I dont even know who you are lol. But glad to see I made an impact.
Edit : NVM got it. You no longer active as Mealea I take it ?
Anyhow lets not derail the threat.
Fw still needs love. Maybe join your buddy Isabella in Svipul’s revenge and try to actively PVP in FW to understand the struggle and frustration FW Pilots face when dealing with this madness of bot farms.
Anyway. Calm seas.
I agree, it does and derailing this would be pointless. And counterproductive.
I should say though that I’m not trolling and you, I guess have figured that out. I’m really sick of the bot problem causing changes to how non bots play Eve, and it seems to me that CCP is relying on players for the most part to do something about it. If that’s the case, and I think it is, we ought to do something about it like Spitfire has been doing. He’s the only person who’s given a really good explanation of what to look for (that I’ve seen) and it seems like getting four whole militias looking at this would be a good idea and not all that hard, though it could be one of those things that end up being like herding cats, I don’t know.
It’s worth a shot though.
I’m not awake enough for typing, gotta make more coffee
Not relevant to the discussion but a bit of history and context regarding the topic.
Militias previously worked together.
Amarr would capture Minmatar FW mission hubs and vice versa. Thus denying access to FW missions which were prevoiusly very frequented by bots and farmers. ( once a system in FW is captured. A hostile FW can no longer dock at its stations, thus the bots and farmers were no longer able to get missions).
It was a mutual agreement between the biggest groups in Minmatar and Amarr FW.
This “solution” lasted for about a month and ended in splinter groups within both sides reclaiming their blockaded mission hubs with minor “civil wars” breaking out on both sides. The Farmers prevailed.
This however is no longer relevant as botting the actual plexes themselfes instead of missions has become the main target of the farmers / botters.
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On the other side of warzone. Galmil and Calmil had some groups agreeing to “awox” i.e. kill their own if they are botters / farmers. This however didnt work as the few pilots that actual did this couldnt stem the flood of botters and in addition when you shoot your own, you loose standing with your own faction. Get demoted and worst case automatically kicked from your militia.
Another thing from the top of my head. Calmil tried to intercept this flood with sensor boosted killer ships and even smartbombers to fight off the botters. Specially designed vessels to catch and kill bots and farmers. Even some of Galmil agreed not to engage their Caldari Enemies when they were on hunting duty. That too was just too little.
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We tried working together and we have failed.
Another not often mentioned factor is that many of the farmers would support both sides of the war.
They would have one account in Minmatar offensive plexing a system while another account in Amarr would defensive plex. These dont have to be bots but just farmers whos interest is the status quo. The same people that incited the mentioned civil wars and splinter factions for example. Plus many of the local pirate groups have alts enlisted in faction warfare as a easy and cheap income source. These Low Sec powers also got involved and seemed keen to support any side that aimed to “unlock” the missions again.
I mention this many timew but imho the underlying issue and why OP suggests Omega only is that Alpha state allows account / character spam that even before free to play is an issue. Now people can create throw away characters with little to no consequence. The effects of which are most visible in the botting issue in general, FW and also suicide ganking.
I do not support this.
I understand that you are attempting to increase barriers to FW farming to try to limit FW farming but this isn’t the solution.
Alfa accounts give a decent amount of content to the area. I fly with a few people that just play with alfa accounts. I still have fun and they still have fun. By limiting FW to omega accounts only you lose accessability to these new players and the content they create or enable.
This is how you fix FW farming:
A concentration mechanic. Real pvpers will find a way to run off farmers. Farmers rely on running from fights. Simply if a real pvpers is there it requires the farmer to run away, so all you need to do is concentrate your pvpers and farmers together. The Frontline System is a good solution to this, where only systems adjacent to a system where the faction does not match the current owners is available to plex.
Change the capture mechanic to a dual Plex timer. This is less of a solution and more of removing an annoyance for real pvpers. Nobody wants to run a plex that was 1 mins from completing by a farmer (there would be 2x-1 mins left on the Plex). Instead, with a dual Plex timer either side will have to sit in the Plex for only the maximum time (10m novice, 15m small, and so on).
