-5 plexes are abused by multiboxers so badly in faction warfare that you often can see only them doing these plexes, everywhere you go you’ll see fleets of 5 full-tanked algoses/thrashers/coraxes/caracals, these are hard to fight because you’ll need to assemble equal or bigger fleets of real players and they’ll reship fast anyway as cost of their ships is nothing comparing to LP amount they generate.
This lowers income of all FW players because these multiboxers collect so much LP that ISK/LP ratio drops significally. Also, discourages players who can’t afford multiboxing from FW as they can’t fight those alone or even with small fleets of real people. In many cases, multiboxers are only reason why systems are flipped as they often use botting software and do that for many hours every day.
So, i suggest to remove all -5 plexes from FW, including open complexes and supply caches/depots. That will increase ISK/LP ratio for real FW players and will increase more healthy competition in faction warfare.
However good the intentions were in increasing player engagement with 5 person plexes, it has had the opposite effect. Even if you do want to go in there solo and fight all 5, they will still almost always immediately run. More often than not, the only people who are religiously running these sites are the LP farmers. These FW plexes are more profitable, faster, and less risky then the old mission/tier system, which was removed under the similar pretense of being too game-able for the LP market .
Didn’t saw them running away from single ship. Good luck in fighting alone against 5 coraxes in small plex or 5 caracals in medium/large. They’re bad in real fight usually but you won’t able to win anyway in these conditions.
I don’t like compromises and those who turn FW into farming. I suggest to link FW profitability more strongly with victories over capsuleers in it. Let the beacons just give a buff to the amount of lp which given for killing other players, but not the lp themselves. If you do some beacon you need fly and kill someone for lp. It will be nice. Also for the motivation, let in the case of defeat of a faction in a war (capture of the entire territory) all stations of the empire in faction regions (even hi-sec) will become unavailable for all for a period of time.
Well, it is. Anyway, i doubt you’ll able to do that with just one logi alt as caracals have quite a range and enough dps to break tank with just one exequror. Or just kill your exequror as its rapid lights range is a bit bigger than exequror’s optimal (and much bigger with heavy missiles). Also, what is your solution for coraxes in small plex? Bunch of alts with griffins or logis?
Generally, almost nobody will hunt those even if it could be possible with just one alt. They will warp off seeing multiple ships and go to next system/plex or dock up for some time. Nobody will bother just as hunting them will be time consuming and not really rewarding.
This sounds like more of an issue of multi-boxing than the site itself. Which means the sites should be remade to make multi-boxing and botting less feasible.
One potential option would be to incorporate the hacking minigame into the sites (reskinned to fit thematically.) But instead of using a hacking module, you drop marines into the central structure.
A multi-boxer wouldn’t receive benefit from having multiple accounts in the site due to needing to engage in the hacking minigame, and the puzzles could be made complex enough with a wide variety of mechanics to prevent bots from being able to do them.
Ultimately, I do believe the idea behind the 5 plexes is a good one, as it’s supposed to encourage people to play together. Clearly there are valid issues that need to be dealt with, but just throwing the feature in the trash is a poor solution.
Honestly, as someone who’s done LP farming, I’m not a fan of nerfing/removing the -5 plexes. It’s by far easier to farm by multi-boxing the group ones. This said, folks really shouldn’t be botting, rear guard or not. CCP needs to be banning folks doing this. Even if it means a ban by IP or even Mac address.
Sounds like the site-design is done incredibly stupid/lazy if you can run them with max-tanked/long-range ships at all.
It is pretty easy to create all group-content sites in a way that you simply can’t do them in a kiting multibox setup. Maybe the FW sites need such redesign instead of removing them…