Ratchman
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Posted - 2010.01.15 10:41:00 -
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As the title hints, I think it may be desirable to combine the Caldari/Amarr and Gallente/Minmatar militias.
Why?
Essentially, both the Caldari and Amarr seem to have suffered from a serious brain drain of late, and they are no longer willing or able to venture out into lowsec. This does seem to be an issue periodically, as every militia seems to have suffered this from time to time (although the Caldari do seem the most strongly affected).
To combat this lack of FCs or willingness to get out into lowsec, I suggest a couple of changes:
I think the militias should be combined, so that there are only really two sides (they would still show as separate militias, but share the same channel and access on fleet finder). This should pool together some of the available FCs, allowing an Amarr FC to step up when the Caldari are lacking, and so on.
Secondly, I think four new stargates are needed (minimum). Two would link the systems of Nourvukaiken (Caldari) and Tuomuta (Amarr), and the other two would link together Villore (Gallente) and Osoggur (Minmatar). This would allow combined fleets to muster with ease.
Thirdly, the aforementioned systems could probably benefit from a few extra links to lowsec. The reasoning for this is that it's just too easy for people to camp that one gate, and it seems that members of every militia are just too lazy to make a diversion to one of the other link systems, even if is only one jump away. They seem more content either losing their ship or spending hours sat in station, rather than making an extra few jumps. I appreciate that you cannot pander to the lazy, but if you want people in lowsec, you have to widen the bottlenecks. The alternative would be to have the lowsec side of the entry gate stationed with NPCs so that the bottlenecks couldn't be camped (at least, not so easily).
Now I know people will say: just form a fleet, but it's not that simple. With the number of spies hanging around in militia, the people camping the gate know exactly when to leave the gate and avoid the fleet, and just return when the fleet departs, and resume ganking solo players. It's kind of like watching vultures around carrion when a big cat disturbs them. You have to construct things with the knowledge that the very first thing that people learn about any mechanism is how to cheat it. If you want more solo players in lowsec, you're going to have to make it easier to enter.
Finally, and I don't know how feasible this is, but I believe there is a way to encourage people to travel around lowsec, and that is to alter the LP calculation formula to include the number of jumps as a multiplier. For example, if someone jumps into lowsec, and lingers in the one system, the multiplier will remain at 1. If they make, say, 5 jumps, the multiplier increases to 2, and the more they jump through lowsec, the more the multiplier increases. However, once they get a kill, the multiplier resets to 1. Again, this is just a random suggestion, but I thought I'd throw it into the mix.
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