First off, congratulations on shipping the changes to Faction Warfare successfully. It has been a long road since the Faction Warfare Committee and the Slack channel, and I can say with confidence that many are glad that despite the number of years it took, they got to see FW got the attention it deserves.
The Frontline is definitely a great achievement, this will indeed help realize the vision of a Strategic, ever-evolving War.
Yet, there are some aspects that I think you guys should be very wary of.
First, most of the locations and structures used to get people out of plexes and for the Advantage system have a clear problem, a* lack of gates*.
I talked plenty of times about the value of gates in FW, and I’m surprised that a feature for it would somehow not feature them.
I can understand people not seeing the same value, but then I would ask those people if they see any value in our plexes having gates then. I can reasonably assume that many would be okay with getting rid of them and having perma-escalations.
But me I see a clear value in them, Accessibility. And thus I can say that what is going to happen is that after the rush, less and less people will engage with Rendezvous, supply caches and depots. Simply because those expose you to more risk than they are worth.
And if you don’t see what I’m talking about, those would be likely done in Cruisers and BCs, and thus would be easy picking and feed for BSs around.
Another thing I noticed is something about the introduction of Navy Dreads.
I understand the goal behind them, they are a great way to flush out all the LPs out there, and more importantly they give something to aspire to in FW. I regret that they follow the usual formula of bigger is better, but I guess this was hard to avoid.
But one thing worrying me is specifically that the pinacle of FW is going to be associated with those. And during your last talk at TiS, @CCP_Aurora , I clearly remember you evoking the problem with Capital gameplay, and I couldn’t help but nod along while you made that point.
The problem is that, with Dreads being the ultimate, unique prize in FW, and with the Frontline being open to Structures, FW gameplay becomes tied to Capital gameplay defacto.
Is it a good idea to tie FW to something that needs works, and has already so much baggage?
I understand that there were elements to please, I can tell without a doubt who advocated for Structures to be open to everyone. All I ca say is that one thing that worries me a lot about EVE is that a lot of the content is made to FEED the current player base, instead of creating new players.
This is the same situation as high-sec mercs, gankers, and null. Becoming captured by a specific group can be a problem in the long run, as you have to feed them both the game and it’s new blood.
To sum it, I fear that the changes that I have seen point to content that does not have Accessibility in mind, and I think this is something you should watch out for in the coming months of the update .