Frontline System. Remove tier. Change FW missions. LP tax. All would be good things.
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Sure while you are in the FW but what about when you leave? your standings are ruined forever and it would take 1200 lvl 1 missions to repair your -8 to -10 faction standings which is just not reasonable.
And your faction standings don’t need to be effected for police to shoot you in high sec it can just be because you are in the other militia.
Yea they are, sometimes you want to keep your faction tier to lvl 3 so that everyone doesn’t join your side and farm the crap out of your lp and devalue it but becuase of bots all the systems go to 99% and become vauln and then becuase of that lots of the militia guys go and flip the system.
This is becuase of bot’s, which makes it imposible to hold your tier and maintain a good system control balance.
also ontop of that if you push passed 3 often your enemy will just stop playing in FW and you have nothing to shoot so bot’s also practically make it so you have less enemies.
Which of your characters are in FW btw becuase it sounds to me like you don’t have any actual experience in FW but are looking at it from a pure logical lore perspective which isn’t enough imo you need some actual FW experience.
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As the Co-Head of the United Standings Improvement Agency [USIA], I can tell you this is a gross exaggeration. I have personally blitzed L1 missions in order to go from near -10 base standings to above the -2 effective “Deathline” to get access to higher level missions (and higher level storylines) with a few different factions in a relatively short period of time. I’ve done this for both empire and nullsec factions. It’s not one fifth as bad as you make it sound if you do it right. (I have some ideas for improving standings mechanics in general that are not specific to FW.)
Furthermore, you don’t actually have to fight the faction police. If you don’t fight them, then you won’t lower your standings. It’s also worth noting that if you are on grid with them and more far away from them (a couple hundred km), they don’t follow you; this fact can be used to essentially plant them on grid where they don’t bother you. They take a while to spawn and they don’t hit hard, so it is not problematic to hit up tradehubs in their regions - I speak from experience on that point. I’m not going to name the characters I use for FW other than to say I have plenty of experience and prioritize flipping systems, which is one of the reasons I focus on smaller plexes: they help flip systems more quickly than larger plexes since they give you the same gain but in less time.
Even if I was mistaken on that individual point, the other points remain intact as well as the solutions, and that includes the secondary effects those solutions have on botting.
sigh (edited to be more friendly sorry)
Those farmers do massivly invest LP into the ihubs right now when it is the right time for them to do it. Seasoned FW players do not dumpster LP into the ihub for nothing. We do it do control the flow of farmers and bots. We stop donating when our faction tier would start getting too high. For PvP players who are willing to do some plex legwork it is best to keep own faction tier around 3 so it is not too intresting for farmers to be on your side but you don’t have to fight the farmers on the other side either.
Please @Archer_en_Tilavine could you tell me on which character in which warzone you did have your FW experience? From what i read i have a hard time believing that you did too much of FW yourself but i may be wrong and i don’t want to mock you or derail this too much with ad hominem arguments.
Let’s try to nail down the core issue again:
Yes obviously everywhere in eve there are bots. But FW is the only place in eve where “sov” changes are decided by bots (and regular farmers) instead of actual committed players. This makes players feel unimportant. They don’t have any influence. The Majority of shifting in the warzones is done by bots … so why should i do plexing myself if we have no say in this?
This fight against treadmills is what exhausted players which finally left FW.
Seriously, solo-snaked-garmurs are not a reason to add a new type of plex. Those willing to get better quickly learn how to counter that kind of playstyle even with a general purpose frigate. And now there’s a bunch ewar navy frigs out there and they’re quite affordable to any rookie that successfully captured 1 or 2 plexes.
I suspect you are quite detached from the NPE.
Faction frigs are neither affordable for new bros nor are they effective without significant SP investment.
They cost 10k LP. I’ve been welping firetails around like they were t1 frigs after just several days of active fw.
Core fitting skills, racial frig 5, thermodynamics 3 - that makes them relatively effective.
T2 weapon systems make them quite solid.
All of the above fits within a month training queue. Maybe even less with all those daily SP rewards they give out these days.
