Factional Warfare Feedback Thread

Feature Previews & Feedback Factional Warfare
167

Long time Amamake & FW enjoyer here to say about Havoc-Pirate-FW mechanics:

  1. Guri/Angel FOB should take assets with it, not asset safety.
  • The Deathless Community’s sentiments, represented by Sepaph above, matches my feedbacks well

  1. Remove standings hits for shooting other pirates:
    a. It is the easiest fix to lowsec bubbles standings losses on friendlies. See 3
    b. It is the easiest fix to alt-farmers pushing to end insurgency early. See 4

  2. Do something about Crimewatch ie “Security Breakdown” should turn it off entirely, even.

  • Crimewatch is the primary source of low-sec lag compared to NS/WH large-fleet fights.
  • I see no reason why a Corruption 5 low-sec system shouldn’t forgo all crimewatch mechanics.
  1. Do something about farmers/mechanics abuse who, rather than enlisting to engage with the Supression Mechanic, instead enlist in pirate-militia and push low-sec systems to 5, so that they avoid the HS security breakdown by ending the Insurgency early.

I LOVE THIS NEW PATCH and it has SOOOOO much potential. Please please please iterate on these points. Well done so far CCP and keep it up :heart::heart::heart::heart:

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168

My Take on HAVOC so far…

Starting with Zarzakh… An unusual “Nullsec” system where Death Sentry guns act more like lowsec security than anything, shooting anyone that fires on aggressors. This makes little sense mechanically for Nullsec or Lore wise for the Deathless. They need to either fire on anyone shooting Angels/Guristas only or be ramped up so nobody fights in ZZ if that is what you are aiming for. (I prefer the former)

ZZ is currently cursed because unlike any normal system you cannot put bookmarks anywhere, this includes undocks, gate pings or anything else, what makes this worse is there is no Dscan or Local so it is effectively worse than being in a wormhole for a system that is meant to be Lore wise a haven for Angels & Guristas. As a result bubbles have been placed outside the exclusion zone to drag individuals or fleets into a hostile area, where they are then easy pickings as the pilots scramble to get out of the exclusion zone before they lose all of their hull. This makes it one of the most inhospitable systems in all of eve (after the Abyssal space)

Additionally there is no automatic marking between the guristas and angel militia’s. Granted they aren’t meant to be overly friendly, however the Deathless invited both to inhabit Zarzakh, and unlike the Caldari & Amarr Militia’s and the Gallente and Minmatar Militia’s who do not stage out of the same systems against their enemies, Angels & Guristas do. Capsuleers should be encouraged to respect their fellow neighbours and punished for breaching that peace just as if they shot their own militia (at least in ZZ anyway)

The Insurgencies themselves… There is no global timer visible on the length of an insurgency till it ends this is not good for any of the involved parties or neutral parties to the affected systems. Devs called them “Incursions but with players” well Incursions have defined stages and some have fixed timers to those stages, for example “withdrawing” is 24 hours, “mobolized” is 3 days. This gives Everyone involved or affected by the invasion of the system notice of how much longer it will go on for. This is excluding victory of course. In victory there is also no timer to the Withdrawel of the Pirates, again to the detrement of both the Empire’s and Pirates alike.

The FOBs, effectively useless apart from the odd time it may be in system with no stations. Angels/Guristas can dock at any station in lowsec, making the FOB a dockable pointless especially given that anything there at the time of the FOB withdrawing is put into asset safety. The FOB is literally being pulled back into ZarZakh, with all the loot the NPC Pirates have taken from the systems, there is zero reason it shouldn’t also take any ships modules or pods with it to ZZ. Asset Safety should be there solely for the destruction of the FOB. it is by definition a Foward Operating Base, and currently serves as little more than a beacon at the end of an acceleration gate (The Ship Caster)

Fellow Capsuleers have suggested that the FOB should also act as a ShipCaster, while this makes sense for shipping stuff back to ZZ towards the end of an Insurgency given that the FOB doesn’t do this automatically (huge oversight) I feel that having it as shipcaster would grant the Pirate Miltia’s too great of an advantage, effectively immune tethered to the FOB and being able to jump back and forth between ship casters being able to move huge fleets in and out at wil.

NPC Roaming Fleets - As I understand it there are meant to be possible drops from these to be used at the Laundering Site… If this is correct then the easiest way for Miltia’s to deny the pirates this is not to add suppression, which is what happened last Angel Insurgency.

Stage 5 - Lowsec effectively Nullsec, Will have to see how it plays out but so far I feel that getting stage 5 corruption actually hurt the pirate milita more than helping them.

