Warfare & Tactics

Status report 1st of January 2013:

Caldari is at 0.8% T1 and have been so for a few weeks now…
Farmers move where there is most LB to get (understandable).
Amarr is trying against the odds and have managed to hold on to T2 and even of late manage to take a few systems pushing Minis down from T4 to T3 (only just).


Frequent topics that keeps coming up:

• Is the snowball effect of the LP bonus too high? (Current T1 = -50%, T2 = Standard, T3= +75%, T4 = 150% and T5 = 225%). Does it in fact make people jump for LP rather than fight for what they believe in and does the fact that the overwhelming power gain of massive LP on top simply kill off the competition as well as people leaving the losing Fraction when at T1 (-50% LP)?


• OGB (Off Grid Boosting) Often alts (not in FW) are used in fleets to massively boost the performance of ships. Especially in FW the T3 OGB has close to zero risk of being attacked (not a War Target) and happily transfers its bonus system wide even into Plex’es where the ship would not be allowed.


• LP gained by running lvl 4 missions in SB (Stealth Bombers) totally neglect the need for getting a fleet together and travel though hostile space to complete a common objective. The SB pilot can travel risk free (due to cloaking and fast warp) and when being challenged in a mission site simply cloak until the aggressor leaves. It’s simply too easy and LP gained this way makes the LP worth less for everybody else.


• PvE vs PvP reward is far from equal. Spend 10min in a Novice Plex with little risk of ship loss and gain 10K LP standard (25K at T4) or get 20-30K LP standard doing a lvl 4mission in a SB vs a few hundred LP if winning a PvP fight seriously putting your ship and pod in harm’s way.


• More Large Plexes wanted / requested.

Moving forward:
I hope CCP/CSM will keep making changes in 2013 (I for one liked they put the button 10km from the warp in - last exp/patch), FW is in general great fun and more changes that possible only can be done on the live server to see if it works as intended need to be executed. It would be a crime to do nothing.


Did I miss anything from the list (constructive please)?

I agree with Gunship that changes need to be done , boosting needs to be fixed because its stupid as alot of people are incapable of fighting 1v1 without them and obviously they posses a great advantage .

Another thing i for one hope abit more change will happen will be to the plexes , i don't want em to be broken cause as far as i'm concerned i make all my isk from farming them so i can afford to buy ships to pvp .. and while i farm i do my faction good by contesting enemy systems naturaly , but the problem i have is that , ok maybe i'm a noob , u can say it , but i think the cruiers and battlecruisers in the medium and large plexes are way to tanky ( also as stated in the post above , gives us moar larges :P ) , i for one cannot afford to fit a cruiser or a battlecruiser for that matter mods fulll house of gyro's to bring the needed dps to take out a bc in the large , i brought nearly 400 dps once , still wasnt enough ...so i dunno about the rest maybe its cause of my low sp toon or maybe again i'm just a noob but i think they could do with abit less tank .


Other then that , i agree with the op and i hope aswell ccp does something to fix some of the problems

no docking is perfectly fine. if I hold a group of systems away from the main warzone its harder for you to get in and harras them.

but you could still take the time and effort to move 1j out into highsec and still have an effect


it creates risk. and if you really lost a lot of stuff. leave fw and move it out


no docking makes places worth more. right now everyone in amarr wishes we could take houla to lock out the fleets based there.

if they could dock anyways it would be no more valued than any other system



PS ******* droid and its ******* typos and ****** lack of able to edit them with ease!

You can afford to stay in FW. Two novice plexes = 1 faction frigate at Tier 1.

You young whippersnappers never had it so good! Back in the old days, we didn't have things like LP for plexes, or missions that didn't give you standings losses if you failed them. We had to earn isk the old fashioned way, by running high sec missions. Nowadays you can be out in space available for a real fight while PVE'ing.

And another thing, it's only PvE when one side decides to not show up - like in Okkamon this past week.

Lerge plex's = the old unrestricted major's same spawning mechanic, nothing has changed just the name so to speak. They are fine.

I have had no problems killing the rats in small/medium (old medium/large) plex with my brawling frigs. Have had some issues when using kitey frigs as the dps is often not enough but only takes a couple of frigs to sort them out generally.