Remove the tier system. Again, this is more of removing an annoyance for the real pvpers. Right now, all the farmers stay on one side. They stay on the side that is tier 4/5, greatly affecting system ownership. All the pvpers on the low tier side not only have to Plex against the other side’s pvpers but also the farmers. This is a strong negative feedback loop for the lower tier side which is mostly controlled by the farmers. Burnout among the pvpers is high. If farmers are equally rewarded and therefore somewhat equally distributed on either side then it will be the pvpers strongly affecting system ownership.
Both of these proposals are not ideal and have been discussed before.
If you reduce gate activation distance the delay caused by the fitting check for a warp core stab will be long enough for enemies outside the Plex to point you. You want people outside the Plex to be able to get in so that they can take advantage of the gate restrictions and enable a fight to happen on terms that are dictated by the gate restrictions. This shifts the meta to the one inside the Plex which tends to be more compatible with low SP, cheap setups.
Not being able to warp out while within 30km of the Plex is also bad. This gives a huge advantage to long-range setups and shield ships, as no point is required. For example, I could sit in a small Plex 40km away from the warp in with a corm, able to both hit an enemy that slides in, be capturing the Plex, and preventing that person from leaving.
That is relevant, and reminds me how old you are. The history of things can say a lot about how things got where they are and why people think the things they do, case in point being Maurospanthiras’s reasons (I’m guessing) for wanting this to be Omega only. His reasons make a bit more sense now, but I still think would prevent a fair number of people from getting into this and that in turn could prevent them from becoming Omega later on when they discover (like I did) that they want more.
What you are saying though is that this (teaming up or forming a truce of sorts) to stop botting has been tried and failed, and that I suppose means its up to individual pilots like Spitfire, you… or, me now that I have an idea of what to look for.
And yah, I need to be more active. I’ve been mostly watching all the other changes and trying new ideas out after each one, CCP is a lot more time consuming than I ever thought possible.
Yup same reason I dont like it either. The argument is often instantly dismissed as its viewed as a sort of elitism but usualy has its roots in the mentioned issues instead.
We shouldnt punish alpha players for CCPs incompetence regarding scripters / botters and generally mechanic abusing / risk averse playstyles.
Gonna put my tinfoil hat for a minute :
What if CCP doesnt want to adress this becausw ultimately the more logged in accounts. (Even not “real” ones) the better it looks to the share holders.
Only idiots who don’t know how to use d scan get blobbed on gates… why should ccp protect u because u cant click a button?
Instalocking Curses used to be a thing in FW. They are still used inside Medium plexes now to catch frigs/dessies. Prior to the change you would also see Instalocking Gnosis on the gates catching people who would try to punch in.
Are they offensive plexing or defensive plexing?
just limit plex capturing , they can still earn lp , even more now, by fighting
Id 100% be down to focus LP gains via PVP.
The LP rewards for pvp are still a joke though.
No tinfoil required, that actually makes good business sense especially if the shareholders have no clue what’s boosting the numbers. They are just happy and look at their banking apps for little black numbers. Maybe.
Something new happened, CCP has a new Eve Academy thing going up and it looks promising to me, if they go all out anyway.
Punishing the botters is a complicated problem I guess, first, if you are CCP you have to detect them, they seem to rely on players for the bulk of this, but could instead use machine learning tools that already exist and just need to be trained on what to look for. What worries me is that I know the basics for doing this, and as far as I know they aren’t and or don’t. Worse, if I were to sit down and teach a small network to use the Eve client (or just what it’s input and output meant) to go hunting for bots I would get banned for it.
In the meantime CCP changes stuff (via intense nerfing usually) to combat this stuff and the botters adapt overnight (I assume) while the real players get increasingly pissed off (not an assumption, I’m one of them).
