Passari was a uniquely good place to measure the effect of players and rats on progress. Being a small lowsec system, we knew exactly which player fleets were running at all times. The system had pro-Edencomm fleets for the extended EUTZ (around 08:00 to 23:00) for two days, and was (almost) NPC only for USTZ. This split makes each effect obvious.
The data shows that:
- Without players, trigs win around 3-4%/hour (here, 30-35% over USTZ).
- Small (10-20) pro-edencomm fleets can reverse this, with a similar progress gain while running.
It follows that:
- Caldari systems will fall in around half a day if no players get involved. This is consistent with trig NPCs winning Manjanakko (right after) in less than 12 hours.
- Defending Caldari lowsec with 10-20 people needs an around-the-clock effort (at least 12 hours a day or so) just to ‘draw’ with the trig NPCs.
In my opinion, this is not balanced or a good player experience.
There are not enough players to regularly contest the trig NPCs in Caldari lowsec. There are fairly few lowsec FW groups that can repeatedly field 10-20 players for 12 hours a day for FW (nullsec, stop sniggering in the back), and even fewer who could for essentially PVE grinding against rats. If they do, it’s frustrating to watch progress disappear whenever they inevitably pause to sleep etc.
The consequence is that most lowsec Caldari systems will quickly fall uncontested (as we’re seeing). These trig systems then make it progressively harder to roam lowsec or do/resupply FW, both of which reduce content. For example, there is now no easy way to fly from Caldari highsec to the current flashpoint systems, which is especially hard on the new players for whom FW is perhaps intended. This will get worse as invasions continue.
Besides the consequences for FW (which, in fairness, is the kind of shake-up CCP promised!), players need to matter. To matter, the NPCs (trigs vs faction) need to be roughly balanced. While ‘balanced to within 10 players’ is pretty even for highsec, that’s a huge skew in lowsec when you consider the player-hours needed.
I would make the same argument for the kybernauts - if the trigs are getting auto-smashed in, say, lowsec Amarr, I think that would also need tweaking. Maybe someone else has data there.
Some choice quotes from Discord:
I feel the effort that we had to go through to save this system was utterly ridiculous
it’s a real uphill battle, that is no fun…
wtf, waste of 12 hours yesterday
We actually timed out a Caldari low sec in Passari, considering how bad is the State, it was a massive win for Edencom
Caldari sucks butt
@CCP_Delegate_Zero @CCP_Convict Thank you for working on invasions and talking to players. I hope the data is useful. You can verify the weak Caldari Navy easily enough by spawning an invasion and letting it run.
Some notes. Progress was reconstructed from timestamped posts on calmil and EDI discord. Edencomm fleets were approx 10-20 people. The Kyber fleet had approx. 25 people. We assume the rats are a constant effect. Data does not include the first day, because we didn’t post about it.