Faction Warfare was a CCP’s attempt to bring PvP closer to higsecs’ dwellers, to ignite interest for it in new players and those risk-averse carebears spending their virtual lives drooling in mission/incursion sites, and to counteract the ongoing issues in game’s economy with lost balance between produced and destroyed things, which is slowly killing it. But in its current state it simply doesn’t achieve those goals, instead it became another easy, no-brainer, little risk PvE content, injecting even more goods into already over-saturated ingame markets. It’s a farm land full of stabbed unarmed vessels used to simply generate LPs with as little efforts as possible, evading any combat - often controlled by botting software, to boot.
There are quite simple fixes to this disgusting state of affairs:
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No ship with warp stabs fitted must be able to trigger site capture, or may be simply not allowed to even enter it. Site capture should be stopped if ship which started it was later refitted with warp stabs (or it must deny any means for such refit to happen, like no ability to drop mobile depot there).
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Starting a capture must be an explicit action, and after it’s initiated, any ship in the range on the grid, or those who’ll come to grid after it’s started, must lose ability to warp out completely, as well as getting PvP timer on them (the 15 minutes one). Capture can be cancelled any time by interacting with the same beacon, but it must take another 1-3 minutes to stop, so even in such case you won’t be able to warp out right away. No cloak usage is allowed for the ship which initiated the capture, until it’s completely cancelled. Alternatively, there could be a new option like “Disengage from FW site”. So any player could individually initiate this process for their own ship, and be able to warp out if they’ll survive 1-3 minutes there. Thus those who’ll be jumping into site only to find an ambush there they can’t handle would still get a chance to run away.
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To continue the capture, you must stay in a certain (not long) range from a beacon. Leaving this range resets/start reducing the capture’s progress. There could be some reasonable limits to the size of the FW site, like moving beyond 150-250 kms wouldn’t be possible (by a forcefield or a scripted stasis webifer indestructible tower reducing your speed to almost nothing) - to prevent the ship which initiated a capture to simply start running away from beacon the moment anybody appears in local, and then keeping its distance from any intruder on grid for the next 1-3 minutes until it will be able to warp out.
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Not related to previous two, just a small optimization to current mechanics. Currently, if somebody not involved in FW comes to the site to mess around, upon killing them you’ll get your security status dropped for no reason (as from the game’s point of view you are a lousy pirate then, and not a proud member of militia). Thus, anybody not involved with FW should start getting suspect timer upon entering a FW site, so militia members could shot him down without any unnecessary implications. Additionally, anybody not involved in FW, but still shooting others in FW sites, should actually be forcibly made a part of it. For example, their standing with faction(s) whose militia he attacks there must drop (but no increase with their rival factions, if you want one - go enlist in their militia officially). This to some extent will prevent FW turning into an easy PEW PEW ground for random low sec pirate gangs.
This way we at least may start seeing FW carebears losing their cheap t1 frigs/destroyers on regular basis, stimulating economy a bit, and serving as a content to those who use FW the way it was intended to be used. And some of them may even start to feel some anger, being slaughtered like a cattle again and again, so they actually finally will try to fit some weapons on their farming vessels, to fight back occasionally - and who knows, may be they’ll like it, in the end