Dude, I honestly do not care. I shat my pants when I read that FW Economics is coming in the next build.

your math hinges that you hire a ground force that loses 100mil per match no matter the opponent.

not exactly reliable when some will hire some of the strongest corps available that would probably lose less and actually work as a deterrent for attacking the planet.

Also say your corp is active in FW eve side, they guys eve side can only fight for that faction, but the guys dust side can take any contract?

How does that make any sense?

I just hope FW gets implemented in a way that we can just fight those battles over pubstomping

I just don't want to fight for the Caldari Corporate Dogs, or those deep south Amarr Slavers

I believe more mercs would play for all sides and be "true" immortal mercenaries playing for the highest bidder if they offered some sort of faction specific rewards, be it through LP or added monetary incentives. I think, setting monetary aspect on a back burner, they need to first fully sync our FW system with Eve's by allowing eve corporations to host contracts on particular planets then picking which corp they want to go take the contract. This will remove the shotgun approach to FW that our current system takes and will allow corps to strategically pick which planet to take as well as the corp they want to hire to go take it. Hopefully if they just take baby steps fixing this, one step at a time, we will see a fully functional, worthwhile FW system.

Isn't roullette a money sink, but there is the incentive to play that you could get the big pay out? I saw the term of isk sink as you can dump money into it but you only have a chance for the pay out. Like gambaling.

So I think longer term this is an issue.

However I think you are mixing some issues in.

1 - I would lean towards thinking the Dust "sov" that we are getting in the short term isn't in fact in the FW systems but instead other parts of lowsec.

2 - The payouts will be in Dust ISK not Eve ISK

Yea I can also see the trouble here.

If dust battle is suppose to be EVE isk sink then Capsuleers won't do it because it won't benefit them.
If there is some benefit in hiring dust mercs then Dust isn't EVE isk sink but it will inflat EVE economic even more.

CCP concept of Dust is simply contradict itself

So to me the correct question is -

Is getting a 25% bonus to the capture status of a FW system worth giving dust mercs eve side ISK to do the capture work?

I don't know how worth it this really is.

Not a bad idea free beers but beta i guess is here to make new emerging corp and solidify foundation of other. Yes you have right corp battle system is terrible right now so why dont give 2xSP and 2x isk 3xsalvage more than pub in the next build, other corp will be more interested and the challenge and the diversification for corp will be better, you have absolutly right with the district system but i maintain my opinion, its too close , i want ccp talk about district come soon in the next build so that fix every dust player what is the kind of game ccp want to bring

Sound good at first but it's actually the worst idea ever :p

Two sister corps will just sit there and farm the hell out of each other ^^"

No offense meant

I truly appreciate Free Beers bringing up this topic because I feel it can not be discussed enough.

Some members of CCP did discuss that one of the purposes of Dust is to act as a type of ISK sink, however this is not its only role. Dust, like many things will have the proper incentives to motivation pilots to take part in it if they have "potential benefits" similar to what CCP has discussed previously. The key word here is "potential."

Like all things in Eve there has to be risk involved. Those successful and well coordinated should be able to profit while allowing those disorganized or overconfident to bite off more than they can chew. Right now CCP has only presented us with future ideas or potential benefits. FW is just the beginning and so harbors very small (if any) examples of this.

People not involved in FW in Eve may not truly understand what the purpose of FW truly is in Eve Online. FW is a place for unorganized groups to form-up, it is a place for small group pvp, it is a place of little risk and little reward. FW is only the beginning levels of true PvP and in no way represents the true combat of Eve Online nor will it be the primary gauge of combat for Dust 514 future. It is just what we have right now.

Make no mistake that FW when it comes to DUST/Eve interaction is little more than a test bed of what the future holds.

In the beginning I know there will be organization that will dump billion into Dust if for no other reason than just to say they own Planet A or completely Destroyed Planet B. That being said unless CCP comes forward with the true, tangible benefits and risks of planetry ownership then msot of us will jsut continue to speculate until we bore each other to death.

