(tl;dr Rewards from should be decided at the time of the action, not at the next warzone control spike.)
This last Sunday, Minmatar pushed their warzone control to tier 5. It stayed there for approximately 120 minutes. All 523K loyalty points that I spent at T5 control, I actually earned while at T3 control. I spent 5 hours earning those LP at T3, yet spent 15 minutes spending them at T5.
That seems wrong to me. It apparently seems wrong to many people, on all sides of the faction war.
This is an idea that Hans Jagerblitzen is pushing for. I agree with it. It makes a tonne of sense. (I have no idea if it has traction with CCP though. I can't imagine it doesn't interest and intrigue them, but you never quite know with those mysterious CCP devs.)
The LP Store pricing should be static. It should not fluctuate with warzone control. The pricing should be fixed at current T3 control prices.
What should scale with warzone control is the amount of LP that is awarded due to plexing and destroying the ships of enemy faction players. (And perhaps missioning, but since faction warfare is supposed to be a PvP activity, including missioning maybe adds too much of an element of PvE into the equation.)
If you're awarded 20000 LP for completing a medium plex at T3, then you'd be awarded 10000 LP at T2, and 5000 LP at T1. Conversely, 40000 LP at T4 and 80000 LP at T5. The numbers are hardly the point though, and can be easily tweaked as necessary.
Basically you're rewarded (or not) for the warzone control that your faction can maintain. You earn for as long as you're at a certain tier of control. You aren't rewarded because you can make short bursts to higher levels.
Even though T1 rewards crappy amounts of LP at its tier of control, players who do eventually build up a cache of LP are still guaranteed to purchase items from the LP store at a reasonable and fixed amount. If they wish to turn those purchases into ISK, they're still guaranteed to get a half-decent return on many of the available items, the same return as every faction warfare pilot, whether they earned their LP at T5 control or T1 control.
As a quick example, let's say an LP farmer earns 6000 ISK per LP under the current system. They're with the Minmatar faction, they earn their LP at T3 control, and then spend it all when Minmatar burst to T5 for a couple of hours. Under this proposed system, that same farmer will only earn 1500 ISK per LP, assuming that Minmatar spend the majority of their time at T3 control. If the Minmatar worked exceptionally hard, maintaining T4 control, then that farmer would earn 3000 ISK per LP.
The proposal is likely a solution that's very doable by CCP, both from a manpower perspective and a time perspective. You're not removing any of the faction warfare mechanics, you're simply applying an existing mechanic onto a different system (in this case, moving the scaling from the LP Store to the plexing and PvP rewards themselves.)
Makes sense. From my understanding though, it's rare that T5 is kept for very long. If this isn't because there's not enough incentive (i.e. it only takes a few minutes to spend all your LP) but because it's difficult, this might be an unintentional nerf to FW income. The last thing you want, after just getting a rush of players into FW, is having them leave again because it's not isk efficient.
ReplyDeleteBut the people that would leave are not really participating in FW to begin with. They're farming LP, avoiding PvP at all costs, and just waiting until the burst to T5 to spend their LP and make ISK.
DeleteThose same people will likely switch from Minmatar to Amarr, now that Nulli is going to try to push Amarr to T5.
If those people were to leave, then no loss really, to system as a whole.
"But the people that would leave are not really participating in FW to begin with. They're farming LP"
DeleteHow are systems flipped.
Currently they farm at T3 and buy at T5. Under new proposal, they would farm at T3 and buy at a fixed, static rate (which would be equivalent to current T3 prices.)
DeleteUnder the current system, if they make 6000 ISK per LP, under the proposed system, they would see their earnings drop to 1500 ISK per LP.
(Disclaimer: I'm not involved in FW)
ReplyDeleteLooking at things in eve like skills or standing changes you barely find something that changes your income/reward/damage/tank with more than 5% per level.
But with T5 warzone control you get 4 times as much as with T3? and with T1 only 1/4? It still sounds way too high this differences.
