most grievous example is iHubs. Meant to foster big fights with capitals on the board during winters in Hell .. doesn't happen, or rather the times it has happened can be finger counted by a clumsy sawmill worker.
- My last suggestion on that topic stands, remove ihubs and introduce a 3-4 hrs period in which plex spawning is accelerated and VP gain per plex increased with an automatic drop to 80% contested if DT interrupts (assuming the timer cannot be made to carry over).

Revise tier to hinge upon raw controlled systems rather than the ~16% current, Increase VP requirement the higher the tier difference is (in under dogs favour obviously).
- Only way that I can see to simulate over-extended supply lines in FW (null needs something similar by the way, say a hard limit on systems that can be transversed using bridges or simply disallowing multiple bridges in systems).
- Other uses for tier should be tied to individual system upgrades, boosting exploitation of resources in said system for instance.

I'll be honest - didn't read all replies... Not a fan of the Tier system as well....

LP should be reduce for plexing. I'm for LP gained from plexing...just not so much. Missions should be the main LP bead winner.

I personally have no issue with mission farmers (as in the past) as they have zero impact on "sov". The issue with plexes giving so much LP is plex farmers have literally zero risk/investment yet DO have an impact on "sov" - which is utter crap. I don't have the magic crystal ball to tell what the magic "balance" is for this....but plexes should not be the LP sink they are now...

Also, I like the timer roll-back concept.