Warfare & Tactics

How is this different than Amarr being at Tier 1 with crappy rats and Minmatar being at Tier 3 with crappy rats as well?

Harder to do equals more isk/lp. It's mostly a wash.

We've encountered 3 stabbed algos so far. Stabbed condor out, stabbed algos in.

I disagree with anyone who believes that the farmers where a positive thing in keeping the warzone fluid. They were locusts, pure and simple. Speaking for the Amarr/Minmatar front - both militias where either forced into a handful of systems or completely out of the warzone. Veterans weren't moving on to bigger and better things. More often then not they were quitting outright or just not even logging in anymore. Both sides are pale shadows of what they were a year ago.

The plexes aren't that big of a deal. Most T1 frigates will clear out a novice quickly. My corax takes no more then three salvos to usually knock out a small plex rat. I estimate that the extra spawns add three minutes at most to a small plex for me. The real price to the changes is that you need different ships to run different sized plexes. Is this really that much of a surprise or a shock to anyone? Is there any outrage in hisec that a T1 Rifter doesn't cut it for level 2 or 3 missions? The LP is still worthwhile, you just have to actually commit a ship with damage mods and some kind of actual person at the computer. Spam dscan. Warp out when you have to. Play the game and stop griping that ezmode is gone.

There are other sources of income in lowsec now. There's other targets to be had. People can find pew while the militias rebuild. Iron Oxide already caught my Cerb while I bounced between medium plexes and asteroid belts looking for Mordus spawn. GF. GG.

As much as veterans roll their eyes at people in militia chat calling for plexing fleets or the newcomers pushing for sov - those people are needed. When you log in at night what would you prefer? A one hour roam hoping to find something? Or the immediate notification that Group A has been pushing System X all day and you're needed to go push them out? When that call comes, would you go without reservation? Or would you worry that farmers will push your home to 10% while you're gone? Would you like the militia living in multiple systems? Or just one or two so that Pandemic Legion and their ilk can keep a close eye on ship movements for potential hot drops? Diversity in both player styles and objectives creates the drama that drives the war zones. Farming killed all that. Stagnation may be a short time concern - but the game was going in that direction anyways. At least now there's hope for the future.

sahtogas area encountering stabbed catalysts.

do you even play this game? i guess you just fell asleep during the last 6 years of fw combat and plexing.

seems like all you do is quote people, troll them, insult them, attack them, im amazed you havent been gaged by ccp yet.

yep, the bots are back. the new plexs do seem to reduce the offensive numbers a bit, but now its much more difficult to catch them. But its amusing that the guy who runs the punisher plexing bots hasnt even changed his fit.
And ocf as expected the defensive bots are out in numbers.

Again Cerain, since you missed it before....

Occupancy warfare comes down to who is willing to flip iHubs. Nothing more and nothing less. While I will happily concede that farmers make that a faster and easier affair - since you don't have to plex up as many systems yourself and can simply concentrate on flipping stuff that they make vulnerable - no farmer ever flipped a hub that I'm aware of.

I will happily concede that now our PvPers who are interested in occupancy warfare will have to do the hard work of plexing up a system themselves.

This also means that it should become very easy to see which systems are getting systematically plexed up, which should draw more PvPers to that area hunting for the PvPers plexing it up. Which should lead to more fights.

Yes, the warzone will move more slowly in the absence of coordinated offensives. This will be no different than when dozens of systems sat vulnerable for days and weeks at a time. You just won't get an easy start to things like you used to.

HTFU.

Wrong again. VP is irrelevant unless it leads to flipping systems. Gallente had lots of systems near vulnerable for quite a while, because of all the offensive plexing the Caladari were doing, and it didn't help advance them in the occupancy war. Their farmers doing defensive plexes made no difference when GalMil rolled in and decided to flip a system.

The only thing that ever made an impact on the occupancy war was PvPers stepping up to flip systems or defend them. Nothing else.

In short, you're wrong.

You can't flip an ihub unless you get a net number of vp in your system than your enemy. Most systems are not vulnerable.

You say no farmer ever flipped an ihub. The farmer probably uses a different character but it is often the same actual person who puts a militia alt in a defensive plex and uses their main for the bunker bust.


As for your predictions, we can test them if you give some sort of objective criteria. But so often people want to use bad criteria and change it as it no longer works.

I wonder if you and I can agree on criteria to evaluate your predictions. I think the best data to tell you if the war is most efficiently won by pvp or pve is to look at the players who are getting the most vp per day day after day using random samples. Then look at their killboard for that day and see what sort of ships they flew that day on their kb. (assuming they have kills or losses that day. If they don't we sort of know our answer right?)

Looking at total vp is not really going to tell us whether plexing is pvp or just worse pve than it was before. Not many people run level 1 faction war missions but that doesn't mean they are pvp.

edit: also if I wanted the whole war to come down to structure shoots I would just go to null sec.

Or you are either are 1)not online 23/7 or 2)running alts to defensive plex when you are.