Glad to see that I'm not alone in beliving that we've legislated ourselves into this position.
What's bugging me some (which is understandable, in a way), is that we're calling for
more legislation, ie, slot-areas etc., to fix the problem instead of addressing the causes that led us to require wingmen. While more legislation is the "American way", we're looking at making a rulebook the size of SFB just to play one server.
Personally, I'd rather see the root causes fixed while not undoing everything we've done...
To me, there are 3 things contributing to the "wingmen required" syndrome. I'll repost them with more details / possible fixes which won't extend our "rulebook" to a thousand pages...
1. EEK missions: On one hand, they do work "as advertised", ie, increasing the challenge level. For a certain ISC pilot that's fairly experienced in Fed and Rommie (yes, that's me), they are a "challenge". Having been designed to be a challenge to an I-CCZ, I can handle them fairly regularly in the over-gunned ISC hulls, and can tough them out in Fed / Rommie hulls. On the other hand, they might be a tad to difficult for the newbies, whether they're the true newbies we've recently attracted, or a "veteran" with no experience in a race (like the aforementioned ISC pilot who's had a tough time learning Klingon due to colorblindness vs. interface issues)...
The fixes for this are obvious, though a bit of a challenge. We could drop them altogether, which also kills our AI-free PvPs. We could "tone them down" from Anti-CCZ to Anti-CC (ie, Fed CC+R / Klink D7L) levels (which requires a recompilation from a retired scripter), or find a way to allow the "easier" TG / ED missions to show up in every hex.
2. OOB / VCs. Both of these tie together, as putting a VC price on a ship is practically as limiting as an actual rule like an OOB. Both of them make the loss of a certain ship painful, whether it's a loss of the rights to the ship or helping the enemy score points. Personally, and from a "watcher's" standpoint, the best servers have been the ones where the OOB / VCs covered the same thing that SFB restricts, ie, the carriers / DNs / specialty ships. Keeping the OOB ruleset at that level would cut down on the ships being escorted, therefore freeing up more solo pilots and one-on-one opportunities.
3. Disengagement. This may be rendered a moot point with Bonk's recent work, as the new multi-DV shift for losing a battle might make killing / driving off a half-dozen or so of the "evil frigate-droners" that led to the disengagement rule the fastest way to flip a hex. Otherwise, the only fix I can think of is writing a server with enough VC locations so that a driven off pilot is "immediatly useful" at another locale.
Of course, another thing that's hurt our 1 vs 1 PvPs is the lack of pilots. When there's only a dozen pilots per side, and half of them (3-6) are in fancy-ships and the other half are escorting those fancy ships, that does cut out the 1 on 1's... :roll:
Topic: J'inn: You Bastard!!!! (Read 83459 times)