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.
< New player. Been looking at it and considering it but the faction hits are scary. And my lack of experience means that I don’t know it’s wise to cut off half of space with the faction hits and not sure I want to accept the long-term implications.
I think the way to go would be an instanced area of space where pilots start in bases that provide pre-fitted T1 or maybe T1.5 ships for cheap which are limited to that instance. You could make sure the sides are even that way too. But being new and all what do I know lol.
Biggest complaint for me wrt faction warfare, though, is the lack of info on the corps that are looking for members. If and when I do this I’ll go with Caldari since I value access to the big trade market above all else. But googling the current corps who are looking for players seems to return a ton of old and defunct groups. It’s a bit frustrating hopefully eve uni will have groups that do this (decided to sign up with them).
Standings hits are not a major problem, you just go shopping on a neutral alt anyway since your at war.
As for corps just get started in the default Milita corp, alot of the FW content promotes solo play and has the low sec sites restricted to specific ship class’s so if you want to get started in a Tech 1 frigate to learn you can do sites restricted to only other tech 1 frigs
Yeah this wasn’t really a problem in 2012-2013 but CCP and the ~elite PvP~ crowd didn’t like that people could make enough money in FW to fund their PvP, so it all got nerfed or embargo’d and now the content is gone and everyone’s like :surprisepikachu:.
The drone Glitch in Jita is one of the lamest thing in that game. I sent many petition to fix it, for years. Used only buy guys rich enough to use multi accounts with rattlesnake and several remote praxis, but without the balls to stand against navy
i’m new player in warfare most of militia don’t care about loyalty point they only care about pvp and some people from militia attacking player in same militia
Personally, I think the tier system as is needs to go. It encourages faction bouncing imho.
The choice you make needs to be meaningful when you select a faction, and there needs to be a way to encourage content.
Perhaps a way to donate LP towards a faction invasion fleet. It could work similar to how Trig invasions worked, FOB, or incursions. The systems for those mechanics are already in place. It can allow an underperforming faction to mount an invasion and take systems, and feel as though spinning around a complex is actually creating content. It creates a destination for FW PvP.
Next, you’d need a reason for your side to control a system. Limit docking access in systems your side doesn’t control? Prevent opposing factions from deploying structures in a system they dont control? Maybe the faction that controls the system can “upgrade” systems for better bounties, roving ore anomalies, and cosmic signatures, similar to null? It could provide a nice introduction to those mechanics before popping into null groups.
Spitballing. But as it stands, FW is not a great intro to PvP. Novice sites intended for low SP pilots still allow pirate/faction ships. Ive seen a few ppl appear to multibox into sites (i get it, fair fights are a failure on whomever engages typically, but this is supposed to be an introduction to pvp for players). Theres no real meaning behind the choices you make, its all an attempt to generate ISK.
There’s a lot of great points in this thread and honestly it’s a shame that FW isn’t more fleshed out. FW has a ton of potential to provide players with actual narratives to fight over. You choose a side and commit to the fight.
As someone who has been involved in wardecs since around 2012 FW is always something I wish was in a better place so I could participate in it instead of Highsec Wars. So just a friendly bump in support of some good ideas here… sure wish CCP would help lowsec out.
-Faction rank tags that proceed your name in local.
-add skins and more clothes to lp store
-add faction destoyers to lp store
-remove fw missions
-remove faction frigs from novices
-add environmental damage to war targets in opposing highsec
-completely remove trigs from gates in fw systems
-remove cross faction plexing
-reduce the cost of t1 ammo, again
-add eve voice, again
There are some really great ideas here, and I too wish FW was more fleshed out. So much potential here, but it’s needed attention for years. One can hope that it’ll come, but I’ll not hold my breath.