Countering slippery ones is a lot more about clicking sequence, timing and positioning rather than SP. Which is learned by communicating with experienced pilots - the same goes for skill training priority.
Racial frig 5 takes significant training time, and is even impossible to train for alphas. And without it you lose significant dps.
I encourage you to start a new char, even better if it’s an alpha. And try to get into some novice pvp.
And try to appreciate how disengaging ‘wait for a month (2 months for an alpha) before you even try pvp’ sounds.
I try to be positive when i encounter new bros and tell them what they could have done differently to increase their chances of success, but the truth of the situation is that there is nothing a new player can do against people like this:
The optimal answer is always: run away.
Alphas are formidable in fleets
PVP is best done in fleets
EVE is an MMO - PVP mechanics should be designed to strongly encourage fleets
The inability to defeat opponents solo can be overcome by fleeting
Alphas will prevail in novice sites if they fleet
Not seeing a problem here - the solution is and always has been to fleet
(The game is also more enjoyable when you fleet)
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Okay if we talk about alphas - they train at half the normal speed. Racial 5 is important of course but even with racial 4 is enough to hold the adversary in place and stay alive long enough for reinforcements to come. That is if you know how to fly your ship and have a friend nearby.
Even a seasoned pilot in an alpha state can do very little in solo pvp
Believe me, I remember it quite clearly - how confusing is the amount of skills you to need to train, how the skills you need for solo conradict the skills needed for a fleet op, how your wallet is barely tanking the ships you lose while trying to earn more lp. And of course how disengaging are those numbers for any level 5 skill. The only difference is - free subscription didn’t exist back then.
And noone says you just have to sit and wait. Keep flying whatever you can fit, lose ships and gain experience, run away when your losses gain critical mass and, of course, join fleets and talk to vets.
And about the killmails you linked - a new player can always try their chances with a seboed arty thrasher or something similar - low risk, high reward.
I am usually the person saying join a gang, However:
The vast majority of pvp in faction warfare is solo.
The vast majority of pvp in faction warfare is also consensual.
You can’t force a fight where both sides bang the drums and form up and you can’t ambush anyone because of gate mechanics. So simply by being in a gang you are limiting your engagements to gangs of similar size/strength to you. Otherwise the target just leaves. As such gangs are very rare in faction warfare. Public fleets don’t even happen in the gal/caldari warzone. So if your suggestion is that a new player just join a fleet, what if there is no fleet (which is the vast majority of the time)?
Keep in mind that you’re essentially telling players to do nothing. Or to keep flying around and running away when a faction frig appears on scan (and again this applies to the vast majority of encounters in faction warfare).
Or…
We could just make a tech1 frig plex that will dramatically change the advice you guys give to noobs.
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Allow me to illustrate it in numbers:
In a 24 hour period there were 46 fights in Black Rise that could have taken place in a novice site. 45 (98%) of them were solo fights.
Of that 45,
- 18 (40%) were faction frigs winning against non-faction frigs.
- 11 (24%) were faction frigs winning against other faction frigs.
- 14 (31%) were non-faction winning against other non-faction frigs.
- 2 (4%) were non-faction frigs winning against faction frigs.
The one non-solo fight was a gang with a faction frig killing a non-faction frig.
This kind-of-sort-of-not-really superficially addresses a symptom without addressing root concerns - all while introducing new problems.
Regarding fleeting:
- If players insist on soloing in an MMO and then are complaining they can’t find fights they can win (or end up complaining that they keep getting ganked), that’s 100% their problem that they chose to play solo. I have little sympathy for that.
- It is not difficult to create fleets that others will join in FW. Fleets fill up quite quickly. VERY quickly. It also helps that CCP recently released a patch where fleet adverts no longer collapse when the second-to-last person leaves; this means that standing fleets are much easier to set up than they were before. Newbies need to take the initiative to form their own fleet, and it is our job to encourage them to do so. One major reason I encounter as to why newbies are hesitant to form fleets is because they are under the erroneous assumption that they have to lead the fleets they form, which is not true - just because they organize a fleet does not mean they need to lead it; they can (and should) let someone else serve as FC to a fleet they put together until they become more knowledgeable and experienced.
