Hey, I’ve tested Homefront operations for some time and faced one problem, which in my opinion can be easily fixed. Problem is that anyone can access site and ruin payout for fleet members who did all the site, doing actually nothing.
For example, me and 4 fleetmates of mine were playing Emergency Aid sites for 13 minutes. When there was 2 minutes left, an neutral exequror came into the site, and stayed there for 2 minutes ruining payout for all 5 of us. So we get not 5 + 5 + 17, but 5 + 5 + 11, and he get 11 for just 2 minutes in site, which is not fair, imo. So whole our fleet lost 30 millions in total.
In my opinion, there should be a specific restriction - if there is a fleet already in this deadspace pocket, no one else should be able to activate the warp gate. Another option is to make this sites looking like sansha incursions - the ones who deals most gets whole payout for their fleet.
Yes, that could be some kind of instancing, but sansha incursions makes some contest, you can either do another site or try to contest and get the reward faster. Current situation makes you, even doing a lot to have the site completed get less reward for your activity.
For example, you can try to hunt for escalations and if you are using fit that shots faster, you will beat your opponent and get the escalation. Same things are applied for almost every kind of content ingame, but not for a homefront. You don’t have any kind of protection from the people trying to make money on you. So this is not a skill, but activity design issue.
The best solution for seagulling, for both this, and fw, is to pay out based on contribution. Top contributors get the max payout, and everyone beyond that get the depleted amount. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the current system.
Could even have contribution thresholds, which would prevent people from going afk.
Also, another fleet could come and there is nothing to do - you cannot aggress on them - CONCORD will respond.
And one more thing: you can warp into site, give 1 heal cycle and warpout - you will ruin payout to fleet if you are staying in the same system the complex is.
It’s certainly unfortunate, but I think this is just the price you have to pay for running them in high sec. You could try finding less populated areas of high sec to run the HF ops to reduce the chance of someone randomly entering, or you could go to low/null for the chance to kill the other player. Instancing would not end well for the game’s health, though.
At best you could lock the gates after 5 ships enter, and not allow further entry until a ship warps out or is destroyed. Of course, this would completely negate the payout scale beyond 5 players and would be a detriment to groups who like to bring more than 5 players as a community event, not to mention the fact that it would negate the ability to gank the HF players mid op.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an easy solution for leeches in high sec HF ops.
Incursions pay out to the highest contributing fleet.
In my opinion, I don’t think that’s the right way to go with Homefronts though. Homefronts should be a way to onboard people into playing together without having to form a fleet first. Homefronts aren’t really that right now though, since you need dedicated fleet comps to accomplish the tasks.
I think what we really need is a step between highsec anoms and homefronts. Something a solo player can get involved in, but it’s more effective when run with a team. That way there’s an incentive to bring the various people together that are running them to form a fleet. Then when they have enough people, the fleet members could decide to up the ante and tackle the harder homefront operations.
I’m certainly not opposed to that. I could see incursions rolled into the Homefront system, or just have battleship homefronts that exist alongside the incursions as an onboarding mechanic into said incursions.
And of course, I have to plug my procedural mission generator concept at every chance I get with the hope that one day we’ll actually get it.
It’s absolutely imperative that mmos have good pve, since that’s what most players will spend the majority of their time doing.
PvP in EVE currently consists of blobbing or ganking, so yes - I’d tend to agree that the current PvP meta doesn’t hold much appeal for most players. People just want to fly around and blow stuff up; it’s not the losing that’s the deterrent - it’s the unbelievable odds always stacked against any kind of solo or small team play that is a huge disincentive to even undock.
Ultimately players need to be able to have PvE to replace those lost ships.
It doesn’t matter what the pvp environment is, even if it were embodied perfection, there would still be more people engaging in pve at any given moment than pvp. Especially in a game like EVE, where you will lose your assets when you die, it’s even more important to make sure the pve experience is good.
