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Adding an ice mining Expedition Frigate in the future is definitely possible.

This doesnt prevent someone from sitting on the capture edge cloaking before you land on grid, but it does prevent people from setting traps in scram bombers.

Extend the no cloak range to twice the capture range I think, and maybe also do something with stabs.

Great to hear that. For my organisation in particular who live in NPC 0.0, the ability to use a ship like this to mine ice would mean we aren't forced into importing it from high sec. I'm sure it would help many others also.

@CCP Fozzie

Can it be confirmed whether or not the ideals put forward in http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/28659, specifically the paragraph reading:


(emphasis mine)

is still the intended design philosophy for FW?

That is to say that FW gameplay should support those who are active in their role in FW, be that holding their ground or selectively choosing when to run, as opposed to those who farm with no intention of ever fighting back, using stabs as a means to escape any fight brought by a solo pilot / very small gang, when the gang have no intention of attempting to shoot fish in the barrel at the expense of finding AND being able to win in a real fight due to mid slots spent on scrams.

Disclaimer: I didn't read every post after this one, if my concerns were already addressed, my apologies.

Fozzie, you just pretty much killed cloaky ambushes on people coming into FW plexes. This side-effect is downright bad, and your attempted solution is not actually doing anything to combat the farming problem. The bat is swinging, and again, it is doing so ineffectively, while breaking other things in the process.

The (AFK) farming problem is caused by stabs (about 4 of them), and not by cloaks. Your solution does nothing to eliminate 4 stab Tormentors sitting in a plex alt-tabbed into another game or client and warping off them they hear they are under attack. Furthermore, your solution does nothing to eliminate people sitting 29.9km from the beacon and about 45km from the warpin and moving for a second, then cloaking up, the moment someone appears on grid (or appears on a 5,000km d-scan). Moreover, since we cannot cloak within capture range, we can't even sneak into the plex by cloaking in warp into the plex and then crawling over them cloaked to catch them off guard, or by cloaking inside the plex and waiting for them to greedily return by cloaking near the warpin (and since we need multiple points to combat stabs, we pretty much need to use scrams and not longpoints).

In fact, this solution has exactly the opposite of what I suspect you intend, unless you intend for farmers farming LP with even less risk from cloaky attackers.

I suspect this is not the only change you plan for button capture mechanics, and I hope I am right. Otherwise, this is a silly change for no benefit.

This is a ugly fix to a much bigger problem.

Great change, but does not go far enough. Please continue to make FW mean "Factional Warfare", not "Farming World".

To those who think PvPers have no right to be upset about FW farming: FW is advertised and intended as a semi-organized system for sovereignty-like PvP, with incentives for smaller fights in smaller ships. It's an admirable vision.

It is not what actually happens, though. Instead, who are the biggest "participants"? People who do not fight, and often do not even have the ability to fight. How are they so active in this "war"? By orbiting buttons and running away. Cloaks are part of this, but not the entirety. As long as FW pays out in full to people who refuse to fight, the problem will persist -- regardless of modules or ships.

So I'm just butthurt and like "telling people how to play" right? Wrong. These "farm and run" mechanics are actively hurting PvP in faction warfare. The prevalence of farmers makes looking for a fight a prolonged sequence of chasing red herring after red herring. PvPers use (or, want to use) the complexes as fight "arenas", nexuses for finding fights. We most often have no interest in boring ourselves to death capturing the complex, or in chasing after farmers.

When I'm in a Rifter and see another Rifter on d-scan in a plex, I get excited for a good fight. I warp there, activate the gate, get ready... and he runs away. I go to the next system. Same thing happens there. Next system, again. Then again several times more. This experience makes fighting in a system indended to promote fighting extremely frustrating. Yes, I can fit more scrams to catch farmers, but why would I want to? Those fights are not fun, and using that kind of fit makes many regular fights impossible too. Again, the problem is not that farmers are hard to catch. The problem is that they are there in the first place, providing the illusion of an upcoming fight, leading to an extremely unsatisfying rollercoaster of unfulfilled adrenaline and excitement.

On top of that, "farming" taking center stage in a "warfare" system over "fighting" is just misleading and wrong.

Some hypothetical parallels:

• You spend time scanning down an exploration complex, fit for it, enter it... and the rats all leave.
• You're looking for a fairly rare item, travel to a station where it's available, try to buy it from the market... and the market says it's not there.
• You go to a mall and there are multiple stores saying "Half Life 3 now in stock!" When you enter and try to find it on the shelves, it's not there.
• Allied troops land at the D-Day invasion, but the German troops are nowhere to be found. The Germans later win the battle because they crept back in and planted a small plastic flag in the ground, then ran away again.

These are not fun mechanics. It's not cloaks or warp core stabilizers or farmers that are broken. It's the whole system. Please rethink it, CCP.

A step in the right direction: the capture meter degrades to "neutral" when nobody from either side is involved, and degrades at a higher rate when there are non-FW people present.

Sorry! I'll crosspost there once it's up.

On topic: I think the Prospect is awesome and something Eve's needed for a long time. I don't mine, but it looks like a great direction to go in. I'll leave the balance discussion to the miners.

Not if it can't cloak in capture range it's not, as Fozzie said. A Cheetah or Helios is probably better at that point.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the sigrad on this ship (with links and pirate implants) can get as low as 16m.

Now a Catalyst (Gallente Destroyer 5) with Light Electron Blaster II and (faction) Antimatter S tracks at 0.657 rad/sec against 40 sigrad targets before skills, so about 0.26 rad/sec effective tracking against a 16 sigrad target (up to 0.33 or so with skills). Add in a scripted tracking computer (I *think* the hull has enough CPU for that) and you are still only looking at 0.43 rad/sec effective tracking or so.


Is it the design intention that this ship (when fitted with an afterburner and orbiting at 1250m) can speedtank a Catalyst that fits for max tracking? Orbiting at 800m/s at 1250m is an angular velocity of 0.64 rad/sec, which is about 1.5 times the effective tracking. At that tracking your hit% is 0.5^(2.25), which my mental math estimates at 22%.

Go in to 1000m and you are closer to 7% hit rate.

Please note: I do not understand agility mechanics. It may be impossible to do that tight a turning circle with an afterburner.



Suggestion: Ensure that this ship's turning circle is at least 3000m so that one of the best tracking ships in the game can actually apply damage to it without needing webs. (This may already have been done). I have no problems at all with it being able to speedtank cruisers or even frigates/dessies that are not tracking-fit.