Homefront Community Feedback

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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Greetings all! It’s “Warlord” or “Code” (for those who know me thru twitch), and I would like to welcome you to my Homefront ted talk! I have been wanting to reach out and give feedback for a while, but I didn’t want to risk dealing with forum pvp’ers or giving feedback on something I am not decently versed in.

A little bit of background before hand if you could bear with me.

Back when Homefronts released Morty(streamer) approached me with an idea that we should combine efforts to create a Homefront community where we could help new players, alphas, and even vets who wanted to play meet up and find a group with no real commitment or ridiculous fitting requirements. (No, you don’t need that 300mil Exeq Navy to run Homefronts we promise. We can do it with 17mil.) The idea kicked off and “Homefront Runners” became a thing currently we almost stream exclusively Homefront content every day of the week splitting stream schedules between the 2 of us constantly inviting people to come fly and see what it is about. Since its creation we have done more Homefronts than we can count. Which brings me to what a really want to get into, but I was waiting until we had completed over 300-400 sites in non-multi-boxed fluid fleets.

The Feedback.

  1. Please bring back specific site spawns.
    By randomizing the spawns you have created an environment which communities are now competing or trolling/grieving each other to oblivion. You can use a tanked-out cruiser to venture into some sites “tag” and either force the enemy fleet to warp out or pay you out even if it’s a diminished payout. The other is fleet screening, using ganking alts. Also please don’t have multiple spawn in the same system it feels hella bad. We had 4 abyssal Homefronts in 1 system one night. (See #2)

  2. Abyssal Homefronts
    Please just simply redesign these. They are not even remotely worth doing in any way both in difficulty and reward. The idea is cool, the execution is just flat out terrible. An idea I was toying with involves having the site yield isogen-10 and zero-point trig resources – Honestly even then it might not be worth doing. Something just needs to be done about this one. Not just payout something needs to fundamentally change at the design level.

  3. Which Homefront have we enjoyed the most?
    By popularity based on player engagement for our community has been “Black Market Raid.” This is the most well thought-out and executed form of this content we could have ever envisioned. You have player engagement in the form of hauling, dps, tackle, logi, escorting, it is fast paced, it just FEELS good. I would love to see all the variations of Homefronts have this level of engagement and feel good attached to them.

  4. UI and search window quality of life Improvements.
    Give us the option to manually refresh the site search windows so we can get ACCURATE accounts of site population. A slightly more revamped and polished Homefront UI would be much desired but for now being able to deploy a fleet better and accurately from site to site would be wonderful.

  5. Metaliminals – Quality of Life
    Please add a hauler to the Metaliminal sites what will pick up all the mined ore like the Black Market Raid Charon. You can have the ore deposited and tie it to a site payout. By doing so you will help alleviate the tediousness of having to dump ore, dock ore, before moving on to a new site.

  6. Suspicious Signals
    These are for the most part fine, but you guys need to fine tune this a bit as it is still very much possible to brute force the amount of vulnerability windows you have. It is my understanding you(devs) want these to be done in 3 cycles? You may need to look at your site metrics on this one and adjust to compensate for a particular ship that might need a bit of a bonk. :wink:

If you made it this far, I appreciate you taking the time to tune in to my Ted talk. I appreciate you. Also thank you guys for releasing this content THIS is the group content I have always wanted for EVE small engaging and not barred only for the sweaty vets. A lot of us play MMO’s for the MM site of it and this has been excellent for on-demand fun. We have even had some newbros START playing eve because of what they saw in some of our Homefront streams so that goes to show you the formula works. Improve on it and make it sexy don’t kill it before it has even had a chance to get out the gate.

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moved to Player Features & Ideas - EVE Online Forums

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I really don’t like the current mechanic that any amount of people can enter the site but the reward is greatly effected by it.
It created a system that some players just go from one HF to another and ruin for others just for fun. Since it’s HS, there is nothing we can really do. We can’t shoot them, we can’t make them go away.
In my opinion, the mechanic should be re-evaluated to ensure the reward for the players who do HFs and not let AHoles to ruin it in the last minute.

Suggestions that can help (one or all):

  1. Make only specific ships to be able to enter and no ship can survive alone.
  2. Lock the reward for the first 5 people entering the site. If second team arrive, on the same site, only the first 5 people get rewarded.
  3. Lock the site from entry after 5th person entered. Only up to 5 people can be at the HF site at the same time.
  4. Allow unlimited entry, but make 15 min timer that people can shoot him/her to the 6th and up person to enter.
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Some of the mining events lock the gate so only 3 people can enter. CCP could do something similar… and perhaps make a visual clue to how many people are inside from the outside gate without having to activate the gate.

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Excuse me, but Homefronts are an insult to EvE just topped by Abyssal instances. If not removed the only fix should be to reduce the payout to a symbolic amount, to not make them worth farming but keeping the fun and “learning aspect”. This would also magically fix your Seagull issue, right?

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How bout:
When you land at the beacon, there are two acceleration gates “Easy Mode” and “Normal Mode”.
Both easy and normal sides can be run simultaneously.
Only one side will ever pay out, at which point the other side despawns with no reward.