Theory crafting is great, but when there is a time for what-ifs and a time for substance. The time for real solid info and decision making is now. The whole don't worry it will be cool stuff won't cut it for much longer.

District control affects FW capture status of the system.

I get Beers' point about the cost of a serious battle, but I suspect most district battles will be happy fun fun time with Zion vs. ScIdama or some other no name carebear corp.

I'm digging all the logic, Beers, but one question for you:

Are you assuming that every district of every planet will be fought over every month?

Do we even have a rough estimate on the total planets/districts?

From what I remember of my FW days, there were a whole hell of a lot of planets. If there's more than can be reasonably fought over (yes, there will always be hotspots, but speaking macroscopically, some planets will get more attention than others) there's going to be profit in it somewhere.

I imagine that battle hotspots will happen like a roving, incredibly hot spotlight.

BLARGITY!

Hey guys,

Been reading this thread and really want to respond. First and foremost thank you for this thread. These types of discussions are really awesome and help us a lot.

You guys make a lot of really valid points about FW corporation battles; unfortunately, or fortunately depending how you look at it, they won't apply to FW battles much longer. One of the design goals we have right now when it comes to battles that are not the instant battles is that the corporation paying for the fight should be the ones owning the district and controlling who gets in.

I am not going to go into much detail here because I and CCP Nullabor are writing a dev blog on it, but I want you guys to know that we agree with a lot of what you have said and are working on a lot of improvements.

I will also note that your estimate for how much a planet should generate is pretty close to what I have listed in my documentation right here... No matter how much a district makes though, we want to encourage people to attack other districts because giant NAP fests are terrible.

No promise on when the dev blog will be out though.

BLARGITY!

... No matter how much a district makes though, we want to encourage people to attack other districts because giant NAP fests are terrible.

Well, again, I think your point as regards highly contested districts is valid- some districts will just not be worth fighting over.

On the other hand, I think MOST districts (after perhaps an initial flurry of activity) will be relatively stable, just like star systems in nullsec.

So, while a capsuleer might have to drop 175M ISK to defend District 4 on Intaki V, most will rarely have to do so.

Indeed, I talked with some capsuleer relatives (RP) and they said that they'd probably use the lowest bidder they could find to do jobs.

That suggests to me that if Corp A is expending 25M ISK in a battle and Corp B is expending 10M ISK, then Corp B is likely to win in the end because they can just keep pummeling Corp A until they go broke.

In my mind, this is how it's supposed to work. Corp battles and/or Merc Contracts should be about expending as little ISK as possible to do the job.

You bring up something that has been really hard for us to figure out. There are so many factors that go into it and finding other examples to base ideas off is really hard because almost no one has done this before.

That something is how much will districts change hands once corporations can own them?

Yes we know we can't stop multiple people ganging up, but can we make attacking more profitable than sitting there doing nothing?

Couldnt a system like that be exploited ? I mean : Create a bogus corp, attack your district and thus "lock it". Or fight the bogus fight and get a bonus to your district "loyalty" as you put it.

that question of the defense\attack mechanics for Player Owned District and planets is probably the thing that occupies my mind the most since i first started to study dust 2 years back.

Beers, I think that the Distric and Planet Loyalty system (call it Allegiance so it doesn't get confused with LP) would solve tons of the exploitation issues.

CCP confirmed something? Where! O_O

There's a nail with a headache in here...

I think the key part you mentioned is EVE players not being able to take a district at all if enemy mercs are on the ground. If that were the case, then it would be a HUGE incentive to employ Dust mercs in any invasion, AND I think it has the added benefit of not having to add in any extra financial trickery with regards to increasing incentive. Doing so may break other things in the delicately balanced economy EVE's got right now.

So, an ISK incentive without an ISK faucet sounds like a pretty good plan to me. No mercs in the district you want? Cool, zoom your destroyer over the district and plant your flag (maybe a quick 10 to 15 min process?).

