Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
996
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Posted - 2013.09.11 21:07:00 -
[1] - Quote
The discussion of FW stats got me thinking about this some more. Faction warfare is the one way that Dust affects Eve in any real way for the majority of players, even if they rarely seem to realize it. Sure PC does affect Molden Heath, but let's be real. Hardly anybody actually lives in Molden Heath. When we win a FW battle it affects how much work Eve players have to do to seize control of a system. About three months ago Arzad was the biggest stronghold of the Minmatar militia. Through cooperation between Fweddit and Subdreddit, as well as other FW corps in Eve, the system was seized so quickly that the Minmatar forces were caught unprepared and failed to evacuate their assets before they lost the ability to dock at the station.
http://www.reddit.com/r/subdreddit/comments/1f3ejv/operation_arzad_and_fweddit_wubs_subdreddit/
http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2013/05/fweddit-arzad-ourzad.html
This was probably the first really meaningful example of the two games interacting with each other. Since those fights were having a real impact somewhere we had a lot of fun fighting those battles, even if they were functionally identical to public contracts. So since then we've been attempting to repeat that event. The problem is Fweddit has waltzed off to nullsec (to take space-sov from us, huehuehue) and essentially abandoned FW. They were the only group in Eve who actually understood what Dust could do for them, everyone else thinks we're irrelevant. A further problem is that with the new matchmaker we can't focus our efforts on a specific system. Granted, it did suck to race to be the first one to enter the battle only to find it full. But the gain in easy access to battles has come at the cost of agency. Our effect on Eve isn't all that impressive if the impact is entirely random.
So how do we fix this? One thing, which I mentioned in the stats thread, is every time a system is flipped provide statistics for the change. In particular, how many hours of plexing did Dust add or subtract to the fight. Make this data visible in both the Dust and Eve clients. That will get the attention of the Eve players. Adding some kind of LP reward for sitting on a planet and providing strikes will help too.
Now the big thing...let us attack districts without Eve players plexing in a system for hours first. The battles generated by space conflict are great, since it does create content in areas that players are currently located in and it makes sense that if there is fighting in space, there would be fighting on the ground. But the problem there is that it makes it impossible for us to make choices. So what I propose is to bring some of the mechanics of PC into FW. Every day let a player corporation drill through the map to a warzone and designate say...a two hour window with a number of sequential district attacks. Those scheduled attacks will become visible as open defense contracts for the other side and can be accepted by another corporation. When the time comes both teams get to load into the barge before it is made available for random players to join. I'm still not sure on this, but I think if nobody volunteers to defend then the district should be automatically flipped and a base reward of SP and ISK given to the players on the attacking team. (Don't make them grind down an empty battle, give them a reward and let them go on to another match where they can actually play the game)
This would let us coordinate with players in Eve and have a meaningful impact on FW. More importantly than that, it lets us start having an impact even if the players in Eve don't give a fig. Once we have the ability to really view the status of the warzone in an accessible way then we can point to that map and say, "We did that". By not allowing teams of purely random players to join it will, early on, result in systems flipping 100% to the attacking forces. This will grab the Eve players and make them realize, "This can help or hurt us. We need to start paying attention and asking for help from these guys."
This also opens the door to Eve FW corps creating the attack contracts themselves, eventually. These would work like the defend contracts in the scenario I just laid out. If nobody accepts the contract the attack never happens, which cuts down the randomness and forces Eve players to stop looking at Dust as some kind of uncontrollable, random force of nature in New Eden. You could even apply the idea of Eve players assigning ISK rewards to these contracts. If the corp accepting the contract wins the battle, that reward is divided up among the players from that corp in the match (and only that corp, ringers and randoms get the basic biomass / equipment payouts we have today).
Summary of the benefits:
-Allows the Dust player to have a visible effect on New Eden in a way that was his/her choice
-Makes it clear to Eve players that Dust actually does matter, and gives them an incentive to work with us
-Makes FW contracts more valuable than a public contract
-Gives an avenue for Dust corps to work together as a team outside of PC, in a way that has a meaningful impact
-Serves as a stepping stone between highsec and sovereignty, like FW does for Eve players.
-Gives players an incentive to leave their starter corps and band up with other players
-Gives a new leaderboard stat for corps that would actually matter to people: the number of non-random FW matches won (ie: the ones that give a greater reward than random battles). A corp that is active and does well in FW would be attractive to potential recruits. |