Honestly you don't really need to force people to stay in the instance anyway. If the goal is to encourage people to stick around for protracted periods of time, the mere existence of scenario objectives can accomplish this. All Frontier has to do is make the scenario objectives much more important than the combat bonds (or not even *start* awarding combat bonds until an objective has been completed, with exponentially increasing payout multipliers for each subsequent objective completed).
If it worked that way, people would have to stick around long enough to achieve these objectives and will be reluctant to bug out at the first sign of human opposition. What's more, if the mere *arrival* of a player-controlled opposing force causes them to leave the instance and lose the progress they've made towards completing their objectives, then the opposing force will in fact have secured a very real "victory" by driving them out, whether they fire a shot or not.
The problem right now is if you're doing BGS work the "smart" thing to do is still to do lots and lots of hit-and-run sorties and turn in 2-3 kills worth of bonds each time. And then for credit farmers the thing to do is just roll on weak ships to raise the kill count for those massacre missions. But if completion of objectives, and winning the little bar graph tug-o-war were the only thing that moved the BGS needle, and if combat bond payouts were somewhat tied in to this same system, you wouldn't need to "trap" players in a CZ. Instead, scaring someone away would be nearly as beneficial as killing them, and running away would be almost a sort much of a "loss" as being shot down.
True. But the issue is there is TOO MUCH running away. There is not enough time for interaction even if you pull someone from super cruise. A full wing can grom people twice and not kill anything with the way engineering works right now. And its not because the players are bad. These are the best players in the game experiencing these problems.
This is why shield booster nerf was brought up many moons ago.
There has to be some platform for winning and losing an instance. Rebuys need to be important in wars. Not only is the group affected. But your personal skill is affected.
IF you're just hitting and running all the time. You're always running and never losing anything yourself. And never really stopping them from completing the goals against you, both sides need to be capable of losing. This happens way too much in this game. They still get to turn in their objectives.
These conflict and power play zones are the perfect platform for this.
My issue is if people can just drop in and out at any time, even while in open play. You can instance with specific friends and ignore the people working the same zone that's technically in the same place. Avoiding conflict all together from other commanders.
Removing tons and tons and TONS of gameplay that could be available. Just in these conflict zones alone.
Again the goal is to keep them there for a little while. Not forever. You just shouldn't be able to nope out right away.
The worst that happens is people see the rebuy screen. Thats really not a big deal once we get into these late game activities against one another we are talking about here.
There is no consequences in this game for losing. And no one really loses on either side.