But if you do this, then whoever owns the district will get a distress message saying your district is under attack, and they have those 10 to 15 minutes to spawn their corp guys on the district and stop you. No Dust mercs logged on? Time to put up a contract and cross your fingers. Don't take space you can't keep.

Hi! I'll add my part in sort of a story.

So (fairly) recently there were merc battles between caldari and something else. I forget, but I'm sure someone remembers. It was for story stuff, there were unfortunately no rewards.

Player: Ok, if we are fighting for Caldari we have to AFK in the back
Me: wtf no
Player: come on, everyone is going to be doing it (insert wall of text here)
Me: Don't care.
Player: [i ]But you have to care! It's (insert more text here)[/i]
Me: Nope, still don't care. I'm here to shoot people in the face.
Player: But it's an important part of the story!
Me: Don't care about the story.

at this point the player became angry

Player: How can you play this game and not care about the story? There's so much going on. You shouldn't be playing it if you're not into the story (or something like that, forgot)
Me: Look, I just put over 1.5 mil ISK into play on the field, and I don't have unlimited time so I want to earn as much SP and ISK as I can per match. This stuff doesn't pay for itself.
Player: Look, if it's ISK you care about I'll reimburse you for your tank and give you 5mil if you run around killing blue dots and making it as easy as possible for the red dots to win.
Me: Oh? How much do I get if we still lose?
Player: I'll reimburse you for your tank and pay you 1mil.
Me: ok, NOW I care. **** the Calamari! DEATH TO ALL BLUE DOTS!

Anyways, I hope that you, the devs, will be able to make the fac war stuff not lose the merc aspect. I was extremely happy that this was happening, because (for me) this is how the game should be. I'm mercing stuff, idc for who or why.

The difficulty might be for corps that do stuff EVE side too. I'm in a corp and alliance that I'm pretty sure is in fac warfare. From what I've heard, they have to do a bunch of work to get on a side or something and fight for it, but once they are there it's hard to switch. I don't want this to happen with DUST. Sure, the corps can tell the Dust players what to do (and pay them!) but I would be very unhappy if the game did not allow me to merc for other sides/people, or made it hard to do so.

So please, do the stuff for peeps who care about Eve and lore. Hopefully you can also make it so that the people who care more about the $ and killing other mercs can enjoy fac warfare or whatever w/o getting forced (by the game) to care about lore and factions.

I'm not against corps choosing what they want their peeps to do, I just want to have the freedom for them to choose.

I got a bit worried about this because I saw stuff from Eve players (it was a meeting or something?) They said they were afraid that Dust mercs wouldn't care about who they were fighting for and why. I just don't want to be forced to care, unless of course, I'm getting as much ISK as I can from the highest bidder. =]

Also, 15 to 25 mil ISK is the break-even point against a good team. (This includes tanks, gear, etc., etc.)

50m is where you start to make a good profit in 8 v 8. "Good profit" as in it's worth it for the players to go all out, and if they win they'll make enough money to pay for gear lost and additional gear for the next fight. Given 50 mil isk contracts, I feel like I would make enough ISK from proto vs proto battles against skilled players than I would from Pub stomping.

Sagaris and Surya (well fitted) are between 2mil and 3mil isk each. Lose three, and that's six to nine mil in tank alone. The good dropsuits (proto load out) seem to be around 200k ISK each. If each player dies five times, that's one mil isk lost for each player. For eight man teams, that's 8mil isk.

That also doesn't include other vehicles (like LAVs, dropships, etc., etc.)


The large contracts are unusual, but this is just what I've seen from the few large contracts that I have participated in.

=[ I thought we agreed that we'd be on different sides of fac warfare. I don't want to spend my whole life destroying noob corps and pub stomping!

Maybe we'll have to go talk to What the French. Hopefully they can take your place xD.

This comes down to who is offering the reward and what is on the line as a risk for them. The fact that the best defense for FW is to not accept the defense contracts... is broken.

What would be awesome is an area of space that players own districts, make money, make more money by attacking, and the fighting is so intense that only the best survive. That would be awesome.

