Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This would need to be handled carefully, Sometimes local is empty when I open a plex sometimes not, I then expect or at least prepare for some form of fight and often I am even trying to provoke a fight by opening the plex that is the notification. Having everyone within a couple jumps swarm in would do little to encourage PVP.

That said if I remain alone in the plex for a period of time then perhaps this could be escalated to the militia interface say five minutes into plexing a minor longer for tougher plexes.

I would prefer an indication on the map rather than broadcasts in a channel that could end up as spam. Perhaps such intel should be restricted to systems local to the player so an element of roaming/patrolling is still required.

I still feel NPC rebalance is the key to the plex issue.

Minor plexes feel balanced. NPC resistance is light and approaches to within small weapon range or can be handled by a few drones. I do not feel they deter PVP and a wave can be dealt with within a minute.

The problem with the harder plexes is it become more worthwhile to speedtank rather than fight due to the increased NPC resistance, I can kill and tank the waves in but it takes longer increasing the time I am vulnerable to attack from both player and NPC (either I don’t mind but not together). If shield fit it attacks my primary form of defence and if armour tanked it completely strips my shield buffer and running active tanks put me under cap pressure before a PVP fight even occurs. Also the NPC engagement range can be from further out forcing me to leave the timer zone if not in a ship with decent DPS projection.

The aim should be for fight with NPC’s to be infrequent over the course of the timer and easily dealt with in an appropriate PVP ship.

NPC’s could be changed to spawn within the timer zone.

NPC resistance should lighter with fast tackle in Major plexes. webbbing and warp disruption maybe but no scrams as that would disrupt PVP fit ships.

Mixing faction militia NPC’s would introduce a third damage type encouraging omni tanking and specific PVE style high resistance fits would be less viable, DPS needs to be reduced accordingly as omni tanking is harder.

A specific end of plex wave with a value NPC ship that has to be destroyed I still feel could be the final piece to prevent speedtanking, If it takes an appropriate amount of DPS to deal with it. It could also be programmed to warp away if it receives a certain amount of damage unless pointed by the player encouraging players to fit points again promoting PVP fits. It could return after a time fully repped or the plex could just close and tough you lost your reward.

I have to say plex fights where random people from both militias just show up are some of the best pvp fights I have ever been in. People in militia a few jumps away just all coming to a plex not knowing exaclty what to expect. Its great.

I really don't know what you mean. A notification system that pulls in random militia pilots would be awesome. Its long overdue.

As for the rest of your post I agree. Minors are pretty well balanced. The trick is to figure out how to make the bigger plexes balanced.

I had put this one on the other thread but appearently this thread is where the main conversation is done. So I'll post it also here. It adresses the alerting, plex alt and snowballing issues.

Here are my (wall of text) 2 cents on the subject:

I couldn't read all posts up to here but I've seen some very nice ideas. Some of them are blended within my suggestions below.

Station Lockouts:

All we wanted before inferno was to make occupancy of a system matter. If CCP removes station lockout completely from game we'll arrive back at old occupancy system. I think some sort of lockout must still be implemented.

Binding the station lockouts to level of ths system is a good idea. This way we have to keep spending LP/defending the system if we want to deny docking rights to an enemy. A tiered system like

L1=agent denial
L2=services denial
L3=Complete lockout looks ok.

Furhtermore I'd like to make following suggestion:

Make upgrade levels limited by the contest amount of the system.
0%-20% contested Upgradeable up to L5
20%-40% contested Upgradeable up to L4
40%-60% contested Upgradeable up to L3
60%-80% contested Upgradeable up to L2
80%-100% contested Upgradeable up to L1

Thus if you want to keep the level of your system at a certain value you need to defend it. Right now there is very little incentive to keep the level of a system high though. To change that:

To flip a system your warzone control level must be up to a certain tier.

If you control 0%-20% of warzone you need to have a minimum T1 warzone control to be able to flip a vulnerable system.
If you control 20%-40% of warzone you need to have a minimum T2 warzone control to be able to flip a vulnerable system.
If you control 40%-60% of warzone you need to have a minimum T3 warzone control to be able to flip a vulnerable system.
If you control 60%-80% of warzone you need to have a minimum T4 warzone control to be able to flip a vulnerable system.
If you control 80%-100% of warzone you need to have a minimum T5 warzone control to be able to flip a vulnerable system.

This way the more systems you control, the higher the upkeep becomes to be able to capture more systems. You'll need to keep levels of your systems high if you want to be able to continue capturing more systems, thus you'll need to do defensive plexing to be able to continue on offense.

Then modify defensive plexing. Make it so that a defender does have NO effect at all on a plex of its own faction. The timer can only be ran by enemies and counts back when there are no enemies in the plex. To decontest system you need to run plexes belonging to the opposite faction which begin spawning in a system once it becomes contested and despawn once the system is no longer contested.

Change minmatar rats to projectiles and caldari rats to hybrids. The playground must be evened out. Yes this will result in more speed tanking, which brings the next point.

