Warfare & Tactics

Regarding #1: It is possible for new players to support their pew pew habits already. You can train for a basic AML caracal to begin running the level 3's (at least for caldari). It's what I did when I joined the militia years ago. Most of these players don't realize they can dispatch a single BC rat with the tank equivilance of a rat they find on a gate or in a belt to get easy income. It's not as profitable as the level 4's, but when all you fly is t1 cruisers and dessies, you can easily support a weeks worth of ship losses with a couple hours of missioning with level 3's. Now that's not to say there shouldn't be rewards for plexing, there should be some sort of incentive for occupancy. I think the rewards should lie in holding occupancy, not giving a bit of monetary income for farming a single plex. It should be "big picture" types of rewards.

One could always do a counter-weight scale type of thing where plexes for opposing side become more and more valuable as space is lost in conjunction with rewards for holding/taking space .. as far as I am aware there is no rule that there can be only form of reward system.

Personally wan't mechanics sorted before entering into the rewards swamp though, as the current "farmable by some" plexes/missions makes any kind of discussion stillborn

Damar, you're in the wrong thread. All hatred towards opposing factions belong in the other FW thread. Welcome back to the Gallente side of space btw.

/On topic: I hope that we can get Hans in the CSM. We'll get proper representation at that point for sure.

Let us ignore the local troll and continue this surprisingly civil discussion.

It's okay Hans, he clearly has some anger issues.

Yeah, big question here. Emphasis on individual plexes will make plex farming a main feature of FW. Guys looking for fights will be disappointed when targets bail and the only way to "grief" targets will be to... hang out in system forever while the targets cloak up afk. If you thought griefing mission runners was painful, how about griefing plexers who just sit idly by until next plex comes up in 40 minutes, or moves to next empty system to run a plex.

Right now the casual player can keep himself in T1 pvp ships (especially the destroyers that are so common nowadays) by looting tags in plexes, but the players never seem to spend the time collecting tags from wrecks. Also, if they invest in some cheap BPO's the logistics train for casual players can be shortened by building massive numbers of dessies from T1 crap loot from these same plexes (Not an issue for richer, older players who can drop-ship a ton of vessels anywhere they want).

Give some LP for plex running. LP = N*VP. (Give us back pay for all the plexing we've done over the years! )

Give some incremental bonuses for occupying a system (POCO/POS HP bonus), station services discount, rat bounty increase, mission rewards increase. If guys want these bonuses, they can join FW (and be targets!).

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In the future, CCP might want to do the same for all low sec and NPC Null sec (and perhaps 0.0). Open up occupancy to all corporations and all alliances. The occupancy mechanic should fit the style of play in those regions however. They may not like ship limited FW style plexes that lead to all the cool fights we have in FW.

Any fix would require some form of additional reward for factions that are not doing well. The biggest problem with the missions vs. plexes is that missions are basically just something that promotes afk mission alts to whore all the missions with little to no initiative to fight in the area. I'd say 75 to 90% of all FW missions are run by people with no desire/want to be involved in the pvp aspect of FW (which in and of itself is not that big of a problem). As I understand it, the whole point of the FW missions was to A) promote conflict, and B) allow pvpers access to funds to replace their losses. Neither of these goals is adequately met by FW missions. Plexing needs to hold a stronger benefit/cost for pilots because they generally drive conflict much better.

Just my .2 isk.

Yeah, I think they could do a couple things to make the missions riskier. 1) Make all of them ungated - so people can warp directly on top of you, and 2) make them harder so people need bigger (slower) ships to do them.

And as someone said before - giving LP for capping plexes would help. Is there a way to divide it by the number of ships that cap it?

It's all about the aggro mechanics. First guy in gets aggro and tanks mission. Second guy in does mission in whatever he is currently in. The risk in the missions is traveling 20 jumps to pick up mission and return home.

Anyways, I say give players the ability to grief mission runners by being able to close out somehow if the mission runner bails (but nobody seems to agree with me). Key feature would be "closure". One side won the engagement, time to move on.

I agree that this is what it boils down to. We don't want to give rewards to plexing just to have it turn into the new pve of choice for carebears.



We should consider potential mechanics that that make it so it would be more efficient to fight and hold a plex as opposed to warping out every time an enemy comes.



I think we need to acknowledge this is not an easy task, but if it can be accomplished it would be awesome and make plexing and occupancy something worthwhile. So I do think its worth brainstorming different ideas that even if they don't completely accomplish this end, they will bring us much closer to that goal.



Here are some ideas that have come up before as well as some of the drawbacks. I think we should mention the drawbacks because in some cases they me be a deal breaker but in other cases they can perhaps be mitigated.



1) Proposal: Limit the number of systems that spawn plexes. Something like Hirana's border system or even if not on the same border or front make it so fewer systems spawn plexes.




How this would work to make it more efficient to fight as opposed to run: Well if the number of systems that spawn plexes were restricted enough there would be no back water empty systems to run to. So people would have to be prepared to fight if they wanted to capture plexes.



Drawbacks: 1) Would likely mean that whoever has the biggest number of active pilots would always win by sitting the blobs in those systems. The side with fewer pilots would not be able to coodenate smaller attacks in smaller out of the way systems. Essentially so the game would not be as strategically rich.



How the drawbacks might be mitigated: 1)perhaps have the systems that spawn plexes suddenly change throughout the day so the smaller side may be able to mobilize faster after such a change and cap a few plexes anyway. 2) Make it so the side that is losing the war has a more freedom to fly bigger ships into the plexes. (Yes the systems might be locked down by the larger side but there are ways around this like the mwd cloak trick. Plus Hirana had the idea of eliminating the accel gates to plexes so ships can't be caught at them and just making it so ships that are too large just can't warp there. Finally they used to have it so if you spammed to use the accel gate you weren't lockable even if it took a while for your ship to warp. This bug was actually pretty nice imo.)




2) Proposal: Give some benefit to actually fighting the enemy. Perhaps you get a lp boost if you engage an enemy pvp ship. Perhaps make the timer go faster if there is some pvp.




How this would work to make it more efficient to fight as opposed to run: Well it gives a direct benefit to pvp.




Drawback: Creating enemy alts that you fly in to kill and boost your rewards reduce timers etc.



How drawbacks might be mitigated: Make it so you get diminishing returns for fighting the same pilot. This would at least force people to make allot of alts. Of course corps them might cycle through different alts. So this would need to be considered.



3) Proposal: Automatically let fw pilots know where and when plexes are being entered and left through the map or an intel channel.



How this would work to make it more efficient to fight as opposed to run: No one who wanted pvp would have to chase anyone around as much because they could just stay there doing a plex and then when the rabbit opens a new plex they would be notified and can go there.



Drawbacks: Some people like to hunt for hours after the enemy. They also like managing multiple alt scouts. Really I am pretty much in favor of this idea as a no brainer solution so I'm not the one to give the drawbacks.



How drawbacks might be mitigated: Well other players don't like having to hunt for hours or managing numerous alt scouts and just want to get some pvp.





Feel free to add new proposals or ideas/issues concerning any of these proposals. Maybe ccp can do all of the above to a certain extent.








I think this is true for everything except the minor plexes.



In my experience the minor plexes have tags that are not worth collecting. Givien the cost of t2 guns and the number of them you have to fit on a dessie - if you want to be competitive at pvp - you would need to do allot of plexes to get them. Yeah you can use cheap t1 guns on your dessie but then you will likely die allot more too.