Warfare & Tactics

Immersion, mainly.

I want to feel like I am fighting a war, not playing a somewhat arbitrary game mechanic. Ideally, the NPCs in the plexes would actually feel more like a pvp engagement. Say a medium plex might have a cruiser with something like the pre-change stats, and two solid web/scram frigates as escort. Not something so scary that you couldn't beat it, and certainly it should be balanced to be taken down by pvp fits (Unlike the original model of having mission like spawns in plexes), but something that makes the NPCs in the plex feel like part of the game rather than a tagged on crap mechanic.

A cruiser doing a wrecking hit on a destroyer for 80 damage kind of breaks any illusion that the NPC in the plex is a real enemy. I would also like to see a much less stark divide between PvE and PvP.

FW shouldn't just be about the good fights. It should also be about a war between the NPC factions and should make the players involved in it feel like they are part of something bigger.

Solo doesnt exist.

Yet, lots of fights are happening all over the warzone, caldari soundly beat our VP numbers last 3 days running.

Sorry the warzone is alive and kicking without your 'participation' lol.

we will see, come back after six moths.

Why is this silly thread at 4 pages? Why the bright blue blinking **** is this even a topic? FW is finally at a perfect balance after a year of flipflopping between negligence and oddball tweaks. Now maybe if nothing else changes for a while, the players can get back to what's important for EvE, which is creating content. You want to feel like you're fighting a war? That's what the plex beacon is for. It's on everyone's overview, signalling where to find you for a fight in the vastness of space. How much more obvious could its purpose possibly be? Plexing leads to system capture, therefore, it's a clever idea to go on a patrol looking to oust enemies from your sites. Makes perfect sense.

The consequence of making the rats harder to fight is obvious; people will plex less and the warzone will trend more toward larger power blocs for any sort of action. This is the first time in recent memory, at least in the Amarr/Min warzone, that both sides are making some headway based on balanced action from players rather than dependence on large power blocs. That's anything but bad, because it fosters the growth of stronger alliances through ad-hoc small-gang action. If you don't get that, then maybe your place is in nullsec.

To be fair, its been 4 pages of me saying its pretty good and a few other people throwing random terrible ideas around like buff rats to fix things that arnt problems or to revert back to a time when FW was horrible.

the rats are ALREADY harder to fight. What I and several others are trying to make a point about is that the npc difficulty should be based on dps rather than tank since that's what's causing problems with offensive plexing specifically. it's bs that you have to ship up to do enough dps to take down the plex NPC, and it makes WAY more sense to me for them to be doing more dps and not active tanking more; I'd prefer to fight and take a decent amount of damage to take them down than being unable to fight at all if I'm in something destroyer sized or smaller fighting the npc bc. Or the cruiser, but to a lesser extent.

Your desire to run all plexes in a frigate while solo so as not to risk a cruiser or be forced to have any friends to share LP with and at the same time more quickly take a system, is the only problem i see in faction war.

Player behaviour has changed. If you want to take a large plex with a frigate, you can. You will just need a few of them. We have already had fw where the check was tank based, it was HORRIBLE. upwards of 100000 VP per day per faction + unknown levels of cross plexing, almost entirely farmers with the entire warzone ready to change hands every 2 weeks or less.

Not to mention making it unrealistic to fight OTHER PLAYERS solo/micro gang inside plexes, which i guess is ok if the intention is to run from any and all threats.

I started out thinking you just handnt thought much about this and had a silly idea. Now i realise you are malicious and would love to return FW to a farmers paradise and ruin the hard work all the factions have been putting in recently.

That whole argument is completely flawed. No matter how you turn it, a group of people will always have the upper hand against one person.

RLML caracal is one of my favorite cruisers, and I've run all of those that you're talking about; i just have bad luck with blobs and camps. Fit crafting is kind of my thing. While I can admit I'm in the wrong about wanting to dial things back for what's necessary to solo run offensive plexes, I DO believe my concerns about supply and distance are warranted; logistically it makes far less sense to be running cruisers for long-distances operations for a number of reasons, not the least of which armor repair in hostile space for buffer fits.
While the argument can be made the same thing applies to frigates and destroyers, generally you're fighting the same sized ships so combat tends to yield better results than waiting to get swarmed in cruiser build that's not a drone or RLML build. The bottom line though, is that I would rather fight people in pvp fits than empty or stabbed throwaway atrons and ventures. I'm sure most of you can agree with that last statement.