Dark Sectors And Solar Rails - Possible Improvements

[RaikenArashii]

So as the first round of the Solar Rail conflicts are coming to a close, people are wondering what the long term impact of Sectors and Rail Conflicts will be.  Unless they end up being nerfed, Sectors are fairly luctrative compared to other missions of their level, meaning people will understandably want to control these points and maintain a tax on them.

 

However, as I'm sure some of you have noticed, on quite a few sectors, clans are competing to put up tax free rails.  While selfless and well meaning, these rails are ultimately bound to fail due to the lack of battle pay.  Combine that with the maximum uptime of conflicts being 48 hours, you end up with clans squabbaling over sector ownership and forcing everyone else to lose access to these missions, and I can tell you right away that as entertaining as conflict missions are with spectres, they are in no way comparable to even regular missions on that planet, since no taxes for that 24 hour conflict downtime means no battle pay.

 

I hope this on 24 hours off 48 hours will eventually stabilize, but I feel there could be some tweaks made that will help streamline that process.

 

1: Limit the number of rails that can deployed in a set period of time by a clan/alliance, or place a cooldown on the construction of a rail.  This will increase the time between a clan taking a sector, losing it, then immedietly trying to retake it, and hopefully reduce the total downtime for a sector mission.

 

2: Put down a minimum battlepay for conflict missions.  Seriously, seeing a reward of 0 against 1 is just insulting..  The goal of owning a sector is implementing a modest tax so when you get challenged, you actually have the credits to pay people to defend it.  Tax free is nice, but frankly unsustainable.  I suggest something simple, such as starting off at 250 on venus, then increasing it by 250 for every successive planet.  This promotes taxing of sector missions, and makes maintaining a tax free rail a real act of charity.  It also will drasticly thin out the number of clans/alliances competing for ownership.  This way, a grind happy ghost clan with a decent tax on a sector will have a fair chance of maintaining that rail for a few challenges.

 

The following points are more fluff than anything, but would make Dark Sectors so much more fun.

 

3: Add a conclave option to rail conflicts.  Fighting spectres is a nice change of pace, but taking the standard conclave gametype and refreshing it for conflicts would do wonders for pvp.

 

4: Add an option for conflicting clans to have a chat log for bantering purposes.  More amusing than anything else, it could also serve as a proper announcement method for the participants, instead of constantly replacing their mission statement with 'beat the other clan!' type comments.

 

That's all I have for the moment, feel free to tweak or use my suggestions as a launch point.  Dark Sectors could become a staple in the Warframe economy, but it will take quite a long time to stabilize without adjustments.

[StevangarCronox]

Sounds like a good idea, but people are still going to argue against it.

[Cpl_Facehugger]

1: Limit the number of rails that can deployed in a set period of time by a clan/alliance, or place a cooldown on the construction of a rail.  This will increase the time between a clan taking a sector, losing it, then immedietly trying to retake it, and hopefully reduce the total downtime for a sector mission.

So far the issue isn't one clan alliance immediately recontesting a node they lose, it's another clan or alliance contesting that node within five minutes.

Like, the Lords of the East lost Sinai. Within five minutes some Russian alliance had deployed their own rail to contest Sinai again.

From the perspective of the community the outcome is the same, the rail's going to be blocked off until cleared. But it does mean that simply implementing a cooldown on specific clan/alliances isn't going to solve the problem.

I wouldn't mind a cooldown on clans/alliances though, just to keep things fresh and popping, but it'll have to be accompanied by a global cooldown on a given node so people actually have a chance to play their dark sectors.

 

2: Put down a minimum battlepay for conflict missions.  Seriously, seeing a reward of 0 against 1 is just insulting..  The goal of owning a sector is implementing a modest tax so when you get challenged, you actually have the credits to pay people to defend it.  Tax free is nice, but frankly unsustainable.  I suggest something simple, such as starting off at 250 on venus, then increasing it by 250 for every successive planet.  This promotes taxing of sector missions, and makes maintaining a tax free rail a real act of charity.  It also will drasticly thin out the number of clans/alliances competing for ownership.  This way, a grind happy ghost clan with a decent tax on a sector will have a fair chance of maintaining that rail for a few challenges.

