John Demonsbane
Unorganized Ninja Infantry Tactics
League of Infamy
2625
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Posted - 2014.04.08 14:14:00 -
[1] - Quote
The real problem, as others have stated, is that it's too hard to get into PC. Smaller corps just can't do it. This leads to a a vicious cycle where nobody is able to gain the necessary experience to be competitive and the PC player pool gets smaller and smaller. Better players should basically always win, but without a way for corps to get in in the first place, nobody gets better. This goes back to the ludicrous absence of team deploy, but that's another discussion.
I'd have to say that the best concepts geared towards increasing participation (not necessarily the exact solutions offered, just the concept) I've seen here are the following:
1) Buying clone packs (or whatever we switch to) should be more expensive the more districts you hold (starting at a nice round number like 5). This gets rid of some of the incentive to land grab because at some point you will get diminishing returns.
2) Opening up more land. Done properly this increases participation as there is more available. You would need to limit ownership in some way. One possibility would be to use the security status concept. Have a small area act as low-sec, and a much larger area as null sec. The key is that if you own districts in low-sec, you cannot own any in null sec. Low sec should also be less profitable in some way.
Low-sec is not as appealing, so the elite corps that want a lot of land would have to move to nullsec. This leaves lowsec as a sort of super-sized PFC (enforced by concord, not some player corp using it as their own little protection racket) for the mid-tier people to fight over and gain experience. Using a "home-base" type mechanic of some kind would be very helpful, but to keep the wall of text at a minimum here I'll not go into it right now.
3) Finally, and to an extent I see this as the key to the whole thing I do think it's more than a little crazy that small elite groups can hold so much land. Obviously this is not real life, but it makes no sense that even Delta Force plus Seal Team 6, both to the third power, could secure an entire country.
I see Kain's point that we shouldn't necessarily keep people from playing as much PC as they want, but some kind of functional limitation needs to be put in place. Whether it be based on distance, cost, time, whatever, something needs to place a realistic limit on what is now a immortal soldier of nearly mythological power, undying and able to fight wars on opposite sides of a star system nearly simultaneously with zero need for transportation or other logistical support of any kind. I realize this is not necessarily a hot-fixable thing, but I don't know that small hotfixes are able to have sizable impact at this point.
"The line between disorder and order lies in logistics" -Sun Tzu
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