Luca Prodan
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Posted - 2010.05.03 02:31:00 -
[1]
 Quote:
But Lowsec dwellers like both of those features, and would cry rivers if they were changed.
As Don Pellegrino said, a lot of pirates, including myself, despise gateguns and, really, gatecamping is inherently an extremely risky activity that broadcasts to anyone close by the size and composition of your fleet. It is profitable (and boring as ****), but it's also really risky if you don't do it right (and most people don't--there's only so many Rancer-like systems which combine a good traffic, a pipe without any alternative paths, and a longass distance between gates. And since there's so few of them, it becomes even MORE risky. The number of times I've busted united camps is countless).
Gateguns limit your fleets mostly to RRBS--even battlecruisers are rather uncomfortable to roam in in lowsec, even though it is doable. Anything smaller (T1) is going to die in a fire.
But in the end, all of that doesn't matter. Lowsec is still a stepping-stone in the ISK-making chain between 0.0 and Hisec. 0.0 is extremely risky, even more than lowsec (bubbles, lack of gateguns so you can have sensor boosted inties catching **** at gates), yet carebears flock there all the time. They do so because there are huge alliances that have an active interest in maintaining their space there (ISK) and will take measures to protect their carebears. There's no such incentive to do so in lowsec because, well, the profit for banding up in an alliance and maintaining your territory is way less than in 0.0--so if you're gonna do it, might as well go for the real thing, right?
I don't have any specific suggestion in terms of a particular change. I do know that it's gonna take a lot and if CCP ever does a lowsec-centric expansion which overhauls the whole mechanics it's gonna be unbalanced as hell at first, since the changes would have to be huge. If you just want to tweak the area, you can go for the obvious stuff (up bounties a bit, moar roids, better moon minerals)... but to *really* fix it we're going to need a really major change. Something that sets lowsec away from the status as a stepping-stone to 0.0. And whatever it is, it NEEDS to attract *ENTIRE CORPORATIONS* to it. Attracting the stupid miner who didn't look at his AP is not going to do anything for it (except perhaps giving us more funny threads in C&P).
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