Warfare & Tactics

Well... let's not go overboard here.

I can tell by the corp you are in that this entire topic is probably a sore subject for you. The beauty of fw is, in a years time you will likely be on top... as that's how this system works.

The pendulum will swing: Success feeds pvp apathy due to pve opportunity/capitalization and fatigue for pressing systems (up until the other side gives up and goes home anyways). Either way, both will take their toll and the longer a side 'wins' the longer they'll be subject to those effects. Should the war go stale entirely, the mechanics of the game give the other side a kick in the ass (the LP market is fully crashed for the side that has completely won, while the LP market for the 'losers' becomes more and more tempting as a faction item/ship 'supply' with great profit margin is waiting to be cashed in on ).

In this regard FW does have a balance that I must respect.
The mechanics at the root are pretty damned good (and you are evidence of this. How? I'll get to that later. )

However, as I said earlier "kill the alt system, amirite?".

The issue isn't missioners.( In fact, the more of them the better, they will kill the pve incentives for a winning side faster than anything.)

THE ISSUE IS THE CLOCKERS.
The issue is pressing system control with little or no effort. The issue is pvp opportunity and mechanics that require a minimal level of effort being applied to press a system effectively (one being much higher than what we currently see)

But we must be careful to also maintain the good aspects FW have brought us. Let's face it, its the best thing for 1v1 combat since Juliardo McPodsalot invented the warp scrambler.

So... a knob and dial appears... how do we adjust it?

I say

-make the NPC's in fw plex more significant (specifically, mediums and larges). no one should be able to afk these things, nor solo them. npc ew galore, sleeper-ish AI, (don't make them insurmountable, but make them much less farmable)

-keep smalls and novices the way they are, people love them for the small group / 1v1 battlegrounds they are

-reduce the impact of small and novice fw plex to system control.
-increase the impact of medium and larges

-change the very mechanics of how the FW plex's spawn. THIS IS HUGE! After a few novice / smalls have been closed someone MUST press a larger plex to continue pressing control of the system. (which thanks to our above changes is a much harder task)

Stop being so melodramatic. FW is great, if it wasn't you wouldn't be so emotionally invested as to make the posts you're making. But you are right that some knobs and dials need adjusted. And that's pretty much it.

It doesn't need a fundamental rework, all it needs is a little bit of thought and attention.

At least there is lot of new players doing FW and having fun, that is how it was ment to be at the beginning,

For older players it may not be so challenging, killing farmers etc feels more like kill mail farming than anything else.

FW is working fine.

CCP mindlink changes was not so good, best would be that amarr had armor+skirmish, so there would be reason for both to fight for better lp, but CCP boosted minmatar and gallente so no wonder those have all systems now.

It seems to me that there's a few different issues entertwined here:

1) Ability for low SP / risk averse alts to farm lots of LPs in plexes easily;
2) PvP not being the driver of tiers / warzone control;
3) Minimal reward for system upgrades;
4) Minimal incentive for PvE focused FW folks to assist in warzone control.

So maybe we need to differentiate between offensive plexing, defensive plexing, mission LP reward / difficulty, and warzone control / tiers.

For offensive plexing, the issues are that the defending NPCs are pushovers for pretty much any minimally skilled alt, even one with stabs in the lows and a cloak in the highs. Making them overly tough across the board would make things a lot more difficult for "legitimate" low SP players just getting into the swing of things. There's also the issue (expressed in other threads) that there's no relative importance of systems - you get the same LP offensively plexing a backwater system as you do a main militia hub.

For defensive plexing, the issue is that you really don't even have to have guns at all. Zero SP alts with 2 WCS in the lows can deplex as effectively as a 200mil SP character in a 500mil isk pirate frigate. And yet, the rewards (LP wise) are the same. Moreover, it's generally not nearly as efficient to deplex systems unless they're heavily contested - it's almost better to let the enemy flip the system than it is to defend it. If nothing else, you can simply deplex it down to the last 30 seconds or so and let it sit there waiting for someone to put twice as much effort to capturing it.

In addition, there's really minimal reason to upgrade a system unless you want to push it to higher tiers. And very difficult to maintain it once you have it upgraded.

So, perhaps we should change how plex LP is allocated?

Set the LP payout of offensive plexing to some combination of the tier level of the system owner, plus the level of the system upgrade. In other words, you get more LP offensively plexing against militias at higher tiers, and in systems that have been heavily upgraded. This should give folks more incentive to offensively plex against higher tier militias, and in systems that are more heavily upgraded. Moreover, it gives militias a way to define what systems are important - you donate the LP to upgrade a system, you're giving the enemy a reason to come there. This also means that "backwater systems" don't give nearly the same levels of rewards as plexing in places more heavily defended. In addition, you don't get a "farmer cascade" as much since you're not being rewarded based on your faction's tier - you're being rewarded when going against more difficult opponents / factions that have more warzone control.