My apologies, I did miss understand that. You are correct though that not all DUST corporations will want to participate in owning districts when that eventually does come around.

We are aware of that. The really nice thing about corporation battles right now is that they allow two corporations just to set up an arena type match. If you remove the FW bit of them they can be fun with limited to no risks and rewards or extremely competitive with lots of ISK on the line. This is something we are aware of and are actively thinking about.

As for the null sec NAP fest: The problem with null sec in EVE as I see it is that an organization (corporation, alliance, coalition, whatever) will expand and take as much territory as they can hold, or think they can hold. Once they have reached that limit they stop. Then they start adding friends on so they they are even safer. There is no point in attacking anything except for the explosions (which I think are awesome) or for taking it. If you are extended to the limit though taking it is not really an option.

Stop for a moment, this is just random chit chat and discussion here, even though I know some of you will still run off as if this is all done and done, this is just me discussing stuff because discussion is fun.

Anyways, what if once you own whatever you think you can you still wanted to attack. Not because you want more stuff, but because after an attack the winner walks away with more than they would have if they sat there and did nothing. So you can sit there and just make money, but attacking without the intention to take ownership gives you the chance to make more money.

Thoughts?

Again, random discussion.

Not sure I would put much effort into this for any kind of first pass at this kind of thing when we do get around to it. I can see the need for it, but I can also see the need for so many other things of higher priority.



You are correct and we are already thinking about this kind of stuff. It makes ones head spin though. I have said in a few other places how hard this kind of thing is. At least it is for me. Trying to find any kind of reference or example for this kind of stuff is just impossible. Gotta love having a research and statistics department though. Love those guys.

The really nice thing about our design is that (hopefully) it will let small corps hold a small part of space and big corps can own a big part and better corps will own more for their size.

This is in contrast to EVE which allows massive force projection, so the bigger alliances just own everything. Smaller entities do exist but only because they are allowed to, not because they legitimately took it and defend their territory against overwhelming numbers.

It's exciting stuff, more details are on the way.

pretty sure Nullarbor just confirmed on IRC that zergin is indeed a terrible tactic in how sov will work for DUST lol

pretty sure Nullarbor just confirmed on IRC that zergin is indeed a terrible tactic in how sov will work for DUST lol

OK, so what you are HOPING for is a more perfect model of WHAT capitalism is, yet in review of the ACTUAL operations of capitalism it is CONSTANTLY operating at a LOSS. Even though this is the case, capitalism STILL PERSISTS.

I find your logic in this case, especially in the fact that you are talking about warfare, which even in the context of human history HAS ALWAYS OCCURRED at a loss. War has only been profitable to a small number of people and the margin of profit in it is relative to that of a descent restaurant, which is to say running at a profit of 5-10% out of the kitchen at a cost of 20-35% total cost to the establishment for materials and labor, while the front of the house may net a 20-25% profit from the remaining 50-70% of total cost of operation.

The real matter is, like other people have stated, you are basing this off of incomplete mathematical models that are COMPLETELY based on ERRONEOUS ASSUMPTIONS on what it will TYPICALLY cost a corp to provide defense or seizure services on provided contracts in Faction warfare.

Kain and Beers; both of you ASSUME to much, and apparently you have forgotten what assumptions do: they make and ass out of you and them.

The purpose of making this kind of interaction to run at such a potentially low margin of profit on both parts is to perpetuate the mining, wormhole exploration, trading, industrial production, and etc. that currently has grown stagnant in EVE.

Once again the Imperfects have proven their name all to well by their attempt to present an INCOMPLETE picture or what is possible through their narrow vision and INCOMPLETE understanding of CCP's intentions. This is supposed to be a Hamster wheel, nothing more. If you don't like it, get OFF.

In terms of priority I would rather see the ability to contract other corporations to take a district for you. That would also mean contracting other corporations to help you defend your district as well.

Beers, where do you see anything related to a SI-IMP grudge ? oO
If the guy disagrees, like i do, and he's SI doesnt mean its because you're an IMP.