I have bad timing, I signed up just in time for these nerfs and changes to begin to ramp up and that are now happening at a furious pace, it took me a long time to skill train tanking only to have most of it taken away while the damage I would have been tanking was increased in the name of ballance, it took a year to recover to where I was (obviously training other stuff at the same time). Then, during this last year, they went apeshit. It almost felt targeted (tinfoil hat!) as each of the things I tried to get better at were moved further away or just yanked out from under me, I’m not alone in this.
As for faction warfare, I think it should have a few things (aside from bot removal). The first is it should be part of the tutorials (alpha and omega), but with little or no standing impact. The second is that it should have a serious effect on the game, like if the Amarr fail to hold a system it should become Minmatar, and vice versa. This would give a real objective and reduce the need for things like these silly complexes and that in turn would reduce farming, you can’t farm if you have no choice but to fight. This last one would seriously incentivize PvP and people like me, who flat out suck at it, would get better much faster if we didn’t have some silly place to sit around in for twenty minutes while wishing for some wet paint to watch dry. Alpha clones would learn fast that omega can be an advantage and either subscribe, Plex their accounts by getting really really good, or decide they want to go back to mining and rat hunting. Both of which also benefit from omega. Wanting more is a very real thing, I went from being an alpha clone and determined to staying that way to wanting to be able to cloak, once I could cloak I got really greedy and wanted even more, so what did I do? I made another omega account. Right now I have five, I’m an idiot and I know it, but but but… I want stuff!
There’s still a lot I don’t understand about faction warfare, and that’s after reading tons of stuff about it, it needs to be a lot less complex, and a lot more direct with some actual results. I like being able to get good implants cheap, but I would love to say, “I fought for that system and now it ours”.
If all I had to do to win a war was sit still in someone else’s country for twenty minutes I would own the world by now. Wouldn’t that be nice? A tyrant that actually wants everyone to be happy…
Anyhow, it’s all fixable, even the bot problem I think, if an AI can teach itself to beat the AI taught by people to beat humanity at the game of Go, there’s not much hope for someone running scripts to controll spaceships in a video game. At least not if the botters don’t figure this out first.
Learn to d scan and stop crying…
If I come home and I get my gf cheating on me, I’m sure not going to throw my bed away. Just burn the sheets.
The problem here is botting, not alpha.
The desperation of not seeing a real solution to botting may lead to this kind of thread, but it’s not the right solution.
Ngl people (likely including myself) would farm the noobs mad. Better have some frustration resistance on their ends…
This is already part of FW. Once a system is “flipped” it changes hands. Only real impact though is on the tier as almost nobody cares about some backwater low sec systems.
The complexes are a unique feature to FW that make PVP encounters special and keeps the blobs (mostly) away. If one were to remove plexes from FW it would hands down die. The plexes are designed to provoke pvp as you fight over them and regarding real players it works.
If you plex in dead end systems you wont see anybody. Even without plexes. Go plex in hot spots. Auga, Sisede or Kedama, Tama. You will get almost non stop fights
Its really simple, really… once you get started.
As mentioned earlier the systems do changw hands and usualy the time when it is about to flip or even on the ihub bash both sides get organized into interesting fleets and potentially fights. You even get a bit of extra LP for showing up for that special occasion.
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FW itsself is a great place and fun thing to do. It needs some love indeed but the base idea including the plex mechanic imho work and are an essebtil part of the experience.
I agree with you one hundred percent. I would really appreciate CCP to be more proactive with botting as there currently are several bots that have been flying around for over a month. I’ve reported them several times each and no change.
I want your Dscan if you can see Curses on them.
I’m not exactly certain, but I think they are just oplexing. That fit can run smalls and mediums pretty comfortably. I can’t remember if I’ve ever encountered one dplexing as you get way more LP oplexing than dplexing.
The Coercs alwaya Oplex.
The unfit T1 frigs always Dplex.
At least thats my observation