Tsubutai
Drifting Falling
151
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Posted - 2013.01.20 19:11:00 -
[1] - Quote
CCP Fozzie wrote:Back in the day when most of the DED complexes were moved from static spawns to the exploration system, the 1/10 and 2/10 plexes were left static because it was thought that leaving them accessible for people who had not yet learned how to probe would benefit new players. A happy side effect of that decision (that most of you are very familiar with) was that the lowsec plexes became geographical landmarks that give people a location to fight over to a certain extent.
One idea that came up from the CSM discussion that I would like your opinions on (no promises at this stage):
What would you guys think about the plexes being reintroduced with the same size restrictions but without the NPCs (or without the NPCs in the final room) as a simple location for size restricted pvp decoupled from the DED loot?
IMO, the success of the static 1/10 and 2/10 plexes as combat hotspots was down to a combination of factors:
i) Everyone knew where they were, so you could create roaming routes specifically to hit several in succession
ii) They provided good enough rewards to warrant spending a few minutes running them if there was no one to fight; this meant sitting still in one place and making yourself easy for other people to find, greatly increasing the likelihood of getting a fight
iii) They could be completed in pvp-fit ships, so you didn't have to bring a gimped pve setup or fit a probe launcher if you wanted to run them (which in turn meant that if someone interrupted you while you were running one, you weren't obliged to run away due to being fit for pve)
iv) They were limited in number, so if you got jumped in a plex before finishing it, you couldn't just move a few systems over and farm a different site; you had to either stand your ground or cede the plex and go do something else
To be successful, any potential replacement would have to reproduce all four of those factors; the gated pvp arenas you proposed would fail because they don't have good enough rewards to warrant sticking around to run them if there's no one there to fight.
The idea of replacing them with plexes that drop tradeable tags that could be redeemed for sec status (and/or faction standing) gains is more interesting, although it would depend heavily on their market value. A payout of tags that could be sold for 30-50m would be about right, putting them in the same ballpark as FW small plexes at a decent tier. That would also help to eliminate the regional disparity in the values of the old static plexes, where the blood/sansha/serpentis statics dropped relatively low value deadspace loot (ANPs, SARs, and prop mods, which were typically worth ~30m at most) whereas the gurista and angel plexes could drop much more valuable c- and b-type shield boosters.
I'd also like to address one factual inaccuracy in your post:
Quote:The benefits of this change [removing the static plexes] will be wider access to the pve content provided by these plexes and hopefully more people exploring lowsec as a whole
This is impossible - under the new system, the 1/10 and 2/10 plexes only spawn in highsec, so there is no way that the change would provide any impetus to explore lowsec. |