Tiberius StarGazer
Thrall Nation
Brave Collective
442
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Posted - 2014.06.04 16:08:00 -
[1] - Quote
A little bit of history on my part before I go into answering your questions.
I was in Caldari Faction Warfare soon after the 2012 nerf to LP and during the battle of Asakai, I ran only a few missions when with the Caldari but did so in a stealth bomber. Earlier this year I was in Amarr Faction Warfare and spent the majority of my time running level 4 missions (thanks to the standing I had built up while in Caldari.) I then turned pirate after becoming disillusioned with FW and spent some time hunting FW mission runners.
1. While currently this isn't a huge issue to me now, while I was in Amarr faction warfare and to a lesser extent Caldari (lack of skill and standing) Faction Warfare missions were my number one source of income, I felt in some situations that without the missions I wouldn't be able to run and compete on the wider stage with the pirates of lowsec and indeed the opposing militia. But this difference in the missions was very apparent to me, I found the Caldari missions far easier than the Amarr ones which forced me to use ships such as Vexor Navy ships to complete the missions correctly. Also as a Pirate, I found hunting mission runners in one type of racial missions are harder than another due to the fact that the stealth bomber was preferred.
2. Mainly the types of Ewar employed by the other races as previously mentioned.
3. I definitely appreciate the fact that this is a type of mission that the stealth bomber is unusually suited for and I would be hesitant to remove that from the game, it is a reasonably easy ship to train into, it falls into the training class of what I would expect to be the usual type of Faction Warfare pilot which is someone first moving into lowsec and is mainly focused on small gang frigate / destroyer / cruiser combat. However, as a conflict driver, as a content generator people hunting these mission runners find the whole experience very frustrating, often I have had to sit in a site with a cloaked ship waiting to grab a mission runner I had chased off. Agreed this provided an interesting cat and mouse mechanic, given I probably could spend the same amount of time hunting a lowsec DED site mission runner for a nicer kill and then steal the site which is much more rewarding than hunting a stealth bomber. So in line with that I would probably like to see more runners in cruisers to give opportunities for pirates and opposing factions to harass and stop the mission runners. (God bless the Astero is all I am going to say on that matter)
On balance, I would be very hesitant to make the ship requirements too high, using a T3 cruiser to run FW missions are, IMO, not in the spirit of the low entry barrier that FW offers, and putting too much on the line. You should, in essence be able to pay for the ship you are using in these sites in 3/4 runs and depending on the tier level that can be anything from 100m to 400m. (25,000 LP to whatever the T5 level is). It is hugely important the original mechanic of FW, which is the gated area restricting the types of ships and acting as a buffer for the person running the sites so they can make that choice of fight or flight. FW always has provided that barrier to aggressing pilots to allow the person in the site to make the decision of if this site worth staying in and finishing and fight or is this too dangerous and should I take that standing hit?
To that end, I feel that the time of these missions is too lenient. If you warp to a site to run it, and you are unable to complete it and have to warp out the site should vanish and the mission ends as a failure, this will encourage people to fight for their rewards more which is something that Faction Warfare plexing just does not do. But as a reward for sticking it out and taking the risk you should then of course get the appropriate reward. As extension to that line of thought, missions do not encourage ships to be PvP fit, which again discourages engagement because your PvE fit ship would never stand up to a fully PvP fit ship. They need to be redesigned to encourage more PvP fittings in these missions. The number of rats in the missions are totally pointless, there should be fewer, but harder to deal with. If anyone says these are all part of the whole tag mechanics, I would be very interested to see how many tag drops actually come from FW missions.
Just some of my thoughts on the matter, but overall, yes SB's a silly, yes encourage the use of other ships, and definitely encourage PvP encounters but in the tried and tested Faction Warfare controlled way.
Excuse the grammar and spelling I did this on fly during my lunch break at work and didn't have time to proof read it! |