Long time player here, done almost every activity in Eve, and I want to say I honestly think Resource Wars is very fun and I am excited to see it improved hopefully sooner than later. I think it is overall very well designed and has the potential to be a primary highsec activity and recruitment tool in Eve, but some major and easily solvable problems are holding it back. I’m torn about the shiptype lockouts, players in general hate not being able to use “their” tweaked t2/t3 hulls, but at the same time I see how the concept of bringing newbies and vets together in content is challenging to both sets of people sortof hinges on the allowed ship types. Anyway: some bullet points:
Good:
requires very active attention to survive, exciting (relative to other pve content)
love the dynamic music and sound design, the thuds of the pirate reinforcements warping in, the timer ticking, the voice warnings - cohesive and moody
the ship skins look great, but only for a handful of hulls… more please!
good paradigm for meeting new people - fleet up > mine and fight together > recruit coolguy to corp (as opposed to the usual pathway of recruit to corp > fleet up > find out you hate eachother)
Bad:
the isk per time spent is beyond abysmal, LP store is severely lacking
short duration, a massive portion of time of this activity is spent travelling, when people team up for an activity the one thing they DONT want to do is travel a lot. Perhaps sites should be more on the order of 20-30 minutes and the ore requirements increased in proportion.
racial ship lockouts prevent people from teaming up, especially newbies for which this content is targeted
the binary success/failure, there should be a reward for partial completion
rocks only last for half a mining laser cycle or about 1/10th of a strip miner cycle, this is good for rewarding attentive players but bad for teaching newbies how to mine. Maybe we could get a special mining laser from RW stores that has an appropriate cycle duration?
nonlinear difficulty, I find Level 1 to be very difficult in a Venture, Level 2 effortless in a Prospect, and Level 3 is only difficult in a Procurer only due to the distribution of the Orcas in the site
the ingame chat channel is unmoderated and filled with hundreds who exploit it for trading, advert spamming, and other highly non-RW related nonsense. Can we instead get a function in the fleet finder for a player to flag themselves as interested in a fleet (with a contextual reason e.g. Resource Wars, PvP, etc.), so that fleet commanders can look through them and invite them? As opposed to the current paradigm where a fleet commander advertises a public fleet and hopes people join (in theory, I have not seen a public fleet in probably 7-8 years).
P.S. super minor issue but I think the “lore” of RW would be cooler if it was empire corporations fighting eachother as opposed to the usual pirates versus navy stuff.
drones lose focus constantly (every 30 sec or so) against the pirate frigates. If passive, they will sit idle, if aggressive they will change target.
rarely, the Orcas can get stuck on asteroids and are unable to warp
the miniature rock debris that floats about usually disappears halfway through. Performance load balance feature perhaps, but my system is not under strain (i3 skylake at 30% consumption, amd 380x at 59C)
the empire ores have a hardcoded isk value, which registers on the Mining Ledger as some godlike isk/hr.
I’m having trouble trying to figure out a viable method towards soloing a Resource Wars site. And by viable I mean survive long enough to complete the objective with the Venture. I can handle the enemy ships no problem if I bring in my combat-oriented ship but it’s pointless being able to fight off the NPC effectively when I can’t mine at the same time. Most of the time I hope there is already a player there mining so I can help out with clearing out the NPC but I don’t seem to come across many sites that already have someone in there. Perhaps the Agency window should give an indicator on how many players are active in the site so I can look for those sites and improve the odds of success.
Level 1 in a Venture is riding the razor’s edge, even for me with tons of SP in tanking etc. I’ve made a little video showing solo level 1-3 with basic tech2 fits https://youtu.be/RSjQfLEkUh0
You can level 2 solo in a venture. Level 1 should be fairly easy. I use a passive tanked venture with an ab and just speed tank and trust my buffer to last.
Caldari rw I had a hard time on lvl 2 due to the jams. But normally made it with about 30 seconds on the clock.
Now I will admit I have high skills to be doing this and it’s not something I would expect a new player to manage.
The rest of the complaints I totally agree with. The giving t1 ships out should be removed since in order to not break the economy they have to cost more than on the market. In which case we are encouraging new players to spend more than they have to.
Instead it should be replaced with mining implants and some factional mining modules. That can even be new modules. With a focus on them costing l.p. and consuming a t1 module.
These T1 ship rewards, do the come prefitted or something? Although I would agree that implants or faction-specific modules would be nice but then CCP has to dedicate a large portion of their development time and resources balancing out any modules that can affect the economy. Especially if that part of the economy it’s affecting involves mining. Perhaps creating faction mining lasers or strip miners that only target the specific Resource War materials would alleviate that concern.
The problem seems to be lack of coordination. There doesn’t seem to be any notification on how many of these RW sites already have players in them, which ones are full or which are still empty or which are partially filled with other players. That feature alone would have made it a little easier in coordinating.
Doesn’t need to be much, but it needs to be exclusive.
Idea: An implant similar to the ‘‘Blackglass’’ implant (Reduces capacitor consumption of miners by 50-70%, 100% bonus to cycle time, 50% yield penalty.)
Idea #2: High Sec access to gas cloud harvesting equipment
Idea #3: Exclusive variants similar to the ORE equipment, with an emphasis on cycle time/cap use to reduce waste.
Idea #4: Hear me out here, an exclusive 8-high-slot variant of their racial destroyer with bonuses to ore hold. (then you have to balance guns and yield and you can use it in resource wars or regular mining.)
Secondly, what I hated in RW when I tried them out was the necessity to travel a lot to find actual sites, they are spread all over the place and I think its a bad thing. I think they should only spawn in definite constellations just like gas sites do. Then there will be enough of them for someone to specialize, to make running them a profession.
Third, rewards are still shite.
And finally,
There seems to be no one in CCP who cares about RW. Why should we?
As a new player and miner I don’t really understand what these sites are about. I have never done one and probably won’t, they seem like this obscure thing is just there I happen to notice in agency menu sometimes, have heard they are something to do with mining and not really worth the time.
Maybe if there was a bit more introduction to what this new challenges are about instead of just something else in space which I don’t know what it is I would do them.