FW Payments

Why do pvp kills pay so little? Wouldn’t there be more people willing to fight if it paid more than capturing plexes?

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Because in times, when it does, people were massively abused alts kills to farm tons of free LP.

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Why should you be paid in the first place?

The game already has mechanics in place to make rational payouts based on destroyed value and target quality. This would minimize alt-farming and kill-milking.

FW doesn’t pay well for kills primarily because CCP doesn’t care at all about core game mechanics; and for the things they do care about, they aren’t capable of designing them properly.

FW should pay well for killing the other faction, fairly well for flipping system ownership, and hardly at all for mere plexing. Instead of course the reverse happens. Which is why FW is essentially a botfarm these days.

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If it was reversed youd get more blobs, no one would sit in a plex exposed and missions would be run more. That would kill PvP in FW.

In a perfect world, sure. But in reality, if the pay is too high, people will just farm new alts in cheap ships and get FW LP.

I honestly don’t get why people say things like this. “In a perfect world”? It doesn’t require perfection to set up FW rewards properly, just moderately competent game design and a bit of college level programming effort.

Why would you quote and reply to one line in my post, when the very first line says:

If you make kills based on destroyed value and target quality (which could be based on FW standings, K/D ratio of the target, Killer vs Killed SP ratio or some other easily calculated measure) then alt-farming will become nearly useless for payouts.

I understand there are many forum-goers who have a knee-jerk reaction where they just look for the fastest thing they can disagree with, but honestly, it’s a very short post. Replying to one line out of context just makes it look like you can’t retain information for more than 3 sentences.

Would you care to explain what calculations currently use target quality?

Also I feel you are asking the wrong initial questions. I feel questions like why large ships earn less & contribute less when plexxing is a much better start question.
After all if you want PvP to pay based on value you need to give people incentives to use larger ships. Not penalise them.

“The game already has mechanics in place to make rational payouts based on X” doesn’t mean that calculation is already taking place. It means all the elements are readily available for making such a calculation and just need to be plugged into a formula.

It’s the OP asking the initial questions, not me. Whether larger ships should contribute more or less to plexing is a valid design question. I suppose CCP at some point believed rewarding small ships relatively more would encourage small, cheap, fast early PvP for players. They may have seen FW as a place for new players to head into with their early ships and start getting a taste for PvP. Which is probably the role that FW should fulfill, except they designed it wrong for that.

The current design says FW is a place where new players in small cheap ships go to die, and the FW payouts go to plexing bots and farmers who primarily run away at the first hint of PvP.

Neither the lore purpose (factions fighting to gain control of systems) nor the gameplay design purpose (promoting PvP) is achieved by the current FW setup.

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There’s better ways to ■■■■■■■ manage this.

  1. each character pays out only max payout once per day if killed.

  2. you dont receive a payout if:
    A. Player killed is on same IP network as you.
    B. Player Omega is on same credit card account as you.
    C. If it’s an Alpha account.

Problem solved.

Even if someone abuses it they are limited by #1.

My neighbor plays, ill just have kill me and give me the isk and vice versa.

Yeah, no. Neither of those are the problem here.

And this is the problem. Ill break down every single aspect of why your argument is useless.

Have you seen the killboards for the 4 faction NPC warfare corps? People arent flying expensive ships, they are flying dirt cheap frigates and destroyers. If youre just trying to decimate Faction Warfare, then a blanket nerf across the board will do just as well, but if youre actually trying to incentivize PVP over all the other aspects, then you actually have to incentivize it. Which means that the payout has to be good. And you cant do that when everyone is flying dirt cheap frigates and cruisers. The amount of LP you would be getting to skirt abuse, would be so low, it wouldnt change the outcome of people who tend to farm sites instead of PVPing. Lets take alook at your other points of calculation.

Unless youre losing FW standings every time you get killed, this is meaningless. Most of these Plex farmers already have good standings because theyve been farming all their accounts lives.

On the flip side, losing FW standings every time you get killed, only punishes the new players and players who suck at PVP. Which is fine i guess, if you want to reward the Farmers and punish the actual players who are trying to PVP or play the game. The farmers wont care because they will just switch their characters around, and raise their standing that way.

