Warfare & Tactics

What about giving plex rats some teeth? Beef them up to Incursion strength of appropriate hull size (cruiser for cruiser-sized plex)... Let's face it, the rats in plexes aren't even bothered with these days. Give players something to worry about.

Any decent modification to current plexing mechanic covers three items.
1. There needs to be something to make sure appropriately sized ship or gang completes apprpriately sized plexes most efficiently.
2. The NPCs should not interfere with pvp.
3. Plex must be able to be closed if one side does not show up to fight.

Proposals of "no rats in plex" fail on Item No. 1. Farmers are going to farm and we're right back to where we are now.
Proposals asking for amped up rats fail on Item No. 2. The consensus of the community is that it wants true PvP, not Incursions.
Proposals asking that plexes only close after a fight fail on No. 3. You have to be able to "win" even if the other side doesn't show up.

K. My turn. Here's the problems:

Factional Warfare is designed in many ways to be Null-lite. It's a way to get newer players into PvP and allow them to learn and fund their introductory PvP through contesting and capturing complexes.


There are 2 fundamental problems facing the devs that all other problems stem from. Fix these, and Factional Warefare will be awesome.


Problem 1: Rewards. Currently, payouts from plexes are divided evenly between everyone in a complex. This is designed to encourage small scale combat and discourage blobs. The issue with this is that if you swing too far one way, as in current mechanics, solo players capturing plexes in empty systems are easily pulling in 150+ mil an hour, at least. If you were to remove the divison mechanic, and, say, make everyone in a Major plex get 25,000 LP, then you encourage blobbing to the maximum because it's significantly safer as a method of plexing and guarantees much larger income. Solo pilots are no longer really viable. Sure, you can still plex with alts, but solo PvP is destroyed.

Summary: If you make rewards scale with fleet size, fleets become absurdly large and solo PvP dies. You make the rewards encourage small groups, and alt farming is optimal, as shown now.

Proposed fix: Diminishing returns on LP rewards based on time and kills. A pilot who captures plexes all day and doesn't get any fights will suffer significantly diminished income after a period of 1hour to 1.5 hours. Frankly, an hour and a half of roaming/plexing is plenty of time to find a fight. Potential problems with this is that newer players will have issues keeping their LP gains high due to problems with getting kills. Second component is a "ramp up" of rewards before approaching a cap. A major plex gives 10,000 LP to 1 pilot, 10,000 LP each to 2 pilots, up to 50,000 LP total, divided among 5 pilots. Any number of pilots over 5 suffers diminishing returns on LP rewards as a way to discourage the excessive blob, while still allowing solo pilots to get paid. A solo pilot who gets a fight every hour and a half maintains optimal income while still being able to go out and do his PvP thing. Additionally, this favors a playstyle of logging in, farming a plex or two, and then going out and looking for fights. It still has a PvE component, but encourages pilots to split their time between combat and logistical duties of plexing.


Problem 2: Defensive NPCs. This one is a bit more tricky, but the basic issue here is that in order to plex requires fitting yourself to do PvE. Most frigate PvP fittings can just speedtank major plexes or have the firepower to clear minor plexes, but it creates issues with scalability. To do the larger plexes efficiently requires either some PvE fittings, large blobs, or ASB abuse. Now this leads into the second problem. If you increase the power of defenders, to prevent alt farmers from farming all day, but you force players seeking PvP to fit for PvE, which further discourages PvPers from doing complexes, and farmers from doing PvP. If you go the opposite extreme and remove all defenders, it makes alt farming very easy, but allows players to actually fit *any* PvP fitting and still assault enemy complexes. But then alt farmers are all over the place.

Summary: If you remove plex NPCs, alt farmers go nuts. If you strengthen them, PvP fittings can't actually plex. Currently we're somewhere in the middle, with the worst of both worlds.

Proposed fix: Remove NPCs, but add incentives to defensively plex, in the form of a Faction-wide "alert" system and LP payouts for defensively plexing, IF the plex you're defending is actively under attack. Basically, no defensive NPCs to encourage PvP ships to plex. Whenever a hostile pilot starts to capture a friendly plex, a faction wide alert goes out via a new tab on the FW window. Players looking to PvP or serve their cause just log in, check the current defensive bulletins, and move to respond. It would show, in real time, how much time is left on that particular button, so that you don't find yourself moving to defend a plex that only has 30 seconds left. IF you kill/drive off the hostile, and then sit on the button to time it down, you would receive LP rewards for it based on how far the plex was pushed by the hostile(to prevent defensive plexing abuse). here's an example. An alt farmer starts capturing a friendly major plex. He gets it timed down to 1 minute left before being chased off by you, intrepid stellar stud that you are. You sit on the button and force it back, which gives you all the LP the enemy player *would* have gotten. In this case, roughly 22,500 LP. Perhaps less, but that's just something in need of tweaking down the road. This creates a way for PvP pilots to get their fights, AND get paid in the process, without creating an exploit like the goons did with the LP/kill trick they pulled a while back. LP is finite, and based on "stealing" LP from the attacker at a 1:1 ratio based on how much potential LP he created, but did not receive due to your defensive efforts. It also ties your LP gains to time because you have to wait out the button as well, so you can't just defend 10 plexes in 5 minutes and make a billion isk.


