Best Of

This is a place to:
   - Provide feedback on the current mechanics of Cosmpiercers.
   - Discuss potential coded improvements to the system.
   - Be respectful and keep clean.
This is NOT a place to:
   - Import or export IC or OOC drama.
   - Call out other factions for what they did or didn't do in/around Cosmpiercers.
   - Force the awesome dev team to wade through mudflinging to find legitimate feedback.
  
So here goes:

The recent changes definitely put things in better shape. TOWREQUEST means you don't have to put 30-60k of ship supplies on the line when you lose a ground fight. Commodity Credits are very flexible and a great reward to incentivize participation. The conflict channel is a nice QoL thing. The new mechanics of COSMPIERCER WARP mean that we have the possibility for proper 3-way fights, and space battles over the generators have already occurred.

Once the ground fight starts, the experience is an intensely pure group PvP experience, which I personally love. We live, we die, we live again.

The main outstanding issue for me is just how boring the experience is when there are no defenders around to prevent the capture. I don't really think it's a problem that people do this, since it can be a good group-building thing to fly out and do something together, especially when including people who haven't done many Cosmpiercers before. But the main cause for my previous burn out was the ceaseless back-and-forth sweeps of defenseless Cosmpiercers, which had us claiming and reclaiming day in, day out, with nary a pk death to be seen. I've wracked my brain on this and this is the only solution I've come up with, and I can't tell whether it's clever or just straight-up foolish:
   - When a Cosmpiercer is claimed, the hour on which it was claimed becomes the time of day it always becomes vulnerable. The vulnerability window begins at 2 hours, but then the longer a Cosmpiercer remains in the same faction's hands, the longer the vulnerability window becomes, until the Cosmpiercer is vulnerable 24 hours a day.

The second issue I have is the 10 minute timer between hacking attempts. This makes it extremely difficult for lower pop factions to have enough hackers interested and available to make an attempt on Cosmpiercers ranks 6-7. Perhaps a 5 minute timer would be more suitable.

The third issue is that PROPS ARE FUN AS HELL and there are none in Piercers unless you bring a Scoundrel and have some time to prep. Join the chant: PROPS IN PIERCERS. PROPS IN PIERCERS. PROPS IN PIERCERS. (Climbabes, too!)

The fourth issue is less pressing, but a QoL thing would be to get the map to render on Nexus, even if this means giving Cosmpiercers  layouts (each having a different random layout, of course, but now it does not change every day, and still does not need to count towards Exploration). This could also make it possible to develop tactics for particular layouts ahead of time, which could add some depth.


And now for something completely different...

The Ishvana sure is silent these days... I freaking LOVE Ishvana from a lore perspective. It's been a long time since I finished the epic quest, and the Ishvana's been out of the Piercer game for a long time, so I'm not really feeling the whole 'deep Sector-wide existential threat' thing out of the Ishvana. So yeah, I think the Ishvana could get back in the Piercer game and offer up some diversity and spice. How? Well, an idea @Rhindara mentioned in the previous thread would be having the Ishvana return to reclaim Piercers. I disagreed at first but it's been on the back of my mind ever since.

My proposal here would be to break the Cosmpiercer game up into cycles. Every 3 or 4 RL months, the Ishvana launches a massive invasion, reclaiming ALL Cosmpiercers. This invasion is so threatening and total that it cannot be countered by any means. It's just a hard reset. Factions then claim from the Ishvana the old way: by plowing through a series of rooms with Ishvana guards to get the terminals fast enough. Play continues as normal, with factions taking Piercers from each other normally. The Y'saari have been around long enough to understand that a sweeping Ishvana counterattack is inevitable and track their total payout amounts to each faction since the start of the cycle, offering up some special reward for the faction that has the most 'points' by the end of the cycle (perhaps a vanity something-or-other for the faction station, or some material or marks reward).

Possibly the Ishvana could also make mid-cycle attacks. The longer a faction is holding a particular piercer, the more likely it becomes the target for an Ishvana assault. This could come in the form of an extremely difficult Incursion which, if not fully fought off, causes the Ishvana to reclaim it. The faction would get some warning, maybe a full day's notice. And of course since Piercer zones are Open PvP, this would be ripe ground for a pretty darn fun and messy space battle where another faction is disrupting the defender's attempts to ward off the Ishvana. Hell, maybe they're even helping the defending faction in order to get at the juicy cargo and captaincy xp.

Ishvana Piercers wouldn't have vulnerability timers and WARP would only work for the attacking faction.

I think this could be a fun way to get the best of both worlds: PvE Piercers that many loved back in the day AND PvP Piercers that are loved now. Hard resets on the Cosmpiercer field keep things fresh, and would generate a flurry of activity around the reset days.