The numbers you’ve presented - if accurate and in context - solidify the case that Toddler plexes are not necessary: non-faction frigs are already in abundance, and are not losing against faction frigs to an extent larger than would be expected or desired. Faction frigs should win most of the time, plain and simple, and navy frigs aren’t expensive. Faction frigs already have to think twice against engaging gangs of non-faction frigs, and it is not difficult to bait such fights if the fleet is initially scattered about in different plexes in the same or adjacent systems. They won’t know that there’s a fleet if the fleet isn’t clustered at the beginning of battle.
If the gate mechanics are so problematic, the gate/site mechanics themselves could be re-evaluated instead of introducing Toddler plexes, thereby addressing root concerns without introducing a site that provides fake PVP while drawing players away from real PVP. (Even filament PVP is more “real” than Toddler plexes.) For example - just brainstorming here - CCP could consider removing the gates entirely but make these beacons only warp-table by qualifying ships. This is a less radical change than the introduction of mutaplasmids. CCP could also consider applying on-grid rulesets similar to the new rulesets being applied to the upcoming new-style ESS (which apply within a 75km radius of structure). I mean shoot, acceleration gates to non-open sites could be replaced with gates leading to complex instances where multiple systems could share the same instance to increase density (and decrease the offensive/defensive value of Local intel) - shoving more subcapitals onto the same complex for three-way militia vs militia vs pirate battles whether or not these players are actually fleeted (obviously they can coordinate more easily if they are.
I’m just brainstorming here, not embracing or rejecting any idea. The point I’m making is that I’d rather examine the root issue - gate/site mechanics - than introduce Toddler plexes.
The problem isn’t that they insist on playing solo. It’s that soloing is the optimum way to find fights because gangs simply don’t get fights. No one will willingly engage a gang and no one can be forced to engage a gang.
If we do force people to take fights against gangs this will almost invariably favour the vets who are already part of a group and capable of forming larger fleets.
The new mechanics in ESS sites will be awful. There’s nothing wrong with mwd’s or warping out of what are clearly one sided fights.
Far better to allow opportunity for both. FW has an excellent solo community and there’s no need to mess that up.
King of the Hill sites will certainly attract gangs and a ‘toddler’ plex solves a major road block for new players getting into pvp whilst being almost completely inconsequential to vets.
The numbers i present suggest that using a tech1 frig in novice sites results in losses roughly 70-75% of the time. And that’s not noobs losing 70% of the time. That’s vets as well.
Now I have no expectation that noobs should have an easier time against faction frigs. I have an issue with everybody’s expectation that noobs should face off against vets in faction frigs and somehow be able to learn something, besides that they should just run away and come back when they are not noobs.
This is entry level pvp. And it’s essentially; come back when you’re not a noob.
I don’t follow. What I’m saying is: One fleetmate is at a site. Target engages perceptively-weak fleetmate. Fleetmate tackles and survives long enough for fleet comes to the rescue. Target dies to fleet. Target would not have known that there was a fleet involved at the time of engagement because the fleet was not present at the time of the engagement. Baiting is easy in FW. Very easy. When vets hunt, they don’t look at a non-faction frig and think “this might be bait” they think “look it’s another easy kill”; you yourself indicated the statistics support this, but the statistics can also count against the vets when newbs are educated enough to operate in gangs as long as the gangs only get together after the target is tackled and not before.
I’m not suggesting the exact same mechanics be applied to FW, only that it is worth brainstorming if proximity (radius) or on-grid rulesets should apply. Nullsec PVP is its own thing with its own culture and set of expectations, particularly since there is a pool of money and ratters/anti-ratters involved, not going to pretend that applies to LS or FW specifically.
Works in some situations. Like the one and only gang fight in Black Rise during that 24 hour period was a tackle slasher tackling a non-faction frig and waiting for a comet to come in to do the actual fighting.
But this is a rare thing (So whilst everyone currently has the opportunity to form gangs, they just aren’t.) and funnily enough faction frigs have the dps, projection or the speed to mitigate tackling. So if you’re ganging up on something, it’s more likely a non-faction frig anyways.
