I know that ArcTic and a few others have addressed this issue before, but I would like to have an opinion of as many people as I possibly can get from the people who are actually involved in setting up battles between corporation and the fairness involved in Sector Conquest that is involved. The first issue I would like to address is the timing of dreadnought battles, the sector costs and how even the spread is.
Right now, what we are seeing are sectors that are remaining unclaimed because the defense of the sector are higher than 60%, which screams out to everyone not to attack said sector or even bother causing damage, because, let’s face it, it is a “waste of time” as some people might say. Obviously, this is true; nobody would like to attempt to claim a sector which has only a maximum of 80% loss that is on 100%, because let’s face it, it’s going to be impossible to even manage somewhere below 10% without three successful defenses or even two squads intervening in sector capture. This is the biggest problem I find; less corporations are being challenged and, therefore, are gettign bored of having to just log in to do daily business of routinely defending their sector or even just siting back because they know that an under-experienced corporation with little to no knowledge of announcements for dreadnought operations has attempted an attack and failed miserably against a squad of uncoordinated randoms.
Here is what I propose, all times according to UTC+0:
At 03:00:
Erebus (III)
Olympus (III)
Haldon (IV)
New Ceres (IV)
Procyon (V)
At 13:00:
Velorum (III)
Corsa Triama (IV)
At 16:00:
Felony (III)
Scheat (IV)
Troy (IV)
Kayeed (V)
At 18:00:
Menar (III)
Ontregos (III)
Pride (III)
Pandora (IV)
At 20:00:
Pallas (III)
Procssima (IV)
At 23:00:
Solaris (III)
Antaress (IV)
Mezza (V)
Additional Conversions:
Iridium Mines and Devil’s Jaw to become Galactic Standards earning sectors.
Gas Harvest Station and Lava Spines to become Galactic Standards earning sectors.
Sectors to go down by 5% each day there is no dreadnought presence. Each undefended sector drops by 5% at 00:00 UTC+0.
Number of attacks increased to 5. Consequently, a recalled attack cannot be re-announced and cannot be withdrawn within the 15 minutes attacks can no longer be announced; once everything is locked, that’s it.
To the corporations’ CEO’s and Vice Presidents responsible for announcing and organising these battles: I would also like your opinions on this setup. Obviously, the masses of server load caused by hundreds of players running dreadnoughts at the same time is unfortunate and this may also provide a lot more opportunity for the European and American corporations playing between Western Europe and East Coast US to gain a lot more coverage. This will also mean that dreadnoughts will happen more frequently as opposed to playing once for a bit and then having to wait for eight hours until the next battle occurs.
Please take care to add other suggestions that may fit within this topic and I will perhaps update this thread containing some I quite like, and thank you for taking your time to read.
I’m going to disagree on a timetable rework. The current times of Jericho, Empire, and second Fed are fine. 7pm GMT and 9pm GMT are fine times for EU/RU pilots to play dreads, and even some Americans who don’t have work or classes. As for fed space, the only thing that needs to be reworked is the fact that it is split up between an Empire time and a US time. Fed space needs to be reunited to US timezones only, as that is the way it was designed in the first place.
If the logic for splitting it up was that fed space wasn’t active, they could apply that same logic to Empire time. Empire time is practically desolate, Jericho time is really the only actively played dreadnought time there is.
But, none of what we want means anything until the gamemode itself faces some major changes and the game’s population begins to grow. A lot of players are quitting this game or playing it less and less because they don’t enjoy it and hate the direction it is going in. I am one of those players. I only play this game once a day now, just to do my dailies and do the occasional fed space dread battle. Aside from that, this game has lost my interest almost entirely.
Also, the logic for splitting up the Federation was to benefit the players in Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia that are playing this game in their evening time on the South Asia server. This makes perfect sense despite some players never going to bed.
