Warfare & Tactics

I can see where you draw similarities, but no it is not.

Right now the most "productive" way to de-plex if you don't care for internet spaceship violence or your e-honor is to:

1. buy a x4 low slot t1 frig
2. fit it with 4 stabs and 1 MSE (~600k Isk hull included)
3. find a system to de-plex and profit
4. turn up sound to max
5. go bake a cake, do your laundry, watch a movie etc.
6. come back when you hear annoying low-shield sound to warp away or to change plex when it's done
7. cash out your semi-afk LP

If you don't think that this is a problem or a flawed game mechanics then no amount of explaining will change your mind.

Everyone already does, but funny thing is abusing broken things is a little bit different to fixing them.

Warp cord stabs have a place in the game but they are currently poorly designed IMO.

The game needs more conflict drivers and a reduction either to the cost of loss or a reduction in risk to PVP.

I personally think this would be achieved by a reworking of WCS modules (wtf spellcheck thinks WCS should be ecstasy) lol.

I would change them as follows.

1. Remove all their current drawbacks.
2. Make them an active module
3. Make it possible to fit only one to any ship hull. Just like a dcu.
4. Change the function to:
4a. At the end of each cycle the ship warp core stability is increased by 1.
4b. At the end of each cycle the maximum number of targets is reduced by 2.
5. The warp core stability value is reset after warp or jump.

There might need to be some HP rebalancing for industrial and transport ships.

You could then amend mobile warp disruption bubbles and probes to have a value rather than infinite point. If so desired? I think these two measures together would actually buff null sec for smaller entities as they could risk logistical work via gates again.

There is a large amount of stagnation in the game other than low sec.

Or.... just deny acces to warp gate in FW complex. and for more fun put some kind of bubble that increase align time maybe !!

so they don't touch ability of others ships etc etc as simple as this

Good idea too and more targeted on FW plexes ( coding FW buuton instaed of warp gate which are use in other areas than FW

I agree to this one ;)

For those of you who wan't to ban WCS from plexes outright, or prevent them from registering time on the plexes; Even though I agree with you completely, you should stop. CCP themselves has stated explicitly that they (wrongly) believe that fitting WCS to run plexes is a 'playstyle' not a broken game mechanic. Thus for freedom of the players to play the game the way they want to(HA!) nerfs are required, and not fixes.

Did the nerfs work? Yes, O-plexing and VP's in general is now down considerably.

Unfortunately, it also has had many bad consequences whether they were intended by CCP or not.

Many PvP fits, namely kiting fits, received a massive kick to the nuts in there viability. And for those of you who say 'Switch to a different fit' the main reason for these types of changes was to keep WCS fits slightly viable, so I think that CCP wouldn't want to impose such restrictions on the fits of myself or others.

And yes I am talking about size appropriate ships. Ever tried a kiting condor in a novice plex after the patch? Congrats you need to spend 20 minutes on a 15 minute timer because the rat takes forever to die and adds a minute per rat if not more. don't know if CCP adjusted the self-repair numbers again after the initial statement, or fell victim to the on paper DPS vs. Applied DPS problem, but the numbers never seem to add up the way CCP seemed to think they would.

Plus the fact that the difference between O-plexing and D-plexing is now significantly skewed for the purpose of taking or maintaining sov.

Defensive Plexers need to put a minimum of one person per plex to defend it. Thats four people in frigs. For o-plexers to do the same, and actually kill the rat in a reasonable time frame, you need 4-5 for the large, 3-4 for the medium, and 1-2 for the small which means a minimum of 9 people to run the plexes well, if there in frigs.

Not to mention the act of actually killing the rat, even for a full sized fleet, takes about ten seconds(rough estimate) on average simply to notice it, lock it up and apply DPS. With 5 spawns for novices, 7 for smalls and mediums and 10 for larges, thats an extra five minutes of plexing if you are plexing all 4 plexes at the absolute maximum potential.

