roigon
Calamitous-Intent
Feign Disorder
76
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Posted - 2014.03.22 16:52:00 -
[1] - Quote
While there is something to be said about AFK cloaky campers in nullsec, from some of the video's I've seen some smartbombs or perhaps ECM burst, should have helped these defenceless carriers against the bomber/cov-ops tackling them and Cyno'ing up.
But regardless I think the balance of hunter/hunted in null is wrong atm. When I go hunting for ratters in null in a fleet, and I'm scouting in my interceptor the chance to catch anything is incredibly low. Generally the second local goes up the ratters warp off and I have seconds to warp to the correct anom or belt to catch them while they are aligning. Given that most upgraded systems have 20+ anoms this is more or less like throwing a die whether or not I will catch them. Sure there are methods to use d-scan and common sense to determine where a ratter is, but that simply takes time that I as the hunter do not have.
Even as recent as two years ago it was much more feasible to catch ratters. At least in my perception. I don't know if ratters have simply become more skittish or if something else changed that has tipped the balance. But only on the rarest of occasions have I been able to catch a ratter in null in recent time.
As such it's no surprise that people who specifically want to catch ratters have resorted to a technique that has a much higher chance to catch ratters. i.e. AFK cloaky camping.
In a similar vain we have a bunch of gate campers in our region that will always run away when we try to fight them. So we started BLOPSing them because that's the only way for us to force the issue.
I'm not implying this is the primary reason, but I do think there is a correlation.
There is also no incentive for the ratters to fight us. We can literally do their anoms and plexes and they will logout or wait for us to leave. Because they know we didn't go there to do PvE we came there for fights, and the second they give us a fight we will be back some other day.
Now there is of course the point to be made that they don't owe us anything, if it's more beneficial for them to stay docked up then that is exactly what they will do.
But it does pose a conflict with the perception that there is supposed to be risk in nullsec. But for the ratter there is no risk, just an opportunity cost while safely docked.
Now this no doubt segways nicely into farms&fields, but so far the ESS has done very little in this hunter scenario. The locals are still better off staying docked.
Now to boil this down to some hypotheticals.
Would you like to see nullsec become more dangerous for PvE centric null players? Perhaps not trough a direct change in the balance versus hunter/hunted. (because honestly the answer to that would be just for the hunted to dock up sooner rather then later)
But perhaps via stimulants for the hunted to undock and defend. Like say if a small gang with a combined DPS of 2k or 5k or something could for instance "disable" the anom spawning sov upgrade, resulting in a 3 -6 hours timer where it's not active. (With the sov upgrade thingy having a high enough HP regen to ignore low-DPS. but only enough HP to take a 2K or 5K DPS fleet 10 minutes to disable.)
Then they can still choose to stay docked up, but the opportunity cost will become much larger. The "stakes" of undocking now becomes the average income for the next 3-6 hours, instead of just the time the hunters linger in system.
This if not a concrete idea or anything, but just a illustration of the type of balance shift I would like to see. |