There is zero notification for anyone militia or neutral as a warning prior to entering an affected system, Granted there is none when you enter an Incursion system, but at least in Highsec there are no Sansha rats on gates, In Low/Null yes there is. Edencom/Triglavian affected systems have warnings prior to entry. I can forsee a lot of posts of the forums and messages being sent to CCP about future ship losses because fleets attacked them in highsec or they got bubbled in lowsec. The only notification I’ve seen is after you’ve already entered and its not a pop up but an alert at the time like a criminal being warned when entering highsec.

Most of this is QOL issues. I otherwise enjoy HAVOC, enjoy finally being able to join the Angels and look forward to the development of both insurgency Miltias.

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169

This CCP,

Jovians have surely unlock the secret of unlimited offices!

170

Oh c’mon Zarzakh station is soooo big even Deathless hasn’t unlocked all its secrets yet. There must be vast unoccupied space there inside for more offices. Let’s just stack Station Containers for it…

Dusties can already do this…

image

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171

Agreed on the asset management when FOB despawns. Seems unrealistic, and really hurts zarzakhs use as a logistics hub. Additionally, allowing bubbles in ZZ without bookmarks or dscan ALSO makes the use of zarzakh inherently less reliable. I’m fine with bubbles in ZZ, but they’d need to show up on dscan or give some method of counterplay, otherwise it feels like its just a dice roll. Especially given how people avoid it like the plague right now, I can’t even get eyes from someone else in the militia. If the requirement for playing in zarzakh is cloaky eyes all the time, just to undock, it makes the content focused on larger groups, and really takes away from the solo/small group friendliness that FW is supposed to foster.
Without fixing these two things, zarzakh will fade out of relevance - and I don’t even understand why? Like, what influenced the decision to remove dscan in ZZ but add bubbles? why create a logistics hub in the FOB that just… disappears every so often, and asset safeties everything into a hostile area? Without some kind of justification it just feels really poorly thought out.

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172

Basically. I’ve been there twice. I saw it was not a great place week 1.

First enlistment. That opening week with ZZ not the most user friendly experience
…aset and turnor was for restocks. And well…it was right there.

And the reenlistment after I left a few days to hammer some airs achievements for skill points since some more orgnanized fleets like ships I can not fly. So I picked up 200k in air skillpoints over a day or 2 in peace and quiet to start to fix that. Assets already in vard used after. and moved to new area last night with a rens shopping run.

ZZ at this point houses a naked clone and that travel ceptor for exit back up plans lol.

I have been liking most angles of fw so far. And just wrote off zz. If they were thinking of making this like grand player driven place like say 1DQ in delve…they basically made that not happen at start up, imo.

Now on reddit some empire mils are complaining about our docking rights. I’d almost say fair enough. But under given setup where the hell else can our gear go when it asset safeties?.

FOB doesn’t ship to ZZ. FOB does’t carry over gear. So…where would asset’s go? The only place left, stations in the FW system. the mystery of pirate docking…demystified. we can park our stuff now, wait 5 days for manual asset move, 14 days for auto move. Eventually…its going to a station there however.

I’d take the FOB being a half baked carrier lol. Or 2 way shipcasting.

173

The new pirate fw stuff is stupid.

  1. Everyone wants the new ships so there’s not much incentive to play faction.
  2. It allows null blocks to into fw in empire space with their obscenely superior numbers to any low sec or high sec alliance.
  3. You still have minmatar/amarr at war with each other and caldari/gallente at war with each other in the event.
  4. You’re allowing them to turn high sec to low sec but you offer people in high sec no additional benefits to desperately trying to defend their sector.

But don’t take my word for it. Take a look at the scoreboards and how not a SINGLE sector has been suppressed. This is one of the most poorly balanced things CCP has ever done.

It’s not even good FW because you’ve just got one side with 150 players and another side with a fleet of 6 or 12 (at peak) trying to do something about it. Most of those players don’t have trillions of isk behind them.

Why didn’t you aim the pirate incursions in null sec? Have them drop into the middle of Goons or Fraternity space.

Why doesn’t CCP bother to find ways to break up these blob armies? They aren’t fun to fight against. Why not reward individual actions by designing the game so blob mechanics has a huge penalty. I mean you’ve got people here in high sec with 12 people all named almost the same thing (multiboxing) and that shouldn’t be doable except they’ve got the security of fighting with 100 other people.

