EVE Online's next expansion, Havoc, intends to live up to the name. As part of the chaos, players will have the opportunity to join two of New Eden's five major NPC pirate factions, the Angel Cartel and the Guristas. Players who choose to join up with either faction get access to nice items they can sell on the market for a lot of ISK.
Before panicking about whether a character can join a pirate faction, check the standings with the pirate faction, not security standings. My main combat character has a security status of 5.1 but thanks to social skills and a decade of killing Angel Cartel NPCs, has standings of 1.5 with the Guristas and 2.0 with Deathless Circle. For those who need a little help with standings, CCP is temporarily going to change some mechanics a bit to help out.
In order to aid capsuleers who need to improve their Angel Cartel and Guristas standings ahead of Havoc’s release, the Angel and Guristas epic arcs have been tweaked to provide a bigger standings boost (up from 30% to 45%) and a shorter cool down period (14 days instead of 90). This tweak to standings and cool down will revert before the end of the year, so be sure to use this opportunity and be prepared for Havoc and Pirate Insurgencies!
The pirate factions will act a lot like militias in factional warfare, which is fair since Deathless Circle has a ship caster to launch pirates into the war zones.
Should a capsuleer have -2 standings or higher with either the Angel Cartel or Guristas, they can enlist with those pirate groups much the same way as how enlistment works with empire militia in Factional Warfare: Direct Enlistment, Player Corporation Enlistment, and NPC Corporation Enlistment. Once enlisted with Pirate Insurgents, a capsuleer can then participate in Pirate Insurgencies.
Speaking of standings, capsuleers who take aggressive action against others enlisted in their faction, or certain NPCs belonging to that same pirate faction which are associated with the Pirate Insurgency activities, will see their standings with that faction reduced. Capsuleers will remain enlisted with the Pirate Insurgents and continue to be in their respective faction provided they keep their standings at -2 or above, be it Angels or Guristas.
I think part of the reason for introducing a pirate faction into the war zones is the theory that three-way PvP conflict is best. With the move the war zones are now broken into three warring groups: Amarr/Caldari, Gallente/Minmatar, and Angel Cartel/Guristas flying under the Deathless Circle banner. Player run alliances, corporations and individuals still can dip into the war zone to have some fun, but the fundamental factional warfare mechanic should hopefully improve.
Up until know, I've written about the impact on factional warfare. But the new pirate content involves a parallel system called Pirate Insurgency. The new system involves some familiar mechanics.
When a Pirate Insurgency begins, a pirate forward operating base (FOB) – be it Angel or Guristas – will be deployed into that destabilized space, and the pirates will begin to raid the space and systems around them. During these raids, corporate outposts, mining fleets and more will be targeted and attacked. At the start of a Pirate Insurgency, taking the star system where the FOB is deployed as the center, the Insurgency will spread into other surrounding systems from that central point, depending on local geography and borders. When those initial systems containing the Insurgency content are chosen, raids won’t have started and security forces will not have come knocking yet, so capsuleers have an opportunity to get their ships in position, or out of harm’s way. Pirate-aligned capsuleer activity can then help the Insurgency continue to spread across more systems.
A long time desire is that matters in factional warfare to affect high security space. The pirate insurgencies will help that come about as fighting in low sec will affect the other security bands in space.
When corruption is pushed to its maximum level, an affected lowsec system will start to feel like nullsec. This will be achieved by way of effects such as allowing the use of interdiction bubble launchers, heavy interdictor bubbles, and bomb launchers. Similarly, at maximum corruption, a highsec system will start to feel like a lowsec system, and this will be accomplished by making aggression against another capsuleer result in a suspect timer and not a criminal timer. This means that CONCORD will not respond to that aggression in the affected highsec system. However, aggression against a capsule will still result in a criminal timer, and under those circumstances, CONCORD will respond. This will make corrupted space feel unique compared to other regions of New Eden.
In a situation where suppression increases within an Insurgency system, that too will feel uniquely impactful, but more secure since suppression is effectively law enforcement. As capsuleers aligned with empire militia complete activities in a Pirate Insurgency system and increase the level of suppression, a different set of effects can apply – and this can be in addition to corruption effects that have already been applied due to the simultaneous nature of the corruption-suppression race. Suppression effects can include CONCORD paying more for pirate bounties, bonuses for militias – including the potential for changes that affect the nature of PvP in those systems – and at level 5 suppression, gates and stations in that system will become even more secure with upgraded sentry guns.
The new pirate destroyers, battlecruisers, and Angel Cartel titan will rank high on the features of Havoc when the expansion launches in less than 4 weeks. But the expansion will really emerge as a success if the developers manage to make playing pirate with the NPCs more than a gimmick.
No comments:
Post a Comment