Warfare & Tactics

I disagree that it killed farming, the system never had time to settle. Let me expand on what happened.

CCP had already announced what was going to happen in the Winter expansion. They were going to stop offensive plexes paying LP once the system reached vulnerable; Move the button closer to the warp in; Change the system from minor, medium, major, major unrestricted, to novice, small, medium, large with different ship restrictions; Force the killing of the rats; Change the rats; Add LP to defensive plexing and also change the way Tier levels worked.

As mentioned above one of the problems with the old system was that most systems were farmed to vulnerable and then continued to be farmed rather than flipping them. My alliance, Iron Oxide set up an alt corp in the Amarr Militia and we started flipping the Minmatar vulnerable systems to the Amarr so that we could farm them back to vulnerable and then flip them back to Minmatar just before the Winter patch. An indication of just how screwed the original system was.

CCP got wind of the plan after we had flipped about 4 systems. They announced an emergency half patch going live the very next day. Several of the feature were implemented. Adding defensive LP; Forcing the rats to be killed; Stopping the paying of offensive LP once the system hit vulnerable and I think the offensive buffer was limited to 125% contested.

The farmers didn't go away, they flocked to defensive plexing. As nearly all the systems were already vulnerable, they could get the full 70% of the LP defensive plexing without having to kill any rats, which saved them 20 minutes per plex. It was simply more cost effective over time to farm defensive plexes. Eventually all the systems were either farmed back to a lower level of contestation or they were flipped the other way.

Farming never settled, two or three months later the winter patch hit and the remaining changes were implimented. But you can bet you mortgage that as long as some form of plexing remained profitable, the farmers would have adapted and continued.

Like the original system solo PvP was very difficult in those plexes. Worst of all, because it became more profitable/cost effective to defensive plex at higher levels of contestation, it became almost impossible to flip a system. The warzone would have eventually settled to a stagnated state.

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Having seen the response to this thread, while a few ppl have been supportive, I can see no general consensus for my idea, thus don't think I'm going to try and progress it further. Thanks for the input though.