What if the players made the conscious choice of saying, “I’m gonna stay there and for the risk I will be allowed more rewards”? The Agency would then have the ability to broadcast the site and tell players “go there if you want commited players who are willing to fight”.
This is the crux of the idea I have been trying to push for a while: Enhanced FW Plex
Why FW and not high-sec?
Because FW is the only area of space where this would be possible thanks to the existence of teams. In high-sec, it would be a small-team versus the entire rest of space, where in FW it would be a specific faction vs. a specific faction, makes it a lot more even.
It is also alt-resistant as the plex allows a limited amount of ships per X amount of times, only enemy FW players being allowed as opponents and them only gaining an ounce of the value of the deployable through the wreck.
What prompted this post was my experience with resource wars when it first came out: I went out and did sites randomly but ended up fleeting with people I ran into. Some of these where new players. I had a lot of fun and made some new friends. However, interest quickly ran dry because… resource wars.
Since the infrastructure is already there, I thought maybe we could easily do a PvP version. Unlike the PvE mining version, it is probably ok if resource wars LP sucks since PvP itself is fun.
Why not just tell newbies to do FW? Too much commitment and effort for newbies. It is hard to get newbies to drop their friend’s corp, enroll in open PvP and attempt to make it to low sec. Plus FW has its problems as pointed out by other posters (and discussed heavily on Reddit). Perhaps a low barrier of entry and casual “PvP wars” could get new players to show up like for resource wars. Although perhaps “fixing” or altering FW could accomplish the same thing.
Consensual PvP in EvE can occur through the “duel” feature.
FW would be ideal and I think also the original goal for the NPE. However this requires significant development effort to be put into FW, which according to the summit minutes will not happen.
It’s as much consensual as shooting a suspect in highsec.
This would be a big problem. The better the rewards the more worthwhile it’s going to be for a group of Tech II armed veteran pilots with excellent PvP skills to sit in one of these arenas waiting for noobs to show up.
With no way to matchmake / level gate (because no levels in EVE) I don’t think this would work.
It’ll end up being like voluntarily throwing yourself into a gate camp.
Well, agency event sites are already full of bling-ed veteran players with excellent PvP skills looking to gank (in low/null) and to suspect bait (in high sec). So it won’t be anything new.
I also see it as a plus if these veteran players are participating in NPE content, something that Resource Wars tried to encourage but failed. Furthermore, all these veteran players sitting around in highsec PvP arenas are extremely juicy content for other veteran players. Might become interesting!
That being said, bear in mind that this post is less of a “we MUST have this EXACT thing now” and more to get people thinking and talking about possibly incorporating PvP into the NPE through existing infrastructure.
Finally, my opening suggestion was to give Resource Wars LP points, which is pretty crappy reward, and see if PvP itself being fun would be enough to drive this.
If you want CONCORDless PvP in your highsec sites, you can use:
killrights,
war declarations,
suspect baiting,
maybe some other means I can’t think of now.
Other than that, as stated above, if you want no CONCORD why not just move out of highsec? Why change the game to achieve something you can already achieve without changing the game?
That is a fair point. I’m not sure having one special site type with different engagement rules than the rest of highsec is a good solution though. I may be wrong.
But lets be honest. the OP is about 'balanced, competitive" gameplay. And “balance, competitive” gameplay is what the EVE forums trolls are deadset against!
Yeah, I am not sure a blanket “special no Concord zone” is actually possible. But since OP said he wasn’t set on the particulars, I let it go.
I think there could be a way to set access through the gate predicated on becoming suspect. Think something like shoot structure to activate gate and shooting gets suspect flag.
What do you mean? When I want to PVP, I look for it and fly around space and thus make myself available to PVP in the process. All we need are more actual players and not just more alts so that there are more people flying around so that you don’t ahve to “wait ages to find targets”.
Well, again, EVE is not about balanced fights. Do you want EVE to start grouping you in 4v4 fights and disabling CONCORD and any other outside interference? What’s the point of the sandbox then?
You can play like any other competitive multiplayer game to get balanced fights. Why ruin the true sandbox where (more or less) anything is possible?
I know!!!