Faction Warfare in EvE should be alot more popular than it is now and could be with some small quality of life improvements. What Faction Warfare should be is a easy entry into PVP for Fun without the hard commitment to big alliances but runs into some problems that could be easily improved on.
System Upgrades and Loyalty point gains.
PVP in EvE is expensive, your loss’s need to be subsidized and new ships bought. Faction warfare tries to accomplish this by paying Loyalty points for Faction warfare activities. But unless you can maintain system upgrade levels the loyalty points you gain are severely reduced and here comes the main problem is that you then need to spend the loyalty points in order to maintain system upgrade levels instead of using them to fund the PVP activities they were originally intended for.
A very easy improvement to this system would be to link the System upgrade level to the Capture Status of the system in question. When you securely hold a system at 0%-20% contested status it is a level 5 system, at 20%-40% it is Level 4 and so on.
This way the upgrade level is directly linked to militia performance in successfully completing warfare activities instead of relying on people to able to spare their hard won loyalty points to drop into a Ihub
Glitch Exploiting to fight in Enemy High sec with no Navy involvement
Again Faction Warfare is expensive and players need a way to fund it. This for a lot of players especially newer ones which Faction Warfare is intended to provide an introduction to PVP is going to involve running missions/sites in high security space.
Now engaging militia’s in their own high security space is supposed to be a very difficult endeavour as entering opposing faction high security space will trigger a navy response. Unfortunately there is a very simple and widely exploited glitch that completely neutralises this mechanic.
If you launch a drone at a random point in high security space and then abandon it and warp off the navy response will stay at the location of the drone and continue shooting it completely ignoring the player. With a Neutral alt character in system to provide remote repairs to the abandoned drone so it does not die the Navy will stay at the drone location indefinitely allowing the hostile player free reign to attack in high security systems.
This while ruining immersion of faction warfare is also devastating to newer players who rely on activities in high security systems in order to fund their gameplay makes faction warfare very off putting.
All it will take to fix this is a small change to Navy AI so that they will prioritise killing player ships over drones.