Wouldn't a change to something like T4: +25%; T5: +50%; T2: -25%; T1: -50%; be a bit more competitive?
Lowering the difference would lighten the impact of war zone control (what is not good) but it would prevent the huge gap between winning and loosing site. That would encourage more fightings (which is good)
Probably true. But I was keeping the current scaling so that the ideas that CCP put forth originally are still intact, just transferred to another mechanic.
DeleteThe scaling itself, is a separate issue. I think what is most important for the time being is removing the binge/purge cycle that currently exists.
(Thanks to Serpentine Logic for the binge/purge description of what happens under the current system.)
LP is used outside the LP store, IE for system upgrades. This approach makes non-LP store use of LP incredibly expensive at lower WZC levels. Perhaps the cost of everything *except* LP store should scale with WZC?
ReplyDeleteAs long the awards are increased for complexes of the owning faction. That is if Minmatar is at T5 and are running Gallente sites that are at T1 then they should get paid at T1 and not T5. Allies should be encouraged to help out with each others warzone control not to just come plex because they have no safe offensive plexes to run.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing majorly wrong with the current tier system. I think it is working well.
ReplyDeleteYour proposal would ultimately lead to no one upgrading their space at all. The tiers go so fast that you would have to constantly be throwing lp at it. We would still get lp for plexing but there would probably be even less interest in capturing systems.
I hope hans doesn't waste too much focus on this bad idea and sticks to the real problem. Plexing most efficiently done by alts in frigates that have no intention to fight.
-Cearain
Eve is probably the only game where people complain when making money is easy lol, I completely don't understand the logic behind people wanting to nerf iskmaking so they have to grind harder in the future to support their pvp habit.
ReplyDeleteZandramus
This actually isn't far from old WoW mechanics for PVP. Back before they had really good pvp rewards and mechanics that separate gear for PVP and PVE activity necessary (they added a stat to PVP items that reduced the amount of damage you took by large amounts when fighting other players, but did nothing during PVE fights, and since their item budget system for stats means a point towards one stat on an item is a point that isn't in another stat it makes these items almost useless for pve.) Back in the days of WoW before the first expansion the best of the best gear for pvp and pve came from top end raiding, involving large groups (for that game) and requiring honestly insane amounts of game play to achieve. The primary PVP area at that time was the battlegrounds.
DeleteYou could always tell when you suddenly faced a bored raiding guild that wanted to blow off steam by the fact that they could steamroller anyone who didn't have this PVE gear. There was a disconnect in the game because the best PVP'ers couldn't compete in PVP against these pve'ers not because they were worse at the mechanics of the game, but because they were facing a division of abrams tanks with paladin mobile artillery with the equivalent of civil war level gear.
The connection to EVE is simple. Some people see PVP as fun and PVE as work. FW is their battle grounds, and they see people doing PVE things (afk plexing in frigates, mining deep in SOV held space etc) as being able to make more money and therefore have better gear than you can earn doing strait PVP.
To put it in business terms PVP is in general a cost center, a necessary one at times, but still a cost center. PVE is a profit center. IF the individual/corp invests more energy into the cost center they end up capitol scarce aka under funded. They may very well be much better at that activity than someone who concentrates mostly on PVE, but the equipment disparity between them can be large enough that it doesn't matter.
a Civil war era army could take out an abrams tank, but assuming the abrams didn't run out of ammo the tank would take out thousands of union or confederate men before it fell. So yeah eve might be unique in the fact that their primary currency is at issue here, but that is because eve doesn't have the same kind of secondary currencies developed by other games and the best of the best ship can be bought outright. (including the pilot from the character bazaar) The concept of people wanting higher rewards for the things they want to do (pvp in this case) than for things they would rather not (PVE) or at least have the fact that they are better at their specialty (pvp) be the determining factor in that arena, and not have to face a tank with a musket isn't unique to eve, It happens wherever there are games that combine PVP and PVE.