CSM 13 - Faction Warfare Issues/Suggestions/Ideas

CSM 13 began its duties today with our first official meeting with CCP.

As I noted I would do to those who made comments, I’m creating open issues threads for the various areas of space that players may have ideas, concerns or issues with.

Please use this thread for faction warfare - issues specific to that region of space.

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Hi Guys: Just a suggestion:

What would be amazing is if FW rank was something you invested in and built up over a long period and was rewarded well for doing so, wouldn’t even mind if everyone started at 1 again to start at a even playing field.

jumping between the 2 sides for tier farming is kind of shallow and breaks the immersion and becomes a farming activity rather than an epic storyline.

Make the fw rats warp disrupt you +10 strength while you’re within 50 of the beacon. Additionally, make fw rats appear on d-scan.

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Few key points:

Standings to be in FW should be based on the factions corp standing as opposed to faction standing (for example instead of using amarr empire standings, use 24th ic). This makes it a lot less limiting to be in one faction long term as currently it ■■■■■■ up the enemy faction standing.

Warp stabs cant even enter plexes now which is good.

More LP should be awarded per kills, some LP should be rewarded for dying inside of a complex owned by your militia - This encourages people a bit to actually stick to their plex and defend it (Loyalty to your faction)

Completely scrap the tier system, LP gain modifier should be based on the characters time served, amount of system captures, amount of o-plex’s/deplex’s, and enemy militia kills.

Currently non-fw low sec is trash, it’s largely unoccupied (aside from a few groups who gate camp for a living, or just drop endless caps on any newbro that enters cos 1337 pvp) and it has so much potential. Make them useful by implementing pirate factions in FW and have those systems be the primary area for them, this gives room for dedicated pirate faction RP’ers to play their game and brings content/makes those areas useful, fun and engaging.

Also, scrap the current warzone rules regarding who can own what. Make all FW systems open to capture by anyone, almost like how it is in planetside where any faction can attempt to take control of a system. Give each faction 2-3 permanent systems at the core of where they start as basis for staging in a lost warzone. System capture could work something like this:

All systems start off owned by the faction whos space it is, so amarr owns amarr space, gallente owns gallente space etc. From there the owners of a system can deplex as usual, however the attackers have their own contested metre, so each faction has to grind up it’s own contestion of the system to vulnerable before bashing the ihub. However, factions can only attempt to capture enemy systems adjacent to one of their own systems, which creates frontline systems where alot of the action will happen.

There is a fair bit more that can be done with this sorta idea, however I doubt it’d matter much going into it here as it would likely be easiest to just scrap FW and rebuild from the ground up which CCP won’t do.

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People are derailing this thread with proposed ideas rather than input on ISSUES. Linked is an ongoing discussion on the new server side check on warp core stabs which has interfered with the old gate sliding bug/trick. RIP: The Hans Slide

Ps. Or please edit to read as:… Ideas on issues or concerns. Otherwise this will be a massive train wreck that will be hard to follow.

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Ran into Tristan and the guys in FW today and they brought this to my attention. Thanks for also noting it here.

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Alright. This might be more controlled than I had at first imagined. Thank you for doing this. I made it no secret that I’m not a fan of sound-board style CSM, because I feel a representative of the player base should understand the intricacies of the game and meta to effectively communicate anything effectually without undue stress added to already sensitive communication channels.

Anyhow, here are my biggest problems with FW:

  1. Loyalty Point faucet from factional warfare missions is too high with the new system where each tier is given a substantially higher LP payout. It used to be a discount in the Loyalty store, but the current bonus has now made FW mission payouts retardedly higher than anything else by a huge factor that it is not even funny and it seriously plays against the spirit of pvp when this is a much more lucrative option in every aspect than spinning buttons (running fw complexes), the only other option of two available in earning LP --because let’s be realistic here, PvP does not reward LP in any sustainable way in the current payouts calculator.

I proposed a long time ago, much as the Abyssal sites have now for allowing only Cruiser type ships into this content, that FW mission acceleration gates should bar/deny access to any tech 2 or tech 3 vessel. Others know this will work, but they are too afraid to lose their own tap to an infinite source of LP, as everyone knows these are farmed by Stealth Bombers, Tactical Destroyers, Tech 3 Cruisers, and HAC’s. Does it go too far? No. Every faction has the ability to solo even lvl 4 FW missions in their respective navy cruisers. Making this a perfect balance change which brings the level of risk up to the reward.

  1. Not enough benefits for maintaining system control. There really is little reason for a FW group to aggressively dplex (defensive plex) the warzone. The payouts are marginal at best and the time sink is excruciatingly real. The biggest problem with bringing down contested levels is, without a doubt, that dplexing is the ONLY way to decrease system contestation levels. If you were to introduce a daily passive drop or some other means, be it by some anchored structure or mode in which the iHub can be eligible at high system tier (and can be interrupted with consequence), could make this much more tolerable for PvP focused groups that don’t want to see dplexing alts as a requirement to participate competitively in this area of the game. In short, give us better system bonuses which benefit FW groups and penalize non-FW groups living within the warzone. There is a very large swath of non-fw lowsec that is near uninhabited and waiting for nice pirate groups to pitch their tents there. They are like the panther that lives by itself as the apex predator in a valley full of prey. Of course they don’t want to move, their dinner is at their doorstep. As I’ve said before, they could consider it a commute to a good job. A mere bonus/penalty, respectively, to structure fuel consumption would be enough to do it without touching docking or anchoring restrictions for Upwell structures.