The majority of players in null sec aren’t very good but when you stick them in a blob with SRP and FC’s that know how to build a ship and just say “keep my ship at range and follow these 3 instructions” it makes them useful. But it shouldn’t. And really good players should have an advantage but it should have its limits.

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174

The title of the expansion is Havoc. And havoc it is. What it has brought is fewer jumps to try some non binding and concord freecarefree PvP.

There is still much highsec left unaffected to live happily ever after :slight_smile:

BTW, Vanguards are coming, brace for more havoc - now it is just 4 days. …but if all will go well we could see some opportunities for Vanguards to meddle in the null sec business in the future…

And get used to hear more often that word: Vanguards

175

Cal or gal mil suppressed fully one of their systems last rotation. Post on reddit on it iirc.

Min/amarr had Auga and some other system almost suppressed in the hot zones for vard campaign.

and last night was a rougher night start to my eyes. Min mil at least when I was on brought the a game.

When I logged for bed Bosger had 2 to 1 lead for suppression. Haven’t logged in my day now to see how that progressed. My time played angels lacked coordination (in game chat or discords I know of to be on). And at least some ushra’khan peeps…had it.

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  1. Won’t be a problem once enough BPCs are in circulation. Numbers will die down once it’s no longer the new hotness.
  2. Not sure what you are saying here. If you mean projection of Null into Low…they have to travel to NPC null first to even be able to enter Null…often times it’s easier to just gate in normally.
  3. Yup, that was the point, pirates taking advantage of 2 empires duking it out.
  4. There are benefits, they just don’t interest you (though they could use some tweaking and that will come).

Null sec is for player driven stories and content, low and high sec is for NPC driven stories with heavy player influence.

LP prices will do most of the work here. Once Pirate LP/isk crashes, most of the farmers will move to something different. Also, the rewards are trash when divided up that many times.

I thought this was a FW thread, not a null sec thread.

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177

Goons are in blood/serp associated space. the lore is pirates for now tolerate each other. We want to see the non pirate universe burn or something.

Fraternity is there already. Angel pilots fly through their space to get enlisted. 0.0 doesn’t need corruption. they can already use bombs for example.

Also FW is in theory supposed to be the lower sp friendly largescale pvp venue. Many newer pilots can’t fly hac’s even. We don’t need to be feeding fraternity t1 cruiser kills.

For free. Even volta had to pay to enter ZZ to feed t1 kills off the shipcaster.

With that added complication…frat was/is in angels. they were crapping up week 1 with team killing. Thye had to at least do logistics to move people over. they had to work a bit.

Put this in their backyard and they’d have farmed up lp for 2 titans in half the time lol.

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I try to FC a couple of fleets per week for the Angel faction. I am EUTZ so I generally get anything from 50-100 people in fleets.

In order to service that level of attendance I need to be able to stage quite a lot of ships and so on.

It’s just totally impractical to do this without the use of a JF, so I dont stage in ZZ.

If we can simply overcome this, I would consider it - using the ship caster to get from one central point to the insurgency fob would be super useful, however as it stands, not practical at all.

Totally get that magical teleportation for Pirate FW would be significantly advantageous, worth noting that as a former Amarrian, we found the ship casting tech to be rather useless given the low life span of the beacons + the need to be in highsec (which is a challenge when you spend most of your life PvPing in low sec)

I would suggest

  1. Allowing more logistics into ZZ (Jump freighters) so its viable as a staging system
  2. Move the ship casters for Empire Factions to Low sec so its more viable to actually use

Presents fairness to everyone and faster travel to content areas.

179

I generally echo the sentiments of this thread.

Piracy should feel like piracy, and ZZ/Fulcrum should be viable for pirates. In it’s current state, it’s more akin to a standard NPC station in null npc space, with more hassel, than it is an attractive base of operations for pirates.

Asset safety to ZZ, or two way ship caster are pretty much required to fulfill the “looting everything not tied down” fluff for Havoc. Personally I prefer the asset safety option.

I strongly echo the sentiment on bubbles. Pirates get very little benefit from pushing corruption 5, as that hinders our mobility for smash and grab, and makes it far easier for the two empires to deal with us. It also shortens our total time for any given insurgency. Angels is particularly vulnerable to this, as so many farmers are pushing for the titan that the farmers tend to blitz to 5s right when we’ve managed to get a HS 5, further reducing our chances to profit from the effort.

So far, I feel more like an advanced rat for the other factions to farm than I do some great threat looting and pillaging the country side.