When you consider that most farmers have only losses, and that dying isnt difficult to do, you have two options. Either have them read the KD ratio for a set amount of time, like the KD ratio of the past month, or the entire characters lifetime. Neither works very well, because if youre just taking into account a set timeframe, then you could just switch the roles around. Have your Alt Account A, kill Account B, then after a month, B kills A. And if its the entire accounts lifetime, not only would that take a lot of time to calculate, but it would also punish people who buy characters, while rewarding the farmers who have been dying because they farmed, and not because they wanted to engage in PVP.

Easily manipulated, and therefore meaningless.

This is also useless. Circumvented by making a brand new character shoot your old character, so you cant make this a category for determining LP payout in any meaningful sense. And of course, unless there is actually a negative value placed on farming players with similar SP as you, farmers wont care.

Again, meaningless.

No, I just thought all these were obvious dead-ends. I didnt think you would actually post them and not realize just how bad an idea each respective calculation metric would be.

You say “Moderately competent game design”, and yet none of your ideas seem viable.

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Say that to people playing at University and using VPN.

What if PLEX is bought by isk?

What is the point of limiting it to alphas when whole idea is to bring more people in?

Nah, it’s just that you’ve spent so long making negative replies to half-sentences in posts that you’re too lazy to hold an entire concept in mind at once.

You’re also using one-dimensional assumptions: that if you change the mechanics of the reward system, everyone will continue playing and flying exactly what they fly now. You’re also assuming that because FW is used as farmville by players who are seeking easy LP->ISK that it must always remain that way.

You’re also missing the fact that the current FW setup is so bad that it’s only played by bots, farmers, and the occasional bored PvPer or inexperienced noob. And that it’s so bad that some of the few players left in it are actively sabotaging it to draw attention to the crap state it’s in.

So yeah, sorry, try comprehending more than a half sentence at a time and you might be able to see a bigger picture.

You can’t ‘farm alts for easy ISK’ when the payout is based on destroyed value, since you will be losing money every kill. You can’t farm your big character with your small one because you’re still losing ISK on every kill. You don’t need big payouts if FW is restructured as an entry level PvP training ground (which is what I said it should be, and thus what my recommendations lean towards).

What exactly do you think FW does now to new players and those who such at PvP? It certainly isn’t rewarding them. Changing things so FW is more interesting to new/intermediate players and less interesting to bored vets in their best fits would be precisely the goal.

You mean, in the way that people use “rare but cheap” items now to inflate their value for bounties to milk the bounty system? You know, that thing that nobody does because it isn’t practical?

Not sure why you think a ‘rare but cheap’ item would inflate payouts. Yes, people would certainly try to put the items that have the most incorrect ‘EVE estimated value’ on ships to see if they could game the system to find a net-positive kill vs. fit setup. Which just means the payouts or the ‘estimated value’ system would need to be tuned a little better.

Every possible system you can think of to put in the game will be a target for abuse or exploitation. That’s not an excuse to leave every broken system in the game as is, because a better replacement might be abused. It means you take abuse into account when you implement the design, and then adjust it later to account for the things you didn’t anticipate.

Yes, like bounties, they took an exploited system and replaced it with a near-useless system. Except in the case of FW, the near-useless system they came up with (rewarding bottable plexing) is even more abused than the replaced system was.

“CCP failed at doing this before” doesn’t mean the system is inherently unworkable. It means CCP is bad at design and bad at programming. These are fixable issues, although apparently not by CCP’s current team.

If you want a game in which bots plex on Alpha accounts and warp away at the first sign of another ship, then you use the current design.

If you want a game in which ‘Faction Warfare’ results in players actually fighting other players on a regular basis, then you reward player combat. Exactly how you reward it is details that can be resolved with competent game design and coding. “Last time we tried it, a handful of folks figured out an exploit so we cancelled the whole idea and came up with something that thousands of people exploit” is not an example of competence.

Yes, with fixes. As opposed to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is what CCP did.

