The permanent empire standings decrease around the faction warfare feature has been blamed for keeping people from participating in faction warfare. With this in mind, I will suggest a few changes.
Positive standing toward the fw npc corporation will be required to join fw, instead of positive empire standing. Running through the npe content of the players chosen faction will give the appropriate standing, just as it does currently.
Faction warfare is technically a war between the militias, not the empires themselves; it is more or less a proxy gang war supported by the empires. With this in mind, standing loss, if any is to be had, should be against the opposing faction warfare npc corporation.
Faction warfare npcs will be from the fw militia npc corporation, instead of being directly empire navy. This way, standing loss will be against those corporations rather than the empire as a whole.
Players entering enemy controlled high security space will no longer be shot at by empire navy, but instead npcs from the opposing militia npc corporation will attack the player. The game will initiate a trigger that spawns militia npcs much in the same way concord responds to their targets. These npcs will be “hunter killer squads” of an appropriate challenge for the ship the player is flying.
Current missions targeting empire factions are mostly skipped by the majority of mission runners. Until you revamp mission content, I propose removing these missions from the majority of mission agents, and giving them to agents that specialize in anti-empire missions players will only get access to through faction warfare or agents that are involved in “criminal” activity.
The fw agents with these missions should be placed in the proposed frontline systems (in both high and low security space,) and will relocate as that front line shifts. If no suitable station exists for the agent, they will be placed in space as a mission agent npc ship object.
New objectives. To move the war away from being entirely centered around Low sec, I propose the addition of high sec objectives that are tied to the security status of the system. Completed objectives in enemy controlled space will work toward lowering security status (though I would caution against moving a system from high security to low security,) and completing objectives in friendly space would work toward raising security status.
With no input from players, security status would gradually increase as the empires work to make things more secure, and the evidence of this would be an incremental number of fw objective locations in space as the security status increases.
New objective type: Capture the flag. Faction Warfare anomalies or complexes you have to hack / salvage / drop militia into a structure and wait a duration of time before they “return” with the object, ect. The player will not be able to enter the site with a cloak fit to the ship or in the cargo hold. Once the desired object is in the ship’s cargo hold, an alarm goes off alerting the opposing faction to the player’s presence. The player will then have to return to a fw mission agent in friendly space to get their reward / influence the faction war.
f up tags market would make many LP stores useless. As there wouldn’t be enough tags to turn into faction items.
Currently anti empire missions are high reward high risk activity and don’t need change. Expect maybe make them similar tu burner missions. No penalty for declining. Which will help new mission runners.
One thing that any FW player will agree is removing FW missions. Burn them and throw ashes away. There is zero point in locking one part of economy to FW which will only incentivize farming and boting. Further reinforcing current FW issue with more consequences on top of that.
Its not a permanent decrease. You attack another empire you shouldnt expect to still be friends with them. Thats true in or out of fw with storyline missions. Im happily -10 with gallente trash.
There are ways to bring your negative standings up or even work to keep them up while fighting the same enemies in fw.
I understand your point, but its not actually correct. Yes there are ways to increase your standing, but the standing change itself is technically permanent until you make another permanent change in the other direction.
An example of a temporary standing change would be standings that degrade over time when you’re not active in the war.
What about just giving us something really useful about having 9 standings for lets say Gallente so that you don’t mind the -9 Caldari standing at all then there will be enough people with -9 standings and more market hubs will start emerging.
We need more bonus’s for having massive negatives (bad Caldari standings and loss of access to Jita.)
Such as Access to lvl 5 missions in npc nullsec (yes I know there is none but why not :D) but the requirement’s for the level 5 missions are:
+9 standings in that faction and - 5.5/6 standings(after social skills) against its enemies (enough not to be allowed in that space without being shot by faction police.)
Or standings having a greater impact on things like tax and material cost for blue print’s, If you want to be the best builder you have to go all out and be locked out of some type of space.
Or even standings having an effect on the speed of gathering that new currency ccp was talking about for ship skin/decal’s/holograms.
It’s cool idea to have actual consequences from bad standings. But the issue is that all of it can simply be ignored with neutral alts. Which results in just another annoyance. Not enhanced gameplay.
To be honest. It don’t take much effort to maintain positive standings with all factions. Which means all gains and no negatives. Even with enforced negative standings to opposing faction you would just end up with alts for each empire to have access to all bonuses.
Not to mention that your standings “rework” has nothing to do with FW.
If your comment is addressed at the original post, the standings issue doesn’t really matter to me. I have alts I use for fw, but keep my main out of fw due to the standings issue. It’s not a problem for me to operate this way.
However, some have claimed the standings issue is keeping some people from using the feature entirely. The purpose of this post is to offer a solution to the problem, while hopefully keeping the spirit of fw alive.
If you have a critique of the proposed plan, or another idea you think would work better, please participate.
I’ve been thinking more about what you said here.
You’re always going to have farmers and botters where ever there are resources to extract. I think it’s probably better to have them in an environment where you can shoot them, rather than just having them run high sec missions in safety which creates a huge influx of isk to the economy. Not to mention, mission runners also have access to some of the same LP rewards that the FW LP store does.
Perhaps what FW could use, is another currency that’s exclusive to the warzone. During fanfest, CCP mentioned interbus credits. Credits you can earn for war activity and exchange for exclusive faction warfare items like implants and skins you can’t receive elsewhere, would perhaps curtail some of the animosity fw players have toward the farmers and botters since those groups would no longer be stealing income from the people active in the warzone.
And if you’re still mad at them, at least you can go and kill them without any major consequence.
I still like the idea of having specific agents that handle anti-empire missions (and probably against specific empire factions,) rather than mixing them in with the rest of the missions mission runners do, even if it’s not a requirement to have those agents be in faction warfare.
It’s also never made sense to me from a lore perspective to have anti-empire missions be running deep in empire territory. How does a fleet of Amarr show up deep in Minmatar space, or vice versa without being rebuffed near the border?
I ran a series of 5 level 1 missions yesterday to get a better feel for the current status of anti-empire missions. In total, they only gave out about 100 LP and tanked my Minmatar standing on that character by an entire point. Not exactly high reward, but pretty punishing. The missions didn’t even raise my faction standing toward Caldari, and only about double the standing bonus toward Caldari Navy.
Yep, this is why people aggressively decline missions that display the upcoming enemy as an Empire Faction. You can see the source of your faction decrease was shooting & killing their ships. The only way to avoid that is to decline the mission or not do Security Agents.
Only Storyline missions – the special mission you get after 15 normal missions – will raise the faction standing (and adjust relationship standings accordingly).
Also note that the standings graph you’re looking at is one of the most busted and counter-intuitive things to read in the game.
When i say SOE, i mean the SOE epic Arc
Depending on what faction you selected in mission 49, you will receive a base +7% faction standing increase. (This standing increase will be higher if you have trained Social, up to a maximum increase of 8.75%.)
Where as the 4 empire epic arcs give you:
10% Faction Standing (with no derived standings)
remove the one time only per account restriction on data center agent tag missions for standing and all this severe limitation on many aspects of the game just disappears. As long as you have isk or are willing to go out and get tags from rats you can always keep your standings up.
Sure you “can”… but how many will? Who has time for that when they’re living busy lives? The standings issue is a barrier to entry many will just forgo in favor of doing something else.
Agreed. The things they hinted at in the fanfest presentations could have some pretty far reaching implications. We can only hope they’ll make things better.