Final note is that the faction manufacturing bonuses on Fulcrum are not sufficient to make it attractive for the manufacture of the ships. The inputs are more expensive due to the logistics risks compared to HS stations, and the bonus doesn’t affect the most expensive inputs, making it far more logistically simple and profitable to just pull BPCs to HS and build there.

I think all factions should get a station somewhere at which they can buy down the advanced input requirements on their own faction hulls with LP. This would make FW an attractive option for industrial pilots, where right now it’s almost exclusively for combat pilots.

All this said, this is still the most fun I’ve had in Eve since I joined in 2008. I think you’ve landed on something that has potential to be an extremely attractive gameplay loop with a little bit of attention and polish.

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180

Update from a couple weeks ago since the letter was posted. Both pirate militias are simply going to use lowsec areas and mostly ignore and not use ZZ or the FOBs in its current state. Most have moved to stage out of HS/LS areas bypassing ZZ/FOB features which truly is unfortunate. Most people I have spoken to still stick by the idea of having FOB assets moved back to ZZ after each insurgence, and possibly allow easier travel between ZZ/FOB to be two way.

I’d also add that two way shipcast should probably be given to empire militias as well as under the current form few if any militias use those either.

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I think when in development CCP wasn’t seeing Amarr having personnel issues that lead to a decent chunk of core crews migrating to gal mil.

Since the FOB is supposed to jump hot spots as I understand it, its jumping into (the same) min mil areas, alot. If we deployed to the heart of Amarr FW…maybe ZZ and FOB would play more into it?

For now, if amarr is doing something its in the same area the FOB’s have hit of late. FOB’s within 3 jumps. and we have’t needed a lot of jumps from even rens for restocks.

At this point when its clear the insurgency is slamming down I take a few minutes to move assets from fob to NPC stations. In case IRL gets hectic I don’t want to have it go to asset safety.

And then move it in the day or so cd window we get.

And I just stage a neut BR in the nearest .5 area and do a quick run ins if system clearish as needed.

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It would be convenient to add special hangar in Zarzakh for putting equipent that will go to FOB when insurgency starts and back when it ends.

It would work simmillary to accessing ship cargohold when it’s docked. But it would be a “ship” called just FOB and visible only when docked at ZZ.

Which FOB is being used would be predeterrmined by the alignment with a particular pirate faction.

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183

It solve a few issues. I get empire FW’s concerns its odd we can dock in the fw systems.

I’d agree. but…where does asset safety go. And most don’t want to feed crews who the only space they appear they can hold is the 100km’s around the shipcaster lol.

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184

Glad to see the pirate BF update being patched in. I do want to repeat the concern among many in the pirate community that the current Zarzakh/FOB mechanic renders both almost useless as a staging tool for us. With FOB assets being moved to random lowsec systems after each despawn, it has made most of us simply stage in empire space bypassing “the pirate raiding hub” altogether. The remedy to this would be as presented previously: assets in the FOB gets moved back to Zarzakh when despawning. Without this few if any pirate FW groups will even bother to use Zarzakh/FOB for the most part.

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185

From a new bro perspective, its so much easier to just put ships in Zarzakh and deploy to the front. I have been bubbled a few times, but I just tend to find alternative routes around them.

I haven’t has to use asset saftey so I can’t really speak on that matter, however for me atleast its been a good loop getting a few ships into zarzakh, keeping them there until fob spawns, then going in when it starts (since no bubbles will happen then)

I hope whatever CCP does next it still keeps up this drop and play feel, I dont’ have the same gripes as others but so far its been pretty easy for me.

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186

Some more in game folks we jsut hit up other means. I can move a br or 2 with alt and move more, faster. That is timer reset timer day actually. Usually happens on mondays which is a bad irl timeing day.

Jita shopping sunday, move to .5 (or close) staging and see where FOB is monday. Move that crap in my 1.5 hours or so between end of work and start of weekly scout meeting. and thus I am ready for a new week of fun adventures.

See some for zz would like at least counters since the bubbles it seem must stay. Its not they are there so much as most every known way to deal with them is removed.

Bubble breaking fleets usually land to warp to’s NOT in the bubble. Why some rant on no BM"s. This is the most basic bubble counter one learns n 0.0. Warp to make bm’s not in bubbles and uses them, we land on them. We engage bubble camp NOT in the bubble. it tends to go better that way.

Smalle/ solo…your bm is some direction to clear most bubble and gives you the hole shot to mwd burn to gate.

Also its the people who put the bubble up really. If I must shoot (or be shot at by)
neuts I’d prefer more fun ones. Like snuffed. I actually have some respect for them. they like to swing by the various fw fronts.