I don’t believe I ever made a post on this, (or seen another topic directly addressing the idea,) even though I’ve thrown some support behind the idea in the past.
Reasons:
People have complained about the state of highsec pvp due to the changes in the wardec system and the Retribution suspect timers.
Highsec ESS would give those players an outlet for this activity, especially if it were divvied up into separate plex hull size locations like fw is. The outside gate could have a hack mechanic, that would (when successfully hacked) turn the flagging mechanic inside the site from the global suspect flag, to a limited engagement timer applied to everyone in the site.
Highsec earnings are a bit unbalanced to other areas in the game.
Ess would lower the raw isk generated by people in safe areas (assuming pvp players raid the banks.) I understand some people wouldn’t like this, but highsec does make a bit too much at the moment compared to other more dangerous activities.
Lonetrek is the first LS/HS region after 3 rows of null sec regions, and generates 10x less bounty income than VOTS. Sure, high sec makes “a bit too much”.
According to your figure you displayed, Metropolis would be the first one (end of the second row,) but that’s not really a good metric to go off of.
Firstly, there’s nothing separating lowsec and highsec in that picture. Secondly it makes no indications of what activities the money is coming from in null. If I had to guess, your null numbers are primarily from caps and supers crabbing (ships that can’t even exist in highsec.) Thirdly, total amount of income is not an indication of a problem with balance. That ignores the number of people involved in activates and how long they stay at those activities. You can’t calculate isk per hour off of what you’ve shown there. Lastly, that infographic doesn’t take into account LP generation for highsec and lowsec activities.
In short, you’re going to need the information packaged in a different manner if you want to suggest highsec income shouldn’t be nerfed.
Besides, you can always raid the bank yourself, and then you wont have your income reduced.
Then you get the money from everyone else as well, which does not work as there are no coherent groups in high sec per system. You are either stealing money from them or they steal from you, depending on who gets the milking done. That’s a really, absolutely great experience for all the people involved.
That’s all irrelevant because the income on high sec is by design far lower than anywhere else in the game. Even if you include all possible forms of currency generation (ISK, LP), you end up making far less than in low sec or null sec with the same activities.
An ESS in high sec only hurts players and offers no positive gameplay aspects that you cannot already achieve with other, actually EVE-like activities like mission loot stealing. If you want easy target farming, you should have to put effort into tricking the targets to engage you where they are active and not with easy-mode farming hotspots.
Metropolis is first, but it’s an FW region. Most of that income comes from FW, not from high sec activities. Lonetrek is not an FW region and only a very small area around Taisy generates significant low sec income with L5s. Most of the income should thus come from high sec, as it’s a much larger portion of the region.
In general I like the idea, because if Nullsec has an ESS mechanic tied to the bounty system, I see little reason why LowSec and HighSec shouldn’t (lore-wise). Would fit into a more streamlined system so people can learn how things work in HS and are used to the mechanics once they go to Low/Null.
However: For the sake of keeping things simple (K.I.S.S. ruleset) I would apply the same rules for robbing ESS in High/Low like in Null.
The only difference would be a global suspect flag for anyone entering in High/Low, so he is freely engagable by anyone.
You also forget that in high sec X different groups dump money into the ESS but only one can take the stuff out when you empty it yourself. ESS mechanics from null don’t work in an area where there are no unified groups filling it up. Good luck KISSing this.
Furthermore, you also forget that you do not fill up only 1 ESS like in null sec where you only rat in 1 system and only really rarely go outside that system for escalations. Missions send you to tons of different systems all the time. Have fun KISSing this.
Again: This does not make anything better. It makes everything worse for the majority of players only to please a really loud, and lazy, minority.
Considering that most LP from Missions is worthless because of FW, the LP income argument does not work.
It creates ways for legal PvP, which Highsec barely sees any more outside the totally crappy wardec system. A missionrunner who get occasionally the ESS part of his bounty stolen simply doesn’t lose much money (as said, the bounty part isn’t significant in Highsec) so really nothing that would “ruin” anything. Also anyone trying gets suspect, you have all the chances in the world to deal with it once you get the message that the ESS is under threat. Go there and make pew pew if you like, or shrug it off, it won’t be more than a few pennies.
Sure he can and he is right. Income isn’t only bounty. The majority of the income is in LPs.
