Re: forcing folks to kill more NPCs, especially smaller ones

It's not a bad idea, but you'd have to balance things out a good bit. Currently, there's literally dozens of NPCs in each mission. Forcing you to kill them all significantly increases your completion time, hence exposure in the mission itself, hence PvP risk. I feel the current times are about right (more or less) in terms of balancing exposure in the mission....

In short: Forcing the destruction of smaller rats as well as the BS rat not only helps to equalize income (adding time and requiring appropriate ship) potential twixt the various FW activities, but the hit to farmability will lower the number of run missions -> individual mission payout increases -> viable revenue stream for PvP'ers (remove missions from tier modifier and that viability goes interstellar).

NOTE: I do not advocate cleaning the rooms, quite the contrary. Mission target BS almost all have an elite escort consisting of 1-2 frigates and 1-3 cruisers (if I remember correctly) .. those are the ones I want added to the kill list, can even change them vanilla rats and still achieve the goal of making bombers mostly obsolete.

As for current times being "about right";
Plexing LP yields has been accepted as being too high relative to risk/time involved resulting in consequent "NERF!", then how can 5+ times that yield with equal or lower risk ever be considered right?
Missions yields ~10k+ LP (was 20k+ once upon a time) and takes 1-2 minutes .. to get that kind of payout from plexes you have to spend 10-20 minutes. We could double, triple or MOAR! the time missions take to complete and still come out ahead as missions not only give LP but more often than not spawn in friendly (ie. enemy can't dock) systems due to the way system occupancy favours flipping the entire warzone to maximize that infernal tier and is thus generally safer to engage in than O-plexing (which is where the plexing LP is).

Note: If you add webbing towers or webbing frigates, it will negate the feasibility of doing it in a Assault Frig and possibly a cloaky T3. Additionally, Gallente and Amarr missions will still be harder due to the EWAR.

The 4 lvl FW missions is the main reason why cal mil is still exist. Your suggestion to "balance" it will ruin caldari militia.

Ruin Caldari farmers maybe.
The actual Caldari militia will still remain.


There's a pretty good reason why Caldari has always had a huge number advantage over the rest of the militias in pure numbers, and it wasn't pvp'ers.

EWAR balance is something that will have to be addressed one way or the other, regardless of the addition of webbing frigates. I'm not terribly keen on the idea of AFs being able to solo L4s anyway, so losing that potential scenario doesn't concern me too much. Opinions vary, of course.

Dead Men Tell No Tales already has web/point frigates, which haven't proved to be much of a problem for T3s yet. Most of the fime I just face-tank the entire mission anyway in my Proteus; dual-rep cloaky Proteus can face-tank about 1100DPS so IMO missions can be done in survivable ships that can run around the warzone at an acceptable level of risk.

Every PVPer farms ISKs. Most of new PVPers do not want to learn caldari ships for pvp and for PVE they want to learn mostly drones. that is hard work to make them join calmil. The main motivation to join calmil for now is more easy money. They can spend less time in PVE and have more free time for PVP.
So if FW gal/cal missions will have equal or near equal difficulty, some new pvpers will quit and many will not join calmil in the future. The result of such changes will be less farmers and pvpers in calmil and more of them in other militias.
I don't now about other alliances but such changes will definitely hit OMG's recruitment.

Every PVPer farms ISKs. Most of new PVPers do not want to learn caldari ships for pvp and for PVE they want to learn mostly drones. that is hard work to make them join calmil. The main motivation to join calmil for now is more easy money. They can spend less time in PVE and have more free time for PVP.
So if FW gal/cal missions will have equal or near equal difficulty, some new pvpers will quit and many will not join calmil in the future. The result of such changes will be less farmers and pvpers in calmil and more of them in other militias.
I don't now about other alliances but such changes will definitely hit OMG's recruitment.

Every PVPer farms ISKs. Most of new PVPers do not want to learn caldari ships for pvp and for PVE they want to learn mostly drones. that is hard work to make them join calmil. The main motivation to join calmil for now is more easy money. They can spend less time in PVE and have more free time for PVP.
So if FW gal/cal missions will have equal or near equal difficulty, some new pvpers will quit and many will not join calmil in the future. The result of such changes will be less farmers and pvpers in calmil and more of them in other militias.
I don't now about other alliances but such changes will definitely hit OMG's recruitment.

Assault Frigates can solo some L4 missions in highsec. So keeping with that theme, an AF should be able to do it in FW L4 missions. I don't like the webbing tower idea, I think webbing frigates would be preferable. Webbing towers could be easily primaried by a SB and killed in 2 volleys. An assualt frigate would have a hard time with webbing towers, but could deal with the webbing frigates. That would make it balanced in my opinion, as it would give AFs a chance in doing FW L4s, but kill off the solo bomber runs.

Reward: At the base Tier 2 level. The Average Payout for a Level 4 is 20kish LP plus a couple million ISK per mission. This can amount to anywhere from 30Million Total Isk to 60 Million Total ISK depending on the market values of LP. Obviously the extremely high payout of 90K LP at Tier 4 is too large of a disparity to be ignored, which is why I insist it be dropped to base Tier 2 Rewards.

any news on this issue?

As folks have previously said, no L4 mission balance will be done until they get their new content tools online. Too much effort / work / reauthoring to make it worthwhile otherwise.

Extremely difficult L4 missions give Gallente too much of an advantage. (tm)

We Gallente have a saying: "CCP created the Gallente Militia to train the Fighters..."

(with apologies to Frank Herbert and David Lynch)

My lord, I suspect an incredible secret has been kept on this region: that the Gallente exist in vast numbers - vast. And it is they who control Black Rise.

IMO they should still be able to be done in a stealth bomber with some effort. .

You do realise

You do realise all races part from gallente can be done in a bomber right gals have to use T3s with eccms in the mids cos of jams

Locking each agent for 24 hours if a mission is declined should rattle things a bit.

The issue people have is that SBs can run these missions for some factions, but not others.

1)Put the warp in beacon into the rat spawn.
2)Remove gates
3)Improve range and tracking of rats so that stealth bombers need to get closer.
4)Get rid of ewar rats. Every time a rat ECMs you for 20s 5 times in a row God kills 7 kittens.