DISCLAIMER: This is a discussion about stuff that has not happened yet and is not planned to happen for at least a few months at the earliest. There was a discussion on IRC about it yesterday and I wanted to keep the discussion going. Nothing in here is finalized yet, work has not even begun on it yet. /disclaimer
Hey guys,
It is no secret that one of the things we would like to do is fiddle with the orbital strikes design. This includes a few small things like normalizing how we name everything (precision strike, orbital strike, orbital bombardment, other random names), making sure players know when they have an orbital strike available by always displaying something on the HUD instead of having the message show up and then disappear which often gets missed (I had 3 OBs the other night and had no idea... I am a bad squad leader...).
One of the other things we would like to do is make it so that NPC provided orbital strikes, the precision strike from the war barge, is only available in what is currently known as instant battles. That would mean that in in Factional Warfare and Planetary Conquest battles the only orbital support would be from EVE players. This is a pretty straight forward change but there is more we want to do.
We would like to also make it so that EVE orbitals are NOT earned via war points. Orbitals in instant battles would still be earned via WP... unless we come up with something else but at this time we are currently not thinking of touching it. For EVE orbitals though we are looking at making it so that the EVE pilot earns the orbital strike by capturing a beacon above the district. This would work very much the same way Factional Warfare complex beacons work. Also very similar to how it worked for the Fanfest tournament.
This idea however introduces a problem. Currently because it is squads that earn orbital strikes the squad leader gets to call it in. That is very well defined. If the EVE player earns the orbital strike who gets to call the strike in? There are several options to this.
- Any squad leader fighting for the same faction as the EVE pilot gets to call it in. This however leads to all the squad leaders rushing as quickly as possible to call it in as the EVE player is probably going to fire on the first target to appear. This means that often times they may be wasted and experienced players will probably rage... a lot.
- The squad leader of the squad with the most war points gets access to the orbital strike. They are the ones with the most WP and so probably the most deserving of it... but that will probably snowball in a match and no one else would ever get it.
In a Planetary Conquest match we could open it up to all squad leaders and say "hey, your match control your people" and that would be the end of it. However in a Factional Warfare match you don't control who gets in and who doesn't so it's not fair to say that and we would like to have the same system for handling this with both types of battle.
We are currently favouring the idea of giving it to the squad with the most war points, but as said above nothing is final at this point.
The three things I am most interested in hearing about are:
- What do you think about removing war barge strikes from FW and PC?
- What do you think about EVE players earning the orbital strike?
- What do you think about who should earn calling in the orbital strike?
That of course does not mean don't discuss other things relating to orbital strikes, but I would prefer to keep that discussion focused around those 3 points.
So please, let us know what you think.