Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Wait wait wait... you mean every single day goons will voluntarily fly predictably fit inty's into my space during my prime time play hours? I don't have to go on a 60j roam looking for them? I don't have to camp a gate for 4 days waiting for someone to wander by? I can just sit in my home system in my favorite anti-trollceptor setup of the day and they will continuously bring me PvP and KMs on a regular basis?

Holy crap, please sign me up for this morale-draining experience.

Best argument for this system, really.

Any interceptor that cannot warp away with its link active, that compromises its speed (via targetting range rigs instead of speed and agility rigs), and that neuters it's midslots (due to sebos) to get 110km+ lock range is simply a killmail. I like killmails.

Honestly, once people get tired of loosing so-called "trollceptors," I'd bet some interesting fights will start to happen in an around the sov structures and nodes spread across all of sov nullsec.

Mind you, the proposed system isn't perfect. The 4 hour time window doesn't sit well with me, but that's a topic for another thread, I guess...

Problem is that you need 1 cycle to connect to the structure, *then* progress starts. So if you drop Link or warp after the end of your first cycle, you don't actually make any progress on the timer. You need to let it start another cycle to make any progress, in which case you're stuck for another 2 minutes unable to warp, or you have to wait out a 2 minute cycle again to reconnect.

When you're talking larger fleets, I don't think there's going to be many line members activating Entosis Links anyway... you're going to get blapped the first sign that you're active and can't receive reps. I can see ninja-Linking with low sig fast ships like interceptors to harass larger fleets, but man... bombers and probes really skew things until they're fixed.

Best part about FW, really. We don't have to "roam" more than about 2-3 jumps from a home system to find a fight - and those buggers get to run away at will, unlike folks with an active Entosis Link who can't warp or cloak for 2-5 minutes at a time.

Ya'll are gonna have a field day for a while.

Why would we have more than one or two systems to harass, unless we actually had pilots in each of those systems to defend them? This idea that small alliances, or ANYone, will be able to hold dozens of systems at an average density of 0 to 2 people per system is pretty much a non-starter in Fozziesov. So yeah, if you want to harass my sov, you'll be coming to my one or two home systems. I don't really care how the large blocs manage to sort out their defensive problems :)

It's funny that you think people will play this game for all of prime time perfectly covering their hovel 0.1 systems for months on end without a break... every.single.day.... I predict that the 1st holiday weekend (probably 4th of July) will see sov carnage.

Keep beating that drum that this change is good, because it is... for us.

Too true and it will be funny to read the complaints of some hi sec wanna be when we have bubbled wrapped his station and POS.

That being said, you know as well as i do that once DBRB figures this out all semblance of cute and adorable goes out the window.

I think this mechanic will incentivize e-war (specifically range damps) to a concerning degree. A single damp ship can effectively cycle through a large number of "other" ships and cancel out their entosis links by massing range damps every 2 minutes, keeping any of them from actually moving to the capture stage.

A. In turn, this incentivizes a high proportion of the attacking/defending ships in a fleet to carry the link module (to cancel out the effect a small number of e-war ships might have). Incentivizing a large proportion of ships to sacrifice a high-slot would, in turn, favor drone doctrines in the meta (since utility high-slots are inherently less valuable and more common for drone ships than they are for turret or missile ships). Whether or not this should be a concern from a balance perspective I can't say, but it's at least worth considering.

B. Another concern is that, although single/small groups of e-war only ships could easily be dealt with by an attacking or defending fleet, small groups of tanked e-war ships and logistic support could be VERY effective at harassing small/medium-size fleets (40-60 or so ships), while almost worthless for harassing larger fleets (since you can much more effectively volley ships off the field after a certain point and scaling e-war to make sure you get *every* ship with an entosis link becomes very difficult as the number of links grows). This seems like an undesirable outcome since smaller groups are specifically subject to this disadvantage.

C. Finally, this mechanic seems to be extremely heavy handed for capital ships. With the current proposed cycle time increase, they already have to dedicate at least 20 minutes if they want to make any progress towards capturing an objective (10 minutes warm up, 10 minutes for the next cycle). Losing lock just once can add up to 20 minutes of dead time (if you lose lock RIGHT at the beginning of your second cycle, meaning you need to finish the current cycle for 10 minutes and then warm up for another 10 minutes)--which seems a little harsh.

One possible solution (I'm sure there are many others), to address at least B and C would be to halt capture progress when lock is lost, but resume capture progress as soon as the target lock is re-established. If the module cycles while the lock is still lost, then the module would need to start the process over (warm up again for a cycle), but allowing the capture cycle to continue as long as the lock is re-established would minimize the effects of e-war cycling (the biggest problem from B) by forcing e-war to pick targets and stay on them to have an effect on the link. In addition, it would make e-war against capital ships less disproportionately effective as compared to the effect e-war has on ships with a 2-minute cycle time.

I would be less worried about DBRB than the leader of our sov-trolling SIG that doesn't exist

You have two members, you aren't holding anything. Using cepters we can take your space with zero risk of losses.