Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Playing as new 10-day Alpha character, I can tell that for me Guardians Gala event is disappointig: I can't compete with players who come in T2 / pirate ships -- it take too long for Alpha to take frigates and cruisers (and frigates for some reason take more time and effort to kill, even in destroyer), so that in 80% of cases someone just comes, kills BC and takes loot. This is discouraging, and feels like I am practically denied to take part in this event.

EVENT REWARDS

I suggest that in the future events like this (go to the site, kill enemies, get loot) will be additional reward system, to reward players who took part in event, but can't compete with Omega / older players. Possible solutions:

1. Killing enemies give you points. When you accumulate certain number of points -- you get reward.
For Guardians Gala event this would be something like this:



• When you accumulate 1000 or more points, you get (claim) your reward (random SKIN).
• Battleship worth 1000 points -- so if you steal it -- you get SKIN, as in current system.
• Frigates worth 50 points and cruisers worth 100 points -- so even if you can't compete with other players, you still encouraged to take part. Numbers is just for example, but they should be meaningful (I think 1/20 of reward threshold is a minimum to feel like you actually make progress).
• When you reach 1000 points, any excess points can be carried over, or dropped -- I can't say for sure what is better (carrying points will effectively increase number of rewards given to players, while dropping them would feel awful whey you got 950 points and kill battleship -- you will lose this 950 points).
• Option: lower security systems give more points (this option makes sense only if point are carried over after reaching 1000 points threshold).

Instead of points, that has issue of managing them, give rewards for each 1 battleship killed, each 10 cruisers killed, and each 20 fighters killed.

I don't suggest, that this points will be cooperative (i.e. given to several players) -- I am assuming that "the killer takes it all" holds true.

I understand that this solutions will take away opportunity of stealing other player's loot, but I beleive that making event applausible for more people is outweghting this by a large margin.

Creeping of number of rewards can be balanced by spawning sites a little bit rarer.

I fully aware of possibility of randomly spawning reward not only from battleship, but from other ships, but it will be a lottery and this fact not only will create more problems, but also won't make Alpha / new player feel like they can make progression in event.

EVENT VISIBILITY
It would be good for future events to make their announcement not only in launcher (where they can be easily overlooked, because there are many other news and announcements which players often ignore for several reasons), but in the character select screen too. Even if there will be no point/task system in future events -- just visually highlighting that event is in progress would be good (ideally, there should be event-related picture, event name, short description, rules and countdown -- I liked SCOPE interface during Shadow of the Serpent event -- but even displaying simple infobox would be good).

The way I see it is to give reward incentives to Alphas so that they can eventually like the game enough to become Omegas.

I'm for giving "lesser" type prizes to those just starting so they can get drawn into the game more.

Why prizes should be "lesser"? Its not like Alphas/new characters has to put less effort (it is routine grind for older characters, while hard for new ones).

My post is about the fact that competitive events as they are implemented now tend to leave some people "over the board" by its design -- it is "all-or-nothing", which I think isn't good design for events intended for general public. "All-or-nothing" is good and natural in events like tournaments with limited participation.

Competitive events can be not only "all-or-nothing" style, but also "take-as-much-as-you-can" style, which I am suggesting.

I don't follow you -- how this relates to giving "lesser" rewards to some class of characters. Accelerators was given to all characters -- so every character got the same reward. Accelerators was less useful to old characters, but they kept their value, because they could be sold, or used for the exact same effect as for new characters.

And if you don't mind, I'd like to hear from you (and everybody else) about "all-or-nothing" vs. "take-as-much-as-you-can" design.

Because former (the current design) is like match where 10 year old competes with professional boxer.

Then players won't compete for the site. Which is bad.

Scan it down with combat probes if there's no others open in system or you want to troll someone that bad.
People can warp to it as a fleet or if a fleet member wants their help right to the member.
And you could have the snipers warp in and cloak which would reopen the beacon as long as they remain cloaked to wait for someone.
The sites arent designed to be competed for since they spawn 6-7 of them in the same system.
Works across the board for competition and cooperation.

Matthius they are designed so players can interfere with eachother and steal the objective, but at the same time allow players to punish those who do so. It is by far the best iteration for these events. Sites should stay open until they are complete.

I agree the frigates are really quite tough, and it's not just from their sig+speed (which is quite good) but their resists also seem high. Higher than the cruisers. Not sure why this is the case. A bit counter intuitive.

Sites should spawn in hi-sec for sure. It's where most of us are and engagement is important. I've thought about scaling sites, easier ones in higher sec, less easy in 0.7-0.5 and so on, like anoms. I think the last event was criticised for its variety because everyone just ran the most lucrative site and ignored the rest, but perhaps sites of scaling difficulties would be better for noobs. Older players wouldn't be interested in the lower sites.

Alphas and Omegas are both capable of taking down cruisers, don't use that as a weak argument. If your wrecks got stolen it had nothing to do with your account status.

I have no problem making these a very competitive event, I had a lot of fun looting wrecks and stealing loot. The skins all hit the market ridiculously cheap so if you don't want to compete, you don't have to.

Because the point of these events is to add limited lines of skins that you have to do the event to get, not to give away any skin in the store (that you have to normally get via PLEX or money) that players may want. Doing it this would would significantly disincentivize spending money on skins to sell and would pretty much crash the market for NEX store skins, neither of which benefits CCP or is generally desirable.

Except that there is no mechanism in the store to prevent people from buying other SKINs instead of just the event ones, and if CCP wants to just hand out the event skins then an event like this is the better way to do it rather than allowing people to grind real-money cosmetics as you are suggesting.

My entire point here is that giving players that option is not desirable for CCP or for the players who currently buy SKINs to re-sell on the market.

Also, just to drive the point home here, using your example numbers the current sites would be worth 125 AUR per site. That means I would need to run a grand total of 10 sites or so to afford a Kronos Police SKIN which sells for, at present, about 700m on Jita sell orders. That would make these sites one of the single most lucrative areas of the game and they require a T1 fitted cruiser, can be done in High Sec, and are fairly plentiful to the point that 10 sites can easily be done in an hour if you know what you're doing and where to hunt.

In short, no, this is a terrible idea and CCP would never make it this easy to get AUR as it would make AUR almost worthless to buy normally. This or something like the Serpentis event are far better ways to give out limited run SKINs.