It takes a lot of effort and time from players to plex, siege, capture systems to increase the tier of their faction and subsequently, LP earnings. However, warzone control is dictated by a bunch of 1-day-old account farmers in 1m-cost ships who constantly farm the faction that has the best LP-isk ratio making a complete 1-sided warzone control loop for a period of months. This has NOTHING to do with PVP, what FW is supposed to be about, and it’s very discouraging for PVP players, when the earning system which is supposed to sustain their activities is broken in that way.
Banning warp core stabs is not the solution to this. The easiest and most direct solution is to remove LP rewards for capturing complexes. Also, increase the LP earns for FW PVP kills. This will encourage people to go out there and fight. This will also compensate for the LP that would otherwise be earned by capturing a complex. Perhaps also introduce an activity that earns LP ( in addition to the missions ) that does not affect war zone control directly.Activities that can be easily exploited should not be dictating the sovereignty and LP tier of a faction!
The game simply needs new players who actually want to run the content. Otherwise it is always just “Working as intended” because the most recent changes I can think of is what discourages the players who only do this on alts and throwaway accounts.
I tried FW and I think the only change I would make is to remove the harsh faction standings stuff. The reward isn’t worth sending any main character there. Probably the biggest problem imo
FW isn’t “content” in the sense of being something intended for earning ISK. It’s a way for new (and old) players to have easy and constant access to solo, gang, fleet PVP fights in lowsec, relatively close to the main trading hubs, without necessarily having to be in a lowsec or nullsec corp/alliance. Some people like to play this game to fight other people, and couldn’t care less about seeing their wallet balance reaching the billions. But they need to somehow earn isk to buy those ships they fight with. It’s not easy or even possible sometimes to do that via the LP earning system when the faction is constantly at tier 1 for months and effort from entire corporations or alliances is needed to change that, only to be quickly reverted back to what benefits the complex farmers using BOTS who have a lot to gain and nothing to lose. FW players have no other choice but to resort to some other activity like mission running or abyssals to be able to buy ships. FW is broken and that’s a fact. And the reason is the easily farmable complexes and that’s also a fact. Question is how to fix it.
So you’re saying that the game is disfunctional in this aspect, but it will work fine if more people are playing the game, and that’s OK, so it should be left as is?
Yes. The ecosystem is stagnant. Like a dying coral reef. I think it’s the lack of ■■■■ to shoot at at basically any level. I think the game would benefit lots of people coming to FW to try it out for the first time or again and I dunno how to do that really. As it is I think it’s pretty fine and they should do something liek remove the faction trouble you would get from ruining your standings. Pretty much why I left as I don’t want to lock out my main from places like Jita
But it’s not fine as it is. What kind of product/concept/system has its quality reliant on the amount of people using it, when the amount of people using it is affected by its quality in the first place? How is that fine? It’s just not how this should work out
The part about the faction standing is a different topic and it’s obvious that it’s not possible when FW enemies can fight eachother in highsec. To disable the standing loss would need to also disable their ability to engage in highsec, otherwise all stations would be camped. And I’ve witnessed some cases where players found ways around this to roam freely in the enemy faction and pick up kills without police NPCs stopping them.
Anyway this post is an attempt to reach CCP, raise the concern, and maybe get some people who actually are involved in FW and actually care about it and actually have something of value to add to weigh in with ideas. It’s not nice when bots run the game and the essence of FW becomes from PVP to afk isk farming… Reward people doing pvp, don’t reward and encourage bots.
I like the idea of it enough to join it but then you find out how messy militia is. You just blued yourself to half of lowsec by joining a militia. Most of your random ‘friends’ are bots just there for LP rewards and no fight anyway. The people who are out for a fight are min/max level V skill tryhards. The major alliances in FW are blue to some pirate groups and not others so when you get into a mixed fleet (same militia but a mixed bag of corporations and alliances) you end up getting sniped or shot by some of the neutral group because of these messy standings.
Great you wanna fix lowsec but the only fixes are people that are botting and not really there for the theoretical fights.
We need to get new players funneling into FW instead of being hoovered up by all of the major nullsec blocs with newbro corps. Probably where the real problem is
But this is exactly what I’m talking about from the first post, to address tier levels - atleast indirectly by removing any reason people have to farm complexes with bots or alt accounts. What does who is blue to who and what they do about it have to do with the topic of this thread? The amount of people joining FW isn’t something that CCP can control (if that even guarantees any sort of improvement). Game mechanics, though, is…
Its acually not a bad idea, remove all rewards other than the ones got from pvp kills, make sure that the reward is smaller in walue than the loss to avoid self-farming, introduce a penalty (a form of debt?) for agressing same-sided militia.
That should cover the basis for what fw was rumored to be, a lower entrylevel to pvp with some cushion on the financial and target finding sides.
After that, extras (like tiers) can be introduced on top of it if must.
One gains lp in the value of the kill.
edit:
Something in the veins of:
value of the kills hull(buy) + value of identifiable modules value(buy, 0 for abyss) - any income earned from the loss(insurance, i dont know of any other)
after that take x% of this and give it out as a reward, maybe in the range of 50%-95% depending on tier.
Yes, but you cannot go over certain values with your tiers. That either means you start at ridiculously low values and the highest tiers are still under the values of each ship, which makes the system worthless in lower tiers and still not rewarding in highest tiers, or you start at reasonable levels and go over the values of ships, which in turn makes the rewards better but also makes it possible to farm your own alts after a certain tier.
What do u mean not rewarding enough? compared to what?
Its faction warfare, not faction farm or faction picnic.
if one wants to farm isk by missions or shooting rats one can do anoms or missions, thats why those are there, faction warfare are for warfareing other factions in a faction.
But people want those activities to be removed because they devalue the rewards for capturing the systems and increasing the reward tiers. No one is in FW just for the PVP and kills, stop kidding yourself. They are all there to get financial rewards because that’s what buys them their ships with which they PVP.
My suggestion is to the question how to make fw more about pvp and less about farming. if we dont want to make it less about farming (see quote above) than, yes, its not a good suggestion.
But without farming rewards, no one will be there. If you would have only people in low sec that are there for PVP, low sec would be empty, FW or not. And the people that would be there are the blue blobs some other people here complained about because they can farm the FW-unrelated rewards.
You need to have farming rewards in FW because that’s what people are after anyway. They draw in the targets for the crowds that want to PVP, or how I like to call it, farm the bears. You have to strike a balance between farming that is too easy and farming that is too rewarding, sure, but it does not work without farming. What happens to areas that do not offer things to earn is well visible in regions like Outer Ring or Great Wildlands or Solitude: No one there.
As i see it fw is for, in its very nature, what ppl like to call consentual pvp.
Either one enlists or not. If one wants to hunt farmers whom have no intention to hunt/be hunted then why enlist?