So an o-plexer has to bring twice the amount of numbers, or bigger, slower, easier to catch ship types simply to do the same thing the d-plexer can do with less numbers and smaller ship types needed?

So now Faction Warfare, in terms of occupation, is going to be infinitely more stagnant. Not simply because of the reduction in farming numbers. But because of the shift from o-plexing to deplexing and the massive advantage given to deplexers. Is there a legitimate gameplay reason to compound these advantages on top of the MAJOR advantage of being able to dock in station systems?

Also, they completely botched the cloak fix. Massively altering the gameplay of cloaky hunters with limited effect on the remaining farmers(one pulse of an MWD, seriously it is usually that easy). Said it before and I'll say it again. Turn the current 'beacon' into a turret entity with 0 dps and a ten second lock delay. If your decloaked for more then ten seconds, your locked and can no longer cloak. Minimal effect on legitimate cloaky gameplay, but prevents cloaky stuff from running the timer.

By the way, can anybody answer definitively if the rats attack neutrals/pirates or not? If they do a change is in order there too.

In short, increase the spawn timer from 2 minutes to something longer like 4-5 minutes, possibly with a difference in plexes as well scaling upward from novice-large. Self-Repair numbers could do with a slight nerf as well, and by that I mean VERY slight. Like maybe minus 5-10 DPS required to kill the novice, -10-20 for the small, -30-40 for the medium, and -50-70 for the Large.

interesting ... sounds like CCP fired the guy responsible for plexes years ago and listened to the FW players ... interesting indeed.

To the OP ... this was one of the options proposed by Damar and other people in the past to get rid of farmers. Well another one was to put disruption/decloaking bubble in the center of the plex. ;)

I've found the closer I am to 100 dps or over that the sooner the novice frigate dies. I took in a Thrasher one day and farmed out a small and medium in a few zones with 200dps or so and that also worked pretty well. I made far more then the cost of the Thrasher I built before I lost it.

Confirm it and bug report it .. doubtful that is the intention. If it is then CCP are doing the hard stuff again

I don't post terribly often, but I felt I had to chime in with my opinion:

I think WCS should stay as they are. I think making it so you can't cloak in plexes was dumb, as it ruins a lot of cool traps you could set up. Everyone keeps pointing to other problems, such as WCS, and cloaking, but I feel the source of the problem is payouts.

As it is right now, people that want to kill people do, and people that want to make isk, farm. I thought FW was supposed to be making money while fighting, but If you fight, you lose money. If you make money (plexing), you need to avoid fights.

Buffing the rats is just frustrating, and I barely even attempt to offensive plex anymore while looking for targets. If I want to make money, I can annoyingly sit in a plex, fighting rats that respawn endlessly, so I make my money elsewhere. Hunting is annoying because of the rat buffs. My proposed changes:

1. Allow cloaking in plexes, really nothing wrong with it IMO
2. Don't change WCS, they have worked this way for years, and have been fine
3. unbuff the rats and don'T have them sapwn so often. It's just super annoying to solo o-plex anymore. Maybe leave 1 in there, and make them spawn every 7 or 8 minutes or so, but nothing more...
4. Lower payouts for plexing a lot, maybe give out 1/10th what they do now. This would seriously discourage plexing as a farming activitey since it just wouldn't be worth the time.
5. Increase LP payouts for killing other militia members. This would incentisize people to fight, instead of trying to farm plexes.

I just don't see why everyone keeps saying to change other things, like WCS, or cloaking, or the rats. Just make it a money maker to fight people instead of running. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? If someone just wants to make money, they will, and they will avoid people coming to fight them as much as possible. Make it unprofitable for farmers, so they go back to mining, and leave the lp for people who are doing FW as it should be. Make it so that the people who are fighting for their empire are paid to kill the enemies, and capturing these stupid outposts are just a nice little bonus, instead of how it is now, where killing a ship basically gets me nothing, and all the money is made plexing.