Battle pay is hugely expensive and repairing rails is also hugely expensive, so yeah, tax free is going the way of the dodo. There's no way even for a huge and dedicated alliance like Eclipse to maintain a rail for long without taxes.

Edited April 15, 2014 by Cpl_Facehugger

[aTrane9001]

Something I saw on another forum post, the rails are currently useless with all the contesting going on.  The "bonuses" you get from the missions are only obtainable when rails are not getting contested.  Sure, when they are getting contested, we get to fight "Spectres", but they aren't very cool.  When they aren't, we get key-free infested missions.

[Abzence]

Here is another suggestion:

 

If they would keep the original reward bonuses during contest but allow the defending/attacking clans the opportunity to top these rewards up with extra credits/resources. So even if the clan offers nothing the player will still be rewarded.

This will generally make it more lucrative for regular players to have rails contested since it will mean extra bonuses.

This will turn contested rails into extra rewarding instead of extra annoying.

[RaikenArashii]

So far the issue isn't one clan alliance immediately recontesting a node they lose, it's another clan or alliance contesting that node within five minutes.

 

I guess it might be a bit better to apply the cooldown to each sector individualy instead of each clan/alliance, to increase overall uptime for the sector missions.  Still, battle pay is a rather touchy subject.  I feel there should be a minnimum, and it's not that big of an expectation considering the rewards from sectors. 

 

Take venus for example: 5000 base pay per mission run, even at 10% tax that's 50 credits per person per run.  I'd think it's a fair asessment that the average player will do the sector mission more often than the conflict missions, meaning the taxes will cover battle pay costs by a majority, assuming my guess is roughly correct.  It also improves the competition for owning sectors with the intention of making a profit.

[superbot34]

i am pretty sure players aren't interested in battle pay and just want to get the conflict over with so they can play the mission they actually wanted to play.

Edited April 16, 2014 by superbot34

[GuyonBroadway]

The missions themselves are a little dull too, leading to player apethy and not really wanting to fight in the conflicts.

 

Here's a brief suggestion for a possible ineresting take on solar rail conflict missions.

Imagine this, at it's core it functions as a survival mission, you're here to disrupt enemy defences while a saboteur wrecks S#&$ offscreen.

HOWEVER! the game wil periodically issue extra objectives that add extra score to your mission score. Say you are gaining score for survivng, suddenly the lotus tells you "There is a rail technician in the area" and some peope can run off and do a capture objective to gain extra score. And then something like "The operative found the backup core, escort it to the airlock" and you then intitate a hijack objective.

The higher your score, the more the enemy rail gets knocked down.

To compensate for all these objectives the enemy spawn rate wouls be lowered bur the individual enemy strength would be upped. (Look, with the 6KDPS pahges a single enemy no matter HOW strong is not gong to be an issue) This way you can bud off and it's safer for tenno to run off on their own in order to do objectives but the challenge to the indiviual is still significant.

The simple merging of exisitng mission types would be my first step for making more interesting contnent.

Edited April 16, 2014 by GuyonBroadway

[Overkill.]

first i think cool down is correct so i think 7day(1 week to make a rail would make any clan think again before deploy it) and 1 alliance only alow to deploy 1 every 7day that 14day if they mess up. then another 48hr rail deployment that kick more time in it so people and rail owner have a chance to gain credit to fund their defend. as well as scheduled their defender.

after the conflict end there should be atleast 48hr grace time for other ppl to gain the benefit of the rail. i mean if there no grace some other alliance would just throw another rail down and we cant use it as dark sector.

 

also i think the conflict should have 2mode like normal mode and defend mode. so normal player that only interest in the node for the bonus can just go and chill with the bonus and what ever tax that gain would be given to the winer of the conflict after.

 

honor buff should be given to the winner like extra creadit/exp/loot/drop chance on the node that they att/defend that should give some motivation.

 

also instead of modify the battle pay i think attacker/defender should have the option of hiring mercenary like grinner heavie or corpus i would like to see jackal or hyena in the mission along side with tenno shade that would look cool.