You apparently don’t know much more about FW than you do about “the awesome massive complexity of changing a system in an MMO”. Feel free to google “EVE FW bot problem” and notice that the complaints have been piling up ever since CCP replaced the “reward PvP” system with a “reward plexing” system. Here, I’ll even give you one for free:
Faction Warfare is dead, Long Live our new Robot Overlords

There’s a lot of supposition going on here, backed up by zero facts. FW bots and farmers are already exploiting a single playstyle and having significant effects on the economy. Neither the current round of exploits nor the previous ‘price fixing’ exploits were enough to make “the rest of the game rubbish”. If your point needs excessive exaggeration of unsupported notions to seem effective, it’s probably not a very good point.

Nah, I’m aware of my experience and qualifications in the area. What you think of them doesn’t matter. Particularly since you’ve got nothing to back your point up other than “EVE game code is so complex that no one can possibly understand it! It must stay the way it is or all hell will break loose!”

Given the state of FW for the past 6 years, it’s very clear that CCP certainly doesn’t know how to balance that particular game mechanic. Given your lack of actual input or understanding on the issue, other than to claim “you can’t possibly know anything useful about this”, it appears that you don’t either.

Perhaps you and CCP should be a bit more open to outside thoughts on possible solutions to an essentially crippled “major game mechanic in EVE”.

Sure. Because as we all know, the majority of players, old and new, prefer to fly expensive, blingy ships, rather than cost-effective, cheaper ships, when engaging in PVP.

Yes. I am assuming that if there is a way to exploit or make easy ISK from any game mechanic, EVE players will tend to exploit and pursue it. How silly of me, of course i was wrong. Eve players dont care about making ISK, after all! All those Bots are just for PVP, and none of them are used to farm ISK.

I never said this, or assumed this. Im all for a change in FW. I just dont think that reversing the LP trend from Farm > PVP to PVP < Farm is the way to go.

Yes, you can, and this is the problem with balance. You need to incentivise FW PVP in order for people to specifically go after that profession as a profession. In our current situation, players who want to PVP, will PVP, and players who want to farm, will farm. Raising or lowering the LP amount will not change the amount of PVP players who want to PVP, because they dont care about reward, theyre in it for PVP. The only reason you would increase payout for PVP is if you are trying to draw in more players, i.e. players who want to make ISK, and are not just in it for PVP. Which means you need to make it worth their while. And yet, you need to balance the insurance payout and dropped loot chance, too. Not only is it very difficult, it may even be impossible to find a middle ground.

And thats why this idea is stupid.

If youre combining it with “Destroyed value”, or any other mechanism, then yes, this would affect the degree at which you earn ISK, and therefore can become a method of making ISK on every kill. This isnt done in a bubble. You specifically combined it with “Destroyed value”, meaning that this compounds the ISK received from the kill.

You say this, but before, you said:

Yeah, people are using cheap, inexpensive fits right now. Entry level PVPers are not going to use expensive, blingy fits.

So youre basically berating me for assuming that people will continue to use cheap fits, while also saying that FW should be restructured as an entry level PVP training ground where people would use cheap fits.

Okay.

Its not like you lose faction warfare standings or anything whenever you die. PVPing, in small fleets where your ships are handed to you for free by your corp, isnt punishing at all, and rewards the player with experience.

And sure, lets make FW more boring for veterans and older players, im sure this will definately help new players. Instead of having experienced, good leaders, lets have the blind lead the blind. Sure. Sounds great.

Spoiler alert: Its not great.

As someone who has seen the mechanics of FW go through it’s pendulum cycle many times I feel the teir system multiplier is completely unnecessary, rewards for objectives would be far better, capturing constellations maybe but definitely something other than teirs. The whole idea is bad as it is all designed just to support mission rewards as by that stage there is nowhere left to plex except as part of a fleet. A 10 ship fleet in a plex compared to running a mission is nothing in terms of reward. FW Mission running saturates the LP market not just for people in FW but all mission runners. A FW mission is basically thanks very much PVP fleet for getting to this stage I’ll just grab 10X the LP you get and provide nothing useful to help the militia in the conflict.

If the missions even did anything but I see an enemy mission runner I don’t bother killing it because it is doing their militia more harm than us.

Man some of these exploits seem like a lot of work.
PvP for fun, even FW, and do something else for isk.