  2. Please introduce a new metric by which tier is calculated. As of this moment, the only thing that decides tier level is the point system with is basically comprised of every system in control (1 point) and their upgrade levels (out of potentially 5 points), which makes each system a maximum worth of 6 points each when upgraded to the max lvl 5. The total points are then compared to a percentage against total possible points, and system percentage control is figured this way. That is tier.
    What it should also consider is kills. A statistics which is already gathered in the Statistics panel of the FW window. This should add a 20% bump to tier by itself, imo. Especially if you remove missions LP from the available LP bank, as donations from mission LP comprise probably 99% of the total LP which is dumped into hubs. No kidding. I would love that the hub of each system becomes more valuable the longer this system is held under occupation, making staging systems a much greater and appealing target, rather than just a kick at the hive for the sake of dispelling boredom.

That’s my spill. It’s winded, but I’ve been here since before Inferno. FW is my home and I love it. I’ve stuck around for this.

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Thanks for taking the time to write this out - it’s useful and I’ll have it handy for discussions.

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I’t would be more interesting to limit the complex’s to navy frigates only, as if it was cruisers only it would be a duplicate of abyss and not something different.

Also if it was cruisers only then no one would get passed the 5 or so perma gate camp’s per day and the missions will remain mostly empty, frigs are the only thing with a small chance of getting through the gate camps.

but agree 100% with everything else you said and would vote for it :].

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You can actually use the mwd warp+cloak trick in any cruiser to get around most gate camps if you are going solo. Even a Machariel can pull it off. Otherwise it would probably fall into group content, which I would not mind one single bit and would be much more different from Abyssal solo content. :: Edit::

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Can always go half way and meet at navy destroyers * _ *, I wish :stuck_out_tongue:.

As much as I would have loved the idea of navy destroyers two or three years ago, now with tactical destroyers and command destroyers, I feel like it would be too much. Don’t forget that we got Talwar, Dragoon, Algos, and the Corax to play with too.

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Maybe if they allow navy weapons to use advanced charges, this would be pretty magnificent for all of our lp markets.

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Any news on the default overview changes for allies with negative or criminal security status?

In my opinion, faction warfare should be eve’s primary place to find solo and small gang pvp, and the current game mechanics aren’t doing much to encourage that.

The problems are:

Territory control and tiers are completely driven by the market not pvp. The statistics say the caldari/gallente war is pretty even, and the minmatar/amarr fight is pretty even. However, the fw window informs new players that caldari and amarr are getting dominated. That’s wrong. The tier system encourages farmers to all push the winning side until those loyalty points are so devalued that it makes sense to all switch to the other side which will then almost immediately begin to dominate. It’s also strange that you gain more “loyalty points” by switching to the winning side. That’s not loyalty.

Pirates were not considered when designing fw mechanics. If fw space is the place for solo and small gang pvp, players that are willing to fight both militias add a lot of value, and there are no fw mechanics that encourage them to be here. You also shouldn’t wreck your security status by defending them. This is a warzone. If a guy in my militia corp has committed war crimes, I still have to defend him against neutrals. Not that he should have been punished for killing neutrals in FW space to begin with. FW space is about fights.

FW missions don’t encourage fights. All they add are jackdraws that warp before anyone can lock them. You could certainly figure out ways to kill them, but why? FW is about fights. These PVE farmers aren’t interested in fighting and aren’t equipped to fight players. That sort of pvp is better handled by wormhole space.

FW mechanics don’t do anything to encourage small gang pvp. If infrastructure hubs were worth defending, you’d want to defend them with as many people as you can find. (Admittedly, people do defend hubs, but it’s only because there’s a fight there. Its not because anyone cares about the hub.)

Some simple solutions are:

Eliminate the tier system. This will make it so territory control is about epeen instead of farmer’s profit motives. It’ll also reduce profitability, which will encourage people not interested in pvp to go away.

Make it so you can kill anyone not in your militia without penalty in FW space. It’s a warzone. Expect to die.

Make FW missions encourage small-gang fights. They should require a group, be worth as much as 5 plexes, be behind an acceleration gate, force you to kill every single npc, not require pve fits, and they should be equally profitable as less dangerous PVE. The point of missions should be to broadcast that your small gang is in system, and that you’ll wait 10 minutes for them to fleet up to come fight. The mission level would gate what level of ships could enter. Making it equally profitable as less dangerous activities will encourage people not interested in fighting to go away.

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Just adding it here, because there were some suggestions around and it may help if they are collected in one Place:

Not my suggestions, just putting them here.

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That bottom post is gold if that was implemented I’m sure a Lot of people would be really happy.

There was no mention of defensive plexing in Suitonia’s blog. Problematic. Dplexing is my second major problem, aside from system ownership being given meaning again.

There are a ton of special things that can be done with unopened plexes. Say a special event can be started by going to the hub and, if there are a set of 4 of every type of plex, you can have a notification come up in the FW window. The completion or failure of could drop contested value or raise it. There could be different types of combinations which spawn different events, or maybe even missions can be started this way with a set of 3 unopened plexes of the same type, the novice opening a lvl1 and set of large a lvl4.

A plex can enter eligibility mode in a set by running the timer to 100% defensive. Just kill L.P. payouts for dplexing. Dplexing is an awful mechanic anyway. Module and ship restrictions are just bandaids for the symptoms of a poor mechanic. I would prefer this poker hand style event spawner.

Can keep offensive plexing the same as it is currently.

There’s a lot you can do with the FW missions without resorting to their deletion. Deleting missions, without any other thing to take their place, would lead to a shortage of LP and we would likely never see tier 3 or 4 again with the current LP donation requirement thresholds by oplexing alone.

Not to mention that faction hulls would be 3-4 X more expensive for the avg consumer.

Another Reddit-Thread with suggestions that I think should be linked here: