Added #22: Add an LP tax to NPC corporations to match the isk tax
Added #9 More Economic Pressure Release Valves
Added: #10: Single scan stealth combat probes
I heavily edited #3: The Advantage System isnāt giving the desired effect. I am going to leave a copy and paste of what I did have in case anyone is wondering what I thought about it before.
#3: The Advantage System isnāt giving the desired effect
To understand the Advantage System itās best to read the Development Dev Blog. The issues with the Advantage System are threefold: Itās too easy to gain Advantage, I canāt deny Advantage sites to the enemy, and Advantage is not rewarding enough.
#3a: Itās too easy to gain advantage
The Rendezvous Site is the main way the militias gain Advantage. Doing the site can take upwards of 10 minutes and respawns every 20 minutes. Completing the site gains your militia 2% advantage. Assuming you do it every 30 minutes (10 minute completion + 20 minute respawn) you can gain 96% advantage in a single day. The system caps at 100% Advantage.
Now compare this to the methodās to decrease the opposing sideās Advantage. First there are supply depots and caches that spawn in system. They do not spawn every 20 minutes, but every few hours at best. Second, there are Listening Outposts. Listening Outposts are deployed overview beacon sites. The source for the beacons are from trading in Operations Center data site items to the LP store. You can anchor up to three of them at a time. They take 20+ minutes to run because there is a 10 minute timer that stops every time rats spawn. It doesnāt help the rats spawn every ~20 seconds. Seriously make the respawn longer. Maybe every 2-3 minutes. Also, the spawns are larger than a Rendezvous site. Why? It makes the beacons take so long to complete! And you know what you get when you complete one? 1%! Thatās half of a Rendezvous site but takes over twice as long and costs something!
The sheer amount of work that goes into lowering the Advantage vs. gaining Advantage is not balanced. Itās to the point that no one really tries to lower the other sideās advantage through Listening Post spam because they tried and the off timezone undid all the work with Rendezvous sites and Propaganda beacons.
I would recommend decreasing the respawn rate of Rendezvous sites to match supply caches/depots, buff the percentage gain/loss of Listening Outposts and Propaganda beacons, increase the Listening Outposts and Propaganda beacon data site items, and adjust the rats on Propoganda Beacons and Listening Outposts so it doesnāt take 20+ minutes to complete.
#3b: I canāt deny Advantage sites to the enemy
A core of the issue is I canāt defensively capture Rendezvous sites or Supply depot/caches. This leaves me with a choice: leave a toon at the site to camp it with the hopes that someone will try to complete it, or just accept itās lost and spend my time grinding plexes. I will take the gain I know I will get and go plexing.
Ideally, there would be more fights over the Rendezvous Site, but itās a scanned down site and 99.9999% of FW ships donāt fit a probe launcher. In the hundreds of Rendezvous Sites I have completed I have been warped in on twice. These sites just arenāt contested. I think removing the scanned down aspect and making it spawn like plexes would help bring more fights.
Overall, there has to be a way for me to defensively capture the sites. If I hold the friendly Rendezvous or Supply cache/depot I should be able capture the site to deny it to the enemy. It shouldnāt just stay up forever until they decide to run it. If I can defensively capture these sites then it becomes a race to complete the site against the opposing faction. That brings fights.
Another idea I heard is to make the Rendezvous and Supply Caches/Depots a non-faction site so either side can capture it. I actually think this is probably the best way to approach it if you could get the rat spawns to make sense.
#3c: Advantage is not rewarding enough
The Advantage bonus isnāt worth going for. I am almost always better off running another site because running another site will give me more VP than the brief time I retain a Net Advantage. Even in cases where there is a massive Net Advantage it just doesnāt feel like it reduced the time to grind the system meaningfully. I think a great way to fix this would be to increase the Advantage cap from 100% to something like 2-300% so consistent effort to push the Advantage is rewarded and harder to erase.
Added #23: Remove permanent Frontlines until the entire warzone is captured
Added #24: Fix Seagulling BFs
Added #25: Fix AWOXing
Added #11: Remote Assistance Bonused Ships
This patch fixed a few items. I am listing the original text here:
#4: Fix the Neighboring Systems Advantage Bonus
In the Development Dev Blog it highlights that Command Ops systems will be providing a 10% bonus to neighboring systems. The issue with this is it makes systems not neighboring Command Ops systems have a higher potential Net Advantage. This means itās potentially faster to capture a Rearguard system, or a Command Ops system with no neighboring Command Ops providing an Advantage bonus, than it is to grind a Frontline. We are using this to pre-grind Rearguard, and Command Ops system with no neighboring Command Ops, because we can get a high net advantage and rack up VP quickly. This means that when we take the frontline the previous Command Ops and Rearguard fall quickly like dominos because we pre-grinded them.
I think it would be better if every friendly system provided a flat percentage bonus to each neighboring friendly system. This would make terrain matter in FW. A system surrounded by five other friendly systems would be a harder grind than one with only one neighboring friendly system. This would make choosing when and where to attack matter, while preventing Rearguards from being the best way to grind.
#5: Battlefields need adjustments
The current state of BFs are that if they spawn in a system that is being hotly contested, you might get a fight. What happens more often is we throw 3 BCs with 3 logi in the BF while everyone else caps other sites in system. At 90% everyone goes to the BF to get the LP.
Also, make the BF more meaningful. Right now it gives a ~0.5% system capture and 15% Advantage. Thatās a lot, but not anything worth going all out for. I can get 1.5% or more an hour with multiple normal sites. Bump it up to 2-3% or more to make us really care. Also make it so if the winning faction would go above 100% Advantage due to the 15% Advantage gain the excess Advantage would be subtracted from the opposing sideās Advantage.
Bumping so I donāt lose this thread to the 90 day lock.
FW is the biggest ā ā ā ā ā ā ā ā ā ā ā . CCP probably thinks they make it intrestesting the more complicated it is. So imo in order to improve FW it should just spawn battlefields (aka a common objective for both sides to fight over) in a random place in low sec. No more influence map, no more capturing of systems and the nope you cannot dock āsurprisesā. Just keep it plain and simple like for example this:
- Battlefield spawns
- Whichever side captures it gets 150K LP (Up until 30 pilots, subject to change depending on how popular FW becomes)
- Let the fighting commense
Thats it. Thats how you do FW. Keep it simple.
But then from there you can start expanding it. Like for example adding small gates or anomalies within a BF that can be used to get around because its like 600km wide.
And then when they added Havoc, there would simply be a 3rd faction vying to capture the battlefield. But it could get messy. There is a reason why most popular PVP games are essentially one side vs the other. And not a āX vs X vs Xā. But CCP has decided to learn these basic principles and truths the hard way it seems. But thats besides the point.
FW is unnecessarily complicated, and they took that to the next level with the recent expansion. I also have to wonder why CCP on one hand dumbs the game down, like giving free stuff, and all this stuff. But then on the other they make extremely complex and unintutitive game mechanics with questionable incentives.
bump to not lose this
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