Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This idea has grown out of something mentioned in another thread that was (probably wrongly) posted in Science and Industry. I thought it had potential and so am fleshing it out here. This is a K-space idea. I don't see how to generalise it to W-space, or even if that would be desireable. If you spend time in W-space and have opinions on this, by all means share them.



The premise is simple. At unpredictable times, an NPC in a capital ship calls for help and the call for help is broadcast throughout the entire region. They have been tackled by a hostile entity and are being whittled down by attackers. If capsuleers do not intervene, the capital ship will lose the fight.

Because these events would be unpredictable and uncommon (but not overly rare), they wouldn't really be farmable like Incursions are. Instead, they'd be a driver for ad-hoc fleet fights.

The distress signal includes information on the system, a warpin point (also visible in-system like a cynosural field), and the two factions involved. Example:

You receive a distress signal from a Federation Customs Moros-class Dreadnought.
'Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. We are under attack in Vylade. Send urgent help. Attackers are Serpentis pirates. Our coordinates are (warp-in point) and Federation Customs will offer significant rewards to anyone that assists us.
followed by
Capsuleers, Serpentis Corporation will handsomely reward anyone that participates in helping us destroy this Federation Customs Moros and its capsuleer escorts. We'll keep CONCORD off your back.

Players can then choose to fight on either the side of the capital ship or its subcap aggressors. In empire, players that help the capital ship can legally shoot players that help the aggressors, and vice versa, creating opportunities for fleet fights.

Neither NPC side will attack capsuleers until they perform an action that declares their loyalty (shooting, remote repair, EWAR, etc).



Crimewatch consequences:
All players that activate a module to support the capital ship (including shooting an attacker) will get a new Crimewatch flag, 'Defender', allowing them to assist any other 'Defender' without Crimewatch repercussions (e.g. you can provide remote reps to a suspect flagged person or war target with Defender, without inheriting the suspect flag).

'Defender' also makes it a Crimewatch red card offense to shoot a Defender or to assist someone with the 'Attacker' flag. In highsec this means CONCORDOOKEN.

Likewise players that assist the attackers will get an 'Attacker' flag which mirrors the 'Defender' one. These flags both persist until the capital ship warps away or is destroyed, at which point rewards are paid to all those on the winning side. (Note that it is possible for the attackers to be entirely destroyed but the capital to be tackled by players loyal to the attackers until it is destroyed, in which case players with the 'Attacker' flag will win.)

On warping out of the site or being podkilled, you lose the ability to legally shoot event participants until you are back on grid.


Rewards:
The more lucrative and unique the rewards, the more likely players are to fight over them. As these events will blow up a lot of player ships and can't really be farmed, they can offer some good stuff, IMO.

Requirements to get rewards:
- To qualify for rewards, you need to remain on-grid, uncloaked, with active modules that do not affect your own ship and an 'Attacker' or 'Defender' flag for at least 5 minutes or 10% of the duration of the fight, whichever is longer. If you lose a ship while it has targetted modules (guns, RR, EWAR, ReSeBo, Remote ECCM etc) active, the 5 min/10% requirement is waived.
- This is intended to stop people AFK cloaking for rewards, and to get them actually participating in the fights.
- As the attackers will win without capsuleer interference anyway, fighting for the attackers does not offer rewards unless at least twenty capsuleers fight for the defenders.

Some ideas:
- Minimal loot/salvage/bounties on the wrecks. Think more like Incursions on this front and less like anomolies - the focus should be on winning the strategic goals of the fight, not ninjalooting everything. Looting capsuleer wrecks will make you a suspect.
- An ISK payout, shared equally between the winning team, equal to 60% of the total losses suffered by capsuleers on the losing team.
- A substantial number of loyalty points with the winning faction, given to each capsuleer that participates, OR a faction-specific reward of fairly low value to each participant (perhaps 2000 units of faction ammo to 50% of players and a random meta 6 faction module to the other 50%). If LP, think 3-4x what you get for a level 5 security mission.
- BPCs for faction ships, given out to a percentage of participants, including at least two brand new ships you cannot get any other way (maybe a faction Hictor for helping attack, and a faction logistics cruiser for helping defend)
- Low/Null only: In lowsec and nullsec, the abiity of players to cyno in reinforcements and capital ships means the NPC ships on both sides of the encounter can and sometimes should be larger. In these larger encounters (which might feature NPC supercapitals) some more lucrative rewards could be considered - faction dreadnought BPCs, meta 10-13 modules and the like.

Impact on in-game economy:
- A slight ISK faucet if considered on its own (assuming 5b losses on each side and a defender win, the defenders would share 3b ISK 'generated from nowhere' plus minor bounties).
- Lots of ships going boom stimulating manufacturing/trade
- Many players that usually run bigger ISK faucets (missions, incursions, anomolies) will likely take a break from those activities, reducing the faucet effect.

Reserved.

Go do null incursions.

This could be a lot of fun.

+1

awesome idea.
+1

buying a fit nado to do some lr sniping-120m
paying for a month of eve-550m
shooting my friends and/or corpies for lawlz because they joined the attacker side when i was on the defender side? priceless.

I would love this. Absolutely love it. I would totally go roaming to assist the Federation against their enemies in a way that was less of a mission grind like FW.

I really like the idea but fear corporations taking advantage of it. If a well organized corporation picks a side and has a proper fleet comp, the randoms and lone wolfs will have a very hard time trying to take them down.

IE a 50 man fleet picks the side of the attacker and kills anything that lands on grid to defend. They have 10 logi with them and any amount of unorganized fire they do take is easily repped up.

Not really sure how to fix it, or if it should be fix or if it falls into this is eve.

I like this!

Couple minor changes to the earlier posts.

CCP please add this!