CCP Games has faced a problem with the last couple of EVE Online expansions. After the goodies accompanying the launch of an expansion end, so does the attention of many players. The developers have come up with a unique solution. Once the login rewards and free game time run out, drop more free content. And so, I woke up this morning to find a mini-expansion's worth of patch notes waiting on the launcher along with a dev blog. After a quick read, I think the mashup might prove useful. So here's part three of the effort covering some factional warfare and insurgency changes introduced in today's patch.
The dev blog didn't really have much to say on the subject.
Over in the warzone, changes to Factional Warfare and Pirate Insurgencies ensure more meaningful engagements with improvements to Battlefield sites, shifting the makeup of signatures, buffing deployables, and more.
The patch notes are a lot more descriptive on the changes made and the reasons why. This section of the patch notes sounds more like a dev blog than the typical CCP patch notes.
In Equinox we fixed battlefields being cheesed by holding a single battlecruiser NPC alive, however with that fix, players feel like Battlefields are now too tedious and not rewarding enough and this has caused a reduction in fighting and PVP in and around battlefields. To address this, we are approximately doubling the time between NPC waves.
- Respawn time for NPCs has been significantly increased
Propaganda Broadcast Structures and Listening Outposts advantage deployables are not being used outside of key system sieges. We’re trying to improve this by increasing their availability and effectiveness.
- Drop rates of Encoder Splice and Decoded Packages from FW Operation Centers (Rearguard Data Sites) has been approximately doubled.
- Doubled the effectiveness on advantage of the Propaganda Broadcast Structure and the Listening Post objective deployables.
A key complaint from anti-pirate players in insurgencies is that the Pirate FOBs have such huge tether ranges that it makes it incredibly difficult to siege as pirate aligned players can remain tethered and invulnerable until they want to engage while close to their ships even in long range setups, so we’re bringing it down to a value that should still feel very comfortable for players coming in from the shipcaster, but less powerful as a tool used against players trying to siege the FOB.
- Tether Radius on the Pirate FOBs has been dropped from 100km to 50km
Another common complaint with FW and Insurgencies is the amount of multiboxing destroyers in the warzone. We’re trying to address this by shifting the FW sites back towards 1-man sites and the insurgency 5-person sites away from Smalls and into Mediums and Larges. We’re doing this because it’s fairly difficult to contest 5 Destroyers inside smalls with less than 5 pilots, but much easier in Mediums and Larges where 2-3 Navy Cruisers/HACs or 1-2 BCs can engage them. Having slower responding but larger, more rewarding 5-person sites will hopefully also increase the number of them that are contested.
- Reduced the number of Factional Warfare Small NVY-5 and Small ADV-5 sites. A slightly increased amount of Small NVY-1s and Small ADV-1s will appear in their place to keep the potential number of victory points generated per day the same.
- Reduced the total number of the insurgency Small ADV-5 sites, their chance to spawn has been rolled into increasing the number of Medium and Large ADV-5 sites which spawn instead.
- The Respawn time of all insurgency ADV-5 sites has been increased (slowed down) to keep LP and Corruption generation rates similar with an increased number of Medium and large ADV-5 sites spawning.
And finally a change I don't really think needs an explanation.
- Added appropriate salvage to the Angel and Guristas FOB wreck.
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