Greetings.
There is a lot to type so I will be quick to the point and blunt.
I am a member of the “almost only” active Caldari Militia alliance Ghostbirds. While Templis is a larger, stronger and more active entity than us, they do not engage in faction warfare apart from only one of their members.
I am grateful for your effort and love for faction warfare and lowsec.
However…
The suggestions in this presentation are undeniably coming from someone who hasn’t been to lowsec or faction warfare in the past 2 years.
I think it will be best to touch every page so here it goes:
-Man Issues:
-Income - There is no reliable income method in lowsec. There are ways to make isk but they aren’t as reliable as any-other-sec isk making for most of the players. Everyone agrees on this.
-Citadels did not make system conquest pointless but they made it incredibly hard for attackers to succeed.
-Wrong. There is a quite significant penalty and benefit to owning a citadel as a FW group. We can not tether to our citadels in a system which is conquered by gallente/minmatar. As we know citadels are not fast-lockers so it is quite viable to follow your enemy to their citadel and tackle them before their weapon timer runs out.
-Pendulum effect is just one of the possible effects. Noone is frustrated that the winning side keeps changing continuously. Of course it favors the winning side and the “characters” that switch side are not in this for faction warfare. They are in this for the lp.
-Entire game encourages evasive farming. No ded-runner, no ratter, no “xyz” waits in their pve-site when they see a hostile approaching. This is how eve works.
-Farmers can and should change their sides. This makes no difference in the actual Faction Warfare. Again, they are farming lp, they aren’t doing faction warfare.
-FW Mission farmers have no say in which the way the warzone sways, but the plexer-farmers do. Honestly I can’t see how you can fix this.
-Indeed there is no sense of individual effort rewards most of the time considering you need to sit in a plex 10 to 20minutes. However, when a faction hits tier 4, solo capturing an open plex becomes very lucrative.
-Wrong. Mission farming is not an issue. A mission farmer has no effect on the warzone. He only farms his lp and may or may not provide content for enemy faction players/pirates. Conquest percentage does not move one bit when an enemy mission runner finishes a mission. Only thing that happens is that he gets his lp and moves on. There is nothing wrong here.
-Yes, missions are like you described, however, I can’t understand what you mean by “bypassing all content”. Killing the cruisers while doing the “kill haulers” mission provides absolutely no content, even for a pve-oriented player.
-Here you say missions are not tied to the warzone or fw content, which I obviously agreed above. So what is the problem? Do you believe that if you take missions away, those mission-runners will become actual faction warfare players? They will not. They are making isk, all players regardless of where they live need isk.
-Income from missions while a faction is tier 4+ is great and again I don’t see how changing this will fix the content and income issues.
-Rank system? Do you mean “Brigadier General” ranks? They have absolutely zero effect ingame.
-I’m not entirely sure what you meant by this “citadels requiring alignment” part. As I understand, you are proposing neutrals will not be able to anchor citadels as long as they don’t become a member of a militia. This is the worst thing for lowsec you can possibly do. It will simply push neutral players out of warzones and decrease content even more. Lowsec’s main problem is the abysmal population.
-Lowsec islands part - the above
-Fw missions getting turned into FW objectives is an interesting idea.
-Add directives? Do you think fw players just randomly charge into any system they wish? We have our goals set by ourselves. We want to defend system X, while applying pressure to enemy controlled system Z so we announce it to our members. “Designated by faction NPCs”. I don’t want to go as low as saying “are you kidding” but, please, are you kidding?
-There is no unique opportunity to give new players a purpose. Eve has been online for an amazing amount of time and people have hundreds of millions of sp and billions/trillions of isk. A new player will get brutally beaten and he will need to suck it up and try to get better.
-Highsec engagements for faction warfare would be interesting but, apparently, things have changed since you alst came into lowsec so we aren’t really bursting with positive security status. We often need to do 10lowsec jumps instead of 2hisec jumps because most of our members are below -3 security status.
-Do not add invasion-like content. Black Rise has ptsd because of invasion content.
The Dream is the dream of a ratter. I can’t deny that it sounds interesting but we need pvp, not pve. Yes, the message that is sent to Gallente players after Kedama is conquered by them will make them go to Kedama and kill the evac-capital-ships for good loot and yes, Caldari players will go to defend/get any fights but its novelty will wear off.
Please do not try to make “NPC Designated goals/systems” a thing. We have our own logistics. We can’t just move our assets according to a mindless npc and we won’t be able to conquer any systems without our assets. If a FW corporation/alliance is “currently” living in Kedama, they can’t simply go and conquer Fliet (in this example the fw entity is Caldari Militia, coming from Asakai side). We need to take Tama, Sujarento, Nagamanen and Deven before Fliet. Even if we move our necessary assets to a favourable location to conquer Fliet, what if this NPC General tells us to conquer Kinakka next? This does not make any sense and makes everything unnecessarily hard and will make even more players quit lowsec.
-T1-only-frigate-plexes mean nothing. You tried this suggestion before with “1vs1-plexes”, it was easily abusable and this time t1 frigate plex brings nothing. A new player flying his cute little condor won’t be able to do anything to the years long player who has 80+m sp with blinged ship and high grade pod. Prevent bling and pods? Still won’t make any difference as Eve depends on experience as much as it depends on your ship/fit/bling.
I’m not saying t1-only-frigate-plex is a bad idea but it provides … nothing.
Black Rise bled because of the invasion. Now there is no “lowsec region”. There are only a handful of systems that house neutrals like Kinakka, Tama, Heydieles etc. Only action is in those systems.
I sincerely respect the time you invested in this and appreciate it with all my heart but your last lowsec activity is 2 years ago and your suggestions are not connected to the reality of lowsec. Not to mention I did read your message of “not knowing what happened to Black Rise” about 7-9 days ago (even though Corvus had been pinging you about it for the past 4 months) on reddit and this only reinforces your inexpertise in suggesting changes for faction warfare and lowsec.
I have absolutely no intent in insulting your work but I wholeheartedly hope that none of your suggestions is considered by CCP because I fear if they accept your suggestions things will get worse and we will need to wait X years for another change.
Thank you for your time and effort, it is good to see that someone somewhere is thinking and devising plans about where we live.
Regards.