On the other hand, defensive plexing (being a bit too damn easy on low SP underequipped alts) shouldn't be as rewarding in general. However, since it takes as much time and effort regardless of the level of system contention, I feel it should pay the same regardless. Fix the LP payout of defensive plexing at 50% of Teir 1, regardless of system contention. This could be modified by the upgrade level of the system in question; basing it on the Tier of the holding faction incentivizes low SP farming too much.

Of course, these could easily combine to a situation where people simply don't upgrade systems as much and don't push for higher tiers. To compensate to some degree, you can scale defending NPC difficulty with the system upgrade level. I feel you still need to keep some level of Novice available, that's always amenable to low SP players, simply to ensure there's always a place for them in FW. But in Smalls / Mediums / Larges, things could be much different. As the upgrade level of a system increases, the defending NPCs could be buffed appropriately. More rats doesn't necessarily change much, but making them into more elite versions at higher upgrade levels (say 3/4/5) would make things a lot more interesting. Cloning some of the mission rats, that are tougher and do more damage, would be a good start. At the highest upgrade levels, you could add in not only racial ECM at a reasonable level, but also things like webs and scrams. That would hugely change the dynamic in terms of being able to use poorly skilled underequipped alts to farm easy LPs. In addition, since the LP payout is scaled to system upgrade level, players would reap an appropriate reward for the increased difficulty.

Another adjustment that could be made to further incentivize fights: if you are defensively plexing, and you fight something in the plex while doing so, you should be rewarded. Players who get a weapons timer while in a plex should receive some sort of tag / flag. Should that player capture the plex, they should get a higher LP reward. This should be a percentage of the normal reward for offensive plexing in that plex - say, 75% maybe? This should incentivize people to stay and fight while deplexing, and again reflect the importance of system upgrades.

Mission LP is tricky - pure PvE guys shouldn't get massive gains for only whoring missions. Fix the base LP reward at something between Tier 1 and 2, then scale it based on the upgrade level the mission is taking place in. Friendly system? No bonus. Hostile level 5 system? Hefty bonus. This should make things reflect risk / reward a bit better. Oh, and tweak Caldari / Minmatar missions so they aren't as easily run in effing solo Stealth Bombers. I'd be willing to bet that's where the majority of LPs are earned in FW, and why Cal/Min has as many more players than Gal/Amarr on a regular basis.

GalMil t1/Caldari t3 = tons of GalMil undocked and fighting, record numbers for kills for multiple GalMil corps.

Caldari t1/GalMil t3 = Black Rise is a squid ghost town.

Just shows who fights when the chips are down and who runs

Why? Then we'd have people complain about farmers benefiting from FW without doing a damn thing for Occupancy Warfare. How do I know we'd have people complain?
1. They always complain, and
2. They complained about mission runners not contributing but getting LP before LP for plexing was implemented.

Thing is they don't. When was the last time a cloaky stabbed alt was able to flip Nisuwa?

Between the emergency patch in October 2012 and the Winter expansion of the same year (Retribution), farming from the Minmatar dried up completely. They had the old style plexes with multiple spawns but the timer would not move as long as they were alive. The farmers were just stopped cold in their tracks. Period. End of story.

People advocating no stabs in plexes are missing the boat. The problem is the plexes are stupid easy. Tie the number of NPC's as well as a number of spawns in plexes to the system upgrade level and you might actually have a purpose to system upgrades. Give them anemic firepower but considerable tanks - just as they are now - and you can get rid of at least some of the farmers.

I agree with this. Removing NPC was a major fault.
Btw the added income for NPC loot/ tags was a good balancement since is not linked to the tier.

I like the suggestion for waves of NPCs coming into the plexes, which then would require combat ships rather than the current iteration of 'plexing' ships. I also agree that the loot from the NPC drops would marginally offset the Tier difference, making running the now combat-required plexes more profitable to the losing faction.

If only NPCs from the faction that owns the system spawn, however, I see two downsides to this -

The first is that defensive plexing would remain passive, which would mean that the people wanting to AFK plex would only be able to do so in the winning faction, which would both keep the stabbed and/or cloaky and/or AFK farmers in business and add more inertia to the side with the advantage.

The second is that fights inside of plexes benefit the owners of the system more, who already have the home field advantage of being able to choose the right ships to fight what their opponents bring and have the opportunity to use boosting links with even less risk. This also makes holding onto systems through plexing easier, rather than encouraging engagements with hub bash fleets.

I like the idea aside from that, though. Anyone have ideas on addressing these?

That's true. I had also thought of having the NPCs deal very little damage, and essentially just serve as HP sponges, but I think that doing something like that would push people towards using ships designed specifically for plexing when they o-plex, which would then be handicapped when engaging in real fights.

I guess ships like these could still provide more interesting content than cloaky ventures, but this still would give the 'defenders' a distinct advantage.