It does because you don’t seem to do math. I sell normal mission LP for 2k each, minimum. I have turned in billions of ISK just in the recent week from L4 missions. Items sell like sliced bread and prices are pretty high right now. FW literally has zero impact if you know what to sell and where/when to buy tags.
We already have that with proper EVE mechanics like loot theft.
That’s beyond naive. That ESS will be any number of jumps away from where you are currently running a mission and from your base. It’s naive to assume that you would go into an ESS with your mission ship. But I guess this is what you want: Easy farming. As said, it ruins a lot more than it improves. And mostly not because of the theft but because of how reward sharing works in the ESS.
No we haven’t, because a) loot theft isn’t worth the hassle usually, at most you can go scan some MTUs but even they aren’t worth the time in most cases. and b) there is literally no risk for the offender right now, because he simply can warp off any time and go dock Or even cloak just in front of you when you warp on Grid. Can’t do that within an ESS site.
I probably do A LOT more missions than you do and where I do them like 90% are within 2 jumps of the Agent base. So there is a very high probability that once an ESS is attacked, you either are in the same system or max 1-2 jumps out. Absolutely no biggie to warp to that within 6 minutes, even if you have to go dock to switch ships in between. And of course the system could be tweaked to increase the ESS-timer. 6 Minutes is Base for 0.0, can be +1 minute per 0.1 of SecStatus the system has. So someone would need to hold out 12 minutes in a 0.6…
Even if the missionrunners wouldn’t want to fight for their stuff, some unrelated PvPers in the Constellation might. Or even bait people with high bank amounts into ESS-traps. Yes, it will surely bring more entertainment than the current boring grind-state of HighSec.
Same thing happens in null. Sure it might be your org that raids the bank, but farmers aren’t the people getting the payout unless they participate in the raid.
Except for all the L4 mission bounties / LP payout, Homefront payouts, Abyssals, ect.
There’s no mission running in sov null, so we can’t really make a comparison there. Belt ratting and anom hunting have a large difference, but people only do that in empire for one of two reasons. To complete their dailies, or to get an escalation (for the purposes of getting deadspace modules.) So, there’s no issue with ess there. However, those activities do pay out pretty well, and you can to 3/10s in a t1 frigate.
Years ago when I was ratting and running null anoms, on average I’d be making about 15 a tick, 20 if I was really moving. You can make that same amount running t1 abysaals in a punisher with far less risk.
Sure, income is higher in null if you can run the 10/10s with your t3 cruiser / marauder or go crabbing with your phoenix, but the levels of investment and risk there are much higher in null. Similar levels of investment do not have vastly varying amounts of payout to take into consideration the risk involved.
Highsec pvp is lame. Station games and trying to catch people at gates. You need a mechanic that puts people in a situation they have to commit to. ESS provides that.
Tbh, I’d like to see that same warp disruption effect in fw complexes and battlefields too.
Most of the loot is garbage, and the majority of mission runners have been around long enough not to fall into a trap like that.
imo, most of the people to engage in pvp in highsec ESS will be pvpers. The majority of farmers will just count it as a loss. So, no, it’s not about easy target farming… it’s about encouraging pvp in a manner that isn’t this terrible station game nonsense.
FW only pays out in LP. There are no bounties.
Besides, if that were the case, Black Rise, Essence, Placid, Devoid, and The Bleak Lands should also be affected.
Metropolis has some L4 anoms that are associated with the L4 Minmatar epic arc, but I haven’t seen them being overly farmed. I think it’s more likely those bounties are from L4 mission running.
There’s a L4 SOE security agent in that pocket.
Fair point. I only allowed for the hacking mechanic to allow for people who were slightly more risk adverse to participate, but I don’t overly care. So that would be fine.
Good points. Yeah, I’m in favor of teaching people mechanics in a less stressful environment that can be extrapolated into other areas. Good game design does this. And it’s how you can have complicated mechanics be easily understood because they’re intuitive.
We could just have other content, that emulates fw complexes for more entry level stuff.
Obviously if highsec ESS becomes a thing and all ships are allowed, it will be filled with ships newbies can’t compete with, so it wont really fulfill the role of entry level pvp. It’s certainly ok to gear some content toward that, but imo entry level pvp should be entry level (t1 ships, ect.)
