I would like us all to raise a glass and toast to the passing of a dear friend. Well… by friend I mean a long standing bug / feature / mechanic (delete as appropriate) of Faction Warfare game play.
Some of you may know it by the name of “Hans Sliding” though more may know it as “Gate Sliding”. For those unfamiliar with either of these terms, to following links will shed some light on the matter.
Since Into The Abyss hit TQ gate sliding has not worked on FW gates. There will be arguments for and against the mechanic. MHO is that gate sliding enabled some amazing conflicts to take place inside the FW plex environment and it should continue to be a feature of the game. I’m sure others will feel equally as strongly that the “Hansploit” should never have been a thing in the first place.
o7 Hans Slide, I will miss you.
Edit: Support ticket replied to on 21/06/2018 and a Bug Report sent.
This could have been a by-product of the FW gate now performing a check to exclude ships fitted with stabs. Somehow that code could have killed gate sliding. This would only be a guess though. CCP would need to investigate to discover the cause of the change. I have raised a support ticket (on 11/06/2018) requesting that, so far the ticked hasn’t been allocated to anyone. With the current server issues, expansion updates, etc. I doubt that investigating gate sliding being RIP is going to pick up meaningful dev time.
As one of the people you mentioned who feel it should never have been a thing, I’m more interested in potential clarification of CCP’s intentions on this.
We’re quite good as a playerbase at adapting to what we’re given with respect to mechanics, so dispel the uncertainty and either case will be manageable.
It seems obvious that pointing a ship should stop it warping, so the ‘hansploit’ has been pretty jarring whether a bug or not; and a contributory factor to the currently stale FW meta.
The game doing 100% of the work in avoiding engagement outside a FW plex creates a situation where potential gameplay is removed, a single pilot cannot use a well fit antitackle cruiser to engage a small frigate gang, the small gang cannot make the choice to cut their losses at the tackled vessel or gamble on an engagement. These kinds of choices are what Eve was sold to us on.
Your two examples are cherry picked to support your view and ignores the purpose of there being different sized complexes when one ship can deny every other ship content which was created for the express purpose of balancing fights. That is not happening when one ship can overwhelm another ship before it can even access this content. At least a gate camp has to worry about sentry turrets. There is no such deterrent here.
The gate slide nearly guaranteed that you could access this content. Now even a large fleet can orbit this area and even bump you, and several other people, before they can get in. You don’t even have to respect the meta that necessitated an upship or downship. You just overwhelm the opposition with denial of entry and win the objective this way outside the objective rather than playing FW inside objectives.
Smaller ships have been avoiding engagements with larger ships without the aid of special mechanics long before Faction Warfare was introduced, what you’re advocating is the idea that FW needs to live outside of conventional balance and my “cherry-picked” examples were one single example, with speculation about potential counter-play.
I’ve seen a lot of changes in FW since 2010 and my first experiences of it, but the current meta is as stale as I have ever seen. It’s confined almost exclusively to destroyer and now assault frigates down, this is due in no small part to the calculation that dominance in novice and small plexes can offset any superiority in other plex sizes. This has been compounded by a situation where smaller fleet comps have been perfectly protected from engagement by any hull size larger than themselves; meaning destroyers and frigates have greater plexing power than, and immunity from interference by cruisers upward.
Having mentioned our tendency as a community to adapt to the ruleset that we have I can’t fault the people who reach this conclusion and act upon it, nor do I think that the meta would diversify overnight.
However I feel that the current system is disproportionately rewarding to N+1 frigates and due to the narrow hull constraints the room for any creative counter-play is severely handicapped.
All of this creates an environment where there is no incentive to commit anything more expensive than a navy faction frigate or larger than a thrasher.
If you have any more persuasive hypothesis as to the why the FW meta is as deficient as it currently is, or if you disagree and think that it’s no fit place for insured t1 cruisers or battlecruisers I’d be interested to hear.
FW in general is pretty stale and has been for some time. Citadel’s made system ownership and lockout irrelevant. There is no incentive for being loyal to a specific faction. The LP tier system is fundamentally flawed and promotes nothing more than farming missions of the winning faction with an alt. This is just another middle finger to FW which at this point should be renamed Forgotten Warfare or maybe (winning) Faction Farmfare.
