Warfare & Tactics

Hello spavebros,

to start with, I really love EVE. EVE is still unique as a game and I hope that this monopoly will not destroy CCP in the long run.

But some times CCP gives me shakes of horror.. As I read the CSM minuites this sentence triggerd sad memornies of CCP destroying faction warfare with the deletion of battlecruiser size plexes:

"The CSM asked CCP how satisfied was with how the Entosis Link system worked out. CCP responded that they underestimated how much the change from firing weapons and doing damage to a pure timer system would impact the experience."

Everyone who flew in faction warfare knows that plexes in faction warfare are engagment filters. Faction warfare had its best time in the age of battlecruisers - due the the battlecruiser size plexes and the unrestricted plexes.

So, generally speaking, CCP did omit the filter option of faction warfare plexes and made entosis "orbiting a button". No one likes entosis - as no one in faction warfare loves "orbiting a button".

Faction warfare is all about PVP - only the farmers, thatt CCP made possible, do not grasp the simple concept of faction warfare: Fight!

The conclusion of this is, CCP really thought that the prominence of faction warfare came from "orbiting a button" and not a filter option to encourage more balanced fights. How horrible real this assumption is can be proven with the fact that CCP made farming in faction warfare more easy all the time.

So in EVE, a game focused on PVP, CCP does not understand that people want to fight.

Fighting against blobs in lame. Faction warfare plexes are the only real engagment filters in EVE.

Entosis forces a player to make his ship combat unworthy. This is anathema the the general princile of EVE - PVP,

Why did CCP copied the worst stuff from faction warfare and let the best part fall?

That is really hard to understand.

Today faction warfare is a wasteland. Few people roam - only svioul cancer gate camps are seen. Null sov will become the same, because no one wants to do entosis.

So why not make faction warfare great again and give it its proper engagement filters back?

And null sow - make it an exact copy of faction warfare as it did work. Null sov has the huges advantage that it must not tolerate farmers. Renters are farmers in a way, ok, but they have to pay their overlords their due - famers pay no one and only damage the game.

Or drop null sov as a whole and do the same in faction warfare, drop ownership of systems per faction and make faction warfare and pure combat zone. Citadells in null and faction warfare show ius that people do care for fights and not sov/ faction ownership.

CCP - why do you guys never als people that actually play the game?

Regards and 07

rigor +1 you are getting it.


If CCP would have kept iterating on FW they would have noticed the mistakes and would have learned from them before redesigning the nullsec sov.

The basic requirement before something can happen in eve are players doing things in space. FW lets players wait in space since capturing a plex involves holding the grid for a certain amount of time. That is the most basic form of domination game mode: "come at me bro, if not i make progress and you will lose progress" (in case of eve it is the system you lose). The players are the matchmaker, take a plex in a fleet and there is a chance that an equal or larger fleet forms, or stick to your solo ship.

The problem starts at the point what if the offender is exclusively there to annoy you and will not fight? Fighting farmers becomes suddenly only possible with more farmers (you have to waste time in a 1:1 ratio) and no conflict ever happens, all you would do is to run away all day.

The solution would be fairly simple and commonly implemented in other games: his/her progress should reset since the offender did not complete the capturing.

In FW that is not the case. That is the reason why stabs, cloaks, unfit ships, deplex trial accounts (soon: armies of alphas) etc are only a symptom of the faulty underlying mechanic, not the cause of the problem (they are pure convenience), the cause is that there is no roll back of the plex timer - your progress is persisted. With timer rollbacks stabs become meaningless since running away is LP inefficient.


Understanding this, you will also see that an entosis link, an item which will force you on grid, is basically overkill. CCP hoped that they can scale null sov like FW. Keeping the minimum requirement at 1 ship, while still allowing it to scale up to fleets. Structure bashes had the minimum requirement of a dps heavy fleet, which due its vulnerability is a content driver all by itself. Entosing is not fun for the same reasons as defending a minining op at a belt isn't (nobody does that). Escalating from a single entosis ship into a nullsec fleet fight is difficult, why are you not bashing the structure with a fleet in the first place - if you would plan an escalation you would need them ready anyway?


I expect null sov to disappear completely once more structure types are in the game and it will end up being a pure occupation mechanic.



its btw unlikely that anything FW related will happen any time soon:

You obviously do not live near Black Rise if you think FW is dead.

As for the CSM minutes let us all keep in mind that CURRENTLY this is CCP's logic (and I dare anyone to challenge it)

Importance:
Null > FW/LS

Amount of attention received:
Null > everything else combined (sorry but while there were specific considerations given to LS/WH space for citadels and capitals, 95-99% of the focus was an Null)

Where is CCP going to be focusing all their efforts on sending new players with the new alpha clones and the NPE?:
FW

The last change CCP made to FW was the added 2 or 3 webbing frigates in missions so they could not be solo'd in a bomber.

If you want to fight in EVE - a game about PVP - the only place where you can get something like instant action is faction warfare.

If you do not want to get blobbed or hot dropped - the only place you can get an engagement filter is faction warfare.

Faction warfare is the model for null sec. Null sec never really worked. Faction warfare worked great - then the nerf hammer hit (the end of the age of battlecruisers).

So if faction warfare is the model for null sec faction warfare is important for EVE and CCP. This is a simple fact. If you want to copy sometthing (faction warfare) but kill it, and then copy the dead corpse (orbiting a button) to another place (null sec) you will only futher lessen the quality of you product (EVE).

To make my statement more clear: EVE needs more engagment filters for PVP and less entosis/ orbiting a button. EVE needs more fighting and less farming and renting!


I care for EVE and its health. Right now we see a peroid of decline and instability.


The only question is: Will CCP start to listen to their customers and provide the content their customers want?

PS.:

It is true that Black Rise has a bit of life left whereas the Bleak Lands are dead.

PSS.:

Conflict and evasion - only possilbe when you have an engagement filter.

FW has missions, those are PVE.

If you see plexing as PVE it is the most stupid PVE ever implemented in any game known to men. You shoot a NPC every 2 minutes which does 0 damage to you to proof you are not a bot and run from any player you see. Or: just sit in a unfit ship at a large plex and deplex doing exactly nothing. If someone kills you, you respawn in the same system and warp back to the plex. Literally indistinguishable from being a bot. 0 player interaction. Less interaction than in mining.

The interesting part of plexing is a) the terrain, plexes give unique conditions for matchmaking and b) domination gameplay, hold the grid and you progress in war.

Your argument about alphas influencing pvp does not make any sense. Thats what everyone wants, more players participating in war, not running away in stabbed ships exploiting the system. Joining the winning side was never smart (unless you are a farmer of course), simply because you can't make progress anymore and you missing out on all the fun. You don't conquer space, you don't siege home systems, you only see that if you join the side which is on the offensive. Alphas are just perma trial accounts after all. We already had trial account deplexers for years - nothing new.



the concept of FW works perfectly fine, it just became worse with every year when players got better at exploiting the system. A system which could be easily repaired if ccp would not have abandoned FW years ago.

I think the plexes are fine as they are. If you want more fights fit a t1 frigate and plenty of people will try to attack you in faction, t2 and pirate frigates. Sometimes they even attack with a t1 ship. That is much rarer however.

The issue is that there are too many places you can do complexes in. And people just move somewhere else if you bother them. I think a cool solution could be to only make complexes spawn in systems that border to another faction owned system. You would get a few systems with a good amount of fights: pirates and FW-folk would all go there. If you are on the losing side of a war your faction would be able to invade more systems because of the systems bordering your factions territory, allowing the 'guerilla' warfare that is now so common (a.k.a. farmers).