Do also note that you are not commonly online during the Empire hours. There is more going on than you might notice…
I don’t like the topic. the new timetable doesn’t help on the main problem. the Dread system built for abuse. We need a totally new system where the corps can’t make fake attacks.
I think there are 3 things that need to happen with dreads and their timetable.
Give the second part of fed space back to US/SA. If the idea was to give it to the Russians cuz they will use it, well that argument went out the window within the first week. The second portion of fed space is seeing close to no activity anymore. There are plenty of US/SA corps that will use those sectors, but most smaller US/SA corps are afraid to use the current US fed space because mostly big-name US corps hold the sectors. Adding in the rest of fed space makes for too many sectors for big US corps to manage (cost for attack to high or w/e), so smaller corps would have sectors to compete for. (Plus I know that the US OWL pilots I’ve talked to would be more than happy to dedicate those sectors for small corps).
Fully support alliances. This would of course have to come with a restriction on the number of corps per alliance, but it would make it easier to attack/defend with your friends. Fully supporting alliances should also make it that an alliance holds a sector, not each individual corp. This way more people can benefit from the rewards of a sector, but it would restrict the number of sectors an alliance could hold due to iridium costs (which should be increased for alliances by maybe 1.5x or 2x depending on the max size of an alliance).
Rework the dreadnought system so that fake attacks are impossible. There are many ways this could be done, many of which are already suggested on this forum, but devs either haven’t looked into them, bypassed them, or ignored them.
This isn’t a hard concept to grasp. It’s common sense really, but yet nothing has been done by the devs to fix any of these issues, many of which have been present since dreadnoughts came out in the Spring. It all boils down to the fact that the devs want to make dreads the best they can for their pet elite RU corps. Corps that heavily abuse(d) fake attacks, corps that created fake corps to accomplish the fake attacks, and corps who are known to always be paired down in tournaments. The rest of the population doesn’t matter, dreads is evidence of this. Devs could care less about the other 80-90% of the population, but as long as their little pets get their precious rewards, it is all worth it… (Sorry for the strong stance, but after months and months of seeing this, my stance on this has only strengthened).
I think there are 3 things that need to happen with dreads and their timetable.
Give the second part of fed space back to US/SA. If the idea was to give it to the Russians cuz they will use it, well that argument went out the window within the first week. The second portion of fed space is seeing close to no activity anymore. There are plenty of US/SA corps that will use those sectors, but most smaller US/SA corps are afraid to use the current US fed space because mostly big-name US corps hold the sectors. Adding in the rest of fed space makes for too many sectors for big US corps to manage (cost for attack to high or w/e), so smaller corps would have sectors to compete for. (Plus I know that the US OWL pilots I’ve talked to would be more than happy to dedicate those sectors for small corps).
Fully support alliances. This would of course have to come with a restriction on the number of corps per alliance, but it would make it easier to attack/defend with your friends. Fully supporting alliances should also make it that an alliance holds a sector, not each individual corp. This way more people can benefit from the rewards of a sector, but it would restrict the number of sectors an alliance could hold due to iridium costs (which should be increased for alliances by maybe 1.5x or 2x depending on the max size of an alliance).
Rework the dreadnought system so that fake attacks are impossible. There are many ways this could be done, many of which are already suggested on this forum, but devs either haven’t looked into them, bypassed them, or ignored them.
This isn’t a hard concept to grasp. It’s common sense really, but yet nothing has been done by the devs to fix any of these issues, many of which have been present since dreadnoughts came out in the Spring. It all boils down to the fact that the devs want to make dreads the best they can for their pet elite RU corps. Corps that heavily abuse(d) fake attacks, corps that created fake corps to accomplish the fake attacks, and corps who are known to always be paired down in tournaments. The rest of the population doesn’t matter, dreads is evidence of this. Devs could care less about the other 80-90% of the population, but as long as their little pets get their precious rewards, it is all worth it… (Sorry for the strong stance, but after months and months of seeing this, my stance on this has only strengthened).