Snaketzu
Gallente M. Corp M. PIRE
|
Posted - 2011.05.04 20:22:00 -
[1]
Farms and Fields: There is already a mechanic in use in the game to attack farms and fields, and it just got a lot more powerful again since most alliances now have their most valuable space concentrated into a very few low truesec systems easily pinpointed on Dotlan. It's called cloaky afk camping, where a player leaves a cloaked ship (and the threat of a cyno hotdrop) basically afk in a system for days, even weeks. This is a widely discussed and widely used tactic to attack the morale and economy of your opponent. The problem I have with it is this: it should not be possible for ANY player to accomplish ANYTHING of any VALUE unless he is actively at his keyboard PLAYING his character. AFK cloaky camping is the same thing as botting in this sense and needs to be nerfed. Hard. Either put a module timer on cloaks so you can't afk your ship in space until next downtime, or introduce some probes into the game that can detect cloaked ships, albeit with long scan times or some other similar difficulty. Neither one hinders an active pilot much but puts an end to the afk camping posthaste.
I'm all for having a legit way of doing this instead, that even small gangs can accomplish. Having "raiders" being able to accomplish something returns much of value to the game, including penalizing large power blocs for concentrating all of their forces in one system. Right now there is little risk to such tactics, since system sov can't be decided decisively in a short period of time (and it shouldn't be). But somewhere in this game the usefulness of small, mobile raiding fleets has been relegated to the level of "I'm bored, let's go roam and see if we can kill something", and I think that's a shame.
Some of the better and easier ideas involve making existing structures vulnerable to disruption by smaller units than sov warfare fleets. IHUBS and certain station services like refining and production are excellent targets for disruption. Disrupt pirate entrapment? No anoms spawn until it's fixed. Disrupt an ore prospecting array? The system suffers a certain percentage of backslide in industry activity. These are just examples that would need balancing, and also possibly a limit placed on how many times these structures can be vulnerable in a downtime period. Having these structures vulnerable to disruption through a different method than HP prevents "blob" vulnerability, gives defense fleets time to form and react, and could give the archeology and hacking skills and modules a new lease on life. Once caveat: no more than one module per ship, if having more modules active has an effect on the amount of time. We don't need to give rise to specialized "disruption" fits and ships. Make the attacking gang trade off a midslot per ship for how much faster they want it to move, and put a limit on it, say 10 modules or so. I'm just freeform brainstorming here but you get the idea.
Two more ideas more industrial based: Minerals and ores are going to have to be fixed soon anyway. In case nobody has noticed, the price of mega and zydrine are tanking fast, and there's nowhere to look but all of the new miners mining ABC in gravi sites in rental nullsec systems. There's way more of these high end minerals hitting the market now than demand needs, so either blueprints need to be updated, ABC rocks need to be nerfed, or make high end ores more valuable because of the mix of minerals they refine into, not that they provide an overabundance of a particular rare thing that can overflow the market. This introduces more low end minerals into nullsec, which is what builders need to build there for the local market instead of importing. At the same time, it's past time that reprocessing got nerfed. It's ridiculous to me that anything can be recycled into its components and then rebuilt with no loss. You should never, with perfect skills and location, be able to retrieve more than 90-95% of what went into something when you recycle it.
|