Icarus Flame
Amarr
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Posted - 2008.11.23 00:29:00 -
[1]
Excellent post, I read it all.
I think that FW has gone a long way towards promoting small scale pvp. It's great for players to have a mechanic allowing them to fight others without repercussions, and without having to commit to an entirely pvp centric playstyle. One can fit out a T1 cruiser and go have some fun, without worrying about losing too much ISK.
That said, more has to be done to make FW 0.0 lite. We need incentive to capture systems, and to switch over occupancy. Otherwise the militias are just engaged in a giant lowsec cluster**** with lots of shooting. The current plex mechanics are completely ridiculous - (woohoo, 100 victory points from capping this plex!  ). Loyalty points with the militia corp at the very least would be nice.
I think that one potential paradigm shift that would be beneficial to the game would make holding the field more important than it currently is. Right now, when I engage a rifter in a belt, me flying my punisher (<3), I know that one of us will lose our ship. This means that roughly 50% of all pvp ships are destroyed, per engagement. This has two effects. The first is that people don't use the best mods they can - fly only what you can afford to lose is the first and most important rule of EVE. The second is that the killmail is, generally, the only reward that players get from a kill. Loot is in almost all cases secondary.
What needs to be done is to make the field of a fight more valuable. (RP solution: the fleeing ship, intact from its emergency warp, leaves behind valuable minerals and gases in its warp contrails. Maybe some mods get dropped from the ship.)
This makes it possible that pvp could be more profitable than it is now. Obviously, the threat of loss is what makes pvp so interesting in Eve, so I guess the loser would have to lose something of great value as well - the dropped mods, perhaps.
The problem with small scale pvp as it currently stands is that one can ALWAYS expect to lose ships, t2 mods, and such. No matter how good you are at it, it is unlikely that you will be able to make a profit. For all but the very elite, small scale pvp is simply a way to have fun. The only loss incurred from a loss, given that one was probably going to lose the ship anyway (eventually), is the lossmail. This makes small scale pvp more arena-like than it should be - stats are the only consolation. Small scale pvp should have us fighting to control resources, just as in large scale pvp, and should not uniformly end in loss.
You have my vote.
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