Having been in FW prior to inferno I would say that it is in a much better state today than it ever has been.

The LP rewards could probably do with some skiming down abit to make it less rewarding to swap to the 'winning' faction.

TBH if people would just go out and plex 'casually' you will get enough LP to sustain your pvp and casual plexing provides loads of pvp.


EDIT: The only thing that really narks me about FW in reality is the amount of people who ***** and whinge about being on the 'losing' side and they go and have alts in the enemy militia to 'fund their pvp'!

For me, I think the main FW topic should be not letting a PVE army unduly influence WZ control and PVP enjoyment. CCP

CCP Promotes FW as:



As such it would make sense that it funds PVP within this realm, not providing the hundreds of billions of isk that dedicated plex/mission farmers have been provided with as a result of the crazy LP that comes from the new Tier 4/5 (and hitting old Tier 4/5).

The LP giveaway should be stomped into the ground, and a smaller differential given to WZ Tiers. CCP could achieve this quite easily.

1. Have a fixed LP store like we have now.
2. Have LP rewards that change with much smaller bonus/penalty. (T1= -10%, T2= Standard, T3= +10%, T4= +20%, T5= +30%)

A large compound at T1 would be 22,500LP and at T5 = 32,500LP. Missions could follow the same scale.

These kind of LP rewards would still over-fund a very active PVP lifestyle in FW terms if a pilot gives some time to both PVP and PVE, but might help mitigate the avalanche factor of farmers all flocking to one militia because of their Tier Level. Maybe this scaling down could be taken even further by cutting back the base LP reward for each size of Plex.

I have no idea if such a change would have desired effect but in my mind cutting LP reward is a change that could be done without much consultation and does not require in depth programming changes to game mechanics that might be required by more technical suggestions.

There also seemed to be a lot less farmers after the emergency patch when we had no speed tanking but still had several spawn waves. Maybe we need to go back to that system aswell so that gunless, cloaking farmers cannot just site in a plex to run the timer after the single NPC Navy ship has been shot by a dps ship for them. I remember when we took back Saikamon from the Minmatar we had to take a small gang into the Large Compounds to complete them, encouraging pilots to work together and making it hard for farmers to solo farm them. Not sure how others feel about the plex mechanics during that interim period before the full Retribution Patch was released.

There are many more things, many of which get brought up again and again by others but the above are two things that remain in my FW thoughts at the moment which I feel would be good to see addressed in the short-term.

Taka.

only way to do it pure pvp would to make it a low sec version of null with ihub timers and blah.... no thanks
. so i agree with you that the pve plex system works. just go out and do it people!

This tickles me in the wrong places.

Yes, because rampant farming was so bad before, CCP changed that you had to kill all spawns which appeared and there was the usual 3-4 extra waves. This also meant you had to be in properly sized boat to plex. Based on my observation, this eliminated most of the farming or at least slowed it down since even with some of the better assault frigates (farmers choice), it takes long time to kill all the rats, making it much more likely someone comes to annoy you.

But some people complained that these waves deter pvp'ing in said plexes, so CCP thought one npc which is slightly tougher to kill would deter farming and encourage pvp. Designing this rat to be still weak enough to be killed by t1 frigate in any size plex is probably an indication how much interest CCP actually has to FW (= none at all)

This has given a small impact in the LP store where many items require "tags" that you would normally obtain from said spawns. Not that I'm a fan of picking up tags, find it very boring and if I am out to pvp they often don't make it home to base anyway. I would prefer the items in the LP store did not require anything but LP.

Regarding the spawn I agree that medium between the single spawn and the multiple spawns could be a good idea? Should a fraction frigate be able to take down a medium spawn? good question? Are we considering a player with 100mill SP and a solid T2 fit or 1mill SP pilot with T1's? Assume for a minute that a 1-2mill SP player with a T1 Cruiser should be able to kill a medium spawn it would stand to reason that a 100mill SP player in T2 fitted fraction frigate would also be able to also kill the spawn. So I think the current strength of the spawn is ok.

As othes have mentioned it would be nice to have more large spawns so we would see more crusiers and hopefully BC's take to the skys in FW. I would even like to see a HUGE plex requireing either sleeper type fits to combat or at least a crusier/BC/BS gang (5-10 ships).