not really - you have to tank the rats while combat ships kill them. if you can’t tank them you die, if you can tank them combat ships are an irrelevance.
know what’s also better for survival than bringing a combat ship? a porpoise or an orca - reps, and they actually contribute to site completion times, and they provide mining links.
the optimal setup will be 1-2 orcas/porpoise + rest mining ships. there’s going to be no need or use for combat ships. i’m calling it now.
to be fair the rewards are so low that if they are the reason you’re doing the sites… then your not doing the sites.
ok, lets be constructive here.
the way sites are completed is quite frankly, poorly thought out.
if you’re having multiple roles in the site, they ALL need to contribute to site clearing times otherwise you’re basically encouraging dead weight to join the sites and that’ll just annoy people.
so enter arbitrary points system 101.
deposited 500 units of ore? great, the group in the site just accrued 500 points. they just blew up 3 frigates and a cruiser? fantastic, have 1400 points. A logistics ship has repped up some damage? fantastic, give them a few points too.
“but if you reach an arbitrary number how does that make sense that the site is ‘complete’” because either you’ve mined enough ore that the empire are happy that they’re ‘done’ with the site, or you killed enough pirates that they’re safe to mine there unassisted, or some combination of both.
dealing with non-contributors is a bit more tricky since you put that player cap on it. make each player meet a minimum arbitrary points value, i guess. however that’s going to kinda suck if you have like 50% of the sites value in ore in your hold but the ships are in unfavourable locations and you can’t get back to deposit the ore before the site gets finished and you miss out. but, that’s also kinda your own fault as you should’ve deposited it sooner and finished the site faster.
had you not put the player cap on it, i’d say calculate the site completion points value based on the top 5 (or whatever number based on site ‘size’ etc) contributors and award them payouts and everyone else can whistle and try harder next time.
After flying around for one night these are my main concerns:
These mining sites are very much NOT EVE-like. These sites do encourage co-operation but as others have pointed out; at least the lower tier sites encourage just tanking the npcs in mining ships. Cap on player count seems like a wrong approach in EVE.
Finding the sites is difficult. I suspect that the Agency window is supposed to show available resource wars -sites from further away but it seems to be bugged. In few locations it seemed like the sites spawned often while after moving around a bit I had to do a good 20~30 jumps (almost all in hisec, do these spawn in low/null?) without seeing a site I could do.
The sites seem to be fairly rare. The spawn rate needs a serious increase or it will be close to impossible to progress to further levels just because finding sites would be near impossible.
How long will the sites keep people interested? While the AI seems to be better in these and the npcs are slightly more dangerous compared to regular rats I already am soloing minor sites in brains off -mode. The sites will have to be unique from one another in some way for them to stay interesting past the first 1-2 sites. Otherwise they will be “solved” in a week and after that people will either farm them in a min-max fashion for x ISK/hour or go back to other content. (That being said I’m actually excited about seeing what the levels 3, 4 and 5 can offer.)
i hear people talking about the cap on sites.
Please remember that lifting the cap on lower sites will make it a gankers heaven for newbies.
You will have a map to find the targets and wait at entrance for targets or search sites for targets.
I do think that points only go to someone that contributes to the site in kills/logi/mining.
it may be difficult to access logi input.
Seeing this on SISI gives me the impression these sites are going to have to spawn rapidly to cope with demand or we are going to have a stalemate situation. Everyone will be wanting to get points at the start and this will move players up the rankings so there should be extra limited,minor etc sites to gain points in the first week or two. This can then be changed as appropriate later demand occurs.
It would be nice to see rats target the non-active players as a priority which would stop people warping in for point stealing.
just some thoughts…
I wanted to compare different NPC’s, so I did some Gallente sites to compare with the Amarr ones. And they really feel different. The Serpentis frigates are more fragile and deal less damage.
With resists at EM 64% and Thermal 64%, a Blood Raider frigate wrecks me for 106 damage. I am using my small shield booster almost all the time. They are also very difficult to kill, I can maybe solo one frigate in about 5 minutes (guessing) with 2x Acolytes II and perfect drone skills. The friendly NPC’s really struggle to kill these, I’m not even sure I have ever seen them do it without my help.
I calculated the raw damage output per shot to 102 base damage (don’t know how often they shoot)
With resists at Therm 51% and Kin 73%, a Serpentis frigate wrecks me for 59 damage. I can turn off my shield booster for some time, it’s not a problem. They also die easily, the friendly NPC’s can kill them on their own, and pretty fast too.
I calculated the raw damage output per shot to 56 base damage (don’t know how often they shoot)
The Serpentis frigates are complete pushovers compared to the Blood Raiders!
Yeah I also noticed some SEVERE disparity between the different npcs, gurista ones were also awful due to ECM mega-spam. The blood raider ones are without a doubt the tankiest by miles ahead of the other ones.
no more than anyplace else and this is eve
you always get the same points so there is no stealing
while the balance could use more tweaking i do like how different they are
In fairness we don’t know whats inside the random loot boxes you can get, those will ultimately decide if anyone does these or not, as I agree the T1 ship hulls and modules are a total waste of time.
didn’t know there were random boxes. thought all there was were the 4 boxes you can get for the LP
Nope, there are 8 or 10 in total per faction LP store. Half are the T1 ship hulls with T1 modules, the other half are tiered random (I think) loot boxes of unknown contents. You’d have to run like 80 sites atm to buy one on sisi because LP is kinda broken/low payout, so noone knows whats in one yet that I know of.
strange i only see the 4 boxes at the LP store
Strange, I’m looking at the Amarr one right now. Are you doing a different race? Devs may have goofed up and forgot to add them for a different LP store.
ah i was looking at the caldari one so maybe.
have you gotten any of the other boxes to get an idea of what is in them?
No, they cost around 136 LP and you get maybe 2 LP per site, so I’m simply not willing to spend that kind of time on a test server to find out if they are crap or not. (Or if the devs even have them working yet.)
Where can I find the LP stores?
Umm you sure we are talking about the same thing? Took me like 3 sites to get well over 1klp
Just dock up and open the lp store
You may need to be inn the Empires space/ station
I did 3 sites and got 6 LP (2 each) 2 trivial ones and one minor. Guess mine are bugged.
From earlier in thread