“Easy Mode” side should take more time for less reward but otherwise be mechanically unchanged.
“Normal Mode” side should take less time for more reward BUT you are suspect flagged when you drop out of warp in the Normal Mode pocket.

ps @Rail_J_kar you can use directional scanner from outside to identify how many people are inside

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Good point

I disagree. Eve needs community activities that new players can do together, that would ideally onboard players into running incursions. We could quibble about balance and implementation, but the idea of homefronts is great.

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Pretty sure you are just trolling but ill bite.

Please tell me how Homefronts are an insult to EvE, and what is a symbolic amount of isk for you? Before you move on to speaking I implore you to also give something constructive otherwise you are straight up losing “street cred” with anything that might come out. At this point it sounds a lot like like: “I am living in 2005 and haven’t woken up to the fact that eve has other active content beyond afk/botting an ishtar in anoms” -But ill reserve judgment until I see a follow-up reply; I could be wrong.

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No, I’m not trolling. Homefronts are in my view like a PvE game inside the otherwise PvP game, similar to Abyss it partly shields players from the sandbox, and gives new players a fatal wrong impression about EvE and fleet gameplay. It will create more entitlement as this thread shows.

In addition each riskless “group” PvE which pays too well, is just a farming ground for multiboxers, moving further players out of lower sec spaces into highsec.

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Eve has never been a 100% pvp game and adding pve content doesn’t diminish from the original vision.

I do agree with the sentiment that abyssals are weird separated instances. But the majority of gamers at large prefer pve (the numbers show this) so having content that caters to the carebear crowd isn’t a bad thing, especially if it encourages them to sub and give CCP money.

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However, at its core it is a PvP game. By CCPs own words.

Homefront with rewards quartered what they are today are still meaningful for rookies. Without being abusable ISK fountains.

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Don’t move the goal post, I’m not against PvE content. PvE content is money maker for many and a base layer of the sandbox. Look at the events, which are very popular and usually balance PvE with PvP in a good way. However there is certain PvE content which in my view harms the sandbox:

  • Instanced content
  • Limited player count content, which effectively creates an instance (with sufficient alts)
  • safe and profitable group PvE, which will just be farmed by more multiboxers
  • content pretending to be something else, homefront fleet simulation

I would even go to that length that almost all group PvE failed as useful content for actual groups, except Incursions. And ironically CCP nerfed Incursions hard to promote their other more instanced crap.

Sotiyos got monopolized, the new lowsec Aegis/SCC sites are either ignored or are run by multiboxers only. Pochven OBS can be called a success as content driver but only in context of the extreme nature of the space. Still multiboxing is the optimal operation mode there. I’m not sure about the multibox situation of FOBs, but I was running them solo back then.

For the educational aspect, I would rather see new players join one of the NPSI communities or join a corp and learn the ropes in real fleets against other players’ fleets, to avoid them to unnecessarily become “carebears” being afraid of loss and feeling entitled about safety.

EDIT:

Let me address this, on first glance this looks like a good thing, but are the players attracted by group PvE the ones which long term will keep with EvE, also when they realize EvE in fact is a different game than advertised?

Personally I have my doubt about a big conversation rate of PvE players towards PvP sandbox players, and those who fail to convert will leave EvE in anger and create “bad press”.

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Who said anything about converting into pvp players? That’s not CCP’s goal. CCP’s goal is to get them to sub, and keep subbed.

One of the largest segments of eve’s player base has historically been highsec mission running. One might think that type of game play is boring, but often they’ll do it with a group of people and the real content for those people is talking to their friends in whatever voip program while they do whatever task they’re involved in.

That type of player isn’t looking for a high stress pvp environment, they’re looking for a way to kick back after a day of work and unwind before it’s time to go to bed.

Imo, it kind of sounds like you’re against pve. What does … “content pretending to be something else, homefront fleet simulation” even mean? That it’s bad that there’s content where people have to fleet up to accomplish the task?

If that’s the point you’re making, I entirely disagree. People doing things together increases player retention.

Furthermore, I think the tutorial / career agents should put players in a fleet with only npcs, to teach them how to use the fleet finder and fleet interface window. CCP can then follow that up with missions where they have to “fc” the npcs by tagging targets.

PVE is a great way to teach players skills that can be used in other parts of the game.

This is pretty much anything in highsec. But null sec too… since the locals just wont run that content with other people in system with them.

If your goal is to hamper multiboxers, then separate achievable goals is the answer. Maybe a site needs logi, someone to navigate through a maze (one of the career agent missions has a structure you have to go through an open door in order to get into a prison complex) and hack multiple objects within that maze at the same time, while on a timer.

All this said, I think one of your main gripes is you think highsec pve is too lucrative. One way toward toning down the rewards is adding ESS to highsec. And if players want to keep all of their rewards, they’ll have to fight for it.

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I don’t do FOBs, but if you check killboard then vast majority of them are soloed or multiboxed. Only handful of corporations are doing this as a corporation event with an actual players but they are doing it once a week, whereas multiboxers do three to six daily.

From what I know about FOBs the loot really is not worth it to be shared between several players you need for this, so why do it with other players when it is still possible to solo this content or dualbox at worst right?

source?

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