I get the tone is a bit rough, but what you're saying is just as embarrassing for you. If you cant handle someone disagreeing (which i know you can) then stop posting as well.

Care to expand upon this? The purpose of timers in EVE is to eliminate having to be on 23/7 and know that if you go to sleep your stuff will still be there tomorrow.

Personally I would rather see everyone be aggressive, not defensive. If everyone is being defensive, then no one is attacking and there is not much game.

/me just wants to have a discussion about random stuff :'(

So:
Corp A holds a district
Corp B attacks it
Corp B is "invading" the district and depleting Corp A's loyalty
Corp A has to kick them out

How does Corp A do that? How do we schedule a match between the two and ensure players are online and able to compete in the match?

The attacking corporation gets it's foothold for free (meaning no fight) but has to fight to keep it and the fights that do happen are still behind timers, 4 hour timers instead of 24 but still timers.

Losing anything while you are asleep and there was nothing you could do kind of really sucks. Why have scheduling for the second battle but not the first?



Could not agree more, but they also can't become a huge grind. If it takes you 3 weeks to grind down a single district that would kind of suck.



Agreed. We also need to incentivise defending corporations to show up to fights and fight even when they know they are going to lose.

I didn't really answer much or respond to much in this post, sorry. It is going to be hard for me to be convinced against having the defender set a time when districts can be attacked, like POCOs in EVE.

If you are in a situation where you have a nice team ready to play right then and there, you look through contracts which are set to go off soon and accept one of those and get some ISK.

The only realistic way to get a full 24v24 (or higher?) match between attackers and defenders is to have the match scheduled with a pretty large amount of time to prepare.

If you can just attack instantly, how will a defending EVE corp ever be able to find a DUST merc corp to come defend their district in time? How would any CORP that wants to engage in merc activities, but not actually take and own districts, be able to find attack or defense contracts and adequately prepare for them under a non delayed approach?

Well keep in mind you dont have to be there to defend your district, you can contract it out, thats the only option for a lot of EVE corps who wont have a heavy footing in DUST.

So you have an 8 hour delay, that gives the UK corp plenty of time to see the attack and find a mercenary group to contract out the defense to.

A lot of the ideas seem to sort of ignore that there are really 4 parties in play. Two corps contracting out work, and two taking it on. Yes, in some cases the corp may do its own work, but not in all, especially when we talk about the EVE-DUst relationship.

Vulnerability windows are just fine ie (one 3 hour period every 36-72 hours).

Players can be even in the middle of attacking someone else, pubstomping hisec , pve or just raiding someone else.

Attack comes up and some part of the team responds (sees its real) and the rest come in as the fight starts.

This is based off the assumption that it is only one match to take a District. What if it's a single match to take a single PI node. If each match occurred every 2 hours then taking a District would take 44 hours in this example. That's enough time for you to respond and repel the invaders.

Its still not the best, you will lose nodes to attacks while you sleep, but it means that neither attacker, nor defender, get the time advantage. But one bad match doesn't lose you the entire District.

Good post beers
i like it, Once enemies arent able to take the district outside the reinforcement window thats good, make the impact be a slight reduction in w/e passive resources come in.

Also i like ur global allegiance system. Makes it harder for corps to keep expanding and maintaining districts/planets/systems bonuses which would make numbers matter. Am i gettin that right?

I have a question that interesting (I think) regarding the Dust/EVE economy link. When people have to produce weapons before they're able to being used, how do the AUR weapons fit in?

In eve there was a major riot when it became known that you could get a ship skin by using only AUR to pay for it, instead of the original Item + aur. The problem was that the way CCP wanted to do it skipped the production and industry side completely, spawning items out of thin air. To me it seems AUR items in Dust are the same, they skip the isk(produced) item completely as it stands now.

How is CCP going to change AUR items, to not make the same mistake twice?

that is not what CCP says;


from the CCP interview on IRC a while ago: https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=327837