As a final touch. Change the way to run down the counter. To run the counter one pilot needs to go in capturing range of button and interact with it for (insert RP reason here). Once the connection to bunker is established timer begins counting and the pilots warp drive turns off. To turn the warp drive back on the pilot needs to sever the connection, which results in stopping of the timer. Severing the connection can be done by just interacting with the button. It takes 100 seconds for the warp drive to re-initialize. Optionally during these 100 seconds the pilot also might get a %50 penalty on speed, though it would ruin kiting setups (Just don't sever the connection and you get no speed penalty). Running the timer all the way down and capturing plex does not involve this 100 seconds wait time.

So when you begin the timer you are dedicated to it. If nobody cares for defending the system you can get away with just speed tanking. If enemy shows up you cannot immediately warp off. You'll have to fight. So you better be prepared.

Caerain had an idea about alerting plexing presence. I believe this can be connected to the upgrade level of the system.

At L1 there will be no alerts.
A L2 system wil alert if there are any offensive plexes open in system. On the FW tab these systems will have a different hue. When mouse hovers on the system normally there is only name.
A L3 system will make a list of open plexes sizes in the system and put it below name of system on mouseover.
A L4 will colorize those being actively run as green.
A L5 system will give you plex timers.

For example Lets assume Amarr are offensive plexing in Auga. There are 2 minors and a med open and there is a slicer in minor and a Omen Navy Issue in Med.

If Auga were a L1 system it would be just another system on the FW map.
If Auga were a L2 system its system color would turn from light blue to dark blue on FW map. (For defending side that is)
If Auga were a L3 system, when you get your mouse over it you would see the name followed by minor, minor, medium
If Auga were a L4 system, one of the minors on the list and the medium would turn green
If Auga were a L5 system, you would get the timer information along with the sizes.

So if you want to have an information network going on you should at least have L2. To see if the plexes are actively being ran or not would require the system to be minimum L4.

Well...that would be all I guess.

Force the room to be cleared of npc's in order to complete the capture of the beacon. You already do this in missions for players to complete objectives. It is a simple if/then statement. Easy fix.

One other thing to be mindful of, vulnerable systems should not grant LP for further offensive plexing. Right now it's more advantageous to leave a system vulnerable than to flip it, it's an infinite LP faucet, and the result is showing in Gallente/Caldari FW, we have several dozen vulnerable systems and nobody flips them unless they're doing an organized LP dump. While the organized LP dumps are probably a good thing (they reward organization and teamwork), the tons of systems being left vulnerable and perma-farmed are not.

I agree with you, except the whole "appropriate sized" ship stuff. If i want to fight a cruiser in a frigate(s) or a bc in a cruiser(s) i should be able to. I shouldn't be punished. Typically it will be several frigates against a cruiser or a few cruisers against a bc. But whatever, I love those sorts of fights.

Until we see that amarr can actually fight their way back then I would say we shouldn't even consider any lp for defensive plexing. At this point I think ccp should consider giving missions a slight nerf to the lp payout as well.

Right but if you try to run a say a medium plex with 3 destroyers instead of 1 cruiser the timer would take longer under your proposal.

The thread is about plexing. If we "nerf" plexing so you can't run them in frigates you are indirectly buffing missions. Its important that ccp understand that connection, or their whole goal of making plexing pay better than missions won't be achieved.

Awesome work doing the research on the plex rats, Cearain - this kind of field testing is very helpful as we approach the time when the developers resume working on the NPC's. I totally agree the DPS on field is just too much, this is clearly a holdover from old-school mission design where you tanked a whole room full of red crosses, and it needs to go away in order to make plexes PvP-friendly. I think we need fewer rats, less incoming DPS, and they should be easy to kill - but could perhaps have a scram or a web and be fairly fast, to pose a threat to those running the plex.

Subsequent spawns should be similar- not too DPS heavy, just enough of a threat that you want to quickly dispatch them and go back to defending against players. The goal as I see it is to create content that will kill if you're AFK or unarmed, but be easy to handle in a wide variety of conventional Tech 1 PvP ships (according to plex size). We hit those two points, and we'll be light years ahead of where we stand now.

Theres probably another couple weeks before they get fully underway with the winter expansion, everyone's trickling back in from summer vacation. Minutes should be out at the beginning of the week, so everyone has plenty of time to read up, see where everything stands, and chime in with your feedback early in the process. Thanks to everyone who's been patient and kept up all the contributions in the meantime!

Just out of curiosity, have any of you played the Dust beta? There's some game play there involving the capturing of objectives that I could see applying to plex design, as far as breaking up the single-button-orbit monotony. I can't really explain exact what I'm referring to exactly cause its NDA, unless you're also in the Dust beta (in which case you should private convo me some time if you have any thoughts) - but

Get ahold of me if any of you guys are testing Dust and we brainstorm some more, if you've been playing you know what I'm referring to. If not, you guys SHOULD run and grab the Dust beta if you have a PS3, its very fun! They have a mercenary pack you can buy for instant access if you've been having trouble waiting for a key, you get all the money back in Aurum after the beta resets and becomes official, so its worth it in my humble opinion.

This would be MONEY if they could pull it off. I mean it makes sense - ever notice in action movies when the leaders of two opposing armies clash in the middle of a war? the grunts clear out, and give the two champions space to duel it out. I'd love to see rats that did this as well. That way you'd only be PvE-ing when there was no one around.