Anyways, even of we disallow faction frigs from novice sites, there’s nothing stopping people from doing this tactic against faction frigs in smalls and mediums. And non-faction frigs can gang up on non-faction frigs. Like i said before, encourage both.
I’m absolutely not telling the noobs should do nothing while they train skills. I’m telling quite the opposite - they should pick fights, lose ships while they can and learn better and worse engagements. When you run plexes solo, you usually pick a relatively quiet system. Most of the time you close a plex or two before somebody decides you’re too lonely. Yes, sometimes the opposition comes right away, and sometimes you sit there for an hour until you decide to look for action youself. So, when you’ve closed a plex or two you have esentially paid for your ship and maybe 1-2 additional reships. That’s when you seize being risk averse and start taking chances.
Following the same logic the navy frigate of their militia’s race is not really a big deal for a new player. That is exactly why they’re in the majority in the warzone - those are not the pirate frigs mostly, but the cheap navy ones. A navy frig can give the new player the edge on regular frigates so then can actually score a kill on something.
A toddler plex not gonna solve anything since the noobs still gonna be engaged by people more experienced than them with better guns and more complicated fittings - and that’s where the SP gap gonna strip them of all chances. And since the best entry level ship class for solo plexing is actually a destroyer, the noobs are not gonna stick to those toddler plexes anyway.
Bottomline, growing noobs in safety bubbles not gonna work - let them die and let them learn.
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You did though.
And as for ‘get into fights and learn whilst losing’. The problem is that there is nothing to learn other than they should run away from faction frigs.
You’re either over estimating the payout of sites or under estimating the cost of navy frigs.
Seriously, start a new character and do this in practice.
So you’re saying vets will stomp noobs in non-faction frigs, but noobs are somehow supposed to play against vets in faction frigs?
So which is it?
Putting noobs in faction frigs won’t necessarily get more kills either. They’re getting fewer fights from other players that aren’t interested in facing a faction frig and are ineffective in fights they do get because of missing skills. Remember fights are entirely consensual. No one is facing the faction frig that doesn’t want to.
I disagree that destroyers are the goto ship for solo pvp because destroyers are expected to take on assault frigs, bait tackling jaguars, tackling interceptors and tech 2 destroyers. There’s a reason destroyers are less common than novice capable ships.
If you read through your and archers posts and look at all the hoops you expect new players to jump through before doing entry level pvp.
Or…
We just take faction frigs out of novice sites and dramatically lower the bar for new players. And allow an environment that demonstrates the ‘rock-paper-scissors’ of eve’s ship design rather than the suggested ‘go faction or get ■■■■■■.’
Read carefully - and you’ll see that I did not. I said, becoming a minor threat rather than a helpless victim is not that much training time, and you can still do things while you’re at it.
This is still a thing to learn. And getting out alive after you’ve engaged is the next thing to learn.
Novice plex pays 10K in tier 2 when you plex offensively. Medium pays 25K and can be done in t1 destroyer even with t1 guns. Your racial navy frigate costs 10K LP in LP store +1,5 mil maximum on top of that.
I have a bunch of low-sp characters some of which are in fw. But I cannot pretend I don’t know how to use dscan, what’s the difference between orbit and keep at range, which ships are expected to kite or brawl. And these are the things that matter most.
I’m saying, it matters very little if the noob in a non-fation frigate engages a vet in a faction or non-faction frigate. The odds of the former killing the latter are still very slim. But a noob in a cheap (they are cheap, mate. when you’re in fw they’re cheaper than a t1 dessie) navy frigate can take their chances against a non-faction one. And there will be ones willing to take that.
I said solo-plexing, mate. When you oplex in a frigate even a small rat can be a problem - especially if you’re a new player. But a destroyer - thrasher, catalyst, coercer - will kill medium rats easily. And when you skills get better, you can even try larges. So basically a destroyer is your working horse to buy faction frigates. And yes, you can take chances against frigs and dessies coming after you.
I say that bar is in a good place. The only way to learn is by your own mistakes. A smaller complex would change very little for new players, would have to give even less rewards and can be potentially abused by blobs of fw big players when they try to win by numbers.