Bam. All your problems fixed. Can I haz job CCP?


Edit: Oh actually, I dunno who originally suggested this, but I feel it is important given the lack of NPC's in my previous suggestion. Allow the button to target, and potentially warp jam. Make it so that entering a plex is a comittment, and give the warp jam a range of say...current button range +50-100%. So 37-50km for majors, and 15-20km for minors. Otherwise cloaking and warping still allow some farming(although farmers would still be chased off just as easily and get no cash without this). If anyone knows who originally suggested that please post that and I'll edit a link into this post.

YES, GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO WORRY ABOUT, BUT NOT NPC, MAKE SOME REASON WHY PLAYERS CHASE THEM UNTIL THEY DIE OR QUIT.

Your plan involves automatic defend :(
why?
This should be pvp war not pve war

I do not want to do missions, if they counted towards system vulnerability then I may pick one up as a target for my roam, I cannot complete a level 4 in a balanced PVP fit though and my goal is PVP. I want to earn ISK having fun roaming for PVP, my play time is shorter than some. I accept I may not always profit because I am bad at it.

I agree with better upgrades would encourage more LP investment for local reasons.

Defensive plexing LP filtering back into the HUBs is a good idea. It gives an incentive for people in their home/key systems especially.

Not being able to add lp to the Hub in vulnerable systems sounds good, again linked with the LP filtering back in from defensive plexing would provide a good mechanic.

No one wants to defensively plex down from a ridiculous %, 110% cap is good. We should see this percentage also. LP rewards for Plexing vulnerable systems should be lowered but not removed.

If no plex activation notifications are introduced, then at least a little red up/ green down arrow in the system vulnerability column next to the percentage so you can see whether it last went up or down it may enable you to judge whether systems are being actively defended/ attacked.

Quick possible fixes: -

The problem with the NPC’s is not the power level, if anything they hit too hard hence the reason they are speed tanked.

CCP has already shown it can quickly remove NPC’s from plexes they did this with the E-war vessels.

Remove the first standing spawn - these guys normally lock you up straight away, if I open a plex with a war target in local then I expect/hope for some form of fight this initial spawn is the first blocker to that happening.

If a fight is not imminent then the NPC’s will still be spawning as normal it just gives a few minutes grace period.

Excluding minors, remove half the rats in all the spawns, preferably not the ones with high value tags (people may destroy these anyway for the tags) also not the frigates as they are dealt with easily and are perhaps the only hope against the speed tankers. The rats that should be removed are the slow/ poor tracking ones that hit like a brick wall all of a sudden if you lose transversal/speed. Hopefully this makes completing plexes in PVP fit ships of normal size easier. It does not solve the speed tanking issue, but may encourage people to try other fits or ship types.

I think the idea of replacing NPCs by a structure is going somewhere.

Keep the timer and add a structure with an amount of hit points that suits ship size intended for the plex size.

i.e. big strong structure in major meant for BC 500-1000 DPS and would take maybe 10 mins with that amount of DPS to kill.

Remove all rats.

Results

Gunless frigs can't run any plexes.
Frigs with guns will take long time to run majors due to structure hit points.
Incourages fleets.
Incourages bigger ships
And no NPCs incourage PVP.

= WIN

I would still not rejoin FW as I could still not be bothered to plex but that I think is a very good idea for solving afk plexing and making the involvement / isk ratio higher than it is now.

I like your post so I won't be a jerk and I will take it seriously.

I don't like the 15 minutes to cash out system. Tier i think would be better to be solely based on the # of systems.
Lp store back to pre inferno for tier 1. Scale down prices for increased tiers.
System upgrades only for adding perks to the system such as industry slots, cheaper tax, no docking, cyno jammers, and lower repair costs (examples). Other ideas could be the anchoring or making gate guns station guns do increased damage.
I would like to see that ANYONE except opposing militia can donate lp to hub (based on above).
I do like the"unique" lp store items idea. I don't know which items would be best or new items.
No missions in home systems.
I disagree with resetting timer when warping out of plexes IF all rats must die.
I think all rats should die, but I agree with x gal that the dps is lowered, but the tank should stay the same imo.
I would like to see diminishing marginal returns for lp in combat to encourage sub blob man fleets (not cheap shotting LNA/IO) maybe have sub 5 man KMs pay the most.
I like infinite vulnerability to secure ihub bash and I like the 110% cap that was mentioned.
Defensive plexing should pay 1/10 of offensive plexing.
Slight lp modifier based on rank (i.e 1.01 up to 1.10 for highest rank)
Lp can be donated to decontest. This should be an absurdly expensive investment such as 100,00 lp per %
Absolutely no mails if someone opens a plex. Undock to find out.

Can I go back to pissing off minmatar on the forums? It's fun to call them out.

[troll]Also, I'd like to see gate and station guns hit non fw players with a 100x multiplier. This is for me personally because I found the most hilarious picture to add to my fw album based on this situation.[/troll]

Edit: no gcc for attacking neutrals who enter plexes

One more thing:

You can only plex in your territory (amarr in minmatar space and vice versa).


Omg I want to respond to Machiavelli post, but I promised I'd behave.

End station lockouts.