SoR, SCAR, ST6, SAS, REDS, ONE (BR1), RED.

SCAR had a few iterations but yes, there is a rich history of Serco guilds rising to prominence, shattering the competition for a period and then getting the shits with the stagnancy of the game and leaving.

I've had conversations with leaders from all of these guilds and the story all seems the same. Then of course there's spuck, he's kinda proof that the best feature of VO is often the feature that you create.

Yeah, I've never seen the point in spending hours of my time and millions of my credits grinding up caps in Deneb with the shitty AI that afflicts allied NPCs of all shapes and sizes...for nothing. Drops relevant to the only "endgame" content available now (cap crafting) should be a no-brainer here.

Spending millions? You make millions on the Border Skirmishes if you're not completely worthless at killing bots.

I routinely dump credits off ARF_02 into the guild bank.

+1 to the capship part drops. I agree, this should be a no-brainer.

+1 for useful drops.

I would add:

- require military missions to get standing > 800, and making standing 850 required for the top ships (ie skyprom and idf/x1 valk), and make deneb the easiest place to get that extra standing [actually, +2 for proper military ranks, but this would be an easy fix in the meantime]

- drop some systems between deneb and grey or at least offer shortcut wormholes deneb - capital - border. Flying across the university makes grinding capships seem exciting ;-)

- require military missions to get standing > 800,

No.

Any reasons for the negative? If it makes you feel better, make it that military missions are required to get standing > 1000 :-)

require military missions to get standing > 800,
+1

The last cap ship to pop at the end of the large mission should be like a piñata, dropping all kinds of cool stuff, then the after-battle battle begins to see who gets to take them :)

Deneb skirmishes often used to inspire a scavenging detail prior to the devs making bot drops only from player hit npcs.

vanatteveldt, while this is a PvP game, not everyone enjoys combat. Such a change would effectively exclude these players from part of the game. Now, as I've suggested before, military ships like the Valkyrie and Prometheus should be tied to membership in the military.

You mean like how the Trident crafting stuff forces players who favor combat to sink huge amounts of time into mining and trading?

Or how the only effective way to improve standing is by doing Trade Guild Procurements?

That comparison works both ways, draugath.

@draugath I am fine with everyone playing by his/her style. I also think (as you seem to agree with) that top-end military stuff should be available to people who choose the way of the sword, just like top end mining gear is only available to people who spend more time than I care for doing exploration missions.

My point was to suggest a "military" hierarchy without requiring core changes to the game, which we know are not highly frequent. AFAIK, the only point of standing is to get stuff, and currently there is nothing that I know of that requires standing > 800. So, it would not hinder anyone's play style or exclude them from any other part of the game to cap normal standing at 800 and require military missions to go beyond that, and place the top-end gear in that bracket (which should not be in the hands of pure trader types unless they procure them using their nefarious trading tricks).

Also, technically speaking deneb is PvE most of the time, and there aren't really any parts of the game that are welcoming to players who refuse to partake in some PvE to get standing.

ARF, this is getting off topic now, so I'll keep it brief and provide a link, but I also don't think that procurement missions should give the massive amounts of standing points that they do. The standing rewards and monetary rewards should be decoupled and rebalanced. ( http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/27221 )

vanatteveldt, while there isn't currently anything that requires PoS to obtain, that doesn't mean that faction standing should be tied to any one mechanic. Things can change, and there are always going to be draft-dodgers who manage to endear themselves to a population.

@draug " Things can change, and there are always going to be draft-dodgers who manage to endear themselves to a population."

Yes, absolutely. Those people generally don't get to fly F16's :-)

"vanatteveldt, while there isn't currently anything that requires PoS to obtain, that doesn't mean that faction standing should be tied to any one mechanic. "

There are currently a number of "achievements" or rewards that are recorded and that help you do stuff: the faction standing (required for border crossing / docking and equipment purchase), global license levels (required for equipment) , and badges (some required for equipment).

The license levels and badges are specifically tied to activities (combat, trading, mining, pvp etc), while the faction standing is tied to factions.

IF we want to restrict military ships to those who help a nation's military, including the topic of this thread Deneb, the license levels can't be used as those are global, so we really only have three choices:

1) limit part of the faction system to military activity (my original proposal)
2) create badges for blowing up N capships, separate for Itani and Serco lines (totally fine with me as well, you could even give them cool RP names to reflect the different attitudes towards militarism)
3) invent a fourth reward system of formal military ranks, obtained through specific military missions.

BTW I don't think this is OT at all, since we are discussing the rewards for Deneb participation, which IMHO should be one of the ways to acquire the right to make top-end military purchases from the faction you fight for.

[OT, I agree that it is too hard to get standing using military means. I don't think procurement is necessarily too easy, it is pretty tedious as it is. I think especially Itan and Serco should have specific missions to damage the other nation, with rewards varying by real danger, while UIT and minor factions should have smuggle and espionage type missions. The point of faction standing is to prove loyalty, and what better way to show loyalty than to damage the opponent. This automatically ties in with faction exclusivity by making the most rewarding missions automatically decrease standing with the opponent. ]

Draugath said: while this is a PvP game, not everyone enjoys combat. Such a change would effectively exclude these players from part of the game.

So make non-combat military missions: supply runs, mineral acquisition, military courier, etc. Only available to enlisted personnel of the nation in question.

+1 CD, as long as there is an element of danger and/or damage to the opponent.

There's an idea. If we ever have conquerable stations in Deneb, it'd make sense to have missions to supply them for whichever side happens to own that territory at the time.

I fail to see how making things more restrictive will inspire more activity in Deneb. The best recent example of this would be the faction redux -- which made it impossible to have enough serco or itani standing at any one time to be able to buy both a Skyprom and a valk. We did not see a flurry of people scrambling back and forth to get varying access to both ships. Rather, people just settled for one or the other and pretty much stayed there.

I'd argue if you made the valk (or some high variant) and the skyprom only available for people who play in Deneb, the overall result would just be most people accepting they can't have those ships. And we'd see little or no change in deneb participation.

vanatteveldt, I was saying that discussion on the overpowered procurement missions was off topic. Further, I was only arguing that standing should not be limited by participation in one mechanic or another. Regardless of how the standing is earned it should not be soft-capped because someone didn't want to do X.

Greenwall, there should be some hard decisions to make. At the moment the only equipment that really warrants further restriction is the Valks and Proms. It would be nice if there was other equipment that incentivised other playstyles, but this too is going off topic for the thread.

+1 for making any proms and valks over mark 3 military only.

There are too many pros of going to grey space for battle and almost no pros to go and satisfy your need for fighting in Deneb. Would be cool if Itani and Serco were fighting in Deneb while UIT would be busy hauling stuff to them, and the pirates would be trying to intercept them on the way in greyspace instead of everyone being in the center of the map, UIT and grey spaces, because you can have everything there. Corvults, Greyhounds, RevCs, all kinds of other goodies, Proms and Valks just a few systems away.. thats the reason why Deneb is dead.Every best bit of stuff is in a close cluster.