Balistyc Farshot wrote:
This is brilliant!
Please listen to his idea.
Another piece would be to allow people to see what the counts of mercs by corp are per planet. Then they could tell if someone is massing an army against them. Then even the corp mercs not in PCs simply hanging around the HQ would add value by being a deterant. The enemy doesn't know that isn't our best player bumming around the main base, when really that 10 man team from our corp and those 6 ringers are preparing for an attack/raid.
Plus, having more than one 16 merc skilled team becomes important. The other piece is give districts the ability to spend points to kick mercs out of their district back to a safe district or home district. Then the topic of land ownership becomes interesting.
There are problems with that
1. How will attackers join the fight? Someone ferries them? If so then the change is pointless. If attackers can join freely then that team is sooooo screwed. An organized PC team will demolish a disorganized pub style team. If the attacker or defender chooses who can join then it is very similar to the current scenario of choose your ringers.
2. PC is not whoever fields their best 16 corp members for the most part anymore. The closest to that statement is whoever fields the best of their corp and ringers they can get. I already proposed a solution to Ratati that makes it so corps can't field whatever best 16 players in the game they can find at the time.
3. Attrition with the current size of Dust's playerbase is very bad. There is another word for it in gaming, it is called burning out. Defending districts with attrition makes PC become a job, literally. People do not want PC to be like a job or have more logistical crap to deal with. People would have to work even harder to defend their land which makes owning districts a pain. We want PC to grow, not make corps feel like owning districts is feeding and caring for a baby which would chase more away.
Imagine defending one district from constant attacks and dealing with attrition, I hope that corp does not have plans for the weekend because they have to deal with a constant zerg.
4. PC is suppose to be competitive, it should reward those who can compete not punish them for not recruiting every soul they encounter to have legions of troops to field any second. This thing already exists in PC and most hate it, it is called a blue donut. It is when an alliance that can field many PC teams exists and anyone that fights them is basically fighting an endless amount of players. The corp can win every fight but it starts to be a job for the players because every day they have PCs which becomes a major drag. Some people say it is a good thing if PC starts allowing zergs but when they get a district, they start complaining about how PC is a pain and feels like a job.
5. Making a district a nightmare to defend makes districts less valuable which can reduce the amount of corps in PC. It could lead to corps on timers that barely anyone plays have districts with little risk while everyone else has tremendous risk.