
Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit Test Alliance Please Ignore
1993
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Posted - 2014.03.31 05:35:00 -
[1] - Quote
What incentive is there to spend large amounts of isk trying to take a district and manage the infrastructure if the moment the bulk of your corp goes to bed someone will attack and take it undefended? Timers are critical to land ownership actually working as a game mechanic. I'd say that even the once a day battle is too frequent, given the number of people actually playing this game and the number of temperate planets in lowsec. For the current timer based mechanics to work and all of non-FW lowsec being conquerable we'd need at least 50,000 people logged into Dust as a daily peak, not 4000 like we have now. And that's just with one planet type - more are coming, which will further multiply the number of potential PC battles. Getting rid of timers is the most foolish response to the problem of PC and I see it proposed over and over and over by people who seem to have not given it the slightest bit of thought.
PC is in the state it is now because district locking actually worked for a long time, and the dominance of cheesy mechanics like invulnerable rooftop forge gunners which sucked any fun out of actually playing that game mode (made worse by having to do it every damn night). Now that locking is fixed and the worst of the cheeseball tactics no longer work the landscape of PC may start to change once the blue donut starts to crumble. Slowly, because the incumbent landowners of PC have become absurdly wealthy though the lack of attention paid the to state of the game mode and can outspend anyone trying to take a piece of the pie.
Politics is not an answer. Politics and a boring game mode with a grueling time commitment is what gave us the blue donut. It will exist whether the timers are for 7 days, 24 hours, or 2 hours. Molden Heath was an experiment in how to do playing owned territory. They intentionally picked a region with far too little land for everyone to be in on it, so that we would fight a lot and find the problems. The experiment failed. At this point I don't think there is any way to redeem the current system. It'll need to be scrapped and replaced with a new game mode. |