Gate sliding was and important part of FW Fighting, from gang fighting to solo PvP.
The ability to instalock Faction war gates on complexes makes it a big Nerf to the Faction warfare system in General. As a long time FW player, I like the low sec PvP lifestyle, and my friends in Faction Warfare.
I would like to see some more love from CCP for Faction warfare.
This is an entirely different discussion and has more to do with victory point values being the same for every completed complex, regardless of size.
Though this might be true speaking strictly on cost effective ships which can complete these objectives. Left to themselves you would end up eventually with stale meta, but what actually happens is that these ships create the ecosystem of a large chain of possible outcomes when you include non -fw players into this environment.
You must be from the southern warzone, because I see the strangest and most uncommon ships up here in Black Rise and neighbor regions. Ranging from the smallest and the biggest. Yet, what is even more wonderful is that this butterfly effect into higher tier content is often began by these feeder bait fish.
The greater plexing power is a consequence of victory point values, and is not only a separate issue but probably a bigger one. I addressed the plexing power as the weakness of cruiser upward in the FW meta (which is certainly exacerbated by gatesliding) cannot really be discussed without mentioning it.
Even the relatively conservative adjustment of normalizing VP to plex duration would retain an advantage for those in smaller ships, due to travel time between sites, the more durable NPCs and even the greater potential for wasted time when forced from a site.
The phenomenon you’re talking about here is precisely the kind of content I was suggesting that the gatesliding minimizes. It’s an option for FW groups never to engage above destroyer and take all of the objectives. Which means many of them exercise that choice, and while remaining difficult to tackle at any point other than the plex itself, and formerly impossible to tackle on the gate outside it, they justifiably announce to anyone who’ll listen that they’re winning; I don’t think the loss of an occasional inattentive pilot is a tremendous price to extract for that victory.
And if your counter scenario sounds like something you’d see in Tama, I’m ok with that. Because you’ll probably only see it in Tama.
Even the relatively conservative adjustment of normalizing VP to plex duration would retain an advantage for those in smaller ships, due to travel time between sites, the more durable NPCs and even the greater potential for wasted time when forced from a site.
I don’t understand why you think that VP values of plexes can’t be normalized for the factors you mentioned.
It has less to do with someone making a blind warp to a plex, and everything to do with reshipping and joining the fight inside a plex, and doing it over and over again, but now at the cost of feeding some random 3rd party that is camping the gates and disrupting a FW objective completely. The more remote the system, the greater the impact in having to waste time to deal with them, because they can now prey on the ships we are REQUIRED to use, but have to sideline everything for a neutral engagement and then reestablish objective control. It’s stupid and it will be a huge time sink.
Could you explain to me any reason other than having had it for years why FW players are entitled to a protection unseen anywhere else in Eve? Reshipping unmolested has never been an entitlement, random third parties who catch you should be able to kill you, being pointed should stop you from warping.
These are such basic aspects of the game, that subverting them shouldn’t be done without a foundation more solid than FW objectives requiring special protection for undisclosed reasons. Or that it’s been this way for ages.
Just because the mechanic doesn’t exist elsewhere doesn’t necessitate a reason for it not to exist in FW. If every mechanic was identical in every area of space there would be even less variation of playstyle and meta.
FW should promote easy access to pvp in a somewhat more controlled environment than null, WH space, etc. A mechanic that enables that additional level of predictability to exist in a niche area of the game is hardly killing content for the masses. Nor will its removal suddenly bring about a new dawn of things other than destroyer and down doctrines. If anything, the knowledge that Gate Sliding no longer exists may just spell the end of anything other than the cheapest doctrine possible.
In Amarr / Minmatar wz the nostalgic good old days with cruiser and BC fights near daily are long gone. It would take a total over-hall of FW to bring back the numbers and motivation for those kind of fights to return.
With all that said though, I can think of no better reason to keep Gate Sliding than “bugger off! I like Gate Sliding!”