So, I’ve noticed the near-zero amount of people in Invasion and thought to myself “how to get more pilots to play it?” And the answer came to me during the last corp Team Battle event in Ice Belt.
We have half a dozen game modes for PvP maps and 4 border systems, one of which seems to hold some importance, Fort Muerte. So my thought was “why not apply the PvP game modes to that map for corp/faction dominance?”
Well, the reason not a lot of people are in the sandbox is that there aren’t enough people or they’re all just logging in for the Invasion dailies or farming the Mk5 blueprints… A bit disappointing, if you ask me; there’s just so much potential for that instanced sandbox to have many more people.
SO. The idea? Apply faction and/or corp warfare to those systems. The maps are already there, so why not have events, like SQ works, kinda… Course, first step is to make a handful more maps on the neutral zone.
- Ownership
1.1) All border systems, with the exception of Fort Muerto belong to the NPC factions. There is no turning away from this. If the devs make more border systems, it should be one extra for each border, with gates realigning to compensate (I see a lot of those red inactive gates, so they must be good for something).
1.2) Small Stations (like those in Detonation) inside those systems may be owned by corporations, each giving out specific bonuses to those who have taken them. More on the bonuses in point 5.
1.3) NPC ships may take those Stations back at any point in time if they are not defended (corps having x amount of time to defend it, should they choose to do so). More details in 3.3 and 3.5.
- Upkeep
2.1) For every Station your corporation owns, you pay a daily upkeep of x Artifacts (yeah, I’m bringing some usefulness to that, rather than them sitting there, doing nothing); the more Stations you control, the harder it is to maintain upkeep and defend them from NPC attempts to retake them.
2.2) The larger the corporation, in active membership, the larger the amount of Artifacts to pay, this is to avoid zerg corps from taking hold of ERRYTHING and to justify the bonuses the Stations give.
2.3) Should you not have the daily amount of Artifacts, stations are put offline randomly (along with their bonuses) until another corp or NPCs take them or you can afford them again.
2.4) The longer your corporation maintains a station, the higher the upkeep and the more often NPCs will attack.
- Taking Stations
3.1) It is done by specific Detonation, Domination and/or Recon events.
3.2) For example, if your corporation is Jericho, you cannot take Jericho stations, you must go to Empire and Federation border space and work there.
3.3) Only corporations of an enemy faction (say, if your corp is Jericho, only Fed or Empire corps can take it back) or the NPCs you first took them from.
3.4) After a station is taken by a corp/NPC, it is put into protection for x amount of time, so as to avoid it swapping hands too often and overloading the servers because of the bonuses.
3.5) NPCs will often attack your stations and attempt to take them back. The stations belonged to them, at first and they’re not happy with that. For example, they will attack your station once a day (to be revised, depending on how effective this is), an attack that your own station should repel, but only barely. The following attacks escalate in size, power and amount, ending up by being nigh-impossible to defend. This is on purpose, to show that a group of mercs cannot hold their own against an entire nation.
- Bonuses
4.1) Before you panic, no. They are minuscule bonuses (1-5% bonuses on any stat such as speed, weapon/missile damage, armour/shield buffer/resists, sensor range, income, etc…) that, overall, do paint a slight effect on individual ships, but not entirely overwhelming to the organized enemy.
4.2) I mentioned 1-5%, but that’s cumulative with time. You start off with 1% bonus to the stat the station gives you and, the more time your corp holds it under control, the larger the bonus, up to the 5%. Keep in mind that, the longer you hold a Station, the harder it is to maintain it in your hands, so these bonuses won’t last forever.
4.3) Income-altering stats (such as credits, vouchers, artifacts, synergy) work in every game mode, from PvP to Invasion.
4.4) Ship-altering bonuses ONLY WORK IN INVASION. This is on purpose, to keep these bonuses away from the unbalance that is the current MM. Not to mention that well-organized groups can become even more overwhelming than they already are.
4.5) Having these bonuses in corp warfare (for the upcoming dreadnought games) might be a possibility, but I’d much rather keep them away from PvP altogether. 5% might sound like a small bonus, but stack them together and we start having issues, with the matches becoming highly unbalanced.
Now, I realize the potential for powerful corporations to hold… EVERYTHING, but take into consideration that, the more you have, the harder it is for you to hold everything. Stations have an upkeep (which is easy to cover), they are open to attacks at any given time by NPCs or corporations from other factions and, the longer you have them under your control, the harder it is to maintain them. At most, corps should only be holding any given Station for one week, tops.
But why all this effort? Simple. Fort Muerto. Just turn the place to either the biggest PvPvE event ever offered (joint effort in taking down a fleet of cartel bosses) for some epic-sized loot, or the biggest PvP event in existence, also for the loot.
What loot? I’ve no idea. Perhaps a high dosage of vouchers or a handful of Standards.
In truth, I’m a bit lost about those systems, I just think that people solely fly in Invasion for the daily monocrystals and Mk5 blueprints. Once that’s done, they’re likely to not touch it ever again, so I’m trying to give the feature some continuity and an extra layer of fun for everybody.
F.A.Q. (as they are made)